iSmart Blog

Email Marketing: Why You Should & How You Can Build a List

2011-12-14T03:40:00.008+10:00

If you're serious about online marketing, chances are you already have a list of subscribers that you can email whenever you feel like. If not, here is why you should and how you can build a list for your business, so you can easily stay in touch with your existing and potential customers.

Did you know that people now spend more time reading their emails than watching TV? Emails have always been a very effective way to get in touch with existing customers and prospects, to let them know about new products or special offers for example...

Social networking platforms like Facebook have NOT made emails obsolete. They are just another way to get in touch with your audience. A Facebook page is a great way to build a relationship with your customers but will not replace good old emails. Email marketing is still a winner: it's fun, inexpensive and effective.

There are plenty of different things you can do if you have the right tools at hand. You can for example send out newsletters, information about your new products, special offers and discounts, or one-off promotions... This is completely up to you!

If you own a site you should add an optin form to your homepage so visitors can opt into your list. The idea here is to offer them something in exchange of their email address: a discount on their next purchase for example... or even a free product. Always remember to state the value of what you're offering.

If you don't have a site, you should add a guest book in your store or office so people can leave a comment... and their email address. You could for example write: "Would you like to receive special offers and discounts from us? Leave your email address below!"

If you're struggling to get your customers to opt into your list, feel free to directly get in touch with them, by email or by phone (or even when you see them) and ask them if they'd like to receive emails from you. Make sure you explain them why they should say 'yes' as some of them might be reluctant to do so.

Remember though... There are laws governing email marketing. No matter how tempting it may be, never add people to your list who did not give you permission. Not only is it unprofessional and impolite but its also illegal.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact our sales team at sales@ismartsoftware.com (or call us on 617 3367 0611). We offer several email marketing solutions like iSmart Bulletin for every day email marketing and iSmart Announce for newsletters.

What Is The Key To Successful Online Marketing?

2011-11-29T03:17:00.004+10:00

Let's get straight to the point. The key to successful online marketing is to know your audience. If you know your audience, you know how your site should look like, what it should contain, how to best promote it, how to drive more traffic to it...

First, it is essential that you keep in mind that the site you have or are about to build should be designed and developed with your potential and existing customers in mind. Too many people build the site of their dream. It looks the way they want, contains the content they want... but is this what their customers want? Maybe not.

Who is most likely to buy what you are selling? Male or Female? Their age? Their income? Those are the sort of questions you should ask yourself, and of course ask your audience. Research is the first step to successful online marketing. You probably have an idea of who your audience is, but if you need to do more research, make sure you do it before you move forward.

You can ask questions to your existing customers when you meet them or have them on the phone... or you can create a poll that you place on your site. Just make sure you don't ask too many questions, or questions that your customers might not want to respond to. For example only ask about their income if you feel they would be comfortable with this question.

Once you know a little more about your audience, it is time to gather your information, analyze your data and patterns and start coming up with conclusions. You can then use those conclusions when building your site, or to make modifications to your existing site. Those findings don't necessarily need to be overly complicated... They can actually be pretty simple.

For example if you know that your audience is mostly composed of seniors, you should make your site very easy to navigate and use large fonts. On the other hand, if your audience is mostly composed of teenagers and young adults, you should focus your promotional efforts on sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are widely used by individuals in those age categories.

Those two examples are easy to guess... but you get the idea. Doing research will open up your mind on the way your site should look like and on what it should contain. This will also help you figure out what to do to promote it and drive more traffic to it. If you need help or have questions, feel free to contact our sales team at sales@ismartsoftware.com

Article Submission & Link Building (Part 2/2)

2011-10-28T03:09:00.006+10:00

In the first part of this series on article submission and link building, we covered the basics of article marketing and mentioned a few of the article directories you can submit your articles to, like Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Article Dashboard...

If submitting articles to article directories not enough to get your pages to rank better in the search engines, you should look into other article platforms, like article networks.

Article networks are networks of sites and blogs that accept other people's content. This is a win-win situation because the owners of those sites or blogs get free content, and you get to submit your articles (with your links) to them.

With article networks you do not submit your articles to sites and blogs one by one but only once, and the system does the submission work for you. It will submit your articles over time so the submissions look natural to the search engines.

Article Networks

Free Traffic System -If you're completely new to article networks, you should give Free Traffic System a try as it's free to join. As a free member you will be able to submit your articles to a number of related blogs, helping you build quality links to your pages.

Backlinks Kingdom - With this network you can submit your articles to 15 sites every day, free. If you upgrade you will be able to submit more articles to more sites every day, up to 100 sites. This is also a great network to start with if you're new to this.

My Article Network - If you start to understand how article networks work, you may want to look into paid networks, like My Article Network. This one is a well-established network and counts hundreds of sites and blogs where you can submit your articles to.

Article Ranks - This is another well-established article network that can help you build quality links to your pages. This network is a little more restrictive than others but links are generally of better quality, from sites or blogs with a PageRank of 2 or more.

Unique Article Wizard - This network is a little different from others as it does not submit articles to people's sites and blogs but to directories. This network is a tiny bit more complicated to use than others but provides good to very good results.

There are several other article networks worth mentioning but these few ones are the ones you should start with. If you want to try more, feel free to leave a comment below and we will provide you with a few more solutions.

Most of these article networks will require you to spin your content, which means that you will have to provide several versions of your articles. Several of them provide you with spinning tools so you can easily spin your content, using their database of synonyms.

We hope you enjoyed reading this series on article submission and link building! Remember to add your links to every article you submit... This is the main reason why you're submitting articles! If you missed the first part, please click this link to read it now:

Article Submission & Link Building (Part 1/2)

Article Submission & Link Building (Part 1/2)

2011-09-13T02:49:00.014+10:00

Submitting articles about your products all over the Web is a great way to spread the word about your business and most importantly build backlinks to your pages. Not only will your articles drive direct traffic to your pages, they will also influence the search engines in the rankings of your pages.

Whenever you submit an article, make sure you add backlinks to your pages, using the keywords you want to rank for as anchor text. When the search engines find the article, they will see the links to your pages, and will take them into account the next time they update their rankings.

What's an anchor text?

An anchor text is the text you hyperlink. In other words, it is the word that is used to cover the destination URL. In this an example: "I like donuts." the anchor text is "donuts". When submitting articles to the Web, you should use your keywords as anchor text, as this directly influence the search engines in the rankings of your pages.

Where to Submit Articles?

There are hundreds of article directories and networks you can submit your articles to.

Article Directories

Ezine Articles - Ezine Articles is by far the most popular article directory on the Web. With Ezine Articles the articles you submit are reviewed by human editors before they are published, which ensures both quality and consistency. In Ezine Articles you cannot add hyperlinks directly to your article content but you can add some to your bio box.

Go Articles - Another great place to submit your articles to is Go Articles. Go Articles is another very popular article directory where you can submit articles about pretty much everything. In Go Articles you can add hyperlinks directly to your article content, which is even better than adding them to your bio box.

Article Dashboard - Article Dashboard is labeled as the Web's premier article directory. Whether or not this is true, it is a place where you should submit your articles to. In Article Dashboard you cannot add hyperlinks to the article content but you can add some to your bio box, exactly like with Ezine Articles.

Article Alley - Article Alley is one of the busiest and most popular article directories at the moment. Article Alley does not allow you to add hyperlinks to your article content, but you can add some to your bio box. Make sure you don't forget about it when submitting your articles, even though you can edit articles that have already been published.

Article City - Article City is another very interesting place to visit and submit your articles to. Article City lets you create a nice author box where you can add a description about yourself or your business, an image and of course a hyperlink. Make sure you make the most out of this section as this is what really matters if you're after backlinks.

These directories are general article directories where you can submit articles about pretty much everything. You may also search for article directories directly related to your business, or articles directories for Australian or British users only. This should help you get even more quality links to your pages.

Author Guidelines

Wherever you decide to submit your articles, make sure you read the author guidelines before submitting them. For example you are generally not allowed to submit someone else's content, and you cannot submit the same article to the same directory more than once. Make sure you follow those guidelines closely.

Stay tuned for more tips and resources!

Update: Please click this link to read the second part:

Article Submission & Link Building (Part 2/2)

Copywriting Tips For Site Owners

2011-08-24T03:06:00.005+10:00

Writing good content can be time consuming but is essential if you want your website to be successful. Good content will not only make your visitors take action, it will also show the search engines that you take your website seriously... so they value it more and rank it better.

First, list down all your products and/or services, as well as their features and benefits, and determine which ones are worth highlighting in your content. Which products and/or services are good enough to attract the attention of most of your customers?

Make sure the content you write is customer-focused. You must write it in words your (potential) customers will understand. Don't go into too many technical details, unless of course you think your average customer would be interested in such details. Simply ask yourself the following question: Is that something potential customers would be interested in?

Avoid information overload at all cost. Information is good but too much information can turn off a lot of people. If you don't know how much information you should add to your website, simply ask a few customers you know. Just make sure they give you an unbiased opinion... so you know how much is too much.

In some cases, you'd rather focus on benefits than features. This depends on the nature of your product or service but quite often people don't care much about features. All they want to know about is how the product can benefit them. The safest thing to do would be to write about both.

Before your content goes live, make sure you proofread it, read out loud to yourself and to colleagues or friends and edit it accordingly. Sometimes you will find that the content you wrote doesn't sound great when you actually read it. Make the necessary modifications before publishing it.

Finally, if you don't think you can write good content yourself, don't hesitate to ask a professional copywriter. There is no shame in asking for help. Not everyone is good at writing good content. However make sure the copywriter has a good understanding of your products and/or services.

These are just a few copywriting tips that you should put into use if you want to make the most out of your website. Always remember that it takes all the right words to make more sales and take your business to the next level.

If you need help with your website content, feel free to contact our sales team at sales@ismartsoftware.com - We can help you write good content and make the most out of your website.

On-Page SEO - How to Optimize Your Pages For Google

2011-06-15T03:25:00.003+10:00

As a site owner, you want your pages to rank well in Google. After you have chosen keywords you want to rank for, you must optimize the pages of your site. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and is broken down into two aspects: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. This article covers the basics of On-Page SEO, which involves the on-site optimization of your pages, as opposed to Off-Page Optimization which is mostly about link building.

On-Page SEO

Page Title - First, make sure your page title contains the keyword(s) you want the page to rank for. If you want your homepage to rank for 'Brisbane Plumber' then make sure it contains the keyword 'Brisbane Plumber' (preferably at the beginning of the title). Every page of your site should have a unique title, and every title should be eye-catching because it will appear in Google's results.

Headings - Headings should also contain the keyword(s) you want the page to rank for. Use the H1, H2 and H3 tags in the following format:

Your heading (with your keyword) goes here

. H1 for the most important heading, and H3 for the least important. Unless the page is relatively long, there shouldn't be more than three headings on a page.

Content - If you really want a page to rank well in Google, make sure it contains a decent amount of text content. Don't hesitate to add in a few paragraphs on the topic of the keyword you want the page to rank for. Google loves content, but be careful... it must be unique content. Also make sure your keyword is actually mentioned in the text content a few times.

It is also recommended to bold, italic and underline the keyword at least once: bold it once, italic it once and underline it once, but do NOT bold, italic and underline the same keyword. This won't help! Do not overdo it either, especially if you don't have much text content on the page.

Meta Tags - When setting the page, you have to enter a description (description tag) and some keywords (keywords tag). The description is important because it will show on Google's results (below the page title). As for the keywords tag, make sure you add in a few keywords (including of course the keywords you want to rank for) even though this aspect doesn't help much anymore.

Images - Don't forget to add a few images. Ideally the image should use the keyword as a name: brisbane-plumber.jpg for example, and most importantly as an ALT attribute: alt="Brisbane Plumber". With iSmart Create you can add an ALT attribute easily by going to the image options so you don't have to go through the HTML code.

Links - Make sure you link to other pages of your site from the page content. This will help you drive traffic to other pages of your site, and will also transfer some 'link juice' to your other pages so Google gives them some more value. You could for example add a link to your homepage (using the keyword 'Brisbane Plumber') on an internal page of yours.

These are the basics on On-Page Optimization but if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below or contact our friendly staff at sales@ismartsoftware.com

Our products and services
Web design Brisbane Room Booking Software Training Course Booking Software

Planning a web design strategy for your small Brisbane business

2011-06-08T07:35:00.007+10:00

Sue Wickenden explains how all small businesses can get an online presence.

