Online Marketing Sydney, Internet Marketing Australia Freestyle Media

God created the internet to market your business online – get that firmly entrenched in your mind … and when he created it what he wanted you to have is thousands of visitors to your site.

To achieve this you’ll need a strategy to get quality traffic to your website and drive sales.

An effective online marketing strategy is more than SEO, email marketing, or even optimising your website. It involves a number of activities that, when combined, result in a dramatic increase in sales.

Over seven years Fred Schebesta has learnt the essential secrets to online marketing success.

If you’ve ever wanted to get a handle on online marketing and make a powerful impact on your business, here is your chance. With only ten places available for this seminar, participants learn from one of Australia’s best and awarded online marketing experts - Fred Schebesta.

You will get hands on experience that will improve you online marketing abilities and enable you to start marketing like a professional online marketing agency.

You can get a sneak preview of Fred Schebesta’s 11 Online Marketing Secrets Seminar below, watch Fred as he explains the fastest way to grow your email database:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ICjnlkeJMo&rel=1]

Learn Internet Marketing from Fred Schebesta, limited places available.

How would you feel if your website wasn’t accessible for a whole day?

Does the thought of that happening make you kind of sick in the stomach?

Well this is exactly what happened to a site I visit regularly (we’ll let them be anonymous to avoid embarrassment).

One evening their site got linked to by a major overseas newspaper and the incoming traffic all through the Australian night was 10x normal … until the site crashed under great stress … and took 24 hours to replicate and bring back up again on a different server.

Prevent this happening to you:

• Get your site optimized by a specialist internet marketing company – the techniques to make a website user and search engine friendly also make sure that is fast and efficient
• Make sure your web host can handle sudden unexpected peaks of traffic – ask them if they can guarantee your website will survive what’s known in the trade as the slashdot effect
• Monitor your website 24/7 and assign an IT manager with a pager/mobile which gets notified if the site goes down so they can react quickly.

Second Life Marketing Review

I was reading the Digital Media magazine that came with my B&T and noticed Hyro had setup a Second Life Recruitment Hub. So I have decided to provide you with a review of what I found.

Hyro’s Second Life Recruitment Hub Review
Firstly I am not a Second Life guru but would more place myself into the Noob demographic. I think this post might be quite interesting from the perspective of a marketer in some of the things to cover when marketing in Second Life. I struggled a bit trying to actually find the Hyro establishment. Its not listed on their press release where the actual coordinates of the Hyro Recruitment Hub were. I actually found where it was by reading a different Second Life blog.

Second Life convenient links that actually teleport your character directly to the place in question.

(BTW The Hyro Second Life Recruitment Hub coordinates are as follows. You need to have your Second Life application open at the same time.)

Whats inside?
So I really like whats inside the Hyro Recruitment Hub! Here is what’s listed in the index:

A picture of the index in the complex

1. Theatre Block
Contruction site - Something thats still being built.
Theatre - This is a big theatre with lots of seats to sit down in. Quite nice. There is a big ad on the wall saying “Heavy Mobile TV. Coming Soon”. I might have to revist to see what thats all about?

2. Conference Centre

Submit your application here. I struggled and couldnt quite work it out.

Recruitment Hub - This is the all famous place where you can submit your application. I couldnt figure out how to get the application onto my character. I consider myself to be fairly technically savvy but still a Second Life n00b so maybe there was a little trick to it. Perhaps, because none of the Hyro people were present they set it not to function?
The Space Station - This is a conference room with lots of seats and a table styled like a space station.
The Forest - This is a conference room with lots of seats and a table styled like a forrest. I didnt really bother going in here as it was the same as the other.
The Beach - This is a conference room with lots of seats and a table styled like a beach, I liked this one because of the lifesaver flags.

3. Showrooms
News & Awards - Some listings of the awards and recent news Hyro has received.
Web & Interactive - Some portfolio screenshots of work
Wireless & Mobile - Same as above.
Construction site - Something being built here.

