Advanced Web Ranking is a search engine ranking software application that helps check the position of a website in search engines. The web ranking systems allows users to pick region specific search engines making managing international sites easier than ever before.  To begin users need to enter a list of keywords or phrases they  wish to track.  Caphyon offers various built in keyword suggestion tools to help users with keyword choices.  Entering keywords proved to be an easy task, from there users enter the URLs of the sites that you wish to track.  After keywords and the URLs are entered for a specific project all that is left is to run the report.  Every time a keyword report is run Caphyon will compare the new page rank with the results from previous page ranks.  MintTwist found the “top sites’ and “overview” tabs especially useful due to the fact that they are useful when tracking a large amounts of keywords and for measuring overall success of a project.  Reports are easily exported to different formats including HTML, PDF, EXCEL and CSV complete with logos, headers and footers.  Users can schedule project updates to run whenever they want as many times as they want.  MintTwist is able to manage multiple large international projects with ease using advanced web ranking software.  Advanced web ranking system provides accurate ranking even when there is a large amount of keywords in the project.  Advanced web ranking system is able to run on multiple platforms which has made it easy for MintTwist to access the ranking system interface when meeting with customers outside of our home office.  Another useful tool offered by Caphyon web ranking system was the local search ability.  It allows users to make their own search engine in a way to find results in your interface using google maps and Yahoo local search.

When first using Caphyon’s ranking system users must be patient because the possibilities of the software can be overwhelming at times.  MintTwist users had to take some time to read the user manual and play around with the software for while in order to gain a full understanding of the possibilities.

The one complaint that we had with the software was it was not entirely easy to figure out how to effectively see how our competition was doing, but after some time spent reading the user’s manual we figured out the process.

The Link manager is also a very useful tool for anyone looking to build link campaigns.  Link Manger does exactly what it suggest in that it enables users of all abilities to efficiently and effectively organize their link campaigns to their specific needs.  Features of Link Manger include, but are not limited to: Finds links relative to the users site, keeps track of link partners, finds broken links that can negatively affect your page rank, monitor competitors, track your back links, and produce highly customized reports.  Link manager automatically eliminates manual searches to reduce the bandwidth burdens of other programs.

Overall Caphyon’s web ranking system has been an essential to MintTwist’s success and we highly recommend Caphyon over all other web ranking systems.  The level of competence and possibilities make it a dream to work with.

It is necessary to support search engine marketing techniques across different aspects of a website.

This is the according to Kevin Gibbons who, in a post on the Econsultancy blog, observed that using methods such as pay per click marketing once is valuable as the chances of conversions are high, but “you don’t want to pay to attract that customer a second or third time”.

Maintaining brand awareness for consumers can be important and blogs were highlighted as being a good way of doing this, as they can create user habits through “regular, engaging [and] relevant posts” that encourage surfers to save pages in their favourites.

Email marketing was also recommended by Mr Gibbons, although he did add that sending regular messages was “pretty useless” and risked angering the customer.

Aude Lesur of Credau, an Anglo-French firm that create eco-friendly fashion wear for men said “SEO alone, did not help us to effectively portray the benefits of our products to our potential customers. We wanted to reach men with style and an eye for classy clothing with a difference. By engaging with our audience through Blogs and Social Networks we have been able to reach more of our target customers groups.”

Elliott King of MintTwist, the web marketing agency recently likened search engine optimisation to politics, saying that it drives debate because many people do not know what it is, have had negative experiences or believe it to be overly complicated.

MintTwist is proud to announce the launch of the redesigned goalgroup.com website.

The company provides specialist legal services relating to class actions and security class actions that can protect clients against investment losses incurred through management failure that result in class action lawsuits.

by Kabir Bedi

The world wide web is constantly changing and to make sure your business keeps pace, it is important to be up to date with the latest trends and technologies. And this is why companies decide to redesign their website. Of course, there are other reasons too like re-branding the business, updating the website to reflect the present status of the company in the market, deleting old pages and uploading new information, better marketing fluff and so on.

However, search engine considerations are the most forgotten part in the website redesigning process. Website owners are so involved with creating a new look and feel for the website that they often fail to evaluate the SEO implications of their actions. They realize it only when the website is done and ready and there are fluctuations in the rankings of the website. But that is only when precious revenue is lost in terms of traffic, leads and sales.

Here are 4 SEO tips that you should adhere to while redesigning your website.

