Tony Attwood’s Blog

It has been suggested that social media is the new super whizzo buzz thing that we should all look at. But the real evidence, more than the say so, shows that blogs are becoming more and more important - as long as you have the creative skills to write them.

This was shown in a Southwest Airlines case when a celeb was asked to leave a flight because of his size. Each side told their tale on Twitter.

But then they moved on to blogs, where much more of the story could be told.

Yet despite the obvious advantage of unlimited space that blogs give, most commentators agree that blogs are underused, or wrongly used.

Blogging about your products and services is one of the most powerful marketing tools that is utterly under your control, and which can reach a huge audience. (As you may have heard me tell before, the blog I set up 2 years ago to find out how to do it, now has an audience of 170,000 readers a month.)

What’s more if you build the blog around targeted keyword phrases, that page becomes an authoritative page in Google that can very easily be found in the top search results by those searching.

Of course not just any content will do. Something quirky and slightly amusing, and above all interesting and easy to read works best.

If you would like to see some samples, drop me a line or give me a call

Tony Attwood, 01536 399 013

The rapid development of new powers for the Information Commissioner seem to have slipped in under the radar - but they are quite alarming.

There is the ability to a £500,000 fine (from April 6), and the new guidelines of March 2008 new guidelines on data breach handling and disclosure are now in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act.

If you suffer a security breach in your organisation and you are fined anything up to £500,000 you will also get the stigma of failing, which will hardly be good for your business.

If there is any evidence that there were continuing reports of data breaches or failures, and action was not taken then you could be in real trouble.

Call me on 01536 399 000 if you want more information on this, or any aspect of selling via direct mail, email or the internet.

There’s more about Hamilton House on www.hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

My thinking is that blogs are worthwhile because they get your company message to wider and wider audiences, and allow you to become known to people who can find your background thoughts and information worth reading.

That is stage one - and is highlighted by the fact that blogs that are content rich get readers, not only for today’s blog, but for all the past ones you have written. A person does a google search for a phrase that turned up in your blog three months ago, and they find you - and there is a chance they will read more, and go onto your main web site.

Stage two involves placing a few advertisements on your blog. In the early days these don’t generate that much money but as the readership builds so can the response rates to the adverts build. Obviously you don’t take on anything that is competitive but you can still make something extra.

Stage three then involves exchanging links with people - getting them to mention you, and you to mention them. Not just the “blogroll” links (a list of links down the side of the blog) but actually in the article. As in “I was reading an interesting piece on…”. This doesn’t generate income but it helps take you up the rankings and gets your more readers.

Now suddenly your blog starts to become valuable in itself, not just because it sells product and keeps people in touch with you, but also because as you grow, other bloggers with non-competitive products, want to know you.

The first blog I set up, as an experiment to see how the whole blog thing works, now gets 170,000 individual readers a month. And this has led to interesting developments.

Each week now I get people writing to me asking me to link with them, or to mention them on my blog. When this started I was being offered sums so small that I took no notice - $20 a link was common. But as the reputation of my site has grown, so the amounts have grown. There are even companies out there who do nothing but organise links for clients - and the money comes in each month.

This is all because links have a double value - they can get people to go onto the other firm’s web site, and they can help take a web site up the rankings, if it is being linked to by a site that is already higher up the rankings.

So that’s stage four - and to summarise:

1. You promote your own products
2. You get a modest sum from adverts for non-comeptive products
3. You start getting links which helps the site develop and go up the rankings
4. You get paid for links.

It’s a strange world - but it can have a huge effect on your business - and those firms that are not part of it, will, I feel, find themselves marginalised over time. At the moment business blogs that work are not that common - but they are growing in number by the day.

Tony Attwood
www.hamilton-house.com
01536 399 000

You aren’t reading because of “email fatigue”.

Even if your email gets through to you and is not blocked by filters and the like, “e-mail fatigue” then clicks in. The fact that you get 128 billion emails a minute means that you have had enough.

They have it worse in the US where only 10% of emails get looked at, while in Europe it is 13%.

The point is that once you are reading a message, there is a chance that you will click on a link. Getting clicks is not the issue, getting people to read the email in the first place is the big problem.

So what to do?

Firstly, stop sending emails to people who really don’t want to know. If you have 5000 emails going out but only half a dozen people opening and clicking through, then the service providers (who have systems that do this sort of thing automatically) will start treating your transmissions as spam, and either send them straight to spam boxes, or refuse to deliver them altogether.

Second, use stunningly brilliant headlines. Headlines that are so amazingly exciting and engaging that you force people to look, even if they are utterly disengaged. “You are probably not reading this” is not the greatest headline in the world - but it is a damn site better than most that hit my in box each day.

(It is certainly better than “Transfer of funding responsibilities is fast approaching!” which just landed in my in box. Anything with an ! in the headline usually counts as rubbish with me).

Third, stop writing in “email speak”. Use a natural conversational voice. With an interesting personal accent. And just one little moment that no one else could ever write.

Fourth, replicate the emails on a blog, so they stay in a permanent record. This makes them public, and other people will find them and then be interested and join in. This item started out as an email to a news group - and now is here.

We get about 4,000 individual readers a month for this blog - not nearly as many as the 170,000 a month we get on another blog, but 4,000 is 4,000 and some of them then become customers. Maybe it’s you.

If you want to talk about writing blogs and emails, or sending them out, or anything else come to that, call me on 01536 399 013 or email Tony@hamillton-house.com

Tony Attwood