It’s Almost Time …..

Now we have been ribbed a fair bit about being web developers without a website, (like the mechanic, works on everyone’s car but their own), well almost no more – you will be excited to hear that the new website is nearly finished and will be launching very soon!

Filled with great news, resources, information for small business and of course the run down on our services – the new ISP Media website is going to be a great tool for small business Australia wide!

So, if you want to be one of the first to take a peep when the site goes live, shoot me an email or comment below and we will let you know when the big reveal takes place!

We have also added a new resources page to this very blog, so why not take a look and see what goodies have already been loaded – more resources are being researched as I type so watch that page for your direct line to great sites, networking opportunities and much much more!

Can You Digg it?

“This post was originally written for and published on the Womens Network Australia Blog“

Digg is a complete user run community. It has everything from news, to videos, to images and all content is submitted by the users within the Digg community. As a user you submit an item, people digg what they like best and if your item receives enough diggs, you could find yourself on the home page being viewed by millions of visitors!

Digg is not just about the content, the site encourages conversation around the content and they pride themselves on being an equal “digg” social media site and for democratizing digital media!

So how does getting a meteoric amount of Diggs for your item translate to business growth?

What the site developers believe the purpose of their site is.

“Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.”

How easy it is to open an account, use the site and what does it cost?

It is extremely easy and free to open a Digg account, once you have filled out the online application form they send you an email to confirm that you are who you say you are, you then click on the link supplied in the verification email and your account is up and running.

The site is quite large but as it is based around categories, you can quickly maneuver through the site to find what you need or get digging.

Will this site bend the time space continuum to suck my valuable time into a vortex?

No – at least not if you are someone who regularly writes quality articles and news items.

As with all things social there is the initial set up time and effort, as well as familiarising yourself with the site and the community. Once you are set up and feeling confident, it becomes a simple task to tick off every time you write an article, post or generate news on your web site or blog.

How can I use this site to benefit my business?

• Position yourself as an expert in your field by posting regular original items on your topic of expertise
• Create your free profile showcasing everything about your business
• Find online articles written about your business and add them to your Digg feed on your blog or web site to generate even more traffic
• People reading Digg have more of a chance to see the content you have dug, as well as your generated content, giving you further digital credibility
• Open a worldwide window to your business and find previously hard to reach potential clients
• Increase your page views (great for SEO)
• The Digg community will send traffic to your site for you by digging your items (you don’t have to lift a finger to gain the traffic advantage)
• Tailor your digg posts to say whatever you want (i.e., work in key messages for your business)
• Increase your brand awareness online
• Search engines are increasingly relying on social media sites to point toward quality content
• Follow trending topics to keep abreast of your industry
• Utilise the Digg delivered functionality that sends targeted “top diggs” to your inbox based on companies or web sites that you are interested in
• Utilise Digg Alerts (http://www.diggalerts.com/) to alert friends and colleagues and other Digg Alert users that you have posted so they can digg your item and increase your chances of scoring well.

The Skinny!

Digg can be a fantastic tool to increase the flow of targeted traffic to your web site if you are serious about quality content. Content, as always, is king and the more attention-grabbing your article, post or web site is, they more you will be dugg by people who are interested in that topic. Items featured on the home page of Digg can potentially receive up to 25,000 visits to their web site from their highly dugg item.

Digg posts submissions in the form of a teaser and when readers click on the title, it will bring up your teaser, then if the reader is interested he or she will be able to navigate directly to your web site and view your content. Also, if the readers “digg” your submission, they will give it a good rating, which translates into free, user generated publicity from Digg.

It is important to test the water before you jump in! Allocate some time to being a Digg voyeur for a while, so you can learn the do’s and don’ts of the culture. Once you are comfortable and have dugg a few items, then start dipping (or in this case digging) your toe in the water.

There is no formula or magic bullet to getting dugg regularly, however, if you provide unique stories or at the very least a unique angle on a story, that is well written, interesting and appealing, you can use this online vehicle to drive quality traffic to your web site.

YouTube Gets Direct

YouTube have launched their greatly anticipated new initiative – YouTube Direct!

While it has amazing implications for news organisations (see video),

This is also a real opportunity for business to showcase their products in video format, leverage community to grow brand and service awareness, encourage real time feedback, offer video tutorials on how to use their products, target traffic and more.

Many organisations have been finding it increasingly difficult to connect directly with the YouTube community and by introducing this great online activity, YouTube Direct has just made it a whole lot easier to leverage video campaigns, coverage or programming initiatives.

What YouTube are saying about their new Direct service:

“YouTube Direct allows you to embed the upload functionality of YouTube directly into your own site, enabling your organisation to request, review, and re-broadcast user-submitted videos with ease.

News organisations can ask for citizen reporting; nonprofits can call-out for support videos around social campaigns; businesses can ask users to submit promotional videos about your brand.

With YouTube Direct, the opportunities to connect directly with the YouTube community are endless.

