Irus Design, Melbourne, Australia » marketing

So, is email dead?

biss — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:20:29 +0000

Well, it may surprise some people but no, email isn’t dead yet. Not even close, it seems.

According to a recent survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, of all online adults, 92% use email, with 61% using it on an average day. See it for yourself here.

As a business tool, email is still invaluable. Social media is a great tool too but can you really conduct a meaningful business conversation via Twitter or Facebook? Posting or sharing confidental business documents? Could be hard, don’t you agree?

Welcome the spider, search engine spider

biss — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:47:52 +0000

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a technique employed to drive organic or non-paid traffic to your website. Being on top of the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for your target keywords and getting majority of web traffic this way is the ultimate goal and desire of every website owner. Well, there could be other goals and desires but I will concentrate on those related to SEO.

Depending on your target keywords, this can be relatively easy or extremely hard to achieve. Easy or not, this will require quite a bit of time, 6 months or more, and some major effort. The search engine spider is a slow creature.

That’s why it is recommended first to test your chosen keywords using another technique known as Search Engine Marketing or SEM, which is all about driving paid traffic to your website via Google Adwords or similar service. The result is instant although not necessarily cheap, especially if you forget to set your daily budget or let Goggle helpfully set it for you.

Anyway, the major SEO benefit of the paid traffic is in the relatively fast fine tuning of your keywords or keyphrases before you begin full scale optimisation of your website for free traffic.

Websites need traffic to survive

biss — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:05:34 +0000

It is a fact – websites thrive with healthy traffic. Traffic stimulates activity, brings visitors and generates revenue. If you have something to say or sell, you will need to have visitors or customers and in some reasonable numbers. Your own promotional activities (including social media) aside, the vast majority of new users will find you via search engines (Google or not) so, unless you are in a market without competition, you have to make yourself visible and easy to find.

There two major ways to drive traffic via search engines:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps with driving organic or non-paid traffic to your website. The SEO is all about increasing findability of the website by search engines. Any serious results will take some time and effort although basic optimisation is quite straight-forward. Although it is often mentioned as an opposition to paid marketing, the serious SEO isn’t free or even cheap;
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) takes care of paid traffic. The result is instant and highly customisable. When set up correctly, you may find that it is not that expensive. It is a great way to test your chosen keywords before any serious investment into the SEO.