Integrating flash design work in any project can dramatically increase the WOW factor and therefore your online presence.
I offer freelance flash work in a variety of disciplines including
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Flash Games
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guy@guydub.co.uk
Saturday
Online marketing | Devon
Online Marketing and Search Engine Marketing in Devon spelled out
Read our interview with Guy Dub on how the Internet can play a life saving role for small businesses in Devon.
JF
So starting off what actually is online marketing?
GD
Online Marketing is much like off line marketing but much more cost effective and far more suitable for businesses that are in remote areas. Online marketing in Devon for example can help company's attract people from all over the world on a yearly basis and therefore unaffected by the tourist trade. There are 3 ways people will land on your site and Internet marketing covers all of them.
Firstly, people will be FIND your site through an Internet search engine such as Google, yahoo or msn etc. This could be via sponsored search results which mainly work as a bidding system, or an ORGANIC search result which is where you website appears naturally in the search rankings without paying the relevant search engine. Organic search results are by far the most popular to the searcher and return the highest click through rate.
Secondly people Will LINK to your site from another site. This is a great way of getting targeted traffic from other relevant sites and creating a higher appearance online.
Thirdly people will be TOLD about your site through a friend or an email news letter
What we do is make sure our clients can benefit from all three of the above methods.
Online marketing is a fantastic opportunity for all business regardless of their size. Its R.O.I or " Rate of return" is often far better then all traditional forms or marketing.
JF
So why does it specifically benefit businesses in rural communities or small towns such as Devon?
GD
Using the Internet to generate business is an excellent way of gaining new profit avenues. Being down in Devon, I am constantly aware of business's struggling to supply their goods throughout the off season, in fact I believe that this is why many business's fail down here. By having a suitable Internet marketing campaign, these business's can look to supply a demand further a field, but from the comforts of Devon. Having a planned online approach can dramatically take your business out of the immediate catchment area and into the global field.
JF
So lets assume I am a small to mid sized business in Devon and want to start using the web more efficiently to generate business using online marketing. What strategies would you use to boost our sales?
GD
To start with I would look at your existing online presence and check your website current health. Many websites in Devon are sadly behind the times in both design and optimisation as the competition from other local business are generally slower on the uptake of global trends. Due to this after a thorough consultation to identify unique selling points, desired target markets and previous sales, I would offer a full web site revamp to make sure that your site is considered to actually take top spot in the search engine results page. Some clients may want to use an Adword campaign or Cost Per Click Strategy to instantly appear top spot of the search engines. This will help us look at what keywords are converting well, who are actively clicking on the ads and a good starting point to look at your R.O.I, also these findings can be used in on site optimisation to help you be found in the serps for keyword you know are converting.
When on site optimisation has been developed, I would then go and look for potential online communities or portals to start improving you online presence. The reason for this is two fold.
1) It will deliver targeted traffic from secondary sources
2) It will help your site appear higher in the results page then your competitors.
The next stage would be a full analysis's of the new traffic or visitors to your site. This will give us an indication of which strategy's are best suiting your business and which areas can be developed further.
Now comes the fun part, one of the most effective ways to get instant traffic from people ready to buy what you are offering apart from the serps is a good Advert Placement campaign.
There are millions of websites who get visited by people that will be interested in your service. The webmasters are always to keep to rent advertising space on their websites. I find suitable sites that can deliver the traffic you want and develop custom made marketing banners in flash, to attract them. Most webmasters want a rental fee depending on their websites statistics. We find and purchase these spaces to suit our clients needs and keep track of how well they are performing to either keep renting the space, create a more efficient advertising banner or look for better options.
JF
Talking of Advert Placement, what exactly do you mean by banners?
GD
Oh simple, banners are exactly the same principal of a flyer or an advert. I am amazed at the amount of companies I see in Devon spending thousands of pounds on a marketing plan, either paying local publications money for advertising or printing flyer's to go and canvass around the streets.
To start with, if they were to just go digital they eliminate all printing costs, save on paper, can update the information instantly, deliver them to as many areas online as they wish with a click of a button, be able to include far more content and successfully track which flyer's are working REAL TIME.
Also the benefits of keeping it digital are that they can be far more eye catching using animations and can even be used for viral marketing.
Really the benefits are endless especially for business in Devon wanting to start online marketing as they will be able to deliver flyer's globally in an instant. This is why internet advertising is rising every year and has aready overtaken many forms of effective offline marketing.
JF
You mentioned that digital banners can go viral, what do you mean by that?
