Has your business grasped the nettle, and have you introduced new ebusiness technologies?

Are you willing to brag about how it has improved your business in just 1000 words or less?

Then enter your business into the East Midlands eBusiness Awards and take a shot at winning the grand prize of £15,000.

There are £5,000 awards for the winning businesses in each of 5 categories, with the grand winner getting a further £10,000.

The deadline for entries is 19 January 2007, so get applying, and good luck!

There are many benefits to blogging: keeping in touch with your client base, creating fresh content for your website, raising your company’s visibility in the search engines, raising your own corporate profile.

But how about making money from your blog? The buzzword is “monetising.”

Placing Google AdSense advertising on your blog has been one source of revenue for quite a while now. People click on the ads, you get the money.

Here’s another way to make money from your blog: paid for reviews.

I’ve registered my blog with ReviewMe and advertisers can buy a review on my blog, essentially paying cash for my esteemed opinion of their product or service. And of course, they’re also buying a valuable link from my website.

You can use the ReviewMe service either to buy links to your own site, or to sell links and earn a little extra money.

Now, I know you don’t want to be deluged with advertorial, but if e-marketing trends interest you, then you will want to read the Advertisement:

Basiclink.com, a web hosting company in San Diego, are trialling a marketing campaign where they are offering 11 lucky customers 50% off the price of their Shopsite Pro E-Commerce Hosting on Monday, 11 December at 11:00.

This promotion is capitalising on Amazon’s latest marketing campaign Vote for Deal where customers can vote for one of four cheap deals on offer. The deal with the most votes wins, and a few randomly selected folk who were lucky enough to vote for the winning deal are then sent a claim code to purchase the deal.

Basiclink.com are introducing this B2C concept to the B2B marketplace, and they claim to be leading on a trend that may set the tone for future business promotions.

What’s also interesting is that Basiclink.com are a local player, serving specifically the San Diego small business community. They’re using international e-marketing techniques to target their niche market. It’s a multi-pronged campaign; they pushed out online press releases, purchased inbound links from blogs, promoting the offering on their website, and I’m sure they’ve got email marketing in the mix.

So there’s an example of small business marketing lessons to be learnt from our SME cousins on the other side of the pond.

Date: 29th November 2006

Time: 17:30

A free Nottingham International Trade Network event at Nottingham Forest Football Ground.

• What should you be doing now to improve your international online
sales? What should you be planning for next?

• What steps are small businesses taking to maximise their international
e-commerce success?

• How can you get an edge, get ahead, and ride the e-commerce wave?

If you want to learn more about international e-commerce, then don’t
miss this overview of what’s here now, what’s coming, and how
your business can benefit from both.

Susan Hallam of Hallam Communications is a well-known consultant in the world of the Internet. She’s a lively and informative speaker, and consistently receives high marks for her entertaining and knowledgeable presentations.

Don’t miss Susan’s talk, and your chance to get the edge on latest international e-commerce ideas.
Join us – share your concerns or experience – there will be plenty of time
for your questions and answers:

* Legal issues * VAT issues * Pricing * Shopping Carts
* Payments * Localisation * International Marketing
* B2B * B2C * Sources of Information

As with all NITN events, this meeting is FREE OF CHARGE and includes
an excellent buffet.

To register, please visit our website: www.nitn.org.uk

Getting inbound links from other websites should be part of your web marketing strategy.

Particularly getting high quality, relevant links.

If you need to boost your linking activity, then you should consider Text Link Ads. Text Link Ads is a marketplace where you can buy links off a publisher’s website.

The benefits of Text Link Ads:

• you can choose from thousands of quality, niche publishers
• you choose the precise sites where your text links will appear
• you define the anchor text used to link to your site
• the links that are created are static html

And best of all, Text Link Ads are offering $100 in FREE Links based on a $125 purchase – meaning you need to spend about £15 to try out the service for a month.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes.

I’ve built my own bespoke Google search engine tailored to search only those sites that I think have great Internet marketing content.