4. Workshop
A place to meet with tables and chairs where you could submit your application for a job again. Again I didnt figure out how to get my application form.

This is a perspective of the different levels that are in the complex.

I decided to take a bit of a tour around and had some fun shooting my avatar around in the cannons. But because no one was there to enjoy it with me I left.

Conclusion
All and all an interesting experience and I learnt a bit about moving around in Second Life. Was super keen to get that application form but perhaps its just a bug they are fixing. I just went over to this castle near by and have found my first Second Life person to speak to. They are French so lets see how I go!

How to get your customers to make big waves with your FMCG brand?

What happens when you get your consumers to send you photos of them using your product? Well in Up and Go’s case they go nuts. Below is a screenshot of some of the photos NEW Up and Go Energize drinkers have been sending in to show how extreme they are.

Up and Go Energize giving extreme drinkers a voice

So how in the world can Up and Go get this to happen. Here are 4 rules to follow if you want to get user generated content from your advocates.

How to get User Generated Content from your FMCG Brand Advocates?

1. Ensure your brand is loved - If no one loves your brand your not going to get good User generated content, your going to get bad user generated content. If more than 5% of traffic in your niche go to YourBrandSucks.com you need to do something about it. Now, dont put your brand on show and let people shoot it down. Get your CEO on a blog to personally answer each question openly and honestly. If your brand is under heat right now and there are some customers who dont love you right now e.g. James Hardie(Killing people), Telstra (Poor share price), BHP (Too much uranium and digging up the earth), Ford (Too much pollution) or JetStar (Treating people like herd animals, hey, i dont feel like that on Virgin?? They make it fun!) stay away from this space.
2. Give them to tools - Make sure its easy and in laymens terms what you need to do in order to get my picture on the website. Assume I am a 2 year old and give me 1 simple function I need to do in order to make me famous.
3. Make sure you page can be viral - If your entire site is flash make sure there is a URL people can still forward to their friends. One of the drawbacks of pure flash websites is that its almost impossible to send someone a link to the content inside the flash to show somone else what you see. Even easier is to just give them a little button to tell someone else.
4. Choose your tribe of people you want interacting - Be selective and just get people who are super keen together. In Up and Go’s case we have the extremists. They are the kinda people who will go out there and wind surf one day and then go rock climbing in the afternoon. They will fly over to South America to climb a massive mountain that only 200 people have ever done. These are the people we have surrounding this brand and these are the ones who we want their content from because their peers will like it too.

What you been working on and whats coming up?

Heres some insights from my recent clients and what they are doing.

Search Engine Marketing for Business to Business Clients

Infra Corporation - These guys supply Help Desk and ITIL Service Management software. Its the kind of entreprise software you need when you have a lot of asset management and some serious help desk enquiries from all around your entreprise. Its an Aussie company and they actually work together with another one of my clients Integrated Research who do IP Telephony Monitoring software. I believe Infra actually supply their software to Integrated Research! We have been working on some serious Search engine marketing and optimisation and online marketing updates to convert more traffic.

New product Launch Coming Soon!

I have been working on a new product launch for Sanitarium. I can’t tell you what the product is you will have to wait until it launches. Its a real disruptive innovation and I think it will make quite a bit impact into the category they are entering! We are going to be doing some hardcore online marketing for this new product and really hit the grassroots level to build up ground swell. I will keep you posted on this as it will be a great case study and something to really learn from when launching a new FMCG product online.

Tourism Online Marketing

We have just started rebuilding the Visit Las Vegas Website (The Australian version) in conjunction with Gate 7 a great tourism marketing agency. The girls over at Gate 7 are absolutely wonderful. Their dedication to their clients is amazing! I love the buzz of their office, they are just such positive people!

NEW Online Marketing Consumer Campagin for CA

Our campaign for CA’s Vet anti-virus software has just launched! Tell me what you think of the creative. Its a great offer really.. getting the optimiser to speed up your hard disk and the anti-virus protection for 1 year for $99. I love the AJAX in there. I really like this landing page and might write a blog post about all the items on it that make it rock!

