For me, the golden rule of Twitter is to be social. It’s all about having conversations, just like we do every day with real people.

I’ve been using Twitter for around a year and a half now, and I’ve got to admit I genuinely enjoy it! I’m communicating with some fascinating people, I’m finding out what interests them, and every day I find something from them that interests me.

There are a few simple things that make Twitter work for me. They’ll not be the same for everyone, as different people want different things from it, but first and foremost I make sure that the reason I follow people is because I’m interested in them, and not just because I want them to follow me back.

I’m not really concerned by the numbers too much, and I rarely actually look to see how many followers I have. I never have the urge to get to a milestone of followers, it’s the whole Twitter experience that’s more important to me.

I find that Twitter is a great leveller! By this I mean that it allows me to communicate with others in my profession, ask questions, give opinions and seek advice just as though they were in the same building as me. I run a (very) small business, and until now I think that a major disadvantage of this was that there were few people to bounce ideas off. If you work in an agency and you have a technical problem for example you can give the PHP Developer a buzz and ask for advice. We never had this – but now Twitter has changed it all. I can floor a question to the whole Twitter community, and often just one comment can put me in the right direction and save me hours of time. It’s faster than a search engine, and it’s a great way to build relationships for future collaborations and business opportunities.

Generally, I will follow an individual to see if they interest me. If it turns out that they don’t (or worse, if I find them annoying) then I’ll have no problem unfollowing them. Likewise, I don’t have any hang-ups at all about people who may decide to unfollow me. I certainly don’t get upset about it, if I don’t interest them and they don’t really want to hear what I have to say then I think that it’s the right thing to do. I don’t think that people should take Twitter too personally, ultimately you should just do what works for you.

I’ve gained so much from the people I follow on Twitter, whether it’s through an exchange of ideas, links to interesting articles or introductions to new people. It’s fair to say though that there are also things I’ve found irritating. I used to find the #NEFollowers tag really useful, but have recently found it to contain too many retweets of posts, most of which just end up going to people who’ve actually already seen them. There ended up being a few too many sales tweets in there too, along with the occasional “help me get to 200 followers” posts, so much so that I’ve eventually just stopped following it. At the moment it seems to be generating it’s own noise and the really interesting comments just get buried. Networking for business is a good thing, but I think sometimes we take our eye off the ball and before we know it we’re not actually being that productive, or helpful.

Ultimately though, it’s a personal thing. People use Twitter for different reasons and in different ways. What works for me won’t necessarily work for someone else – I think that it just takes a little time to find where it all fits in with your business and personal life. Get this wrong and you have an incredibly distracting application that sucks hours out of your week. Get it right though and it’s probably one of the most useful communication tools you could wish for.

The internet has quickly become the main source of news and information to a large proportion of the worlds population. I can’t remember when I last bought a newspaper, and my first task of the day before I begin work is always to check out the BBC News site and see what’s going on in the world. I try to keep up to date with current affairs, and I try to understand why they are happening. After I have done this I’ll then form an opinion.

So, having all of this information at our fingertips within a few seconds is undoubtedly a good thing. Or is it? I’ve noticed quite a lot of instances over the last few months where many people are happy to accept things on the web as fact without even considering whether they are actually true or not. Whilst I’m not suggesting that we should question absolutely everything we read, I think that we should be more careful and certainly not take it as gospel.

Whatever you read on the web is often going to be someone’s opinion. The reader will then form an opinion from that opinion, and the cycle goes on. Before we know it we’re reading articles which contain very few accurate facts, and sometimes just blatant lies, but we just accept them as being true.

One of the worst culprits is social media, and in particular Facebook. There are numerous ‘fan pages’ around which many users have signed up to (some numbering hundreds of thousands) which are completely inaccurate. Let me give you an example. One of the most common themes is the ‘fact’ that Facebook are to begin charging users for access to the website in the middle of 2010. The charge varies from £3.99 to £14.99 per month, but they all have a similar message, something like:

We Will Not Pay To Use Facebook. We Are Gone If This Happens
(36,500 members)

. . . or . . .

I will not pay £3.99 a month to use Facebook from July 9th 2010
(711,000 members)

. . . or . . .

We’re against the £4.99 a month charge for Facebook from June 30th 2010
(110,000 members before being shut down after attempting to infect PC’s with malware)

The official Facebook line? Try this:

Question: Does Facebook plan on charging a membership fee? Over three-quarters of its users are going into a panic-induced assumption that this is true, even though there hasn’t been talk of a membership fee from the business press or Facebook itself. So can you calm the panic?

Answer: The answer is no, we are not planning on charging a basic fee for our basic services. Once again, that question stems from people thinking we’re growing so quickly we’re running out of money. We’re growing really quickly, but we can finance that growth. We’re not going to charge for our basic services.