GD
These are techniques that use pre-existing networking sites to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily
Infact I got into web marketing after realising the benefits of viral campaigns.
I developed a site that would offer content for the popular networking site Myspace. People would visit my site to copy graphics and animations to decorate the profiles. Now what I did, was to make sure that these graphics are actually links to my site, so when somebody clicked on one they would be taken to my site to get the information needed to decorate their profiles and so on. So what would happen is if each person that would use some of my graphics on their site would just get one other person to click the graphic, jump to my site, find one for their profile and embed it for others to see, eventually traffic would explode.
JF
That sounds great, how did you get on.
GD
Very well actually, traffic was booming and I could target pockets of people with various products. Unfortunately, I was targeting a very competitive market where many people were realising the same potential, this was a few years back before Myspace was popular over here so people were using many unethical techniques to get to the top before the industry really took off. I was one of many sites that got hacked by unscrupulous webmasters when some body left a firewall down in a server in the states - by the time all was corrected the market had exploded so I altered my approach in to the online gaming world which is still working well.
JF
Hacked, I never met anybody who actually been hacked.
GD
People get hacked everyday, it cant be avoided, in my case some body left an open invite to anybody looking for an easy target for a 24 hr period and as a result 10000s of site got vandalised. This led me to take the hosting and back end work alot more seriously and identify decent hosts that offer more 1on1 packages. I now use a firm in Devon called Blue Arena who have been the most helpful and professional host I have ever dealt with and to date have not had a single problem.
JF
So going back to the companies in Devon looking into Online Marketing but yet to make the final step, what advice would you give them.
GD
I get asked that regularly, and I ALWAYS SAY THE SAME THINGS
1) Dont be scared by it - its actually far more easier and more forgiving then off line marketing, and just because its web based it doesn't make it really that much different to off line marketing - apart from being more effective that is.
2) Think of the money that you will save, printing costs, adverts and pr companies cost a lot of money, 9 times out of 10, for the same cost of one flyer design, printing and time taken to canvass it - you can get a far more targeted results that can be tracked and modified at any given time 10 times as fast and twice as effective.
3) If you and your competitors are not doing it yet, they certainly will be -So take advantage of it whilst the competition is easy and the traffic is yours to take. One of the statistics the search engines look for when performing a search query is the age of relevant incoming links. The older the better. In fact I have a string of websites I have and am building up all sorts of relevant links for, so in the future should I choose to use them I have a step up on my competition.
4) There are so many ways you can use the internet to develop sales or leads. Affiliate marketing, viral strategies, social networking, email marketing and loads more. Its fun, its creative and its instant, there isn't one reason why you shouldn't be online marketing. Especially in Devon where the tourism trade dries up over the winter.
5) Its eco friendly, and people are respecting companies more and more for that. Advertise the fact that you use emails instead of letters wherever possible, advertise online instaed of offline to save paper and even promote popular online messaging services such as skype or msn to have online meeting as opposed to driving everywhere.
6) Diversifying your business is easy. I make sure my clients can update the information on their site easily to incorporate new offers, extra pages and content. If you want to tell your clients about a new service just put up a new web page and email them - SIMPLE!
7) You will regret if you dont in the future when its more competitive, more expensive and more timely. The sooner you get on it now the easier it will be in the future.
8) If you are based in Devon, you need to be marketing online. Down here the wages are terrible and house prices extortionate, if you are marketing online successfully you will be able to trade higher to counterbalance living costs.
9) Its fun and a refreshing change.
JF
One more question and will I let you go.
Do you have any advice for people that want to start online marketing in Devon and want to look in to it them selves?
GD
Lots, thats the million dollar question at the moment.
Look into how the search engines work and how they return the results for a performed search, look at your web site and optimise accordingly.
The main thing to consider is links to your site from others. DONT JUST BUILD LINKS WILLY NILLY. You can be penalised for many things if you don't know what to look for.
Consider what the search engines look at when checking the importance of links and only build them to suit. If you build to many to quickly or use un researched places to place a link or buy links from you WILL get penalised overtime
You really need to consider how the search engine work before you can start building them, its just as easy to do harm to your online presence then it is to do good. Also beware of what spamming is and its implications. If you spam you can get your site de listed from the search engines and may never appear again so be very careful in your approach.
JF
Thanks Guy for your time, you are obviously very busy and have many exciting prjects on the go. Is there anything else you want to say?
GD
Yes, just to reiterate, dont be scared by online marketing, even if you are computer illiterate and technophobic. If you have long term goals for your business the sooner you start online marketing the better it will be for your company both now and in the future. I offer in house and outsourced work so even if you just want an initial review on how you and your employees can benefit from online marketing in Devon then I can act as a consultant as well as a freelancer.
