Seeing the below in my profile screen inside Google + has made the little +1 button make a whole lot more sense and seem that much more of an important addition to your website. All your +1′s while not only having an impact on search results*, will show up in the streams and profiles of everyone using Google +.

So, how do I add it to my website?

It’s super simple, visit the +1 Webmaster’s page and follow the simple instructions. Basically you’ll need to add some code (a script tag and another custom tag where you want it displayed) to your websites html.
NB. You’ll need to be able to edit a page’s html source so if you need some help, contact your website developers (or us) for some help.

For more info about the +1 Button – Watch the intro

The Interactive Tour is also quite cool and worth a look.

* From the +1 FAQ

The +1 button and search results

+1 helps people discover relevant content—a website, a Google search result, or an ad—from the people they already know and trust. Adding the +1 button to your pages lets users recommend your content, knowing that their friends and contacts will see their recommendation when it’s most relevant—in the context of Google search results.

When a signed-in Google user is searching, your Google search result snippet may be annotated with the names of the user’s connections who’ve +1′d your page. If none of a user’s connections has +1′d your page, your snippet may display the aggregate number of +1′s your page has received.

More FAQ’s

What do you think, do you think Google has come up with a decent answer to Facebook? Will you add the +1 button alongside the Facebook Like & Tweet buttons?

P.S I’m out of invites so sorry, you’ll have to wait or find someone else….

P.P.S – I know, we haven’t even added the +1 button to our own blog yet but it’s coming don’t worry… be sure to +1 our home page though…

Recently, Bluewire Media has claimed the #1 spot from John Hacking, who has dropped from #1 to page 2 (any ideas why?). If you looked at the home page of the Bluewire Media website however, you might be confused as to how we’ve made it to the number one spot. There’s no heading saying “Web Design Brisbane”, the words “Web Design” and “Brisbane” appear only once each in the browser title tag, and they’re not together or near the start. In fact, the phrase “Web Design Brisbane” or “Brisbane Web Design” doesn’t even appear anywhere on the page.

Compare this with the companies who share spots 2-10, most of whom start their titles with “Web Design Brisbane”, and you’ll be left to wonder why Bluewire Media is even on the first page.

Well, if you know anything about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you’ll know that inbound links (links from someone else’s site back to your site) play a huge factor in getting your site to rank higher in search results. A quick scan of the number of links pointing to each of the top 10 websites reveals that Bluewire Media has roughly 24,000 inbound links, while the rest of the top 10 have between 1,000 and 10,000 inbound links (with a couple of exceptions).

Search results for "Web Design Brisbane" using SEOBook's SEO Toolbar to display link data

Fair enough, you might say, until you hear that Bluewire Media does not actually offer SEO services directly (apart from ensuring the websites we build are search engine friendly, we refer our clients to our SEO partners, Reload Media, for all their other SEO needs). How then, have we managed to get twice or three times the number of links that our competitors have, most of whom offer SEO and linkbuilding services?

Well, at Bluewire Media, we’re big believers that the best way to market your business online is to give something of value away for free. Our free Web Strategy Planning Template, co-created with international keynote speaker and best-selling author David Meerman Scott has been downloaded and used by thousands of businesses worldwide to help them define their web strategy.

By giving this template away for free, we’ve managed to not only get our logo and contact details into the offices of hundreds of companies Australia wide, but also to get hundreds (and eventually thousands) of links from webmasters and bloggers who have found it useful and wanted to share it with their audiences, and in doing so have helped us achieve our number one ranking.

We try to recommend to most of our clients that they write an e-book or similar and give it away for free, but many of them, being business-people, just can’t get their head around the concept; and it’s often hard to think of all the right arguments to convince them on the spot. Here, I’ve outlined here what happens when you give away for free something other people thing is pretty valuable.