It's something that all internet marketing experts agree on; organisations without an online presence are missing a great opportunity to attract new business, members and/or clients. There is no exception for small businesses that want to extend their sales. Successful businesses need a comprehensive website and need to use online marketing tools to communicate with their employees, members and fans; from sporadic information emails to regular extensive e-communications. While larger organisations can spend an excessive amount of money on online communication this does not rule small-to-medium organisations out of the game as technologies to manage website and online marketing campaigns are now available at a reasonable cost.
With a little searching, organisations can access a wide choice of web content management systems and internet marketing tools that can meet the requirements for the 'one man band' or business with hundreds of employees.
When planning the production of a website or e-newsletter the process can be a smooth or bumpy ride depending on how much homework organisations do at the start. Undertaking an online strategy is like any other project, it requires a sound knowledge of the process, a realistic understanding of the outcome, and a champion within your organisation to nurture and manage it. By following this simple six-step process I believe organisations can take control and hopefully enjoy a simple, trouble free path to a great end result.

Step 1 - The Champion

Finding a 'champion' within an organisation to manage the project is the first critical step to ensuring a successful outcome. Usually this person will be found within the marketing department but smaller organisations without this resource will choose a team member who has a passion for design and gets a buzz from using the internet. Remember, attitude is just as important as ability. Choose a person who wants to do this, rather than one who has to.

Step 2 - The Brief

The champion will be responsible for putting together the brief for a web developer and liaising internally to ensure that all business criteria are met with the full support from their team. A good brief will consist of a set of questions and answers.
Who do we want to visit our website? What information will they be looking for? What is in it for the visitor? What do we want them to be able to do on the website? What is the call to action? How will we measure if the project is a success? How do we get visitors to keep coming back?
It is helpful to supply the web developer with a list of information about competitors, what we like and dislike about their online communications, what websites grab our attention and why, domain name ideas and a sitemap.
A sitemap is like a family tree, at the top will be the first page of your website (homepage) and nested directly underneath will be the pages that link directly off the homepage. This is usually 'about us', 'products', 'services', 'contact us' and other information that will make the visit to the site a worthwhile experience for the visitor.

Step 3 - The Content

Putting together an online project is the same as putting together a magazine or book, you need to source the best content possible to ensure that you engage, or preferably excite your readers. If you have the resources within your company to produce good photographs and snappy text, then the Champions' job will just be a matter of collating the information for the web developer. Reading is the primary activity undertaken on the internet, people read words and they need to be relevant and persuasive. If you don't have the in-house resources we strongly recommend you find a business writer or journalist and photographer or photo library account. Online, as within a printed newsletter, a bad photo will always be a bad photo and won't show your organisations professionalism in the best light.

Step 4 - The Hunt

When looking for a web development firm, it is a good idea to interview two or three to see which one fits best with your vision. There are several important aspects to consider before making the final choice. Where will the website be hosted? What kind of design are you looking for? Do you want to be able to manage the website and to modify its content? What level of support will you need? The website development industry is flourishing within Australia; there are thousands of web solution providers throughout the country. Web developers will publish a portfolio of their work on their own website, this feature will give you an insight into their capabilities. Develop a clear strategy to make sure your web provider understands your requirements and has the capacity to fulfil them to your satisfaction.

Step 5 - The Deadline

When will the website be launched or the e-newsletter sent? Is this realistic? The champion will seek a time line and confirmation from the web developer, put the dates into a diary and check up - tick off as each milestone is reached. The major dates will be; delivery and sign off for designs, implementation of those designs into internet language by a technician, supply of content and photos, followed by insertion, testing of the website or e-newsletter, then launch.

Step 6 - Launch

All the work has been done and the champion has reviewed the website or e-communication, and implemented feedback from the team, everything is ready for the launch.
Your website is not like a baseball stadium, once you build it they will not necessarily come. You need to get your website out there by utilising search engine marketing and traditional cues. Some organisations will have an official launch at a trade show, or send out an e-communication with a special offer to drive customers to their new site. Updating your content and marketing your website regularly is an essential ingredient to ensuring success.

The easiest way to keep your photos and text updated is to use a content management system which allows anyone with basic computing knowledge to manage the content of a website. The simplicity of the tools should be a primary requirement for organisations as regularly updating the content of a website, is for many experts, one of the most efficient ways to retain visitors. It is very important for the web champion to understand what visitors search for on the website. If you meet your visitors' expectations at their first visit, there is a very good chance they come back on a regular basis. This information can be obtained from website statistics. Out-of-date content does not interest anybody; internet users look for fresh and interesting information. Post your news, press releases, promotions and/or any kind of content that could make a visit on the website unique. Meet your visitors' expectations and make your online presence a successful experience for both your organisation and the visitor.

Sue Wickenden is a director of iSmart Software
Our products and services:
Course booking software Rooming booking software Web design Brisbane

Social media is about relationships, not marketing

2011-05-24T21:13:00.001+10:00

How many times have you seen a friend on Facebook plugging their own products or services? Did you avoid them at the next BBQ?
For me it brings back memories of friends telephoning and saying the words “Sue, I have this great business proposition for you…”, immediately I knew they were selling Amway or another similar pyramid product and the next time I saw them at a BBQ I avoided them. Why? Suddenly I didn’t feel like a friend anymore, I felt like part of a demographic they collected to earn money from.
The word ‘social’ is characterised by friendly companionship or relations. Being social is about forming a relationship with another person.
A market is a place to meet people to buy or sell. When I visit Facebook I am not expecting that my friends use it as a market place to sell me their products or services. I expect it to be a place where we socialise, like we do at a BBQ with stories and questions that lead into a deeper friendship of trust and sharing.
Does this mean that business pages on Facebook are a paradox? No I don’t think so, but I do believe that marketers need to understand the environment that they are entertaining their customers in.
It is easy enough if you visualise yourself in an offline venue. I am meeting a customer for the first time at their office at their request, I am formal in my sales presentation and we enjoy an honest and authentic conversation with an agenda that is understood between both of us. To me the online version of this is the business website where I formally pitch my products.
If however I invite them to a BBQ in a relaxed setting then it would be wrong of me to begin a formal sales pitch. Even worse, if I invited them to my home to meet my family and then started a hard sell, I would immediately alienate them and make them feel uncomfortable.
I believe a successful business page on Facebook is about being relaxed with your customers and inviting them to a place where they can interact with you without receiving a hard sell, a place where you both enjoy getting to know each other and build a relationship based on knowledge and trust.

How to Build Traffic to Your Site - Part 2/2

2011-05-12T02:09:00.008+10:00

Last month we covered four different ways to build traffic to your site (How to Build Traffic to Your Site - Part 1/2): with the search engines, with pay-per-click advertising, with email marketing and with social bookmarking. This time we're going to talk about a few other, less common yet effective ways to drive traffic.

Nowadays a lot of site owners build traffic using article marketing. By submitting articles to the web, people get to read what you have to say but you also create links back to your site, both driving direct traffic to your site and influencing the search engines in the ranking of your pages. There are plenty of article directories you can submit your articles to. Here are a few examples: Ezine Articles, Articles Base, Go Articles... People find it hard to write articles and submit them to article directories to generate traffic but it's actually one of the most consistent ways to build a traffic and boost your search engine rankings.

Last time we talked about social bookmarking, which is not to be confused with social media. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter can help you drive traffic to your site. By creating and maintaining a page on those sites you get extra exposure, hence extra traffic to your site. If you create a Facebook and a Twitter profile for your business, make sure you don't completely forget about it two weeks later. It is important that you maintain those pages, so people see that you are an active member willing to participate in the community. Facebook and Twitter are great if you want to build a community around your business, but you might also want to look at other sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Buzz...

Depending on your business, you might be interested in online advertising. There are plenty of sites offering advertising space for a reasonable price. For example if you're a real estate agent you might want to advertise on RealEstate.com.au or on a similar (more affordable) site. The most common forms of online advertising are text advertising and banner advertising (either static or animated). Text advertising is generally more affordable but banner advertising (animated) is often more effective: better exposure, higher click rates...

Last but not least, make sure you add a clickable link to your site in your email signature. Not everyone you send emails to know about your site, and if you already have some sort of relationship with them, they will be more likely to click the link and visit your site. If you participate in discussion boards related to your business, feel free to add a link to your site in your signature. Discussion boards are now considered by many as a prehistoric form of networking but are still very popular in several industries. Here is an example of popular discussion board in Australia: Whirlpool Forums

We hope this will help you drive more traffic to your site! There are of course plenty of other ways but these are all effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your site, when properly executed! If you have any questions, feel free to contact our friendly sales team at sales@ismartsoftware.com

If you missed Part 1/2, click here:
How to Build Traffic to Your Site - Part 1/2

Mobile website or app for a small business? And what about SEO?

2011-05-03T18:58:00.005+10:00

Last month we finished our first mobile website and the client is now adding content for a go live at the end of the month. With one mobile site under our belt I have been reading as much as possible on the trends and it seems that the growth in mobility is huge, especially within the younger demographic.

Why did we suggest to our client that we build a mobile website instead of an iPhone app?

Our client wanted to update their content leading up to the Cairns Indigenous Art Festival and I knew they were familiar with the iSmart CMS which they use for their current website so the learning curve to update content for their mobile website would be minimal.

I love my iPhone, but when considering a solution for CIAF I had to be realistic. As much as I enjoy the apps, if it doesn't need to interact with my iPhone, then I couldn't see the benefit, especially as a mobile website worked out to be less expensive than building an app for each smart phone platforms. Also considering how fast new phones and platforms are hitting the marketplace it would be beyond the budget of their organisation to afford the constant app update.

We are considering building a small app that can be downloaded to simply point to the mobile website, but I have read negative comments from users on other sites who feel cheated with this type of short cut. I would really appreciate your thoughts on this??

How does it work?

When a user with a smart phone goes to the website a bit of smart coding can detect the device they are using and automatically shoot them off to the mobile website. Very cool. We need to be aware that iPad users will probably prefer to use the full website rather than the cut down mobile site and might get annoyed if we chuck them elsewhere.

Is there a difference between a traditional website and a mobile website?

Absolutely. You will know yourself how hard it is to read the information on a small smart phone screen, especially for those of us over 35. We recommend that you research the top 5 pages/information your audience would like to access and present it to them in a simple way so they can easily click and read on a small screen. It is a good idea to check out what the savvy large companies do, especially the airlines, for an idea of what works really well. Make sure you look at your website statistics carefully to understand the way your current audience navigate your traditional website.

We do lots of websites for retail shops and shopping centres and I can say with 100% accuracy that the 'location' and 'trading hours' will be the most popular page listed on their statistics (followed by specials, competitions and coupons). When it comes time for them to build a mobile site I will suggest that the first two big buttons are tagged 'our location' leading to a google map and 'our trading hours'.

What type of business is suited to mobile website?

PayPal lists the following:

clothing, shoes, accessories

books

gifts

financial services (love that Internet banking)

music (yep, another favourite)

tickets for movies (get me out of this lineup)

computer software

video games, apps (can't get my son away from them)

collectibles, memorabilia

baby and child related goods (mummy on the go)

What about SEO?

The good news is that all that work that has gone into SEO (search engine optimisation) for your traditional website will benefit your mobile site too. You won't need to start from scratch or go through yet another steep learning curve on 'how to drive traffic to an app'.

If you do have the budget, you may consider doing both a mobile website and an app. But think very carefully on what the benefit and ROI (return on investment) an app would bring to your organisation. I use my banking app all the time, I could use the website, but the app makes it very quick to transfer money or check my bank balance via big buttons and simple steps.

Mobile browsing is here to stay and with the explosion amongst the young tech savvy we would be foolish to ignore them and not give them what they demand. I am yet to meet a 14, 18 or 22 year old that doesn't have their phone glued to some part of their body.

Sue Wickenden
CEO, iSmart Software

Our products and services:
Web Design Brisbane, Room Booking Software, Course Booking Software

What does a university professor and a small business owner have in common with SEO?

2011-04-30T08:22:00.007+10:00

iSmart clients are small to medium sized organisations and for the past 15 years our web design service and our CMS product have been the cornerstone for our business. Up until 5 years ago clients were keen to own a WOW website, one that when their prospects (or competitors) visited the first reaction would be WOW.

