Nottingham SEO: about my SEO Nottingham adventure

I am currently testing out some SEO techniques which are free and simple to set up. This is just a little side project started when researching the local job market.
I titled it my SEO adventure.


I am using a squidoo lens as the landing page rather than a webpage as I want to document this up for small businesses and entrepreneurs to utilise once completed.


Please follow the link to find out more and remember that I will be posting updates as the weeks go on.

Whose advice do you follow?

When it comes to Ebooks and articles about marketing techniques, 
whose advice do you listen to and who do you ignore.

Too much information can leave you confused,
so here are some quick pointers to help you get the most out of your research and reading.

What is it you want to read about?
A simple, but often overlooked question, this can help you avoid being sidetracked by topics that are not relevant to your direction or development. If you see and article or ebook that is not on this subject, do not open or spend time reading it.

How to shut out the noise.

• Take time away from the screen.
• Print out some material to read somewhere else.
• We are used to reading printed material.
• Use highlighters to mark important text and keep a note book to write down the most important key words or ideas for referring to later on.We can digest information without other office, work or home distractions.
• Turn off your phone while you are reading, or put your calls on hold until then.
• Web adverts and banners are distracting and often articles have link words which take you away from the main article you were interested – resist clicking these until after you have finished the article.

Information paralysis and how to avoid it.

I spend so much time reading about how to do things, that I often use up my free time to start them.
It is necessary to spend time researching, but give yourself some concentrated bursts of research and review, then extract the useful info then outline how you need to put this into practise.

Then repeat this stage again and again as required.

Make sure you can follow through on your to do list from each section review before undertaking more research..

Avoid the trap of downloading every ebook you can get, then never really reading through them to dissect the information.

Try writing a review of each one which highlights the useful information in less than 200 words.
What is the core information that you or others would need from this ebook. You can use these reviews at a later date for generating content for blog posts or review posting.

When to get started.
If I made a small start when I first thought about doing something then I would already be underway. I still struggle with the feeling that I should wait for the right time. There is some belief that if you can maintain the first 6 minutes at any task then you will be in a mind to continue the task rather than stop the task after this point. Set a kitchen timer or phone alert for 6 minutes and then make your start. See if this start time makes a difference to your task. What start time works best for you?

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Remember that everything is a learning curve.
If you are not engaged to learn and develop from what you are currently reading, then try reading something else.

6 ways to avoid your emails being seen as spam.

Here is a quick list of ways to keep yourself out of spam bin.



1) Warn your new sign ups that they may need to change their filters.

Before someone submits their details to your email subcription box, highlight to them that they may have to set their filters to allow your emails. Once you have regular emails received by them the filter issues seem less likely to misread your emails.

2) Get them to add you as a contact into their contacts folder.

You will need to let them see the exact sent from IP address to that they can add this to their contacts folder and save your name. This should reduce your emails being labelled as SPAM.

3) Don't fill your text with Spam words.

Make sure you write your emails without the hardsell keywords, or without too many single link words. This can be scanned as spam. Google current lists of Spam words as there are loads of articles on this: try this one
http://www.eadm.co.uk/spam-words.html for starters but please look for more to get a better understanding of the types of words.



4) Use images to show filtered words.

If you have to use words like free and special offer, make these into images and place as eyecatchers in your design. Be careful not to label these with the keywords as the meta data in the HTML will still be picked up by the spam filters.


5) Don't use 3rd party link shorteners to track your clicks.

Popular link shorteners like Bit.ly and others act like a tracking cookie. So the browser can see these as being a masked URL. Always try to use the link tracking through your email client. They are more recognised by the browsers.


6) Allow people to unsubscribe easily.

Last on this short list is a promblem that is sometimes overlooked.
If you do not make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your emails then they are more likely to just save time and click the spam button to block you. The more of these your send address receives the worse your performance in emailing. You cannot control your contacts changing their minds after registering.

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Please let me know your comments and if this information was of use to you.
If you have more information then please add your advice for others to read.
If you want to receive further updates then please subscribe to my RSS feed on the homepage.

Keep your data clean, and clean your data regularly.

You can waste a lot of energy and money by emailing to customers whose data is not cleaned.

Before you send, make sure you know where your email contacts have come from.

Good practice dictates that you should always look to grow your email list organically, from contacts who have signed up directly to you through your site or through your direct marketing and promotional material.

Where possible get them to double opt-in through your email service by. This means that when they sign up and are then prompted to confirm their email sign up online. By opting in twice they show a better level of interest and as long as your content is relevant and interesting, you should be able to market to them more efficiently.

Double opt in also protects you from malicious reporting as a SPAMMER. If someone reports your emails as spam, their double opt-in history can be used to prove they were aware of what you would be emailing. It is always useful to protect your online reputation and this is a good system to use for that reason alone.

 

Only use trusted email lists.

I would caution against the use of 'purchased email lists' or if you are looking to buy email lists from third parties. If a small percentage of these lists report you as spam, you can quickly become blacklisted and unable to send any e-mails from your email client - which impacts on your time and money.

Would you respond well to emails from unknown parties?

Understand that growing email lists happens over a period of time and is the result of a combination of other marketing methods.

Don’t panic if you find people are unsubscribing from your e-mails. They are doing you a favour by

showing you they are not likely to answer your call to actions. As long as they opt out, rather than report

you for SPAM, this will not affect your reputation. It only helps to clean your list of contacts interested

in your e-mails.

Send a yearly 'clean up' email that asks people to update their information and unsubscribe if they no longer wish to receive your emails (though this should always be a link in your email anyway). It's not about how big your list is, but rather about how responsive that list is.

How do you currently store or manage your customer email information?
If you use a CRM database (customer relationship management) who is responsible for making sure the data is correct, are your sales team or colleagues adding in data correctly?
Clean data is a product of everyone's behaviour so try to make sure this is put into practise.

An effective way to clean data is to pull reports showing the least active openers and split test your emails to these lists to see if different content, layout or special offers increase clicks or call to action responses. 

How clean is your data?

Questions to ask yourself before you send your email campaigns

Some simple questions that still get overlooked by many email marketers.

1) What information does my email need to communicate?

2) What content am I going to feature?

3) What key indicators am I going to use to measure my success rate?

4) Have I created a proper email schedule and marketing plan?

5) Have these planning stages highlighted any changes that I may need to make before I begin?

Remember!

Each email campaign should be treated like a proper marketing campaign.

Email marketing is not effective when used as a blast all marketing tool without thought and planning.

If you do not measure your results, you do not know what the impact is of your emails!

11 steps for better email marketing

Here is a link to my short ebook called '11 steps for better email marketing'.

When you are putting together your email campaigns remember to check you have followed all the outlined steps to make sure you take advantage of each and every email you are sending.

View the PDF on Google


Don't forget to leave a comment about how you found the ebook. You can also sign up for the RSS feed so you will receive updates for every helpful post.


One of the biggest challenges with email marketing is giving yourself enough time in advance to plan fully around all the apsects of your campaign. See my post on how plan your email campaigns for the best return of investment for more advice.