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.