CleverNews February 2009
What’s News at CleverLink
Planning Day Success
You’ll love the decisions we made at our planning day – just take a look at some of the great new approaches we have come up with to benefit you.
a) Guaranteed Sales, Absolute Satisfaction, Even More Added Value & Best Prices CleverLink had a great planning session at our own client/business partner’s venue, Wollongong Golf Club, on 10 Feb 2009. You may be curious to know what we discussed and what the outcomes are. You know we love sharing so here you go!
Our highlight outcomes were:
Our Guarantee
From 1st March 2009 CleverLink will guarantee all websites developed by our company, and that meet certain criteria , will generate sales or/and plenty of leads for our clients within the first 12 months after the launch (conditions apply). If not, we will provide two years web hosting absolutely FREE! We are very confident you will be pleased with the amount of sales and leads you get from your new site - so give us a challenge!
Contact us about your website or let your contacts know about this guarantee
Prize
All clients engaging CleverLink in 2009 will have a chance to win a “Business Makeover Package” valued at $3,000.
Spend it however you like (except printing services!) – see our full range of available services here.
The winner will be announced in our December Newsletter. This means you best look into how you can leverage our knowledge and skills for your business right now, because the winner could be you! Imagine what will happen to your business when we guarantee more sales, more leads and a chance to win $3,000 worth of services? Wow! YES! You will be amazing!
Price Promise
CleverLink acknowledges the difficulty we all face in the current economy and the recent devastation in both QLD & VIC. We will make sure we will keep our prices to a minimum, so don’t expect any increases in our prices this year. What you can expect to be increased are our service, our commitment to you, quality deliverables and our innovation!
Business Opportunity
We will franchise/license our business sooner than planned and we are very excited about this. CleverLink is celebrating its 11th anniversary this year and it is time to share our business model and get more committed people to serve the business community. If you love what we do or know someone who may like to join our family, send an email to CleverLink management now. This way we can let you/your contacts know more about the system and exciting opportunities. Note that if you can help with the Franchise process - please make yourself know to us.
b) A Brand New Service at CleverLink:
Online Reputation Management: protection & promotion for your brand
If you care about your reputation and want to protect your valuable brand – online reputation monitoring & management will be of interest to you!
With the popularity of social networks - blogging and various mainstream online media and other emerging media like Twitter - personal and business identity is scattered far and wide. Anyone can make a comment on your products, your service, even your personnel. Whether it’s true or not, as you can imagine, it can be extremely damaging to the brand you have spent time building.
The Right Tools for the Job
Of course, you still can decide what goes on your company website but you no longer control what goes online. This is why you will need the right tools and support so you know exactly what is being said about you and your business online and how clients feel about you.
As you can imagine, it is quite a challenge to determine who’s saying what about you or your company, but so very important to manage your reputation and protect your brand name online. Online Reputation Management is in direct response to our clients concerns and their need to protect their brand – and we would like to help you too.
Have the Chance to be Proactive
With the right approach, you can engage and participate in any online conversations or comments when needed (a proactive approach) as opposed to being reactive and trying to find who made the comment and trying to make them post a retraction – or even resorting to legal solutions. Being proactive can give you a distinct advantage.
So, how will we know what’s being said? We will track every online mention of your brand or any keywords identified by you and help you monitor what is said about you, your brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. You will receive reports from us that will outline whether the mentions are positive, negative or neutral and help you decide what action to take.
Monitoring
The monitoring and protection of Online Reputation Management form an essential part of business communication, marketing and sales operations. Given what’s happening, do not be surprised if personal and corporate reputation management becomes a major trend this year. For anyone interested in what’s happening with their brand online, a monitoring tool is a key part of everyone’s digital toolbox.
Contact Us now and to let our team help you protect and promote your brand
Industry News:
Google Ocean – Many of us enjoy Google Earth and now Google has just launched Google Ocean – you can Google under the sea. Latest Google Earth features:
- Google maps has a much more detailed bathymetric map (the ocean floor), so you can actually drop below the surface and explore the nooks and crannies of the seafloor in 3D. While you're there you can explore thousands of data points including videos and images of ocean life, details on the best surf spots, logs of real ocean expeditions, and much more.
- Historical Imagery: Until today, Google Earth displayed only one image of a given place at a given time. With this new feature, you can now move back and forth in time to reveal imagery from years and even decades past, revealing changes over time. Try flying south of San Francisco in Google Earth and turning on the new time slider (click the "clock" icon in the toolbar) to witness the transformation of Silicon Valley from a farming community to the tech capital of the world over the past 50 years or so.