The process:

1. You publish something (let’s call it a widget) that people would pay for (because it’s that good), but instead you give it away for free. It could be a free e-book, an online tool or app, a printable template or checklist (like ours), or even just a great blog post!
2. People read or use your widget and find it valuable. It’s so good that they can’t resist telling their friends and followers about it using social media (especially if you make it easily shareable). This spreads your brand name and increases your reputation.
3. If your free widget is good enough, eventually it will create enough of a social media storm that people will start blogging about it (hello backlinks!).
4. People who read those blog posts will then know about you and your free widget, and if they find it valuable enough, they’ll tell their own friends and followers.
5. This cycle goes on and on while your brand name is being spread further and further and your reputation is skyrocketing.
6. You now have a first-class reputation, and your customers come to you ready to buy your products/services because they’ve read about you, seen your work and trust your expertise.

But why does it have to be free?

Making your widget free means that when someone comes across it, they don’t have to deliberate over whether they can afford it or whether it will be worth the money, they don’t have to get up and walk across the room to get their credit card details (don’t under-estimate the laziness of the general population), and they have no reason to trust that your widget will do what you claim it will. If it’s free, however, there is absolutely no reason why someone wouldn’t use/read/download it right then and there and be blown away by how valuable it is. Basically, by making it free, you’re allowing it to spread faster and further.

Want to learn more?

[Edit: Lesley has linked to an excellent video in the comments. If you're interested to know more, please have a look]

David Meerman Scott is a thought leader in this field, and has some great books that really help clarify exactly why you should give something away for free. I recommend buying and reading his book ‘World Wide Rave’ (we’ve got some copies in the office if you’d like to borrow one) and downloading some of his free e-books (yes that’s right, he practices what he preaches).

Are you convinced?

A lot of people will remain un-convinced, especially if they think they’re in an industry that this doesn’t apply to. Really though, if you have a product or service and you have a website, there’s a way that it can work for you: you just need to be creative.

If you’re having a hard time thinking of a way to do this in your industry, leave a comment explaining your situation and I’ll think of one for you!

Sadly there’s no magic rubric for deciding whether an in-house social media workforce, a social media consultant, or an agency will best be able to meet your particular business needs. Like almost every business decision, it depends on your business’s goals, budget and particular situation.

There are, however, definite pros and cons to each approach. We’ve highlighted some of the most important factors to consider for each style of social media team. Read More…

Calendaring Your Social Media Marketing Content – Hubspot
From the many Website Optimization Webinars I’ve done over the past six months, I’ve signed up for many Facebook company pages, and I follow tons of people on Twitter. I realize there are those companies – or people – that overkill on the posting and those that I never hear from. The over-killers tend to post information about themselves, and to be honest, after a while I don’t even read their content. Then there are those whose information is consistently valuable. I may not have time to read everything they send, but whenever I do, I’m rewarded. Read More…

5 New Ways to Market Your Brand on Facebook – Mashable
With 500 million members and growing, Facebook offers brands and marketers direct contact to the largest pool of online users on the web. After all, social media is fast becoming more popular than e-mail on mobile devices and more convenient for news consumption than the daily paper.

In recent weeks and months, Facebook has introduced and improved a number of on-site tools that sage brands and businesses can use to better market themselves. Even the simplest of tools such as “Likes” and photos could serve as a catalyst for a viral network effect. Of course, there’s also opportunity to be had with more calculated efforts around Place Pages, Questions and the New Groups. Read More…

Should Your Content Aim for Traffic or Conversion? – Copyblogger
Which articles attract reader attention, bringing you more traffic, more tweets and Stumbles, more eyeballs on the page?

Which articles convert, bringing you more subscribers and sales?

And how do you roll out a strategy that maximizes the twin impact of attraction and conversion? Read More…

7 Deadly Assumptions of Online Marketing Success – Open Forum
It’s not really enough to have a website. These days you must create a total web presence, but you’ve also got to create strategy based on overall objectives.

This is another way of saying unless your online activity ends in a sale you’ve failed in the game of online marketing. There are countless ways to fail on the quest to convert a pair of peering eyes into a paying client. Read More…

Jeff explains that the sales process has evolved from selling your product (era 1.0), to responding to your prospect’s problem and solving it with them (era 2.0), to what is now the sales era 3.0.

