Category Archives: Articles

The benefits of using Google Analytics for your business.

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Do you have a website for your business?

You presume people visit it…you definitely tell customers about it, but how can you be sure when, where and how people are accessing your website?

Google analytics is an outstanding tool that allows you to gather information on where customers are accessing your web page from and how they interact with each page, in a real time situation.

Ok, so let’s start from the beginning;

A Google analytics account can be set up for anyone who has a website and would like analysis of how well their website is performing under their business aims. The analysis tool highlights where customers are visiting the site from in real time and it records how they got to your website. This allows a business to monitor the customers more closely and build a plan around targeting them. The facts and figures can tell you the average time spent on the site, percentage of visitors who are browsing for the first time, the traffic sources (the percentage of people that found your website through a search engine, a link on another website or directly typed in the web address) and the bounce rate (the amount of people who landed on the home page and then exited the website).

At Cocoonfxmedia Ltd as well as setting up an analytics account for your business, we can look at the different types of data received and help your business translate this into a plan of action. The information on the amount of time spent on the home page or an individual page, is essential for your website to be at the best it can be. Cocoonfxmedia can also customise filters through the analytics tool so that any ‘internal traffic’ generated by you visiting the site personally (for example through updates) will be recorded separately so

you can see how many unique visitors have found your site. Again, allowing a true figure to highlight how successful your current campaigns are at communicating with customers. The tool also has a featurefor reporting on a Google Adword campaign.

 

Google Analytics then becomes even more detailed, which is especially exiting for those who are constructing the marketing campaign! The map features will show where your traffic is coming from geographically, highlighting the areas of the country, or in fact, the city that you should be targeting with your business marketing. It is possible to see how often your customers visit the site, the languages they speak and whether they are coming from a desktop computer, tablet or mobile device – which could lead to your business considering whether you should create a mobile app?

The pages of your website that are most popular with visitors are shown by how many hits they have and also on which page the customers exited the website.

 

 

 

 

Here is an example video from SEOmoz.

Cocoonfxmedia analyse the detailed data fully for the business, which will then lead to the progression and development of your marketing strategy. Without this tool it is near on impossible to work out a true and accurate return on investment. The statistics surrounding the website visitors and which pages are most popular, are key to the growth of your company. We can help you plan for the future of your business and evaluate campaign that may already be in place with this tool. Your marketing strategy analysis can take an even more integrated approach, with the feature that compares visitor figures week-on-week, so the impact of a campaign can be fully examined.

The more visits your website has, the better ranking it will have with Google in the search facility. When websites have a strong ranking they often trade links with other strong industry partners, thus improving their SEM (search engine marketing) which is their position in the search of a keyword that relates to their site – for example ‘videos – YouTube’. Google analytics gives you all the information your business needs to get the higher number of customer visits and create the strong links to improve your SEM.

We are currently working with Alan Hendersen Racing, ACE Brains Consultancy, Staffordshire & Birmingham Carriages and TC Media LTD on Google Analytics projects. We have found that the results have helped these companies make informed decisions concerning their businesses future direction, in the short and long term. TC Media LTD is currently using the results from analytics for targeted marketing promotions surrounding their web hosting packages.

Talk to us  today about becoming more integrated with your business website.

We will help you calculate a true ROI, plan a direction for your future and evaluate where the interest is geographically surrounding your business.

 

Using Audience Feedback to Shape Keyword Strategy

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Deciding which keywords are the “best” for your website is an on-going process. You should be constantly analyzing and adjusting your keyword strategy. And there are a variety of tools you can use to get basic information like search volume and competition. However, one of the best places to get feedback about your keywords is to ask your audiences.

If you have a business website that generates inquiries, leads, customers, or whatever, you should be getting feedback from your site visitors about how they found your site. Ask them where and how they started looking. Ask them where and how they actually found you.

You should also ask them more generally about how they would describe your products, services, or business. In many industries, the words that industry insiders use to describe themselves is vastly different from the way that their customers would describe them.

Web Analytics

Another great resource for getting audience feedback for keyword selection is your web analytics data. Your web analytics reports will tell you where visitors came from and what search phrases they used to visit your site. This provides some very key information.

First, you should check out your referral traffic to see from what sites and pages people visited you. Identify what keywords were targeted on those referrer pages and see whether they have positions in search results. If they do, there’s a chance that the visitor found the referrer in search. This can help you shape your keyword targets.

Second, use specific keywords that visitors came to your site from in the titles of pages and posts that you publish. Some of the most valuable keywords that I have discovered for myself came from questions that visitors had typed right into search results.

