Successful email marketing depends on building trust with your audience; abuse that trust and your email transforms into spam.

I was involved in a situation this week where it was suggested that email marketing addresses had been shared between organisations. Sharing data is bad practice, and potentially a breach of the Data Protection Act.

Fortunately, we had clear records to show that no sharing had taken place. Nerves were jangled and tempers were fraying, but in the end we were on safe ground.

So, remember to keep a clear audit trail of the permissions you receive from your email readers.

On my own website, subscribers to my email newsletter Double Opt-In (meaning they get a confirmation email message asking them to click just one more time to finally confirm their subscription.) The email marketing service I use keeps the proof of that Opt-in.

I’d also recommend using a customer relationship management system that keeps track of how you met people and why you added their email address to your database.

If you want to read more about email marketing, then take a look at my email marketing resources.

If you are interested in search marketing, which blogs should you be reading?

What other people are reading might be a good signpost, so take a look at Top Rank’s listing of the most popular search marketing blogs as measured by Feedburner’s RSS feed with subscriber information.

Sadly, my own blog doesn’t rank up there, but you might like to take a look at:

• John Batelle’s Searchblog (67,450 readers)
• Search Engine Watch (23,294 readers)

So much to read, so little time!

A recent research report from ScanSafe warns that up to 80% of blogs contain offensive content.
The risks range from adult language to pornographic images; and up to 6% of blogs contain malware and other unwanted content.

The risk to small businesses, of course, is that your members of staff could be visiting these sites and exposing your business to viruses, or loss of sensitive business information.

More importantly, you need to ensure your business has the proper safeguards in place to ensure your staff members aren’t contributing to this wave of offensive material using your own business resources.

Read the full ScanSafe Global Threat Report (PDF)

Nottingham based Experian has acquired Internet marketing intelligence company Hitwise. Hitwise collects and aggregates data about how consumers use and search the Internet.

Take a look at the type of reports Hitwise is able to produce about people’s online behaviour:

In this example, Hitwise is reporting on the Travel sector for the period ending March 2007:

Not many of our small businesses can afford this kind of data, but from time to time Hitwise produces a freely-available report which can provide us with invaluable information:

This acquisition strengthens Experian’s offering for it’s clients who are switching their advertising pounds into online ads and the Internet:

Google may command a whopping 78% market share of searches in the UK, but there many other search engines that are superior to Google for specific searching tasks.

Charles Knight has produced a guide to the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines and I tried out some of his recommendations.

ChaCha is a search engine that has a real person waiting there to help you out (I guess they used to be called librarians…) I gave my personal guide Marna the task of finding out driving license requirements in Ireland. The ChaCha gave the search results, and then Marna very helpfully hand-selected two results which were perfect for my needs. Wonderful!

If you haven’t played with Ms Dewey then you’ve missed a treat. She’s tough and sassy and a unique search partner.

My favourite meta search engine is Ixquick – it searches across multiple search engines simultaneously and shows you the relative rankings for your team in each engine.

Charles Knight will be updating his list of search engines regularly, so well worth keeping an eye on those developments.

Google Checkout has arrived in the UK – and it is offering it’s Google Adwords Advertisers free credit card processing until 2008.

Even if you don’t advertise with Adwords, then you can still use Google Checkout to process your sales, and you will only be charged a low 1.5% + £0.15 per transaction. With Google Checkout, there are no monthly, setup or gateway service fees, and Google Checkout will not charge you to transfer funds from your Checkout account to your bank.

If you don’t have a shopping cart on your site yet, the Google has a simple way to use a Buy It Now function like PayPal.

I’ve set my Google Checkout account up to let you buy a place on my new Advanced Search Engine Optimisation workshop

Date: 12th April 2007

Time: 13:30 – 16:30

Creative Launchpad, the business development service for the creative industries, will be running a free informative half-day training seminar designed to give you the tools and techniques necessary to develop an effective Internet marketing strategy. Taking place on:

Thursday, 12 April, 1:30 – 4:30pm

Voicebox, Kensington Mews, Forman Street, Derby, DE1 1JQ

Internet Marketing on a Shoestring is where you’ll learn about simple and low cost Internet promotional techniques.

