In the fight for credit crunch business, grabbing the attention of your target audience can be extremely difficult. To paraphrase Alick in his previous post – A website is just the beginning – you can’t just hope for online business to find you.

The solution? An integrated business blog and subscribable RSS feed, like our very own miggleblog. An inexpensive, simple tool, it can give you direct access to millions of prospective customers worldwide.

The benefits of a blog:

Reach more people, and make money
The likelihood is that only your existing customers will read a news section on your website. With a blog you can reach out and find new prospects. Google’s Feedburner is an invaluable tool that can help you publicise your RSS feed content and make it easier for people to subscribe. By participating in the FeedBurner Ad Network, you can make money from your pearls of wisdom.

Build customer relations
It’s far harder to get business from new customers than it is to get more business from your existing customers, so keeping in touch should be one of your top priorities. An interactive blog is a friendly and fun way to keep your existing customers up-to-date with all your new offers and products, so that your business will be at the forefront of their mind when they need your products or services again.

Better search engine rankings
The migglemedia team always recommend that a business blog be hosted on the main business website, as the more people that read your blog and link to posts on it, the higher your website will appear in the search engine rankings.

Bring in more traffic
Google search loves frequently updated websites, therefore a blog can bring in a surprising amount of new traffic to your website through natural search terms. Blog posts are rapidly indexed by the major search engines and can be extremely profitable.

Start a buzz
Blog about your new products, drop hints about forthcoming events, publicise your research – grab the attention of the press! Blogs are increasingly quoted and cited in the mainstream media, and as such are a great way to score free publicity for your company.

Become ‘the guru’
If your business occupies a niche sector of the market, why not share your knowledge via a blog and build a reputation as a go-to person?

Test your ideas
Thinking about a change of direction for the company or expanding into a new range of products? Blog about it and let your customers tell you exactly what they want from your business.

>> How to profit from social media

>> Drive user engagement with a newsletter

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

This is the next post in Alick’s series on our miggle website fundamentals, “a functional website is just the starting point for an effective online business”.

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I always have this vision of a guy – maybe back in the 1930s at the height of the last depression – sitting in his office, elbows on desk, head in hands, staring at his brand new telephone and waiting for it to ring. He’d heard that all his competitors had got a phone and thought if he got one too, the business would come. So he got it installed, but never figured out why it didn’t ring.

I see a similar thing happen with business websites. How many can say that their site’s working for their business the way they want it to?

For the purposes of this post, we’ll assume your website is a great website – focussed on the needs of your audience and/or current and future customers, providing the features or functions that match those of your competitors in a way that makes it easy for users to get what they want and encourages them to come back for more. But we’ll also assume that its not delivering the return on the investment you wanted – so why is that?

In most cases it’s because too much focus, time and money was placed on the build and the design – and not enough thought given to what time, money and resource would be required to get it seen.

The common problems we see are:

* The front page never changes
* No new content gets added
* No promotion of special offers
* Worse still – as a combination of neglect on the three points above, out-of-date content is featured on the website
* Broken links – or searches on Google link to pages that can’t be found
* Offline advertising and literature are not referencing your website
* No money is spent on online advertising and marketing.

They exist because:

* No one within the business ‘owns’ the website
* No budget has been allocated to the website
* Somehow the business believes that because everyone can access your site, everyone will.

They can be mitigated by:

* Allocating a budget within your business to promote your site
* Ensuring someone has the skills and the time to make updates to your site to keep it fresh, accurate and reflective of your business
* Having a clear plan of what you can reasonably expect from your site.

Our most successful small business clients have got themselves to the stage where their sites have paid for themselves. In every case, it’s been because they’ve been prepared to spend at least the same again as they spent on the build to ensure their online investment returns with interest.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

My wife, Caroline, has spent a lot of this week up the allotment with the baby. Planting stuff. My interest in this venture will, shamefully, only start to kick in about six months time when she walks through the door with a trug of vegetables – hopefully with more parsnips this year than last!

We’ve been planting a few seeds at miggle this week as well – with the launch of our first .tel sites. We’re hoping they grow over the summer months in the same way as Caroline’s crop – but for now, do take a look at what we’ve done – even though they are just seedlings.

The most obvious one to check out is brighton.tel. We’ve listed a few of our favourite Brighton businesses on it – and we’ve also launched a new site – called miggletel.co.uk – from which Brighton businesses can sign up for a FREE or PREMIUM listing – or engage us to get their own .tel websites built. We’ve also added lettings.tel, motors.tel and jewellery.tel at the same time.