Strengthen the Information Architecture

Usability should be the key concern while designing the information architecture of the website. However, you should also consider including some SEO objectives for the usability process. Search engine optimization should not come after the website has been launched. Rather, it should be a key consideration throughout the design and development of the project.

Draft a set of relevant keywords that encompasses the essence of your company and business. Then make sure your website has pages that are devoted to those keywords so that search engine have relevant content when their crawlers come to index your website.

Make sure you add new pages to your website, especially if you are deleting certain pages. This is because you don’t want the search engines to think that your website is shrinking. Rather you should tell them that its growing. The deleted pages would obviously take with them their search engine credibility so you would need something to compensate the loss.

Don’t Change the URLs

When you change the URLs of your web pages, the new URLs would be treated as completely new pages by the search engines. All the search engine credibility of the previous pages would be lost along with the URLs.

Therefore, focus on creating search engine friendly web pages with search engine friendly URLs and light code with WordPress and other such CMS platforms. Make sure all the pages of your website are able to rank well in the search results and not just your homepage.

Update the Website Content

Search engine crawlers are always on the look out for new and fresh content. And there is no better opportunity than the redesigning process to upload new content on your website. Unlike blogs, it is not possible to change the contents of the website, especially on the homepage etc. on regular basis. So, make sure you upload useful and updated content on such pages. Ideally, focus on constructing more content on the homepage of the website followed by lesser supporting content on the internal pages.

Launch the website Carefully

don’t forget to run down the last minute check list before launching the new redesigned website. The search engine ranking of your website depends on a variety of factors including the website structure, the design and layout and the content. It is not just about the number of links pointing to your website that decides the ranking but how popular the website actually is among the users.

MintTwist Web Design understands the importance of  SEO in web marketing, MintTwist work with clients to significantly increase the number of targeted sales leads achieved by clients.

by Dave Rosenberg

Microsoft’s launch party videos have proven to be entertaining to viewers even if not for the reasons for the marketing department had hoped for. There were a great many comments on my post that provided context to their release, but generally speaking most industry-watchers have been confused as to the goals behind the program, questioning the target audience not just for the videos, but for the launch parties as well.

I reached out to Microsoft for comment but they withheld at this time as the videos are apparently just one step in a much larger integrated marketing campaign.

I personally found the most recent video weird, but after thinking through things a bit I think this is a case of a good idea hampered by poor execution. The videos are well-done and professional and try to connect with consumers in a humanistic tone. The fact that it feels like you stumbled into a shiny-happy Windows world filled with sit-com throwaways is the problem. Even if this is a training video to show others how to throw a launch party, it’s hard to connect with the vapid characterizations of party guests.

This is the crux of Microsoft’s marketing problems. It’s not that they aren’t good at technical marketing issues, it’s that the brand itself is so voluminous, it’s very hard for people to connect to specific products like Windows. And the efforts to persuade consumers isolate the tech media and confuse IT shops.

One of the biggest issues Windows Vista faced was consumer confusion as to why they should buy an upgrade at all. Microsoft did a very poor job of communicating why anyone should care and added such a complicated set of offerings that people simply couldn’t figure out what to buy. (Note that Windows 7 also has a very complicated pricing scheme.)

Right now, the Windows brand doesn’t have a huge amount of momentum behind it, even if Microsoft itself and Bing do. Getting momentum behind Windows 7, regardless of the methodology should be Microsoft’s main goal right now. And the company is pulling out all the stops, from commercials to launch parties to getting the OS out into the channel sooner than retail, it is trying to gain back the lost mind-share.

The challenge is that companies like Apple, with a significantly smaller share of the operating system market, have developed such sophisticated and stylized marketing, that Microsoft has a very hard time competing with the overall effect. So, Microsoft has instead gone after the mythical “every-man” (or every-man, woman and racial/gender/ethnically diverse party in the world), which falls way short for we Valley media types that will mock anything and everything.

But the target customer for Windows 7 may actually like the experience of a launch party simply because it humanizes the operating system and allows them to ask silly questions like how to burn a CD. These were not made for sophisticated tech buyers and that may not be a bad thing.

The point is that PC manufacturers need people to buy more computers and really only Microsoft can make that happen until vendors (and consumers) embrace Linux or switch to Macs.

Do not make the same marketing mistakes as Microsoft, Minttwist provides all our clients with effective and targeted  web marketing campaigns to propel your business to the next level.

