Lisa Cox is a garden designer based in Leatherhead. We’ve been working together for the past three months on her marketing strategy – focusing on getting Lisa plenty of profitable clients to help her achieve her financial goals. We started in May by defining Lisa’s brand strategy and understanding who her most profitable clients would be. This really helped us target our marketing to some very specific groups of people. In June we looked at pricing – how much Lisa should be charging and how she might package up some of her services to make them easier to sell. We also explored a financial plan for the year and created her a set of sales targets. Finally in July we created Lisa’s marketing plan. Using the knowledge we had gained in the first two months we were able to create a really focused and targeted marketing plan that will help Lisa attract more of the profitable clients.

Lisa's current website

Lisa had recently had her brand identity created and was very happy with that but was unsure about her website. We both agreed that whilst the website could do with some tweaks – both in terms of content and design, it wasn’t the most important area to spend her budget on at the moment. It looks good (if a little technical) and there were more pressing issues that needed dealing with, such as the creation of a branded blog and newsletter and the implementation of a direct mail campaign.

Rob has taken much of the look and feel of Lisa’s brand identity and developed it further to bring out more of Lisa’s personality and create something altogether softer and more engaging.

I love the font he’s used which just softens the look and feel. He’s also kept the very structured images but softened them with an inset border which just feels a bit more classy. It should appeal to Lisa’s target market very well! You can see the blog at the top of this post – both newsletter and blog reflect eachother without being exactly the same, which I think is important.

Over the summer Lisa will be running a two stage direct mail campaign. She already has some brochures printed and she’ll be dropping a handwritten note into each of those before posting off to 300 select houses (we’ll be testing two different notes over 50 houses first to see which one pulls the most response). She’ll follow up that campaign with a very focused flyer aimed at encouraging people to book a consultation with her.

I wrote the copy and Rob has created this gorgeous design to really lift the words and bring them to life.

And here’s the back

So what do you think? We have one very happy Lisa, and I’m pretty chuffed with the results myself – even if I do say so myself…

We’ve been creating a lot of blogs for people recently, and something I must sound like a broken record on in every briefing meeting is my insistance that bloggers work with a {good} photographer to get a professional headshot. I can’t tell you the difference it makes. Actually I don’t need to tell you the difference. You can see it just from the before and after above. I can’t believe I’m sharing this with you but I’m reminding myself that I’m doing it for the greater good…

Let’s start with the presumption that a good headshot will make you look your most attractive, professional and approachable. By attractive I don’t mean sleazy or sexy or like you’ve just stepped off a boudoir shot. I’m talking about a photograph that strokes your ego and makes you proud. But it also needs to look like you.

Before I met Matt Pereira my headshot was a picture I’d had taken in a studio in Birmingham several years before (see above). I was one of the female entrepreneurs invited to take part in a cover shoot for franchise magazine. They had hired a make up artist and after several hours (I kid you not) primping and preening we were wheeled out into the studio where we were draped over a chaise longue . To get us used to the camera the photographer initially took headshots of us on a bar stool. I looked attractive but nothing like myself. I limped on with this photograph for several years but I had to laugh when I met the lovely Shelly Van Litt from the Elmbridge magazine at an Elmbridge Women In Business event I was speaking at. Shelly said to me “I’ve been looking at your website today, I wanted to meet you. You look nothing like your photo! I wouldn’t have recognised you if you hadn’t introduced yourself”. That was me told.

Fortunately a couple of weeks later I had the most gorgeous shots taken by Matt and I’ve never looked back. Like I said, a good photographer will take photos of you that actually look like you. But they’ll be of your best self. He or she will capture the essence of you and present you as someone people want to get to know. A good social media photograph has got to be engaging and approachable. And so that means eyes to camera, smiling and saving those sexy pouts for the boudoir shoots.

And a good headshot isn’t just about helping you appear more engaging in your social media profile. It’ll also help your website and blog appear more attractive. Let me show you how. This post has been utterly inspired by a blog we created for Sam Jones (herself a fantastic photographer) for her Home Truths blog. I loved the makeover Rob worked up for Sam, but was blown away when I realised she’d changed her photo. Here was the blog with the old photo…

And here’s the new photograph. Personally I think there’s a dramatic difference between the two, and all Sam has done is changed the photograph!

