I know it is only October but people are starting to plan and get ready for Christmas.

You need to be putting the final elements to your Christmas internet marketing plan now in order to make the most of the high volume Xmas purchasing.

In a lot of cases this is:
- a small content change to focus on Christmas,
- a blog entry or article seeding present ideas,
- a new focused adwords campaign,
- or to just increase SEO work already being done.

Why not give us a call 020 8123 8159 to see if we can help. No obligation to purchase anything just a chat to bounce around some ideas.

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which you get paid for helping others earn profits. This is done by marketing their product or service and receiving commission for each sale that happens through your efforts.

You will see lots of reports of people earning millions and millions of dollars each year. Although, you have a few that do earn this type of money, it is hard work. Remember you don’t get money for nothing!

Affiliate marketing can be approached in many ways, but is in effect internet marketing for somebody else’s product. As you are promoting another’s product you have the same internet marketing challenges but without the expense of product development.

Affiliate Marketing basically falls into a number of techniques and a clever affiliate marketeer will combine:

* Review Site Marketing: Here you build a website that offers a review of the product. Review pages can be placed on your own website, social media or one of the many free blogging sites.

* Article Marketing: Here you write short articles related to your affiliate product. The articles need to be to article sites, directories, blog sites and social-bookmarking sites. Every article site has the bio of the submitter and this is where you promote the affiliate link. The bio can have the affiliate link or point at your own website.

* E-mail Marketing: You need an email list before this will even get off the blocks. If you do have a list then an excellent way to upsell. The success rate will be directly related to the product you are promoting and the reason you captured the email address. Note, please obey all spam laws.

*PPC( Pay Per Click) Marketing: This is a very profitable marketing model but requires an upfront investment as you will have to try a few times before you are successful. You must make sure and monitor carefully your cost per click against the percentage of people that purchase. It is easy to get carried away and spend more than you make.

Where now?

If you want to read up some more why not have a look at The Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing on the Web: How to Use and Profit from Affiliate Marketing Programs

We will sit down with you in front of your website and generally walk through it and answer any of your concerns.

So if your business is local in towns like Hemel Hempstead, Berkhamsted, Tring, Aylesbury, Chesham, Amersham, St. Albans, Watford, Wendover or even as far as Milton Keynes just send a message on our contact us form or give us a call.

If you are further afield or you represent a trading body or business group then by all means contact us and we will see what we can do.

Some of the questions already asked include:
- my website looks dated, any ideas?
- how can I get more control over my website content and not always have to pay for changes?
- what does SEO mean to me?
- website review please?
- keyword selection tips?
- am I spending enough or too much on pay per click advertising?
- should I concentrate on local search?

As you can see we have covered and helped a lot of businesses. Again, no obligation to purchase anything.

If you’d like to know more, call us today on 020 8123 8159.

So what do we mean by split testing?

• For every keyword targeted we will create two ads with slightly different content.
• These are then monitored daily by our marketing professionals and we will identify a winner. A winner is where we get the best click rate that converts to a buyer, we have to get the click that converts as this tells us the content of the landing page (product or service) is what the person expected when they clicked.
• For the ad that didn’t win we adjust the text and then start to monitor the two new ads.
• This is repeated continually until we have constant dead heats, or we have an excellent acceptable conversion rate.

When we have finally settled on this winning ad we can then start to execute standard search engine optimisation on the landing page against the winning ads keywords, this can’t be done until we have a stable winning ad. Then as the click through rate increases in organic search results we can reduce our spend on the PPC campaign and re-focus the spending to new areas.

This strategy is often not used as it takes time, but at Praeparo we have the people and tools set-up to handle 100′s and potentially 1000′s of ads per customer based on a split test per keyword, where a campaign can have many keywords. See our Pay Per Click Services page for more information.

What do you need to do?

• Decide how you will track success. Often this is easy…it’s when you make a product sale, other times it can be harder to spot. If you’re a selling high value services, you’ll most likely be tracking leads and not sales.
• Decide how to assign a monetary value to leads so you can determine how much advertising to spend in order to get it.
• Do the keyword research.  Identify the core ones and include people outside of the business, look at the advertisers who already show on the results and then use other tools to expand this core list.
• Build focused landing pages. You may want different potential customers to go to different pages within your site. This is often the case to enable you to highlight the different value propositions to solve their particular problem.
• Set up your adwords campaign using the keywords and landing pages.
• Monitor and test; use split testing, adjust bids and remove non-performing keywords …EVERY DAY.
• Then SWITCH! As soon as a great term is found that returns a high value you must start the search engine optimisation (SEO) process for that term so you get natural or organic search engine results (SERPs). Over time you can then reduce the PPC ads on that term and put your money into finding the next winner.

