Young Enterprise starts again

First Young Enterprise session of the year yesterday at King Edward VI College in Stourbridge.

Brand new group just starting to think about company names and product ideas.

They have already cottoned on to the fact that the primary markets they can focus on are a/ the other students and b/ the families of the other students.

Good start.


Gareth Edwards
Arrowsmith Marketing





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Arrowsmith Marketing Ltd., Stourbridge, UK

Will Google Webmaster Tools Allow Geo targeting for this blog

Just to test things out I have put GWT in the template of the Airtime for Arrowsmith blogs and set the target country as the United Kingdom.

The intention is to ensure that the blog posts are more visible in UK only searches on Google.  I will keep you posted as to the impact of the change.

Gareth

Gareth Edwards
Arrowsmith Marketing





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Arrowsmith Marketing Ltd., Stourbridge, UK

Latest B2B Centre "Web Workshop" - Latest Ever!

James Pennington and I conducted a Web Workshop on Wednesday for a hardy group of volunteers.

Little did we (or they know) that this would be a marathon session with the winner of the endurance challenge hanging on until 5.45 (well done Andy of Vivo Telecommunications).

There is a serious message here though, because our attendees (with no small amount of understanding of business, websites and social media) between them) were surprised about exactly how much there was to say on all of the topics we covered.  And we really only gave a high level overview.

What this means is that although you can "do it yourself" it is really important to understand exactly how much time and effort is required to do things properly.  It is a really good idea to put a monetary value to your time (start at £10 per hour and work upwards) so that you make some comparison between the effort you are putting in and the cost of getting someone else to do it.  Or between the cost of say, blogging, and perhaps simply picking the phone up.

Sessions like this one help people to understand exactly why what looked like an exorbitant quote from a web developer now looks tremendous value for money.

Gareth Edwards
Arrowsmith Marketing
Stourbridge, West Midlands, UK





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Put Webmaster Tools in Blogger

A few exchanges between B2B Colleagues prompted us to realise that it is a good idea to add Google Webmaster Tools so that you can target geographic users: in my case I want to focus on the UK.

It is easy to add the appropriate code from webmasters into the template of a Blogger blog. Go to layout and then choose edit html. Insert the code just after the <> tag.

After you have verified the site choose site configuration from the left hand menu and the click the settings link. You can then select the appropriate country from the drop down menu.

Gareth

With thanks to James Pennington (H1) of the National B2B Centre

Gareth Edwards
Arrowsmith Marketing





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Compulsory online VAT returns

My client Lewis Smith & Co. (accountants for Dudley and the Black Country) are advising that the process to make on-line VAT returns and payments obligatory starts next year.

And I quite liked doing it on paper.


Gareth Edwards
Arrowsmith Marketing





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Use Google Analytics to help SEO

In a recently article for the National B2B Centre (Google Analytics - First Time Through) I highlighted the top 5 or 6 reports I look at when reviewing Analytics for people.

If I was trying to prioritise that list then in fact I would choose the keywords report as number 1, especially for clients who are just starting out in understanding how their website is working and beginning to make their own changes.

The keywords report will tell you exactly what words and phrases visitors have typed into a search engine to get to your site (or blog). So you get to find out exactly how people are thinking about you or your products when they do a search.

SoOme of my clients are a bit disappointed when they see that a lot of searches include their company name. I usually suggest that they turn that thought round and consider the possibility that their company or brand name is strong enough for people just to type that in.

Other times people are disappointed when people search on "simpler versions" of a product name than they have used on their website (e.g. "thermometers" rather than "temperature monitoring equipment"). This is an example of having to understand the language that your customers use to describe products, services, processes, places etc. Use this feedback to modify the way your site is optimised and maybe even modify your sales processes.

Finally people get drawn, naturally, to the keywords that have generated the highest number of visits. Well don't ignore the smaller numbers.