Donna Pourtyemour of Cobham Pilates is so sold on the benefits of having great headshots that she insists that all new staff have a professionally taken headshot. This shows consistency on her website and ensures that all members of staff come across professionally. Something Donna has found is that by having her website revamped she’s been able to attract world class teachers to her studio and her business is now expanding at a rate of knots. I have no doubt that the professional and engaging photographs (along with the gorgeous new branding and design of course!) have a lot to do with this…

So next time you think you’ll just upload that holiday snap from two years ago, think again. Find a great photographer and get some professional headshots done. It will pay dividends.

Blogging has many benefits. It’ll help you build relationships with your clients and prospective clients. It enables you to demonstrate your expertise.  It helps you gain immediate feedback on an idea. And done correctly you’ll also gain targeted leads for your company which should turn into profitable business. Oh, and the traffic you receive from your fabulous content will also help you in the search rankings.

There’s a reason that I added SEO as an afterthought. It’s because it should be when it comes to blogging. SEO is a nice outcome from a good blog – it’s not the reason for its being.

At the recent Blogging workshop I ran a couple of weeks back with Tom Evans a large chunk of our audience were motivated to blog because of the perceived SEO benefits a blog brings. They felt that if they could just manipulate their blog to bring them in thousands of visitors, then that would have a positive impact on their website. I’m delighted to report that by the end of the day they all felt somewhat different!

Your blog will receive thousands of visitors if the content is great, if it looks good, and if you post regularly. You’ll build up a following of loyal readers who will recommend your blog to their friends and where it features in the search engines will be but a distant memory. You’ll be generating enough business from the blog it won’t matter.

Recently I stumbled upon a blog that had clearly been contrived to provide search traffic for the company. It was an imagery-based website and the images were gorgeous. Sadly I felt a little “used” because the writer clearly wasn’t writing for my benefit. She was writing for the search engines. She’d clearly handpicked a couple of search terms (and no, I won’t tell you what they are) – let’s just say they were lifestyle artist hampshire for arguments sake. Every single blog title was pumped full of these keywords. And scrolling down the list I could see this wasn’t a one off, this was a Search Engine Optimisation onslaught.

Imagine this blog, full of lovely images but pumped full of keywords that mean very little in relation to the post they’re describing. How would you feel as you were reading it? Like a valued reader who just had to return to see what said company had been up to? Or a little used and worthless that the point of the blog was simply to scramble the website up the search rankings.

There’s an art to using your blog to gain traffic and pumping your titles and posts full of “clever” keywords isn’t it. I’m not suggesting that it won’t work from an SEO point of view – I’m sure it does. But my point is that this isn’t a blog.

A blog is your chance to journal what’s going on in your world. It enables you to showcase your expertise, build relationships and generate profitable business. Make the most of the opportunity: if you don’t, your competitors certainly will.

Have you seen Julie and Julia? It’s a heartwarming (read cheesy rom-com if you’re a cynic) tale of a downtrodden woman in a dead-endly depressing job who wants to make something of her life. She’s tired of her over-achieving friends looking down on her career and one day, decides to blog her experience of cooking all 575 Julia Charles recipes. You can see the trailer here but the meanies wouldn’t let me embed the video on my blog (probably something to do with copyright per chance?)

There’s a classic moment in the film when, on the verge of a nervous breakdown (or meltdown as she calls them) Julie is wondering why on earth she’s bothering, and whether anyone is even reading her. Then she gets her first comment… except it’s from her mother, asking if she’s the only one reading this and when she’s going to give it all up and start behaving like a wife.

Of course it all ends happily ever after. Julie gains an enormous following, she is inundated with calls from book agents, she’s now a writer AND she gets a film deal. Wow! That’s some happy ending.

When you start blogging (and even when you’ve been doing it for a while) it’s easy to worry about who, exactly, is reading you. Is anyone visiting your blog? Do they like what you have to say? Is it adding any value to your business or your life?

I remember talking to Karen Skidmore a few years back. She always used to have such vibrant conversations happening on her blog, and I’d be lucky to get a comment a quarter.