I’ve also published a few more as well – and what these show is how simply you can daisy chain .tel’s together. webdevelopment.tel links to miggle.tel links to alick.tel. Obviously, its just hyperlinking, its not rocket science – but it does mean, that providing I can keep on top of keeping alick.tel updated – then anyone who links to it will always have access to my latest info.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Telnic.org, the registry operator for the new .tel top level domain, have singled out miggle’s newly created .tel website – brighton.tel – as an example of a .tel that is “helpful, well-populated” and offers “innovative ways to keep in touch”.

Check us out on their .tel of the week page.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Web design and development for CHAIR: an effective business website with a minimum of fuss.

CHAIR founders Melissa and Sophie came to us with a plan for how they wanted their website to work. We created a simple yet elegant 5-page site, with email, hosting, contact form and an all-important photo gallery to show off their beautiful stock of chairs. Built in the miggleCMS content management system, their new site was up and running within a couple of days.

Sophie and Melissa were chuffed with the results: “We can’t thank miggle enough for their professionalism, creativity, dependability and quick turn-around. They are a cohesive, dynamic group that work together to create precisely what their client is after and we highly recommend them. When starting up a new company, it is important to make key choices financially and we feel that we invested wisely by choosing miggle and look forward to growing our online presence with them. Thanks to everyone on the miggle team!”

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

The online travel industry is an extremely competitive one. Big name brands all compete on the same keywords for the top search rankings on Google’s homepage (as well as on Yahoo! and MSN search), so when The Cooden Beach Hotel, a private hotel in Bexhill, asked us to manage their search marketing, we were up for the challenge.

Firstly, we was asked to redesign their website, which helped because, as with all the websites we build at miggle, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is considered throughout the website build process. We identified The Cooden Beach Hotel’s best keywords and prepared website copy both search engine friendly and useful to the user.

The preparation paid dividends. Not long after launching The Cooden Beach Hotel’s website, we were achieving first page search results on our chosen keywords. This in itself was great when you take into account the very competitive market.

So, from a natural search point of view we were doing well. Our selected keywords were ranking the website on the first page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) but in such a competitive market place you can’t rest on your laurels. Being pro-active is a must in search marketing, so we continued working with The Cooden Beach Hotel to improve their search rankings.

The miggle media team decided to run a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign using Google Adwords, with the aim of achieving maximum exposure in both paid and natural search for The Cooden Beach Hotel.

As mentioned in our previous post, Is Google Adwords right for your business?: “A recent study found that search advertising is still the most cost-effective method of advertising (and it is a fraction of the cost of direct mail, email, online banners or yellow pages), mainly due the fact you can target your market so effectively.”

Our initial aim was to hit the top 3 positions on the Google sponsored ads as often as possible and to drive quality, targeted traffic to the hotel’s booking engine in order to provide a good return on investment (ROI). This has been a great success – now The Cooden Beach Hotel pretty much dominates SERPs on our chosen keywords. The hotel is thrilled with their ROI and have already increased their Google Adwords spend.

The screen grab shows how The Cooden Beach Hotel has the whole page covered giving them the best opportunity to gain clicks, and hopefully bookings. A very successful search marketing campaign.

The following guides you through the screen grab (left):
1) This is one of our Google Adwords ads – competing with some huge brand names means your ads and landing pages need to have a high quality score and be extremely relevant to the search.

2) Local business listing – essential for any business to get listed here and as you can see, can give good exposure. It’s also free to submit your listing!

3) This is the natural search listing – ranked in second place for this keyword. It’s also worth noting that the website link on the first place listing goes to a page which in turn links to the hotel making it another valuable source of clicks.

If you’re interested in search marketing, contact the miggle media team to find out how we can optimise your online presence.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Internet advertising in Britain was the only ad medium to grow in 2008, rising 17 percent and bucking the overall 3.5 percent industry fall, according to the latest reports.

The reasons? Pay-per-click and online display advertising offer businesses what TV, radio, mail and press simply can’t – total accountability, the flexibility to adjust and test advertising messages in real time and pinpoint targeting of your desired audiences.

There are millions of places on the internet where you can buy advertising and lots of different ways you can do it. Advertising comes down to two things – you’re either building your brand or you want to elicit some direct response. There are distinct strategies for both.

In terms of building brand – it’s important to establish what kind of websites have a commercial offering that’s right for you and a relevant audience. You could buy an ad on the front page of Yahoo! and reach many millions of people from all walks of life – it’ll be priced accordingly. But you may find that there are websites that cost less and work better, helping you to access a relevant niche audience.

The migglemedia team can advise you on where you should advertise, what your mix of branded and direct spend should be, bargain advertising opportunities and how to design compelling creative.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.