Key features of YouTube Direct include:

• Built on the YouTube API, this 100% open-source solution provides you with an easily-integrated audience engagement platform for your website
• The customizable interface allows you to tailor the look and feel of the tool precisely to your audience
• Visitors can answer your call for content by uploading their videos to YouTube via your site without leaving the page
• A moderation panel enables your editors to review and approve/reject all submitted videos, deciding which ones meet your organization’s editorial criteria
• All videos approved by your editors include a link back to your site when viewed on YouTube”

This is an amazing opportunity for marketers to get on board instantly to take advantage of another channel to promote business and drive traffic to websites and blogs, cost effectively and directly!

So why wait? You can get started straight away by visiting the YouTube Direct project page, and your developers can get to work today! 

Or, if you want to more you can visit the YouTube Direct FAQ pages.

The Bing Files

Since its launch Bing has been consistently adding new services. Since June they’ve released a bunch of new stuff to try and meet the demands of users including Twitter integration, Visual Search, Twitter Search, better maps, and a host of user interface and index improvements.

Below we take a look at a few of the latest additions

Bing Videos

Launched on November 11, Bing Video is touted as providing a new unified online video destination that delivers a comprehensive, organised, and high-quality video experience. This change will combine the powerful search experience of Bing, with the expertise of MSN video all into one destination.

With the New Bing Video you can now access videos from across the web, MSN’s array of high-quality videos, and videos from sites such as Hulu, ABC, and Youtube.  Bing videos viewing options are nearly endless.

You can check out the new home page here, which Bing says makes it easy to search and browse for the videos you want to see.

They have also added a new viewing experience, which offers the ability to share videos and a dim the lights feature – should make for some great viewing online.

Bing Maps

While it doesn’t appear that anyone in Australia can figure out how to actually independently list their business yet (I am open to someone proving me wrong here), Bing Maps Australia has launched with what looks like all references coming from “Listings By Yellow”.

Hopefully in future updates, Bing will integrate other sources, e.g. Hot Frog, True Local, Start Local, etc. as well as offering businesses the ability to add their own details independently.

Some of the applications you can expect to experience right now include:

Search

You are able to search via Businesses (Category or business name) and Locations.

Draggable Routes:

You are now able to generate a route, and change it, simply by grabbing and dragging it to where you want the route to go. To use draggable routes, click the directions link in the welcome pane or the car icon near the bottom of the welcome pane. Enter a start and end, generate a route, then grab anywhere on the route to move the route line. The route will regenerate for you.

New Navigation:

There is now a subset of features on the button bar along the bottom of the welcome pane.

•  “Welcome” loads the welcome pane
•  “Car” loads driving directions
•  “Star” loads My Places, formerly called Collections
•  “Envelop” loads the ability to share the map with someone via email, copy a URI or embed the map into a web page
•  “Printer” is for printing
•  “Traffic light” will load the traffic overlay

Twitter Search

You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favorite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today.

The search results on people’s tweets will show up like this:

If you want to keep an eye on a topic, you can just watch the Tweets roll in. Or, click on “See more Tweets about…” to go to a page full of Tweets. On that page, you can change the ordering to “Best Match.” Here they arrange Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower. For example, I saw a Tweet from ABC News ranked pretty high in the Best Match mode during the “boy in the balloon” fiasco.

By the way, you won’t see any of your tweets if you protected or deleted them, and tweets don’t last more than 7 days in the Bing Twitter Search index.

What Style of Email Marketing Suits You?

Quick Announcements

Often called postcard emails, these are simple, brief announcements you might want to make informing your customers of a special offer, a popular new product or quick fire sale.

These types of emails are typically restricted to a single call-to-action and should be easy for the recipient to scan in a few seconds. Here is an example of a quick announcement in action.

Catalogue Emails

A catalogue based email is fairly self explanatory, being an electronic version of a print brochure listing particular products, with the primary goal to encourage customers to purchase.

Email Newsletters

The primary purpose of an email newsletter is to build upon the relationship you have with your customers. Of course, this might (and should) indirectly result in an increase in sales, but the focus should be on providing relevant, useful content your subscribers might be interested in.

Often the content isn’t directly related to your products either. For example, an online grocer might send a monthly newsletter featuring a few recipes, a story on the benefits of organic produce and a column with exercising tips. To get the creative ideas flowing, here is a quick example of great looking email newsletter.

Press Releases

If you have a list of media contacts that have given you permission to contact them, email press releases can be a great way to attract news coverage. Of course, there are a number of services that can distribute your press releases to the media, but maintaining your own list of media contacts can be a great way to send targeted, personalised press releases only to those contacts who will be interested.

One size does not fit all

When considering which types of email to send to each of your clients, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to take a one-size-fits-all approach. Some clients will be happy to receive email newsletters as opposed to one-off announcements, while the reverse might apply to others.

The best thing about email is that it’s so measurable. You can try a newsletter to your clients for a month or two and then look at the results. Mix up the topics you cover to see which garners the most interest.

Try a different layout for each issue. As long as you stick to the expectations you set for your subscribers, use your creativity to find what works best for you!.