Karen told me that they’d start to happen. And once they started to happen that they’d snowball. And she was right. Although it took a little longer to figure things out than I’d hoped. Comments, retweets and people stopping me at a networking event to say that they love my blog is the ultimate validation for me that the hours I spend blogging are doing something. That I’m not just talking to my mum and dad through this blog, but that there are real people out there enjoying and benefitting from what I have to ramble on about.

And when I get new clients because they’ve been following my blog for a few months and love what we’re doing, that’s great. In fact, it’s more than great, it’s now a core part of my marketing strategy.

But how do you get your blog to a point where you have regular readers, subscribers and your blog has a real presence?

I think there are lots of factors. Design is key, think about blogs like decor8, designsponge or some of the foodie blogs I like to read such as Sweet Paul. The photography and design is utterly gorgeous – people keep coming back for the inspiration and escapism these blogs provide.

Content is king, but there’s more to a blog that people want to read than good content. We’re suffering from information overload. If your blog looks dull, it doesn’t matter what you’re saying, your readers are going to think your blog is dull. And it doesn’t matter how compelling your post, they’re likely to forget you. As people start to comment more you’ll be able to suss out what they want to know about.

When I started blogging I didn’t post much on what we’d been up to in the studio. I thought it would be too boastful, that people wouldn’t want to read about it. But actually, the more In the Studio this Week posts I wrote, the more comments I received. Of course, I always make sure I intersperse with some “how to’s” as well, or it would just turn into one massive online portfolio.

Your writing style also has an influence. I’ve found that the more I let my emotions loose in a blog, the more comments and dialogue I seem to gain. And uber-bloggers like Holly Becker seem to do the same.

One of the things that’s revolutionised my blog more than anything is my use of twitter. By feeding my blogs in to twitter I’ve been able to “promote” my blog to my followers, who, if they like what I’ve written, have retweeted on to their followers. When I get this right, my hits shoot through the roof and I know I’ve struck a chord.

But how about you? What do you do to promote your blog? How do you engage with your readers?

I just received this topical email in my inbox from Pizza Express. Not only have they managed to create a great offer that’s making waves virally, they’ve also tied it in to the election without being cheesy or contrived.

The email has “gone viral” (ie, people are forwarding it to their friends of their own accord, it’s not coming direct from Pizza Express) because it’s a great offer. Who wouldn’t want a pizza for £1? And it’s caught peoples attention in the first place because it’s topical, has some great artwork and is also related to the product (see that “election pizza”?). Personally I think it’s a cracking piece of marketing. And the fact that you have to join their mailing list to gain your voucher only makes it more commercially successful.

Hurray for Pizza Express!

I’ve begun to wonder whether small businesses are getting too het up on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) at the expense of the rest of their marketing strategy.

Don’t get me wrong, getting found on Google is important. But is it important enough to pin all your hopes, dreams and marketing budget on? I mean, are people actually going to Google for your product or service? And when they do, will it revolutionise your business?

A close friend of mine runs a retail company. She invested several thousand pounds last year in an SEO company who promised to get her to page one of Google since he’d done the same thing for two of her competitors. Given that she sells product online it seemed like a sensible thing to do. She has a nice looking website and although there are many improvements that could be made, the site looks good and is converting visitors at the moment.

A year later (and several weeks of nailbiting disappointment whilst she was blacklisted as he’d left the server open and some Chinese casino hackers had put dodgy code in her site) she is finally on page one of Google. And she told me that she used to think that this was the holy grail. That once she was on page one of Google her business would skyrocket. Well she’s getting an extra six hits a week. In what she does that’s not translating into significant sales to make the process worthwhile.

My feeling is that she should be using social media: blogging, twitter and facebook, to drive more traffic to the site. All of these things are free, but time consuming. There are also plenty of things that we could do to her site to make it more sticky and process visitors through it more effectively.

My experience is that small businesses regularly invest huge chunks of money in getting their sites optimised, without looking at the fundamentals.

I was talking to one business owner who was number one on Google in his particular niche… but he had an 80% bounce rate! He was loathe to have anyone touch the site because he didn’t want to fall off the bottom of the search engines. But the design of his website was putting people off, and that’s before he’s thought about the sales structure on there.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t optimise your site; but I do think that before you start paying for people to visit it you should make sure that every last element of your site will do everything it can to convert visitors. And I think that’s the missing link for many small businesses.

