1. Get your personal profile right first 

Before you start using LinkedIn for your business you need to get it right as an individual user. Your profile should include your full name and a good image of yourself. Add information about yourself, your website details and employment history. Then encourage people to endorse and recommend you.

Use the status updates to share what you’re doing, any relevant insights and useful content. 

2. Network 

View LinkedIn as an online networking tool. Look at the possibility of connecting with others, and consider following up with personalised messages. Keep an eye on what people are doing and sharing, and comment and add to the conversations where you can.

3. Join and contribute to group discussions 

LinkedIn is full of groups. Look to join relevant industry groups but also consider those outside your industry which may help you grow your business. So if you’re an accountant you could join not only accounting groups, but also manufacturing groups to offer accounting advice to manufacturers.

The trick to making groups work for you is based around sharing your knowledge and helping people, rather than selling direct. Do this well and you will build your brand and reputation, and so increase the likelihood of people coming to you. 

4. Set up a company page

The tips so far are all “personal”  - set up a personal profile, build personal connections and share your personal knowledge.

A company page on LinkedIn promotes your business directly, and can include, for example:

• A banner
• Company information
• Product and service information
• Job listings

Employees can connect to the page and anyone can follow it to get updates.

Again the more detail you put here the better. 

5.  Post updates on your company page 

As with personal updates on LinkedIn, you can update the company’s status. Use this to share what the company is doing, promote new services, advertise job openings or pass on useful content. You could use a tool like HootSuite to syndicate social media updates across networks. 

6.  Advertise

LinkedIn allows you to advertise to targeted groups on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis. For example, you can target people by location, job title, seniority and industry. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This is a good way to target specific people directly. 

7. Share content 

This theme has run throughout this blog but like any social media (and content marketing) sharing content is highly beneficial. Any content you create should be shared on both personal and company profiles. Add LinkedIn share buttons to your website (like the one at the bottom of this blog) and encourage employees to share content.

For more information on marketing on LinkedIn get in touch.

Last summer, a day after a client set off on a two week holiday (with no access to email), their website was hit by a virus, making it inaccessible. AdWords were automatically paused, and a warning message appeared in Google’s search results.

Luckily, another member of the team contacted us. We removed the virus within a couple of days and rebuilt those parts of the website that had been lost. However the site was down for two days –  and the client also had to pay for the website repair.

2. Website gets hacked

Recently, a website we had built for a client in 2010 was hacked. Everything on the server was deleted. Although we had a backup of the original website and copy, all the changes undertaken in-house over the last 2 and a half years had disappeared. The website was out of action whilst being rebuilt, and again there was a cost to the client for this service.

3. WordPress targeted by hackers

In April 2013, self-hosted WordPress websites were targeted by hackers, leaving many such sites vulnerable in the days following the security scare.

Hopefully, these stories will motivate you to ensure you are doing everything possible to keep your website secure, maintained and backed up.

Some simple tips to keep your website safe

• Organise regular, ideally automated, backups of all your website folders
• If you use open source software like WordPress, make sure you update the software and the plugins regularly. Out dated versions on your website could leave it vulnerable to cyber-attack
• Set up strong usernames and passwords for your website
• Choose a good, reliable host. For example, our host (Heart Internet) automatically added an additional level of authentication on all WordPress website login pages during the recent WordPress scare

A simple solution

We offer a service, where, for a monthly fee of £35, we will back up any WordPress website twice a month, and update WordPress and all plugins monthly. Your website will run with the latest bug free software, and you will have peace of mind that, should the worst happen, we can get your site up and running again very quickly with minimal disruption.

Another option, of course, is to, cross your fingers and hope for the best!

For more information on our WordPress maintenance service click here.

This new SlideShare presentation provides the questions you need to be asking to create a targeted, results driven strategy for your business:

What is SlideShare?

SlideShare is like a ‘YouTube for slideshows’. You can upload any presentation or document to the website.

The website gets over 60 million unique visitors and 120 million page views a month, and is owned by the biggest social network for businesses – LinkedIn – so it’s a great place to share your content and be discovered.

As with YouTube, presentations can be embedded into your own website and other social media.

Why do people use SlideShare?

