Tony Attwood's Blog

I recently found an exceptionally good reason to use Twitter – as a backup when a web site goes down.

Of course web sites don’t go down that often, but when they do it is a pain and a half – and it can happen to anyone at any time.

It recently happened to some of our sites, and one great way around the problem that we had was through letting people know what was going on via Twitter.  Of course not every reader of our site also subscribed to us via Twitter, but quite a few did, and we quickly found that they were passing on the news of what was going on to others.  Quite a discussion started in fact.

Being on Twitter is just a tiny detail in terms of marketing, but then quite often marketing is made up of tiny details.

If you want to talk more, give me a call on 01536 399 000 – you can also follow us on Twitter @HHMailings and read the blog: www.blog.hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

It seems that people are getting increasingly used to the notion that doing a search on Google can be more than just sticking a few words down and seeing what comes up.

It is not that the use of the quotation marks is new, but rather it is catching on, and many non-IT people who just use search engines when they need to find something know that they can make their search more specific by writing one or more key words, or even a whole phrase, in inverted commas.

Thus when I wanted to know about Edward Liddell, often known as Ned, who played for Arsenal FC in 1914 searching for “Edward Liddell” would be no good, because in any article he might be called “Ned” (or Edward, or anything else).   But Liddell had to be in the article, “Liddell” went into inverted commas.  Likewise since there could be lots of other guys in history with this name I knew I only wanted the one who played for Arsenal, so again the speech marks came out, resulting in Edward Ned “Liddell” “Arsenal”.

This kind of slightly sophisticated search pattern is growing, as is the number of words that people put into searches, and the beneficiaries of this change are the people who fill their web sites with text full of relevant words.

So I am tending occasionally to add to my internet articles phrases such as “as Fred Blogs, as he is referred to in some places (or Fredrick Blogs as he is known elsewhere) has said…” so if anyone has a different variation on the name of a person or a machine or a technique or anything else, I am equally liable to pick those readers up.

In other words writing articles for web pages is not as simple as just describing what you are and what you do.  A little artifice is required as well.

Which is why large amounts of relevant and interesting text remains just about the key way to get your site up the search engine rankings.

If you would like to talk about this approach, do call 01536 399 000 or email Tony@Hamilton-house.com

You can follow us @HHMailings and on www.blog.hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

A recent Advertising Standards Authority ruling on the display of VAT exclusive prices took me by surprise.

I think most of us know that if you sell primarily to people who can’t get their VAT back (eg the public) then you have to put in VAT inclusive prices.

Warwick Castle advertised its visitor attractions saying

“Prices from £10.00 excluding VAT plus VAT £2.00, total £12.00”

That would seem to many, I suspect, as being perfectly clear.  But the ASA has ruled it is in breach of the code, even though it shows the final VAT inclusive fee.

If you would like to discuss any issue of advertising through the post, email or on web sites and blogs, please do call 01536 399 000 or write to Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

If you are interested in where your web site turns up on Google then you may have heard of Google Panda – the name given the changes Google introduced this year, so that ”low quality” sites go down the rankings and good quality sites rise to the top.

I mention Panda today because there are stories circulating among those whose job it is to keep sites near the top of lists that yet more changes in the way Panda is working are coming on line.  There are reports of sites going down the rankings and coming up again – and other strange effects.

Indeed it is said that the Panda changes can affect around 12% of all search results.  While many are happy that “content farms” which simply publish nonsense articles about topics are reduced in the ranks, others say that copyright infringing sites can now be higher up the rankings than the original articles.

Two things seem fairly clear – that Panda doesn’t just affect one page’s results – but the whole web site, and that the changes are going to continue happening in order to get good original content up the top of the Google rankings.

At Hamilton House we’ve never pretended to have inside knowledge on the way Google works, but we have always focussed on producing high quality original pages of text on topics of interest for our clients.  These, we are sure, have a double effect.

First, because people do enter longer enquiry strings into Google search boxes these days, the more you publish the more likely you are to be found when someone puts in a specific text request.

To give an example, in the past people might have written “dyscalculia” into Google and looked that the results.  Today more people will write “how to cure dyscalculia” or “testing to see if you have dyscalculia” – and if you have used that exact phrase you will come out higher up the rankings.

Second, Panda seems to like quality text, and so the more of it you have the more likely you are to go up the rankings.

