I was at a Business Growth Show recently (aka networking) and as I was going around the room talking to all the people there and swapping business cards, I was asked by six people on the trot where my company was based after they thoroughly analysed my card observing that our company address isn’t on our business card. By the sixth person I chuckled and asked if one expects to find the business address on a business card, with a stern face, the lady simply looked at me and said ‘yes’ – so this got me wondering what is essential to a business card and what isn’t?
Pictured to the right is the front and back of my business card and they have the information I consider vital. Company Name, Contact name, Various Contact details (e-mail, phone, mobile and web) plus a list of services, then on the other side a sales/marketing opportunity, we have a logo and strap line which summarises the services we offer. I do know of a business who simply has the company name, logo and web address on it, the original reason for this was that the business card owner was travelling around Asia and needed a business card he could easily hand out regardless of where he was and now he tells me it means that the only people who contact him are people genuinely interested in doing business with him – great idea.
But as I said, it got me thinking to what was vital and what wasn’t and I even went through the hundreds of cards I have to see if I was in the minority by not including my business address and amazingly it turns out that the split is about 50-50 – Now I personally think that if your business, service or product is limited by location then including your address is certainly wise, for example a plumber based in Manchester isn’t likely to take on work in Cardiff (though his business card is also unlikely to make it to Cardiff, but I hope this helps you understand my thinking) so having an address or area on the card would make sense. Our business is web based so we can work with anyone anywhere as is the wonder of the web so I see no reason to include the business address on the card.
The one major annoyance of mine when it comes to business cards are those who only use one side, I was taught this on a sales course I was once sent on, why only use half of your advertising space? You would never pay for a full page advert and only send in half an add, or pay for a timed advertising slot on the radio or tv and again only fill half of it, so when ordering a business card why only use one side? I realise that it costs more to have both sides printed, but not twice as much so it really is worth the extra expenditure. It is also said that your business card should stand out from the others, be memorable and make it clear what you offer.
I think all of the above are key to a business card and if you have any ides on what else should be included I’d love to hear your comments. I know one man in America thinks he has the ultimate business card – hit play below and enjoy then let me know what you think – but please keep it polite.
Well for some reason WordPress wouldn’t backup any posts with images in them, but luckily I was able to find these old posts on the old hosting and restore them, so now our blog is once again complete (I think)
Well I think I’ve worked out what the problem was/is. The Like/Dislike Plugin isn’t compatible with the latest version of WordPress – Just have to let the other WP users know.
Now I’m not going to claim to be ground-breaking following my newly created Twitter account, in fact until last week I was a bit of a sceptic, but as is partly the purpose of this blog I wanted and intend to test all forms of social media and plan on maximising my companies exposure through social media whilst minimising the amount of time invested in achieving this goal. In a future blog I will explain how I am using Twitter to fully tweet my messages but for this post I would like to focus on Twitter the social media tool.
So I’m confident you have all heard of twitter following the mass media coverage it has received over the past months with many celebrities and even politicians using it (it was part of Barack Obama’s campaign) But in case you haven’t the concept is that you can ‘Tweet’ your message which is made up of 140 characters and contact all your followers with one single message. The idea was inspired by MSN Messenger where it is possible to add an out of office/ away to lunch message according to co-founder Biz Stone, Biz and the other two co-founders decided to create a prototype and insisted that family and friends use it, at first they were reluctant, but following a minor earthquake many turned to twitter to get a message of their safety out to friends and family instead of using the phone to contact everyone individually – this was a real moment in Twitters history when they realised that there was a use for Twitter. The other was when the plane was landed on the Hudson River and Twitter seemed to be ahead of the media in delivering the news! According to Sue Robinson from the School of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin told the Daily Campus “It was a kind of mass network journalism, or crowd sourcing is another term for it. A lot of people are writing in, and that mass, that collection of data, creates the news story.”
So Twitter had arrived and had a respectable following for a social media site, but it was when celebrities began to use it that it really took off. It is claimed that when American celebrity Oprah Winfrey ‘Tweeted’ live on her show traffic to the Twitter site increased by 43%. The site has grown in the number of users dramatically, from half a million in February 2008 to seven Million a year later and in the past four months it is thought to have grown beyond 10 million, but there is a downside. According to a study by Harvard University, 10% of Twitter users generate 90% of the content where as on a typical social media website the top 10% of users generate 30% of content. It also claims that more than half of people using Twitter updated their page once every 74 days. This research has led to the longevity of the site being questioned, will Twitter survive the hype?
It is our belief following our brief experience that Twitter is here to stay, it is just the way in which it is marketed and used that needs re-defining.
On the Twitter home page it claims that:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
But it is our belief that users do not want to share the same information with family, friends and colleagues and do not want to use Twitter to communicate personal information. In fact as a personal tool for communicating I am not convinced that Twitter has any future, but as a commercial tool for businesses to promote their services and to maintain continued contact with the clients who are interested it is ideal. In a matter of 140 characters it is possible to remind customers of your company and direct them to your website.
