SEM for a BMX video website

Recently we were asked to give some recommendations for a BMX video website to assist with driving more traffic to the main site. Here’s what we said they should do:

Soulbmx website SEM

Traffic/SEM:

· General SEO

· Back links from industry related websites

· Forum activity

· Video sharing sites

· Live internet tv sites

· Human edited directories

· Image sharing

· Social networking

· Press releases

· Wiki’s/factual articles

· New content

· Newsletters

· PPC campaigns for Adwords, Yahoo and MSN

· Classified internet advert campaign

· Ezines and other online media publications

· Papers, magazines and other advertising

· Adsense advertising

· Blogging

· Google tools, Google sites, Google pages

· Online shop to sell associated products (gives presence on Google product search and Ebay shop)

In no particular order, the following recommendations are proven methods of internet marketing which drive traffic to any website.

General SEO:

Meta tags need tweaking page per page, header tags also need looking at with more site associated titles, sub-titles used. More text content should be added, FAQ’s added and the news section should be added to as often as possible to give Google new content to index each time the site is crawled.

Back Links:

Integral part of search engine marketing to enable page rank and to drive traffic from other sites. Reciprocal link campaigns with bike related websites also worth thinking about.

Forum activity:

Forums are great for back links and also to advertise the main site. Perhaps even add a proper forum to the community pages on the Soulbmx.tv site. Forum posts help with getting back links, to advertise competitions etc and also for the general promotion of any website. There are a lot of bike and BMX or sport related forums out there that can be used to increase internet presence in a big way.

Video sharing sites:

The usual suspects like Youtube.com, Yahoo video and Dailymotion.com are great examples. Videos from the main site can be posted using RSS/API feeds or by hand and they assist hugely with increasing internet presence, driving traffic and obtaining good quality back links. Other potential members can also be sourced by searching for their BMX videos on these sites.

Internet TV sites:

Justin.tv and Sopcast.com are good examples where one can start ones own internet TV channel. Live streams can be started to show latest clips or live bike shows, videos can be posted and groups can be started which all help with the widening of Soulbmx.tv internet presence as well as creating something different for existing and potential new members to take part in.

Human edited directories:

These are a must for improving page rank and back links. Dmoz.org is the best example as Google uses it for its directory. Listings can be added on a regular basis to the highly ranked directories.

Image sharing:

Picasaweb, Flickr and also the social networking sites all have image sharing platforms where images can be posted either by hand or with API/RSS feeds. These are great when used correctly with quality, relevant tags as images associated with the main site are then shown in image searches and you will find that people start to use your images more. Copyright issues and permissions need to be thought out carefully!

Social networking:

Social network accounts are a no-brainer! For your particular industry and the fact that you want more members ALL possible social network accounts must be started and built on day by day. Groups, bulletins, images and videos, Blogs and more can be started and friends can be added so that more traffic is driven on a daily basis to the main site.

Press releases:

These are great ways to get back links to the main site and also to advertise absolutely everything about what is happening on the main site. There are thousands of sites which can be used and as long as new PR is wrote and published regularly, they assist well with SEM

Wiki’s and factual articles:

Listings on Wikipedia.com are a good example of helping with driving traffic to an existing site. As long as the articles are factual and don’t blatantly advertise a product or a service then they are mostly accepted. Existing members can be invited to add to the articles or to post their own on the main site and then these articles can be added to the exterior sites.

New content:

As mentioned above, new content is imperative to assist with achieving and sustaining high placements in search engine listings for any website. Members can be encouraged to post Blogs, image, videos via competitions or prize draws and then this new content can be added across the board on all of the sites/posts that Soulbmx.tv maintains. The news section should be added to on a regular basis and every newsletter sent out can also be posted across the board.

Newsletters:

Newsletters should be sent out at least once a month to existing members. They can also be used for attracting new members to the main site by approaching other organizations associated with bikes and BMX’s (shops, clubs and other websites) and inviting them to join/sign up to the main site. Data can be purchased which lists all these relevant organizations and then emails can be sent, snail-mail outs posted and the newsletter content added to the news section on the main site.