In 2011 small business owners are much savvier and realise that, yes it is great to have a WOW website, but more importantly what they need is to be on page one of Google.

I often tell the story of a client we have in the UK. A Mum and Dad distributor who started up 18 months ago from their garage. When the couple had sufficient sales to put on a sales rep they looked at the expenditure and came to a crossroads. Do we spend 70,000 per annum on a real person who works five days a week or do we spend 70,000 per annum on search engine optimisation which works 24x7 days a week? In the end they decided to go with the SEO option which was the right choice for their business. I recently checked their shopping cart turnover and in 12 months it has topped 1.5 million, clearly their strategy is working.

Once they made the decision to use their 70,000 a year on SEO their next question was where to now? Wisely they employed SEO exports to execute their strategy, but honestly, any small business owner can do this themselves if they have the time and line their ducks up in a row.

I have been refreshing my reading on SEO to make sure a new 'trick' hasn't slipped me by and found I could barely understand the terms being used by experts today regarding search engine optimisation (and I live on the Internet 16 hours a day). I like to explain it simply to my clients like this.

Google was built by two university students for university. As such they decided that the best methodology was that when a student went onto the Internet to find information then they would be presented with links to papers published by the professors who were experts in their field.

The way the Google algorithm worked out if they were experts in their field was because students referred to the professor's research from within their own papers. Just like in books or white papers or assignments. If you refer to an expert's research then you always cite it with a reference back to the research for further reading.

I then go on to explain that if they want their website to be on page one of Google then they need to be seen as an expert in their field and other people [websites] need to link back to their published research/articles. [Referred to as backlinks.]

Easy?

I think so. All it takes is the time and passion for a small business owner to put the knowledge they have accumulated over the years onto paper.

Often of course this is crunch time. Small business owners are so busy running their business that it is a big task to find the time to articulate and publish their knowledge. Which is a whole other discussion for another day.

Sue Wickenden
CEO, iSmart Software

Products and services we sell....
Web design Brisbane, Course Registration Software, Room Booking Software

How to Blog

2011-04-28T20:29:00.005+10:00

What is a Blog?

Blog is short for Weblog. Usually a series of posts or entries in reverse chronological order, blogs provide an outlet for a writers (or blogger as they are called) thoughts and opinions on particular topics. A blog can be used for a variety of different reasons. Many people keep personal blogs as a type of online diary or a place to share their thoughts and feelings about particular topics or items.

Companies can also use blogs as a tool to keep their customers up to date with the latest information regarding their products and services.

Whatever the reason for having one, blogs are very popular and are accepted and embraced by savvy consumers as a legitimate form of research.

How to blog?

A close friend of mine and I were chatting two weeks ago about a business person we both knew who used his blog to create controversy in their industry. My friend has a family and little spare cash and was lamenting that if he had a healthy bank balance he would start a blog and publish his thoughts in opposition.

I was shocked when he made the statement and quickly cut across his speech to tell him that he didn't need money to start a blog, he just needed to have the time and desire to type his thoughts.

My friend hesitated not quite understanding that anyone could become a published author on the Internet and he rapidly started asking questions. Is it difficult to learn the software? What do I write? Who will read my blog?

I happily answered that we had used free software since 2006 by blogger.com and that he should write whatever thoughts he wanted to share with anyone who was interested in reading them. I offered to help him set up a blog and gave him a quick tutorial.

Within 24 hours he made his first blog post and has been writing most days since. He is a close friend and even I am delighted at the willingness he has shown to share his thoughts so openly with his readers. I love this new dimension to our friendship and am pleased that I was able to play a small role in helping a new author get published.

How do I start my own blog?

If you want to start a personal blog, there are many excellent blog providers available. We use http://www.blogger.com as this is one of the more popular blogging tools available on the net.

If you would like to start a company blog, please contact us about custom blog template options to suit your company’s branding.

Sue Wickenden
CEO, iSmart Software

Services and Products we supply:
Web design in Brisbane; Course Registration Software; Room Booking Software

Offline Marketing - using search engine marketing

2011-04-27T20:22:00.008+10:00

Want to drive traffic to your website? Don't restrict your marketing to the internet only.

Like the Rocky Horror song 'creature of the night', I think of myself as a 'creature of the internet' and as tempting as it is to concentrate all my efforts into online marketing, offline marketing should never be ignored.

The key to successful marketing is to know your audience and if the majority of your audience is going to be reading the morning paper then that is where you should advertise. You can still drive readers to your website by offering an incentive such as a 'web only' discount.

Last year I was working with a client who spends nearly half a million dollars per year on Google adwords. We were brainstorming using the Google keyword tool and found there was an unprecedented number of people looking for 'Health and Safety' courses in Mackay, Queensland and Newcastle, NSW. It didn't take us long to work out that the commonality was 'mining towns'. We checked key word searches for other mining towns in Australia and sure enough there was a massive increase for that keyword set.

We had identified that employees within mining companies were being pushed to updgrade their skillset to include qualifications in Health and Safety.

As it happens my client runs online courses for 'Health and Safety' so that afternoon she ordered classified advertisments in all the local papers and cashed in on the gap she had discovered in the market.

Be imaginative when looking for ways to promote and drive traffic to your website and consider using search engine marketing tools such as Google keywords to identify gaps in your market.

Sue Wickenden
CEO, iSmart Software

What we sell:
Web Design in Brisbane; Course Registration Software; Room Booking Software

Life's for Sharing

2011-04-26T19:54:00.007+10:00

I received an email tonight from a favourite aunt with a link to a video of the royal wedding. The music and action and dancing were so much fun I watched it to the end. I then noticed it was put together by T-Mobile in the UK with their positioning statement "Life's for Sharing". The video has reached 11 million views.

It got me thinking about iSmart clients, mostly small to medium sized businesses who often ask me about innovative ways to get their message out onto the internet. A small business might sell its soul for 11 million You Tube views, so how can we smaller organisations, on limited budgets get this type of response?

My first thought is by being creative, daring and brave combined with the will to execute an idea. I love brainstorming and have had lots of fun with clients whilst we come up with some crazy ideas. The will to execute a crazy idea makes the difference in hugging your product or service to yourself or sharing it with the world.

T-Mobile UK have clearly thrown a lot of money into their You Tube videos, but honestly, a smaller organisation CAN come up with a zany idea and as long as they have the will to execute they can achieve major results whilst having a rad time along the way.

Life’s For Sharing - Spread The Word

T MOBILE UK

In January of 2009, the travellers at Liverpool Street Station in London got surprised when instead of hopping on the trains, most commuters started dancing. We know now that this sudden revival of joined dancing was an advertising stunt by T-Mobile for their ‘Life’s for sharing’ campaign.

And it got shared: the video spread online through e-mail, blogs and social networks and generated over 21 million views on YouTube alone. Within only a few weeks time the stunt got imitated several times, including one that shut down that same Liverpool Street Station.

The success of the ‘Life’s for sharing’ stunt at Liverpool station is another example of the changing advertising landscape.

Television commercials and print ads were the marketer’s anchor for decades, but traditional mass marketing has been in decline for some time now. Consumers are no longer impressed by the hundreds or even thousands of advertising expression they deal with every day. And just screaming louder has proved not to be the answer either. People listen to and trust their peers, rather than the marketer trying to sell them stuff.

With the credit crunch, advertising budgets have been cut and marketers and advertisers are looking for new ways to reach their audience and spread their message. The internet provides marketers with these new approaches and growing portions of media budgets have shifted online over the past year. Now, the continuous popularity of social media can help in spreading the word. Unilever Chief Marketing Officer Simon Clift said: “The overriding message of the Internet is that you can do more with less”.

Social Networks allow consumers to find peers online and share their experiences, findings and opinions with others. In doing so, consumers can help marketers spread their message: a blogger writing a review on the latest mobile phone, placing a commercial video on YouTube or starting a Facebook group dedicated to a brand or product. What marketers must do is facilitate the message, like T-mobile did with the ‘Life is for sharing’ stunt and people will help spread the message. (NY Times)

With the recent video of the royal wedding receiving more than 11 million YouTube impressions T-Mobile, like "Blend It" have found a formula that works for them time after time. It has nearly been 2.5 years since the Liverpool Station stunt and still the theme of 'fun' and 'on topic' is working for the Mobile phone company.

How can a smaller organisation achieve these results?

The formula is pretty simple and coming up with a crazy idea isn't too far from a good bottle of red wine, what differentiates small and large business is the will to execute the idea. Sure the big business pays the big dollars to the big agency to get the results, but really, the trick here is that someone is being paid to execute an idea so they need to start and finish before they get paid.

In small business it is usually the founder or the sole marketing executive whose job it is to come up with the idea and then to produce it. Often a big task when there is so much else to be done. The payoff can be huge and well worth the time and bravery of following through with an idea.

My advice is to brainstorm some crazy ideas, run it by two peers you respect for validation, price up the execution, budget and then go for it!! Don't hesitate in giving me a yell if you need help.

Sue Wickenden
CEO, iSmart Software

What we sell:
Web Design in Brisbane; Course Registration Software; Room Booking Software

How to Build Traffic to Your Site - Part 1/2

2011-04-08T05:17:00.017+10:00

If you want to succeed online, you MUST have a site with great content. However, a site with great content alone is pretty much useless. You also need traffic! There are plenty of different ways to build traffic to your site, and you probably know a few already. Here are two questions you should ask yourself: What am I trying to achieve with my site? What are the traffic building methods that apply to my site?

One approach to creating a consistent flow of targeted traffic to your site is through the search engines. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of applying certain methods to rank in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. SEO may sound tedious but it is actually fairly simple to do, and provided you have done everything right, your pages should be listed on the first results pages. Whenever someone types in your keyword your page will be one of the first things they see. This of course leads to more traffic in the long run which can result in more leads and sales.

If you sell products on your site and wish to have some instant traffic, pay-per-click is what you need. The most well known and widely used pay-per-click service provider is Google AdWords. You may sign up as an advertiser and set up an ad campaign. Once you set it up, your ads will be displayed in Google and content sites. You only have to pay when a user clicks on your ad. Pay-per-click advertising is a great way to generate instant traffic.

Email marketing is also a great method to bring continuous traffic to your site. Your visitors may not be interested in purchasing your product at the current time but they might be interested at a later time. How can you not lose these potential prospects. Ask them to subscribe to your email list and send them update by emails. This way you can keep in touch with your prospects and build a long-term relationship with them. If you want to build an email list and email your subscribers every now and then, get iSmart Bulletin, our easy-to-use email marketing solution. If that's an online newsletter you want to have, then you should get iSmart Announce, our online newsletter software.

Submitting your site to various social bookmarking sites is an easy and efficient way to generate targeted traffic to your site. You simply have to write a small description of about 150 to 200 characters and write a catchy title. The two main benefits of social bookmarking is that you get instant indexing of your pages and possibly better search engine rankings, and you get exposure to millions of registered members. For more information, read this blog post: What is Social Bookmarking?

Stay tuned for more traffic building techniques to help with your search engine marketing! If you have any questions about our products and services, including our email marketing solutions iSmart Bulletin and iSmart Announce, feel free to contact our friendly sales team at sales@ismartsoftware.com

For Part 2/2, click here:
How to Build Traffic to Your Site - Part 2/2

SEO - Backlinks Explained

2011-03-28T01:22:00.016+10:00

If you're new to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you're probably wondering what backlinks are. It is important to know what they are and how crucial they can be if you want your site to rank well in the search engines.

Backlinks are hyperlinks located on other sites that link back to your site. They are also known as inbound links, as opposed to outbound links, which are hyperlinks located on your site that link to other sites.

If you want your site to rank well in the search engines, it is important to get backlinks linking to your site. Most search engines (including Google, Yahoo! and Bing) take backlinks into account when indexing and rankings pages.

Google will not only take backlinks into account but also the anchor text, which is the hyperlinked text. With this link: iSmart Blog, the anchor text is 'iSmart Blog'. This link now influences the search engines in the ranking of the blog for 'iSmart Blog'.

It is also important to distinguish nofollow backlinks and dofollow backlinks. Nofollow backlinks are backlinks with a rel="nofollow" tag. This tag is a consensual way of embedding links without you taking editorial responsibility for the landing page quality of the link. Dofollow backlinks are thus much more valuable than nofollow backlinks.

