It’s been said that Sam Taylor has “a voice and a face that will break hearts”. With his debut release, ‘Run Away’, featuring on the soundtrack to BBC2’s comedy, Beautiful People, Sam is poised to become seriously hot property. See more about what they say about Sam at Gaydar Radio.

Listen to Sam Taylor below and see what you think!

Sam is being managed by William Baker who is renowned for his creative work with Kylie Minogue and more lately for his work with the show Rent. Hatch Internet Marketing is managing Sam Taylor’s online marketing and his new interative website will be live in the New Year. You will be able to get latest doownloads, news, tour dates etc directly from www.samtaylormusic.co.uk

Sam Taylor is without a doubt a major new talent and his internet marketing campaign will be a lot of fun!

You need to create a brief for your designer, this is a set of instructions. In the design brief you need to communicate as much as you can of what you want whilst allowing your designer to have freedom to be creative. Your design brief should be clear and concise. Discuss with your designer what kind of information would be helpful. Here are some examples of the kinds of information you should consider:

Purpose - Is it educational, commercial, informational or simply for entertainment. Clearly define the objectives of the website and your goals.

Target Audience - Clearly define who is expected to be using the website and provide as much information about them in terms of their likes and dislikes.

Structure & userability - Provide the designer with a site plan / structure outlining what functionality and features will be required for each page. For example would you like animation, sound, video, sign up, offers etc.

Branding - If you already have corporate or product branding then make sure you provide a style guide to the web designer.

Content - How much content will there be? Do you have a tone of voice? Are there specific facts/messages that are to be included? Is there any special visual material for them? How important is their location within the site?

Style/Emotions/Mood - Do you want it to look modern, traditional, contemporary, light, cool? Do you want it to feel informal or formal? personal? humorous? serious? friendly? funky? Use competitor and customer research to help decide.

Colour - Can you attach colours to the kind of impression you want the site to create? Do you want a main theme of one colour (monochromatic), many colours, bright colours, pale colours, a mixture of bright and pale, etc

(more…)

• No technical knowledge required: you don’t need technical expertise to write a blog. You add pages or articles through a “Windows” type of interface so there is no need to rely on a web designer to update it for you.

• Display your expertise in your field, and build your reputation and credibility

• Project your personality: Your expertise is highly important but so is that of your team and how you and they get on with your customers - blogs let your personality, beliefs and vision shine through

• Readers can leave comments: your readers can respond to your posts so that you can open a conversation with potential customers interact with existing customers, keeping them loyal as well as opening up new business relationships with suppliers or partners.

• Automatically organised: ‘categories’ and ‘archives’ are integral parts of a blog and each post will automatically be placed correctly according to the selection you make. This gives great organisation and structure to a blog which is perfect for your visitors and Search Engines alike.

• Search Engine magnets: with regular posts, categorised content and search engine friendly links and addresses, business blogs become ideal places for Search Engines and more importantly your prospective customers to find the type of content they love and find your business products and services in the process.

(more…)

1. PROSPECT
2. RAPPORT
3. QUALIFY
4. PRESENT
5. CLOSE

It’s also worth noting that these steps are not necessarily sequential as feedback should be taken from each to influence the others whilst moving towards the final objective which is the close. I also refer to this in the online arena as persuasive architecture as that is exactly what you are doing you are designing, building and structuring your website to PERSUADE a visitor to complete an action.

(more…)

Time and time again I speak with business people that are bewildered as to why after spending a sizeable amount of money on a website, it simply isn’t working for them. The reality I tell them is that not enough planning was done from the outset. Here are some simple steps to follow before you even start building your website to ensure the best possible chaance of success.

1. Your Website Strategy

• Choosing your domain name - if you have a well established brand name that has enjoyed plenty of offline and online marketing activity then go with that but if you haven’t had any real marketing activity to date then consider using a domain name that incorporates the keywords that people are using to search for the products or services you sell e.g. www.organicseoservice.co.uk. Why? Well this will give you a major boost in the search engines for those keywords, there are of course other SEO factors to consider but it will give you a head start.

• Your website objectives - Be completely clear as to what you want your website to achieve. Outline the objectives of the website and also the critical success factors. This might be as simple as getting traffic to your site and visitors to read your infomation but often will include, generating leads or enquiries, online sales, registrations, subscriptions and so on. Once you are clear as to what you want your website to achieve you can sensibly work how to do it.

• All things to all men - There is a tendency when building a website to try to be all things to all men or to try out new fads and technology often completely unecessarily. Don’t over complicate your proposition - keep it simple. Make sure you understand what type of website you are; information-based, e-commerce or social media. You can of course be all three but make sure it’s what your audience want and needs before doing it. Think about what you want people to do when they visit your site and give them the cleanest, simplest path to doing it without too many distractions!