If you sell a product that people can buy online, then yes, optimise away. But only once you’ve got the rest of your house in order.

Start with the design. Is it engaging, arresting and attractive to your potential clients? Does it do you justice? Then take a look at the copy: objectively as a human being (not as a search engine). Writing for search engines is all very well, but it’s boring to read. And what you must remember is that once people get to your site they’ll need to be interested in what you have to say.

How about the way your website guides potential visitors to take action? Is that clear? For example, if you want people to buy a particular lawnmower this month, have you asked them to? Have you signposted them around the site?

What’s your imagery like? Naff stock photos or something that’s inspiring and represents your business well? Do you have an easy way of capturing peoples data, via a contact form or newsletter sign up box? Are you doing all you can on social media to bring traffic to your site?

I’d be looking at all of these elements well prior to search engine optimisation. What do you think though? I sense this might be a little controversial!

It’s tempting to think that a website will solve all your marketing problems. Once that new site’s built the customers will coming flooding in. Or will they?

I speak to far too many business owners who have invested (usually not enough) money in having a website built for them. They’re struggling to make ends meet and genuinely can’t understand why their website isn’t generating the enquiries they need. So they chuck a bit more money (again, usually not enough) at someone else to try and fix the problem.

The thing is that I think the problems are usually much deeper. Take a contact I spoke to at the beginning of the week. He’d just had a site built by a company and was frustrated that his site wasn’t being found in the search engines. A quick look at the site told me the problems were greater than just being able to google him.

The copy was weak. It didn’t show prospective clients how he could help them. Instead he talked first about himself and his business. Secondly there were no “products” that people could easily “buy”. But crucially, his marketing plan started and ended with his website.

Your website is a piece of the marketing jigsaw. But it’s only a part of it. If you haven’t thought through your offering; if you haven’t created a process for managing and converting your enquiries into clients; if you haven’t identified other ways of spreading the word offline as well as online, then I think you’re going to struggle.

So before you invest all your time, energy and hopes into your website, just think for a minute: do I have a robust marketing plan that will help me win the clients I need? If not, then start looking there first and come to your website when you know what you want it to say.

I’ve been blogging now for 2 1/2 years and have been on a journey that’s taken me from writing passionately to no-one to having a regular daily audience who (thank you, lovely readers) interact and respond to me. I’m often asked by clients how they can get the best out of their blogs, and so here are my top tips on how your blog can win you more business. I hope you’ll see that it’s not rocket science. It’s just about persistence, passion and authenticity.

Embrace the design. We’re visual creatures. Give us a lovely looking blog and we’ll want to stay and chat. Expect us to read something unattractive and it doesn’t matter how compelling your words, we’ll struggle. One of my all time favourite blogs is Decor8. Some of you may find the style OTT, that’s fine. You can’t win em all. Personally I love it! It’s beautiful!

Use twitter and other social networking tools to tell people about what you’re blogging! Driving traffic to your blog is one of the main points about this – don’t post day after day and not tell people what you’re doing! Install a Plugin to push links to your posts (not spam) into your twitter/ facebook/ linkedin accounts.

Make it easy for others to retweet your post if they find it useful. TweetMeMe does this well.

Add an inspiring (non-cheesy) image to every post. And I find the bigger the better, so mine take up the full width of my post window. Reject cheesy stock photo images and find some that really inspire your readers.

Post regularly. 2-3 times a week is good, every day is better. We always used to get frustrated with my mum when she first got her mobile phone because she’d never have it on her when we tried to call her. “But no one ever calls me on it” she’d say. “Well why do you think that is?” we’d retort! Eventually she started taking her phone out with her and we started calling her on it. It’s the same with blogging. You have to persevere. You might be writing to no one to start with, but if you write with passion and conviction then your audience will find you! And you don’t have to sit down and write every day – most blogging platforms enable you to schedule posts, so you can be writing while you’re away!

Give plenty of advice. That’s what people come for. But beware of lecturing or patronising. They won’t thank you for that.

Use your comments and retweet mechanisms for direct feedback on what your readers want. I learned that people want to see what we’ve been up to, which is why I regularly run my “In the studio this week…” feature.

So I think those are my top tips, but how about yours? What else can you add to this list?

