Hi Everyone,

After spending a few months specialising in managing Google Adwords campaigns and taking their exam, I recently received my Google Adwords Qualified Professional certificate.

If anyone wants my help or advice, I am here.

Regards,

Nati.

My world evolves around the internet. As such, I always assume that the basic definitions and elements of the internet sphere are known to everyone.

Alas, I was surprised when during the last few weeks I told a few businessmen about our new Retail Blogs website, and they had no clue what a blog is. 

After a short explanation of what blogs are, they all showed interest in having one. Why wouldn’t they? It is a free tool that allows you to communicate with your potential clients, employees, friends and other people from your industry in an informal and personalised way. If you work in a company, you can use the blog as another means to boost your personal profile. (btw, recruitment professionals should start reading applicants blogs as another screeninng tool).

Blogs are basically an online journal where one writes about what ever he likes. If you are writing it as a marketing tool you can write articles, case studies, stories from your day to day experiences and more. Blogging is a great way to communicate as it is not your “corporate identity” that you are communicating but your personal identity.

Face to face meetings are only a result of some research that a client made before actually picking up the phone and making an appointment. Part of that research includes looking at your website. But your website is usually not you. And sometimes what the client is actually looking for is you. The person behind the screen and the formal messages. That is where your blog can kick in. It is not part of your website which puts some constraints on you. It is an external and private journal which you link to from your website. This gives your client a quick look into the person that you are and will usually make him more comfortable in approaching you.

As a marketing tool, blogs also have an affair with search engines which tend to look at them as a useful resource and therefore rate them highly under organic searches. You can also join network of blogs which will drive more traffic to your website.

For some people, blogs are a cost effective alternative to a website. You can put links on it, pictures, documents and use it's address as your website.

There is a lot more to say about blogs, their features, technological solutions etc, but I will let you explore it yourselves by joining our new RetailBlogs website which is a new service for people around the retail industry in Australia. Whether you are a consultant, a retailer or a consumer, you can join our retail blogs website. Registered service providers on Inside Retailing Directory can join for free. Others have to pay a once set up fee of $99 to have their blog up and running. 

Go on, do it.

I have started this blog in order to give retailers and other service providers in the retail industry the tools and knowledge they need in order to use the internet as an efficient marketing channel. It is not enough to build a website if no one is visiting it. It is not enough to build a website if the website is not converting the visit into something valuable: a lead, sale, branding impact, recruitment tool etc.

Internet marketing is a complex issue. It involves many forms of marketing. The beauty is that many of them are free.

This blog will discuss Internet Marketing in detail over the next few months, but I decided to start with an introduction to search engine marketing since it is the most popular marketing tool, and if you know how to use it right, it provides the best return on investment.

Search engine marketing comprises two main methods:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - A marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimising a website, including the content and structure of the website's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process (There is much more to it than just changing your website's structure but I will discuss in it future posts).

The purpose of the search engine optimisation is to rank the website at the top of the organic search. The organic search is everything which is not a paid search. On Google for example, the organic search is the white box in the middle. The paid search is the blue box at the top of the page - and the results on the right-hand side column. They are marked as “sponsored search”. Take for example our website, Inside Retailing Online. If you search under Google Australia for Retail News you will see that we rank very highly, most of the time as number 1.

So the purpose of SEO is to get your website to rank highly under the organic search results. If you are rating as one of the top websites in the organic search results, that is a promising start which will generate free traffic to your website.

But - and this is the big one - it is not easy to rank highly under the organic search. It requires a lot of effort and most of the time will require hiring a professional to do it for you. This may be an expensive procedure and success is not guaranteed. Even if you are successful, no one guarantees you will be number 1 for ever and you would probably have to keep working on it. Nevertheless, if you can do it, it is the best internet marketing you can do.

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) – An online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying click-throughs. Even if you are successful in your SEO efforts, you will never be able to rank as number one for all the keywords which are relevant for you.

For example, Inside Retailing may rank number one under the key term retail news but if you search for retail industry you will see that under the organic search, we do not appear on the first page of search results. That is why I had to add  the keywords: “retail industry” to my SEA campaign so that I will not lose the traffic of those people searching for Retail Industry. This is where SEA complements SEO. What you should avoid is a case where you are doing SEA to those keywords which your website will come up highly under the organic search anyway. It that case, you might be paying for traffic that you could have got for free.

SEA is a great tool which gives marketing departments (if you have one) an amazing ROI (return on investment) if it is done right. If you are a medium size company, you would hire an SEA consultant to do it for you. If you are a small business (and that is something you won’t hear a lot from SEA consultants) I recommend either learning it by yourself or taking a one day training course which will show you most of the things you need to know in order to manage your own SEA campaign.

SEA kicks in when it is too hard, too expensive, or sometimes not worth the effort to do SEO. SEA is so crucial in search engine marketing that whoever is not doing it is missing a great opportunity. The system works like a market with companies bidding for keywords. The more demand, the higher the price. That is why it is a good time to do it now while the competition is not too strong.

In future posts I will elaborate on DYI SEO and SEA. If you want to know more, I am always happy to help and you can contact me either by leaving a message under the comments below or contacting me at Inside Retailing.

Good luck and good night.

Nati.