There are many ways to fail when launching a new website. Just as anything else in life, the Internet is a massive place and you are just a tiny speck on one of billions of radars.

The trouble starts when you, being so close to your own project, see your website as much more than it actually is. And I’m not only talking about finding a niche and all that fun stuff, but you have to take yourself and your project with a pinch of salt because that is exactly how the rest of the world will be taking it, too.

If salt is not your thing then you may just have to substitute it with a dash of failure because, perhaps unfortunately, the Internet is very salty indeed.

Being close to your project is not a bad thing – indeed you can be the driving force behind it and thrust it upon the bleary-eyed and unyielding world. But the measure of success comes from afar. You simply cannot march head-first into a new web venture with guns blazing and developers flanking your left and investors flanking your right; for a start, success comes, ninety-nine per cent of the time, over a long period of that thing we call time, after many sleepless nights.

However, a project often falls into disarray when certain procedures aren’t adhered to. I’m going to list five things here that I think are of such great importance that it could form part of a check-list by which to measure the success of many an online venture. I list them in no particular order and the list is by no means complete.

1. There’s no rush
   Really, there isn’t. If you’ve come up with a brilliant idea, a true light-bulb-ping moment, get it all noted down, research it and talk about it (a lot) with people in the know. They can advise you of what is out of scope, what might be better and what is so good or bad about your idea. Don’t rush to a cheap freelance developer and hope to get it done and be reaping the rewards by Friday.
2. Do a “soft launch” if you have to
   If you really want to get your project out there ASAP, there’s usually no problem with doing what the industry dubs a “soft launch”. That is, launch your project warts-and-all and hope to gather a decent enough following to continue after you update to full-launch mode. A soft launch doesn’t just mean slapping a ‘beta’ tag next to your logo, it means carefully informing users what’s going on and what might change. It is also a great opportunity to gather feedback from Joe Public. Remember that openness is so sacred on the Internet that if you don’t inform people that you intend to start charging, you may face a backlash as soon as you flip that big ol’ switch.
3. Don’t hope for an instant crop from a single seed
   As I’ve already alluded to above, it’s so important to be careful not to hope for too much from your project. I’m really not trying to put a downer on any project, I completely believe that more Facebooks and more Googles are hidden in the back of peoples’ minds in random exotic places around the world. I just think that keeping a cool and level head, working really hard and speaking a lot with people who know what they are talking about is much more successful than blind hope. They don’t talk about crops with regard to success for nothing; a crop takes time to grow and, often, people can only afford the time, money and effort to start that crop with one tiny-weeny seed.
4. Don’t panic when something goes wrong
   Things do go wrong, FACT. It’s not always one person’s fault and it can, almost always, be fixed. But the most important part, before fixing what’s broken, is to not panic. Remember, you are close to the project so it’s difficult to see it from a more reasonable, and indeed a more real perspective. Seek help, calm down and have a tête à tête with your developers, designers and anybody else involved. Not only are you more likely to get the problem fixed, but you will probably get it done a lot more quickly than if you ran around like a headless chicken first. If a project completely falls over, you don’t need to follow it like a sack of potatoes; cool it to the extent that you could shock an ice cube, roast your chicken and potatoes with your pinch of salt, then get things sorted. It’s also worth noting that, if you use an agency, they will have factored-in (I hate that phrase) some contingency time in case of such an event.
5. Enjoy the process!
   It’s one thing to be good at it. It’s a completely different thing to enjoy it, too! If you enjoy the whole process, you will find that you are able to handle a lot more problems head on, with fingernails intact. Things run so much more seamlessly if you choose people who you like working with to help build your project into something important. Gifted with the choice between a person/people/agency who are very good at what they do, but are lacking in the personality department, and another person/agency who aren’t as good but can get the job done and are fun, engaging, interactive and proactive with you then, hands down, the latter is the better choice.

I’ve tried not to be too negative in my five points up there. I think that the Internet would be such a cleaner and more successful place if people just stop falling over each other trying to find the next big thing and just relax, sit back and take things one step at a time! And if things don’t go according to plan, pick up the pieces and keep going with your head stuck firmly on your rigid shoulders.

My boss told me something today that resonates well with this article. He said, “don’t worry if there’s something that really can’t be done, or that goes wrong; there’s always a work-around”.

Indeed.

Are you concerned that competitors can steal your website?

