Internet Marketing Essex

If you’re struggling to come up with ideas of what to write about on your blog, Facebook page or newsletters, try using these seasonal ideas to get you started. You can use each one more than once, e.g. refer to Valentine’s Day before, during and after the day itself.

Here are some seasonal suggestions: New Year, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, Spring, Father’s Day, Summer holidays, New school year, Halloween, Guy Fawkes, Christmas.

Some industries have their own seasonal topics, e.g. Financial institutions have the end of the tax year, the government budget, etc.

You can also use national days such as St Patricks or St George’s day, or awareness days like Earth Day, Fair Trade Fortnight or International Women’s Day. There are hundreds if you do a search for them, so chances are you’ll find at least a couple that you can use for your business.

Fashion, retail and the beauty industry will find it easy to associate various celebrations with their products, but even if the seasons don’t relate directly to your services, you can usually still find a way to build a discussion around them. For example recruitment agencies can use the New Year to talk about career goals, Valentine’s Day to discuss finding a job you love and Halloween to talk about facing your fears when job hunting.

You don’t need to be rigid about sticking to the themes, just take the ones that work for you, or use them when you’re stuck for other ideas.

Social media is increasingly important for the holiday industry.  In fact for most people this is probably their first experience of social media.  I'm talking about reviews, who doesn't check out what other people have been saying about the hotel or holiday company that they are looking to book with.  Websites like http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ and http://www.holidays-uncovered.co.uk/ have long been a point of reference for those looking to go away.  In fact if you are a provider in the holiday industry then you need to be looking to social media as a way of managing your company's reputation online pretty sharpish.  What better form of feedback than to find out what people are saying about you on these review sites or social networks like twitter.  People are expecting you to be monitoring these portals and taking this feedback and using it to improve your business.

This is relevant for any service provider in this industry, even those originally aimed at the older market such as cruise company's.  The over fifties is the largest demographic of online users so it would be foolish to assume that this age group are not internet savvy.  They are also one of the few age groups at the moment that have the kind of disposable income to allow them to travel when many others are tightening their belots, bringing up their families.


In fact booking a holiday couldn't be easier now, you can research, compare, book and then manage your booking very easily.  With the online sites that are now available people are given much more freedom and arean't reliant on purspose built package holidays like they once were.  If they want to change the flights, book a hire car, stay and extra night or book multiple hotels and travel, then the internet can offer all of this whilst offering the kind of cost saving that you often cannot get with your local high street travel agent.

As a service provider you are forced to become at the top of your game, offerin great service and value for money, because if you don't not only will it be plastered all over the web, but people will start to look to your competitors to make that booking, even if it is a slighly higher price.  

If you take the time to write a good article, there are plenty of things you can do with it to get the most out of your effort. Here are just some suggestions:

Add it to your website – if you have a section for articles you can add it there, otherwise you can add it as a content page anywhere on the website that makes sense.

Post it on your blog – you can either add it as a blog post or, if you have already added it elsewhere on your website, you can add a short introduction and link to it from your blog.

Get it published – your articles can be submitted to article directories and ezines where others can access them for publishing elsewhere (with a link back to your website of course). Bear in mind that you probably don’t want to publish exactly the same article on your website as you submit to article directories – if you’ve already added it to your website, rewrite it to make it a little different before allowing others to publish it.

Add it to your newsletter – whether you send out a printed or email newsletter, it’s a great idea to include an informative article in it, to encourage recipients to open and read it.

Use social media to promote it – post a link back to the article on your website or blog from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and whatever other social media you engage in. Add it to your RSS feed too.

Finally, once you’ve written a good number of articles you can put them together and publish them as an ebook, which you can offer as a free gift to newsletter subscribers, etc.

By making your article accessible from a number of different places, you can ensure that it gets read by as many people as possible, which after all is exactly what you wrote it for.