Sales era 3.0 recognises that most of your prospects can’t even define their problem or may not even know they have one! Because of this, it is very difficult for them to understand where your solution delivers value. Also, as the solutions become more complex, prospects don’t have the expertise, the experience and the criteria to evaluate the relevance and usefulness of your solution to their business. And that’s when you end up in a price war for the part that they do understand!

Check out this video for a 3 min explanation from Jeff Thull himself (interview courtesy of Verne Harnish):

These are some pretty daunting starting assumptions when it comes to selling your product… So Jeff offers a few really critical insights in his book:

1. You MUST have a “value hypothesis”
   You need to be able to analyse your prospect’s business and, based on your experience and industry knowledge, realistically assess the value for a prospect. He really stresses the point that if the value isn’t there then you’re wasting the prospect’s time and importantly, your own.
2. Single decision makers are obsolete.
   Decisions on complex solutions require buy-in from all of the impacted business functions. Each of these people needs to understand the value for their part of the business as well as the overall value to the company. There may be one person signing the cheque, but they’ll need all of those others to be driving the change and the implementation.
3. Value does not end at the implementation!
   True masters of the complex sale, are absolutely committed to ongoing “value extraction” for their customers. How many times have you heard about the dream solution being sold, then the implementation simply not measuring up and everyone feeling let down by the experience? Businesses have an ongoing commitment to help their customers extract all the value they possibly can, in a true win/win situation.

In terms of your web strategy, you need to consider:

1. How can I assist my prospects and customers in calculating the value of my offer on line?
2. How can I ensure that there is useful and relevant information for all of the impacted business functions?
3. How can I continue to serve my existing customers in such a way that they are able to continue to extract value from my solution?

To start your own web strategy, download our 1 page web strategy plan tool or enquire through our website.

Zap.

OK, so maybe on that occasion my comment wasn’t necessary, but I’m going to take a punt and risk the “blindingly obvious” again…

The first priority of your web strategy has to be people. Your website, Facebook page, email campaign, tweets, that’s all important but it’s still secondary. It’s all about your people.

Who?

At the beginning it’s about figuring who it is you need to be talking to. What are they like? What positions do they typically hold? How do they operate? David Meerman Scott suggests naming your “buyer personas” first to make them more human, more real, than just a “prospect”. Straight out of John Jantsch’s “Duct Tape Marketing” comes the idea of then vividly describing them.

For the sake of this post let’s call this persona Frank.

What?

Doesn’t sound so people oriented does it? But there are two parts to the “What”.

Firstly: What problems do you solve for Frank? What are Frank’s issues that you can address? What keeps Frank up at night? If you’re not solving his problems, then he probably won’t be interested…

Secondly: What actions would you like Frank to take? Would you like him to sign up to your email newsletter, enquire, buy, follow you on twitter or watch your videos? You need to  understand this so you can being to assess the success of your marketing.

Why?

And why… Why will Frank take that action? Why will he want your product/service over someone else’s? Why should you be Frank’s first choice? So now it becomes a matter of convincing him. Frank will take that action if he believes that you’ll be able to solve his problem. Here’s a quick list of things that might help persuade Frank that you’re the one:

1. Authority - Qualifications, experience, presentations, industry commentary, articles, blog posts, whitepapers, books, forum contributions – in a word – content.
2. Guarantees - maybe you can offer a money back guarantee or a response time guarantee or an uptime guarantee.
3. Testimonials - written and video. Not doctored, not scripted, not faked. The real deal. Real people saying real things that will help Frank to be convinced.

If you can answer these questions with reasonable clarity then you have the core of your strategy. When it comes time to execute, that’s when you start looking at how best to use your website, your social media, your email marketing.

Workshop

We’re in the process of putting some tools together that will tie a whole lot of these concepts together into what (we hope!) will be a useful reference for you. Actually we’re going to be conducting web strategy workshop next Tuesday (27th of April). It’s called: “Your web strategy and topping Google”.

