You know that niggling feeling, something at the back of your mind that just keeps nudging you… just when you’re sitting down to relax, at the end of another busy day. Something that you know you should have done, but just haven’t got the time, but it still needs doing. Want to know what it’s likely to be?

…

It’s updating your blog. A simple post to your blog/website that keeps it looking fresh, keeps it current and most of all makes it look like your company is still alive! It’s also a great way to help promote yourself on search engines (Google et al give your site a better rating if it’s kept up to date).

Thing is, it’s so difficult to do. You don’t know what to write, you haven’t got any ideas and so you just keep putting it off. How do I know? Because I am that Chief Procrastinator. I’d win medals for it  – it’s just so much easier to meet a client’s/colleague’s deadlines than to apply your own.

It’s hard for SME companies and individuals to change the way they work and adapt to a different style of marketing. It’s not like the days when marketing  was planned months in advance and case studies, brochures and adverts were all planned in the schedule. Now it’s tougher, it’s more instant and that takes a different mentality. You’ll be glad to know that we find it just as hard, that even as we preach to our clients about keeping websites up to date (even doing it for them sometimes!) there we are neglecting our own house.

However, last year we implemented a few pointers to try and make it a bit easier to adapt to the worldwide blogosphere and thought they may help you.

5 tips for blogging along like a good ‘un:

1. Don’t rely on just one person to blog – If  you don’t have a dedicated web editor on your payroll, you can’t expect someone to be responsible for all the content unless it’s in their job description. Plus it’s nice to have a number of contributors and views coming from your company. It adds to the personality. We actually have a bit of a rota here at wow to help people know when it’s their turn and so they can plan some ideas for articles.
2. War and Peace it ‘ain’t – OK so I can never write one word when 15 will do but the reality is that a blog post doesn’t have to be a novel. One simple paragraph that gives an insight into your company, or a snappy comment into a recent event or news article will do.
3. Plan it – You plan all your marketing in advance – blogging should be no different. Make a plan of content 3 months in advance for each week so that you’re not scrabbling around for ideas. If something more urgent comes up then use that and hold on the post for another week. The best thing about blogs and online content is their immediacy.
4. The magic number – Decide a realistic aim for the number of posts per week/month/year. Base this number on how often you think you’ll have something that readers would be interested in. For us, we generally think that’s once every 2 weeks, there are others that aim for every day, some once a month or every week. The aim is to keep your site up to date, to enable search engines to find you, however if it’s full rubbish, the readers won’t come back so it’s a pointless exercise.
5. Add value – Why do people want to read anything you write? There are plenty of ways to tell them about your new widget, bling or souped-up service, that’s not what a blog is about. It’s not simply a place for news releases. It’s stuff that can add value to a readers day. It’s an insight into your culture, your personality and your ideas. Leave the reader with something that helped them, or enriched their day – even if it’s just a little laugh during a hard work day.

So there it is… it’s not a definitive guide and I’m sure you have other tricks and tips – but it helps us. You’ll see from our blog role that we don’t always keep to it. (What do you think spurred this post?! Last time I blogged was January – 3 months shameful, I know). Paying customers always come first, but we’ll continue on with our quest to stay on top and tame that blog – good luck with yours.

Once upon a time, time itself made you money… In today’s world, time is money and now both time and money are limited.

Every industry has expert consultants who charge various amounts for the time they spend advising you on things like how best to run your business, get more clients, make more money, save your money etc. Employing these experts can be money well spent – especially if it improves you business as a whole.

Design and marketing is no exception to the rule of charging for expertise, after all, any good marketer knows that if a good marketing campaign costs you a lot, imagine what a bad campaign can cost you! However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go some way in trying to reduce the cost of marketing and it doesn’t mean looking to you’re your friend’s 14 year old who has their own Mac. No, there are simple steps you can take to eliminate incurring unnecessary charges with design and marketing agencies. Here’s a few tips:

• 1. Use your time at the beginning wisely: If your submitting a brief to an agency, make sure you’ve fully prepared it before handing it over. A golden rule – always confirm everything with the decision maker of your company before you give anything over to an Agency. There’s nothing more frustrating than you putting your heart and soul into a project, not to mention your budget, to discover that it’s not what your boss had in mind. It’ll cost you more than your sanity to hear that! So check you’re all singing from the same hymn sheet.

