Mike from Flantoons exceeeded our expectations again with this fab cartoon – we hope you like it as much as we did!

Part of what I love about my job is that no single day is the same as any other – because we have a good range of related services, I can be working on quite a few things throughout the day, and chatting with many different customers and associates, as well as trying to keep order in the offices both here in France and in the UK!

Today, among other things, I’ve been working on:

• Article Marketing for a company providing a solution to cellulite – we’re all going to get it girls, so it’s nice to know how to get rid of it. And I know where I’ll be going for cellulite reduction!
• Article and Blog Marketing for an eco friendly toy company – can’t say much more about this one at the moment but it’s certainly been eye opening!
• Constructing a Wordpress blog site for a client who specialises in software used in Accounting – I really love how Wordpress gives control to the client, in that they can update as and when they want, and there’sa plug in for every eventuality! (I really should get around to putting the blog design packages on the website!)

We’re also restructuring social media marketng services at the mo, and that’s coming along nicely, so I’m quite excited about it.

It’s nice to see the Twitter interview requests coming in – 3 so far this week, which I’m looking forward to doing and will definitely talk about more in the near future!

a) Know we’re doing well for our clients

and

b) Show potential clients that we are as good as we say we are.

So it was nice to come across this blog by Emily Cagle Communidations – Ten Steps To Better Customer Testimonals.

In the post, she talks you through getting and using testimonials, with the following steps:

1. Ask promptly
2. Ask personally
3. Name names
4. Get permission
5. Tell a story
6. Illustrate the decision making process
7. Keep it short
8. Use them creatively
9. Keep them current
10. Be honest

We’ll certainly be taking a few of her pointers on board, as should you if you want to include customer testimonals on your website!

You’ve submitted to the list of free press release sites you downloaded from NikkiPilkington.com.

You’ve found a list of PR people and emailed your release to them.

But you’re still not being covered.

Want to know why?

My guess is it’s one of the reasons on Kickstart’s list of Reasons You’re Not Getting Media Coverage.

People come to us for online press release submissions quite alot, and more often than not we turn them away for one of those reasons. Read, then think about how YOUR press release can stand out in the crowd.

I do realise that in some cases you will need to link to something that is stupidly long – and that’s why Tiny URL was born.

Tiny URL www.tinyurl.com enables you to shorten web addresses – simply tell it the address you want to point to and it will give you a new, much shorter address for it – easier for your web visitor and your newsletter reader and better on your formatting.

Add line breaks at around 65 characters – that way you can be sure it will fit in the window of most email readers.

The last thing you want is people deleting your newsletter because it is difficult to read!

Not only do newsletters allow you to position yourself in front of potential clients on a regular basis, they also give you valuable archiveable content for your website on a regular basis.

Running a newsletter can be as simple as sending it out from Outlook, or there are resources such as Constant Contac www.constantcontact.com that will help you to run the whole thing smoothly.

There are all sorts of reasons why people use image maps, and navigation is just one of them, but if you don’t offer an alternative then Google and other search engines will just turn around and ignore your site.

If you must use an image map, also offer a text and HTML version of the navigation or links to give the search engine spiders something to index and follow.

Is it obvious what you are selling / offering / promoting?

If I don’t know that you can solve my problem, whether it is a business or a consumer one, how do I know if I am interested in your site?

You don’t have long to grab my attention – use bold text, large text and headlines to let me know I’m in the right place.

Clients say to me all the time: “But Nikki, we have nothing to add – what can we possibly write about and add to the site? Everything we do is right there!”

And I can guarantee that within 5 minutes I have thought of 5 or 6 things they could add to their site to increase their content, visibility, and ‘sticky’ factor (the amount of time people spend on their website)

Recent examples:

- the localised cleaning company that added pages to their site for
customers to leave them testimonials – they had content added by their
clients and had to do little or nothing themselves

- the telemarketing client that adds an article a month about the areas
people find difficult in telemarketing; cold calling, closing, getting past
gatekeepers

- the baby goods affiliate site that now trawls the net for review of the
products they sell and adds them to the site frequently

- the software company that regularly adds support documentation and
FAQs

- the chauffeur company that adds ‘holiday checklists’ and more tot heir
site as often as possible

All of these clients came to me saying they had ‘nothing to add’. If you’re thinking you have ‘nothing to add’, I’ll happily rise to the challenge – email me at nikki@nikkipilkington.com and I’ll take a look at your site and make some
suggestions.