For more about prioritising people in your web strategy, call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

It’s a statistical phenomenon that has been popularised by Chris Anderson to describe the impact of the web on the business world. I’ve just finished reading the updated version of his book called “The Long Tail” (surprise surprise!).

To quickly illustrate the “Long Tail” concept, I’ll use Amazon.com – one of Chris’s examples in the book.

Amazon.com sells books (and many other things, but we’ll leave at that for the moment). It sells the bestseller titles (the “head” – green in diagram) that you’ll find in any of your local bookstores, but it also sells thousands of other titles (“the long tail” – yellow in diagram) that you will not be able to find in a store because:

1. Stores have limited shelf space and therefore have to allocate this space to books they think will do well
2. Demand for the book was small in comparison to the bestsellers (maybe it wasn’t fantastically written, maybe the topic was too specific, maybe the marketing of the book was terrible etc…)

Why then, is Amazon selling loads of these lesser known titles, the ones that hadn’t enough demand or were too specific for the book stores?

1. Amazon is not limited by shelf space because all of its inventory is online and directly links to publishers’ and distributors’ shelves rather than its own.
2. The web has enabled them to reach a market size that is simply impossible for a physical bookstore. All of a sudden the small demand that made it unfeasible in the market size of a physical store with restricted space, becomes feasible online with a world wide audience.

So that is the concept of the long tail. Thousands upon thousands of options, all previously unavailable to you, now only the touch of a button away… Feeling daunted?

The antidote for feeling daunted is one of the really interesting ideas from “The long tail” – the importance of the “filter“.

If you now have thousands of book options, how on earth do you decide what you would like to read? How do you sort through “the junk”? (Remembering that your “junk” might be your friend’s “treasure”!) How do you find something that is useful and relevant?

That is where search, social media and recommendations become so important.

What I love about Amazon is that when I login, it provides me with a whole host of recommendations filtered by what I’ve bought in the past and related purchases from all of Amazon’s customers.

By allowing me to search I can filter my results by topic, author, title, price, relevance, age of book…

By providing uncensored comments of others, I can filter my options by gathering other’s opinions and not just what a publicist thought.

I love this concept of filtering!!

When you are daunted by information overload, how do you filter it? If your customers are daunted by too many options, how do you filter it for them?

If you’re selling products, then learn from Amazon – they know what they’re doing.

If you’re in the service industry though, how is it relevant?

Here’s what I think:

Whether you are an accountant, lawyer or web strategist, your role is to be the filter. To take all of the inputs of your experience, knowledge and client circumstances and make the best recommendations and give the best advice you possibly can. Every client has a long tail of options – your role is to filter these options and help your client find the most useful and relevant for their situation.

The role of the trusted advisor is now very much the role of the filter.

It will be really interesting to follow this “filtering” concept. If anyone has any thoughts around it, please leave a comment or get in contact.

Thanks.

Sydney managed web strategy: Having trouble cutting through all the options on the web? Give Bluewire Media a call on 1300 258 394.

Here’s Guy to explain the concept for you and how it might apply to your business:

How might it apply to your web strategy?

So the key message: your effort might be better spent reducing waste rather than adding value.

To find the waste (especially time – both your and your customers’/prospects’) in your web strategy, start asking some of these questions:

1. Data – Where in your business do you double handle data?
2. Customer service – Who answers the same questions day in day out? What are those questions? Can they be put online for your customers to self serve in a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list?
3. Qualifying leads – How long are the forms on your website? Do you need/use all of the information? Are the mandatory fields wasting your prospects’ time? (Guilty. We had feedback from a prospect on this particular issue last week and we’re in the process of resolving it now)
4. Website content – What is your most popular content? What is not visited at all? How much of your copy is adding value? Are the key words bolded or made easier to read?
5. Ecommerce – How simple is your shopping process? Are there steps that could be removed? Do you make it easy for people to come back and purchase again?
6. Email marketing – Do you know what information your audience enjoys? Which articles are most frequently read and clicked through? Which ones are of no interest at all?

