Virtual support can help you with all aspects of building and servicing your list. Working with a programme like Aweber they can help build forms for sign ups and install them on your various pages. By tracking the different sign ups they can review and analyse to see which forms attract the most visitors and which result in names being added to you list.

A VA can build into your website the option ‘to tell a friend’ , making it easy for people to spread the word about you and your services or products.

Together you can decide your strategy and what you intend to achieve. What you will provide for your list and how you will thank them for signing up and later, for their loyalty.

By creating an email signature that links to your sign up page, each communication that you send via the internet advertises and promotes you and your product.

A virtual assistant can network on your behalf and when you have been networking, they can ensure exchanged business cards from meetings are added to your list.

Virtual support can develop a timetable to remind you of dates when you have decided to broadcast, blogs, newsletters and reminders for your list.

A VA can help in many ways to build your list on the various Social Media platforms. By setting up accounts on LinkedIn, Ecademy, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and designing a strategy, they can ensure that all profiles are completed so others can find you and learn about you and what you do.

All Social Media accounts can be bought together in one programme e.g. Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Marketme Suite where updates can be scheduled for posting to the different channels.

Virtual support can assist with the servicing of the accounts by being responsible for responding to enquiries,messages and reviewing ‘mentions’ where necessary. By researching and joining relevant groups in your niche they can keep your profile uppermost in people’s minds. A VA can analyse posts and links to see which achieve clicks and further action, so that posts can be tweaked for performance.

A virtual assistant can create videos for you to place on YouTube, Vimeo, etc and ensure that they are uploaded and relevant information added so that the videos are easily searched for and found by the search engines. They can provide links for adding to other social media platforms giving you a highly visible video which advertises and promotes you and your products or services, which lead to sign ups and build your list.

If you need help with any aspect of list building, contact us here, or telephone Tamara on 0208 468 8594.

Google are permanently changing it’s search algorithm and this year intends to make as many as 550 changes. A direct result of a recent change has seen the Google rankings of some large websites plummet. Ezinearticles.com, Suite101.com and hubpages.com losing on average around 90% visibility.
For the small business this is a rather disconcerting figure and things are hard enough getting ranked on Google without the hassle of staying abreast of Google’s constant changes. For those publishing high-quality content that people want to share the changes should not be of concern.
Improvements by Google are a constant desire to provide high quality and relevant search results for the user. This recent change was an attempt to remove websites that are content farms, e.g. sites that are high-volume but low quality in content and those trying to play the system. After the changes a few sites got caught in the net that didn’t deserve to be there.

How to stay ahead of the game

Google’s aim is that an initial search by a user will provide the information they are looking for. To improve SEO and search engine rankings, look at you site from a users perspective and check that you are providing the best and most relevant information for a given search term. If not then change things so that it works for your user.

Content -it’s about quality not quantity. Using blogs to increase the number of pages indexed by Google achieves a higher ranking but ensure high quality content on all pages. Don’t keyword stuff, publishing text that is optimised for keywords. A blog is still a great way to rise in the search engine rankings and an efficient way to add high-quality information to a website. If you have a low ranking, check your pages and if some appear to be lacking in good content, remove them from your site and check your ranking after removal.

Again its quality over quantity but this time it’s in relation to links. Google have always liked links and by generating a high number of incoming links, which point to a specific web page, it is a way of moving a site up the ranking list. As Google aim for higher quality content in websites, links are not effective and if overdone it can be detrimental to ranking. Good news for the small website designer is the lack of a need to generate a multitude of links to sometimes substandard content they can now concentrate on providing quality instead of quantity.
Guest posts will generate high-quality links and links supported by strong keywords will benefit websites. One downside of the new Google update is that previously press releases generated good back-links but these links are not as valuable now. However, a well-written press release can be very effective if picked up by a major publication or journalist.

Social media, social, social!
Google have introduced a +1 button to join the social media,sharing and search world. It’s there for you to share with friends sites you have found interesting or useful, places you like and provides users with the ability to block sites. All the more reason to keep you content high-quality.

Let people know you are there Tell Google about yourself so that users can find you easily. With good content in place make sure that meta titles and descriptions are in line with your content . Making these parts differ widely, will hurt your rankings likewise keyword stuffing has negative results. Use the SERP (the short paragraph that shows in search results) wisely and write a clear description so people are curious to learn more.
Google’s intentions are to provide the most original and relevant results and duplicate content is not shown. Users can view omitted results but in most cases they are ignored. If your content quality is high and original this shouldn’t be of concern. Duplication of content occurs when RSS feeds are directly published from other websites and content is copied, resulting in lower rankings and removal from search results.

Advertising – Google looks at sites with too much advertising and rates them as low-quality or spammers and lowers their ranking accordingly. Too many adverts and any content you do have may appear lower on you page (where people can’t be bothered to scroll to if their attention isn’t gripped in the beginning) or the view obstructed.
Google continue to change things so that the user has the best possible experience and if your content is of quality rather than quantity and you use the tips above, you should rank well in the search engines.

Can we help? Email us or telephone Tamara on 0203 468 8594.

The savings made by removing travel and accommodation expenditure, together with venue costs will obviously make a vast difference to your costs and expenses associated with a virtual event as compared to a physical one.

ON24, a virtual event company, their research shows that between 20% and 95% savings are achieved when the event is a virtual one. When you realise it doesn’t just stop at savings made by attendees and all the travel and accommodation costs, the people who are arranging the event also gain from the ease and speed of arranging a virtual event, together with additional benefits of spending less time on the project.

In creating a virtual event you have produced a permanent record for future use, whether in a learning base, or for repeating at a future date to another audience or to re-purpose the information to use outside of the event.

A virtual event generates excitement, meaning extra customers and more leads. ON24 research reports that 4 to 5 times more leads are generated from a virtual event than from a physical one.

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Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Engaging your audience is a large part of staging a virtual event.

Let your audience determine your content. Make your content interesting and cover popular topics. Find out what your audience likes to do both on and off line. Produce your event so that the content is familiar and comfortable to them.

Promotion

Once everything is in place, event planned, sponsors on board, your twelve week time line gives you plenty of time to publicise your event.

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With all the social media activity available today, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, your Blog or any of the many others, here are a few tips to keep them all running smoothly.

Construction – a plan

If you know where you want to be, what you are aiming for, your strategy for all your social media marketing can be formulated with this in mind. If you have no idea where you are heading or just what you are trying to achieve, all your efforts may well be in vain. You may well have opened up all the channels but wander around not knowing what to do next when all your work results in no interaction with others.

There are such a vast number of people using social media, it’s an incredible opportunity to reach a worldwide audience, bringing your service or product to them with ease and speed.

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