I’ve been blogging now for 2 1/2 years and I think I can finally say that I’m at a point where my blog is a big part of the marketing tools that win me more business.

I started, like most people, because I saw someone I respected and admired doing it (the fabulous Karen Skidmore) and thought “I’d like to have a go at that!”. Of course I knew that it would probably help me build relationships with my potential clients. I suspected that if I did it well I could communicate my expertise. And I hoped it might help win me more business.

I built my first blog in a couple of hours and started writing. I have a passion for writing and over the years my blog has been a great creative outlet for me. I started writing about things that I thought might be useful for my clients. Things that I thought were obvious about marketing or design, but things that they seemed to find genuinely helpful. Things like the fact that if you’re going to mail an offer to your clients you should really do it more than once. I resisted putting much out there on designs that we’d created because I didn’t want to show off!

As the years progressed I updated the designs several times. And interestingly I noticed that every time I updated the design I’d get more comments and more hits. I was starting to understand what my readers wanted. I also started to find out a little more about what they were interested in simply by the number of comments or hits I was getting.

Right up till last Autumn I was blogging a couple of times a week on Typepad, perhaps once a week if I was really busy, and I was probably getting 20-30 hits a day. 100 or so if I’d just sent out a newsletter with some links in it.

I’d taken my Typepad blog as far as I could in terms of design and I was becoming curious about what Wordpress had to offer. And so one frustrating week later, this Wordpress based Flourishing blog was born. Four months on and I feel I’ve finally cracked it!

Visitor numbers are now more like 80-250 a day (now that’s a drop in the ocean compared with the uber-bloggers! but it’s a big leap for me). I receive comments most days, and my posts regularly get shared on twitter. And all of that means that the tangible work we’re getting as a result of the blog has skyrocketed. To the point where I’m conscious that I need to post on a daily basis to keep you lovely readers coming back for more!

I put this shift down to several things. Wordpress has enabled me to personalise the design much more than Typepad ever did, which hopefully means that it engages people more. The category led navigation bar means that people can flit around more than they did on my old blog. I suspect the Flourish rebrand has played a big part in the credibility (even though what I’m saying is the same!) and my presence on Twitter has also had a big impact.

I didn’t realise quite how long I’d waffle on with this post, so I’ll save my top tips for tomorrow if that’s ok with you?

I was at a networking event with a couple of friends some weeks back. They were quite excited to meet someone they’d been tweeting with for several months. He’d inspired with them with some compelling thoughts on his particular area of expertise and they’d built up quite a relationship with him. Excited to finally put a name to a face they introduced themselves to him. Sadly he had no idea who they were, despite the dialogue they’d had.

Why? Because he’d been paying is VA to tweet for him.

My friends were slightly less than impressed. All that goodwill he’d built up on twitter had been shattered because they realised that he wasn’t for real. I mean of course he was – all the expertise had been written by him, but the dialogue felt like a charade.

Contrast that with The Home Show’s George Clarke. I’m a bit of a fan and I’d tweeted him (along with half the female population) a couple of times. I didn’t expect him to remember who I was. And yet when I met him at the Homebuilding and Renovation show at Earls Court back in October he couldn’t have been nicer. He recognised me from my photo on twitter -and we had a nice chat! I left an even bigger fan than when I arrived!

Here is someone who probably should be getting his PA to tweet for him, but who realises the power of personal PR. I know who made the more lasting impression on me.

So that begs the question… If twitter can help you build relationships (as long as you’re the one actually building the relationship), position you as an expert (as long as it is your expertise that’s being tweeted) and drive traffic to your site (as long as what you’re saying is worth hearing) then is it ever ok to pay someone to tweet for you?

I think the short answer is yes and no. I honestly believe that if you’re on twitter as yourself, then the tweets must come from you. I think tweets that come on behalf of you, whoever you are, are empty if you’re paying someone to do them. Ultimately, people will “find you out” and that’ll do more harm than good.

But if you’re tweeting as a company or organisation then I think that’s a different matter. Quite frankly most of the companies I follow tweet nothing more than blatant links (at best) – spam at worst. They could do with someone who knows what they’re doing to tweet properly for them! And there’s not the risk of “finding you out” because we don’t always expect one single person to be tweeting behind a company.

What do you think?