There is nothing worse than doing a load of work and not getting paid for it.

Over a year ago I was approached by a man who wanted me to market some books he had published. This project sounded too good to be true (and in fact this was the case, as you will read later).

So I redesigned his website (with the minimum of information), set up a shopping cart and autoresponder, plus a blog and other social networking accounts. I tried so hard to promote his terrible books (learning that you need to have a good product that people actually want to be able to succeed), tried to get them redesigned so that they actually looked nice both inside and out, fielding his awful adverts in expensive magazines that were so bad they were a complete waste of money (not designed by me of course), and coping with a torrent of emails and telephone calls from this persistent and annoying person.

Of course he never paid the invoices I sent him, always coming up with excuse after excuse. I stupidly carried on working for another month, amassing more money owed, until I’d had enough. I downed tools and refused to work any more until I was paid. More excuses, and no payment. Then silence…

The next thing I had was an email from his cousin saying my client had died and since his business was illegal and he had no money, it was highly unlikely I would get my invoices paid. I actually rang up the crematorium the day of his funeral to see if he really had died and had not done a runner. I also heard that all the bailiffs for his other debts had totally stripped his flat, so there was certainly nothing left for me.

The moral? There are several. Draw up a contract at the beginning carefully laying out exactly what you are supposed to do. Calculate a price for the amount of work decided upon, and get at least 50% deposit in advance. No deposit, no work: it shows good will and commitment. Form a strategy for work to be done, including when contact is to be made (don’t tolerate constant interruptions) and confirmation of drafts before the final product is published or produced. And above all, make sure the project you undertake has a possibility of success – go with your gut feeling about quality, consistency and – above all – get a credit check done first to learn the liability of this new project.

And don’t put up with this trash for 3 months, only to land up with nothing at the end. No wonder my business has gone to the dogs…

How easy are you making it for your customers to use your services? Do you go out of your way to help them?

I like the way Clark’s the shoe shops now offer a personal service to their customers: I saw a pair of purple (well, that is my colour) shoes that I liked, and asked for a size 5 and a half. The shop assistant arrived back from the stock cupboard to say they hadn’t any in that particular size.

Then she asked whether I would like to order them in. I could then try them on and decide whether I liked them. There was no obligation to buy them, and if they didn’t suit they would go back into the stock cupboard for the next customer.

Then she asked me for my mobile number so the shop could text me to say my shoes were ready to try on. I know this is a very simple procedure and extremely common-place, but I consider this to be extremely convenient, more so than finding a message on my answerphone.

It dawned on me as I walked out of the shop that I wasn’t leaving unfulfilled. Clark’s really wanted to sell me those shoes, and they were doing the utmost to relieve the inconvenience of not having any available at that time. I now look forward to my mobile phone beeping with the good news.

Anyway, back to the marketing issue: what are you doing within your business to provide similar excellent service for your customers?

We all get pangs of insecurity from time to time. Mine have been very frequent of late, which has resulted in abandoning my businesses and taking on a job.

Lots of friends have been very supportive during my decision, and surprisingly once I had accepted my new fate, I received three requests to speak about marketing at various networking groups. Why is it that suddenly I’m seen as an expert after I had decided I wasn’t good enough to continue with my own business?

The main reason I quit being self-employed is because I wasn’t making any money. The recession had hit hard and marketing is (stupidly) one of the areas companies cut down on, and a fast declining bank account does nothing for one’s self-esteem.

Another reason is because my own marketing messages were confused. I had a lot I could offer, yet was unable to untangle them into a coherent presentation. I was just beginning to do this when the job offer came along, so I chickened out and jumped ship.

Another blow was from one particular marketing directory I regularly post into, had managed to attain some respect and become one of the most frequent bloggers. But this particular position was usurped by someone else who posted a huge amount of extremely informative posts and pushed me unceremoniously down the pecking order. Nevertheless, I have picked myself up out of the dust and will continue to post, even though this has severely shattered any notions I had of being a reasonable marketer.

