Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

While there are some on Twitter who place value on the number of people they have following them, or that they follow, for me Twitter is about extracting the maximum value from a carefully selected group of selected people. Let’s face it, who has the time to trawl through tens of thousands of tweets to find something of interest?

I’m a big believer in getting the most out of your feed and rather than post multiple tweets about who you should follow on “Follow Friday”, I wanted to take the time to list them all and give a snapshot of who they are. When I was looking at this post, I thought of making it “50 people you should follow”. However, in the interests of reading time, and to make it just a little different, I have decided to make it 27 people you should follow. Obviously each niche in the online world will have their own rockstar tweeters, but as far as online business and marketing goes, these are the people whose tweets I derive the most value from (in no particular order).  Read more...

It seems like a social media frenzy this week in Sydney, with a couple of events bringing together some great minds and great discussion. I spent lunchtime today at an event organised by Beth Etling from The Insight Exchange to hear some interesting strategies from a cross section of different industries.

On the panel today was Kate Leaman of Foster’s Group, Digital and Social Media strategist Con Frantzeskos, Aisha Hillary of SBS and Chris Noble of World Nomads.

Rather than rehash details from each presentation, it is easier to distill them into what I considered the three standout messages and what it means for your online business:  Read more...

I really wanted to call this first post the Adventures of Bollocks in Twitterland, but I thought better of it for SEO purposes…

I’m really excited this week to write the first in a series of posts that will see me work with a live site in an effort to drive visitors and ultimately help with sales. The client has given me permission to use their site as an example of how to use different techniques and be completely transparent about what we are doing.

Each post I plan to outline what tasks we will undertake during the week ahead. Thoughts, comments, feedback and alternatives are more than welcome. I hope along the way, this becomes very much a crowd sourced overhaul through your feedback.  Read more...

During his session on Social Media at the Affili@SYD conference, Lee Hopkins made an incredibly valuable point about Facebook for business.

If you are using Facebook as part of your marketing strategy for your online business, it is vital that you maintain a separate presence from your personal account. While it is fun to post photos, make witty commentary on others and rate movies and music, these may not be what you want your customers seeing.

This observation got me thinking about similar implications on Twitter. Unlike Facebook’s wide and varied application base, Twitter is a very basic 140 character broadcast service. So should you keep your personal tweets and your business tweets separate? Does replying to someone else’s tweet all of a sudden take you away from your key message and show a side to you that may not be what you want to present to your customers, damaging your reputation?  Read more...

I’m just back from the first Affili@SYD conference, and wanted to share what I considered some of the highlights and point you in their direction, as I think there was some incredibly valuable content that anyone starting an online business should know.

The keynote was from Jay Berkowitz, the CEO of www.tengoldenrules.com, and was certainly one of the most engaging presentations I have heard on online and affiliate marketing. Jay spoke on 10 Super Success Strategies for Internet marketers, which covered effective SEO, blog building and the importance of personal brand and what tools you can use to build it. One such site was PeoplePond, which allows you to aggregate all of your online presences and manage your reputation, something I will be covering in depth soon. Jay’s advice is incredibly practical, I recommend checking out his site TenGoldenRules.com  Read more...