Reputation: Cleaning Up Your Business Image Online - Updated for September 2020

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DigitalMarketingConsultantcyExeterDevonDid you know that your business is judged by online reviews?

Your potential Customers are influenced by online reviews when choosing who to buy from. If poor reviews are the only thing that potential Customers see, then they will go to your competitor.

So it is essential that you keep an eye on your online reputation and actively work to ensure that any poor reviews are pushed down onto the second or third page or search engine results. Of course if the reviews are genuine it goes without saying that you need to address the issues within your organisation too.

The problem with search engines is that they decide which version of the truth people see! Most people “Google it” for information and never really look past the first page of search results as 91% of people do not go beyond page 1!

So it’s imperative that your business has plenty of online reviews from happy and satisfied customers and that you engage with bad comments to solve issues whether on review sites or on social media.

It takes a lot of work to push those bad reviews out of the way. You can start by claiming your company’s real estate. That means Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, a domain, and a blog. Flood the internet with new “news”. Even start a Tumblr and Pinterest account and register with lots of social networks – even the obscure ones.

Update everything regularly and the new “news” pushes down all the older content, helping move it to the dark, dingy page two or even the barren landscape of page three!

The average company doesn’t have things that need hiding, but need to be reactive to Customer issues. So to keep looking good online it would take about 10 – 20 hours or so a month on a continuous basis to keep ahead of the competition.

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Right Click Digital
1 Bridge Chambers
Barnstaple
Devon
EX31 1HB

https://rightclickdigital.co.uk

Web Design Barnstaple: Viral Marketing 101 – Not Using It Could Kill Your Business! - Updated for July 2016

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Creativity

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, or a funny story.

Many ideas are still out there. Self promoting has been going on way before social media! Create a gossip or a buzz – many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to get them noticed!  So try it – create your own publicity!

What Next?

If you have been thinking about setting up a new website, or your existing site doesn’t work for you – or just needs updating – call us on 01271 324 841 or get in touch with us without any obligation.

We’ll do our level best to answer your questions without resorting to complicated jargon and industry-speak and then you can decide for yourself whether this service is something you would be interested in.

Web Design Barnstaple: Top 5 Ways To Generate Low Cost Website Traffic - Updated for July 2016

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There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income. Many sites have tried and failed in doing so, and these results to the sites demise. It takes money to maintain an income generating site; it also takes money to make money.

BUT, it doesn’t take a whole caboodle of cash to generate website traffic for your site.

Ever wonder how does big hit sites drive traffic top their site? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmickries. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.

You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it.

Here I present to you the Top five ways to generate low cost website traffic that could help your site a whole lot. Even if you only get a small percentage of successful visitors in to client ratio it still works especially if you get a high number of website traffic.

Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.

Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs.

Traffic Exchange

This is like exchanging links but on a different higher level. This may cost a bit more than exchanging or trading links but could be made cheaper because you get to earn credits. You can use those credits when viewing others traffic, while you earn credits when someone views yours.

Traffic exchange services are the viewing of another’s site or page. This is done vice versa where a site can use your sites contents and so can you to his or her site. You both benefit from each others efforts to generate traffic. The other sites visitors can go to your pages and know more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your sites existence is boosted.

Write and Submit Articles

There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself.

Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.

Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more.

Make a Newsletter

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a newsletter but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in on your newsletter. This will also provide free advertising for them as well.

As your newsletter gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site.

Join Online Communities and Forums

This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.

Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

What Next?

If you have been thinking about setting up a new website, or your existing site doesn’t work for you – or just needs updating – call us on 01271 324 841 or get in touch with us without any obligation.

We’ll do our level best to answer your questions without resorting to complicated jargon and industry-speak and then you can decide for yourself whether this service is something you would be interested in.

Web Design Barnstaple: Using Facebook to Generate Targeted Traffic to Your Website - Updated for July 2016

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As an affiliate marketer or as a person who owns an online business, you have to remember that internet marketing is very important. You first need to be successful in internet marketing in order for you to get customers. You have to remember that if you want customers, you need to get targeted traffic in to your website.

There are quite a lot of methods to get targeted traffic. You can try writing articles about the products or services you are selling and posting them on article publishing websites. This is a great way to market your website as well as the products or services you are selling, but what if you don’t have the knack for writing? What if you have people skills instead?

If talking to people is your forte, you might want to join social networking websites. One social networking website that is so popular is Facebook. Here, you will see that there are now over 62 million people who are actively subscribed and millions of people are logging in and out every single day.

With this amount of people, you have to consider that this is truly an internet marketer’s dream.