But the title is: don’t let insecurity rule. My new job will give me the opportunity to learn new skills, work within an organisation that is doing well during the recession, and will give me plenty of spare time to think, blog, twitter and unravel my overloaded brain. And this subject will be the fodder for more posts in the future… so watch this space.

This is a good subject for start-ups and very small businesses who don’t have a large budget to work with..

The first free marketing method is networking. Go to as many meetings as possible, particularly the free events or those that don’t require a big entrance fee. But to make these successful you must arm yourself with a good pitch, both 10 and 60 second versions, the first to grab attention to yourself, and the second if you get a chance to address the whole room. If you can create something that is different, easily understandable, poignant and relevant to your listeners’ needs, then you have a head start above many others.

It is important to get yourself as visible as possible in the business world. There are two possibilities: blogging and social networking group pages. It is very easy to create a free blog, and social networking sites allow you to create groups or fanpages which you can devote to your business.  In these you must regularly post up information about your business, and then, as with the blog, use RSS feeds to inform your followers of your new posts, or email through the social networking system to your followers that you have recently contributed new material for them to read.

And then there’s Twitter, equally free, which is an excellent way to promote your business, not forgetting that you can feed your blog to it, and now your posts can be automatically replicated on your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

Writing articles and publishing them around the net is another way to spread your expertise. Make sure the resource boxes direct the reader back to your website, blog or social networking profile pages, so they can find out more about you.  Take advantage of keywords to improve your search engine optimisation, and careful attention to the headlines and first paragraph will increase the likelihood of a response.

If you do have a website, get as many links back to it as possible from other websites and web directories. The more high profile the link source, the more respect search engines give your website, not to mention providing more portals for the spiders to crawl over your site and report back pages for indexing.

Create a good signature for your emails, to publicise your website, blog and social networking profiles. Don’t forget that the space at the bottom of your communication is just waiting to be filled with promotional written material and links, and everybody you write to will get a chance to see them.

For some people blogging seems to be a technological advance they cannot cope with. For you and me it seems to be very easy, but for one particular friend I needed to find an alternative.

Originally she asked me to advise her on search engine optimisation, so I gave her a quick summary over coffee. She had a website that her company had provided, with the limitations self-editing within a template allows, and hopefully my advice on keyword research would spice up her copy a bit more than it would have done.

But since blogging was not an option she was willing to undergo, I suggested creating a Facebook Group instead. She already had a Facebook account and enjoyed using it, so this was just a natural progression.

Out came her laptop, and we soon created her a brand new group, much to her surprise and enjoyment. My preliminary explanations about SEO made the process a little easier, as she was primed with suitably keyworded copy from her company’s literature, plus a few of her own.

During this exercise I needed to find a simple way to explain how to optimise a Facebook group, so I created the three main actions required: collate, paste and tell.

It really is very simple:

• Collate: get together all the information you need to promote a new event or product from your company, such as words, pictures, recommendations, videos or whatever.

• Paste: go to your Facebook group page and put in the material you have collected.

• Tell: then don’t forget to tell all your fans about your new entry through the link underneath the photo, not forgetting to tell their friends and Facebook contacts to visit the group, add in their comments and suggestions, and sign up themselves.

Never expect the popularity of your group to grow on its own. You need to ask your friends to help you with your viral marketing, don’t expect it to happen automatically. And if you provide good material for them to recommend to potential new recruits, then that makes it all the easier for them.

Oh, and there’s a fourth action just to complicate things: schedule in a time each week to put in new material. If you have an ‘update urge’ within the week, don’t resist it, but why not create a folder to store possible fodder for your Facebook page update so when the time comes you are ready. This makes the process all that much more enjoyable.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the natural or organic method of getting your website placed higher in the search engines, as opposed to paying for online advertising.

As a result it is a task that is never ending, always requiring you to be one step ahead of your competitors, and any successes tend to be short lived, as Google responds to all new material that is posted online, and it is always the latest contributions that are indexed at the top.