- Touring: One of the key challenges we have faced in developing Google Earth has been making it easier for people to tell stories. People have created wonderful layers to share with the world, but they have often asked for a way to guide others through them. The Touring feature makes it simple to create an easily sharable, narrated, fly-through tour just by clicking the record button and navigating through your tour destinations.
- 3D Mars: This is the latest stop in our virtual tour of the galaxies, made possible by a collaboration with NASA. By selecting "Mars" from the toolbar in Google Earth, you can access a 3D map of the Red Planet featuring the latest high-resolution imagery, 3D terrain, and annotations showing landing sites and lots of other interesting features.
Check it out ...
Google Earth 5.0
Client Spot Light
Elizabeth Macarthur High School
Elizabeth Macarthur High had been nominated as one of four schools in NSW to receive selective students from 2010, and they recognised the need to market themselves in order to attract top quality students.
The school had an existing logo based on their connection with the area’s historic figure Elizabeth Macarthur and which we tied this in with a fresh and vibrant design. They wanted to be able to illustrate the student’s achievements, allow both students and parents to access resources school and subject info and reduce the burden on the administration staff.
So, how did we help them achieve their goals? They now have a photo gallery that the school can update in-house, an event calendar and downloadable newsletter function, which students and parents can access anytime and find out what’s on (no more last minute costume design, frantic muffin baking or missed excursion bus!). The website includes an easy-to-use system where they can update and change any information as required. A variety of forms such as enrolment, illness and membership forms can be downloaded directly from the site and there is a host of information including:
• bell times,
• school policy,
• P & C information,
• canteen,
• uniforms,
• curriculum,
• careers
The amount of information that would usually need to go through the office is now found online and this reduces the time staff need to spend finding, printing & handing out.
There is also a page where organisations can advertise their support, thus providing an additional revenue stream.
If you would like to talk to us about your Web Design & Marketing needs, contact us
Up Coming Events
Event 1: Business Expresso at CleverLink last thursday of the month
Places are limited so if you are interested in attending please
contact us
Power Words
Tired of Low Sales?
“The meaning of your communication is the response you get”
Low sales could result from a number of areas in your business and you’ve probably been over these many times already. But have you tested your content, lately?
These days’ people want everything fast and focused, so if you want them to understand your message you have to communicate in a way they can take it in and understand it instantly. Even so, you can have the most dazzling writing ever on your website, your brochure or your banner, but if you are not getting enquiries then your content is not working for you. You need make a change and then test that the change is working.
How to test your content
There are any number of ways to test whether your content sizzles or sucks – let’s look at two simple methods you can do manually that are quick and won’t cost the earth:
1. Send a copy of your content to 10 people: Ask these people for their feedback – both good and bad. You need to know what they loved, what they didn’t and how it made them feel (were they interested, did it make them think about talking to you more about your offer or even about buying right now?)
2. Create two versions of your content: (assuming you have done your market research first) Perhaps V1 can be the content you have already, and V2 can be the content you have re-written yourself or had your own professional writer do for you. Give each one a slightly different email address ie: info@yourbusiness.com.au and sales@yourbusiness.com.au, a different serial number or simply ask each person which message they received. Post or email them out as usual and add up the responses of each.
We’d love to know how your test went - email and let us know
by putting “content success” in the subject line.
Let your website test itself
Just about every professional website will have statistics available in its control panel. These provide a variety of ways to track your successes and they are very handy if you want to focus your energy on what’s working for you right now. If you haven’t already, you need to learn how to read them and put them to work for you.
Going a step further and still not breaking a sweat! (The Split Test)
If you have a new campaign but can’t quite decide on a few of the details, try a split test. This is where you create two identical sales letters or web pages and change just one or two things on one of them, then put them both online (on their own page) and note the response each one gets. If you have CleverLink’s content management system, Clever Tools, you can do this today. If not, give us a call and we can get you started.
If you would like help writing content that truly engages, contact us NOW
Contact us today for help with your sales copy/professional writing – and make sure you’re words are working for a healthy bottom line!
Traditional Marketing
The Science of Building a Website
This month we will take a closer look at content. Good or bad content can make or break a web site. It can have your customers stay on your web site briefly for a minute or keep them engaged and enable a purchase or enquiry.