Now you're probably wondering how you can get backlinks. In the early years of the Internet, you'd approach other site owners and politely ask for a link on their site, and in return you'd offer one on your site to theirs. Now you can get backlinks with web directories, article networks, social bookmarking, blogging...

To learn how to build backlinks and search engine marketing to your site, get our SEO eBook (PDF): SEO for iSmart! Contact us at sales@ismartsoftware.com for more information.

What is Social Bookmarking?

2010-08-23T01:51:00.006+10:00

Social bookmarking is the practice of saving, storing and managing your bookmarks online. By saving their bookmarks online, users can then access them from any computer and even share them with other people. Social bookmarking has become very popular among everyday internet users.

Social bookmarks are usually stored with tags, in others words: single words that describe a webpage, making it very easy for people to search for similar bookmarks or even find the bookmarks they have saved. Social bookmarking can also be a very effective link building technique. However, many overlook it because they consider the links as low quality links.

Social bookmarking links shouldn't be considered as low quality links because search engines know the social bookmarking websites very well. They visit them every single day, searching for new webpages to index and rank. They know that when a lot of people bookmark a specific webpage, they should visit it, index it and certainly rank it better.

Social bookmarking links will not only drive direct traffic to your website but also help it get better search engine rankings. Many use the same link building techniques, and search engines know about most of the tricks. Social bookmarking is considered by many internet professionals as one of the most underused link building techniques.

The most popular social bookmarking websites are Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Diigo, Propeller, Mister Wong... among many others. All these websites are very large websites crawled by search engines every single day. They are some of the most visited websites.

The more people bookmark your website, the more chances it has to be found by search engines. We thus strongly suggest you to submit your website to all the social bookmarking websites mentioned above, but also get your colleagues and friends to bookmark it as well, so the links really gain in value.

If you use iSmart Create or iSmart Announce feel free to ask us about our AddThis widget. AddThis is a very popular social bookmarking and sharing service with which you can can bookmark a webpage with Digg, Delicious, Reddit and many other services in a single click. For more information: AddThis - Now with Create and Announce!

Free & Paid Keyword Tools

2010-06-16T06:39:00.007+10:00

Keyword research is an essential step when building a website. Your online success could depend on how well you searched for the keywords that would generate the most traffic to your site. Choosing the right keywords is vital, because Google can greatly help you boost your business: more traffic, more leads, more sales...

There is a large choice of keyword tools available on the web. Google provides a free keyword tool called Keyword Tool. If the latest version looks a little complicated to you, switch to the old version, which is a little easier to use. To switch to the old version simply click 'Previous Version' on the top right corner.

Trellian also offers a free keyword tool called Keyword Discovery. This tool is also very easy to use and will generate the Top 100 keywords for you. Another good keyword tool is SEO Book's Keyword Suggestion Tool. You must sign up to the site to access this tool but this is really worth it if you're looking for free alternatives. Note that these two companies also offers paid keyword tools, which are of course more advanced.

For paid keyword tools, three main options: Market Samurai, WordTracker and Keyword Elite. Market Samurai is one of the most popular keyword tools among internet professionals. This tool gathers very useful data from Google and Microsoft. Market Samurai offers a trial version of the tool so make sure you give it a try.

WordTracker has been around for quite a while now, and is still used by thousands of people. A great, easy to use and affordable keyword tool that will help you find the best keywords for your site. As for Keyword Elite, it's a good alternative to other paid tools but it is a little more targeted at internet professionals and might thus look a little more complicated to you.

When searching for keywords for your site, make sure you check the competition too. Some keywords might generate a lot of traffic to your site if you're in the first few positions on Google, but they might also be very competitive, and thus very hard to rank for. Try to avoid broad keywords and rather focus on narrow keywords, which are more likely to drive targeted traffic to your site. Then you may optimise your site for search engines with the keywords you chose.

For more information on keyword research, feel free to contact us at sales@ismartsoftware.com in Australia or sales@ismart.co.uk in the UK. You might also be interested in our SEO eBook.

Worried about online privacy issues?

2010-05-25T04:32:00.008+10:00

The Web has become a major information and communication tool, with hundreds of new networking platforms being created every single day. Social sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Viadeo, Twitter, Google Buzz and FriendFeed now play a very important role in a lot of people's everyday lives. However, many are concerned about online privacy issues.

Online privacy has become a trendy topic. Even traditional media regularly cover this topic, as Facebook (and other networking platforms) modify their privacy policy almost every week. How can you take full advantage of these great communication tools and not worry at all about online privacy issues? Is this even possible? It's very difficult to answer these questions but here are a few tips that you should follow...

First, before signing up to a social site, you should read its terms and conditions and privacy policy. This is the only way to be 100% sure to know if your private information will be safe or not. If the terms and conditions and privacy policy are too long to read, do a search in Google and you should be able to find a summary. There are now a lot of information sites specialized in online privacy issues.

Always consider that the information you put online may be viewed by any internet user. Even if this is actually not the case, you should try to keep that in mind. While it's pretty cool to upload your party pics on Facebook, this might actually not be a great idea... Make sure this is something you avoid if you're looking for a job for example. According to studies, there are now a lot of employers googling for the names of candidates.

Avoid putting your full birth date, street address and phone number on your Facebook profile. Who really needs to know which year you were born, where you are currently living and what your phone number is... besides marketers? Social networks already make it easy enough to get in touch with other people. if you want to get in touch with you, they'll message you, don't worry!

Now if you start to think that you shouldn't have uploaded some of your pictures on Facebook or tweeted without moderation, don't worry too much. You can (most of the time) delete any of the content you have put online. Always remember, anyone can go online (and potentially access your information): your family, your friends, your colleagues, your potential employers... and total strangers! Consider the Web as a public place!

Why you should send online newsletters

2010-04-22T03:20:00.005+10:00

Print newsletters have been around for a very long time... but the web quickly changed how things work. Online newsletters have been very popular among businesses having a presence online. They can indeed go a long way in educating and persuading your potential and existing clients to work with you.

When people subscribe to your mailing list, they usually expect you to send them quality content: news, articles, offers... However, if you send too many emails, they are likely to unsubscribe. Honestly, who likes to receive several promotional emails a day from the same company?

One of the best ways to provide quality content to your subscribers without flooding them with too many emails is to send them a newsletter. Newsletters are usually sent on a regular basis, so people even expect them and don't necessarily consider them as promotional emails.

Some of your existing clients will forget about you after they purchased something from you. You don't really want them to forget about you, do you..? Newsletters can be great to interact with your 'dormant' clients. They are also great for cross-selling related products and providing post-purchase information.

However, creating an online newsletter isn't easy if you don't have the right tools and skills. What you basically need is: an online newsletter software that allows you build a newsletter template and use it for all your newsletters, and copywriting skills.

Print newsletters are more for large companies, because they cost money to produce, unlike online newsletters, which are much more affordable, even for very small businesses. Online newsletters are very cost-effective: they are inexpensive yet very effective. Finally, they are much 'greener' than print newsletters...

iSmart Announce is a great online newsletter software that will allow you to create and send newsletters to your mailing list with ease. If you're interested in online newsletters, make sure you give
iSmart Announce a try!

For more information, contact us at sales@ismartsoftware.com in Australia or sales@ismart.co.uk in the UK.

Google goes social with Google Buzz!

2010-02-25T06:24:00.011+10:00

Google recently announced the official launch of Google Buzz, a new social networking platform integrated into Gmail. This is not the first time Google goes social. You may have heard of Orkut or OpenSocial already... but these two platforms haven't really been successful. Google Buzz is Google's latest attempt to catch up on social networking giants Facebook and Twitter, which now count hundreds of millions of users.

Google Buzz is described as a mix of Twitter, Foursquare, Yammer and Yelp in the way that it allows you to easily share messages, but also links, images and even videos with your social circle. Google Buzz has quite a few very cool features including the inbox integration, a public and private sharing function and an auto-following function.

If you use Gmail, you must have read about Google Buzz already. If not, you should know that the only way to try Google Buzz is to sign up to Gmail. No big deal considering that Gmail is considered as one of the best online email platforms. Once you're logged in, you will see a link to Google Buzz right below the link to your inbox.

Google Buzz integrates several platforms including Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, YouTube, Blogger and Twitter. For example, by linking your Twitter account to your Google Buzz account, every message you tweet will be posted to your Google Buzz feed as well. Google Buzz is very easy to use and has already been used by millions of users. The fact Google Buzz is integrated into Gmail really helped!

Google Wave was in everyone's mouth a few months ago... If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present! For more information on Google Buzz, visit the website or watch this video.

SEO Guide for iSmart Create

2009-12-24T07:58:00.007+10:00

This week we are proud to announce the launch of the SEO Guide for iSmart Create. This e-book (in PDF format) will help you optimise your website for search engines (like Google, Yahoo! and Bing) with ease.

For those who are unfamiliar with SEO (short for Search Engine Optimisation), it is the process of getting your website at the top of search engine rankings (in other words: onto page one of Google). SEO is one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing you will ever find.

The e-book is specifically targeted at iSmart Create users but can also be used for other content management systems and website editors. It was written by our Internet Marketing and SEO Specialist Julien Duc.

SEO Guide for iSmart Create
Click here to purchase
(if you're in the UK or Ireland, click here)

This e-book will assist you in the optimisation of your website but not only. It will help you learn what SEO is all about, find the keywords that will drive targeted traffic to your website, optimise your website on-the-page and off-the-page and show you how to monitor your web statistics.

In other words: Make the most of your website and build a strong, durable online presence.

Feel free to email us at sales@ismartsoftware.com or call us on
1300 762 786 if you have any questions. If you're in the UK, please email us at sales@ismart.co.uk or call us on 020 7618 8368.

Communicate and collaborate in real-time

2009-11-17T07:00:00.006+10:00

... with Google Wave! There's been a lot of hype over Google Wave and you've certainly already heard about this new service. It's a new personal communication and collaborative tool developed by Google in Australia and designed to merge emails, instant messaging, social networks and wikis. This very promising communication tool is still in development but is expected by many to revolutionise the way we communicate and collaborate on the web.

With Google Wave, you don't send emails to recipients anymore but you create and share waves that you can move around, embed in blogs and sites and even play back. It's very intuitive and has the potential to become a great work tool. It's customisable and has lots of very useful features, which makes us wonder if this is the beginning of the end of the email era... Google also plans to release most of the source code as open source which means that web developers will be able to create applications and extensions. This is great news and we really look forward to learning more on the opportunities this new web-based service brings.

If you haven't received an invitation to join the preview version of Google Wave yet, make sure you ask around you or request an invitation from Google and make your own opinion. Anyhow, Google seems to be constantly trying to provide web users with new tools to help them make the most out of the internet... and we can't really complain about this, can we?

New system update module: iSmart Updater

2009-10-09T02:40:00.011+10:00

Today we are proud to announce the release of iSmart Updater, a system update module that allows us to upgrade your version of iSmart Create, File Manager and iSmart Bulletin within only a few clicks! This is great news for us, and you will be glad to learn that upgrading your modules will now only take us a few minutes from now!

iSmart Updater only supports the three modules previously mentioned, but we are in the process of adding User Manager to the list, and hopefully more modules in the future, including iSmart Announce. This will help us streamline our processes and significantly reduce the time spent on upgrades.

Any member of the support team is now able to update the modules of several clients at the same time, from any iSmart office (in Australia or in the UK). It is now just a matter of minutes, which means that you won't have to wait much to get the latest system updates! Upgrading your modules has never been so easy, thanks to our beloved web programmer Steven!

Why blogging matters for your business

2009-09-17T06:02:00.006+10:00

Blogs (short for weblogs) first appeared in the late 90's, and have then become one of the biggest web phenomena. Blogs were primarily for individuals, but businesses slowly but surely started to use them. Nowadays, it is rare to find an online business without a blog. If you have a site and would like to have a strong online presence, then blogging is a must-have. Most blogs are primarily textual but there are several other types of blogs: photoblogs, videoblogs (also known as vlogs), sketchblogs...

Why you should have a blog for your business

There are many reasons why you should have a blog for your business. Here are some of them:

A blog is another way to communicate with your existing and potential customers. Blogs can be considered as a more approachable way for your customers to communicate with you. People often say that blogs help put a human face on businesses. They usually know you by your products or services, but rarely by your business itself. Do they know about all your products and services, or just a few of them? With a blog, they get to know more about your whole business.

