Today’s message, bootstrappers, is to be nice to people who are nice to you.  Does that have a place in online business?  Well, yes it does.  For example, when you find a blog has said something nice about you, perhaps posted a link, get right in there and stumble, digg and twitter them.  Use all the social media to give them the recognition you think they deserve.  Boost their visitor numbers and that will in turn boost yours.

Of course, you can start the love-fest by saying nice things about them first.  The secret is to know the people who will make good friends, and that has nothing to do with how nice the people themselves are.  Some of the leading lights of many market sectors are great people who will willingly help others.  The problem is the big boys an girls won’t notice you amongst their many other true admirers and occasional sycophants.

Look for people whose work you admire and who are a little way ahead of you in your sector.  They are more likely to value your support and take the time to return the compliment.

You may have a social media presence, but do you have a social media strategy?  When we interact with people in social media, or in any other marketing activity, we have broadly one of two aims: we either want a direct sale, or we want a delayed sale from an enhanced brand image.

Social media can deliver either of these, but not from the same message.  We can either encourage people to click a link which we hope we can convert to a sale, or we want them to think our product is so cool they will pass the message on to others.  Understand which you are looking for and you can start to track the impact you are having.

There are three things you can do to.  location3.com use the acronym MOM – Monitor what people are saying; Outreach to support positive comments and tackle negative; Measure the results.

If you are looking for direct sales you can simply measure the number of visitors referred from different social media sites, and look at your conversion rates.

If it’s indirect sales you’re after this is, as usual, more complex.  You can count followers and fans, follow the path of discussions across the Media, track positive to negative comments.  You can also set up ways to capture earned referrals – those who by your product as a result of hearing about it from someone else.

So, bootstrappers, know what it is you want from your social media strategy and it becomes easier to see what it is you should measure.

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Web users don’t like to wait.  They will loose patience if your site is slow to load or run.  They may not even wait for your site to load if it is very slow.  Site speed is vital for a good visitor experience. There are a few simple things you can do: limit the number and size of images; don’t run loads of java scripts.

There are also some techie things that can greatly improve your speed, including gzip compression, which is pretty standard these days.  These coding issues may be beyond many site owners, but if your site was designed by a professional, speed should be one of the issues they resolve for you.

You can quickly check how fast your site is loading using one of several free speed tests around.  WebSiteOptimization, in which I have no financial interest, offers a quick and easy test.  Just enter your URL and get a result in seconds.  They give results scores in green/amber/red to help the non-techies, along with comment about improvement.

Google have entered the debate and are encouraging us to think about site speed, though they say it does not affect page rank ‘at present‘.  See what Google are saying about web speed on their blog.  If you’re a webmaster, they offer tips and tutorials.

Do you think Google will use website speed for page ranking in the future?  Leave your views.

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New research shows that email marketing is set to grow hugely over the next five years.  So it’s maybe time to take a leaf out of the books of the big boys and ramp up your email marketing campaign.  The expected growth is because email marketing is seen as being cost effective, especially as people increase their use of social email accounts.

Particularly expected to grow are:

• Retention email (the stuff people sign up for)
• Use of professional email companies
• Ad-sponsored newsletters

Take a cool look at what it could mean to your business if you were to ride this email wave and begin or increase your success selling through email.  Your list of prospects could stay with you for many years.  Prove to them that you bring them quality advice, news and products and you’ll be a trusted provider whom they’ll buy from you again and again.

When building your email, autoresponder and newsletter campaign an integrated package is vital.  The research I report above recognises this and squarely says that people in the know will be placing campaigns in the hands of the experts.  When you look at these specialised areas, a little money spent with an email campaign provider can save you time, as well as greatly improve your  sales performance.

I notice too that those nice people at Aweber are offering free test drives of their email campaign service.  A coincidence?

I could have titled this ‘bootstrap marketing and the forgotten art of praising others‘.  No website owner likes anything better than praise.  It helps to boost the popularity of their pages and gives them credibility.  But your side of the deal is that you should get a link from them. Of course, with the advent of social media, you can do this with comments left on blogs; or by following, befriending and giving the thumbs up on social media sites.  But the pre-social network methods are still valid.  Here are five ways to get links by praising others, and not a tweet in sight.  Always leave a link (or at least a mention) of your own site.  Don’t try to sell.  And please be more genuine than ‘Great info, see me at obvioushook.com‘.

1.  Guest books and any other opportunity to leave your calling card.  Leave a short thank you for the information, or praise for the new insight.

2.  Give a testimonial.  If you bought a product and liked it, say so and allow it to be published if they include a link.

3.  In discussion groups and forums make supportive comments about others, especially if you have taken a few minutes to visit their site.

4.  Write a glowing review of a website.  Post it on their site if you can.  If not, email it to the webmaster and allow publication if it includes your link.

5.  Email a positive comment.  Sometimes this can be a more personal approach and better appreciated.

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The simple question to ask yourself is – why on earth would anyone link to my page?

And the answer is – if what you have is interesting and valuable enough, and they feel they won’t get it anywhere else.  That means thinking about not just your visitors, but also thinking about visitors to sites you want links from.  Tough, eh!  The concept of link baiting has been around for at least five  years but seems recently to have gained more attention.

