Copyright © 2010 David Horth 2010-03-16T12:39:27+0000 2010-03-16T12:39:27+0000 http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. http://www.i-com.net/blog/ http://i-com.net/images/icom-net.gif http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. I-COM International blogmaster at i-com dot net David Horth David Horth en SEO, SEM, Web Design, Web Development 1440 http://www.i-com.net/blog/no-more-mail-shots-32/ When I first started at I-COM, one area that I was keen to develop was that of putting on seminars, where I could channel all of the internet marketing knowledge that I-COM has in house and bathe the local business audience with it, all in one compact, coffee-fuelled morning. One thing that really surprised me was the number of delegates that registered from our online marketing activity as opposed to the scarcity of delegates responding to our large and quite costly traditional mail shot campaigns. So what did we do? Well, we sent out keyword-rich press releases online to over 2000 news feeds which then picked up the story. These sites then feed to many other sites across the web and many of these news sites have subscribers that want information on specific topics. I personally have several alerts set up in Google, and each day I receive an email outlining stories that contain my keywords it appears that plenty of other people do too! We identified some useful web sites on which to advertise and these also drove some good traffic to our events page where some of those visitors went on to register for our seminar. Our CRM database system was also called into action. This database contains many prospects, and many of them have email addresses; so coupled with the online PR activity, we have sent out a simple e-newsletter to everyone on our system giving them details about our seminars. This takes less time than it takes to fold and pack only a handful of letters and it filled our June seminar and brought registrations for the July seminar as well! Just to give you an idea of the difference in value between traditional, offline marketing and our internet marketing efforts our seminars are based on 50 delegates. After taking out staff time from the costing, traditional methods cost us around 100 per delegate which means it cost 5000 to fill the room. Online marketing, however, gave us each delegate for 0.16, which is a massive saving in anyones book! So, one seminar now fully booked, and not a postman in sight! Internet Marketing 2008-06-18 09:28:39 http://www.i-com.net/blog/no-more-mail-shots-32/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/ethical-seo-why-bother-21/ 8 years ago, when I first got into the web industry, it was hard-going to convince business owners that they really needed websites. Today my challenge is not convincing people that they need a website. In fact, its quite refreshing to hear business owners telling me what their sites need to have: news pages, more content pages, case studies and even blogs. These days, its all about driving traffic to these websites. More and more people are now searching via the internet for products, services, advice - the list goes on and on - and these same companies now want to attract these searchers to their websites. This is where good, ethical SEO work becomes vital! We are now finding that the companies who have the best search engine results work on their sites on a regular basis. By regular I mean weekly, adding more pages, more content, news stories and blog entries. They also work hard to obtain quality inbound links from other sites. These links are incredibly important as they are effectively votes from other sites for your website that will do 2 things: 1) drive human traffic; and 2) allow Google to measure the popularity of your site when presenting the searchers with results - the more votes the better. The overall importance of ethical SEO work is paramount in online marketing the hard work being put into your site on a regular basis really does bring results! Search Engine Optimisation 2008-05-29 14:35:11 http://www.i-com.net/blog/ethical-seo-why-bother-21/