A blog can help you educate your existing customers. You can indeed provide them with training through blog posts: how to use your product or service, what to do if something goes wrong... You can give them tips or even inform them with industry news. If you're looking at reducing your support workload, then you should definitely think about it!

A blog can also help you generate more traffic to your site. Internet users may land on your blog before landing on your site. Blogs can rank very well in search engines and help you grow your overall traffic. Blogs are great at ranking well for very targeted keywords and keyphrases. That's a fact, because blog posts are usually about very specific topics.

There are many other reasons why you should have a blog, but this should help you have a better idea why you should have one for your business.

How to create a blog for your business

We use Blogger.com (which is owned by Google) as a blog platform but WordPress is also a great platform. You can either have a blog hosted on WordPress (that's WordPress.com), or use WordPress as a blog platform with your web hosting provider (that's WordPress.org). Otherwise you may be interested in minimal blogging: Posterous.com is a great blogging platform that allows you to publish blog posts by simply sending an email to a dedicated email address. You just couldn't find a more simple way to blog!

At iSmart, we can help you with the design and set up of your blog, so feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We have helped several customers build and maintain their blogs over the past few years and we would love to help you too. Contact us at sales@ismartsoftware.com in Australia or sales@ismart.co.uk in the UK for more information.

Microsoft's new search engine: Bing.com

2009-06-26T10:00:00.014+10:00

A few weeks ago Microsoft launched a new search engine called Bing, in replacement for Live Search. They do not call it a search engine, but a decision engine. It was developed around web users' evolving needs, to help them make better decisions. Bing's developers talk about a new approach to internet search. To find out more, check out the product tour.

"Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find", says Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they've found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions".

It is hard for Microsoft to compete against Google, which is by far the web's most popular search engine. If Bing is far from being perfect, it surely has some interesting features. Bing is great at finding restaurants for example, by providing more than just links. The interface is a bit confusing though, and search results aren't as relevant as they are on Google. Even though it doesn't seem to be the time to give up on Google, Bing is definitely worth the try!

If your website was indexed by Live Search, it should be indexed by Bing. If it is not the case, make sure you submit it here. It usually takes a few days, if not more, for Bing to index a website.

Create now integrating Google Analytics

2009-05-29T15:23:00.025+10:00

Google Analytics has become one of the industry's most powerful web statistics tools, and we've had an increasing number of clients enquiring about this free service.

That's why the iSmart Team decided to add an option to Create that allows an easy integration of Google Analytics into your website. There's no need to do anything to your web content anymore, Create does it for you. You simply need to insert the Web Property ID that Google gives you when you create a profile for your website. If this is a little confusing, don't worry too much... we can do it for you. You can receive daily, weekly or monthly statistics reports, and if you wish to view the statistics of your website online, you also may do so.

All you need is the latest version of Create. If you'd like your version of Create to be updated, contact our friendly support team at support@ismartsofware.com in Australia, or support@ismart.co.uk in the UK.

If you've never heard of this tool before, we strongly recommend you to watch the product tour. It is definitely worth a look.

Page Age Module

2009-04-09T10:27:00.004+10:00

How old is the content on your website?

Page Age is a very convenient module that allows you to generate a report detailing when all your webpages were last updated. The report can be generated instantly, or can be sent every month, two months, etc. Page Age is free of charge, very easy to use and can be quite useful to check if some of your webpages haven't been updated in a while.

Keeping your website up-to-date is essential to the success of your online presence, because fresh content encourages visitors to come back and shows search engines your website is worth visiting (and indexing). Take a look at our article on the importance of keeping your website updated if you'd like more information on this topic.

If you'd like Page Age to be installed on your website, contact our friendly support team at support@ismartsoftware.com or telephone 1300 762 786. If you're in the UK, email support@ismart.co.uk or telephone 020 7618 8368.

Site Secure Made Easier

2009-03-12T14:45:00.007+10:00

This week the iSmart Tech Team is proud to announce the release of a new version of Site Secure. For those who haven't heard of Site Secure yet, it is the functionality that allows iSmart users to secure webpages, by allowing groups of users to access webpages made unavailable to the public. The iSmart modules required to use this functionality are User Manager and Create.

This new version of Site Secure doesn't require us to build (and charge you for) a template dedicated to secure webpages anymore, and thus you to select this template when setting up secure webpages. The whole process has been simplified by our beloved technician Steven.

If you'd like the new version of Site Secure, contact our support team at support@ismartsoftware.com

Add YouTube Videos to your Site

2009-03-06T09:21:00.010+10:00

YouTube has become a pillar of the web, and is now the second largest search engine in the U.S. after its parent Google. According to internet marketing research company comScore, YouTube accounts for 25 percent of all Google searches. Nowadays, more searches are done on YouTube than Yahoo!. Would you believe that?

With its channel system, YouTube allows businesses to create a company profile and regroup all of their videos on a single page. That's pretty clever, and a good opportunity for businesses to gain online exposure.

As part of our ongoing commitment to our clients, we are always looking for new ways to maximise the performance of their online activities. We didn't miss the chance to give you the opportunity to take full advantage of this increasingly popular video sharing website. The iSmart Tech Team is indeed proud to announce the release of YouTube Video Embed, a pluglet that allows you to add YouTube videos on your site in a very simple way. It has all the mod functions of YouTube and all you have to do is copy and paste the link to the video into the pluglet. Yes, it is really that easy. You can also customise the appearance of the video by modifying its borders, colour, size, etc.

If you'd like our Support Team to install this pluglet on your website, free of charge, email us at support@ismartsoftware.com or telephone (617) 3367 0611 (Australia).

Google's Webmaster Guidelines

2009-02-20T15:01:00.005+10:00

To help Google find, index, and rank your website

Google has long been advising webmasters on what to do and not to do on their websites. Still, too many ignore these simple but useful advices. Some spend an incredible amount of time trying to find out what technique will help their website be better positioned in search results, while Google already tells us a lot in a 5-minute read.

Let's see what Google has to say about design and content :

Design and content guidelines

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.

Make sure that your title elements and alt attributes are descriptive and accurate.

Check for broken links and correct HTML.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Ensure you also take a look at the quality guidelines by clicking the following link :

Google's Webmaster Guidelines

Click here to view the full guidelines

For more information on search marketing practices, check out Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing eBooks.

AddThis – Now with Create and Announce!

2008-11-27T12:01:00.014+10:00

AddThis is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, bookmarking and sharing solutions available on the web. Most of you have certainly already seen this free widget while surfing the web. The buttons are very popular among blog owners and news network administrators. With AddThis, web users can bookmark a web page with Google, Digg, Del.icio.us and many other services in a single click, and can share it with their relatives, friends and colleagues within a few seconds.

The advantages of using this service are numerous. With AddThis, bookmarking and sharing have become much easier. A few clicks are often enough to reach your goal. By sending your content to social bookmarking services and social networks, AddThis also helps your site or blog get more traffic. The button is already very popular among web users, and is usually rapidly recognised. AddThis also offers free analytics that can help you measure the popularity of your content.

AddThis buttons can now be easily inserted on Create-built web pages and Announce-built newsletter articles. All you need to do is register on www.addthis.com and get your free customised button. The next step is to insert the AddThis Pluglet on the page or article and fill in the blank field with your username. Save your work, preview the page and publish it if everything looks fine. Click the button below to try out, or have a look at www.thefurniturecompany247.co.uk to see how it could look like on your website.

An interesting feature of this service is that it provides you with valuable statistics about how readers are bookmarking and sharing your content. You can thus easily measure the popularity of your content.

To get the latest version of iSmart Create and iSmart Announce, contact our support team at support@ismartsoftware.com

Click it to see what it can do!

Introducing Technique Gallery

2008-10-03T10:25:00.005+10:00

If you are struggling to get your head around how to build a good web site or to solve some specific problems, don't get stressed.

Technique Gallery contains small articles with tips and tricks to help you to make more polished and successful web pages. Like anything worthwhile in life a successful web site needs a bit of work but if you come to terms with a few basic things and be enthusiastic your web site will more than pay for itself.

If you feel like you would like to improve your web site, or you would simply like some inspiration, have a look. You may find a solution here. For comments or suggestions, feel free to email Benedict at benedict@ismartsoftware.com

Flash, You and Search Engines

2008-09-12T09:51:00.014+10:00

Flash is one of the most popular ways to add animation and interactivity to a website. When properly used, Flash can make webpages more dynamic, interactive and attractive. Several Create-built websites use embedded Flash animations, such as www.brisbanewritersfestival.com.au, www.restaurantmanx.com

and www.metropoliscongress2008.com. With our content management system, nothing’s easier than inserting a Flash animation on a webpage. At iSmart, we can build Flash animations to your brief, but if Flash is not in your budget, we have a few other solutions that may suit your needs. We have built several plugins that allow you to make your website more dynamic and interactive. If you wish to hire a third-part agency to design your Flash animation, there’s no problem at all. We will help you implement it in your Create-built website.

If you think your website is a bit too static, or not interactive enough, have a think about how Flash could improve the user experience. Some large corporations now have full Flash websites. However, full Flash websites are not recommended for most businesses. www.nike.com, www.puma.com, www.sony.com and other big brand names tend not to suffer so badly from Flash’s biggest disadvantage: its incompatibility with Search Engines (SEs); as their established brand name alone helps them to rank.

Flash technology and SEs don’t really go together. SEs simply can’t read the content that’s on a Flash animation. You may read somewhere that SEs now read Flash. There may be some improvements, but things between Flash and SEs are still difficult… This is why full Flash websites are not really recommended. If your website uses Flash, you should ensure to make the content readable by SEs. You can create a new webpage and add the content to it, in text format... Alternatively, you can simply add the content somewhere on the existing webpage where the Flash animation is. And don’t forget to make the page title relevant; it can greatly help!

For more information about embedded Flash animations and alternatives, feel free to contact our team at sales@ismartsoftware.com or on (617) 3367 0611 (Australia).

Marketing for SME's Made Easy! by Ian Godbold

2008-08-08T14:42:00.010+10:00

Australia-based marketing guru Ian Godbold, who has over 20 years marketing experience, recently published his latest book entitled Marketing for SME’s Made Easy!. Ian is head consultant at Godbold & Associates, a national and international marketing consultancy services firm.

Marketing for SME’s Made Easy! is quick and easy to read. Academic jargon is strictly avoided. Get new ideas and up to date approaches to the market your business is in. Find out how you can effectively compete with major businesses, keeping in mind two of the most important assets: time and money. The first chapter of this book is about action... Don’t expect too much marketing theory! This refreshing book is about experience and practice, and is perfect for time-poor small to medium business managers and marketers.

Find more information and some extracts in iSmart July 2008 News. You may try your luck with our giveaway, but if you don’t feel lucky enough, you can simply order the book online at www.godbold.com.au/bookorder
This is not another internet marketing ebook!

Marketing for SME’s Made Easy! is recommended by iSmart's marketing staff.

The Dangers of Duplicate Content

2008-04-30T14:19:00.005+10:00

Avoid being penalised by search engines

Copying content from a website and pasting it onto yours is one of the quickest ways to be penalised by search engines. Duplicating content is a quick and easy way to get your website up and running but is strongly discouraged by most (if not all) search engines experts.

What Google has to say about duplicate content is pretty simple: “Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” You can find more information here. If your website is still under construction, you might be tempted to duplicate content from another website. The World Wide Web is a great source of information. You can find hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about almost any topic. They may give you a lot of good ideas about what to talk about but avoid directly copying and pasting them onto your website. If you website is already up and running, you might already have done it... Act before search engines penalise your website.

Most search engines, like Google, penalise duplicate content by devaluing the websites in their results or even by delisting them. Being delisted sounds pretty bad but being devalued by a few pages is almost like being delisted. Most search engines users do not go past the third results page. If your website is brand new, you might even be totally ignored. Keep in mind that you are trying to improve your search engines rankings; not trying to damage them... And we’re not even referring to copyright infringement (yet)!

From the user point of view

It is important from the search engine point of view but also from the user point of view. Let’s imagine an internet user landing on a page of your website; what this visitor finds is just content he or she has already read before. Your page is never more than one click away from being closed. Would you read an article twice? Moreover, if search engines will not sue you for copyright infringement, internet users can. Anybody can report copyright infringement online.