The most important thing to do is to be constantly revising your keyword strategy. The ways that your visitors, leads, and customers search for the products and/or services that you provide, will take a vast variety of forms. You don’t want to limit yourself to a small segment of your market by focusing only on those keywords that you think matter.

Gyi Tsakalakis does seo for lawyers at AttorneySync – 2835 N Sheffield, #216 Chicago, IL 60657 (773) 828-8878.

Local Search for Small Businesses

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If you’ve spent some time poking around Google for local searches, you’ve probably noticed that a lot has changed recently. Instead of serving up the traditional 7-pack of local results, like many search engines, Google is now serving a wider variety of local results. Further, even for searches that don’t, at first blush, have a local intent, search engines are becoming more sophisticated at deeming local intent.

For example, in the past, searches for plumber, florist, or lawyer, probably brought up business directories like yp.com. Today, these searches are likely to serve up Google Places listings. This means that small businesses need to pay much more attention to local search marketing. Fortunately, there are several free, or at least affordable, steps you can take to increase your small businesses visibility within local search results.

First, and foremost, you need to claim your Google Places profiles. I also encourage you to read the Google Places Quality Guidelines. Not all the Guidelines are completley intuitive, and you may make mistakes that could hurt your visibility, or get you banned from Places altogether.

Second, I also suggest you head over to GetListed.org. There is a wealth of knowledge on local search from some people who really know the nuances of the local search economy. There’s a lot to learn there. Plus, they have a tool you can use to see what profiles need claiming and updating.

When you boil it down, local search really comes down to your proximity to the search or searcher’s location, you businesses prominence, including the number of consistent business citations appear across the web, and sentiment, what people are saying about your business on rating sites, like Google Places, Yelp, etc.

You’ll want to increase the number of citations that your business has across the web. You’ll also want to encourage your customers to leave reviews and testimonials about the positive experiences they’ve had with your business. But be careful! You’ll want to spend some time making sure you’re familiar with the FTC’s guidelines on disclosing testimonials. In other words, if you give your customers some kind of incentive for leaving a testimonial, you should disclose that fact on your site.

Gyi Tsakalakis is law practice web marketing consultant with AttorneySync – 2835 N Sheffield, #216 Chicago, IL 60657 (773) 828-8878.

The Virtual Marketing Manager

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Why should you have to employ a Marketing Manager for 30k+?

Well you don’t! Cocoonfxmedia Limited offer a “Virtual Marketing Manager”.  By having a Virtual Marketing Manager you don’t need to worry about your head count.   Cocoonfxmedia Limited can plug into your business at anytime you want and help you drive your companies marketing strategies both on and off line.

We can consult or manage any Marketing promotion or idea.  Some of our expertise are listed below:

  • Brand Management on/offline
  • Search Engine Optimisation
  • Webmaster management
  • Business Intelligence reporting (Business Objects, Excel,Access)
  • Exhibitions/Event Organisation
  • Design (Web,Advertising,System)
  • Competitor Analysis
  • Prince2 project management (Professional Structured project management)

 

We also just don’t sit behind a computer screen and communicate via email, we will come to your office and sit with you to discuss your ideas/strategy and then take the hassle in managing the project.  We will keep you upto date by using proven project management methodology, giving weekly updates and progress reports if require.  We can even take over the management of your website by managing the content.

 

We can offer from £120 a week (2 hours) we can help you develop your business in a cost effective way.

 

 

For more information on this exciting new service click here or call 0785 2288877

Making Online Marketing Work for You

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Making Online Marketing Work for You

Utilising the internet to promote your business and see profits has become much easier using tactics that get your website or article ranked in the top results which consumers will see when they search for relevant products and services. What we are talking about is sometimes known as search engine optimisation (SEO). Here, you take into account what specific word criteria potential customers will type into a search engine and use these words in your website or article a certain number of times to make it the most likely search result.

But how does it all come together to earn you cash?

First, you will do some market research so you can get a feel of your potential clients like their shopping habits such as budget, preferences, expectations etc. It doesn’t make sense for you to have very attractive products then aim them towards the wrong market group or present the products poorly. Gaining some form of presence online demands that you target the right people with the right methods and at the right time. The next portion of your research will be geared towards your online competitors. Always assume that they also know about marketing with SEO so that you can try to remain above the bar. Learn what they are offering and how they present it so you can be better than they are.