It took me around one minute to find evidence to prove that there isn’t going to be a charge for Facebook, so why have nearly one million people blindly accepted this as fact without question just because somebody said so, with a few of them becoming quite angry at the prospect? So why do these groups appear? More often that not it starts with a sensationalist headline which results in the maximum number of people joining the group. These people are then subjected to any marketing message that the group admins decide to post, as these posts now appear on their Facebook walls. In the grand scheme of things this isn’t really that important, but it shows the potential of misinformation spreading via the internet.

There was a rumour spread that US President Barack Obama was a muslim and was sworn in on the Koran. In a poll conducted by CBS it was found that 7% of those interviewed believed that this was true. This doesn’t sound like it really matters until you consider that 45% of Americans stated that they would be less likely to vote for a candidate if they knew he or she was a muslim. It got to the stage where the President actually had to make a statement informing people that he was in fact a Christian and was sworn in on the Bible.

I quite often see people posting comments on social networking sites such as Facebook which contain few facts. Often they are opinions formed from assumptions or half truths, sometimes just from ignorance, but in almost all cases a few minutes looking around the web for evidence from credible sources would set the record straight and give them a fuller understanding of why things have happened or what the real facts of a situation are. This is where the true value of the internet really comes through.

I believe that we must take responsibility for the information we spread on the web. We have to check the facts, and be able to verify them from credible sources. We can say what we think, and we can certainly have an opinion, but too often people will simply accept what they read as the truth without questioning, and I find this worrying.

• http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_barack_obama_muslim.htm
• http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3194740.ece
• http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7830237130

This question can lead to quite an emotive debate between web professionals. As a web designer one of the most common questions that clients ask me is “Will I be ranked highly in Google”. Each time I’m asked this I generally give the same answer, and that is to not be too focussed on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) at the expense of other marketing practices. So, to a degree my answer to the question of this post has to be ‘Yes – I do think that SEO can be overrated’.

It’s estimated that there are around 3 billion web pages on the World Wide Web at the moment, and there are more being added every minute of every day. This means that each day the target of being listed on the first page of Google becomes more and more difficult. Even if you do manage to get that elusive listing, is it for a relevant keyword?

A great example of this is elmnet’s Google number one for the phrase ‘Is size really that important?’. This result comes top of the pile out of a few hundred million results so on paper sounds fantastic, but in reality it’s really quite useless. People searching using this phrase are incredibly unlikely to be searching for a blog article about the sensor size in digital cameras, and so our web page will be closed within a few seconds as the user goes back to the search results.

This doesn’t mean that I think that SEO is a waste of time. It clearly isn’t, and having a website which ranks highly for relevant keywords can be hugely beneficial. What we must be careful of is that we don’t see SEO as a magical answer to all our marketing questions because it’s not. Any business that relies solely on this is in trouble. Search results can vary according to location, previous behaviour, whether you are signed in or out of Google, which datacenter you hit, algorithm tweaks that happen every week and more, so are never as predictable or consistent as you may at first think.

A web marketing campaign needs to be robust and should be carried out using a variety of methods. Building a database of contacts and sending regular email newsletters should be considered, along with social networking applications such as twitter and facebook. In addition blogs can be used to attract inbound links and then there is the time honoured tradition of flyers, brochures, stationery and business cards. A well designed site, written in a standards compliant way with good content should be the final piece of the jigsaw, and is where all other marketing activities will feed in to. And we haven’t even mentioned SEO yet!

Include as much of this in your marketing plan as you can and everything should just fall into place, and the overall effectiveness will be far greater than if the bulk of your time is spent worrying about keywords and where you are in Google.

I spoke with a highly respected authority on all things web not so long ago, and he still insists to this day that for most smaller businesses simply having your web address on every email, letter, invoice, business card, quotation and estimate is just as effective a marketing tool as ranking well in search engines.

Hot on the heels of the last post about Facebook comes this one about Twitter. I’ve briefly talked about Twitter before (click here to read the post) but having now used it for a little while I thought I would give it a post of it’s own.

Twitter is similar to Facebook in that it’s a social networking tool which allows you to update people by writing short lines of text which is posted to your (and your followers) Twitter feed. Anyone can follow you, unless you protect your tweets, but doing that defeats the whole point of Twitter. So, the main difference between Twitter and Facebook is that you don’t need to know the person you are interested in to follow them. I follow a mixture of local businesses, international celebrities and family members!

The other noticeable difference is that with Twitter you are allowed a maximum of 140 characters to tell the world what you are doing. There are no quizzes, no applications, no photo galleries, nothing like that, just 140 characters of text. You can link to whatever you like, but Twitter’s appeal is it’s simplicity.

I have to admit that at first I just didn’t get it. Twitter just didn’t make sense. I can perhaps understand why Facebook users may be interested in what I was doing because I already know them, but why would strangers care? Who would want to know what I was having for lunch, or what I had bought at the shops that day? Once I started using it though it started to make sense.