A few solutions

The best advice we could give you is to write totally unique content. Thus, you will avoid any problem with search engines. Any internet marketer would recommend you this. The only problem you could have is having your content duplicated by other website owners but even in that case, the repercussions aren’t very serious as search engines will continue to see your content as the primary content. If you’re not a good writer, ask a friend, a colleague or a specialist.

Copyscape’s first use is to protect your website against copyright infringements. However, you can also use this online tool to verify if the content of your website is duplicate content or not. If this is the case, we strongly suggest you to modify it by changing it or rephrasing it. Never use the title of an article you’ve been inspired by. Note that Copyscape is free to use until a certain amount of searches has been reached.

Another solution to duplicate content is the use of a robots.txt file. It’s getting a bit more technical here so let’s try to make it simple. A robots.txt file allows you to tell search engines what pages of your website not to crawl. You simply have to upload this file on the root folder of your website. You could thus hide your duplicate content to search engines. However, be very careful when creating this file; make sure you don’t tell search engines not to crawl your entire website.

If you have no other choice than copying and pasting content from another website, never forget to insert a link to the source on the page you have added the content on. Let’s imagine you’ve just found an article talking about your business, and you would like to add it onto your website. You may do so, after checking the copyright statement, but always insert the link to the source. You could also simply add an abstract, or writing your own piece about your business being mentioned in an article.

There’re many other solutions we could talk about but try to keep in mind the ethics of writing. How would you react if you find the content of your website on another website? How would you react as an internet user if you find content you’ve already found on another website? How would you react if you were a search engine? Well, this one might be a bit more difficult to answer...

Feel free to contact us at seo@ismartsoftware.com if you have any question about duplicate content or even about search engines in general.

Introducing... iSmart Wear

2008-03-19T13:26:00.006+10:00

Don’t be too surprised if you see a few people wearing caps with an iSmart logo; especially in the Brisbane suburb of Milton! Indeed, the lucky winners of the iSmart competitions get tickets for an event at Suncorp Stadium but also a stylish military cap. The iSmart team tried an extensive number of hats and caps to choose the best of the best of EmbroideMe’s selection. Embroidery Brisbane’s EmbroideMe franchise that delivers iSmart Wear. The team selected a modern military cap design that perfectly suits your headwear needs when at Suncorp Stadium; or anywhere else in Sunny Brissie… Two models are available: a black model and a white model. The iSmart logo is discretely located on the right side of the cap. It is reported that the cap has already been witnessed outside Australia!

How to make your site user-friendly

2008-01-14T15:09:00.000+10:00

Making your site search engine-friendly is definitely a good idea, especially if your business is in a very competitive online environment. Search engine optimisation is a recurring topic among website owners. Though search-engine friendliness is important, user-friendliness is essential. It’s not a plus; it’s something that every single website owner should have in mind. Here are a few basic recommendations:

Design and Navigation
Make sure your design is consistent so you don’t confuse your visitors. You can use several different templates but try to use the same structure and colour scheme for each page of your site. Make your navigation structure logical, use intuitive titles and headings. You can also use call-to-actions. Use them properly or visitors could be misled.

Site Map
Create a site map and keep it up-to-date. A site map is a hierarchical diagram of the pages on a site. You can also add a short description to help visitors click on the link of the page they are looking for. If you use iSmart Create Content Management System, nothing’s easier than creating a site map. Thanks to the Site Map Pluglet, you can set up a site map within a few clicks!

Broken Links and Misspelling
Check for errors on a regular basis. One broken link can make you lose tens of visitors, if not more. There are a few link checking tools you can use. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you can easily check for link errors. Don’t forget to check for misspellings and grammatical mistakes. If you’re not a good speller, ask one of your friends or colleagues.

Web Browsers
Make sure your site is displayed correctly in the most recent versions of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox; the two most used web browsers. Your site might look different from a web browser to another, that’s why it is important to have a look at your site using different web browsers, and possibly different versions of web browsers. If you’re an iSmart client, you don’t have to worry about that; iSmart’s web developers always make sure your site looks good in major web browsers.

Search Function
A search function enables the visitors of your site to search for specific keywords. It can be very helpful, especially if the size of your site makes searches difficult. You can insert keywords in the meta keywords tags of each page of your site to lead visitors to the pages they are looking for.

Contact Details
Visitors should be able to find your contact details easily. Create a page dedicated to your business’ contact details. Include all your details; your business address, your telephone number(s), your email address(es)… If you’re concerned about spam, you can use a contact form. Once again, if use iSmart Create Content Management System, you can include this feature very easily. If you have implemented a contact form, make sure it works correctly.

These basic recommendations make sense to most website owners, but are you sure you fulfil all of them? More recommendations to come...

Creating an effective newsletter

2007-11-29T13:11:00.003+10:00

When you create a newsletter, always keep in mind that while your reader is certainly information hungry they are also probably in a hurry. That’s why you have to make sure that you display your content in the best possible way.

The information that you include in your newsletter will obviously depend on your business and the target audience in which you are marketing but we can give you some general recommendations.

In the announcement, include recent information about your business, products and services that can impact your readership. For instance, you can write about upcoming trade shows where your business will be exhibiting or a seminar that your business will be sponsoring.

Include an article that relates to your products or services and above all that helps your readers. If your readers don’t quickly find any benefit to your article, there’s a good chance they don’t read any further… Developing a resource centre that contains additional articles is also highly advised.

Providing a case study can also be very beneficial in order to build credibility with your audience. For instance, writing about a client who has achieved great outcomes while using your products or services can give your readers a better idea of the benefits they could take advantage of.

In other words, make sure you give useful information about your company, products and services, provide value to your newsletter by writing an article that can affect your readers and include a case study that shows businesses can achieve success with what you offer.

Do you read a newsletter as you read a newspaper? Most people scan a newspaper and stop only on items of immediate interest. That’s why it’s very important to keep your newsletter clear. Use eye-attracting headlines and insert visuals that will give a greater insight. Keep your article short : people will tend not to read articles more than 700 or 800 words long. Break your article in several sections with bolded headlines.

Don’t forget to insert a link to share the newsletter. If your readers find your newsletter interesting there’s a good chance they share it with their family, friends and colleagues. Most email marketing software like iSmart Announce provides a forward feature that allows the readers of your newsletter to easily forward it.

With iSmart Announce, you can create an effective content-rich newsletter in a very simple way. Do not hesitate to contact us for more information about this newsletter software application!

Landing pages, what are they and how can they be improved?

2007-08-21T11:35:00.000+10:00

When talking about websites, many of you may have heard the term ‘landing page’ and may have thought, “what does that mean”? The concept of a landing page is very simple. Essentially it’s any page on your website to which people navigate through a search engine, affiliate link, paid advertising (like Google adwords) or email marketing campaign.

Many people fall into the trap of thinking that most people navigate to your website through the homepage. This is not necessarily the case, particularly if you have a healthy search engine marketing strategy in place. People enter your website through internal pages all the time, especially through search engines.

If you think about it, if your homepage is all about ABC Pty Ltd and one of your internal pages is all about ‘red widgets’ and an Internet user was searching for the term 'red widgets', it would make sense for a search engine to display the red widgets page and it would be a relevant match for an Internet user to navigate to it.

Now that we have an understanding of what a landing page is, let’s look at how we can improve them. All too often people tend to get wrapped up in ranking for a particular term and sometimes forget this is only half of the process when it comes to converting customers through your website. An often forgotten part of the process is to analyse your landing page and ensure that it’s a relevant match for the your rank of search query and that it provides enough information for the visitor to make a purchase decision or some other type of action.

I have arbitrarily chosen the term ‘hubcaps’ and added this into http://www.google.com.au/. For the purposes of this post I will look at the second and third listings given by Google, as these are more typical of a standard website (lets face it, how many of us are running a site like eBay!)

To give you a little background story, the third listing, 'Antique Tyres', is a Victorian based veteran, classic and hotrod tyre supplier. The second listing, 'Tweakit', is a Sydney based performance engine management specialist.

Tweakit does quite a good job of enticing a click through to their website. The description of

"Hubcaps, Hub caps, Wheel covers, Center Caps, Hubcap, Hub cap, C, Factory original hubcaps, hub caps, hubcap, hub cap, wheelcovers, wheel covers, ..."

is a very relevant match when it comes to the term ‘hubcaps’. Antique Tyres does a reasonable job as Google seems to be displaying part of the on-page content and navigation items, as opposed to Antique Tyres manipulating this content using their description tag.

"Australia's Largest Range of Veteran Vintage, Classic & Hot Rod Tyres. Home > Parts > Vintage Wheel Hubcaps. Vintage Wheel Hubcaps ..."

If someone clicks on the link to Tweakit’s website, they come to the following page:

This is where Tweakit’s problems start. Firstly, there isn’t a reference to hubcaps anywhere on the page and the information that’s provided are links to external websites, so straight away they are driving traffic away from their website. The second point is that there are no instructions for the user. What am I supposed to do? I want information about hubcaps and I have been presented with lots of content and no reference as to what I should do. If you click on the Antique Tyres listing, things are a little clearer:

Even though they only sell classic and veteran hubcaps, this page gives me information about them and the products which they provide. Given a choice between these two listings, the Antique Tyres website does a much better job of enticing the user to a sale. They could, of course, put some type of instruction on the page about how to order or find out more information. Whilst both companies do an adequate job in enticing a click through from the search result in Google, only one company is showing relevant and helpful information to the user when they navigate to the landing page. Both companies could do a much better job of capturing data from the user by offering something in exchange for their details (an e-book on 'how to protect your car' or 'top ten tips on saving money buying petrol' perhaps). There doesn’t seem to be a strategy in place for when the customer actually gets to their website. So, to wrap up, there are a few points to look at when evaluating your landing pages:

What’s being displayed in the engines?
Look at the information displayed in the search engine’s results page. When your website ranks for a particular term, you’re up against nine other listings to get that click. Make sure that you have an enticing description showing in the search engines to ensure that people go to your website.

Create pages so that people can scan
When people are searching, typically they scan landing pages to make sure that it’s a relevant match before they invest time into reading more content. Add headings to the page that match the keywords which you have in the content and the terms you’re ranking for.

Give instructions
Never leave it to chance that your visitors know what to do when they go to your website because, chances are, if they have to think too much or do too much work, they will click the back button and go to your competitor. Give clear and concise instructions on what you want the visitor to do.

Offer something to get customer data
By offering something that is useful and relevant to your potential customers, this gives you a better chance of getting their data and marketing to them at a later date.

Hopefully these tips will be useful in helping you to create better landing pages that convert more customers.

B&T Online and Interactive Bootcamp – Brisbane

2007-07-12T15:59:00.000+10:00

Last week I attended and spoke at the B&T Online and Interactive Bootcamp – Brisbane. It was a very interesting day to say the least. The presenters were from a range of different industries and companies and all had some very useful information to add to the ever increasing online toolbox we all seem to be collecting.

There was a large range of attendees at this event, ranging form agency types to marketing managers of companies in the bank, travel and advertising sector. Whilst the attendance wasn’t quite as high as our Melbourne and Sydney counterparts, I think the fact that B&T held the event here attracting a healthy attendance suggests there is a large pool of talent in Queensland.

The thing that interested me the most was chatting with people afterwards at the networking drinks. Talking with people highlighted to me that there is so much talent and knowledge here in Brisbane, but not too many avenues to explore, share and combine this collective knowledge with others in our industry.

Brisbane seems to be a little secular in that way, but things are changing. More and more of these types of events are coming to Brisbane and more associations, groups and get-togethers are happening when it comes to talking about search, online marketing and advertising etc etc.

I think B&T did a great job of getting local speakers to the Brisbane event. This had the added effect of keeping things real and the presenters giving very useful and relevant information to their peers.

All in all I think everyone enjoyed themselves….I know I certainly did!

.com domain prices rising!

2007-05-17T07:06:00.000+10:00

I have just got used to being able to buy our clients very cheap domain names and now the prices go up!

Smartype have been a reseller with Melbourne IT from day one of their reseller programme and we love being affiliated with them because they are big and they are safe and we know the domain assets of our corporate clients are well protected.

A few years ago I realised that clients were getting the knack of buying their own domains, usually at half the price that Melbourne IT offered, so I went off to find another cheaper registry. I got burnt!!

Some companies in the States have unfriendly business practices that left us cancelling a corporate credit card to stop the US registry from automatically deducting fees from us at their whim.