PPC (pay per click) campaigns:

This form of internet marketing can be used to great effect to really kick start the main website. Adverts can be run for a limited period to attract new visitors on Google Adwords, Yahoo and MSN. Paying for adverts on other sites like Facebook.com or highlighted listings on classified sites are also really worth thinking about as they can really start a major influx of new traffic and new members to the main site.

Classified internet adverts:

This is a tried and trusted method of driving traffic and obtaining back links. There are thousands upon thousands of classified sites out there which allow free posting of adverts on them. Most are geographic targeted but new pages can be added to the main site for each country/geographic area with perhaps a contact person/administrator chosen to deal with new enquiries from the adverts.

Ezines and online media publications:

There are a multitude of online publications out there on the net which would definitely be very glad to hear from Soulbmx.tv. Back links can be obtained and a share of their traffic. Sports Ezines and other similar genre related publications can be chosen and then approached with either a newsletter or personally, which would perhaps ensure a better response.

Papers, magazines and other advertising:

A presence in genre related magazines is always good. It is worth contacting all possible BMX and biking magazines to let them know about Soulbmx.tv and perhaps get some stories running in them about the site. It is also worth budgeting for running small adverts in these sorts of publications with references to the website and other online activites.

Adsense:

Adsense can help to generate revenue to pay for advertising like the above or for the PPC campaigns. The more site visitors, the more potential clicks you could get on the Adsense adverts which advertise other websites on your site. It is easy to set up and quite simple to maintain and also can be added to Blogs and other online activities.

Blogging:

Blogging is again, a no-brainer. It simply has to be done! Blogs can be set up both on the main site and on third party hosting sites and content can be posted regularly by the Soulbmx.tv team as well as members who are interested in guest Blog posts. Blogs are always great back links as they are controlled by the writers and they offer a more personal view of what happens behind the scenes of any company which helps with attracting new members.

Google tools:

Google offer a variety of different tools to assist with indexing a given websites content, driving more traffic and increasing internet presence in general. Some of the tools are being used already but they could do with more time being spent on them to optimize their true performance. Google Maps is being used but there should maybe be a maps section for every country where members are from. Administrators can be chosen from new and existing members and their contact details added to Maps to ensure a wider presence.

Other Google tools include:

• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster tools
• Google sites (was Page Creator)
• Blogger
• Google video
• Adsense and Adwords (as mentioned above)
• Google Maps and local business listings
• Google groups (could be a great addition for your members to post on)
• Orkut (Google’s social network platform)
• Picasa (Photo sharing)
• Google book search partner program (for future paper/online publications from Soulbmx.tv)
• Google Base (for products, reviews, stories and more)

Online shop:

The main site does have a form of a shop at the moment but it’s not very good/user friendly. A new shop should be built, perhaps as a separate entity from the main site which will help with back linking selling product associated with bikes and BMX and also clothing. This could be a fantastic source of revenue and also encourages more traffic as one can obtain a presence on Google product search (Google Base), set up an Ebay store and also advertise individual products with back links to the main site.

Click here to visit IC247 for assistance with your website!

Google and indexing Flash Content

For all those beautiful Flash built websites there is good news as Google announces a new Algorithm to assist with indexing Falsh text content. Click this link to read their Blog post from yesterday.

This is great news for businesses and individuals with their pretty Flash based sites who could never get their sites included in search engine results and is a step forward as well as another feather in the cap for Google as they continue with their domination of internet search.

For further information and consultation about increasing your search results visibility contact IC247 here

Website evaluations and new SEO relationships

SEO Agencies and evaluating your website:

Most agencies are secretive and a little elusive about how they will “optimise” your internet marketing/selling campaign. They don’t like to give too much away, which on one hand is understandable due to the competitive nature of the SEO industry and also due to how long knowledge and experience can take to accumulate but on the other hand is a nightmare scenario for anyone who has a business, knows they want to improve on their websites performance but would like to have a good grasp of what their money will be spent on.

Basically, all the main tips for SEO and SEM are out there for all to read and to learn about so we at IC247 believe that we should be as open as possible about our techniques. This not only helps to get a deeper relationship with a client so that their services/products that need marketing better online are clearer to us but also assists with striking up the kind of open partnership that we like to have with any relations, be them business, networking or social.