But it is a process that should not be ignored. Even if your website or latest blog post reaches its desired placing for a short time, it has got there, and who knows will look at it or read it while it resides in its lofty position. The more times you manage to attain this prize, the higher the chances of recognition, acknowledgement and conversion through response.

To explain simply, SEO work on three main elements: new content, links and keywords. I know all SEO experts out there will be saying ‘Oh, but you’ve forgotten this element’, and of course they’re right, as experts they should have many tricks up their sleeves to attain the final goal: get as high as you can in Google. But if you understand these three elements, there is no reason why anybody can’t give it a try.

New Content: search engines rely on their spiders: mathematically driven robots that ‘crawl’ the net looking for new material that has been posted. Once found, they feed greedily on it before passing it onto their master, the search engine, to be indexed. If your website or blog, especially the blog, has regularly published new content, it stands a better chance of being placed higher than any old material from your competitors.

Links: spiders need to have a method of entering and leaving your website or blog. Think of links being the doors or portals spiders use to find new content. Incoming links allow spiders to enter and feed, and outgoing links (especially if they are relevant to the content and final destination) will enable them to leave and visit other suitable sites, giving you brownie points as they do so.

Keywords: relevance is vital for spiders to work effectively. Keywords should be relevant to the content, destinations of links, and popularity of searches, eg what people are searching for at that moment. It would be wise therefore to properly research suitable keywords that are not only popular but truly reflect your new material and business. It’s simply like a game of snap, and the best results are attained through correct recognition of a match!

Now that you know these three elements, take them into consideration next time you post up something new on the net.

Here’s just a small visual e-course I quickly compiled to demonstrate how easy it is to submit articles into groups in LinkedIn:

http://www.designyourmarketing.co.uk/How to create submissions in the BinB LinkedIn group.pdf

Let me know if it helps to make it easier to contribute. The more activity there is in these groups, the more there is to read, the more promotion members can make, the more new material there is for the internet spiders, and the more interaction from members also contributes to search engine optimisation.

So how about it – go on, give it a go!

This all depends on what caught your eye out of the usual selection of brown or white envelopes.

On 23 July 2009 my website was hacked into.

The result was that some malware was put into the code of my theme of my website.  This activated links to hundreds of pornographic sites whenever I uploaded new material.

Recently I have been quite busy uploading new pages about my blogging beginners self-help e-courses, so all my activities had been blasting off all this pornographic stuff left right and centre throughout the net.

I do have a wonderful brother who is a wizard in website programming, and he worked his magic behind the scenes, locating and removing the malware. Let’s just hope it doesn’t have secondary programming to reappear again later.

Meanwhile I have tried to submit my website for reconsideration by Google. I have contacted my server and have closed all my FTP access (which I will have to temporarily open every time I want to upload something). That was the back door that was wide open and allowed the hacker in.

So check all the portals of your website to make sure they are secure. Change all your passwords to everything regularly and use combinations of letters, numbers and punctuation to make them stronger.

Keep an eye out for anything suspicious or out of the ordinary with your website. This malware was totally invisible on my website, so it was the fact that I couldn’t see my theme that alerted me that something was wrong, but only after all the damage had been done.

An internet spider is a robot that crawls around the world wide web. They are also sometimes called crawlers. They use an algorithmic programme that follows links throughout the net searching for new content. This then fetches the new webpages and adds them to the search engine indexes. Google is a crawler-based search engine, as it relies on spiders to automatically create its listings.

Some spiders have even been given names, such as Mozilla for Netscape, Scooter for Alta Vista and Slurp for Hotbot. They leave evidence of their visits just like human surfers in analytics, code and stats.

Spiders enter and leave websites through links, which act as portals throughout the net. That’s why it’s important to have lots of incoming links to your website to encourage spider activity. If you provide lots of new content for spiders to feed on, they will remember to visit your site more frequently.

Spiders only see text on the webpages, therefore pictures and Flash programmes are invisible to them. You can add alt tags to your pictures which are written descriptions behind them, enabling spiders to understand your images.

