But first why would you want or need to write an article? Well in this day and age people love to get free information and you want people to use your free information before anyone else’s. People read articles to gain experience saving time, money and gain more knowledge in a subject. Of course for you it is a means of both helping people & becoming an expert in the field.
A common mistake is to think that you need to write the next best selling book, this is just not the case. As long as your information is good quality and the text is clear in its intentions you should be able to build a good audience over time. Another mistake is using an article directly as an ad for a product or service that you sell; only put these types of links in a resource box not the article. Ok so back to how do you get a topic for an article, well here are some of the quickest routes I’ve found to guide you:
1. Ask your potential and actual clients for topics or questions they have about what you provide, what they don’t understand or how something works.
2. Do a basic mind map of all the things that interest or is related to what you do.
3. Write about something you need to or have learned that could help others.
4. Do you read other articles and think to yourself “but you’re missing...” or “I don’t agree with that viewpoint” then use that emotional response to write your own article on the subject.
5. Look for trends in the marketplace or in the news.
So you have your topic but what style do you want for it. There are 4 types of articles that tend to hold true throughout the internet:
1. Top 10 lists - Usually consisting of an intro, the list and an ending, but it can be any combination.
2. Tips - Usually consisting of a short article of no more than about 400-500 words that has a problem and then how to solve it.
3. How To - Usually this is a teaching styled article and can range from a simple paragraph on a blog to a manual.
4. Assessment - Usually consisting of interactive parts to the article like checklists or do A, B then C analyse the results. You can even provide answers on your own site or in a continuing article.
Ok so you have created many different types of articles with the information above, here are few tips of how you can get more mileage out of them.
1. Take your top ten lists and write an article about each one, you now have a potential 11 articles from just one top ten list.
2. Is one of your articles on the big side? You might find that you actually have several articles on the one topic. Go over the article and see if you can split it up under different titles.
3. Does your “How To” go on and on and on, well do it as a series, part 1, 2, 3 etc... This should keep people coming back for more and is a great one to setup for when you go on holiday or are particularly busy.
4. Your assessment style articles are very much in the basic form of a workshop, could this be a potential for phone conferencing or room booking? It also helps you to get in touch with your audience and potential customers.
One last quick but very important tip, try to choose an interesting title.
So there you go that should keep you going for a while, I will create more articles like this as I follow my own advice by expanding on some of the information you have just read.
Alan Fair
Contact Multimedia
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( 2.9 / 34 )Ok so you want to get your site in search engines, but first consider exactly how important the results are to you. Why? Well you need to decide how much time and energy you can afford to spend on SEO and what results you expect to get.
Not all companies require a number 1 spot and some companies don’t really need to be searchable online – really you ask? Yes really! You might find that you sell a service that responds better to word of mouth or advertising in the local papers, so think about your target market and if they would search for you online or elsewhere.
If however your business relies on SEO then be prepared to spend lots of time and money on getting to the number one spots.
Below is a few Top SEO Tips that will get you started on the right path to Search Engine goodness.
Inbound Links
Get as many quality inbound links as possible to your website, how do you determine if it’s a quality link – well simply make sure the site is relevant to your business or you have resources that they can use (Forms, Tips, Articles, Downloads etc…).
If the company has a high page ranking (install Google toolbar to get this) then it’s a good chance that it will help your site ranking. Make sure the site you’re being linked from has a high level of visitors that would potentially click through to your site.
Basic Listings
Getting a basic listing isn’t difficult, go to the targeted search engine, type in website submission and you should find in the top 5 results that Search Engines simple form that you fill in.
Is your product unique?
If your product is unique then you’ll find that it is easier to get up the search engines simply because there is less competition, but you need to make sure that the product or service keywords on your site are the ones that people actually would type in to find you.
You might have to do a PR campaign to get people to know your product or service, but do the site first as you’ll miss out on all the good work you would have done to get recognised.
Keywords
How do you determine the correct keywords to use on your site, simply follow the 3 bullet points below to get you started:-
- Will people search for the product or service you are offering on your site? If not you’ll want to stop here and try other marketing methods.
- Ok so they are searching for you, now you need to figure out what words or phrases they would use to describe your product or service. Ask people to describe what you have, you may be surprised to learn words that you would never have thought of as you are too close to your company’s product or service or relay a technical description when you customers aren’t that knowledgeable.
- Now you have your keywords type them into search engines and see who your competition is. This will also let you see how difficult it may be to get up to the top of the listings. It will also let you see how they do their text to get good rankings.
Here are two really good tools to help with keyword searches, and the best bit, it’s completely free! We will add more links to our resources category as we come accross them.
- Adwords keyword tool
- Yahoo keyword tool
One you may need your web designer for
This tip requires a little bit of HTML knowledge but is a vital step in your basic SEO campaign. You need to make sure the following include your keywords as much as possible but still of course make sense to your visitor.
1. Page Title – This should be short (5-6 words) and describe the page content accurately. When possible try to use keywords here.
2. Metatags – The meta description and keyword tags should contain the main keywords and a short description of what is on the page. This is for Search Engines when they come and visit your website.
3. Heading Tags – Ensure you use heading tags for heading in the body of the site. Add keywords to them to help your page rankings. Use only 1 <h1> tag per page if possible and then filter down to the <h2>, <h3> etc… if you need to add more.