• 2. Advise the agency of any restrictions you know of, give clear concise instructions about your goals and what you are expecting and supply brand guidelines.

• 3. If you’re writing the copy – try and supply fully approved copy or make it clear to your agency if it’s not finalised. That will stop the agency spending time on fiddly typography that is going to change anyway.

• 4. Provide any images you want included – this saves time for an agency in searching for photo library shots, or preparing photography.

• 5. Finally, work out a schedule between both parties and stick to it. You’ll be surprised how often timetables slip and costs spiral because clients haven’t kept to their deadlines.

These five steps, will go a long way to allow an agency to do your job efficiently, effectively and succinctly and the final cost should be as you agreed before the starting the project. A good agency can save you a lot of time, a lot of money and create designs and campaigns that will seriously improve your business. But it is a joint partnership. Working together can make a massive difference to your bottom line.

Want some more tips? Read our ‘really useful stuff’

If you always do what you’ve always done.
You’ll always get what you got.

I read that for the first time recently in a book about training for rowing. It just stood out. It’s so true and so relevant to so many things, but especially to marketing. Every business has traditionally always built their marketing plans on what they did last year. Their budgets are set by looking at the past and making judgement to do it again.

The thing is, times they are changing. There’s completely new surroundings now (and there always will be). Advertising is less effective, print costs are high, inboxes are filling up with spam and yet – we return to these tried and tested approaches year on year to deliver our messages.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got…

…but perhaps less of it, after all, there are new kids on the block, up-and-coming competitors that want a piece of your pie.

Be brave.

Push the boundaries. Set aside some budget to get creative. Do something that stands out and makes you get noticed. Promotion, campaigns, marketing are about attracting the attention of those that will be interested in your service or product. Ask yourself  how can you attract attention. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but it does need to be creative.  It’s those that stand out that get remembered no matter what the economic environment.

With the advent of Twitter we’ve all become used to writing the most amount of content in the least amount of words. Adding a link to your Tweet or post on other social networking sites takes up valuable characters – enter URL shorteners such as tinyurl.com or bit.ly. Typing in the exact address tha tyou want people to visit and clicking a button generates a much shorter URL that you can add to your post – giving you more characters to play with.

A few URL shorteners have offered extra features: the ability to choose one or more keywords to your short link – making it more relevant; the ability to preview the page that a short link leads to, for example, giving higher security (stopping you from opening a spam link). However, a few months back Google launched their own URL shortener which we’ve been using and think beats others hands down:

Using goo.gl allows you to shorten your URL in much the same way as other sites. What goo.gl does over and above this, though, once logged in to your Google account, is to keep a list of each URL that you shorten comprehensively, allowing you to filter them by day, week, month and in total. More than that, though, they also provide a chronological graph of the clicks that your URL has received: you can see georgraphically who clicked, from which browser and from which operating system or platform.

What a great way to understand whether your URL is being clicked on by your target audience without having to trawl through your website analytics. Use a different goo.gl URL for each place that you list your link and, hey presto, you have measurable results!

We could all find a reason to like the Snow. Whether it’s snowball fights with the kids, sledging down hills, the necessity of warm fires, or snug duvets, cosy layers of thermals and for those of us who think we hate it, we enjoy and appreciate being indoors looking out at it!

But on a serious note, the Snow can create a slippery path for many Retailers and Businesses especially those on High Streets and villages reliant on footfall, if you’ll excuse the pun. Stating the obvious, if people can’t get out, shops are empty, shops empty means staff cuts, staff cuts means higher unemployment and the chain continues down that steep slope!  Earlier in 2010 the snow cost the British economy millions of pounds per day. We find ourselves in the next few weeks heading for a similar if not worse spell of weather!

But there’s no need to loose out on the lack of visitors to your shop or store, not in this day and age. Every retailer big or small needs to have a website with an online shopping facility. They don’t have to be expensive all singing all dancing e-commerce sites, it doesn’t have to be a competition against the big boys but you can place yourself in the same arena. Remember, every large retailer set out as a small guy and you can always develop your own site to cope with capacity as you grow. Use the resources that are out there, try the likes of Ebay or Amazon to help you set up a shopping cart to sell your items online.  Take the time to learn how to use them and set yourself up. Don’t be left out in the cold this winter!