There is a massive discrepancy between the amount of advertising dollars going into Online Marketing and the amount of time people are spending consuming the medium. What kills me these days is watching TV and getting offensively advertised to. The key thing here is that the balance between the number of ads the TV stations can show to not piss their viewers off is so much lower than it used to be. Why is that? Its because we can now get the content for free online as opposed to putting up with the advertising. I wrote a post before about the brilliance of Myspace and how it has balanced the amount of advertising it shows compared with the value the users are getting. Its brilliant.

Checkout this discrepancy.

Where is the growth in Online Marketing going to come from?

Its coming from marketers talking to the audience which isnt getting blasted from advertising already.

Here are some interesting stats about Myspace usage courtesy of B and T.

The Australian version of popular social networking site MySpace claims more than 50% of its users are over the age of 25.

Research from Nielsen Netratings show that over 1.1 million MySpace Australia users are in the 24 to 34 year-old age demographic.

I think its interesting the demographic change. Although I am putting my foot in this and laying down my prediction that Myspace is a fad. I also think that too many people are wasting their time on it and that it will die a slow painful death just like AngelFire, Geocities and Friendster.

Sorry Myspace lovers, but its just my internet history that gives me this hunch.

A lot of people ask me what makes the business Freestyle Media different from other web design companies. I will tell you an analogy to explain this. Ask yourself right now and be brutally honest, Do you have a brochure website or is it a marketing tool? Have you just wacked up a site and hoped for the best. If you work with a web design company they will build you a website without a single regard for how you are going to get traffic.

“Web designers are builders NOT marketers.”

Its like if you get an engineer to build you a house. They dont care what it looks like that is the architects job. The engineer if they had their way would make the whole thing 1 story and plonk all of the rooms together to make them as structurally sound as possible. With your website you dont want the most technically sound website you want one that brings in the most traffic and makes the most sales. Get an online marketing agency to build your site if you are a marketer not a web design company nor an advertising agency.

3 quick ways to tell if you are working with an Online Marketing Agency or a Web Design company

1. No keyword recommendations - If your company isnt providing you with keyword recommendations before you build your website fire them. That is like building a super market and not knowing where the people live. If your site isnt setup for attracting visitors to your website from the beginning you will be forking out for retrofittings from search engine optimisers to make it attract visitors.
2. None of their websites rank well in the search engines - Browse their portfolio and see where the sites rank in the search engines. No rankings… fire them.
3. They can’t code in CSS and xHTML - If your agency cant code in CSS and xHTML fire them. There is no point coding in tables as opposed to CSS and xHTML as it will cost you the same amount. Choose the premium way to code and get the piece of mind that you won’t be retrofitting your site with SEO addons.

Freestyle Media number 1 spot for “Online Marketing Agency” in Google Australia

Redeveloping your website can be a real challenge when you assume your web designers and developers understand search engine marketing. Unfortunately this is not usually the case. Most designers are great at making pretty pictures and developers are great at making great technology. But pretty pictures and great technology don’t necessarily give you great search engine results. I have come across many designers and developers in my time and following are the main problems I encounter when building a site that you want to rank well in the search engines.

1. Too much Flash with keywords inside it – Websites with too much flash kill the opportunity to gain great results in the engines. The flash also contains all of the keyword text. This is exceptionally unfriendly to the search engine as there is no way to browse the text. The designer will tell you, “We will be using the latest technology in flash, you will be cutting edge!” I like flash but only moderate amounts used for promotion or product demonstrations.
2. No text – Sites that have little or just 1 paragraph of generic text. Google only reads text, pdf’s and word docs. The designer will usually tell you, “Your web design has visual impact because of all the flash.” Unfortunately it will have no impact with Google.
3. No Sitemap – There wasn’t a sitemap. Some developers will tell you that this is just old school and you don’t need it anymore. I assure you that adding a sitemap to your website will improve search results.
4. No web page theming – Firstly a definition, Web page theming is structuring a website into different sections with specific themes so that a search engine can interpret and rank/categorise the pages accordingly. The search unfriendly sites I see are structured in a manner that is great for human browsers and ignore search engines. I always think about the search engines and the user at the same time and develop a structure which brings about a happy medium. Developing your site into themes and topics allows you to deliver the best site for human and search engine browsers. The read the words and browse and the search engine can categorise your site and browse.