Content refers to any digital information that is included on a web site. This includes audio, video, images and text.
There are four different dimensions of content.
1 . The offering mix: This can include products, information, services or frequently a mix of these three elements. For example, http://www.xlevents.com.au gives details about the various products the company has, information about the company and also services the company offers offer.
2. Appeal Mix: This refers to the promotional and communications messages projected by the company. The appeal mix should be strongly linked to the value proposition (what is the customer going to get from you). There are two broad types of appeals that are used in appealing to customers. They are cognitive (appealing to functional or rational thinking) and emotional (appealing to desires or fears). Functional factors include such things as low price, reliability, availability, customer support and degree of personalisation.
Emotional appeal focuses on emotional ties to the product or brand. These include humour, novelty, warmth or personal stories. Using the previous example www.xlevents.com.au utilises both the cognitive appeals by giving information about the benefits of its services and products and also uses photos and video to appeal to the emotion of fun!
3. Multimedia mix: This refers to the variety of media, text, audio, image, video & graphics incorporated into web site. Using the same example the XL events web site utilises, video & audio, photos, text and graphics to great effect.
4. Content Type: The information on a website has a high degree of time sensitivity. Online newspapers for example, are highly time sensitive with content having a short “shelf life”. Reference content on the other hand is less time sensitive with a longer shelf life. Often it is historical in nature and used as supporting or related factual material. Often there can be a mix of both as most online newspapers also have archive sections. The web site for Elizabeth Macarthur high school uses both current content in their event calendar and also reference content for general school policies
Updating your content is a high priority that should be undertaken regularly to keep returning visitors to your web site interested, to assist with achieving higher search engine rankings and show new visitors to your site that you are keeping up with change and new ideas or developing new products. The Elizabeth Macarthur High School web site utilises the CleverLink Tools Software Package to keep up-to-date and this means it doesn’t need to enlist an IT professional to make the changes.
Information sourced from “Internet Marketing, building advantage in a networked economy”
Second edition, Rafi Mohammed et al, McGraw Hill New York ©2004.
If you would like a no obligation review of your current web site or would like to discuss building a new web site, please contact us and we can have a brand new or revitalised web site for you in a matter of months.
Digital Marketing & SEO
SEO For Small Businesses
If you’re a small business owner then you know how difficult it is to get into the top Google rankings for your targeted keywords. So here are 11 tips to keep in mind …
1. Write for readers. While it’s important to optimize your site so that spiders pay attention, remember that it’s human who are going to buy your product or service. Make sure you content is relevant, interesting, helpful, and unique. Bots are not buying your stuff, humans are. Of course you need to include keywords in your text, but never so many that they render your copy unreadable.
2. Include a unique meta description and title on each page. The title of your page is the key on-site SEO factor. Your description tag won’t influence your rank, but it will most likely be what potential customers see when they conduct a search, so include your keywords and a compelling copy that will inspire them to click on the link to your site.
3. Make your content unique. This is key for everyone, but it’s especially important for online retailers, particularly if you’re selling a product similar to what everyone else is selling. Rather than using the description provided by the manufacturer, write your own description. If you’ve done your keyword research, then you’ll know exactly which keywords to target in your copy. And no matter what you’re selling, you’re more likely to get powerful inbound links if your copy is good.
4. Be smart about links. When you submit your site to directories, only submit to trusted ones like Yahoo and Aviva. Find authorities in your market niche and ask them to link to you. Find out which sites are linking to your competitors and find out if those sites will link to you as well.
5. Keywords as anchor text. Never use “click here” for internal links. It’s a waste of a good way to increase rank.
6. Blog. Blog about what you’re doing and read other blogs in your market niche. This increases your exposure, and commenting on other blogs can help you get new links. By blogging and commenting on other blogs you’ll be creating new content and creating relationships with others in your niche.
7. Be smart about press releases. Rub elbows with the media in your area who cover your industry. See if local media sites will link to you. Distribute press releases online, but only when you have real news to share. Writing a press release for every breath you take will only annoy journalists, and you need them on your side.
8. Be smart about social media. Two words: NEVER SPAM. The purpose of using social media is to establish yourself as a friendly, helpful, knowledgeable authority in your field. If Flickr is relevant to your product or service then post photos there. Yahoo Answers is a great place to let people know that you know what you’re talking about.
