Friday, August 29, 2008

Atacama Audio - Contract Won

St James Systems are pleased to announce that they have won the contract to look after the Atacama Audio website. The company aims to increase the profile of the Atacama company online and to increase the conversion rate of Atacama's companion site which sells its products.

The agreement sees St James Systems working with another of Leicester's largest manufacturers and comes as very good news.

St James Systems welcome Atacama's ambitious plans for their websites and look forward to helping them in any way they can.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The Assault on 'Party Products' - The High Seas Part 3 - The Press Release

A press release can be an important part of any PR campaign. It can open up your product or service to markets all over the world very easily. There are a number of ways of doing this including writing to local media outlets, writing to interest groups over the Internet, writing on your blog and sending a press release through an Internet portal.

In this instance we are using PRWeb, an online company who make press releases on your behalf. The cost of a submission is around $200 but, if you have the right product to sell, the coverage can be invaluable.

In the press release we have written, we have talked up the size of the Party Catalogue and that it does not rely upon advertising to gain its income.

Press releases must be written in a particular way so that the news media can quickly pick up what you have to say and so that your headline and a quick summary can be posted across the news and the web with the greatest of ease. Anyone interested in writing a press release would be welcome to contact us for advice.

it is always worth consulting with a professional before you send off your press release. At $200, you might be wasting your money and, with copy and content the most important considerations, you want to do it right.

The release is scheduled for 12.05AM PST. Wait & see what happens.

The Assault on 'Party Products' - The High Seas Part 2 - Lines of Attack

You may remember that we have been trying to get The Party Catalogue to the top of the search engines for the keyword Party Products. It's steady as she goes this week with the website sitting in the smae position but we have made a number of decisions.

We will be attempting to lift The Party Catalogue in 5 ways:

- Changes to the site
- Link building
- Social Networking and Social Bookmarking
- Article writing and article submission
- Good old PR

Each of these attempts will enhance the reputation of The Party Catalogue and, through the provision of well-written content, will help to deliver increased, targeted traffic in the long term.

Onsite changes will include a rewriting of the META data on the site (this is information that tells search engines about a particular webpage but remains hidden to viewers), a rewriting of the cop on the site and an increase of the copy on the front page and a restructuring of the site to ensure that the search engines focus on the fact that The Party Catalogue is a place that sells party supplies rather than anytihng else.

Link building will involve a campaign that will ask webmasters of sites in the gifts industry if they would consider linking to our site. Links act like votes in the search engines and each link on another person's site is an exit form their site and an entrance to yours - this is a very powerful tool.

Social media work will involve making the most of the new applications that the web is being put to. With over 90 million people on Facebook, with over 10 billion pieces of video media being viewed per month and with people quickly and easily communicating with each other in ways that do not involve the search engines, it is important to have a social presence.

Article writing is a way to enhance the reputation of your brand and to get targeted customers to visit your site. This is a matter of writing good content and finding good content partners.

PR is the art of figting a guerrilla war through the media to get the maximum exposure for the minimum of effort.

Over the next few weeks, you will find out how we use these tools to gain favourable positions for our clients. Stay tuned to find out more.


Friday, August 08, 2008

The assault on 'Party Products' - The High Seas Part 1

We thought you might be interested in a serialisation of how we mount an assault on the search engines. This might give you ideas about how to promote your own website as well as giving you a chance to gague our own success. We've been working with a company called The Party Catalogue recently and we've picked out a number of keywords that we want to see them rank for. For this serialisation, we've picked two keywords for the homepage, party products and party supplies.

We hope you enjoy reading about the rise & fall of the company on the high seas of Google & look forward to seeing what happens. We've done a bit of preliminary work on the website & the site has begun to show up - a Google UK search currently reveals position 85 for party supplies & 19 for party products.

Search Engine optimisation is shrouded in mystery and we aim to remove that mystery & we hope you'll be interested in the results. From our studies, we know that being on the front page of Google can mean getting five times as many visitors as being on the second page and so there is the potential for revenues to increase by 5 times. That said, the top spot on Google can have 3 times as much traffic as lower spots on the first page and so competition is fierce.



Some Cold, Hard Facts:

On average, there are 595 searches a day for the keyword party supplies and 160 for party products.

We are competing against 15,700,000 & 21,200,000 other sites respectively & so we're not doing too badly to start with.




If you'd like to help and you have a web page or a blog, please put the following code into it:



and lo, we might make a difference.

Female Voiceover - the site & the sounds

We have recently uploaded a new site for Louise Wilson Voice Imaging, a company specialising in providing voiceovers for corporate videos, e-learing courses, websites and on-hold marketing. You may well have heard Louise's voice but you're going to hear a lot more of it as time goes by.

The website aims to be simple and clean and to show Louise's breadth of experience. A full FAQ aims to answer many of the queries and problems that Louise has encountered in her work and aims to provide an informative resource to potential clients.

Testimonials are vital for any business and in LW Voice Imaging's case, they don't come much better as she has worked for a number of high profile clients.

Finally, there is an audio showreel, which showcases Louise's talents and works as a 'greatest hits' for her voiceovers and which gives her customers an ideal chance to 'try before the buy'.

We hope you enjoy it and welcome your comments.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Cuil - the fallout

As with every young pretender that promises much, obscurity is an ever-present threat. The naysayers and detractors are waiting in the wings.

Part of the reason for the failure of a new search engine is the symbiotic relationship that many companies and search engine optimisers have with Google. Google gets 60% of the searches and so those who want to get the best from their websites will focus on Google and encourage people to use Google.

Another part is the failure of the search engine. Although the verdict is still out on Cuil (pronounced 'Cool') there are whisperings that it's not all it's cracked up to be and that hubris reigns at their Palo Alto HQ. Sarah Carey, a journalist and friend of Cuil CEO, Tom Costello, was somewhat taken aback by the profligacy of the operation being amazed that the company pays for muffins, drinks, a personal trainer and a gym membership for everyone. Dragons will be rotating in their dens at hearing this. With only $33 million to play with, can such expenses be justified in a fight against multi-billion dollar search engines?

Time will tell for Cuil but things don't look good already.