OK then, so what makes you want to use our SEO and SEM services rather than a competitor, if all of these tips are already out there? You ask:

Well, opinions differ as to what steps one should take to get a website ranked or to get traffic levels higher and a lot of results have come about from our own learning curves (good and bad) over a long period of time. Some of the tools freely available, like the Google tools for example, need fine tuning and take time to learn properly. We know about all these tools; the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that work well and quickly and the ones that don’t work at all.

From the outset of a client finding us via our site or through another of our online activities we tell it straight. We go through your site with a fine toothed comb and tell you what you’ve got that is cool, what you need to get, what needs tweaking and then on top of this we give you recommendations, that are easy to understand, with links so you can see actual results from similar campaigns and information about neutral tools you can look at to see what we mean.

The internet evolves constantly, business is getting more and more competitive and time is money – it stands to reason that you, as a running business need to market your products and services in a manner that gets results fast and also is structured so that potential issues, future plans and competition activity can be monitored and dealt with efficiently.

Here is an example website evaluation we did recently with a few pointers so that you can see as an example how our client relationships start:

Internet marketing “example website”

There are key elements code-wise that need to be integrated into the website so that it is optimised correctly for better search engine performance. Clean HTML should be used. Divs need to be incorporated (also good for mobile internet) and Header tags (page per page).

Meta tags are needed and need to be adjusted page per page. Please check this completely neutral tool and input each individual page URL, following the instructions, to get a detailed Meta tag breakdown and page analysis. Then use www.responsiva.biz (a site from our portfolio)as a comparison.

The site itself has a good keyword rich text content base and has a page rank of 3/10, which isn’t too bad at all. Search engines need information (as text content) in order to rank and place your site according to its relevance to the given search result listings. Look to add a news section or articles and also look to try to provide a regular stream of new content for the search engines to index every time they revisit your site. This can be changed via Webmaster tools.

I also recommend a contact page with Google maps integration, different calls to action (see below), videos, Podcasts/recordings of example talks and a helpful links page for reciprocal linking/back link campaigns.

Here is a good tool to analyse your competitions sites according to the pages that show up from them for searches you want to be found for. Use this tool to get ideas about keyword rich text copy-write for your site and your Blogs. Add the URL of the example website you found on Google to the website content tool and check out what they are being found for.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Links coming in from other highly ranked websites are of great importance to how a search engine will rank your site and this is lacking somewhat to pages within your website (not just to the home page – by this I mean ‘deep links’). SEM (Web 2.0) practises, including the use and integration of Google tools, exterior Blogs and other SEM would enhance traffic rates, achieve better ranking for your site and increase exposure in general for your branding.

There are currently only 2 registered back links to the homepage from video sharing sites and 9 in total overall. This needs to be improved dramatically. Below, in the other sections to your evaluation, are recommendations for getting back links.

You can look at your competitions sites and see which sites they have linking to theirs by simply typing the following into Google:

Link: www.thesitesnamedotcom (including the link: and also trying with a space after the colon and without a space).

You’ll be able to see then which sites they are registered with and have links from and add your website to the same places. Alternatively, you can utilise this tool for a bit of a breakdown of different aspects of your and your competitor’s sites performance:

http://diagnostics.googlerankings.com/website-diagnostics-panel.php

Calls to action/content:

· More keyword rich text content

· More pages overall, covering different aspects of your industry/training methods

· News section (perhaps use newsletters emailed monthly to your client database as content)

· Sitemap added (then submitted to Google Webmaster tools)

· Helpful links page with links to all your other SEM

· Social bookmarks as calls to action on each page

· Sign up for newsletter as call to action on each page

· A questionnaire of some description as a call to action

· Email this page to as a call to action

Google tools:

· Standard tools including; Analytics (traffic analysis) and Webmaster tools (Google’s indexing stats)

· Local Business Listing; Your business (including website) listed for Google Maps demographics search tool with links, in depth contact and business information

· Google Base; upload whole product or service portfolios from your site to Google’s specialised search engine. Add references, testimonials and other individual information