Good luck with it ;)
Read our interview with Guy Dub on how the Internet can play a life saving role for small businesses in Devon.
JF
So starting off what actually is online marketing?
GD
Online Marketing is much like off line marketing but much more cost effective and far more suitable for businesses that are in remote areas. Online marketing in Devon for example can help company's attract people from all over the world on a yearly basis and therefore unaffected by the tourist trade. There are 3 ways people will land on your site and Internet marketing covers all of them.
Firstly, people will be FIND your site through an Internet search engine such as Google, yahoo or msn etc. This could be via sponsored search results which mainly work as a bidding system, or an ORGANIC search result which is where you website appears naturally in the search rankings without paying the relevant search engine. Organic search results are by far the most popular to the searcher and return the highest click through rate.
Secondly people Will LINK to your site from another site. This is a great way of getting targeted traffic from other relevant sites and creating a higher appearance online.
Thirdly people will be TOLD about your site through a friend or an email news letter
What we do is make sure our clients can benefit from all three of the above methods.
Online marketing is a fantastic opportunity for all business regardless of their size. Its R.O.I or " Rate of return" is often far better then all traditional forms or marketing.
JF
So why does it specifically benefit businesses in rural communities or small towns such as Devon?
GD
Using the Internet to generate business is an excellent way of gaining new profit avenues. Being down in Devon, I am constantly aware of business's struggling to supply their goods throughout the off season, in fact I believe that this is why many business's fail down here. By having a suitable Internet marketing campaign, these business's can look to supply a demand further a field, but from the comforts of Devon. Having a planned online approach can dramatically take your business out of the immediate catchment area and into the global field.
JF
So lets assume I am a small to mid sized business in Devon and want to start using the web more efficiently to generate business using online marketing. What strategies would you use to boost our sales?
GD
To start with I would look at your existing online presence and check your website current health. Many websites in Devon are sadly behind the times in both design and optimisation as the competition from other local business are generally slower on the uptake of global trends. Due to this after a thorough consultation to identify unique selling points, desired target markets and previous sales, I would offer a full web site revamp to make sure that your site is considered to actually take top spot in the search engine results page. Some clients may want to use an Adword campaign or Cost Per Click Strategy to instantly appear top spot of the search engines. This will help us look at what keywords are converting well, who are actively clicking on the ads and a good starting point to look at your R.O.I, also these findings can be used in on site optimisation to help you be found in the serps for keyword you know are converting.
When on site optimisation has been developed, I would then go and look for potential online communities or portals to start improving you online presence. The reason for this is two fold.
1) It will deliver targeted traffic from secondary sources
2) It will help your site appear higher in the results page then your competitors.
The next stage would be a full analysis's of the new traffic or visitors to your site. This will give us an indication of which strategy's are best suiting your business and which areas can be developed further.
Now comes the fun part, one of the most effective ways to get instant traffic from people ready to buy what you are offering apart from the serps is a good Advert Placement campaign.
There are millions of websites who get visited by people that will be interested in your service. The webmasters are always to keep to rent advertising space on their websites. I find suitable sites that can deliver the traffic you want and develop custom made marketing banners in flash, to attract them. Most webmasters want a rental fee depending on their websites statistics. We find and purchase these spaces to suit our clients needs and keep track of how well they are performing to either keep renting the space, create a more efficient advertising banner or look for better options.
JF
Talking of Advert Placement, what exactly do you mean by banners?
GD
Oh simple, banners are exactly the same principal of a flyer or an advert. I am amazed at the amount of companies I see in Devon spending thousands of pounds on a marketing plan, either paying local publications money for advertising or printing flyer's to go and canvass around the streets.
To start with, if they were to just go digital they eliminate all printing costs, save on paper, can update the information instantly, deliver them to as many areas online as they wish with a click of a button, be able to include far more content and successfully track which flyer's are working REAL TIME.
Also the benefits of keeping it digital are that they can be far more eye catching using animations and can even be used for viral marketing.
Really the benefits are endless especially for business in Devon wanting to start online marketing as they will be able to deliver flyer's globally in an instant. This is why internet advertising is rising every year and has aready overtaken many forms of effective offline marketing.
JF
You mentioned that digital banners can go viral, what do you mean by that?
GD
These are techniques that use pre-existing networking sites to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily
Infact I got into web marketing after realising the benefits of viral campaigns.
