Online Marketing Tips for Newbie Consultants

online marketing consultant
If you’ve just registered your company, decided to go out on your own as a consultant, are prepared to embrace online marketing strategy to get you where you want to go, then good for you! That’s awesome and I hope you really achieve what you’re setting out to do. It’s an exciting adventure.

No doubt you’re going to set up a website but have you really thought about how you’re going to use it? Is it just going to be a nice, pretty online business card? Something people will find if they know who you are and google your name? Something you will know exists but no one else does?

Or is your new site going to be an online marketing powerhouse that helps you get found; helps you generate leads and turn leads into customers? [Read more...]

3 Things Kodak & Your Marketing Strategy Could Have in Common

So Kodak has gone to the wall. The once giant of the photographic industry has shuffled off this mortal coil. It’s a shame. They’re the first brand in photography I can remember from my childhood. You know I can still see that familiar logo on my grandmother’s shelf.

There’s a lesson or three in the story of Kodak’s demise. Just as Kodak needed to future proof their business, you need to change your mindset and set out to future proof your online marketing strategy.

1) Be Open to Change

Kodak kept coming up with new products but they got stuck in the box of thinking as they’ve always done. Although they were first to discover digital technology in the 70s, they didn’t follow up on their breakthroughs and stuck to what they saw as profitable markets: film.
[Read more...]

Convert Visitors into Customers

The majority of visitors to your website will never show their face. They won’t comment, send you a tweet, follow you on Facebook, Google+, download your free ebook or sign up for your newsletter. But if you check your Google Analytics you’ll see that they are there.

The silent majority are the visitors who account for the majority of your page views; they arrive at your site via Google search or Twitter and (often) quickly disappear but many stick around to check out your About page or your Services page.

Whether you’re getting regular lurkers who don’t make themselves known or fly-by-nights who don’t stop to linger, you need to work hard to get these visitors involved in your site; they are invaluable to the success of your online marketing and ultimately your business.
[Read more...]

360 Degree Guerrilla Marketing


Guerrilla marketing sets out to create unique, engaging and thought-provoking content to generate buzz, and interest.

The concept and term was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book Guerrilla Marketing.

Guerrilla marketing in the real world is any unconventional marketing intended to get maximum results from minimal resources: PR stunts, surprise giveaways, weird and wonderful gimmicks.

Digital guerrilla marketing uses both mobile and web technologies to engage the consumer and create a memorable brand experience.

This week’s episode looks at 360 Degree Marketing, a guerrilla tactic to use in your online marketing small business.

A Bang on the Head

I recorded this show suffering from concussion, which was a little bit silly. I banged my head in a bit of a nasty fall and stupidly didn’t get it checked out or take anytime off. After the show I went and got a CAT scan and thankfully there’s no lasting damage. Still, I’m under orders to take it easy for a few days. Apologies if I’m a tad unfocused. The show script I’d written pre-fall helped me get through it.

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How to Develop an Editorial Calendar Template

The better your editorial calendar template, the better the implementation of your business blog strategy is likely to be.

Developing a successful editorial calendar, however, is not always easy. What’s more it is often much more complex than just putting a bunch of dates and preliminary titles for blog posts together.
[Read more...]

How to Improve Your Content Marketing Continually


Succeeding with content marketing doesn’t come from a moment of inspiration or sublime creativity; for the most part it comes from strategic planning and implementing a process designed to achieve maximum results.

For businesses new to online content marketing developing this process and taking appropriate action is not always easy; however, there are a number of key stages to work through to ensure you continually improve your marketing.
[Read more...]

The Secret to Increased Landing Page Conversions

Maximizing your landing page conversions is a serious business. Do you have Landing pages for your products and services that convert well?

Or are you struggling to get conversions from visitors to your site?

Landing pages are all about getting visitors who “land” on the page to do something: whether it’s sign-up for your newsletter, enquire about hiring you, download an ebook or purchase a digital product.

In this episode I discuss 5 simple changes you can make to maximize your conversion rates:

  • Why you need great headlines
  • The importance of removing distracting content & links
  • The benefit of dropping your main site header & navigation bar
  • What you can do to improve your sign-up forms
  • The need to split-test and analyze your data

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8 Actionable Marketing Tips


Actionable marketing is one of the key secrets to growing your business online.

By actionable marketing, I don’t mean the kind of creepy online marketing that gets you busted. I mean marketing that persuades visitors to your website to take a specific action.

Great copyrighting and design strategy should, as an example, result in visitors to your landing pages taking the action you want them to such as signing-up for a newsletter or trading their email address for a free ebook.

1. Target Your Audience

For your marketing to hit home you have to understand your audience inside and out. You need to know the demographics, their likes and dislikes, where they hang out online and where they don’t. In this way you can ensure that you or your team develop tailor-made content marketing for your audience. Giving visitors to your site exactly what they want or need will give you the very best chance of them completing the desired action whether it’s signing up to your newsletter or purchasing a product.

[Read more...]

Think Content Marketing, Not Copywriting


Great copywriting is meant to prompt visitors to your website to take action like sign-up for an email newsletter or purchase a product on a landing page.

Content marketing, on the other hand, is copywriting’s big brother; it’s blogs, podcasts, ebooks, white papers and video that are created directly for the purpose of marketing.

If you’re new to digital marketing, a first time business owner or just setting yourself up as a consultant, before you think about investing in professional copywriting services to tighten up or even create the copy on your website, it’s important to understand that online marketing is not just an online CV or newspaper ad.

Online content marketing, for example, is NOT:

  • a salesy landing page pimping your products or services!
  • or an advertising banner you see down the side of your Facebook page

The One Thing Swedes Can Teach Your Business About Social Media

social media sweden

The results of a study here in Sweden by Viasat and SIFO reveal that every other Swede who uses social media like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook follows a business. The figure is even higher for Swedes who follow a business on Facebook with them on average liking four companies.

Despite these striking figures, less than half of the Swedes surveyed know that you can get customer service through social media, and instead see a company website as the main channel for getting customer support.

This still reveals though that 50 percent DO know that social media is a route to content businesses for customer service. [Read more...]