What are the pitfalls for an offender, what are the legal comebacks and can you turn the situation to your favour?

Maybe, take the real world example below…

A case of website and web copyright theft

MintTwist and N.I.D-lab both create websites. N.I.D-lab stole MintTwist’s website with a cut-and-paste job.

The Original MintTwist Website

Stolen MintTwist Website with MintTwist clients still listed

This provides MintTwist with an opportunity to demonstrate an important selling point

Indulge us…

Ok, Clients of MintTwist, the multi-national web design and web marketing company are a smart bunch. They know that for a business website to be successful at winning more new sales leads it must get the right messages across to the right audience groups in a fast and effective manner. In a nutshell this is the secret of website success and the true value of a web design service.

It follows then, that one design does not fit all…

For example, target customers of MintTwist are medium sized businesses that target customers in the UK, Europe, USA and across the Middle East. MintTwist returns value to its clients by helping them to increase their revenue by significantly growing the number of sales leads they achieve from their web strategy through improved web design and web marketing services. The design that MintTwist created for their website gets this message across.

Conversely, N.I.D-lab, is a cheap web design company that offers cheap website services to anyone. The design that they have chosen for their website is a cut-and-paste copy of the MintTwist site. This was an error of judgement for several reasons ….

Pitfalls for the offender and their clients

As well as risking a lawsuit for themselves and any of their clients, who will be liable if they have performed the same ’service’ for them, they have also failed at the first fundamental step of web design. The MintTwist website design is aimed at well-informed professionals with a vision of how to extract a significant return from their website purchase. These are not the kind of customers who will buy from N.I.D-lab and therefore should not be N.I.D-labs targets.

The next time N.I.D-lab decide to ‘re-design’ their site, to make it more effective they would be well advised to focus and optimise for their own (somewhat unique) selling point and target customer group – “cheap copies for people who like getting sued”.

What to do if your website is stolen?

If you are a website owner who have had your website stolen you should consider legal action. Google can also help to prevent damage by black-listing offenders using the power of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Google page dealing with offenders of website theft will provide more information on this.

More Opportunities

After a successful launch into the Abu Dhabi Web Design and Dubai Web Design Markets MintTwist is seeking to further diversify its markets in order to increase the level of service it can provide to its clients. For more information on attractive partnership opportunities with MintTwist, contact Elliott King. N.I.D-lab management need not apply.

MintTwist is proud to announce the launch of paukrodgersjournalist.co.uk. The new website is for UK-based journalist Paul Rodgers, who writes regularly for the Independent, The Observer and the Economist, amongst others.

Mr. Rodgers required an online portfolio of his writing and MintTwist delivered a slick, modern website, powered by WordPress. The style is clean and current, with a nod to the print press in its use of typefaces and structure.

http://paulrodgersjournalist.co.uk
http://minttwist.com

… Maybe. Although this time it will be more complex.

IE and FireFox are the dominant incumbents and Google’s Chrome is the rising super-power. However, dig a little deeper and you’ll see there are more potential players in the battle for world domination.

Are we heading for a second wave of browser wars?

“The issue that lies ahead is whether browsers will remain a relatively simple window on to the internet or become intelligent agents that shape online experiences. If they go down the latter route this would have potentially disruptive effects for others who do business on the internet”, said Elliott King of MintTwist web design.

For the internet’s booming social networking industry in particular, the prospect that some of the capabilities associated with social networking will be embedded into browsers, making them more aware of users’ interests and social relationships, could force difficult strategic decisions.

Google’s main contribution to the browser skirmishes we’ve seen thus far has been an obsession with speed. With a new, faster engine for executing Javascript – the code that makes it possible for a browser to imitate applications that run on a PC – Google galvanised the rest of the industry and forced rivals to focus harder on their own core technology.

Google’s goal, as it takes on Microsoft, is clear – to accelerate the advances in the internet platform in ways that eventually make it unnecessary to run “native” software applications that rely on a PC’s underlying operating system. That, ultimately, should benefit the web-based services on which its success depends.

Others, however, see deeper potential in the browser and are out to push its capabilities further. As a piece of software that all users have to use – it clearly has a strong strategic position.

For instance, Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, says it is looking into arming its browser with a number of extra munitions – such as ‘knowing who you are and handling authentication on the websites you visit, keeping a record of your social network so that you can interact with friends; and, making it easier for you to share content with your network.