This seminar isn’t a beginner’s guide to the Internet. We assume you already have a website, or you have a website in development.

And now you’re looking to fine-tune your marketing strategy so you can make your website work harder and give you better results.

At the end of this seminar you will go away with a collection of tried and tested techniques, and an action plan which you can immediately apply to your own creative business. The training seminar will provide you with:

• The secrets of how to get your website found in Google and on the top listing

• An action plan to give your website a “health check”
• More information about email marketing, blogging and other online marketing techniques

This workshop will be lead by Susan Hallam of Hallam Communications.  Susan is a well known consultant in the world of Internet marketing.  She’s a lively and informative speaker, and consistently receives high praise for her entertaining and knowledgeable presentations.  Don’t miss Susan’s talk, and your chance to learn more about low cost Internet marketing.

This seminar is funded by the Learning and Skills Council, European Social Fund and the Derby and Derbyshire Economic Partnership and is therefore FREE. There is however an eligibility criteria, for more information or to book a free place please contact Cheryl Gill on 0115 950 3730 or c.gill@creativelaunchpad.co.uk

Back to events

“Mashups” a great word – it is simply a web page that combines content from different websites or applications. Google have just announced an amazing little tool that lets you create a mashup that combines your company data with Google Maps.

I spent a quick half hour creating a mashup demonstrating a number of places where Abacus Lighting Ltd have installed lighting solutions. It’s an effective sales tool to show clients where your projects are, whether it be here in Nottingham, in the UK, or indeed internationally.

Here’s a snapshot, or you can click directly through to my example of an Abacus mashup

You can include commentary, photographs, and most importantly links that help users to better understand your map (and indeed, to help the spiders understand your content.)

With a bit of imagination, content like this is valuable to virtually every business.

Danny Sullivan in SearchEngine Land has a useful discussion of the other mapping mashup tools that you might want to investigate.

Announcing a new Advanced Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Training Course to be held Tuesday, 15 May 2007 at Regus House, near the East Midlands Airport.

The course is suitable for folk who already know the basics of search engine optimisation and want to know more; it is also particularly suitable for web designers who want to get up to speed with latest developments in SEO.

A number of Online Marketing Web Academy delegates have asked me for a “next steps” search engine marketing course in order to further improve their SEO skills.

It’s going to be a really good day:

• Update: what is new in search engine marketing
• Advanced Search Engine Optimisation Strategies
• Innovative techniques for building inbound links
• What about purchasing inbound links
• Jump starting poorly ranking websites
• Practical new keyword analysis tools and techniques
• Do not be afraid of Latent Semantic Indexing
• Latest Google Webmaster Central developments
• Exploiting Web 2.0 and new media marketing
• How to use Blogging as an SEO tool
• Localisation and getting found in Local Search
• Techniques for increasing conversions rates and sales
• Staying out of trouble with search engine
• Pay Per Click and Bid management tools

Download the Advanced SEO course flyer

It’s been a busy couple months, with a few items worth celebrating:

I’ve been appointed to the board of the East Midlands International Trade Association (emita) which helps East Midlands businesses to trade in the global marketplace. All credit to Costa at emita for recognising the importance of Internet marketing as part of any business export strategy.

Internet World takes place in London from 1-3 May. It’s free, and if you’re there come and see me speak in the Revolution Zone: “Can You Spot These Top 10 Online PR Mistakes.”

Need eBay training? I’ve just been successfully accredited as an eBay Education Specialist. I don’t work for eBay, I’m not affiliated with eBay, but they consider me a safe pair of hands for delivering their training.

I’ll be speaking about Blogging and Search Engine Optimisation at the Women, Business and Blogging conference

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