The key principle of LEAN is that you’ll get more return for your time and effort by focussing on reducing the 99% of your time that is wasted, rather than trying to increase the 1% of value add.

With this philosophy in mind, go back to your web strategy and start looking at the areas of waste to reduce as much as you look at the areas to multiply.

Managed web strategy: If you think you’re not wasting any effort in your web strategy, then please call us and let us know what you’re doing! If you think there might be ways we can help to streamline what you’re doing though, then try us on 1300 258 394.

There’s my website, Facebook page, YouTube channel, iPhone app, email, Flickr, Twitter, articles, blog posts… The list seems endless sometimes! Now, though I feel like I am starting to get a better understanding.

Back at high school, I remember sitting in classrooms sometimes listening, sometimes not. I knew I should be listening, but that didn’t mean I actually listened. I think of the different teachers I had and the ones that truly stood out have 1 thing in common.

Variety.

My best teachers often employed different methods to grab my attention and help me learn. They used a mixture of routine (eg weekly quizzes – biology) and surprise (eg a spontaneous game of petanque on the school oval – French). They stood in front of the class and lectured us as a group on simultaneous equations and then monitored our individual progress on solving x-3 = y, x + 2y = 30 (answer at the end of the post!). Some lessons would be by audio tapes, other lessons by educational videos, others with handouts. And of course there were always experiments to be done.

How does this tie back to your web strategy?

At the heart of good web strategy you are trying to solve problems for your audience. Knowing, like teachers know, that everyone learns in different ways means it is your responsibility to present your information and solutions to those problems with as much variety as you can. This doesn’t mean you have to take on every possible option immediately, but keep in mind how your audience would most like to learn.

Whether it is by video, audio, download, article, photo or interactive application ask yourself:

1. How can I make it easy for my audience to learn?
2. How can I cater for their different styles?

Then you’ll be able to start making decisions about your web strategy and how you share your content.

Answer: (x = 12, y = 9)

Managed web strategy: If you’re wondering how to solve the simultaneous equations of your web strategy, please call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

Radiohead are widely regarded as one of the most successful rock bands in the world both critically and in terms of popularity.

Coming into their most recent album InRainbows, they had completed their contract with the record company. Their contract had pre-dated iTunes so the band had received no royalties from iTunes downloads for their previous albums at all… It was time to do something different.

Rather than going down the old path of printing CDs and distributing them, they opted to release the album on their website. This isn’t entirely unusual. What was truly different was that they let their users pay what they thought the album was worth. No limits – you could pay nothing if you wanted.

Wow.

While the exact figures aren’t available, some websites have estimated over a million albums were downloaded and that the band made millions with this strategy. Thom Yorke, the lead singer, in an interview with Wired magazine said: “In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together…”

Why did this work so well for Radiohead?

In my mind, the lesson here is the importance of mutual trust online.

Radiohead had an extraordinary track record for delivering outstanding albums, so the fans were prepared to take a punt – without listening to the music – to pay for it. Equally, Radiohead trusted the fans to respect their music and so handed over the control for payment to the user.

One of the goals of good web strategy is to build that long term trust that was so important to Radiohead’s success.

So ask yourself:

1. How are you building trust with your fan base and the online community?
2. Are you thinking about what your customer would like?
3. Are you prepared to hand over control to your user and empower them to make choices?

Regardless of what you think of the band, the web strategy worked for them because it:

• Was interesting (no one had done the “pay what you think it’s worth” approach before in music and hence generated a huge amount of publicity)
• Was relevant (it was the first album they’d released in 4 years)
• Made it very easy for the customers to go and buy (allowing them to control the price)

If you manage your web strategy with these principles in mind, then you’ll be on the right track.

Managed web strategy Sydney, Brisbane – To find out more about our managed web strategy services, please call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

 
Impressive: could you play Yann Tiersen on 6 iPhones?