Creative strategies to market your business online
Grow Your Profile by Blogging
For the Sydney Writers’ Centre, which offers training courses in a range of writing-related subjects, building an online presence was a critical part of marketing its real-world offerings. Most of the organisation’s initial marketing was carried out online.
“When we first started in September 2005, we were invisible on Google in the natural search rankings,” says founder Valerie Khoo. The centre’s first attempts at a site were based on a pre-defined template, but Khoo quickly decided that spending time learning site maintenance skills would be worthwhile.
“We tried Google adwords and for the first year or so it was responsible for around 95 percent of our business,” Khoo says. “Without Google adwords, we would not have been able to grow the business so quickly, and our business would not be what we are today without the technological tools we’ve come to rely on.
“At first, I had no idea whether adwords would be effective or not. But the beauty of adwords is that it is low cost so the risk is minimal. If it doesn’t work, you’ve only lost a few dollars. And if it works, the return on investment is excellent. I also like the fact that you can control the dollar amount you want to spend each day by setting an upper limit so that your advertising expenses don’t go out of control.
“It’s been flexible in that we’ve been able to grow our AdWord campaigns as we’ve grown. When we develop a new course, it’s only a matter of minutes before we can advertise it online.”
Maintaining search engine visibility requires constantly changing dynamic content. With a focus on the written word, developing a blog—an online diary or newspaper reporting on issues relating to writers and the business—was a fairly natural step for the centre to take. “To help this we added a blog, which has also proved to be a useful marketing tool,” Khoo says. “Through this, we can also notify students of author talks, poetry nights, and writers groups in the area.
“It’s not difficult to add new entries to the blog because, as we have gained a profile, we are now regularly sent interesting news and announcements from other writing-related organisations. We also include interviews with authors on our blog so it has become a great resource for that too.”
The centre also developed an online newsletter, which now has more than 2,000 subscribers. “We ensure that the newsletter contains useful information, tips and competitions so that it’s not just all about the courses.”
Further expansion into the online medium is on the agenda. “We started offering online payment a few months ago and enrolments increased immediately,” Khoo says. “We have since created online courses which are mainly delivered by audio programs that can be streamed or downloaded via a password-protected site.”
Top 20 Websites
Want to know which sites are getting the most hits?
Hitwise Australia presents the most popular websites based on Australian internet usage for December, 2007, ranked by market share of visits across all Hitwise industries.
Rank Website Market Share
1. www.google.com.au 7.8%
2. mail.live.com 3.16%
3. ninemsn.com.au 2.64%
4. www.myspace.com 2.18%
5. www.ebay.com.au 1.99%
6. www.facebook.com 1.73%
7. www.google.com 1.72%
8. www.youtube.com 1.07%
9. au.yahoo.com 0.95%
10. www.bom.gov.au 0.9%
11. www.netbank.commbank.com.au 0.61%
12. mail.yahoo.com.au 0.6%
13. www.gmail.com 0.6%
14. www.yahoo.com 0.6%
15. www.wikipedia.org 0.57%
16. www.live.com 0.55%
17. images.google.com.au 0.52%
18. www.msn.com 0.51%
19. www.microsoft.com 0.48%
20. news.ninemsn.com.au 0.46%
*Source: Hitwise Australia, December, 2007—based on market share of visits, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or industry, from the Hitwise sample of 2.95 million internet users in Australia.
IT’s Million-Dollar Babe Awards
Six Australian women in the IT industry were recently awarded Million $ Babes Awards, in recognition of them running million dollar technology businesses.
The women, aged in their 20s to 40s, were recognised for their innovation, creativity and transformational impact by itmillion.com.
The winners are:
Vanessa Brewis: CEO Taurus Software
Taurus delivers comprehensive web-based project, contract, tender and works management solutions.
Liesel Capper: CEO My CyberTwin
My CyberTwin creates an artificial intelligence ‘clone’ of themselves, the cyber twins live on social networks, corporate websites, and inside virtual worlds like Second Life.
Lisa Fletcher: CEO b-Free
B-free is a revolutionary friendly accounting software that automatically prepares your accounts and BAS from your online bank statements.
Raeleen Gillett: CEO Octahedron
Octahedron develops innovative comprehensive and powerful jewellery management software. From business intelligence to customer marketing, stock control and sales.
Julie Irwin: Executive Chairman ADB Group
A-DB Group of Companies provides application development and database administration solutions.
Danielle Lehrer: CEO GO Shout
Go Shout is a social Web 2.0 application that lets people publish and promote their own petitions or polls on important social issues or issues that affect their daily lives.