• Define your target audience - it is absolutley imperative that you understand from the outset who your target audience or customers are. You will need to understand their wants and their needs and this will help you shape your website and define a tone of voice, design and structure to meet their needs. I wouldn’t ever advise trying to target the whole world wide web, you would need some serious marketing spend to achieve this. Your target audience may be defined by location or by gender, age etc. Once you understand who your target audience is as well as making sure that your website meets their needs you can also conduct customer research to better enhance your online proposition, product or service.

• Who are your competitors? - You must be aware of both your online and offline competition, remember they can be different and your offline competition without an online presence can always be a threat in the future so keep an eye on them.

In researching your online competition you can better undertsand how to differentiate your product or service from theirs, whether you have a clear cut USP (Unique Selling Point) and/or whether there is a gap in the market that you could fill. In addition you can gain a better understanding or how your competition are promoting themselves online and what you’re going to need to do to do better - particularly in terms of SEO as you can see which keywords they are currently being found for in the search engines and armed with that information and what search words your target audience are using you can incorporate the right keywords within your heading tags, navigation, links and content from the word go.

• The bad news - To get a website right from the outset will either cost you money or cost you time before a designer or a developer have got anywhere near it. Be clear who is responsible for what from the day the project commences and use a project tool like Basecamp (which is free) to facilitate and manage the project.

• The good news - Getting it right from the outset with save you a small fortune later on and position you for the best chance of success when your website goes live!

(more…)

Increasingly now your online reptutation can be the making or breaking of you and your business.

In this day and age whether a potential customer is looking for a service or a business is looking for a new supplier more often than not the person or business looking will look to verify the company, its product or service online by doing a simple search via one of the leading search engines.

This is fine but what happens if a disgruntled employee or a disatisifed customer or indeed more sinisterly a competitor decides to voice their negative opinions of you and your company online. For example, you’ve just left a potential client after giving a pretty impressive presentation and you feel that the closing of the deal is imminent. However, when you call back to speak with the potential client the tone has changed and gone from hot to decidely cold overnight. Did you ever consider that the potential client may have done a search for you online and received negative if not damming information about you or your company?

(more…)

Cuil.com (pronounced cool) if you’ve not already heard about it is a new search engine launched by 3 ex-employees of Google and it has gone live today.

I was keen to try it out as I thought anybody wanting to leave a success story like Google must have something pretty interesting up their sleeves. Perhaps more importantly though I read in The Independent that the last time Google published figures on the number of pages they index was about 3 years ago and the figure stood at 8.2 billion pages catalogued whereas Cuil are promoting on their site below the search box that they have catalogued over 121 billion pages and counting!

In terms of the design I really liked the simplistic layout and I think it has very strong branding with black, a sharp blue and grey as the core colours used. Actually in terms of the simplicity it reminded me of google before all of the add-ons and extras, not that I’m complaining about them as I find most of them very useful but still I like the simplicity, the innocence of it. Apparently the name Cuil is derived from one of the founders celtic origins….I wonder if it was originally pronounced ‘cool’ back then?

(more…)

Anybody with a business website will have objectives and goals. Ultimately you will want your visitors to either purchase, subscribe, register, refer, particpate, recall your brand, be loyal or something along those lines. You’ve got their attention as they’re already at your site but now you have to create the interest and desire to convert them into whatever you want them to be i.e. a customer or a sales lead for example.

Conversion is a complex, multi-faceted process whereby the design, content and structure of your website persuade prospects to take the action you want them to take. Your conversion rate is a measure of your ability to persuade your prospects to take that action. It is a measure of both your website’s effectiveness and the satisfaction of your customers.

Marketing plays an important role in attracting people to your website but it is important to remember that this is not sales, it may create the desire and pave the way to the sale but marketing alone will not close the sale for you. I’ve witnessed too many people see the solution to not achieving their goals as to simply spend more on their marketing and it is a complete waste of time and money. Instead they need to be addressing the conversion rate of the traffic they already get and improving on the sales process. So whilst it is important that your marketing and sales are in harmony it is also improtant to address them separately and not to confuse them as the same thing…

(more…)

A client approached me recently and asked me to get to the bottom of why they weren’t converting more of the visitors to their site into either enquiries or orders.

They have a healthy amount of visitors to the site but have a really low conversion rate. Infact they were only converting 0.63% of visitors into enquiries and only 0.07% into orders. In certain instances this might be considered acceptable say for example in blanket marketing or cold calling but not I thought when the analytics show that most vistors to the site were finding it organically through the search engines i.e. people were searching for my clients service but there was still a really low uptake. I thought initiallly that maybe there was a problem with the SEO keywords chosen, so I looked more closely at the bounce rate and the time spent on the site and in actual fact the bounce rate was low and the average time spent on the site was comfortably over 4 minutes which I thought quite acceptable.

(more…)