Spiders are programmed to look for new content with links, tags and keywords. They particularly relish appropriately selected keywords combined with extremely relevant links and their destinations.  They don’t like hidden or invisible keywords, as they think they’re being fooled. If your site’s navigation is complete, spiders will visit every page, indexing anything that’s new. If you treat spiders well, they are more likely to return.

Spider top tips

• provide lots of new content for spiders to feed on
• remember to put alt tags behind your pictures
• gather as many relevant inbound links as you can for spiders to enter
• remember to add your tags within your blog posts
• create contextual links (linked key-phrases) for maximum effect
• make sure your links go to relevant destinations
• blogs are visited hourly by spiders, unlike websites who may not be visited for several weeks

How does your online marketing hold up? Even if you have a system in place, are you sure its actions are focused on the correct direction?

I gave a health check at a networking meeting to a HR specialist. There were a number of subjects we touched on that she could expand from her existing systems in place.

First, I assessed she wished to change her newsletter provider and was considering ConstantContact.com and Aweber. We discussed the merits of both, but further probing revealed that she could combine Paypal with Aweber to provide a shopping cart that collects the details of her purchasers. These details can be used for promoting further products or events, as well as setting up a series of automated emails to further educate her subscribers to the remainder of her business.

Of course her newsletter will also do this function, but with a different slant. Don’t forget the call to action and purpose focus, or your communication will be ineffectual. Even if your message is purely educational, link back to the relevant pages on your website for further knowledge.

We discussed her series of online adverts she had in place. They had been suitably placed by an Adwords expert, but I felt there was more that could be done at the website end. The main consideration of this kind of advertising is a correct focus, for example, line it up with a squeeze page that collects the visitor’s details in exchange for a ‘prize’ or special report. These details can be used through Aweber with the automated emails directing to relevant webpages and the newsletter. Alternatively, the adwords ad could be directed to a squeeze page relevant to the words, where the visitor can make a selection for purchase or perform one action to satisfy their needs, again providing their details in the process.

We also touched on the power of blogging and how RSS can spread her expertise around social media and the web, and how followers could subscribe to her newly published blog posts. These posts could be expanded into articles and posted around the web in article directories, and by asking her followers to retweet or forward her posts to other potentially interested parties, especially if they liked what they have read, she could expand her audience appropriately.

We then discussed her recent website performance. She had recently updated it (very good for SEO reasons) but was confused that her rate of conversions had declined since doing so. I asked whether her index page may have become more confusing, as she had added more facilities and information to it.

My suggestion was that she needed to concentrate on the pain of her potential customers by investigating into what problems she should focus on in order to provide the appropriate solutions. Customers only surf for their problems on the web as they don’t yet know the answers. Carry out research through questionnaires and the Q & A section on LinkedIn, of which she was a member.

Combine these problems into three main ones and present them on the index page. The visitor will see the company fully acknowledges their pain, and combined with promises of the solutions if they click on the appropriate links, will get the visitor further into her website, which is an action she wanted to promote.

On the next page relevant to that particular problem then she could start to elaborate and provide the solutions. As long as this continues to be clear and understandable, the visitor can click to other more succinct pages on particular solutions and then make contact through a strategically placed contact form to discuss the subject further with the company.

I expect that took longer than half an hour, but I forgot about the time. If you would like such a health check, then go ask Alice!

How sad it is when you see examples of online marketing failing to work, and sigh when you think of how much money is wasted.

Hooray!

After months of promising, I have finally done it. I have created the first sixteen of my blogging e-courses on how to create a WordPress.com blog the really easy way – using visual e-courses that show you, step by step, with screen-shots of each procedure, the simplest way to create a fully functional blog – and they’re now ready to buy at incredibly reasonable prices! Just go to my make a blog! page to find out more.

And that’s not all, I still have two more e-courses to create, and I will be dotting around free pdfs with relevant top tips, time-saving methods and inside knowledge nuggets of how to make your blog and its posts all that more successful.