9. Use search engine tools. Webmaster Central on Google and Site Explorer on Yahoo will tell you how search engines view your site.
10. Be smart about local search. Attract local traffic by making sure that your address and phone numbers are displayed prominently on your website. List your site in local directories like Yellow Pages, Start Local, and True Local. Ask customers to post reviews on these sites as well.
11. Find new ways to get traffic. These include newsletters, blogging, social media sites, and anything that can keep you afloat if your Google ranking goes south.
Small business SEO is challenging, but it can also be very rewarding. If you’re unsure of your next steps, consider talking to an SEO expert or internet marketing professional. Then prepare to see great results.
B2B & B2C
Website of the Month
Today it’s all about communicating fast so you can move on. And we now know that people take in information in different ways, they have different learning styles, so your communication has to take this into consideration. This months’ website has made a business out of just that – making information visual, aural & concise. Have a look at http://www.commoncraft.com/.
Wondering if your site would thrive with some new technology? Call us now – we are only too happy to talk about the future of your website with you!
Food for My Brain
500 Award-winning Small Business Secrets
If you haven’t read “500 Award-winning Small Business Secrets”
by Geoff Grist. It is the most appropriate time to read this wonderful book
You can buy a copy at here . I picked up many tips from this book and one tip that I have been implementing for almost eight years is to attach a ‘scratchy’ to invoices, so encourage a positive reaction to the arrival or your invoice - and at CleverLink we are still enjoying the positive feedback we get from this simple action. Thanks Geoff!
Positive Mind
Listening Techniques
L Like to Listen.
I Ignore Distractions.
S Summarise.
T Tame Emotions.
E Eliminate Hasty Judgments.
N Never Interrupt.
I Inspire Openness.
N Need to Listen.
G Generate Conclusions
Humour: IS HE or IS SHE? (Unknown author)
A lot of non-living objects are actually either male or female. For examples:
WEB PAGES: Female, because they're constantly being looked at and frequently getting hit on.
THE REMOTE CONTROL: Female. Ha! You probably thought it would be male,
but consider this: It easily gives a man pleasure, he'd be lost without it, and while he doesn't always know which buttons to push, he just keeps trying
FREEZER BAGS: Male, because they hold everything in, but you
can see right through them.
PHOTOCOPIERS: Female, because once turned off, it takes a while to warm them up again. They are an effective reproductive device if the right buttons are pushed, but can also wreak havoc if you push the wrong buttons.
TYRES: Tyres are male, because they go bald easily and are often over inflated.
HOT AIR BALLOONS: Also a male object, because to get them to go anywhere, you have to light a fire under them.
TRAINS: Definitely male, because they always use the same old lines for
picking up people.
EGG TIMERS: Egg timers are female because, over time, all the weight shifts to the bottom.
HAMMERS: Male, because in the last 5000 years, they've hardly changed at
all, and are occasionally handy to have around.
CleverLink would like to help you do well – so, check our full service by visiting our website now www.cleverlink.com.au or call us to arrange an appointment now!
Clever Tool Box
Work Wise: How to stay positive in difficult time
It is a fact that we are living in a difficult time right now: we hear it on radio, see it on TV and read about it online, etc. Of course, each one of us chooses how we react to these things personally and professionally, but this can seem more difficult the harder things appear to get. We would like to share with you a few strategies on how to stay positive through difficult times.
Do provide prospects more options to do business with you. Package your products; provide progress payments, finance, sponsorships, etc
Don’t allow sad and bad news to get you too down. Do something constructive by offering support where you can and then re-focus your energy on something positive.
Do focus on your long-term goals and your day to day tasks
Don’t cut corners – just cut costs where appropriate
Do CREATE and DELIVER real value - in difficult times people want even better value for money
Don’t cut your marketing budget. Running a business without marketing is like "winking in the dark" – you know what you are doing it, but nobody else does.
Do use this time to acquire more market share and create more value for your clients
Don’t stop networking. Your network is your net-worth – in difficult times, people turn to those they trust. Keep your connections – set up a referral network, joint venture, etc
Do develop multiple revenue streams – ask yourself, what else can we offer? Who else can we serve?
Now is the time to make sure your website is professional, up to date and all your marketing materials are creating a lasting impression for you and our company. CleverLink can help! We are just an email or a phone call away! Contact Us today!
If you have interesting news or topics you would like us to cover, please email us and we will do our best to slot it into the format!