Given that these are all territories that social networks like Facebook currently view as their own, that could create new fronts opening up between browser makers and the internet services that rely on them.

If it makes life easier for internet users, bringing more capabilities into the browser will be hard to resist and populations of internet users may start to migrate away from using artificial silos [like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn].

This has attracted a flurry of interest and investment in browsers from the social networking big guns. The potential for “social browsers” is a currently a hot topic in Silicon Valley.

The internet industry has long nurtuerd a feeling of mutual growth and co-operation; but there’s a growing evidence that the time may be coming for players to choose sides, ready themselves and prepare for war!

MintTwist help medium sized product and service based businesses to increase revenue and sales leads by defeating their enemies on the battlefields of the internet with better web design and web marketing services. Contact Elliott King for more information.

London is becoming the Twitter capital of the world, in terms of number of users and number of businesses developing add-on tools for the communications network.

While Twitter is the toast of its native Silicon Valley in California, London boasts more users than any other city in the world.

Even though Twitter itself is yet to generate any revenue, early-stage investors are pouring millions of pounds into small companies in the Twitter “ecosystem” in the London area.

London web designers have produced many of the most popular of the many third-party tools used to post to Twitter, called Tweetdeck. Reading’s Tweetmeme, which tracks the most popular news stories discussed on Twitter, is attracting millions of visitors a month while Twitterfeed, based in Tooting, is used by thousands of publishers to post their latest headlines on to the site.

Twitter was launched in 2006 but really took off in the UK at the beginning of this year, thanks to support from celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross. But many see Twitter’s potential as far greater than documenting the lunching habits of the stars.

“Twitter has huge potential as a marketing and communications platform”, says Elliott King, Director at MintTwist Ltd.

As Twitter has broken out of the early-adopter niche, it has attracted more mainstream users and uses… Jobseekers are using Twitter to find new employment. Many businesses push marketing messages and even run customer support services through their Twitter profiles. Millions of users flock to the site for the biggest news stories of the hour, as defined by the Twitter community rather than newspaper editors.

MintTwist help medium sized product and service based businesses to increase revenue and sales leads with the smart application of web design and web marketing services. Contact Elliott King for more information.

If you are going to have a bad website, you are probably better off having no website at all. It’s true. While a bad website at least gets your name in the search engines, it can also ruin your credibility. A hard to use website, for example, may push your potential customers over to the competition, while an amateurish website can convince potential customers that your business is simply not a serious one.

So how can you avoid these marketing gaffes online? Quite simply, by:

1) Making sure that you get your website when you are ready. You should only invest in a company website when you are ready to spend time and money on the project. Only develop a website when you are ready to hire professionals to design it for you and you are ready to promote and update your website regularly.

2) By entrusting your website to professionals. You may know someone who understands basic HTML or WYSIWYG programs, but you need professionals with a discerning eye to develop your professional website for you. You need a professional team – like the one at Ciplex – to get professional results. While amateur results may be OK for a personal webpage, any minor glitches or design errors on a company website make you look less credible. Unfortunately, with so many scams online today, customers may see any lack of credibility on your part as a red flag sign. Don’t give customers an excuse to not do business with you. If you cannot afford professionals, wait until you can or work out a financing plan.

3) By making your website part of an overall business plan. Your website is not stand-alone. It should work with your overall business plan, marketing strategy, and branding plan. If you are not sure what you want your website to accomplish, you should determine this before setting a site up. Nothing is worse than the business website with no discernable goal.

4) By ensuring that your website looks its best. Your website should be professional, clean, and attractive. It should err on the side of simplicity and work well with no delays or glitches. It should work well on different computers and with different browsers, so that all your potential customers can read your marketing message. Check and re-check your website to ensure that it looks as good as it possibly can.

MintTwist help medium sized product and service based businesses to increase revenue and sales leads by defeating their enemies on the battlefields of the internet with better web design and web marketing services. Contact Elliott King for more information.

Internet users can take just one-twentieth of a second to decide whether they like the look of a website, researchers say.

Dr Gitte Lindgaard and colleagues from Carleton University in Ottawa flashed up websites for 50 milliseconds and asked participants to rate them for visual appeal.

When they repeated the exercise after a longer viewing period, the participants’ ratings were consistent.

“Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression,” the Canadians report in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology.

Associate Professor of psychology Bill von Hippel, from the University of New South Wales, says it takes about 50 milliseconds to read one word, making this a “stunningly remarkable” timeframe in which to process the complex stimuli on a website.