I then discovered that Webcentral who look after our dedicated hosting were selling really cheap domain names so we began buying for our clients from Webcentral. Webcentral are more or less around the same price as the cheap overseas domain name resellers but there control panel for renewals is manual. Melbourne IT still have the best online, automated control panel that I have come across and I have dealt with many overseas companies.

So, I have become very comfortable and competitive with buying domain names. I know that on balance I have chosen the safest and cheapest option.

Now look what is going to happen! This email came from Melbourne IT this morning.

"Melbourne IT has been notified by the domain registry operators Verisign, Afilias, Neulevel and Public Interest Registry (PIR), of price increases that will soon be implemented in relation to .com .net .info .biz and .org domain fees. The fee increases being introduced by the registries will take effect from 15 October 2007 and will impact each annual increment of new domain name registrations, renewals as well as domain name transfers."

I am not sure how much domains will increase by which makes it hard to advise clients, but Melbourne IT are suggesting we renew our domains for 5 or 10 years to beat the price hike.

What do you think? If our domain names are a very important brand asset does a few bucks matter?

Has the corporate world finally discovered blogging?

2007-05-17T06:40:00.000+10:00

It seems to me that it was only a year or two ago that when I mentioned the word 'blogging' to anyone in a suit they looked at me as if I was talking dirty to them. Now Smartype is receiving regular emails from corporate clients explaining why 'blogging' could be good for their business and asking how to set one up.

Has blogging finally been discovered by the corporate world? Have marketing managers worked out how they can make money from blogs?

It seems like Deja Vu from the early 1990s when it was just us nerds who were interested in the internet and then by 1996 the SME corporate world worked out they could make some money out of this and the gold rush was on.

Debbie Weil has even written a book on "Corporate Blogging".

Is this another exciting opportunity or just another task for overworked SME managers to try and juggle?

New Smartype invoice

2007-02-12T14:05:00.000+10:00

As of this week you may notice a change in our invoices. We have updated the look and feel of these to reflect our brand a little more. Here's a sneak preview!

Possum Magic

2007-01-04T12:42:00.000+10:00

We found a possum in our office this morning. One of the guys went in to the kitchen to make a coffee and we caught him munching on our biscuits. We herded him out the back door and managed to capture this footage.

Finding keywords for your website

2006-12-13T16:41:00.003+10:00

One of the things that people ask me most at search engine workshops is “how do I find keywords for my website?”

The first thing I say to people is get into the head of your target market and think about the keywords or more importantly the keyword phrases they might use. People often think that they need their website to rank number one for very high level terms like weddings, cars or tv. Most of the time this will drive much traffic to your website however it will be untargeted and mostly, these people probably won’t find what they are looking for hence they will not convert into customers, subscribers etc.

The idea behind keyword research is to find and use keywords and keyword phrases that compliment your service or product i.e. if you sell Sennheiser earphones in Smithsville, ranking number one for the term Sennheiser won’t drive people looking for your product to your site. (most of those people, in reality, are probably looking for the official Sennheiser website)

If however, you rank number one for the term ‘Sennheiser earphones in Smithsville’, whilst you may get less traffic, these people are more targeted and thus more likely to purchase your product or service.

So, now that you have an idea of the types of words to look for, how do you go about finding them?

Keyword Tools

The use of keyword tools is a very effective way to find out potential keywords for your website.

Overture
Overture’s keyword assistant allows you to type in a keyword or keyword phrase and it will bring back results that are related to this keyword term. It will also tell you how many times that keyword has been looked for.

Google Keyword Tool
The Google keyword tool essentially works the same way as the overture tool except, you don’t get to see any numbers for total times a keyword has been searched for.

These are probably two of the most widely used keyword tools available for free on the net.

Competitors Websites
You can actually go to your competitors website and see what keywords they are using. If you analyse the content on their pages and look at their meta keyword and meta description tags, this will give you a good idea of the keywords they are using.

Finding keywords in the meta keywords tag and meta description tag
To find keyword in the meta keywords tag you will need to look at the code of the page you are on. To do this simply click view/source and the source code of that page will appear. To most this will look like gobbledy-gook but there is one section in this code that will reveal all the keywords someone is using on that page.

What you are looking for is a piece of code that looks like this meta name " keywords " content " keywords will be in this section of the tag"

The easiest way to find this is to press Control F on your keyboard (shortcut for find) and type description into the box. The same method is applied for the meta description tag except replace the term keywords with description.

Statistics
Use your statistics to analyse the keywords people have typed into a search engine to find your website. If you do not have an analytics program, there are many available on the web for free. Google Analytics for example.

Log internal search data
If you have an internal search box on your website, make sure you can log all the terms that are added to this. It is a fantastic way to find out what people are searching for on your website.

Ask people to search for you product of service
Get a bunch of friends or family to look for your product or service in the search engine of their choice and get them to take a note of all the keywords they use whilst looking for this product: Sony headphones, Sony headsets, Sony earphones...

Hopefully this is a enough info to get you started in finding the keywords for your website.

What can you do to improve you website accessibility for the disabled?

2006-11-23T09:08:00.000+10:00

In Australia and the United Kingdom it is becoming increasingly important to aim to make your website accessible to users with handicaps. This might be a user with:

colour blindness
repetitive stress injury
deaf
visually impaired
aged
those with cognitive disability

There has been a case in Australia that was been brought before a judge relating to the Sydney Olympics and a couple of cases in the United Kingdom where complaints were settled out of court.

In general there is leniency shown towards smaller organisations who may not have the budget to employ expensive development, but there are ways that you can improve your website if you are using a content management system that allows you to administer your own web pages.

Software readers for the visually impaired don't like the JavaScript that is employed to create a drop down menu. It is recommended that you also put links to pages within the context of the site as a hyperlink. This can be easily done at the bottom of the page. Or even just a link to a site map is good. Hyperlinks can be read and should make sense.

The latest version of iSmart Create builds all the menus on the server so that nothing is hidden by JavaScript black magic. The above suggestion is a good backup approach if you use Create.

Software readers for the visually impaired cannot read an image, so when you put an image on a webpage you should use the function which allows you to type in an 'alt tag' or a description of what the photo is.

If you wish to improve your compliance you should:

use text alternatives when importing an image
use a typeface colour that contrasts with the background
put in the meta description and keywords [available in iSmart Create]
type in when you last updated the site
put in a width and height when creating a table

avoid using tables if you can. Use bullet lists where possible. Use tables for tabular information not content

do not use flash to publish important information
put in hyperlinks to a sitemap and/or other pages
avoid blinking text
create hyperlinks that make sense rather than 'click here'
use style sheets [iSmart Create does automatically]
provide user with a sitemap
provide clear navigation
minimise the amount of clicking a user needs to do to get to a destination
if you use audio on your site also publish a transcript in text format
use simple language and layout

Getting your website indexed

2006-11-09T14:03:00.004+10:00

If you go to a major search engine and type in the following operator site:www.yourwebaddress.com.au, this will tell you all the pages that particular search engine will have in its index for your website.

If you have a 300 page website and there are only 25 pages in the results of this type of search, you know something is not working correctely.

How do you get all your pages into the search engines index?

There are a few simple ways to ensure all your pages are listed in a search engines index.

Create a sitemap and add a text link to it from your homepage. By creating a sitemap, you are giving a search engine spider every opportunity to crawl through your pages with ease. Adding a text link to this page from your homepage ensures the spiders will get to the sitemap page and thus, crawl and index your pages.
Get links to the most important pages on your website. Take 5-10 of your most important pages and have them listed in directories and other websites. Remember, you don’t always have to add your homepage to a directory, blog or other website.
Use a facility like Yahoo! And Google webmaster tools. Using these sitemap facilities helps get all your pages into the index of the major search engines quickly.

For more information about search engine optimisation and internet marketing, please go to http://www.ismartsoftware.com/

Reliable Hosting is Worth the Money

2006-08-28T14:52:00.006+10:00

Imagine your run a delivery business. A medium sized express flower delivery service that has several vans and is busy all year round. The vans and their drivers that work for you are the engine room of your business. They are responsible for the reliable, on time delivery of the flowers you sell. They are the face of your company when someone opens their front door to receive your product on happy, sad and sick occasions alike.

Imagine there are over 200 quicker, better and cheaper delivery businesses in your area, more than willing to take your customers and turn them into lifelong advocates for their own product, business or service.

One day you find out your vans are inferior imports bought cheap in bulk by the previous owner. They constantly break down and parts for them are hard to purchase causing lengthy delays. These vans cause your customers to put up with late deliveries, grumpy drivers and bad service, making them go elsewhere.

This story can relate to web hosting. It’s the engine room for your website. It provides visitors access to your website and ensures it will be working for you while you are figuring out ways to make more money.

Reliable hosting is an important part of your hosting considerations as you really do get what you pay for.

7 Tips when Registering Domain Names.

2006-08-09T14:41:00.000+10:00

A Domain Name is the first step towards starting your online business. Don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s a simple case of registering your company name with a .com.au attached to the end. There are many considerations when purchasing and registering a Domain Name, some which you may be aware of and others that don’t present themselves as obviously.

Keep it short
Trying to remember a series of several words instead of two to three memorable ones creates unnecessary complexity for potential customers. Keep your domain name short and punchy.

Be Specific
Obscure names and references can confuse and disorientate users when trying to recall your domain name. They may also go to a more relevant site-name when searching for your product or service in any of the major search engines.

Make it Memorable
Sayings or combinations of words that infuse themselves into our language and colloquial are part of our everyday language. These types of addresses can be recalled without having to think.

Make it Easy
With such a time poor world, simplifying and reducing the amount of work a consumer needs to do to spend money with you, brings you one step ahead of your competition. Remember, your competitors are only a back button away, so keeping it simple online is sage advice.

Don’t use Difficult Words
People are lazy. People are lazy consumers. We want something close by, easy to find at a good price with the least amount of hassle and pain. This attitude juxtaposes itself into the online world as well. Just because your marketing company is called “Guerilla Entrepreneur Hierarchy Systems” don’t expect your potential customers to remember this when there are 100’s of other companies (whose names are easier to remember) pushing the same service.

Plain English
If possible try to avoid using the number 0 in your Domain Name. This can often be mistaken for the letter o. Likewise try and avoid using 2 for ‘to’, 4 for ‘for’ and the letter u for ‘you’ as these terms can confuse your visitors.

Register More Than One
You are able to register multiple domain names. If you are a software company called SoftwareNOW Pty Ltd that develops Content Management Software and online learning software, you may want to consider registering www.contentmanagementsoftware.com.au and www.onlinelearningsoftware.com.au. Doing this can also prove to be successful creating better rankings for those keyword terms in search engines.

Different Countries
If selling internationally buy that countries extension if possible.

See example below. (Note – this is only an example designed to help you choose your own domain name that best suits your company type and industry)

Richards Lawncare & Garden Services Pty Ltd

Potential Names www.rlgs.com.au
www.richardslawncare.com.au
www.lawnandgardencare.com.au

Recommended Name
www.mowthelawn.com.au

Whilst this address may not reflect the company name, it’s a saying that permeates its way through every household in the Australian summer and can be easily recalled by almost everyone

Cannex website redevelopment

2006-06-27T03:41:00.000+10:00

Cannex, Australia’s leading consumer finance research firm have recently re-developed their website using iSmart Content Management Software.

Incorporating a new look and the addition of a Cannex blog, this gives the site a competitive edge in the highly competitive financial sector.

You can view the new Cannex website at http://www.cannex.com.au

Microsoft update may effect your iSmart Software

2006-04-27T10:39:00.000+10:00

Microsoft update may effect your iSmart Software.

Due to a recent update in Microsoft Windows an unfortunate situation is now occurring in the editors for iSmart Create and Bulletin. When you open up an editor you may see a window stating "Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate and use this control" before you can make any changes.

Why has windows changed?

On April 11 Microsoft released an Internet Explorer update in response to the patent battle between Microsoft and Eolas. Microsoft and Eolas have been fighting a patent battle over the use of the ActiveX technology by Microsoft. The result is that Microsoft has been required to upgrade every installation of Explorer with this new "Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate and use this control" when ever an ActiveX component is used.

What are we doing about it?

To overcome this issue a simple fix is required for both our software products. This fix has been made and we are in the process of updating your software.

We ask for your patience whilst we perform these updates.