The standard thinking says that link bait falls into: News, Contrary, Attack, Resource or Humour. A good starting point for ideas could be to look at your bookmark list to see what content makes you mark, share or link.

Here are some ideas.  If you have ideas you use, I’d be very glad to hear them.

• Latest news in your niche
• Lists (especially of links)
• Special reports
• How-to guides
• History of, the story of …
• Interviews
• Contests
• A controversial point of view
• Scams exposed
• Disagree with experts
• Plug-ins, widgets or tools
• Valuable giveaways
• Visual humour

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Post your link bait ideas below.

Are you in a market niche where trends change according to the season?  Be ready to boost your efforts by researching those trends and planning your marketing.

The Google keywords gives you monthly search figures for the last year, but for an in-depth analysis use Google Trends (if your sales are restricted to a single country, google ‘Google Trends’ to get your local trends site).

Try to identify those trends that you can respond to with fresh marketing content or products.  Take a critical look at large online stores that sell your type of products, you can be sure that they will have done their homework!

Search on Twitter to see what people are discussing and what needs they identify.  Do the same on your favorite forums.  You may also find the social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon and del.icio.us are useful, though I find they are better for non-seasonal trends (movies, games, news and so on).

Once you’ve done your research, create and publish your new content, articles, newsletter, blog and forum posts to catch the attention of visitors as they browse for their seasonal needs.

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You have a few seconds only to get a viewers attention before they click out of your page.  Construct your pages to grab and hold visitors’ attention.  Research by the Poynter Institute reveals what parts of the page and what items draw viewers eyes.  Although they warn against sticking too rigidly to formulas, their suggested tactics are:

1.  First seen is top left, followed by the top of the page

2.  People scan large fonts but read smaller ones

3.  The first few words of a blurb or heading are important, people won’t read further if their attention is not grabbed

4.  People do scroll down the page but are scanning for things that grab their attention

5.  Navigation panes across the top of the page work best

6.  Short paragraphs (perhaps only one sentence) and single columns work best for articles

7.  People generally do not look at ads    But they are more likely to if:

• They are in the top left of the page
• They are near the page’s main content
• They are large
• They are in type

8.  The larger the image, the more time people spend looking at it

Take a look at your pages: do the stand up to scrutiny?

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Bootstrap marketers should always read what other people are saying, whether they’re gurus, competitors or people in the know.  You need to follow trends and get the latest news, views and gadgets.  Here are 20 of my favourite blogs for marketers.  I’ve picked a variety: well known or just good; how-to guides or thought provoking.  Hope you enjoy them.  If you have your own suggestions, add a comment.

In no particular order:

SEOmoz Blog – Search Engine Marketing News – News, tips and highlights from the search marketing industry.

The social media blog by Mike Brito – Thoughts and tips on social media and more.

Seth’s blog – Thought-provoking comment from the excellent Seth Godin.

Hubspot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog – SEO, blogging, social media, landing pages, lead generation and analytics.

Futurelab’s Marketing Strategy and Information Blog – Advice and opinion from field leaders on a range of marketing topics.

Blog marketing strategies – Advice from Jack Humphrey.

Matt Cutts: Gadets, Google and SEO – Matt Cutts of Google on SEO and website improvement.  Advice straight from the horses mouth (sorry Matt!)

Make Money Online with Rosalind Gardner – Rosalind shows you how.

Sugarrae – never mess with a woman who can pull rank – Advice and lots of opinion from the inimitable Sugarrae, aka Rae Hoffman

The Official Google Blog – Latest info and gadgets.

The Social Media Marketing Blog – How to use social media in marketing with Scott Monty.

Business Blogging Optimization Strategies – Does what it says on the tin: a blog about blogging.

Guerilla Marketing Online – Jay Conrad Levinson, the originator of guerrilla marketing.

Web Ad.vantage Online Marketing – Background  information on online marketing from this consulting firm.

Online Internet Marketing Blog – Internet marketing, social media, mobile media and public relations.

Clickz – news and advice for the internet marketer – News from the big marketing world.

Court’s Internet Marketing School – Information for both beginners and the more experienced.

Internet Marketing Strategy at Winning the Web – Variety of news and tips.

Search Engine Marketing Tips – Varied news and tips on SEO.

Online Marketing for Marketers – Marketing tips from a wide range of contributers.

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Confused?  A bit too techie for you?  Fear not, the answers are coming!  I still see a lot of discussion on this subject, though Google – and the other main search engines – put a fix out a couple of months ago.  The problem about “duplicate content” is actually about multiple ways of refering to the same web page.  For example, my main website could be http://www.muntjack.com or just http://muntjack.com (no www.) or it could end in .html or with a / and so on.  And things – believe it or not – can get more complicated than that.  Google will probably still find the pages, but I may not get the value (and page ranking) from links that use different versions.  Matt Cutts from Google gives a great and easy to understand explanation of the problem, how to avoid it and how to fix it in this video.  If you just want the fix go to Google Webmaster Central.

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