I developed a site that would offer content for the popular networking site Myspace. People would visit my site to copy graphics and animations to decorate the profiles. Now what I did, was to make sure that these graphics are actually links to my site, so when somebody clicked on one they would be taken to my site to get the information needed to decorate their profiles and so on. So what would happen is if each person that would use some of my graphics on their site would just get one other person to click the graphic, jump to my site, find one for their profile and embed it for others to see, eventually traffic would explode.
JF
That sounds great, how did you get on.
GD
Very well actually, traffic was booming and I could target pockets of people with various products. Unfortunately, I was targeting a very competitive market where many people were realising the same potential, this was a few years back before Myspace was popular over here so people were using many unethical techniques to get to the top before the industry really took off. I was one of many sites that got hacked by unscrupulous webmasters when some body left a firewall down in a server in the states - by the time all was corrected the market had exploded so I altered my approach in to the online gaming world which is still working well.
JF
Hacked, I never met anybody who actually been hacked.
GD
People get hacked everyday, it cant be avoided, in my case some body left an open invite to anybody looking for an easy target for a 24 hr period and as a result 10000s of site got vandalised. This led me to take the hosting and back end work alot more seriously and identify decent hosts that offer more 1on1 packages. I now use a firm in Devon called Blue Arena who have been the most helpful and professional host I have ever dealt with and to date have not had a single problem.
JF
So going back to the companies in Devon looking into Online Marketing but yet to make the final step, what advice would you give them.
GD
I get asked that regularly, and I ALWAYS SAY THE SAME THINGS
1) Dont be scared by it - its actually far more easier and more forgiving then off line marketing, and just because its web based it doesn't make it really that much different to off line marketing - apart from being more effective that is.
2) Think of the money that you will save, printing costs, adverts and pr companies cost a lot of money, 9 times out of 10, for the same cost of one flyer design, printing and time taken to canvass it - you can get a far more targeted results that can be tracked and modified at any given time 10 times as fast and twice as effective.
3) If you and your competitors are not doing it yet, they certainly will be -So take advantage of it whilst the competition is easy and the traffic is yours to take. One of the statistics the search engines look for when performing a search query is the age of relevant incoming links. The older the better. In fact I have a string of websites I have and am building up all sorts of relevant links for, so in the future should I choose to use them I have a step up on my competition.
4) There are so many ways you can use the internet to develop sales or leads. Affiliate marketing, viral strategies, social networking, email marketing and loads more. Its fun, its creative and its instant, there isn't one reason why you shouldn't be online marketing. Especially in Devon where the tourism trade dries up over the winter.
5) Its eco friendly, and people are respecting companies more and more for that. Advertise the fact that you use emails instead of letters wherever possible, advertise online instaed of offline to save paper and even promote popular online messaging services such as skype or msn to have online meeting as opposed to driving everywhere.
6) Diversifying your business is easy. I make sure my clients can update the information on their site easily to incorporate new offers, extra pages and content. If you want to tell your clients about a new service just put up a new web page and email them - SIMPLE!
7) You will regret if you dont in the future when its more competitive, more expensive and more timely. The sooner you get on it now the easier it will be in the future.
8) If you are based in Devon, you need to be marketing online. Down here the wages are terrible and house prices extortionate, if you are marketing online successfully you will be able to trade higher to counterbalance living costs.
9) Its fun and a refreshing change.
JF
One more question and will I let you go.
Do you have any advice for people that want to start online marketing in Devon and want to look in to it them selves?
GD
Lots, thats the million dollar question at the moment.
Look into how the search engines work and how they return the results for a performed search, look at your web site and optimise accordingly.
The main thing to consider is links to your site from others. DONT JUST BUILD LINKS WILLY NILLY. You can be penalised for many things if you don't know what to look for.
Consider what the search engines look at when checking the importance of links and only build them to suit. If you build to many to quickly or use un researched places to place a link or buy links from you WILL get penalised overtime
You really need to consider how the search engine work before you can start building them, its just as easy to do harm to your online presence then it is to do good. Also beware of what spamming is and its implications. If you spam you can get your site de listed from the search engines and may never appear again so be very careful in your approach.
JF
Thanks Guy for your time, you are obviously very busy and have many exciting prjects on the go. Is there anything else you want to say?
GD
Yes, just to reiterate, dont be scared by online marketing, even if you are computer illiterate and technophobic. If you have long term goals for your business the sooner you start online marketing the better it will be for your company both now and in the future. I offer in house and outsourced work so even if you just want an initial review on how you and your employees can benefit from online marketing in Devon then I can act as a consultant as well as a freelancer.
Good luck with it ;)
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