• Firstly use the filter field at the bottom of the report to aggregate searches that include important words and synonyms, for instance "Thermometer|Temperature gauge|Celsius". The report that follows will show you all the searches that include those words and suddenly you may see a substantial amount of visits from all sorts of variations of these search terms. Most people find some real surprises when they do this and it can impact the way that you think about your business.
• Secondly have a look at some of the search terms that have generated a small number of visits (but which are relevant) and do a search on them. If your site isn't ranked in say the top 3 pages of the search engine results then consider what effort people have made to actually visit your site. If your site isn't optimised for the keyword already then "make it so" because it is likely that your site gets more visible for the term you will generate additional traffic.

Gareth



Gareth Edwards
Arrowsmith Marketing





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National B2B Centre. eBusiness Conference 2009. The truth.

We had an excellent National B2B Centre conference on the 17th September.

It was easier to prepare for this year because lots of things were already in place - that didn't mean that we weren't under some pressure to make sure that it went well on the day. It didn't help that I forgot that I had prepared a speaker overview document so we had to repack the conference folders.

There was a last minute issue over one of the room bookings, which didn't help, and trying to decide how much food and drink to order was a pain. At one stage Warwick Catering wanted to provide us with 45 litres of OJ (about a barrel) in addition to the vats of coffee and bottles of water.

The A45 did us again. There were loads of tail backs, then the free car park got full. All of this meant we started late.

However once things got going it was great. Martin King-Turner is very good compere for these events and he kept the theme of moving from eCommerce to eBusiness at the front of people's minds. The speakers all did what we had hoped for, with Susan Hallam hitting the spot for many people.

The highlight for me was the way the B2B Centre team worked. Everybody did pretty much the right thing all day with the minimum of fuss - I remember mentioning roles to people in passing but not in much detail. Our new Project Administrator, Marie Greene, was very assured in dealing with the ummm eccentricities of some of the audience, with some expert help from our former Project Administrator Steph Williams who kindly supported us for the day (sadly not the right day lol). Mark Bonnett made a fine maitre'd, although some delegates didn't recognise him because he had shaved specially for the event. Rayhan Abdulmughnee hasn't heard the Sade song "smooth operator" but it should be his theme tune - his networking skills are becoming legendary. James Pennington stuck all of the bits of wire together to make sure that we had sound and pictures (as well as finishing his presentation off during the first speaker slot). And Steve Orriss? Well considering he doesn't like the accolade of B2B Centre guru, he had 50+ people hanging on his every word. He'll probably tweet about it.

In the end there were over 170 delegates. The B2B Centre is now taking advanced bookings for eBusiness 2010 - I shall volunteer someone else to sort it out next time.

Gareth

Gareth Edwards
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B2B Centre #ebiz09 hash tag

National B2B Centre are using Twitter as an information distribution tool for the upcoming eBusiness Conference 2009: Finding and Keeping Profitable Customers.

We have set up #ebiz09 as the conference "hash tag". Anybody who Tweets about the event (including the B2B Centre) can add the tag to their post which makes it easy to search for. If you save your search then Twitter lets you know if new Tweets have appeared with this tag.

Convenient way to talk about conference topics.

Gareth Edwards
Arrowsmith Marketing





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New B2B Centre article "Google Analytics - First Time Through"

Just completed an article for the National B2B Centre entitled "Google Analytics - The First Time Through" to try and help out new users of Analytics to pick out some of the important pieces of informations and makes sense of what they mean.

There is so much there that it can be confusing. No claims that this is necessarily the best approach but at least it is an approach.

Gareth

Gareth Edwards
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Gillian Wesley on YouTube

Gillian Wesley Designs showing off a great reuse of content (in the form of photos) for this YouTube video showing off her wedding corset collection.

Gareth Edwards
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Website First - Then Pay Per Click

A lot of our B2B Centre clients are experimenting with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, usually Google AdWords, and it is great that people are losing their fear of technology to do this. PPC is easier to understand than SEO and people like it because they can do it themselves: no web developer bills.

There is a problem with taking this shortcut though. They are spending quite a lot of money delivering traffic (sometimes of a dubious nature) to websites that are frankly rubbish. The question that we get asked is "why aren't we converting the traffic?" and the answer is because people take one look and go somewhere else.

Gareth




Gareth Edwards
Arrowsmith Marketing





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