· Picasa; Google’s image sharing tool. Upload images with descriptions and links to main website. Create slideshows and improve indexing from Google Image Search

· Blogger; Google’s weblog tool. Personalises internet presence as well as providing back links to the main website

· Google Pages; Hosted free by Google – your own Google web space with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor

· Adwords; initiate PPC (pay per click) campaigns and/or manage said campaign with daily CPC (cost per click) budgets, landing page optimisation, keyword analysis (including competition websites) and calls to action

Back link campaigns:

An intrinsic part of website SEO is the importance (Page Rank) of other websites that link to yours. Individual campaigns can be initiated as well as strategic standard link campaigns. This creates a net within the net and also obtains shares of other highly ranked websites traffic.

Directory listings:

· Listing of company details with website links, logos and contact information on highly ranked business directories

· Highlighted listing discounts possible

· Obtains client larger overall internet presence

· Obtains back links to main website

· Share directory website traffic

Classified advert campaigns:

• Blanket internet advert campaign
• Target geographical areas
• Place strategic adverts per product/service group and client area
• Gain back links from highly ranked classified advert sites

Web 2.0 SEO:

• Social bookmarking
• Video/Podcast sharing accounts
• Blog/news sharing
• Wiki/E-zine entries/posts
• Press releases
• Review sites for testimonials
• Forum participation/creation
• Group participation/creation
• Social/B2B networking accounts set up
• Shopping/service comparison site submission

So now you see an average breakdown of how we evaluate a website SEO and internet marketing enquiry to us. Of course there is a downside to giving out all this information straight away and we and also individuals close to us have had experiences of providing this and more in depth information for a client or another SEO agency they were working with freelance at the time, only for them to use the information provided themselves and cut out the information provider completely.

What do we think about this?

Half of the time people who do these things make a mess of stuff like packing header tags with spammy keywords or not coding the site correctly or not using the search engine tools available properly. Great results, over a longer and more sustained period can only be achieved with experience and good, solid SEO knowhow!

Contact us for an in depth chat about your internet marketing needs – we’d love to hear from you!

Happenings At IC247

It’s been busy here at IC247 the last couple of months. We’ve had many new customers, lots of new internet experiences and, as always, have learned a hell of a lot of new and really helpful things. We are going to tell you all about these innovations in the next few Blogs but first let’s have a look at two of the newest clients to have come into the fold:

Portfolio Bodykitsuk.com

After initial consultation, IC247 had the job of coming up with some designs for a website with a Paypal shop to sell a large range of car body styling products.

The website is a content management system (Webrender CMS) that has a special dynamic search function and is also easy for Bodykitsuk to add their own, new content, news and different products. Each page within the website is perfectly optimised with header tags, Meta tags, canonical URL’s and the customer is very happy with both the look and performance, as currently (and the website is very new) they are receiving around 2-300 hundred new visitors everyday and this is a growing number.

Google Analytics are installed so that Bodykitsuk can easily see where each visitor comes from, where they go and what marketing exercises they do on the internet and elsewhere work. The SEM has begun in earnest with the site currently linked from in excess of 100 websites, all within the auto industry genre, forum participation and regular updated Blog posts.

To come are Google products, where every single product in the shop is uploaded onto Google’s shopping search program and also an area on the website for reciprocal link directories.

Click here to view the website

Portfolio Aiecquest.com

One of our international customers from Turkey who organise English courses for Turkish and other foreign students in schools around the world wanted a re-design of their website and integration with our content management system (Webrender CMS). Our designers came up with the new look and we incorporated all the pages upon pages of lovely text content into the new website. The language is Turkish, which is just one of the many different language capabilities we have at IC247.

They have the news module, top search dynamic module and Google has really indexed the website well over the last few weeks, with currently over 16000 pages currently indexed. Aiecquest receive large numbers of visitors to their website due to the really informative text content that they have posted and this is updated on a regular basis – well worth remembering if you are looking to improve your own websites performance. New text content on a regular is king for the search engines!

Click here to view the website.

Search Engine Wars

Microsoft + Yahoo versus Google – or are there yet more others out there?????