Internet Marketing is a combination of all of your marketing efforts using the online world.  The advent of the internet has changed the way that businesses market themselves, no longer do we need to rely on interruption or push based marketing.  Now, strangely enough people are actively looking for you at a point in time when they are in the buying process.  Because of this being visible in search engines for the right key phrases is essential.  If you are a vet in Gloucester for example, then you want to make sure that when someone types in 'vet in Gloucester' into a search engine that your business appears in the first handful of listings.  

What you also need to ensure however is that when those people searching then click onto your listing and take a look at your website that you have a solution that converts.  By that I mean a site constructed in such a way that when someone gets to a page they take the action that you want them to take, whether that be a phone call, make an online purchase, send an email etc...  If your website doesn't do that, then spending budget on search marketing is not going to help you get customers.

If you have a site that works well and have just embarked on a search marketing campaign you may want to do a combination of things.  Start with SEO and paid search to drive traffic to your website, what we often find works well it’s to start off with a higher budget in paid search and then as your SEO efforts start to work, you can reduce your PPC budget accordingly, or you may want to keep it the same to see even more sales!

Combine the more traditional search marketing techniques with social media and content marketing, make sure you have a blog as it's the easiest way to engage with your audience and also keep your website up to date with information and as a bonus you will be adding additional content.  We all know how much search engines love new content!  Use articles, social blogging and social networks to get your business in front of a as large an audience as possible, this way you will help to become known as the expert in your field, drive traffic to your website and hopefully also gain some referrals too.

Once you have your clients, you need to keep in touch with them.  What better way than email marketing, I’m talking about permission based emails here and not spam - we HATE spam!!  Keep your clients informed on what is happening in your business, how you can benefit them, up sell your products and services and again drive traffic to your website.

Lastly, measure, measure, measure, the boring bit for some of you but understanding the results of your marketing efforts will help you make better decisions about how to move it forwards.  If you are making no profit from PPC and you are performing well organically, don't waste your money.  But how can you tell unless you analyse what is happening.  How can you improve if you don't understand how people engage with your business online?  

This, my friends is an incredibly brief overview of what an internet marketing campaign should look like, deep breath and relax.  Please, please, please email through any questions.

When it comes to writing articles, blog posts or any type of content that involves sitting down and putting pen to paper for more than a few minutes, it’s easy to put it off and leave it for ‘later’. We make all sorts of excuses why we can’t do it now, and it ends up never getting done. Here are the top three excuses we tend to make, and the reasons why they aren’t valid:

1.    I don’t have time to write

Time is always the number one excuse made for not doing something, but quite often we overestimate how much time we actually need to write an article or blog post. Provided you don’t need to do too much research you can probably allocate roughly 30 minutes to write 300 words, which isn’t excessive. Most of us waste that amount of time just making coffees!

Even if you find it takes you double this long, just schedule an hour into your day and get on with it. Allocating a specific time and day on your calendar will help you to stop procrastinating and you can feel wonderfully smug when it’s done.

2.    I don’t know what to write about

It can be difficult coming up with new and interesting topics to write about over and over again, but there are ways to make it easier. Rather than trying to come up with a new topic each time you write, why not set aside an hour one day just to brainstorm topics? Experiment with different ways to search and browse the internet, like StumbleUpon or Google’s Wonder wheel, to generate ideas. If you’re worried about wasting too much time, set a timer to buzz when your hour is up and see how many ideas you can come up with in that time.

I keep a list in Word with a variety of possible topics, so when I sit down to write I can just pick one and start writing. Some of these are from brainstorming sessions, and others are just new ideas that came to me when I was out and about or surfing the internet.

3.   I've got more important things to do

All the other excuses we make are probably based on this one. If you’re not convinced that writing regular blog posts, articles or website content is important, then it’s unlikely you’ll ever make it a priority. Perhaps write yourself a list to stick on your pin board to remind you why you need to do this. If you don’t know why, then perhaps you need to find out more about it. Once you realise the benefits of content marketing and blogging, there should be no stopping you!