Hi, We are quite newly established business providing administration services and business support (like data entry, internet research etc.). We have tried many ways of promoting our company, some of them were more successful, some of them less :).

We did some SEO with our website, e-mail marketing campaigns, telemarketing etc.

At the moment I am thinking of being more ‘interactive’ in internet. It is just initial level of planning marketing actions and I don’t have any experience in such areas . That’s why I would like to hear your opinions on these ideas.

1. Testimonials/feedback/guestbook section on our website – I guess this is the simpliest and most certain way of being more interactive with people in the web

2. Twitter marketing – Did any of you ever tried something like this ? I am considering writing brief updates about our business, following business people/businessess that might be of interest for us, and hoping that they start following us and maybe have some work for our company :) Do you think it can work ?

3. Having own blog – probably not in traditional meaning but rather as a place where I can post some updates, new offers, testimonials etc. and where other people can give comments and ‘interact’ with me.

4. Facebook advertising – I have no any experience in using facebook, and dont know much about it, do you think it can be good place to advertise ? and what are the ways to advertise there ?

Any opinions and ideas welcome :)

Take a look here:

Free Internet Marketing Tools (http://www.indizine.co.uk/free-internet-marketing-tools)

Blogs and RSS (http://www.indizine.co.uk/blogs-and-rss)

Article Submission (http://www.indizine.co.uk/article-submission)


Make sure that all your internet marketing links to your keywords which link to your relevant web pages.

Try posting more often on forums such as this one, A1businessforums.co.uk and UKBusinessForums.co.uk

Try submitting to directories (http://www.indizine.co.uk/submitting-to-directories) - plenty of free online business directories (http://www.indizine.co.uk/free-directories) to go at

And finally when you are doing all of this internet marketing, make sure you are using the most effective keywords to produce results from the external websites linking back to you.

At the moment the website itself isn't optimised so any off-site SEO you have been doing will not have been as effective as it could be.

Yes, you do need to get your page code sleek first. Try to get all your scripts off your content pages and linked by external files like some of your other scripts and css files.

The use of divs and lists is good but you would do better seo wise with text links to your other pages although you may lose part of the graphic quality.

1. Testimonials/feedback/guestbook section on our website – I guess this is the simplest and most certain way of being more interactive with people in the web

--Testimonials are good as long as they are not too cheesy. Feedback a must. Guestbook? Its 2009 not 1999.

2. Twitter marketing – Did any of you ever tried something like this ? I am considering writing brief updates about our business, following business people/businesses that might be of interest for us, and hoping that they start following us and maybe have some work for our company :) Do you think it can work ?

-- Personally, I don't get it. http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/05/05/for-those-who-still-dont-get-twitter/ Claims with a screenshot that it works for him.

3. Having own blog – probably not in traditional meaning but rather as a place where I can post some updates, new offers, testimonials etc. and where other people can give comments and ‘interact’ with me.

-- I wouldn't bother. There is a case for one but unless it writes itself then the ROI isn't there. Look at the number of blogs that start off with regular posting and then stop. Same with mailing lists. I cannot see the point unless they write themselves or bring in revenue.

4. Facebook advertising – I have no any experience in using facebook, and dont know much about it, do you think it can be good place to advertise ? and what are the ways to advertise there ?

-- I don't get Facebook either. http://marketing.contrastwebsolutions.co.uk/2009/03/facebook-changes-step-forward-for.html It looks like facebook could be used to do what you were thinking about the blog. They also run a pay per click scheme http://www.facebook.com/advertising/

I think your biggest problem looks like your write up on your product.

Bronze package

* Customer management database (in ms Access or excel)
* Logical set up of electronic filing systems
* Effective diary management systems
* Ongoing support for 6 months to help you adjust to and use your new systems

£350

Sounds like you are trying to sell a spreadsheet for £350. It doesn't matter how much traffic you get, no one I know would buy your product based on your write up. You can buy sage act 2009 for less than £150 inc VAT.

I would consider making a youtube video demonstrating your product. You can use media encoder 9 to capture videos for free http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

I have never trusted a single testemonial on any website in the past 11 years. While some of them may well have been true testimonials there are far to many fake ones that show happy customers and you just cannot trust their content...i would never buy a product based on the testimonials.

It's my belief that if you are going to gain customers your product has to shine all by itself with no support from those who pay you for the product in the first place.