By joining Facebook, you will be able to create a profile page for yourself. Complete the profile page. In this page, it will state basically everything about you. It will contain your interests, your age, gender, as well as your political views.

If you already have friends who are registered and actively using Facebook, you might want to try to add them to your network in the website. You can also invite your other friends to join through email in Facebook. By building your network of friends, you will be able to gain access to other networks in Facebook. Here, you can start communicating with other people, and even build new relationships or make new friends.

This is a great way to start marketing in Facebook. Don’t just jump in and start peddling your products, services or website, you first need to establish yourself in Facebook.

After getting started and getting familiarized with Facebook, you will notice that you will be able to join groups. Find a group that is interested in the products or services you offer. When you find one, join the group.

Here, you will be able to discuss things about their interest and little by little, you will be able to indirectly market your products or services. Just remember that you first need to establish relationships within the group in order for you to market effectively and in order for you to become trusted by the other members.

There are quite a lot of communicating tools that you can use in Facebook. You can use the News Feed and you can even syndicate your blog website using RSS. The Notes feature offered by Facebook is also a great way to market. And, you can also write on the “wall” of other people’s profile in order for you to get known.

The great thing about this is that you don’t even have to invest money when you use Facebook. It is completely free and what you just need to invest is time. Although it may take quite a while for you to get people in Facebook to trust you and get them to visit your website.

You have to consider the fact that with the amount of people using Facebook, it will definitely have a lot of potential in generating targeted traffic to your website.

Web Design Barnstaple: How to use Twitter in your Marketing - Updated for July 2016

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Twitter has become one of the strongest social media
sites out there today along with Facebook, Pinterest,
and others. Using Twitter one can tweet and follow other
users which basically is like communicating and friending them.

It is always good to have a social media presence if you own
sites and want to further interact and get personal with the users.
I would recommend having a seperate Twitter account for each site
you own.

Much like building an email list, a Twitter account is useless
without having followers. You can build followers by having social media
badges or buttons on your site in order for them to join which would be
the most common way of gaining followers. Or actively scouting twitter
for people who have interests that pertains to your niche.

Going back to the reference about email marketing, you should
treat Twitter in such the same way. Remember that Twitter is
a social media service and such you should treat it that way FIRST.

Start out by building a relationship with them by offering tips
pertaining to your niche. Say if I am in a SEO niche, one tweet
could be “Are you making a presence in Web 2.0? If not try making
sites at WordPress, Hubpages, etc.” and keep building a friendship
with them.

You want to build a relationship with them because more often
than not I would not buy something from someone who just joined
Twitter and already tweeted their salespage to buy a $1000 course.

Get in a routine of sending out Monday, Wednesday, Friday tips or
freebies for two weeks. Then try throwing out an offer and see if
you get any bites. Then keep repeating some process like that so
they are not worn out with your offers or too fresh.

Treat them like a friend with the ultimate goal of selling things to them.
If you make out a decent plan you should have good success in marketing
to Twitter users.

Web Design Barnstaple: How to treat you subscribers - Updated for July 2016

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Creating rapport is an element that only the top
marketers practice and it’s one of the few things
that sets them apart from the average marketer.

By creating a rapport or relationship with people
in your peer group and with your customers, you
start to build on the initial contact you have with
them and they start to get to know you.

Once they get to know you, they start to trust you. Only then
will they buy from you or promote you to other people.

Listening is a key skill here. Listen to your JV partners
and your customers and deliver what they want. Try to
hear what’s happening beneath the surface or between
the lines.

If they want a product in another format, then realise
that this means that they want ease-of-use. It also means
that your customers take on information in a number of different ways.

Once you have rapport with your clients, you can
begin to practice persusasion. This sounds like a
‘dark art’ but in fact it simply means showing the
benefit of your products and services in a way that
shows people why they would want or even need them.

Only when you’ve listened to the market can you do this
effectively, as you’ll know what makes them tick. Find out
what their desires are and then tap into them.

Ensure that you use the personal touch when
communicating with your partners and customers.

You may have heard the phrase: ‘People Buy People First’

This is very true when it comes to online marketing.
Just think of the online personalities that have sprung
up as a result of them making a connection with their
own ‘tribe’ or group of fans.

It’s also worth noting that people buy people like them.
If you can demonstrate that you share their values and
aspirations, people will be far more likely to connect with
you on an emotional level, simply because you help to
reinforce their values.

Align yourself with the values of the market, be genuine
about it and then deliver your own value to help them fulfil theirs.