So if you know any start-up businesses, people who haven’t got a blog yet and are scared about starting one, or those who already have a blog and want to find out more about maximising its potential, then send them to my make a blog! page.

Oh, and leave a comment! I would really value your thoughts, and any questions are more than welcome!

I presented my muffin post idea to a group of 30 women, and was pleasantly surprised when they appeared to ‘get’ my idea.

Some interesting questions arose:

“If you don’t follow this recipe for creating blog posts, what happens?’

“Well, you get a misshapen, tasteless, half-baked mound in the middle of your baking tray, in other words, not a good post.”

“Lots of people might not know how to create posts properly, so are there lots of badly baked muffins around?”

“Of course, take a look at other blogs and see if they have all the ingredients in them. You’ll soon know which ones are baked perfectly.”

One woman came up to me afterwards and revealed she had started a blog, and now realised her posts were lacking in flavour. “Thanks for letting me know what tags are for, can I go back and put them in?”

“Yes, blog posts can be rebaked with the correct flavourings (tags or keywords), unlike real muffins, which cannot be ‘undone’. That’s the beauty of blogging, and not baking. I suppose you could crumble up your bland muffins and add flavourings to it for another dish, such as a rewritten post.”

What thoughts or questions do you have that arise from my muffin blog post?

Let’s bake some muffins (the American ones that resemble large cup cakes) and compare the process to writing a blog post.

First, gather together the necessary equipment and ingredients. You will need a bowl, a saucepan, cooking scales, a bar of chocolate, flour, butter and sugar, an egg, vanilla essence and chocolate drops, muffin cases, a baking tray, an oven, some hungry people, and a recipe book.

Your bowl represents your blog’s posting page. It’s empty, and needs the ingredients to be put in it to make your muffins. Likewise your edit post page needs some post material to be written into it.

The idea for your post is like deciding what flavour your muffins should be. It’s best to choose a subject that everybody will want to read, so we have chosen chocolate as this is usually a favourite. Melt your chocolate in a saucepan.

Now weigh out your flour, or the words of your post. This is the bulk of the final product. But other ingredients need to be added, as flour alone won’t make a muffin.

But before you add the flour to your bowl, you must cream together the butter and sugar. This mixture represents the headline or title of your post, as it needs to be done or thought of first. It can be hard work to create the correct consistency, but it will be worth it.

Add a beaten egg to the mixture, or check that the headline has become a suitable permalink or URL for your post, and doesn’t read just as a page number. The permalink is important for search engine optimisation, to allow the mixture to rise during cooking, so it is a good idea to get it right.

Now you enhance the flavour of your muffin mixture with vanilla essence and chocolate drops (which represents the tags or keywords of your post). These will transform your muffins into tasty double chocolate samples rather than just ordinary chocolate ones.

Now you fold the flour into the mixture, or write the words with all the elements included above. Remember to add the melted chocolate (or retain the relevance of your post), or your muffins won’t turn out as expected.

Then spoon the mixture into your muffin cases, so they retain their shape and cook better on the baking tray. This is the equivalent of allocating your post to its category or topic page.

Now you need to publish your post, or cook your muffins in the oven. Mmmm, wonderful chocolatety smells! Once the time is up, they should be ready to be devoured by hungry readers.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the baker’s shop. If you supply a baker’s shop to sell your muffins, more people who pass by or visit the shop will get a chance to buy and eat them. And if the shop provides a delivery service, regular customers will receive half a dozen as soon as they are baked. This is the equivalent of RSS feeding and subscribing your newly published posts.

And the last item is my recipe book, or blogging pages, where you can learn more about blogs and how to create them.

Yesterday Chrissie Slade of Gorgeous Guineas came to see me for a half hour health check (but as always with me she got a bit more than just half an hour!).

Chrissie makes aromatherapy skin products for guinea pigs, and claims she’s the only one in the world doing this. It’s a fascinating little business, and Chrissie spends her time looking after her own five piggies, plus any that are holidaying with her, and cooking up various lotions and potions to cure skin problems in guinea pigs.