Secondly, you need to make your website user friendly. Let’s say you are using link building to connect your website to others which could either be affiliates or your own businesses as well. As a customer, I have often gone from a nicely built website to one which was just uninviting with its layout and navigation hurdles. If you want your clients to find your site and stick around longer, you must ensure that the overall website design is easy to navigate and makes for easier shopping. Make that “add to cart” button irresistible. Apart from customers, did you know that a simpler website design makes it easier for you to be located by what are known as “search engine spiders” or web crawlers? These normally browse through websites to pick up those important keywords and links that go into placing you either in a top or bottom rank on major search engines such as Google.

Third, you need to have a strategy which will see your online marketing campaign work. Keeping up traffic to your website is no easy task. Turn your visitors into a stable client base by using emails to keep them posted on any new developments and referrals to get even more traffic from your existing portfolio. But how? Make use of subscribe buttons which allow you to create an email database of clients while also employing the use of “share” buttons which link to other social sites which are often visited. Consider this; if a customer has a personal profile on  any of the major social networking sites, a single click on your website is all it takes for everyone else in that person’s address book to be informed of your page. That translates to higher traffic, which in turn translates to higher sales potential.

To be completely honest, online marketing is quite simple. All you have to do is know what card to play, when and where to play it. It is safe to say that every single potential client uses a search engine to find what they want. Google is the most common solution in such a case and considering that the average search produces millions of results, you want to ensure that you get a strategic position in that pile of options to capture the attention of these potential clients then follow through with an attractive sales pitch to convert that to sales and repeated traffic.

Search engine optimisation is a very powerful tool which can be used to ensure that your business is successful both online and offline. At the same time, don’t make your website a hidden little island in the vast sea of information online. Use link building to connect you to other websites similar to yours to reach an even wider market and realise even higher traffic and sales numbers.

What is Web Design..?

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I thought it would be nice to do a little short article on web design and web hosting.

Web Design is the process of designing websites — a collection of online content including documents and applications that reside on a web server/servers.

Its a pretty generic term “Web Design” but I am hoping to show what makes up web design.

Web Designer

A Web designer is someone who designs Web pages. A Web designer is more focused on the look and feel of a website than how it works, and often uses WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get.) editors rather than diving into the HTML directly.  They will work graphically to design your web site to the brief you provide.

Web Developer

A web developer is responsible for programming the functionality of a web site. So while a requirements analyst is tasked with determining what a web site should do, the web developer figures out how it is going to do it and then writes the necessary programming code. Much of this programming code is behind the scenes and not visible to the user.

However, a web developer may also be responsible for the code that the user sees. This is the HTML/DHTML and Javascript/PHP etc that make up most of the web pages you interact with in your web browser.

Web Hosting

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center.

Some pointless facts about web design:

  • Takes at least 10 minutes to resize and simply amend 1 image.
  • 1 GB of space for web hosting is more than enough space for a individual to a small sized company.
  • There is no such things a unlimited webspace! normally this means your sharing a hard drive with 1000′s of clients
  • A web designer/developer is like an artist, with the more work/experience the higher the price.
  • A web site fro less than £300 means an inexperienced designer/developer
  • Linux servers are more stable than microsoft (in my opinion)
  • Marketing your website will cost you more than £100 a year, in fact £100 a month my not be enough.

The Advantages Of Choosing A Local Web Designer

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Are you planning to have a website designed to promote your business online? Are you finding the process of selecting the right web design company very challenging? Yes, choosing a website design company can be really daunting especially when you have so many options right before you. It is challenging because all the web design companies claim to offer the best services and all of them claim to be experts. When you actually set out to select your web design company you are very likely to be left with confusion. Before you start your search, you need to have your own criteria based on which you should select your web design company. This will help you narrow down the options you have and help you select your web design company fast.

One of the major dilemmas business owners have when it comes to choosing their website design company is whether to hire a local web design company or an offshore company. There are many advantages in working with a local web design Tamworth company rather than hiring a company from an offshore location.

Firstly, when you hire a web design Tamworth company your service provider is more likely to understand your requirements better than an offshore company simply because you speak the same language as you and your web designer are from the same place. By language we do not necessarily limit the scope of the word to the language ‘English’ but all the aspects of that language such as metaphors that you will use, examples that you will use to explain your requirements and the choice of words you will use to explain your needs, etc., will be easily understood and interpreted in the way you want them to be understood. This will make the entire process easy as you need not have to send endless clarifications on your requirements and specifications during the web design process.

The basis or the key to creating a good website depends on your web designer’s ability to understand the customer requirements. Here the word, ‘good’ is relative because the customer decides whether the website designed is good or not based on what he or she has in mind and whether their ideas have been given shape. So if you hire a web design Tamworth, Staffordshire company you are more likely to put yourself in an advantageous position. This indeed will solve most of the problems faced by customers that choose offshore web design companies.