4. Page Text – This text should contain keywords and phrases that people would search for. Don’t repeat keywords for the sake of it your text still has to make sense to your reader, Spread them around without making it obvious. Any text that is contained on an image will not be picked up by Search Engines.
I hope that these tips serve you well and that you have a better understanding of SEO and how important it actually is to you.
Alan Fair
Contact MultiMedia
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( 3 / 205 )We will add to this list as we find new sites that help with SEO.
Adwords keyword tool
Yahoo keyword tool
SEOMOZ
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( 3 / 234 )Contact Multimedia have just won a contract to work with Sedley Place on a Gleneagles Presentation Project.
We can't wait to get into the project as it will be our first full Actionscript 3.0/Flex hybrid project that's specifically for offline use.
We'll post a link if we can when the project is completed so you can see what we create.
Until the next post...
Contact Multimedia
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( 3 / 196 )So what can happen should you fall victim to a spoof/fake email, well you could lose all the files on your computer or worse all the money out of your bank account.
Here are Contact MultiMedia’s top tips to spot a spoof/fake email so that you won’t fall foul to anything that isn’t legit or cause your computer to crash.
1. Most companies that you have an account with will usually address you by name and not with something like “Dear Paypal Member” or “To all our Members”. If it has a greeting like that the first thing to do is make sure you don’t click on any links in that email.
2. These types of emails always have some critical timeframe that you need to get back to them by. This is another tactic to stop you thinking rationally about the email in front of you.
3. The “from email” field is not an indication that it is from the actual company. This field is unfortunately very easy to fake, so don’t use it as a measure of trust that the email is legit.
4. Spoof emails can often have misspellings or bad grammar. Why would they do that? Well they want to avoid your spam filters and that may be the only way to do it.
Spam filters that are updated regularly will be alerted to the latest spoofs going round the internet and will do their best to protect you by eliminating the chance that you might click on the email. So update your antivirus and spam filtering software on a regular basis.
5. Attachments are another of the spoof emails favourites. Never click on an attachment unless you know the person.
You can look up the name of the attachment in a search engine like Google. It may be that someone else has fallen foul to it and posted up a warning on the internet (you can look up text based emails as well in this way).
If that doesn’t work and you think the attachment is something that might be important right click on the attachment save it to the desktop. Then update your antivirus and scan the file. Beware that this is NOT a guarantee that the file is safe, but you increase the chances that it could be ok if you really do think you need to look at the contents of the file.
6. So what do you do about the links within the email if you think the email is legit? Well if you hover the mouse over the link it will come up with a tool tip telling you what the actual link is. Yes the text you see isn’t always the actual link that you are taken to.
The link may even contain part of the companies web address or email address, but if you look carefully you will find that it isn’t exact. Sometimes the link is just a “View the details here” or “Click here to login” these lead you into a false sense of security as you will have seen these types of links on many websites before.
For example a recent spoof email that I received was for PayPal it had the following text:-
* I have removed the dangerous links from the email.
<---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Dayne Jackson has just sent you 68.00 USD with PayPal
From: PayPal Service [service@paypal.co.uk]
To: alanfair@contactmultimedia.co.uk
This email confirms that Dayne Jackson has sent you $68.00 USD with PayPal.
To complete this payment, you must accept or refuse it within 30 days by clicking here.
If you do not accept or refuse this payment within 30 days, it will be cancelled and the funds will be returned to Dayne Jackson's account.
-----------------------------------
Payment Details
-----------------------------------
Amount: $68.00 USD
Transaction ID: 9D373904HC6937454
View the details of this transaction online
This payment is pending because it was sent in a currency in which you do not currently hold a balance.
Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team
----------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 1999-2006 PayPal. All rights reserved. PayPal (Europe) Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom as an electronic money institution. PayPal FSA Register Number: 226056.
PayPal Email ID PP280
<---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->
No I don’t know a Dayne Jackson or why this person would be sending me $68.00 USD. At first you think WOW great $68 and you might click because if you don’t do it now you lose out on the money.
You have to ask yourself
- Do I know who they are
- Why are they sending me money
- What is the money for
- How do I check that this is real
The actual links in the email took you a link that looked like the following address:http://86.131.4/~www.paypal.com/webscr/cmd/login_run/
I have deleted some of the details in the link just in case someone tried to go to the link.
The link above is a typical example of a link that you really don’t want to click. The numbers just after http:// is actually directing you to a computer that has nothing to do with paypal whatsoever. It may even take you to a page that looks identical to the paypal site (it’s not difficult to copy a website, especially these days). Again they do this to let you think it’s an official site and then when you start entering in details they have you.
These links will also usually include things like the @ symbol or letters swapped with a number “1” instead of “L” or even other words like www.cmmc-secure.co.uk
So if you receive an email from a website/company that you do have an account with the best policy is to open up a new browser window, then log into your account and check for the details in there. If the information from the email isn’t there you can always email the company to find out for sure.
Sometimes bigger companies provide an email to forward the spoof email to for example paypal have spoof@paypal.com. This will help them warn customers and also track where the email came from and hopefully put the person behind it in jail.
I hope all the information above helps you to avoid what could be a very stressful and unfortunate situation.
Alan Fair
Contact MultiMedia
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