We’ve all heard the news and have seen how Microsoft have put in an offer to forge some sort of new partnership with Yahoo in a bid to bite into Google’s hold in the online marketing business world but what will it mean for all those whose businesses rely on the world wide web for some or all of their revenue?

Well, IC247 have always maintained that it’s important to try to get a presence on all of the search engines and this is an integral part of any form of internet marketing strategy that we initiate with any contact. It stands to reason that one should look to milk all opportunities to promote and gain more custom right across the board – no matter what your industry or your genre/needs!

As things stand Google is the ultimate leader in most aspects of internet search marketing; their range of tools is outstanding. Whether it’s pay per click with Adwords, advertising your shops products for free  on Google Product Search or if you want to Blog and post videos or photos for the world to see, Google really have taken the reigns and led internet searching into a whole new dimension.

Microsoft/MSN have always been there and they always will because the guys there have the cash and the presence to really get it on. We all know about the need and then the arguments for and against Windows and this proves conclusively that one must never discount the power of Microsoft.

Yahoo were once the big boys: They ruled the world with regards to the internet and everyone had an account with them and everyone strived to climb their rankings but…. they let it go and why was this? Well, a new upstart came on the scene (Google) and started to kick butt with their innovative and economically sound ideas regarding our views and habits with internet searching, surfing and marketing.

The outsider was Ask (or Ask Jeeves, as they once were known) and they slid in on the peripheral boundaries of search engine marketing providing us all with results that were….hmm, OK. They have themselves embarked on a recent promotional campaign featuring their version of a new and enhanced search experience and it’s a nice idea but is it enough to carve a slice into the search engine industry? Maybe it is but hell, they sure must have spent some money making all those UK TV adverts for someone to search online… Enough said!

OK, let’s not forget about our beautiful friend Wikipedia; the provider of factual information for you, me, our kids with their homework and also another powerful internet big boy flexing their muscles recently with their Wikia search. Google’s Matt Cutts recently wished them well with their foray into the internet search engine industry and this, we feel, is where the buck stops – the reason for so much volcanic movement amongst the big players.

It’s widely known that Wikipedia are the encyclopaedic Bible for factual information with their better than 98% truth rate on factual information. If those guys want to start a search engine then it makes us happy here at IC247 as they are one of the forerunners in the future of the internet. Call it Web 2.0, call it us using the machine or call it what you want – factual information rules.

With the emergence of the Mobile internet industry there is a new battlefield for all of these search engines but it’s all about the content shown on any website, on any search engine, which brings me to my most important point:

ANY search engine will always look for relevant information, topical, well presented and text that is in tandem with your genre and as long as you can provide this then you have a fantastic starting point. If you couple this together with a well compiled web page that has its coding optimised so that all these different search engines can access it and index it properly then you will be winning before you know it!

Once you have got to grips with the above then IC247 recommend looking at all the different tools available from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and Wikia to help you to further promote your well written content and increase visitors and clicks on your informative web pages – no matter what happens with search engines coming together, fighting or starting new ideas!

Contact IC247 for an informal chat about how we can help you improve your internet commerce.

IC247 January Newsletter Promotion

Internet Promotion January Newsletter

IC247
IC247 Inter Communication – One World, more information to share with one another
IC247’s services include

Free website evaluation with a concise breakdown of what your website needs for better presence on organic search engine results

SEM (search engine marketing) including:

* Back link sourcing campaigns
* Internet advert campaigns
* Directory listing
* Web 2.0 social networking campaigns (Youtube, Picasa, WordPress, Blogger etc)
* Press release, E-zine and online articles
* Google tools (Base, Product Search, Local Business etc)

Keyword rich text copy-write including:

* Blogs
* Internet articles
* Website content
* Adverts and PR

Website design and build including:

* E-commerce websites
* Informative websites
* Database driven websites
* XML based CMS (content management system) websites

PPC (pay per click) campaign management:

* Complete pay per click management
* Optimised and efficient campaigns with streamlined budgets and keyword analysis

Hosting, Network and server management:

* Small Business Server installation
* Windows Server 2003
* ISA Server
* Gigabit Network installation and management
* Website hosting with sharepoint and SQL databases

Direct marketing including:

* Data supply (company information targeted for geographic area and industry)
* Telesales and telemarketing (national or international multi-lingual)
* Newsletter emails and “snail mail” outs

Why not take advantage of our New Year special offer:

* 50 internet directory listings (website URL, contact information and company description where applicable)
* 50 internet adverts on highly ranked classified advert sites (website URL, description of product or service, contact details and logo where applicable)

ALL for the introductory offer of £150.00
A great way to kick-start your internet promotion for 2008!

