I’ve had a rather stressful day sorting out a number of less-than-pleasant issues arising from marketing on the Internet.

The first of these concerns folk lifting content from this blog and publishing on their own websites. (You know who you are. And I know who you are.)

I knew this blog was good, but I didn’t realise it was good enough to plagiarise (or scrape, or steal)

I had received an e-newsletter that contained an article that looked suspiciously familiar. Upon closer examination, I found it was a cut-and-paste lifting of one of my articles from my blog.

My curiosity piqued, I searched Google to find if any other sites were re-using my article. All you need to do is select some copy, put it inside inverted commas, and Google searches for your text.

And to my surprise, I found 3 more sites, all happily using my text as their own.

What to do?

I just dropped each website owner a message, saying they were welcome to use my article but that they needed to attribute it to me with a link to my website.

And to my delight, I now how 3 new inbound links. A great contribution to my SEO strategy.

The moral of the story? Keep an eye out for your valuable Internet content. And remember that, like me, you probably don’t have the resources or inclination to fight a legal battle. My grandma always said “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” – and the polite request for attribution worked just fine.

This time, at least….

Date: 26th January 2007

Time: 09:00 – 16:30

Day 1: Monday 3 December 2007
Day 2: Monday 10 December 2007
Day 3: Monday 17 December 2007

This 3 day course has been designed to help you harness the marketing potential of the Internet. This course focuses on quality, and you will be part of a small group being taught to be a leading online marketing expert. Individual attention from your course leader, sharing experiences with other businesses, and detailed course materials all contribute to a successful learning experience. You will also have access to a computer, giving you the opportunity to explore the issues we will be discussing.

The programme is designed to:

• Increase your knowledge of Internet marketing
• Provide you with the practical skills you need to make informed decisions about budgets, strategies and campaigns

Companies that are:

• Wishing to maximise their use of Internet marketing
• Wanting to see their website from a customers perspective
• Aiming to heighten their appreciation of visitor perception and site usability

The workshop is aimed at business owners, managers or marketing professionals responsible for their company’s website.

This opportunity is strictly limited to small and medium sized businesses located in the East Midlands region.

“Non- attendance: The cost per delegate to attend a Web Academy course is in the region of £500 and demand for places is extremely high. We reserve the right to charge your company an administration fee of £100 + VAT should you fail to attend the first day of the course. As funding for fully subsidized places is limited you must be committed to attending all three days.

Wordtracker have announced the launch of a UK version of their popular keyword research database. The new service will be launched at the SES conference in London on 13-15 Feb.

Keyword research is an essential first step in developing your plan to improve your website’s rankings in the search engines.

The lack of UK specific data has been a significant weakness for Wordtracker, and this development means they should be able to capture a significant part of the UK keyword research market.

Wordtracker costs from UK 4.20 per day up to 140.00 for an annual subscription.

Other keyword research tools for the UK specific research:

Keyword Discovery which costs US70 per month, or US600 per year
Yahoo Search Marketing’s Keyword Assistant which is free

It’s always made sense to put your company details on your website and on your emails – but now it’s the law.

If you’re a company in the UK then you need to update both your website and your email signature files now, or you will breach the Companies Act and risk a fine.

The First Company Law Amendment Directive came in on 1 January 2007, and you’re now required to put the following information on both your website and business emails:

• your company registration number
• place of registration (such as England and Wales)
• registered office address.

In addition, on your website you also need to include:

• Your company name, postal address and company email address
• The name of any trade bodies or professional associations that the business is part of, including membership or registration details.
• Your VAT number, even if the website is not being used for e-commerce transactions.
• Any prices on the website must clearly state whether they are inclusive or exclusive of tax and delivery costs .

All of this information only needs to be on your website once, for instance on your Contact Us page, or your Terms and Conditions.

OutLaw.com has a very useful article giving you the information you need.

A number of new resources have been added to our Internet marketing library:

• Email marketing checklist: avoiding those email marketing disasters
• Tackling email marketing: Summary of Susan’s email marketing presentation at SfEP 2006
• Google eyed: Just how do you get your company name on the first page of the search engines?
• Hallam appointed by ArtsDerbyshire.org.uk to develop Internet marketing strategy

There’s a new publicity photo of Susan Hallam

Some of you have been asking me why it is not possible to submit your website to one of the most important of all the Internet directories, DMOZ.

It’s been frustrating that the service has been unavailable since late October.

Poor old DMOZ’s servers crashed, and they found themselves in the embarrassing position of not having a backup of their data…. Ooops…

Using sources that mirrored their data (such as Google,) DMOZ have been slowly rebuilding their database. Editors have been working on trying to recreate and clean up data.

But here’s the most important fact for some of you: if you had submitted your site and it was awaiting approval in the queue, then your queued entry has been lost. You need to resubmit to DMOZ.