You need to establish an easy business relationship with your web design company because only when you work with your web design company closely, you will be able to create a satisfactory website for your business. Especially when you are designing a website for small business, you need to make sure that your website is impressive because you are likely to have limited budget for other promotional activities or and your website will be used extensively in marketing.

Another important reason why you should choose a Tamworth, Staffordshire website design company to get your small business website is that when you hire a local service provider, you will be working in the same time zone. Many business owners that chose companies outside their time zone ended up keeping their midnight oil burning waiting for their website designers to log on as they were in a different time zone or they had to wake up in odd hours to catch up with their web designers. You would certainly not want to work in graveyard shifts to get your website designed. The process can be really simple by choosing a dependable web design company from Tamworth such as Cocoonfxmedia Limited.

Even if you need to make a phone call, it will be easy to work with Tamworth service provider otherwise you will end up spending a lot of money on your telephone bills making international calls. In case, you need to visit your service provider and have a meeting with them, it is much easier to organise such things with a Tamworth, Staffordshire company like Cocoonfxmedia Limited. You will not have all these advantages when you hire web design companies from other locations.

When you are in the process of hiring a web design company it will be helpful if you can hire a company that also offers web hosting Tamworth services. Once your website is ready, they will be able to upload the files easily themselves and set up the website for you. The process will be much simpler as you will be able to get in touch with your Tamworth web hosting company easily in case there should be any server related issues.

Another value-add service that you should look for from your service provider is SEO or search engine optimisation. Your website needs to feature on top of the search results if you want to drive traffic to your website. This does not happen automatically, your website needs to be made search engine friendly. Search engine optimisation will make your website search engine friendly. If your website design service provider also offers SEO services, it is even better as you need not have to hunt for another local SEO company or deal with multiple companies, one for web design, another for web hosting and the third for SEO. One of the top Tamworth web design companies that you can consider for all your web design, web hosting and SEO needs is Cocoonfxmedia Limited. As a local service provider this company will make the entire process of launching your website easy and fast. You need not have to worry about time differences, expensive phone bills, language issues or lack of understanding with this company.

When you take into consideration all the above factors while choosing your website, you will not only be able to identify the best service provider but you will also find the entire process easy. Choose a Tamworth web design company and have an enjoyable web design experience.

For more information on the author please click here

Social Marketing – The Power of Twitter

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Ever wondered what Twitter can do for you?

Twitter has changed the way the world communicates with its clients. At first I was very sceptical of Twitter, thinking what can 140 characters do to improve my business? Do people actually read the tweets? Why do I only seem to attract people from the US?….

It always seemed like a waste of time and I could not understand the hype – however once I started using it I immediately began to see its potential and some tangible benefits. So how does Twitter and the 140 characters improve your business?

As you may or may not know traffic to your site are critical, not only to gain a good return on investment but also the search engines need traffic/hits on your site to grade and rank it.  A site with 30 hits will not be given the same rank or importance as a site with 100 hits.

Here are some basic facts about Twitter:

1 - There are currently 110 million tweets per day from the 200 million registered users.  (est.1200 tweets per second…)
2 – You can send out a targeted message which alerts users back to your site.
3 – Your targeted message reaches a global market, not just your followers.
4 – Google stores Tweets
5 – You not only promote your business/brand but you can create a community which helps develop your brand reputation.

OK.. big numbers but still what can Twitter do for you!


Well, you could do what we did by setting up an account and then start twittering… so you have a few followers and you have a few 100 people your following… however this is not going to make a big difference to your stats or increase your brand awareness.  So then you start to search for Twitter accounts around your area but this could take months to develop enough followers to increase your stats and more impotently how many tweets do I have to make to get these followers… 1 day? 2 an hour? How many?

The good news is Cocoonfxmedia has a tool. It means we can now offer you a system where we can do the following:

1 – Can Tweet upto 999 times in a 24 hour period automatically.
2 – Tweets to be randomly sent
3 – Tweet message creator
4 – Search for Twitter accounts, by keywords, location and distance i.e Tamworth within 5 miles
5 – Automatically follow the targeted Twitter accounts
6 – Manage your Twitter account
7 – Send out tweets with links from your RSS feeds

So they are the features. What are the benefits?

1 – Increase the traffic to your site within 12 hours
2 – Target direct hits from a local market or markets of your choice
3 – Instantly get hundreds of followers within minutes of setting up the account
4 – It’s fully automated
5 – Improve your community

This does sound too good to be true but we use it ourselves.   In a 14 day trial we increased our followers by 500 and increased the number of local people we’re following to 900 new accounts. This increased our direct hits to our website by 150% a day.

