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TopExert is tasked with developing a long term organic marketing strategy for NaturalTransition.com

As an independent business person Julie Cottle recognises that the long term success of her online business rests on developing partnerships with others. As part of her outreach programme to owners of maternity, pregnancy and childcare web sites and blogs she has launched a free ‘themes’ site.

This web site will offer free website templates, themes for WordPress,  Joomla and Drupal skins all with a family, childcare, and maternity theme. These Templates are offered completely free.

Top Expert developed the website that showcases the themes, it has been developed in such a way that it will drive traffic to her freshly installed blog. This is done as a result of visitors wanting to preview themes, we have installed the “Theme Preview” script on her blog at http://naturaltransition.com/blog/ thereby driving traffic and targeted eyeballs to her latest posts.

The concept for driving targetted webmaster traffic to the Natural Transition web site, strategy and execution was all undertake by TopExpert including the design and development of all the designs you see on the maternity Theme Site.

The web site launched on Mothers Day 2008 has already started to draw some attention and we plan for it to grow to the single biggest Maternity and Motherhood theme and template repository online. Check out the Maternity Themes site here http://themes.naturaltransition.com/

First Steps

1. Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
2. Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
3. Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
4. Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
5. Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
6. Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
7. Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.
8. Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
9. Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
10. Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.

Ideas About WHAT to Tweet

1. Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
2. Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
3. When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
4. Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
5. Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
6. Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
7. When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
8. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
9. Don’t toot your own horn too much. (Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I do it all the time. – Side note: I’ve gotta stop tooting my own horn).
10. Or, if you do, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too.

Some Sanity For You

1. You don’t have to read every tweet.
2. You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
3. Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
4. Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
5. 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
6. If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
7. If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
8. Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
9. If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
10. Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

The Negatives People Will Throw At You

1. Twitter takes up time.
2. Twitter takes you away from other productive work.
3. Without a strategy, it’s just typing.
4. There are other ways to do this.
5. As Frank hears often, Twitter doesn’t replace customer service (Frank is @comcastcares and is a superhero for what he’s started.)
6. Twitter is buggy and not enterprise-ready.
7. Twitter is just for technonerds.
8. Twitter’s only a few million people. (only)
9. Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing.
10. Twitter opens the company up to more criticism and griping.

Some Positives to Throw Back

1. Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups).
2. Twitter works swell as an opinion poll.
3. Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
4. Twitter at events helps people build an instant “backchannel.”
5. Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
6. Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
7. Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).
8. Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
9. Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).
10. Twitter can augment customer service. (but see above)

From Chris Brogan with permission

Also thanks to @ suecartwright for this link:  Building a Twitter Community

You should also check out these 20 Twitter Apps

A brief overview of the main types of marketing that you can do online:

Pay-Per-Click: This is the equivalent of classified advertising in the real world, however unlike traditional advertising models you pay only on results, usually based on ‘unique visitors’. This kind of advertising/marketing only last as long as you are paying for it, however the results are immediate.

Banner or similar advertising: This is similar to ‘display’ advertising in traditional media such as magazine. Again this advertising is only effective as long as you are paying for it, as soon as you stop paying the advert is removed, however it has the advantage of offering almost immediate results. Unlike pay-per-click, banner ads are usually sold on a CPM basis (Cost per thousand impressions).

Affiliate Marketing(*): This is where webmasters and other site owners promote your products in exchange for a commission. This is an extremely effective way of marketing as your costs are directly tied to sales. Once you have setup your affilliate network it will require a few hours work to manage it each week (depending on success), however it will should not be an ongoing cash-drain.

SEO (search engine optimisation)(*): This involved developing a website which has been optimised for search engines, contains relevant keywords, relevant content and is easily readable by search engines. This however is not the only factors that Search Engines take into consideration PR (Popularity Rank) which is incoming links to your site, Alexa Ratings (how many visitors you get compared to competitors) are both big factors.

Viral Marketing(*): essentially word of mouth marketing, using electronic media to encourage dissemination of your ‘message’. This is extremely powerful. Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly. If the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles. This type of marketing can include articles and press releases.