New upgrade of iSmart Announce coming soon

2006-04-11T15:07:00.000+10:00

We are in the process of Beta testing a new version of our e-zine software iSmart Announce.

iSmart’s programmers have been working on this new version for the last few months and it brings this piece of software up to the standards you know and are used to.

“iSmart Announce was developed quite a few years ago and really needed a facelift” Says senior programmer Steven Harrop “We have incorporated many aspects from the current range of software products distributed by iSmart to bring it more in-line with the current software on offer”

Some of the new features of the upgraded version of iSmart Announce include

Upgraded interface – look and feel of iSmart Create wysiwyg editor
Tracking facility – Keep a track on who is reading what articles
RSS and XML Feed – automatically send RSS feed of your newsletter to subscribers

If you are an iSmart Software customer, currently license iSmart announce and would like to BETA test the new version please contact Peter Dowse and he will arrange for the upgraded version to be installed in your admin panel.

Rally of Canberra - A Great Experience

2006-03-15T09:04:00.000+10:00

This years Rally of Canberra went off without a hitch partly due to the work that our Senior Programmer Steven did whilst attending the 3 day event.

Steven had this to say about the event.

“The rally is an amazing event and the people who run it do a wonderful job whilst attending to thousands of calls, queries and requests from punters, race officials and team members.
It’s a competition environment so everyone had to be very accurate while taking down times and presenting information.

As you can appreciate my job was to make sure that all that data was displayed correctly on the Rally of Canberra website. I had a few long hours and stressful periods throughout the 3 days I was there, but all in all it was a great experience”

Rally of Canberra

2006-03-09T16:15:00.000+10:00

Every year, someone from iSmart Software makes the pilgrimage down to Canberra for the Rally of Canberra, a 3 day motor sport event conducted over closed public forest roads in and around Canberra, Australia's National Capital. We don’t go there to look at Subarus zipping along dirt roads at 100kms per hour, but to help with the facilitation of the live results section of the website http://www.roc.com.au/

As cars make their way through check points, officials take note of times and correlate scores etc. This information is then added to the Rally of Canberra’s database.

Once this information has been inputted, it sends an xml data set to http://www.roc.com.au/ the website run using iSmart’s content management software and other plugins.
The software that iSmart has developed then takes this data and displays it on the web for anyone around the world to view.

ROC is hosted at Webcentral, Australia's largest ISP as it is essential for Canberra Tourism and iSmart to feel secure with an web hosting company that possesses the resources and skills to service and maintain the hosting of the website during such a high profile event. High levels of availability are critical over the 3 day Rally of Canberra Event.

Last year thousands of people logged on to http://www.roc.com.au/ during race times to get live updates of scores and other information.

The Rally of Canberra is happening over the next couple of days so please visit the ROC website and get up-to-date info live from their website thanks to iSmart’s talented team of programmers

Website Design

2006-02-21T09:25:00.000+10:00

Please feel free to look at the new page on our website that displays a range of website designs we have created for clients. I thought I would post this page as many people know of our Content Management Software but are not aware that we provide website design in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, London, UK, Ireland

iSmart Software to Re-Design Playbill Venues Website

2006-01-27T10:51:00.000+10:00

iSmart Software has effectively positioned itself as a leading Australian supplier of Web Design Services with the success of their recent proposal to redesign and re-brand www.playbillvenues.com.au

Playbill manages three world class venues including the Hordern Pavilion, the Royal Hall of Industries, and the Byron Kennedy Hall all located in Fox Studios, Sydney, Australia.

Marketing Manager for Playbill Venues, Gabby Jackson had this to say about working with iSmart.

"iSmart have shown a real understanding of where we want to take our website.
They are as enthusiastic as us when it comes to developing new tools for our
site and clients, a great quality in a partner."

Along with the redesign iSmart Software will also be developing a new SMS module for its email marketing solution iSmart Bulletin, which will greatly increase the communication opportunities for Playbill using iSmart’s range of online software.

The development of a unique Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) induction module is something of a first for this industry. It will accredit suppliers to playbill via an online question and answer pro forma.

iSmart Software is proud to partner with Playbill on this project and look forward to seeing the positive results from their new website.

iSmart

2006-01-18T14:55:00.000+10:00

iSmart Software - Developers of website content management software

What is a Blog?

2006-01-11T05:30:00.000+10:00

Blog is short for Weblog. Usually a series of posts or entries in reverse chronological order, blogs provide an outlet for a writers (or blogger as they are sometimes called) thoughts and opinions on particular topics. A blog can be used for a variety of different reasons. Many people keep personal blogs as a type of online diary or a place to share their thoughts and feelings about particular topics or items.

Companies can also use blogs as a tool to keep their customers up to date with the latest information regarding their products and services.

Whatever the reason for having one, blogs are becoming very popular and are accepted and embraced by savvy consumers as a legitimate form of dispensing information .

How do I start my own blog?

If you want to start a personal blog, there are many excellent blog providers available. We use http://www.blogger.com/ as this is one of the more popular blogging tools available on the net.

If you would like to start a company blog, please contact us about custom blog template options to suit your company’s branding.

If you would like to find out more about blogs please see the wikipedia’s description.

Read This Blog Using RSS

2006-01-10T11:29:00.000+10:00

Before you can read this blog using RSS, you will need to decide what type of RSS reader you would like to use. Typically there are two types of RSS readers, online versions and downloadable desktop versions.

Online Version

An online RSS reader allows users to log in to their readers online and receive the latest RSS feeds from any computer with an internet connection. Many people choose this option as the freedom of being able to read your RSS feeds from any computer makes keeping up to date with your latest news sites and blogs easy and convenient.

You may be interested in some of these online RSS readers.

http://www.google.com/reader
http://www.bloglines.com/
http://www.bloglines.com/
http://www.newsgator.com/
http://www.inform.com

Downloadable Desktop Version

Downloadable RSS readers work in a similar fashion to email applications like outlook express. When new content is picked up by the RSS reader an alert will let you know you have new content waiting to be read.

You may be interested in some of these desktop RSS readers.

http://www.desktop.google.com/
http://www.awasu.com/
http://www.newsplorer.com/
http://www.feeddemon.com/
http://www.feedexplorer.net/

The feed address for this blog is http://ismartblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

What is RSS?

2006-01-09T09:52:00.000+10:00

Many of you may have heard the term RSS feeds floating around lately. You may have even seen these little logos on many of your favourite websites, particularly news sites and blogs (define blog ). Many clients are asking, what is RSS, what does it do and why would I think about using it?

RSS is another channel for distributing information to people. Just like TV Advertisements, Skywriting, Newspapers, Websites, Blogs or Podcasting, it is a way to get information about your company, or yourself to a wide audience. It is a fantastic tool for companies who have regular updates on their websites and are designed to keep your company, ideas, products or services in the forefront of consumers minds.

Before we delve into the mechanics of RSS, feeds let us look at some real world examples of how they are used. There are two angles with which to look at RSS feeds.

1. As the consumer
This person will read RSS feeds from different sources through an RSS reader or aggregator. 2. As the provider This person will create the RSS feed. The Consumer Let us presume you are an avid news and blog reader. Each day you visit 10 blog sites and 10 news sites to see all the latest news updates and blog entries.
That’s 20 different websites visited each day. It would make sense to be able to see all the updated content from these sites in the one place, Right? Enter the RSS ‘reader’ or ‘aggregator’ An RSS reader gives you the ability to read multiple feeds from different sources in the one place.

There are many types of readers available. You can download a software program that runs independently or there are many web-based facilities to utilise. Most of these facilities are free to use and are a good way to start using RSS and evaluate if it would benefit your company. Once you find a site that has an RSS feed of interest, add the address of the feed into your RSS reader. When you click the update button, the RSS reader will compile the different feeds you have in your reader and check for updated information.

Feeds may happen every hour, day or month and could range in information from personal blogs, tech news to movie times, recipes and stock prices. With hundreds of thousands of websites providing RSS feeds, the list is endless. Most news sites and blogs have an RSS element within them. You may even have your own blog site or be looking at sites like MSN and Yahoo without realising they provide RSS feeds! If you use MSN Messenger or have an MSN Password, you can already receive RSS feeds through My MSN.

2. The Provider
Lets say you publish a page on your website outlining the benefits of your latest service or device. You can create an RSS feed about this and anyone who has your feed address added to their reader will receive your update without having to go to your website. If you are considering creating RSS feeds, this is a great way to keep people up to date with the latest information from your company. You may also drive traffic to your website as others pick up your feed and display it.

But how do you start creating and publishing your own RSS feeds?First, you will need to create an RSS File. This simple text file holds your news, recipes, stock price (whatever information you add to it) and is created using of the one of the methods listed below.

1. Create a raw file in a text editor like Notepad or Wordpad. If you are not familiar with XML or HTML, then this option may not be for you; however, it is not as hard as it sounds.

2. Use a software program to create an RSS File for you. I have tried a variety of different programs and found RSSEditor one of the easier options to use.

Note - There are many providers of RSS creation software; I suggest you do a little research and choose the one that is right for you. Don’t be too daunted by this, you probably create different types of files every day, Word files, Excel files etc this is no different. Both options take a little getting used to and some practice, but the rewards can be well worth the effort.

For this article I will be creating RSS files using third party software. If you would like to create an RSS file from scratch there are many excellent tutorials on the web.

Creating an RSS file
RSS works on the concept of channels and items. To put this into perspective, think of a television station. Channel 10 is one channel, yet shows different programs or items. Your website is the channel for your RSS feed and the news articles, blogs and stock prices you create are the items. All RSS software will ask you to input channel information and item information.

There are three main sections to an RSS file.

1. The Title This is the website name/headline or title of an article.
2. The Description This is a brief outline of the website/article and what the website/article is about.
3. The Link This links back to the website/webpage where the article is stored on.

So, the three sections for an RSS feed about movie reviews might look like this:
Channel Title - Great Movie Reviews
Description - Get the latest reviews on all the best movies
Link – http://www.the/greatmoviereviews.com.au
Item Title – War of the worlds
Description – Aliens invade earth in this action packed sci-fi adventure
Link -ww.greatmoviereviews.com.au/waroftheworlds.html

Some RSS creation software also allows you to add other features like an author, pictures or time of publication etc. It depends which one you use. Once you have created your channel and item information you will need to save this information as an .XML file.

For this example, we will save this file to our desktop and call it review.xml. Most software has a ‘Create RSS’ Button that will automatically save your file as an .xml This file then needs to be uploaded to your server or file manager. Now that you have created your RSS file, uploaded it to your server, and are ready to feed it to everybody’s RSS readers, how will you let everyone know you provide an RSS feed?

The most common way is to link your feed to a graphic. Most websites use the RSS or XML Graphic. You can also use a plain text hyperlink. If you're not sure, try using all three. Note iSmart Create users; to hyperlink to a graphic, in design mode click the graphic you wish to hyperlink, click the link icon, choose file or download and then select the .xml file you have created.

Updating your Feed.
You can have any amount of items in your feed; however, most RSS software programs limit the number of items to around ten. When you create a new item it will be added to your .xml file. Save this file and overwrite the original master .xml file you created.

For example; open your review.xml file in the RSS software, add a new item to it and then save it again as review.xml, thus overriding the old file. Re-upload this new file with additional content to your server or file manager and your feed will be updated. Now that you have created an RSS feed, there are two more very important steps to take.

1. Validating your feed
2. Syndicating your feed

Validate your feed.
This is a simple checking process to make sure your feed is working properly. The easiest way to check your feed is to cut and paste your feed address into a feed validating website. The one I use is the aptly named http://feedvalidator.org/ This will tell you if your feed is valid and if not what needs to be fixed.

Syndicate your feed.
Now that you have a feed going, it makes sense to add this to the growing list of RSS search engines out there. This will ensure that anyone trying to find RSS feeds about your topic will find your feed and hopefully add it to their reader. This process is similar to adding your website to search engines.

The last word
If you are not sure about the validity of RSS as a communication tool for your website, I suggest you use an RSS reader, get used to the idea and then move forward from there. I do not believe RSS is going to be ‘the next big thing’ like some internet marketers are suggesting. I cannot see it replacing email, e-zines; blogs or websites. Video did not kill the radio star, email did not replace the post and the internet did not take over from the multiple channels of communication open to marketers. I do believe RSS will provide another useful channel to communicate with customers; smart marketers will quickly add this to their online toolbox.

If you would like assistance in creating an RSS feed for you website, please feel free to contact us