But having created her range of products, she wanted to know how to market them better. I took a look at her website www.gorgeousguineas.com and its accompanying shop, and was suitably impressed. Chrissie certainly knows her stuff, and she was keen to write more articles about her products to educate the world. I suggested selected articles could be linked into a the shopping pages that presented the relevant product, acting as testimonials, examples or recommendations.

She already has a blog (hosted WordPress attached to her website) which needs more content, even though what is on there is good. It is lacking various elements such as a RSS feed and a sign-up form to her newsletter, plus better regulation of her categories and tags, and more encouragement for comments, but once accomplished this can become a useful prop towards getting more traffic to her website and shop.

Chrissie also has a newsletter that regularly goes out to several hundred subscribers, each with a defined purpose and special deals, and Chrissie informed me the response rate was good, not only opening and reading it, but reacting to her offers as well.

She had recently moved her newsletter to another provider that offered her an autoresponder as well, so we discussed ways of how she could use that to her advantage, such as creating e-courses on how to care for guineas with particular problems, spacing out the emails over a series of days to correspond with the various stages of the treatment, watching out for signs of improvement and providing gentle reminders. Chrissie could see other ways how this could be used to educate her followers.

We discussed how articles could be transformed into various guises, such as blog posts, newsletter articles, pdfs for downloading, posted onto article directory sites such as EzineArticles.com, and also ‘fed’ into other areas on the web, such as her Facebook fanpage and Twitter, through the power of RSS. Chrissie was impressed that one action could result in several reactionary performances to spread her word around a wider area on the net.

Chrissie had set up a Facebook fanpage but had done very little with it. Once I had explained how she could fill its pages with different details and information about her business and her piggies, such as ‘before and after’ pictures of treated guineas, encourage responses and similar stories from her 117 fans, visit other like-minded groups and comment on their walls, feed in her blog posts and Twitterings, publicise her new products or successful treatments, she soon saw the page’s value. Like all social networking it should not be neglected, only warranting regular small attention now and again.

Whew, all that in half an hour! The next question is: how much are you doing to market your business?

One of the aspects of a blog is that it is interactive. This means readers are able to contribute to your blog if they have something to say. Blogging programmes automatically add an area after posts where readers can add their point of view. The ability to comment is also part of the phenomenon Web2.0, which is about interaction on the web.

So, what is special about blogs and commenting? Ordinary websites don’t have areas to put your point across, unless it’s a form to leave your details or send an email. Therefore what you have written is not automatically showed to you afterward for others to read, something that naturally occurs on a blog (unless the blog’s administrator wants to moderate your comment first, to make sure it isn’t spam).

But why should you comment on blogs? Apart from sharing your opinions, your comment may increase the value of the blog post, making it more interest to other readers. The author may also be inclined to respond, and starting a conversation – all adding to the entertainment factor.

Another thing to note, comments are viewed by the search engine spiders as new material, so the more interaction, the more the blog post goes up the search engines.

Comments can vary in content, as their authors can agree or disagree with the topic of the post. As long as you continue to be polite and forthcoming, and your contribution is relevant and resourceful, any comment is good. Sometimes comments lead onto other blog posts, especially if backed up by links. As spiders thrive on links, there are opportunities for comment authors to leave their details.

How do you induce a comment? Simply ask for one, as sometimes it won’t occur to the reader to leave one otherwise. Positioning a question at the bottom of your post may also encourage a response, as well as controversial subject matter. Those who comment are usually used to interaction on the net, and are likely to be avid social networkers, but anything that stimulates a reader to take action is advantageous.

Why is it good to comment? If you want to find your way in your chosen field, visit as many relevant blogs and leave a comment where you can. Then you will begin to get noticed by other bloggers and blog readers, and commenting will also enable you to link back to your blog or website, thus increasing your visitor rate. If you get a name for yourself by leaving good quality comments, visitors are more likely to visit to read your articles, subscribe to your blog and even leave comments themselves.