Feel free to contact one of the IC247 team here for an informal discussion about how we can assist you in increasing your internet presence, generate potential clients and improve your search engine positioning.

Helpful SEO tips from IC247

Here are some simple and helpful tips to get you on your way to having a perfect website, with some information about standard steps from IC247

• Meta tags need to change to suit individual pages. Meta tags provide information for search engine spiders and robots re indexing and the crawl of your website. See http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html and input each of your individual website URL’s as per the instructions to see performance and recommendations. Click here for some more detailed info about SEO

 

• H tags (title, sub-titles etc) are missing completely from all pages. Google spiders follow information presented within H tags, therefore enabling easier indexing. Recommendation to add H tags for highlighted, bold and as paragraph explanations text within your website. It’s good to use the Firefox add on Firebug to help you inspect your website.

 

• Back links: After keyword rich text content and coding, back links are an intrinsically important part of page ranking from Google and other search engines. add your site to relevent highly ranked directories and begin a link sourcing campaign. Click here for advice about back links

 

• Keyword rich text content: Your website looks great, with lovely photos and it gives a potential client a good idea of what they get for their money . You do have SOME text but ideally you should look to add more text where possible. Blogs are indexed brilliantly within search engines because of the new text content that is posted on a regular basis and also forums will always be found high in Google search results, per genre, because you have a large number of people posting different articles and questions. Obviously, a smaller website won’t be able to have this degree of text content BUT our recommendations are that you look to write more descriptive text about the your area in general and post it on your website and try to add more descriptive text on each page (coded correctly). Also look to try to post regular Blogs and helpful information associated with your industry/genre and add a “revisit” Meta tag to this work so that the spiders can crawl and index all the new information. Text content ideas – click here

For more advice, please contact us here.

Directory listings: IC247’s views on the subject

Listings on Directories

How it helps gain more online presence:

There are a lot of benefits to adding your own listings to highly ranked directories, no doubt about it. First and foremost, it’s about choosing the real good directories that will help you with good quality back links and give you a good platform where a large amount of people will see what you are offering. Some of them will enable you to add an in depth desription of your business or service as well as back links to your own website whereas others will just let you add a brief description of what you do.
At the end of the day these sites help you promote yourself better across the board and will, once you have added your listing, assist you in obtaining more traffic via shares of their own website visitors. You know how IC247 go on and on about back links and Web 2.0? Well. this is a part of what we carry on about and as much as you think it all takes too much time, it’s really worth the effort.
You see, if you have a website (which is great) then you need to encourage others to be able to access your website and the things that you offer. Adding your site or your company description to a directory will help you to do this. IC247 strongly advise all of our contacts and customers to take the time to physically look on the different search engines, determine the best directories and then add sites/services/listings to these websites. Promotion of any aspect (as long as it’s legal and won’t get you penalised by the search engines is good, come on…..)
The way the WWW (world wide web) is evolving means that we all as users are now able to add or share content as we wish. This was the initial idea for the Internet; a democratic information source where we as individuals are able to access information at the click of a fingertip…. OK, so we all know we can get the information we look for – the natural progression is to be able to add the information we want for others to view it. There are many steps to do this and directory listings help!
Human edited directories such as dmoz are excellent ways to get yourself a great presence and get your site added to Google’s directories. You can also add your URL (as you well know) to Google, MSN or Yahoo driven directories.
OK, let’s look at the negative aspects of adding your listings to directories; erm… there really isn’t a great deal, maybe some spam which one can deal with using the usual filters and anti viral protection, but this is extreme stuff and if you choose the right sites it aint never gonna happen. You need to be clicking on the right sites at the beginning to make sure that you get you know funny business..
So, IC247 recommend directory listings and also we think its good to add your services and businesses to classified advert sites. Get a bigger presence; use the tools, sites and mediums available to you and get people viewing your adverts and listings!