Last week I attended a lunch with Michael Luscombe, organised by the Australian Israel Chamber of Commerce.

When Mr Luscombe spoke about the working culture at Woolworths, he gave an example how dedicated Woolworth’s employees are, by explaining that if you come as early as 7am, the parking lot is close to full, and the same applies at 7pm. He also said that if you visit on a Saturday morning, you won’t find the car park empty

He then went on to tell a story about an employee who joined the company and declared that he wouldn't be doing extra hours (which of course no one is getting paid by the hour at head office). Well, you know what happened, after a few weeks on the job, that employee was sucked into this “amazing” work culture where everyone was working more and more hours.

If you ask me, this is not something that Mr Luscombe should be proud of. It is very easy to demand your employees do more and more hours. I find it very hard to believe that these employees are working these extended hours because they like the company so much. They are staying so late because:

1.      They can’t handle the amount of work they have in the regular working hours.

2.      The pressure at the work place is just growing and they have to prove themselves.

3.      Everyone else around is staying late so the employee feels bad leaving before the others (especially if you are new to the company).

4.      The company overloads its employees with work and instead of hiring more employees to handle the work, they just demand more from their existing employees.

Is it really something to be proud of? What is the affect of this on our communities? Is the fact that mum and dad are staying until 7pm at work and then arriving home at 7:30pm or 8pm to spend the very little time they have with their kids, making our community better and our future brighter? Is the fact that parents are spending less and less time with their families, jeopardising our future in terms of education, crime and other sustainability factors?

I think so.

So, it might make business sense to build a working environment where employees stay more and more hours, but no one is taking into account the affect on the future of those families and our community in general.

Companies should try to find ways in which they can allow their employees to finish their work on time. That may be by demanding more efficiency at the work place, introducing technological solutions and most of all, hiring more employees to handle the increasing work load instead of asking the existing employees to do it. After all, at the end of the day, the employee who stays the extra hour, will ask to be compensated in some way. The monetary compensation will never compensate a kid for the loss of quality time with dad. Yes, he might get a new Xbox but, playing violent video games is not the solution.

In some countries, and thankfully not yet in Australia, the work culture is that everyone works until 7pm. So, if we don’t want to be there, we should all wake up and not congratulate companies who pride themselves in ruining our community.

You can also read this story about stress driving workers from job published by Inside Retailing on the 27th of Feb.

Choosing a domain name is as crucial as choosing a trading name for any other business. Let me correct myself. It is even more important than choosing a trading name for your business. Reason is, it doesn't only affect the branding and perception but also your search engine placement.

Let's start from the beginning. If you are thinking of a website for your existing company you have two eligible choices:

1. A domain which is an exact match, acronym or abbreviation of your business, products or services

2. A Domain which name is close and has a substantial connection to your business, products or services

The first choice is just using your existing company name (assuming it is available). It is best suited for companies trying to keep and enhance their existing brand and those who would like their website to come up under a query for their name in a search engine.

For example, if my company's name is: Soho Projects, then if I would register www.sohoprojects.com.au as my domain, it is very likely that under a search for "Soho Projects" my website will have a good placement under the organic results (not paid).

Nevertheless, the domain name says nothing about what Soho Projects does as a company or the services it provides.

The second choice means that a company like Soho Projects, which I can tell you are Shop Fitters, can choose a domain name which has a close connection to the title of the website and its services and content. For example: ShopFittingSolutions.com.au (BTW, I just checked it and it is up for grabs if anyone wants it - probably won't be after a shop fitter reads this)

Using a domain name which bares a connection to the title and content of the website will help your SEO efforts (search engine optimisation). Why is it good is a topic that goes into SEO methods, and will be discussed in a future posting.

So assuming you have made the right choice and decided to go for a domain name which will be better for SEO  these are the guidelines that I would reccomend:

1. Research the most popular keyphrase - there are many research tools available. But start with the natural search query that you would use to search for your products. Then, start using research tools. The following link will help you to see the popularity of specific keywords: overture. In the future I will probably write a more comprehensive guide to keyword research.

2. Ask your friends and collegues for suggestions - I have done so with my friends from the office. I actually offered a prize for the winner and I got more than 40 suggestions.

3. With or Without hyphen -  Hyphenated domain name is more search engine friendly. Nevertheless, it is less friendly and natural for our human memory. People find it hard to remember the hyphen where it's not used in a natural way.  

4. What if the name is taken - Well, I say that there is always a domain that someone did not think of. If you are considering .net or .org you must take into consideration that people usually search for a .com first. If there is already a website with that domain, then your customers are on their way to your competitor. Think about that.

5. With or without numbers - that doesn't have much affect except that it is hard to remember and not so user friendly. For directories purposes, some directories actually list the websites by their first character and a website with a number before the name will be listed at the top.

6. Using a few domains - you can have a few domains pointing to one website, but you must make sure that you only use one domain for your marketin purposes. Otherwise instead of making one domain strong, you are divising it between a few.

Now, since so many domains are already taken, I suggest that when you come up with a domain that you think can serve your business in the future, go and buy it.

Search Engine Marketing is proven to be the most effective way to do online marketing today. Very easy to monitor, analyse and see the return on investment.

To get started, 

If you need help, or would like to have this done for you, contact me and I will be happy to help.

Regards, Nati.