This probably looks complicated and overwhelming. However, if you know what you’re doing you can get a good return on any investment. Praeparo can help and with just a bit of effort on your part, you can beat the opposition.

Too often website owners believe Page Rank is SEO. Well it is not, with over 200 factors that Google uses Page Rank is only one.

Praeparo believes you need to get your own website in order first! Make sure your URL, page title & description, content headers and actual content should all be good and be targetted at what the user wants and expects on the topic concerned.

Once content on an individual page is good then make sure it is a good fit into the overall website through internal linking with appropriate anchor text.

Now with good content it will start to return results from Google SERPS. To get better results we need people to find it and start talking about the page, viral marketing is the best where other people like the content and so will talk about it on blogs or sites like Twitter and facebook.

In summary don’t spend too much time on getting external links and monitoring your Page Rank until you get your website in order!

Praeparo thinks this is a good idea as we all should be creating a good user experience. Page load time is critical in a user experience as if we can’t convince the user the site is good in a few seconds they will just bounce.

The only area of concern is that some sites to create a good user experience are rich in content that slows the page down. This is acknowledged and accepted by the users BUT how will Google handle this? In this case we should just accept that these pages will not rank so high and thus create other more focused landing pages that then direct to the slower pages for more information.

Very important for all website owners to evaluate page speed and create an action plan to rectify any pain points. This does not have to be expensive, we suggest find the quick wins and make any changes as part of your usual maintenance or content refresh processes.

But remember DON’T PANIC as content is still the leading factor. Page speed is only a very small element of the overall ranking algorithms.

If you have concerns please get in touch with Praeparo and we can quickly help you find out if you have a problem or not.

By optimised we are not talking about a technical web developer just adding some keywords into the address bar URL or some relevant keyword titles, descriptions based on the page content. We are talking about applying marketing principles to each page.

Praeparo believes SEO is about actually attaining marketing goals. These goals are not just about traffic but more linked to conversions.

So how do we get a marketing optimised website? Website optimisation needs to take the marketing goals and link these to a specific website page(s). Once this is done we have a goal to achieve and the page needs to be worked to meet this goal. Items to consider are:

• Keyword Research: We need to understand the keywords that Search Engine users type that we want to get our website page in front of.
• Sales Pitch: Treat the Search Engine Results (SERPs) as a sales advert. We need to convince the viewer in around 160 characters that our page is relevant – we need to sell our landing page.
• Relevant Page: The landing page needs to clearly match the sales pitch in our SERPs advert, if not the visitor will just leave [bounce].
• Call to Action: The page needs to get the visitor to convert, i.e. achieve the marketing goal.
• Secondary Action: We need to handle a secondary option for the visitor just in case the page is OK but not quite what they were looking for. This is about keeping them interested and on the site by going to a secondary page.

The web site design and development process needs to be tightly integrated into the marketing plan so that as new content is delivered it has a clear objective.

In conclusion, website optimisation is about meeting marketing goals and optimising for those goals. Thus, you can’t optimise a website without having first developed a Digital Marketing strategy or plan.

Praeparo are offering a 50% reduction on our strategy workshop was £995 now £495.

For this you get an expert on site for a day to discuss your website and internet marketing strategy and help you validate the current plan and discuss improvements and way forwards.

This is not a formal report generation meeting but a real person sitting down with yourselves and talking through ideas. We admit that we may not have all the answers but will either point you at a relevant resource to get an answer or we will take away the question and get back to you.

The agenda can be anything you want but we typically think a discussion around:

• Where you currently think you are?
• Where you think you are going?
• Gap analysis between you current and future state.
• Start to discuss how the gaps can be addresses.

Use our contact form or give us a call on 020 8123 8159 to start the ball rolling.

Remember, visitors hitting your website and thus purchasing don’t come by accident, as the internet gets more competitive you need to be on top of what your competitors are doing.

Note: onsite visit for UK customer within 150 miles of postcode HP22. Other will be considered but travel may incur a small charge.

If you think about reality TV programmes it is all about the programme makers seeding enough information to gain momentum outside of the programme. Each programme wants people to spend the week promoting an act or contestant on the programmes behalf and even better if they then say bad things about the competition.

So when looking at marketing we want to seed just enough about our brand, services or products to get “a community” discussing it on our behalf. This means the community is defining our brand and obviously this does bring advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage is that if people recommend then it is well known that people respect personal recommendations but and it is a big but you need to manage those that don’t like the brand. If done well then those that like will help with those that don’t.

In summary we can learn a lot from this with social marketing.  For some companies it is critical to identify “a community”  to market a brand and/or product marketing and along with that the importance of making sure your are monitoring your brand.