3 Ways to Avoid Developing your New Website into a Search Engine Nightmare

1. Check the designer and developers Competency of search engine marketing – Ask your web agency if they understand search engine marketing. All of them will say yes because you are talking usually to the main salesperson. Ask to see some result in the search engines of website they have redesigned. Type in the main keywords for the site and see where the site that was redesigned ranks. They are no good if:
1. No listings – They cant show you a listing
2. Non competitive terms – the terms which they used to show you results were just the brand name of the product and not a generic keyword. E.g. if they were showing you a Nike site and they typed in “Nike” that is no good. Instead if they typed in “sport shoe” and showed you number 1 listings, then you are on a winner.
2. Check that the Content Management System is Search Engine Friendly – Ask your agency what CMS(Content Management System) they use. Get them to show you examples of websites they have built using the CMS and what sort of rankings they have achieved in the search engines. A CMS system can make or baek your searhch engine results by the following things:
1. Too much junk in CMS – If the CMS is dumping huge amounts of content and code into the page, this can ruin your results since Google doesn’t understand code its looking for text.
2. URL formats not compliant – If the CMS formats the URL and filenames of pages with too many query strings e.g. (ThisGreatPage.aspx?id=pinkelephany&Page=ContactMyMum&Query=NotSearchFriendly) All of those query strings will clog up the search engine and it will assume you are just content spamming and treat each of your webpages as a single page. I.e. the search engine will chop off the querystring elements and just assume that there is one page there, even though the query string elements allow you to see different content.
Optimal website search strategy is to assign 2 -3 keywords per webpage
3. Structure your site for the engines – I know the pain you have gone through developing your sitemap and thinking through all of the content that you want the use to look at. What I want you now to do is look at your sitemap and think about all the content you want the search engine to look at. Key things to do:
1. Choose your keywords – First you need to figure out which keywords you are targeting. Your agency should be able to help you with this if you haven’t done any search engine marketing before.
2. Choose your high ranking pages – Since you know which keywords you are targeting, you now need to decide which pages you want to target these keywords and rank highly in the search engines. These will need to be specially developed and your internal linking needs to be structured to give these pages the highest number of backlinks.
3. Homepage vs Subpage organization keyword assignment – The strategy with keyword assignment for web pages is to choose 2 – 3 keywords per page. The normal trap people fall into is assuming their homepage will target all of the keywords. Your homepage needs to be treated just like another page it should have some main generic keywords assigned to it and just target those. (See diagram below)

Optimal strategy for Keyword assignment of website pages

Choosing a competent online marketing agency to build your website

If you are encountering any of the above problems with your current web agency I would suggest building your website with an Online Marketing Agency. The difference is that a web agency can build your site but an online marketing agency can save you money by building your website to be search engine friendly. Save yourself the cost of rebuilding your website and work with an agency that understands how to build a website that is search engine friendly. Contact Freestyle Media, a competent Online Marketing Agency (h
ttp://www.FreestyleMedia.com.au) or call Fred Schebesta on 02 9818 7300 to discuss your website requirements.

Who Else Wants to Learn Fred Schebesta’s Internet Market Secrets?

You now have the chance to register for my Online Marketing Course on the 28th of February! I am putting the seminar on again because of popular demand. Last seminar had 100 people attend and everyone who came up to me afterwards said, “I wish I heard your seminar before I started marketing online.” Here is what some of the people who attended have to say.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOqPaOgypCQ]
Murray Fay, Dore Achievement Centres

I do not want anyone to attend if they are not serious about taking action to market their business online. If you are not serious about online marketing leave this webpage too. I have a responsibility to the community of people who read this blog and that includes ensuring that everyone who is involved is serious and committed to online marketing.