November 2nd, 2010 by The Online Marketeer

As part of a direct mail campaign we now have our hot sauce production in full swing. The process of applying the custom designed labels is a lengthy task but it should hopefully be worth it, boosting our local presence.

September 17th, 2010 by The Online Marketeer

Voodoochilli Design Ltd as a company has never needed to advertise. We are very lucky in the sense that the majority of our new clients are referrals from previous clients. This has to be the best single way of getting new work – people telling other people how good you are at what you do. However, even we have a seasonal dip with considerably less work in the winter months than in the summer. Anyway, we have decided to launch a direct mail campaign over the next few months and so far things are looking great.

Our intention is to send out jars of chilli sauce to existing clients who have been good to us as well as potential clients we would like to work for. All in all this kind of marketing is about brand reinforcement – we hope to show that we are an exciting company doing interesting things. We have the first roughs for you see see below – we have chosen to go in the direction of the first, grey one as we feel this best represents the image of the company.

Chilli sauce label 1 - our chosen design. It needs a few tweaks and proof reading before proceeding.

Chilli sauce label 2 - rejected idea in favour of label 1.

direct mail, offline

August 18th, 2010 by The Online Marketeer

As mentioned in our last post, cleaner HTML markup can improve a website’s page rank. It does this by making the page more efficient, using less code to do the same thing. Not only does this increase page load performance which is a factor used in page ranking, it also gives more emphasis to your content. Additionally, search engines give priority to the content located at the top of your page and removing unnecessary clutter can help do this. Below I have listed some easy ways to improve the code on your website. If you are not a web designer or developer, you can view your code by visiting your website in your web browser and viewing the page source.

Use CSS and avoid font tags
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are no longer a new thing and are used by nearly all decent web designers these days. This allows you to separate content and style, enabling search engines to focus on the content rather than the appearance of your website. Essentially all of the markup that tell the browser how a web page should look is stored in a separate file. This is standard practise but was not always the case. If your site contains lots of font tags, it might be worth getting in touch with a web developer to update your sites code.

Avoid tables for layout
Before the days of CSS, and even after them many designers relied on HTML tables for layout purposes. Frankly, web browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 simply could not handle CSS correctly. However with IE 6 officially dead and all web browsers supporting CSS in most part, it is time to stop using tables for layout. They still have their place, and a table would be well suited on a page showing tabular data, for example a chart or list of some kind. Tables are clunky and use up a lot of space in your sites html with newer CSS methods being far more efficient.

Alt tags and Title attributes
Even many non web professionals know about alt tags on images, an essential part of naming an image that is often used in SEO practises, but how many know about Alt’s little brother the Title attribute? Title attribute can be placed on links to give relevance to the link, an technique also used by SEO specialists. Here is an example:

A standard link:

<a href="”products.php”"></a>

A link with the title attribute, giving emphasis to a product which you want to promote, in our example “London Canvases”:

<a title="”London Canvases" href="”products.php”"></a>

Get your HTML and CSS validated
Having valid html (and possibly CSS) can only be a good thing for search engine positioning. Correctly formatted code is obviously going to be better interpreted by a search engine crawler than code which is invalid and buggy. Run your site though the WC3 validator website and if the errors it spits out are confusing, consider hiring a web developer to tweak the code. Typically this should only take at most an hour per page, less if the site is built in a way that allows it to be updated en masse (for example using server side includes)

css, google, html, links, seo, web development

August 17th, 2010 by The Online Marketeer

1. Google AdWords
This is the fastest but also one of the more expensive methods in our list of getting exposure to your website. However, a relatively small budget can bring in that immediate boost of traffic that is sometimes needed. Especially recommended for very new sites or companies that have a seasonal dip in trading.

2. Advertise on Facebook
Advertising on Facebook is a very powerful way of gaining exposure to a very specific target audience. You can choose an age range, educational background, even gender target adverts. Choosing to pay by impressions (CPM) however can become very expensive so make sure you pay for the number of actual visits (CPC).

3. Hire an SEO Expert
Hiring an SEO Expert is a very costly, however very effective long term strategy. Although some gains will become permanent SEO is a long term venture and real progress is gain over a period of time and assessment. Our own company offers SEO services at a very competitive rate.

4. Hire a Web Developer
SEO specialists are typically more expensive than general run of the mill web developers. A good developer will be able to optimise your code increasing the sites effectiveness with search engines such as Google. Badly formatted code will actually damage your sites ranking. We also offer this kind of service at competitive rates so check out our site.

5. Improve your content
As the saying goes, content is king. Having relevant, natural sounding keyword rich content that is useful to your visitors will increase traffic. Not only will the now very clever search engines appreciate this better content, your visitors may come back for more as well as act as word of mouth promoters for your site.

6. Get a better web host
The very best search engines such as Google now measure a websites performance and factor this into their ranking algorithms. Having a page that loads fast will increase your ranking.  As mentioned above, hiring a web developer would help with this also. We offer business level hosting.

7. Register with DMOZ.org
Putting your site in the Open Directory Project may well take some time, sometimes several months but it is worth the wait. Try to get your site into several categories if possible, bearing in mind that submissions are reviewed by different volunteers. Try to make your submission as natural as possible, without boasting to ensure you get added. Use this method as a long term strategy to boost your overall traffic levels.

8. Exchange links
Exchanging links with other relevant sites should already be part of your overall marketing strategy. Ideally, you want to get links from people that will give you more traffic than you will give them in exchange. If you have a website that gets say 100 visitors per day, swapping links with a larger site that gets 1000 visitors per day can only improve things for you.

9. Advertise in the paper
Yes, I know this is off-line promotion but it is very often overlooked. Although costly, advertising in your local paper or magazine will bring in a small amount of traffic, but more importantly it will build your company’s image, reinforcing it’s brand. This is a long term strategy and should be done over a number of months for it to be truly effective.

10. Advertise with niche websites.
Approaching a small to medium sized website that offers a specific market to advertise to will be a very effective way of targeting your customers. Essentially you will get more bang for your buck as the advertising is going to appeal to a larger proportion of the people viewing it, and people that click on your ads are much more likely to purchase from you. One such example is on a project of ours, an online portfolio for artist, http://www.voodoochilli.net/ads/

content, dmoz, facebook, google, hosting, links, lists, online marketing, seo, web development