An additional bonus of Twitter is the way in which it now connects to varying applications, we believe it has become a useful SEO tool and an excellent way of generating inbound links. In a future post I will share with you how I am now using Twitter to create at least 3 in bound links to my post whilst writing my post – through blogging I am creating in bound links using Twitter (without even logging into Twitter) which will help to further promote my blog and website.
So now you know what the tweet it’s all about don’t you think you should get tweeting?
Well I’ve been thinking about tweeting for some time and to be honest I’m still not entirely sure of its value to our business (though I do recognise that it can be almost invaluable to certain industries) and I will blog on this later, but for now I want to anounce our arrival on Twitter and let you in on a little secret – I have a plugin which should update my Twitter account (This is a test) meaning that as I blog I Twitter, hitting two social media tools in one go and generating links back and forth between blog and Twitter.
I’ll post soon on my experience of setting up Twitter and the plugin used for my blog. But got to do some more testing first.
So some of you may have heard that Microsoft is/has launched a new search engine, they claim it’s in order to catch Yahoo, the second most popular search engine online, but we all know Microsoft have always had Google in their targets but I think they are telling the truth and this is maybe a two tiered attack.
I’ve inserted an image for a quick look at bing or head over to www.bing.com
Now firstly where did they come up with the name Bing? Google is so well known that ‘to google’ has been included in dictionaries since 2006, so will we all be binging it in2019? I like to think that this search engine was dreamt up in a suburb in New York full of Italian-Americans and they said, “basically Big BG (Bill Gates) you hit search then bada-boom bada-BING – the results are shown” and this is how Bing was born, but really the name doesn’t matter, its what’s in the box that counts.
So first impressions: Appearance, when you open up bing.com your greeted with a beautiful picture of mountains and a lake, a tranquil image, it’s more interesting than the plain Google page we’re normally greeted with, and a lot less cluttered than the Yahoo home page with all its news. Now I’m not a Yahoo user, but I’m guessing that part of the reason users use Yahoo is for access to the news and for access to their e-mail etc, so has MS missed a trick here? I’m not sure that they will win Yahoo users over on appearance alone, though it is nicer than the standard Google page – but then I imagine most people now user iGoogle which is full of fun and if your a web developer like me then your iGoogle is very important! So the Bing appearance, I’m going to say it’s pretty and impressive on first impressions, but ummm why. But lets not get caught up on appearance there are more important things to consider like how it works!
Next up: How it work. Now I’ve read a couple of things on Bing, online and in the Times and the one major difference compared to all the other search engines is that the results are presented in three columns, the right is reserved for sponsored links (i.e. where the search engines make all their money) the centre column is reserved for the results, but in the left hand column there is something new, related searches, in an article I read it claimed that when someone searches, the search engine bing recognises what is being searched for an suggests related searches in the left hand column, the example was if someone searches for a Nikon camera, bing recognises that it is a camera and will also return search results in the left column for shops where you can buy the camera, user manuals, reviews and lots of other related results – however when I tried it and I searched for my camera which I bought some four months ago (Sony T77) my ‘related searches’ results returned umm nothing, so excellent concept, but does it really work? I’m not going to attack bing here, as in the UK we’re still playing with the beta version right now, as it is soon to be or has just been launched in the States with a $100 million advertising campaign. But since IE8 introduced the chrome favourite website thumbnail concepts I have been using bing quite a lot and have noticed that quite often when I search the left hand column is blank, but like I said, lets give them time and a chance. A very nice feature they seem to have introduced is a pop up box, when you hover just right of the results a preview box with the first couple of paragraphs of text appears to help you decide if the website is the right result without visiting it. I also understand that this feature will stream videos without you having to click on the video – a excellent concept, but will it actually work?
The most important part of a search engine: Results. This has been quite hard to assess really, how can I decide if the results returned by bing are better than Yahoo or Google? If I search for an obvious term, one such as the football team I support then I would expect the Clubs website to be the top result and it was, but it was interesting how they all presented the information. Google as we would expect delivered the ’site links’ – these are sublinks which enable the user to quickly reach a specific part of the website without going through the home page, they usually logically reflect the site navigation and thus the main sections of the website, Google also returned a search box which allowed me to search the club website using Google. Yahoo impressed me with its results (as I mentioned I’m not a Yahoo user) at the very top of the results was a box full of stats as well as a link to the website, these stats showed the league position, last match result top scorer and more. Just below this info box was the first real result which again was the club website and Yahoos take on ’site links’ but these were not as logical as Googles. Finally we reach the new Search Engine, Bing, and sadly it seemed to me that the concept was good but the delivery poor, Bing also presents us with site links but this time they were news story links a great concept, but sadly nearly all the news stories were old news, and I mean 7 months old, which in the world of sport is very old, so for me Bing comes out last in this test. To further supplement this test I wanted to search for something obscure but I couldn’t think of anything so decided to search for my own company to see how we perform, I’m pleased to say that on Google and Yahoo we were Number 1 as I’d expect, but on Bing we didn’t even make the top 100 which worries me for more than one reason. Just to be safe I then searched on Bing for my company using “” and we were 5th, though on this occasion I’m going to let Bing off as the other websites above us were all related to us, but this still worries me a little. Are these search results a simple teething problem? and lets not forget it has only just been launched here in the UK, but still it seems to come third out of three for me.
