Keeping up with all your competitors on the internet today can be very, very expensive. Websites can be expensive. Search Engine Optimisation is time consuming so expensive (ineffective seo is even more expensive!). Google Adwords is expensive when you don’t know what you’re doing.
But you know, it’s never been CHEAPER to market your Glasgow based business worldwide.
If you run a business you’re smart enough to learn any of the following internet marketing tips that will enable you to begin to market online effectively.
1. You Should Have An Open Source Website Content Management System
Basically, open source is free stuff. A content management system is simply a means by which non technical people can edit website content and even change your website design. If your website has a CMS, it will mean YOU can edit the content yourself, dialing out the web design company and so saving your business money. In years gone-by a good CMS costed THOUSANDS OF POUNDS. Now, you can get excellent content management systems for FREE.
There are a lot of Open Source CMS on the market today. Usually they are simple to set up (although you might need a bit of technical know-how) and easy to configure. A lot of them come with many kinds of templates that let you change the design of your site easily.
To add to that, you can easily add what are called extensions to your new cms that will add functionality to your site (like a forum, booking system or a poll).
To compete in Google today you need to be regularly adding good content to your site to attract visitors. A content managed website makes this easy and enjoyable and ultimately puts you back in control.
- CMS – Try out: Joomla / Drupal / WordPress
Hobo offers an open source cms configuration and set-up service called Arachnid (which you’ll need if your not willing to spend the weeks learning how to do it properly).
2. Google Local Business Centre
Yes! You can get to the top of Google – guaranteed! And for FREE (albeit in the Glasgow area and based on the number of competitors already featured). You can also get free directions to your business. It only takes about 24 hours to get listed above that pesky competitor who’s been there for the last 7 years! Try it out at Google Local Business Center before they do!
3. Google Analytics
Track your visitors for free. Find out where they come from and where on your site they go. You can even find out which exact keyword combination visitors typed into Google that lead you to get an email from your website. For most this is the only website statistics program you will ever need. And yes! It tracks everything, including visitors from Yahoo and MSN and other websites. Sometimes you get what what you pay for, and on some occasions, you actually get a lot more. Try Google Analytics FREE for yourself.
4. Get a Blog!
You’re website needs a blog! Yes, you might not know what this is – but everyone’s doing it (at least everone who is generating lots of visitors to their site!). A blog is ideal for your news section in 2009 and lets anyone in your organisation easily add content to your site if necessary through a simple online interface. As mentioned, we use it for our news section and basically it lets you add fresh news content easily without any wwebsite expertise and to boot it allows you to, via blog techy stuff, instantly promote whatever article you’ve written worldwide to blog search engines everywhere.
We use WordPress. It’s free, too, and probably the best! It takes minutes to install on your site and can be configured in about 4 hours to look and operate like the rest of your site (like ours). Download a copy at WordPress for your site.
What? You don’t have a website? Then you can set up a free blog on WordPress.com or Blogger (not ideal – but using this method you actually don’t need anything apart from an email address).
5. Organise Your Own Domains
Domains can be confusing. My advice? Set up an account with 123Reg.co.uk and manage all your domains here. Just the domains, mind. Get the hosting elsewhere. Open an account for free and start adding domains (web addresses) you want to own (domains cost about £10 for 2 years depending on whether it is a .com or .co.uk etc. Then, organise hosting, but not through 123. Why not try out…..
6. Organise Your Own Hosting
Through a reliable host, you can organise your domain/s through a plethora of packages. There are a bazillion hosts out there, a lot of them good. At the time of writing however I believe Rochen do not support .asp, which might be a problem for some.
However if you are following any (or all) of the advice on this page (ie open source CMS or blog using PHP/MySQL) make sure your host suppots these platforms.
Basically if you organise your own hosting and domains it really puts you in control. If you’re in control you call the shots with your web development company. It’s not a hard thing to learn how to do, either.
7. You don’t have to pay to get into or (free traffic from) Google. All you need is a link from a site already in the index (ie already in the Google results pages). Get a link from a good site, though, and your site could be completely spidered in a week. Then you too could enjoy more free stuff from Google – traffic! Kiss goodbye to all those seo companies who say they will get you into Google for only £39.99! Sweet! Check out our very popular free guide to search engine optimisation.