Newsletter Marketing(*): If you run a newsletter you are able to offer your visitors a reason for supplying you their email address. Thi is the single best way to stay in regular contact with your visitors. Have an opt-in form on your main page and offer an incentive for subscribing, something free or enticing to generate sign-ups.

Email Marketing: Paying to email opt-in lists

Offline: Advertising in Magazine, Radio, Newspapers, TV etc

Time and again clients ask me questions and seek advice they could just as easily have found out themselves had they simply used Google, or used Google better.

The secret here is truly getting to know Google, and even if you think you know Google very well, spend some time once a month getting re-acquainted. It is constantly moving on and changing. However if you have not spent time understanding the advanced search features,  exploring some of their specialist search portals and sister sites then you are missing out on maximising the value of the web.

Once you have a good grip on the advanced functionality of Google you will find your search time decreases and the usability of your results will increase.

There are a few key titles that I think will help anyone and you should take a few hours out to read through them and practice some of the tips and techniques contained there-in.

The three downloads are here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/33584625/Google.Hacking.PL.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/10191298/Google-Secrets_2005_Q4.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/31160831/55_Ways_to_Have_Fun_with_Google.rar

I also came across an old article which is still extremely pertinent:

Googles forgotten secrets part two

I receieved an email today from a past client wanting some help as the site he had hosted with his web developer had been hacked repeatedly.

The advice I offered him is as applicable for anyone who has experienced this problem so I thought I would share it with you here.

He asked are “older versions of osCommerce insecure?” amongst other things, and a synopsis of my response follows:

This will happen again and again if the root of the problem is not found and will simply cause any work I do to secure your site to be wasted..

The short answer is yes old versions are insecure, there is no admin security by default on the new one either, so the person installing needs to secure the admin area.

The default latest install of oscommerce,  has many of the secruity holes patched so that’s a good start.

But there are many settings on the server that can leave it open to security breeches. However research has shown a lot of this is relates to stolen ftp passwords.  There is PC based virus going around too that steals ftp passwords stored in ftp programs. Files with 50 or more ftp address usernames/pwds go round regularly such files are shared by hackers.

So it is not always a server based flaw that is leading the attack.

To protect yourself you could install:
http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,4441/category,all/search,hack

To secure your site as a minimum the following should be done when you find an OSC site hacked…

1. Change all user names and passwords, including the db user (don’t forget the configure.php file entries).
2. Make sure your site uses at least osCommerce 2.2 MS2 (060817), and if it doesn’t then upgrade.
3. Make sure that no folder has permissions above 755. If your hosting requires permissions of 777 on folders then move hosting.
4. Delete the filemanager.php file from your osCommerce admin panel.
5. Rename the ‘admin’ folder to something unique (not ‘admin2′ or ‘newadmin’), and then change the entries for /admin/ in admin/includes/configure.php to /new_name/
6. Password Protect the renamed ‘admin’ folder with a new user and password.
6. Run a full virus scan, Malware and SpyBot scan on your PC and any PC which is used to FTP files to the site – as this may be the source of the injection.

Those ‘in the know’ will be aware that I have decided to use adderuppa.com for client billing and time management. Everyone in the consultancy/freelance industry will at some time or another face the problem of client billings and how to track and record time effectively. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of apps out there to help you. I chose adderuppa.com because I know of Anthonys work and trusted his code.

I am extremely happy I did, after sending some brief feedback to Anthony Manning the developer over in Cornwall I got an email back within a few hours. Not only had he taken on board what I had said, but acted on it and implemented the changes.

As a result I now am proud to offer per second billing increments. That means you will not be charged for a single second more than the time you have used. If you do not understand or appreciate the implications of this allow me to elaborate. When you hire a VA, Consultant, Lawyer, Accountant, Architect or Freelancer you will usually be billed on a time/hourly basis, or billable time. When this is the case there will be billing increments and usually your expert in the field will use 15 or 20 minute increments.

So ask your virtual assistant to do a simple task that takes 3 minutes and you are likely to be billed for 15.

I had expected to offer per minute billing, however the changes ANthony made I will be billing to the second!

http://www.adderuppa.com/blog/?p=64

Welcome to my professional Blog, long overdue I know, I have been advising my clients for years to get one and have been writing for other blogs for quite some time.

So here is my start to blogging!