I guess the obvious questions are, is it better than Yahoo or Google? Will it return better results? and most importantly will it topple either of them? Following my personal test and in my opinion, the answer is NO, though the concept of Bing is great and there seems to be some fantastic ideas, unless they work then there is no point to them and it only frustrates me as a user. I must say though I am disappointed with Bing my first impressions of Bing were impressive, and I must admit, I am a Microsoft fan (well I’m not anti Microsoft) but I don’t see this really toppling Google, and I’m not even sure Yahoo will be concerned but if Bing can take second place in the Search Engine popularity stakes, then we will be paying much closer attention to it than we already are.
I’ve spoken about linking in previous posts, it’s in my top 5 SEO tips and I’ve spoken about the annoyance of spam, but the Internet is made up of links and it is essential. We all now that generating links to our website or blog will have a huge influence on traffic and search engine results and usually with my Web developer hat on I would recommend contacting customers and suppliers and anyone else you know with a business to see if you can get a link, though it is important that the website linking to yours is relevant (hence customers and suppliers) or you can look for businesses working in the same industry which can link to you, my ideal example is the wedding industry, it’s made up of so many different parts which don’t necessarily compete with each other. So assuming you’ve exhausted this route and have all the links your going to generate you turn to your blog and it can be a powerful tool.
One of the excellent things about a blog is the way in which it is structured means that it creates loads of internal links when you post, and it helps to create pages quickly almost everything you create on your blog, be it a post or category, or using the archive or calendar feature, they all help create unique pages so if you had enough material to blog daily you could create 365 posts, if these went into 30 categories was part of your monthly archive and you had a tag cloud active on your site well I’m sure it would generate nearly 500 pages! All of which will have an effect on your search engine rankings.
Having hundreds of internal links is great but how do you use the blog to generate incoming links? Well you need to get into the world of blogging, research bloggers in your industry or field, or even just blogs your interested in, take the time to read them and then comment on them, but only if you have something to say, I’m sure they will be interested in who commented on their blog and visit your blog, but by leaving a comment you have left a link back to your site. Hopefully by writing good relevant comments you will generate interest in your blog and bring readers in, but better still if they read your blog and like it they will recommend your blog to others and then the world of word of mouth marketing takes over. Think about it, if you could comment on a blog a week, that’s 52 blogs a year, now imagine they have a strong readership of say 100 each that’s 5200 people who will see your comment, not say only 10% of those people take an interest in your blog it’s 520 visitors, now what if half of those visitors went away and recommended your blog via their blog – that 260 in bound links plus your original 52 which is 312 links, not I know this is a lot of what ifs – but by being a proactive member of the blog community you can reap the benefits and contribute some value to it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read some of my favourite blogs and hopefully be able to make some comments on them
Well spam is annoying, or at least it used to be, back in the day before we had junk mail folders and learn’t not to hand out our e-mail addresses to every website we visited. But now I don’t have an issue with e-mail spam as it rarely makes it past my defences – in fact there’s more chance of an e-mail I want to receive being found in my junk mail until I mark it as safe.
BUT unfortunately Spam has found a new way to annoy me, on my blog. I have recently come under attack from what I understand to be ‘Spam Bots’ these pesky pieces of code search out blogs and post comments on their posts generating links back to their blog. Now some of these have been good enough to fool me, some I have allowed as the blog I’m linking to is ok in my eyes, but below is an example of a comment I had from a blog entitled – how I lost 30 pounds.
I was just now searching around about this when I came upon your blog post. I’m simply visiting to say that I truly enjoyed reading this post, it’s very clear and well written. Are you thinking of posting more about this? It looks like there’s more material here for future posts.
Now it actualy seems like quite a genuine post until you see the post it related to and if you don’t believe be here’s a link to the actual post! (click here)
So I’ve signed up to technorati and am in the process of ‘claiming’ my blog, I need to verify that I own the blog by including the below hyperlink. I’ll fill you in on technorati later though as I’m busy verifying!
Now how relevant does the comment seem?
And what’s even more annoying about this is that I downloaded and installed a plugin to protect against spam (invisible defender) which doesn’t seem to be be doing anything, or maybe I’m mistaken and these are genuine comments, if so I hope they continue but we’ll have to wait and see.
The only sure fire way I have of avoiding the success of spam bots is to monitor your comments and ensure that they are only published when you approve them, after all links to websites or blogs with a negative score in the eyes of Search engines can actually have a negative effect on your own blog!
and what isn’t?
