There were two chateaux which had lovely gardens open to the public. They both had similar grounds, similar plants - even similar mirror pools and dove-cots. Even the gardeners looked a bit similar.

They had both adjusted their entry fees relative to each other so that neither was more expensive than the other. (Because that's competition, right? It is certainly where a lot of company strategies stop.)

The trouble was, one chateau had a roaring trade and easily made enough profit to maintain the business and the grounds. Unfortunately the other chateau barely made enough money to stay afloat and presently had to close its gardens to the public (and move the gardener into the kitchen to wash dishes - since under French employment law they couldn't sack him).

Why had one of these two - pretty identical - chateaux done so well and the other so badly? And what one earth does this have to do with internet marketing (or even real-world business?) Read More... Read more

Ask for referrals. Ask, ask, ask

I've heard many small businesses proclaim words to the effect "we currently advertise, but next year we're getting a website, so we can stop all that" (WHERE did that notion get invented???? But it is shockingly common.) The absense of proper marketing only undermines the outlay on the website in the first place.

And I've written other posts about how useless such sites are without at least some attempt to market them. Gratifyingly, this post was referenced by another blogger writing about - and enhancing - the same topic. (So I'm returning the favour and giving a link to them).

But I concede there is a problem with small websites getting noticed when there are 63 billion legally indexed pages on the web (not to mention the illegal or just un-indexed number of pages out there). That is why I wrote in a blog post a little while ago that you can't forget the 'human' element of building a business.

So why is obtaining referrals important and what are some ways to do so? Read More... Read more

Sites of interest this month

We are involved with the following sites this month:

"Fredsleads"

Fredsleads

"Fredsleads" dropped our way via a referral. Fred is an internet marketer based in Australia adopting a very specific route to market via Pay Per Click advertising. (I'm giving away no more than what it says on the website.) Nothing new in marketing via Pay Per Click advertising, but if you lift the hood, you'll find quite a clever proposition underneath (and I'm certainly not disclosing that here.)

Anyway, we're performing some preliminary investigation into helping Fred develop the proposition and we'll see how this goes. Have a look at Fredsleads meanwhile and hopefully in subsequent months we should be able to showcase some of his successes.

I guess my point about Fredsleads underlies one of Briquesetclics' values: that the present recession represents as much a structural problem in "real-world" businesses as it represents tight credit. It is not that there is "no business". It is just that business is no longer typically approaching you via your shop-door any more. (See also "Staying positive in tough times" from our February newsletter).

infrared-heating.blogspot

Infrared-heating.blogspot.com

As you know we have been doing a lot of web marketing work for Greenenergy-eu.com over the last few months, meeting with considerable success. One of the media we launched for them in August (see previous newsletter) was the infrared-heating.blogspot. The initial take-up of this blog has surprised me - I have to confess more in the US and Canada than in the UK at the moment - but it all builds reputation for the blog, Green Energy (Eu) and Redwell. We've had 140 hits so far (i.e. just under 5 a day) and 53% of this traffic has come from search engines, 26% by referring sites and 19% directly (i.e. because they already know about the blog). 12 of the 140 visitors has then gone on to visit Green Energy's site itself (i.e. a 8.5% "conversion" rate). This is a really healthy start for a brand new blog with no track record in a competitive market.

Domaine Chater

We continue our relationship with Domainechater.com and should shortly be catching up with how their summer went. Link-building is really the next "big" thing on the agenda and we hope to be able to guide them through this (tortuous and slow) aspect of a webmaster's activities. Unfortunately it is also THE ONE activity Google admits to favouring very heavily in its reputational scores.

Check out Award-winning French Duras Wines at http://www.Domainechater.com to see and purchase their products on line.

Xoom Hire

We're quietly confident about Xoom. The "organic search" tactics we started implementing in May in preference to the PPC campaigns (subject to huge competition and questionable pactice in this very competitive market) finally seem to be making some headway. We are relying hugely on Google Analytics to point the way ahead (so we focus on the site's strengths and pick up straggling pages as a secondary priority).

See http://www.xoomhire.com and why not use them next time you want to find the best car rental deal from over 100 rental companies worldwide?

La Croix Spa

As expected we're back down to "June" levels of traffic (summer 2010 is now 1/4 booked) although we've just done a huge piece of re-modelling learning from this summer's analytics which will have put a small "dent" in the rankings whilst Google catches up with what we have done. This is the famous "Google sandpit" people refer to - alluding to the analogy that children (aka web designers) making a mess in the house get slung-out to the sandpit by their parents (aka Google) until they stop messing about and promise to return quietly and in good order. It is why a site re-vamp often leads to a drop in PageRank (although the revamp itself is often necessary). Have a look at what we've done: http://www.LaCroixSpa.com.

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