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Whenever I explain to people what I do and my methodology, one of the things I’m at pains to say is that I’m a marketer that focuses on return on investment.

All my career we’ve been talking about tracing how conversions are attained and working out cost per conversions. It’s a standard format however recently I’ve been starting to think about the point of marketing and how it works to change the way the marketed to interact and engage with the brand and how difficult that is in reality to quantify. Continue reading ‘Does ROI focused internet marketing spoil creativity in marketing?’ »

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I try and take a step back on a regular basis and ask myself what have I learned about myself from the things I’ve just done. It always surprises me that people are happy to plod on allowing themselves to get into the same situations where they have to make the same mistakes because they haven’t learned anything about themselves from their experiences.

Gnoshi Seauton

The ancient Greeks had a saying and although the  spirit of the original meaning is lost to time, Gnoshi Seauton or Know Thyself still resonates with me today. I remind myself of this on a daily basis, whatever I do I approach it from a situation of how I will best cope with it, where it is likely to test me and how it is likely to enable me to develop, both professionally and personally.

Agency vs. In-house Marketing

I’ve worked for agencies and I’ve worked client side and it’s fair to say that when I’ve found myself in the position of a client side role I’ve hated it. There are a couple of reasons, firstly I love the variety that working a number of different projects brings, this gives me loads of opportunity to develop and hone my skill set, f I can do it in one industry I can do it anywhere. The second reason I prefer agency work is that I like being in the role of being an industry expert, maybe this is an ego thing, but I think it’s good to have that ego sometimes, I make the things happen through my advise and strategy. There is no real difference as to where this advice goes to a client or to a marketing director / managing director however it’s often harder to advise the guy that’s paying your wages than the guy that’s paying for your service, especially if you work for someone who has used various internet marketing techniques in the past.

Plan the event in advance or plan for the event / Overview vs detail

I probably bang on about this too often. One of the reasons I think I’m so good at search marketing is that I can disatach myself from the detail and see what’s going on as an overview. It’s a useful skill, sure it’s important to get a little bit fixated on the percentage of keywords on a page and where they are located however once you’ve done that you’ve got to be able to say “what’s the bigger picture, what are the general trends”.

I used to work for a guy who asked me how I knew what was going to happen with PPC, I explained it was experience, I also explained the reasons and he looked a bit blank – then I said “I just know, I cam’t really 100% tell you the complexities of how I know, I’ve been staring at this date for so long I can see the patterns.” He seemed quite happy with that response and let me carry on.

Quite often I’m talking to people and they tell me they don’t want to do pay-per-click (PPC) as they don’t like paying for traffic, it’s at this point that I tell them that there is no such thing as free organic traffic.

Sometimes you are lucky and you write a blog post or a page and it ranks really highly and you get loads of traffic from it, this is the exception, normally you have to spend ages tweaking your onpage content and building links, it can take months to get onto the first page of Google and often about the same amount of time to get from the bottom of page 1 to the top 3 (which is where the money and traffic is).

Continue reading ‘How to predict SEO ROI (return on investment)’ »

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I’ve met a load of designers in my time as an internet marketer, I’ve steered them in most cases to get from them what I want, however I think it’s fair to say every now and then you come accross someone that you want to take a step back from and say “there you go, do what you got to do”. That’s trust, trust in their abilities and their understanding, I’ve come to realise recently how important this can be in getting a fantastic web design and not just a mediocre web design.

Continue reading ‘Appreciating Web Design’ »

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When I first meet with a client to discuss Pay Per Click, after all the excitement is over I have to have the conversation of how much, it generally goes like this:

Me: What kind of budget do you have?

Clients: Well how much do you think we should spend?

Me: You can spend as much or as little as you want, how much does your average sale cost you at the moment?

Continue reading ‘How to set a PPC Budget’ »

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SEO is an essential element to the marketing role of most marketing departments in most business. The main problem with SEO is that it’s difficult to measure.

It’s therefore important for anyone carrying out SEO for a client or internally to make sure they scream and shout about what they are doing.

Remember often the changes that you make in seoing a website will take weeks to have any real impact, so it’s important to log every single change that you make to the website – you’ve got to be really anal about it, being able to go back is essential, and sometimes you know what? Even this won’t help because your seo efforts are effected by other factors such as the seo efforts of a rival website, or changes to algorithms.

he other thing is you can be adding 20 relevant pages a day with great content however they’ll probably only get what appears to be a small number of visits, maybe a few a day in some cases – so you’ve got to focus on the overall picture and strategy when talking to the decision makers, after all if you can add 20 really good pages a day to a website and you get a few visits to each the seo team are going to be generating some serious traffic overall in a week.

It’s when the accountants get involved that you have a problem – seoing a weebsite is about the future of that website and the busines, it’s not like ppc were the returns are instant, with seo the returns take months and they are incremental and you’ve got to speculate about the success of a page.

If you focus on the individual aspects of seo too much your decision makers will lose sight of the overall bigger picture and start to devalue the seo your are carrying out for them.

As ever in business, and especially marketing, if it’s going to be done you better make sure you can back it up with data and it’s especially true when managing an seo campaign.