You can have this tool for the following bargain price of:

£50 one off setup fee
£35 per month (12 monthly payments).

So what’s included in the one off payment?

  1. User license
  2. Setup Twitter account (Brand and descriptive text)
  3. Create 5 location based searches for tweet accounts
  4. Add RSS feeds from Blogs
  5. Setup up 30 key messages (Tweets)
  6. Setup Automation tool

What does the monthly fee consist of?

  1. Use of automation server (24/7)
  2. Monitoring followers/following lists and black list (ban) accounts and white list (user you want) accounts
  3. Update key messages to your choice; up to 30 changes/new ones a month
  4. Update 5 new location based searches
  5. Tweet 60+ times every 24 hours 7 days a week.

All prices are subject to VAT.

To start using this tool or if you would like a demonstration, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards
James Blackman
Managing Director
Cocoonfxmedia Ltd.

Search Engine Optimisation

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Get your site in front of a buying audience

with your own Search Engine Marketing program!

Millions of searches are performed every day on the top search engines and directories. Quality listings on top search engines or directories can direct thousands of new visitors to your site that would otherwise never find you. Search engines are the number one cost effective way to market your website. Using the expertise of a SEO specialist team Cocoonfxmedia Limited now offer aspecial SEO program.

Submission Tool

Includes a site review (by a human!) and monthly submissions of upto 2 URL to the top search engines and directories like Google and Yahoo, maximizing your site’s accessibility to your online customers worldwide. Reports can produced and can be sent by email after each monthly submission. * Site Review  - analysis site structure and recommend changes. * Monthly Submissions * Reports – we can provide reports on demand every month. This tool will help you get your company noticed with very little cost. For more information please visit our website http://www.cocoonfxmedia.co.uk/seo.html

If you have any questions regarding this email please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Squeeze page???

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ARE THEY AS GOOD AS THEY MAKE OUT TO BE…..

A Squeeze Page is becoming a commonly used term for a direct marketing tool for a website. Often, so-called marketing experts sing the praises of such a practice, but is it really as good as they make it out to be?

I have discovered that a lot of so called E-Marketing experts are starting to use basic one page websites with an auto responder email to the owner. Its sole purpose is to capture a vast amount of information about highly targeted audiences.

The site is coined as a Squeeze Page and normally such a page will offer a free book, a free cd or something else for free, as long as you give your name and email. It will have strong headlines, gripping bullet points, and colours which draw you into the site. Once you’re drawn in and give your information, this information is then used to build a database for direct email marketing. Sometimes this information is sold on to other marketing companies.

The information is golden as it’s a very cheap, effective away to build a highly targeted list of potential clients apposed to buying a mailing list. This then allows the owner of the Squeeze Page to market their products effectively to subscribed people who COULD be interested in their products.

This sounds ideal, but is it?
Lets look at this in detail….

First of all you need to build yourself a Squeeze Page and this could cost anything from £60+ including domain registration. Sounds cheap so far but now you need to get people to this site. How are you going to do this with just one page? That’s going to be tough.

Adwords. How much is this going to cost? It will cost anywhere from £20-£100+ a month, not guaranteed as the value of the keywords increase every month.

Link building. This is one option but it takes time and you have to make sure the links are high quality or google could penalize you if you link to a link farm or to low scoring websites.

Offline marketing. This unfortunately is the only real way to market the Squeeze Page. However this could cost you a lot of money. If you were to advertise in a trade publication you could pay around £3000+ for one advert which may only appear for one month. That’s a large amount of outlay to start a campaign with. However, any traffic going to the Squeeze Page is targeted and anyone giving information are likely to buy your product.

However, there is a strong possibility that the search engines will list such pages as spam and therefore could be a high risk strategy.

At this stage you’re possibly thinking where am I going with this article? I will explain:

If you were to do a search for “How to market your website” for example, the first site that Google advertises instantly has a pop up asking you to fill in a form to receive something. But this is not want you want. You want to see a forum or a website by a professional person with experience, which can give pointers for free.

Squeeze Pages are now becoming as annoying as the flyers which come through your letter box every day.

My advice to anyone wanting to sell their service online should concentrate on building a slick looking website packed with good content with the ability for users to either use a blog or the option to subscribe to a newsletter. This will then give you not only something professional but a better presence and a better brand image.
Having a strong brand is better than a flash in the pan one-off website.

I would always recommend offline marketing. It is the best way to get targeted traffic to your website AND you don’t need a squeeze page to help you do this.