It will show confidence in your product, confidence in your ability to sell the product, and also the quality and level of service. People will go to other forums and website to talk to others about if your service is worthwhile or you could have your own in place not so much to have questions answered by you, but to directly ask others currently using your product or service how they find it.

While you could ride on the huge success of facebook etc, remember while these are giants at the moment, they can fail or the userbase can move in droves to somewhere else...just like having a website isnt as flash as it used to be, and how flash animations are not the big fancy idea they once were, using facebook in a way that's been used a million times over is not a great idea for innovation and interactivity as users WILL get bored quickly.

Think fresh, think dynamic, think outside the box, that is where your future marketing should be aiming.

Thank you for all your opinions and suggestions. They are all very useful/ interesting and it means that we will obviously have to rewiev and probably change some of our methods of marketing.

I will try to reply at some of your posts in short time.

I would like to see more about YOU.

Your about page consists of random quotes from a GCSE business skills project. Tell us about YOU. (I outsource everything and there would be no chance of me picking up the phone because I know nothing about YOU).

You need to make your message standout more.

I can get someone to do data entry for a lot cheaper than £350 from guru.com and as we spoke about on an earlier thread, office has "dumbed down" typing in the last 5 -10 years.

From your services page

# Logical set up of electronic filing systems
# Effective diary management systems
# Up to 5 hours worth of our other admin support services

I wouldn't want illogical filing systems or ineffective diary management and "up to 5 hours" says that you will be clock watching rather than working.

Before you start with all your (good) ideas, I think you need to look again at the words on your pages and your offer.

PS I think you have my disease of Capitalising the Wrong words Also...

hth

Some good ideas would be to register for dedicated business forums such as:

http://forums.teneric.co.uk
www.uksmallbusinessforums.com

And just offer general advice, as you offer administrative services it shouldn't be too hard. Once you have a decent post level people will start taking you serious and you can probably start gaining custom from that. All completely free and would maybe take up just a couple of hours a week or so.

I've promoted a few of my internet businesses this way, don't just blatantly advertise but offer some advice on the board and ask them to contact you if they want to proceed further.

Thanks for giving good information

There are some good points and some good advice, like optimizing your product, rather than focusing on marketing. But this is like asking about fishing at a golf club. There's a reason why online-shy business owners are seen as pots of gold by the internet marketing community ;)

You will get some of THE BEST advice you can receive from http://warriorforum.com

Some of the brightest and most successful internet marketers and internet entrepreneurs congregate there. In fact, there is a site dedicated entirely to the best threads featured on the forum:

http://bestwarriorthreads.com/

You will learn everything you need to know about internet marketing through those threads. Bare in mind, the visitors are predominately us based though there are quite a few uk based people on there.

My *personal* advice is to refine your product selling points and develop a solid usp.

Testimonials make a HUGE difference despite what people THINK above. I have quite a few products and sales pages and I've split tested with/without testimonials. There's a definite increase on conversion rates with at least a few testimonials. Credibility is a major component of testimonials...regardless of your moral sway, fake testimonials work as long as they 'sound' credible. In 5 years, I don't think I've had one customer check up on a testimonial I've featured. That's not saying I create fake testimonials, I personally don't agree; just making a point about how effective and flexible testimonials can be.

Twitter can indeed gain you more exposure and clients. But don't forget, this is simply one medium of 'social marketing' which is a single aspect of internet marketing. Facebook, again, is another medium of social marketing, as is myspace etc. etc. Because you offer services of a 'global' nature, where locality is mostly irrelevant, social marketing will play a big part in your success (over the internet). If you haven't already, look at globalising your packages.

Finally, have you tried to gain any work on any freelance sites like guru.com, getafreelancer.com, rentacoder.com? Ignore people who say they hire at $3/hr so why would they pay you $25/hr...they are web-savvy business men....not everybody is and most seem to live by 'you get what you pay for'. If you gain some testimonials on any of the above sites, you can feature them as *actual* testimonials on your site, which can be fully backed up with a link to the testimonial.

Really, I hope that helps.

I think I've mentioned this in previous threads; buy "SEO for Dummies", everything in this thread is covered plus a whole load more; I used it and got our product design business to #3 in google for the UK for the search term "product design" after about 3 months hard slog :)