This is why we’ve always pushed Blogs as a great way forward – a simple way to put up information about your company on a daily basis.   Even if you know nothing about blogs we can set one up for you and get it running for under £100 – see http://www.hamilton-house.com/blogs

If you would like to see a blog in action, take a look at www.blog.hamilton-house.com

And you can also follow us on Twitter @HHMailings.   Or call me on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

Why do people read blogs? Because they believe the newspapers even less than they used to, I guess.

I thought of this today as the news broke that the Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch, has been channelling money through European companies in order secretly to buy thousands of copies of its own paper at a knock-down rate, thus misleading advertisers about the Journal’s true circulation.

When the News of the World was revealed to be an organisation with criminal activity at its heart, many people thought, “well it was that sort of paper.”   But the Wall Street Journal?

And what does this have to do with blogs?  Basically it is just one more factor that makes all sources of info equal.  If you set up a blog that talks about your specialist area each day, you are as likely to pick up an audience as the largest paper.

The Wall Street Journal scheme included a formal, written contract in which the Journal persuaded firms to join in by agreeing to publish articles that promoted its activities. All reputation for editorial quality went out the window.

According to the Guardian, when the story emerged the senior WSJ staff did nothing except make the whistleblower redundant.

The scam ran by having “sponsors” pay for publicity by buying copies of the Journal at 5¢ each and distributing the bought copies to university students. The “sponsors” gained a prestigious link to the Journal, and the Journal boosted its circulation figures.

Worse, the Audit Bureau of Circulation ruled that the scheme was legitimate even though the people buying the papers were not reading them, nor even seeing them, and by 2010, it was responsible for 41% of the European edition’s daily sales – 31,000 copies out of a total of 75,000.

A Dutch company called Executive Learning Partnership alone were sponsoring 3.1m copies.

After this the WSJ got into all sorts of other deals involving ”leadership videos”,  seminars, and “special reports”.

But ELP complained that the Journal was not doing enough, and threatened not to make a payment, which would mean that the Journal could not officially record the sales and their circulation figures would suddenly dive by 16%.

So it went on, getting murkier by the day.  You can read all the amazing details on WSJ circulation scam claims senior executive

But I return to my main point: most main news sources are no longer trusted – people pick and choose what they want.  With a spot of work you can become the central news service for your niche market, and pick up readers that way.  And promote your own business alongside that.

If you want to talk about how it is done, call me on 01536 399 013.

Meanwhile you can follow all our stories on Twitter @HHMailings, and on the HHM blog www.blog.hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

I don’t know why it is the case, but it seems most firms still don’t run twitter accounts – just as they don’t continuously add to their web sites, and don’t run blogs.

And yet these are fairly simple and inexpensive things to do.

With Twitter, I would suggest you should try sending out one or two messages a day, and link this to new articles on your web site and your blog.

If you have not used Twitter before you can sign up for free on www.twitter@com – and then join our service (@HHMailings) just to see how it all works.

If you think that blogs and extra web pages don’t work for you, do give me a call, tell me what your business is about, and I’ll make some suggestions on how twitter, blogs and web pages will do you some good.  No charge of course.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

There’s a lot of talk on marketing discussion groups about the issue of sending out too many emails.

One area of concern is that of news groups like this one.  In case you hadn’t realised, you get between three and five emails a week, each week via this service.

I try and keep these emails relevant, and because I get a fair number of emails back from readers I can see which emails are read and thought helpful, and which one’s not.

Anyway, I was thinking on this when I got a helpful email from Ticketmaster reminding me that I have a ticket for the Bob Dylan / Mark Knopfler concert next Tuesday in Nottingham.

That’s fair enough.  I haven’t forgotten, but I guess I could have done.

But what then made it so silly was that they went on to tell me that I might also enjoy the upcoming Cliff Richard concert and would I like a ticket?

It was rather like the thing Amazon does when it says, “Other people who bought ‘Theoretical nuclear physics and the issue of gravity’ also bought Noddy in Toytown.”

I am sure that someone bought both – even theoretical physicists have children, nephews and the like, but it just shows you how silly automatic systems can be.

And to stress, I have nothing against Mr C Richard.  Indeed only the other day I listened to “Living Doll”.  But I don’t think very many Dylan/Knopfler fans will also want to go to a C Richard concert.

My point being, yes, irrelevant and badly written news can turn people away from news services, but so can automatic systems that have no one overseeing them.

News services like this do work – and we have set up a number of them for a number of companies – and they generally do perform extremely well in getting the company’s message and image across, and in bringing in customers.  But like everything they need to be handled with care.

If you would like to talk this through or see how such a system could work for you, do give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Otherwise, I just hope you find some of the emails of interest.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.