• Traffic: With over 60 million unique visitors, SlideShare is great channel for driving traffic to your website
• Audience: It has an established business audience
• Sharing: You can share SlideShare presentations on your website, in social media and elsewhere
• Capture leads: Advanced features allow you to capture leads via built in forms

The content of your SlideShare presentation

You may already have a presentation that you’ve given at a conference or to clients. Alternatively, you may want to turn some existing content (a white paper for example) into a presentation. Here are some tips:

• Have a great title slide…think of it like a poster for a movie
• The best presentations are usually image heavy, and can be flicked through quickly, telling a story or emphasising a point
• Use a mix of strong, bold colours and large text to capture attention
• Along with images, other visuals such as charts and graphs work well in SlideShare
• There is no perfect size. Sometimes a small, succinct presentation will do the trick, other times a longer presentation (60+ slides) will be needed. Just keep the content relevant, though!
• Include a call to action on the last slide
• You can tag and add descriptions of your content, so take this opportunity to use the best keywords for SEO in your descriptions

Have a look at our most recent SlideShare presentation below. If you’d like help with getting started on SlideShare or with your next presentation, get in touch.

Here we explore the key components of your marketing team:

What roles do you need in your marketing team?

• Marketing Manager: Sets the strategy and ensures it’s delivered. Manages the marketing team and acts as the conduit between the marketing team and the director/s and the wider organisation. Produces new ideas
• Marketing Executive: May be required at a lower level from the Marketing Manager to execute the strategy on a day to day basis
• Copywriter: Creates content, including white papers, guides, case studies, blogs, emails and press releases
• Designer: A creative resource (for the website and marketing collateral). Ideally you would have someone who is experienced in graphic design, website design and website development. It can sometimes be difficult, though, to find all the necessary skills in one person
• Search engine marketer: Your search engine marketer should focus on ensuring your website ranks highly on search engines and generates organic search traffic. They should also be able to manage and optimise PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns.
• PR: PR is simply about generating press coverage. Whilst a copywriter could write a press release, the value PR people bring to an organisation is their relationship with the press, and access to PR databases
• Telemarketing: In many businesses this is the link between marketing and sales. A telemarketer can take a ‘marketing qualified lead’ and turn it into a ‘sales qualified lead’

How should you structure your marketing team?

There are a number of options, and ultimately it will come down to what your objectives, activity and budgets are:

• It may be that one person can take on a few of these roles. A Marketing Manager may also be a good copywriter – however it’s very hard to find one person with the requisite skill set for all the different roles
• You could take on an employee for each role on a full time basis
• You could employ people for some roles on a full time basis, using  part timers or freelancers to fill the remaining positions

Or

• You could use a marketing agency that embraces all these disciplines and is already set up as a team. For SMEs with a budget for 1 or possibly 2 marketing employees, this approach has much to recommend it

If outsourcing to a marketing agency is a route you might consider, why not take a look at our outsourced marketing packages, or get in touch?

Alex will be answering questions on ‘How to successfully grow a small business’ and will be providing expert tips, advice and insight to SMEs looking to expand.

This is part of the Guardian live series and will be live on the Guardian website between 1pm and 3pm on Wednesday 10th of April with a full transcript available afterwards.

Sign up and get involved with the live chat here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/small-business-network/2013/apr/03/how-to-grow-your-business

Many websites have lost rankings overnight and don’t know why, others will have gained rankings. Here we go back to basics, discuss what sites the updates have impacted and make sure you can stay on top of future Panda and Penguin updates.

What are Panda and Penguin?

Panda and Penguin are simply Google’s names for algorithm updates. Google is constantly updating its search engine to make it the best search engine in the world.

In a nutshell Google Panda is designed to target websites that are low quality. These are sites that are low value, not very useful and copy content from other websites. To date there have been 27 iterations of this update starting on the 24^th February 2011 and the last one was the 25^th March 2013.

Google Penguin targets ‘webspam’. These are things like aggressive use of anchor text, exact match domains, low quality article marketing and blog spam and keyword stuffing. There have been three updates so far between the 24^th April and 9^th October 2012.