Give it a try – if you need some ideas, why not search for Inbound linking or Social bookmarking or PageRank

It’s all part of the new Google Co-op service which enables you to build your own custom search engine. It’s really easy to set your own custom search engine up, and if you want to suggest other sources to include in my search engine, then go right ahead.

So, if you’ve always dreamed of a search engine just for plastic injection moulding, Ilkeston, or Star Wars, then here’s a great tool for you to try out.

(… and please, go right ahead and click on those Google AdSense links to help pay for some Chrissy pressies for my kiddiwinks…)

Continuous improvement is an essential part of your web marketing strategy.

How could you improve your web design? How can you improve the user experience?

I’ve just discovered a quick and easy automated website review service. It gives feedback covering:

• marketing
• design
• accessibility
• experience

and a review of where you rank for what it perceives to be your key phrases.

I only get a measly 8.4 out of 10, and I think they’re trying to sell their own web marketing services. It’s a very useful little tool, but could I suggest you take it all with a large pinch of salt!

Looks like another Google PageRank update is underway.

Here’s a screen shot showing the update taking place on my own site, moving the my PageRank up from 4 to 5 across the many Google Data Centres (DC):

You can check your changing Page Rank at a number of places:

Live PageRank Checker

PageRank Checker Tool

Remember, PageRank isn’t really an indicator of where your site is positioned in Google’s search engine results. It’s just one measure of the importance Google places on your site.

For those of you using Pay Per Click advertising as part of your online marketing mix, here is some required reading.

Take a look at Business Week magazine’s cover story on Click Fraud (hint: the “Print Friendly” version gets rid of all the annoying advertising)

For the more visually-inclined amongst you, Business Week have also published an interesting click fraud slideshow illustrating how the scams and deceptions works.

But if you want to rest your weary eyes, then listen to Business Week’s clickfraud podcast interview with the journalists who wrote the story.

Do you click on Google’s AdWords advertising, or do you ignore the ads?

I ignore the ads. And Google knows I ignore the ads based on my browsing history.

Google appear to be experimenting with the positioning of its Google AdWords advertisements based on your personal ad-clicking history. They know your propensity to click, of course, through cookies or even through your Google personalised account.

If you’re not a clicker, then they are not displaying the ads at the top of the screen, but moving them to the panel on the right.

One explanation might be that users will be better served if ads are not pushed at them that they just don’t want. Another explanation is that we’re getting blind to the ads, and a bit of variety might spice things up.

I did an experiment: I searched for “solicitors Nottingham” using a computer without any cookies on it (so they didn’t know who I am) and then repeated the search logged onto my own personal Google account.

The assumption is a “stranger” might click on ads, but Google knows for a fact that Susan never does.

The “stranger” receives the blue sponsored ads horizontally at the top of the search results.

Non-clicking-Susan receives all the ads in the vertical panel on the right.

“Stranger” results:

The identical search, this time logged on as “Susan the non-clicker”’s ; note there aren’t any horizontal AdWords across the top of the results, and even the top ads are over on the right

So, if you’re advertising on Google AdWords, what might this mean to your campaign? Fewer clicks? Fewer, better clicks?

Watch this space….

Date: 18th September 2006

Time: Afternoon

The SfEP Conference will take place at the Jubilee Campus of the University of Nottingham on Monday, 18 September 2006.

Successful Email Marketing

Great email marketing is not just about promoting and selling. It’s about building trust and loyalty, and developing long term profitable relationships with your customers.

Email marketing may be a low cost solution, but if it’s not done right then your efforts will flounder and your well-intentioned plans may backfire.

This presentation will cover the basics of successful email marketing and provide you with practical examples of successful campaigns.

Presentation Content

• How to plan for a successful email marketing campaign
• Email marketing and spam: ensuring your messages are well received and not harassment
• How to craft an email masterpiece
• What to expect: costs, what response to expect, tracking results, testing your campaign
• How to find prospective customers, how to rent third party lists, and how to build and maintain your own in-house lists
• Other ways to conduct email marketing

Learn more about the conference at the SfEP website.