“It’s quite remarkable that people do it that fast and that it holds up in their later judgement,” he said.

“This may be because we have an affective or emotional system that [works] independently of our cognitive system.”

He says that in evolutionary terms, this ability helped us respond rapidly to dangerous situations.

Halo effect

Professor von Hippel says the study also reflects the so-called halo effect, where an initial bias towards something drives subsequent judgements.

“This suggests that we make very quick judgements based on some sort of emotional reaction and our more considered judgements still reflect that first impression,” he said.

Australian researcher Sue Burgess, who evaluates website useability and is a senior lecturer in information management at the University of Technology Sydney, says the finding comes as bad news to anyone hoping to convey information.

“There’s no doubt that people do respond very quickly to websites and decide very quickly whether to stay on them,” she said.

She says the appeal of a website is usually tied to colour, movement and interactivity, with the way the information is structured coming second.

Ms Burgess says it is unclear whether the Internet is changing our ability to concentrate for long periods or if we are adapting to the medium.

“There’s so much information and … there’s always going to be a lot of clicking around just to see what’s there,” she said.

MintTwist help medium sized product and service based businesses to increase revenue and sales leads with the smart application of web design and web marketing services. Contact Elliott King for more information.

Has the recession changed the way you approach business?

Many of the business people in my network have answered an emphatic YES to this question…

Jurga Zilinskiene who runs established language translation services company Today Translations said, “During the recession we realised the value of our local suppliers. Trust and pulling together has been the key to the success that we’ve enjoyed through these lean times. By working in close proximity with our partners we have been able to focus on delivering a high quality service and a fast turnaround for our clients which has really made a difference to our bottom line.”

Jurga Zilinskiene who runs established language translation services company Today Translations.

Doing business with people trust and meeting people face-to-face are coming back into fashion. The perception amongst my ad-hoc sample appeared to be that by working with people (suppliers) that you’ve met and with whom you have developed some level of trust – and by trust I mean an intuitive feel for the person, as well as an understanding of the services their business can offer – you will achieve a greater level of customer service and ultimately an increased ROI.

Aude Lesur of Credau an Eco Menswear label specialising in eco clothing for men all made in Britain said “From conception to packaging, Credau has always believed in using local industry. All of our clothes are made in Britain, East London. Our care labels are woven in Pembrokeshire, and environmentally sustainable. We keep our carbon footprint to the minimum. We do not use plastic and we send out goods using a biodegradable polybag. We started out doing this because we care about the environment and it’s a core business value of Credau – however, we have been amazed at the resilience this policy has given our business during this downturn. We have experienced increased levels of service from our suppliers – all of them know the value of raising quality and because we are in it together they are also personally motivated to deliver even more value.”

Another client of ours who is reaping the rewards of the increased value that is being placed on “trust in business” is Mike Lacorte, Director of the Private Investigator agency Conflict International. Mike said, “We are seeing an increasing number of corporate businesses come to us, who want to find out more about potential employees they are thinking of taking on for key positions. They want to know if the person is drinking too much or doing drugs before they take them onto a very lucrative package. For them it’s a smart business decision and everything we do is within the law and entirely confidential.”

My conclusion; meeting with and trusting in your suppliers, partners and employees is crucial if you are to create sustainable business relationships. The benefits are a strong ROI, increased profit and (dare I say it) ‘friends’ who will be amongst the first to provide real help in challenging times.

The world economy is improving, but that has not translated into increased demand for expensive, elaborate advertising campaigns, according to WPP Group chief Martin Sorrell. However, the industry has the potential to rebound, and when it does, it will focus on digital, Sorrell said.

Sorrell told reporters Wednesday that the ad industry will look very different when it fully recovers from the effects of the recession, with the focus moving away from traditional, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“It’s not going to be in 30-second TV ads; it’s not going to be in newspaper or magazine ads; it’s going to be digital, it’s going to be viral and organic” Sorrell said.

One particular reason the industry won’t rebound as quickly as the economy is that marketers have grown accustomed to paying less for campaigns as agencies have been forced to slash rates in an effort to retain clients. Even Dublin-based WPP, the world’s largest agency by revenue, reported a 48 percent drop in net profit (to $177.3 million) for the first half of the year.