Bonus Tip
The Hobo Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing Company, based near Glasgow in Greenock, Scotland is just down the road from you – so why not consider giving us a call on 0845 094 0839 or contact us today and we’ll do all this for you in the blink of an eye and at a franction of the cost some unscrupulous companies will charge you.
Our website is visited by over 50,000 visitors every month and we’ve NEVER paid a penny in advertising since we started Hobo – we actually share with others how to promote their site online too on our SEO Blog.
A lot of internet marketing companies in Glasgow simply won’t tell you where you can save money online – we will. We don’t rely on your ignorance of internet marketing. We rely on our expertise.
Thanks for these tips! An Internet marketing beginner like me can certainly use tips as valuable and useful as the tips you’ve provided.
Shaun can you recommend some tutorials for Joomla?
I currently use wordpress and joomla, if you have a host with fantastico installed it is a two or three step process to install both. There are a ton of templates available for both. You can google for the templates or both sites have a list of templates available also. Daryl, go to joomla.org and click on help at top of page on left hand side about 2/3 way down the page you will find a link for visual tutorials! Thanks for the tips!
I’m reading this a long time after it was written. Are the same tips still valid?
Hi, Doesn’t Joomla do a blog as well? o.k. WordPress seems to have become the de-facto standard these days, but it just seems a bit more straightforward to have the whole thing in one package.
Shaun, Very interesting and useful. I think business owners can really act upon this advice and get their own web development on track!
Shaun I found your advice to be very helpful. Thank you.
I, too, am wondering if these tactics are still valid almost a year later. If they are, it’s just proof that they should work for a long time to come. Thanks.
I am interested in the CMS applications as I don’t have any web design software. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Thanks for the tips. We are a new website ( two weeks old) and any marketing tips i can get are well needed. Thanks again. Rob
As rightly advised, using a blog on your website is certainly a useful technique for search engine marketing. A blog can be a useful addition to any website no matter how small or large. We are a web design company and use Joomla for our main web design company website. Although blog is built into Joomla, we decided to go for an independent WordPress blog on our website. Using WordPress as a blog software has many advantages. Google themselves have acknowledged that WordPress pages are easily indexed by Google and that it can promotes search engine optimisation.
Great article. Thanks for the tip on adding a new blog, I think I will add a secondary blog like your on the blogger site that you mentioned.
Great advice. My small website went online 2 days ago. Now the hard work begins… Cheers…
It’s amazing how many SEO “experts” don’t know of Google Local Business and Google Base. In the tourism industry getting onto the Google Map it’s a must-do. I suggest you put the location in the heading: example … Sydney Widget Factory – Gamma Widgets Do a search on London Motel and you’ll see over 600 sites. You can see photos, customer reviews and so on.
Adding a blog takes no more than a minute to install and usually comes with your webhosting package. Check out your cpanel and find it under fantastico along with all the other content management systems. Uses a mysql database but you don`t have to do the upload as its instant once you have chosen your sub page (if its not to be installed on your main url). The RSS feed is your main source for one way backlinks for your blog, just do a search for rss submission directories. Submit it to googles own Feedfetcher and evrytime you post, your rss feed is updated too. WordPress is definitely more google friendly compared to the rest.
Thanks.. although I am curious why you reccomend not hosting at 123 (since all our domains are registered via them)…
Hi, First let me thank you for giving me such a good tips for a internet marketer(me) Already i am following few steps but let me follow all the steps suggested by you and see the improvement! thank you!
I have used your site in the past and as I have now moved to a new company I am using it again. Thank you for your help and great information.
I don’t know, people will do anything for a few links :) , even architecture firms !
Everybody has got to start somewhere :)
Thanks great starting article with some interesting ideas
Cheers Shaun, Some very good pointers. Incidentally, if you have any tips on AdWords to save me blowing any more money then that would be well appreciated.
Here’s a tip: always use exact match or phrase match in your Adwords campaigns. With broad match you run the risk of picking up too many unqualified clicks.
Agree with your spot-on post. Particularly re blogs. Although this won’t apply to everyone, I actually mothballed my bespoke website and instead use the blog for everything (certainly at the moment). As a journalist and copywriter, I find Word Press does all that’s required and more … Thanks for your insight.
Thanks. Some great ideas and interesting tips
Great advice, only just discovered 123reg which is great for managing domains and parking domains for free! WordPress has to be the best blogging platform out there and its open source!