Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

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...

A week ago I kicked off a survey on whether people use Twitter for business, pleasure or both, and if for both do they separate their accounts (original post here). After a great response from the wider Twitterverse, the results are in.

Question 1 was “Do you use Twitter for business reasons, personal, or both?”

Use of Twitter for Business, Personal or Both

70% of people who responded use Twitter for both purposes, with another 20% utilising it as a business tool, and the remaining 10% using it without the aim of financial gain. So for those of you planning to use it to promote your business (and assuming this is indicative of the Twitter population), you are competing with up to 90% of the users for a share of voice. Naturally, depending on your niche that number could fluctuate either way, but when the base is as high as 90%, it is safe to assume that marketers and business owners of all kinds realise its value as a tool, and you need to be clear with your messages.  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...

Despite the fact that it has been around for 2 years, the latest social networking tool that everyone is jumping on right now is Twitter. Celebrities, companies and even world leaders like Barrack Obama are avid Tweeters. For the uninitiated, Twitter is basically like your Facebook status, but you only have 140 characters to work with. People can “follow”your tweets (the term for each short message), and you can in turn follow them.

So can 140 characters in Twitter be used for your business? It really depends on what you want to achieve, but if you are going to use it as a business tool you need to make sure you are delivering something of value to your followers. If you run an information business, promoting your latest blog post is a good way to remind your followers to come back. If you are in retail, consider using it for special offers available only to your followers. Services business can use it as a means of answering common questions from the larger consumer base.  Read more...