MintTwist help businesses increase sales in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Worldwide markets. With a Managed Web Marketing service, MintTwist make sure their clients have the right setup before commencing an all-encompassing web marketing stratgey that dramatically increases sales leads, visibility and improves the reputation of our client’s businesss in target markets.

For more information contact Elliott King on +44 20 8349 8213 or elliott@minttwist.com.

Remember all that time and effort you spent coming up with the right name for your business? You wanted the right name because your name is a large part of your brand. You want to create a brand that will conjur positive images about your business and stick in people’s minds; you wanted something that will last, something you could build around, and grow.

Brand building is just the start of bigger things to come. How people perceive your business matters – it can increase sales and reinforce your reputation. Negative perceptions, on the other hand, can do great harm to your business.

These days the extension of your online brand and reputation management is as crucial as it is in the real world.

Whether we like it or not, with the advent of social media people will be talking about us online. And two, the possibilities this word of mouth online presents – are endless.

Online PR is therefore about building and managing your brand and reputation online by creating relationships with the right people and linking up to them. Where possible, engaging in convesrations that are taking place about your business (because they will take place whether you like it or not) can potentially provide huge benefit to your brand, and increase your sales.

So just why is online PR so important?

It’s quite simple really. If you care about your business – then you should care about creating and maintaining a good reputation online. The web has changed the way we live, the way we communicate and the way we do business.

Once driven by the offline world, now we need to go where our customers are and the fact is, most of them are online. However with trust being as important an issue as its ever been, a good reputation plays a big part in closing the deal. And social media gives you the ability to create a seal of approval and build a reputation that can last forever to counteract this issue. A blinkered view of the online world could have the opposite effect.

An even bigger advantage in building that reputation because by getting other reputable people to talk about and link back to you, you increase your visibility. Think of it as networking with your niche.

Getting relevant links back from websites and other internet channels also increases your search engine ranking!

Tradespacer, Antonia Chitty (AC PR) who has used online PR extensively for her business recommends it, “I use online promotion for my business and it gets great results. The wonderful thing is that you can post a call to action with a link that takes people straight to your site: this can lead to much better response rates than in print media. I’m writing this while in the middle of an online campaign to promote www.themumpreneurguide.co.uk and it is really gratifying to see how many people are responding by visiting the site within minutes of receiving an email, and going on to make a purchase too.”

Spelling out some of the benefits of online PR. Here’s what’s in it for you ….

• You become aware of what’s being said about you and by whom.
• Millions of consumers are turning to the web first for news – if you have news, it should be online as well as offline.
• When news sites and bloggers talk about or reference you, it not only increases credibility, it gives you a link back to your website which helps your search engine optimisation and ultimately your ranking.
• By being part of the conversations taking place online, you lead the conversation rather than being the butt of it.
• By building relationships with online bloggers and influencers, you are helping build your own reputation.
• A reputation built online has a longer lifespan. An offline press release for example, has a limit to its lifespan it only lasts as long as that issue of the newspaper lasts (if you get featured). This is not so online, once you get a link from a valuable source, it’s there till someone manually takes it down.

I’m convinced! How do I build my reputation and traffic? Online PR takes a bit of skill to get it right, so here are a few things to consider when drawing up an action plan.

• Do an audit of how you are currently perceived. Google yourself, and take note of what Google suggests people are searching for with your brand.
• Research your audience online and how you can reach them. Spend some time researching where your online audience hangs out – forums, blogs they read, communities they participate in.
• Find out who the stakeholders/influencers are within your space.// Identify who sets and challenges the trends within the scope of your own business and then prepare to build relationships with those people. Tip: bloggers and influencers need to be approached on a one to one level – not with a press release.
• Setting yourself up as an expert is key – so brush up and make sure you blog often and that your blog works (so people will want to reference it or link to it)
• The search optimisation bit works when you get a link from a reputable site back to your own – so aim to build these up.
• Learn how to write an effective online press release that you can distribute online to PR websites.
• Add a place for press releases, coverage etc…. have a look at ours for ideas.
• Finally don’t forget to use those all important and relevant keywords when submitting an online press release to get the maximum benefit of tying in your reputation and your search engine ranking!

MintTwist help businesses to improve their reputations and increase sales every day. With a Managed Web Marketing service, MintTwist make sure their clients have all the right things in place before commencing an all-encompassing web marketing stratgey that dramatically increases sales leads, visibility and improves the reputation of our client’s businesss. Contact Elliott King for more information.