Click here for more information from IC247

Online videos: IC247’s ideas about it

Online Videos: The Benefits and thoughts about posting them from IC247

Everybody’s heard of You Tube (now owned by Google), Google Video or Yahoo Video and we have all watched some of the really funny and amusing videos that get posted on these websites daily. The different types of videos are absolutely astounding with diverse ranges such as the ramblings of weird and wonderful charactors right through to commercially astute product demonstrations and advice on different brands.

Web 2.0 (The IC247 way!) encourages one to be able to post information using many different mediums via many different hosting websites. Visual information transmitted on all these different hosting sites is obviously a great way to do this (from your website via RSS feeds if you want) and enables you to show either potential customers or a wider audience a visual aid to help you get your message out there.

Nowadays everyone looks at Youtube to see videos about their hobby or about films and books they are interested in and also to help them with assignments for school and college. The millions upon millions of people that visit video hosting sites benefit from all the information there from different videos that these sites hold and host.

You don’t have to post a video that’s serious and designed to get you money one way or another. It can be fun too. You can post those holiday videos that gave you so much pleasure; those moments that were so golden and you can share such good times with the rest of the world and help the internet evolve. From a commercial point of view it’s also “golden” because if your posted videos take off, are interesting and well thought out then you will get people looking at them and therefore potentially get more visitors to your main site (via links from your videos) to see your products and services.

As with everything there has to be a darker side and there are videos out there that show a different side of life that the most of us don’t really want to see. Just recently in the British press there were the “Happy slapping” videos which weren’t fun or enjoyable at all. We just have to understand that the internet is a huge world which takes all sorts – good and bad to make it. We don’t have to watch those tasteless, indiscriminate videos because we have a choice. If you see these sort of videos then flag them so that the hosting sites are aware of them and go on and surf to find the videos you want to see.

What we at IC247 want to encourage is the idea of providing more information that others can share and learn from on a wider scale and we want to help you to do this to by helping you learn how to host and post videos, write and post Blogs, write articles and really open up the Internet world to you with simple explanations and training that will assist you to get the most out of any online activity. It’s all about Web 2.0!!!

Come and talk to us about it! Look at the contact details here with this posting and just get in touch – it’s easy and we’ll be happy to share our knowledge with you.

Here’s a great video about what we love – Web 2.0, click on this link and check it out.

For more information: IC247 Web 2.0

Customer campaign – Global Cargo Solutions

Global Cargo Solutions

Increased internet presence and data supply

Leicestershire based freight forwarder, Global Cargo Solutions contacted us and asked us to put together a plan for them to increase their internet presence and to help them expand their current client base.

After meeting up with them to discuss their needs, plans and ideas IC247 put together a campaign which included:

• Website design and build including corporate design of logo and website look and layout
• Blog template design and build
• Newsletter design build and newsletter tool supply
• Internet advert campaign
• Directory listings and back link sourcing
• Google tools including; Google Maps (local business listing, Google Base service listing, Google analytics to monitor website visitor trends, Webmaster tools and a Google Page mini website)
• Data supply
• Telesales (calling above to introduce Global Cargo Solutions)

Campaign description

After going live with the website we compiled a database of 500 company names with decision maker contact details for businesses that had shown a previous interest in freight and shipping services or UK businesses that exported their wares internationally. This database includes a wide variety of different industries, based all over the UK and Northern Ireland.

IC247 then initiated an online advert campaign describing Global Cargo Solutions services, with text provided by them and posted these adverts on different highly ranked classified advert websites. We then added their services to Google Base, built the mini site, Blog and sourced well ranked business to business websites for back link partners and also other top listed website directories for the freight forwarding industry.

The enquiries from the adverts and website have been forthcoming and the sales calls have been a hit. IC247 make approximately 20-30 calls per day and these calls have led to at least 2-3 new quote requests every day.

Check out Global Cargo Solutions on our site