What websites have been affected – the Google Panda Victims

The types of websites that have been affected by Panda are sites with:

• Thin content: Little original content or little content but websites full of advertisements and links. These are sometimes known as content farms
• Duplicate pages to target keywords: Duplicate content is a big no-no in 2013 for SEO. It used to be a tactic to create multiple versions of the same page and target different keywords. So you may be based in the south of England and you have a page for each different county. Too much duplicate content is now being penalised
• High ad ratio: A website with more ads than actual content, and especially ads above the fold
• Empty web pages: This usually isn’t something intentional but happens on websites. This could be empty pages from search functionality for example. Housekeeping and tidying up your website regularly should prevent this
• Purchased links: We all know link building is a major SEO tactic, however natural link building is the tactic, not buying lots of links from websites that sell them

How to recover from or prevent further issues from your website

Let’s go back to basics and understand what search engines (especially Google) want:

• When a search takes place Google tries to match the keywords searched for and rank relevant websites
• Search engines like unique, fresh and engaging content that is written for humans (not search engine robots)
• Search engines like trusted and authoritative websites. This is usually measured by links back to a website with each link from another site being a ‘vote’ in Google’s eyes for your site. The more authoritative the website that link comes from the better, so a link from the BBC is worth more than a brand new website. The view is if you have great content other sites will link to it

The major premise of recent search engine updates are about a focus on fresh and unique content and clamping down on dubious tactics. Create quality content, build links but build good links and make sure if you have a site or use the tactics that the Panda updates are targeting that you change them quickly.

To discuss your search engine marketing strategy in more detail get in touch.

Or if you need quality, fresh, unique content click here to see our content marketing packages.

With the rise in inbound marketing and the decline in outbound marketing Content Marketing has never been so important.

What types of Content Marketing are there?

Content can be written, spoken, a video or graphics. This can be used in:

• Blogs: An article, like you are reading now
• White papers: An exploration of a topic with a unique or intriguing angle on it. Will usually go into depth on the topic
• Guides: Shorter than a white paper a guide can still explore a similar topic but can be more practical
• eBooks: A more informal document, eBooks are made to fit a computer screen and should be easy to pass on and spread. They are good for sharing ideas
• Case studies: Interviews with a customer explaining the challenge, how your business provided a solution and the results
• A book: Both printed and as a longer eBook for example on a Kindle
• Podcasts: An audio file that could be a talk show, an interview or give hints and tips. This is usually distributed via iTunes
• Videos: Talk shows, interviews, ‘how to’ guides, testimonials. Anything with a video camera
• Presentations: A PowerPoint (or similar) presentation that tells a story or presents an idea. These can be distributed on websites like SlideShare
• Infograpics: Graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge
• Webinars: A web-seminar. Providing a presentation to a group of people live over the web

This content can then be distributed on your website, blog, social media, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, SlideShare and many more places.

So what Content Marketing should I start with?

There is no simple answer to this, however it’s worth asking yourself, and the people in your business some questions:

• What content do you enjoy producing? If you’re a good writer written content is the place to start. If you love being in front of a camera video may be best for you
• What do other companies in your industry do? Should you do the same as them to keep up or can you do something different?
• How does your target market consume content? A gym goer may consume more podcasts as they are in the gym a lot with their iPod. Someone who spends all day at a desk in an office may prefer written content

Whatever you choose the important thing is to get started.

Do you want help or more information?

• Download our free white paper: Content is skill king: How Content Marketing enables businesses to differentiate, lead and succeed
• Or if you don’t have the time or resource to do your own Content Marketing why not let us do it for you. See our Content Marketing packages here

The problem is there is a lot of bad advice out there and business owners really need to be wary of this. In just the last 2 weeks in conversations with business owners we’ve heard the following:

• Using a website builder like Moonfruit means we’ll have a professional looking website
• A website company wants to sell me their custom built content management system
• The website builder I used has SEO built in so that’s taken care of
• We have to be on social media
• We’ve been told to put our sales message in an email and send it out to 10,000 people

 Business owners believing these ‘so called experts’ should be wary… 

• Just because it’s easy to build a website doesn’t make you a website designer
• Why waste money with a propriety content management system built by a few people that will cost a fortune compared to using a free open source system like WordPress (which over 20% of new websites are built on)?
• How can you optimise your website without using the keywords you are targeting in the right places on your website?
• Social media isn’t right for every business, and different platforms will work for different businesses
• Results show emails with great, free and relevant content work better than a sales message

We think small businesses need better; they need to stop being lied to and given bad advice. Xander Marketing can help with this because:

• We are a full service agency. An agency that only offers one service thinks their solution is the only solution, we’re not biased like that
• We give genuine, impartial, honest advice even if it means losing out on business
• Our marketing has yielded results for over 70 businesses

We offer a free one hour no obligation consultation so whether you want fresh ideas or to debunk myths from so called experts get in touch today.