So, how do you get the best out of Twitter for business? How can you make it work for you? As Twitter is such a new thing there are no hard and fast rules, and most of us are making it up as we go along, but I have a couple of rules of my own which work for me.

• Firstly, Twitter is a social networking tool. It’s about following people you are interested in, and in turn it’s about people who are interested in you following what you have to say. There is often an impulse to automatically follow anybody who follows you, but be selective about this. There is a bit of a backlash now against those who follow people purely to get them to follow back, so think for a second before you do this. There is no point in having 500 irrelevant followers, better to have 10 useful ones!

• Next, get involved with your network. Ask questions, post answers, provide links to content they may find useful, be an asset to them so that when they come to clear out those they no longer wish to follow you are not on that list.

• Be careful of how many tweets you post at once. There is nothing worse than blasting out a dozen tweets within a 30 second timeframe. This hogs your followers Twitter feeds and is the quickest way to get you unfollowed.

• Complete your bio info on your Tweeter profile. If somebody decided that they may like to follow you then they’ll want to know a little about you and where you are based before they do. Provide this to them or you risk losing them.

• Do more than promote your own agenda. Users who purely self promote won’t be followed for long. Of course self promotion is really what most users are after, but be sensible about this. Try and write a mixture of posts, some of which may refer to your site or blog, but others which comment on someone else’s blog, a news article or other item of interest.

To quickly summarise, I’ve found that the real benefits of Twitter come from being involved with the people you are following and the people following you. It’s not just about advertising your product to as many people as possible, it’s about becoming actively involved with them, engaging with them and benefiting from their experience in their field.

If you’re a business, and you’re not yet tweeting then you’re missing a trick. Get involved, sign up for an account and get following. Visit http://www.twitter.com to get started.

Most people are now aware of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, indeed we’ve covered it before in this blog – click here to read the article.

Three months on from that article I thought I would add some thoughts to the subject of using Facebook for business. It sounds perfect! Instant communication with interested potential customers, but there are a few things to look out for here, and a couple of golden rules that really shouldn’t be broken.

First thing to think about is mixing business with pleasure. A Facebook page tends to be a personal thing, and you’re likely to talk about all sorts of things on it. You need to decide pretty early on whether your page is to be used for yourself and your friends or for your business. It is possible to mix the two but you always must remember that whatever is seen on your page is an instant reflection on your attitudes, professionalism and personality to potential customers.

You also need to decide very early on who your business audience is going to be. If your company Facebook presence is purely aimed at being a networking tool for employees then that’s fine – but if this is the case then make the group private.

If your Facebook group is to be public then be careful what you post, and make sure that it can’t be read in a way that could harm your business reputation. Don’t post up incriminating photographs from your last drinking session, and don’t make offensive comments about people – no matter how much they deserve it! I always use the “Mum test”. Before you post your blog item, tweet or Facebook post read it back to yourself and ask yourself if you would be happy with your Mum reading it!

Remember also to take care when writing on friends walls, as whatever you write here is also visible to all friends of that friend. Eventually, as you use Facebook more, people begin to build up a picture of what you are like as a person. Even if you are posting from your personal Facebook profile rather than your Facebook business group people can still view your profile and put two and two together. It’s likely that they will also assume that this is what you are like as a business so naturally it’s important to make sure this is a positive impression rather than a negative one.

Finally, never repeat your posts over and over again. The same self promotion message posted more than once is the quickest way to get you blocked by your friends. Post it once, then move on.

Facebook is a very useful tool for business, but what you post is visible to lots of people, probably more than you may at first realise – so use with care!

We’ve been running this blog for a few months now, and one of the reasons we decided to launch it was to see first hand what effects it would have on our search engine rankings.

We’ve put a variety of topics in here about all sorts of things that interest us, but at the back of our minds it’s also been a little experiment. If we write a post, how long will it take for a Google search to bring us up as a result? How can we use this to pro-actively market ourselves?

The trick is to write about things that you think potential customers will search for, hopefully meaning that they will see your post in their Google search results and potentially consider using you for their project. Here’s a list of our top ten search engine hits so far, in no particular order – and all from posts within this blog. We’ve included the ranking in Google out of the total number of returned results.

Bear with me on this one, and read right through to the last result, which we think is quite staggering!

• “Vive la Tour”
  Position 7 out of 4,630,000

• “Dragging the shutter”
  Position 11 out of 388,000

• “Nikon 85mm f1.8″
  Position 10 out of 577,000

• “Building up contacts”
  Position 4 out of 273,000,000

• “Should I sell online?”
  Position 6 out of 128,000,000

• “Free high res desktop wallpaper”
  Position 9 out of 597,000

• “Reasons for being standards compliant”
  Position 6 out of 9,330,000

• “Photographer portfolio online”
  Position 9 out of 10,400,000

• “The myth of the fold”
  Position 25 out of 175,000

And finally, our personal favourite:

• “Is size really that important?”
  Position 1 out of 108,000,000!

So, naturally at the end of this our top tip is to start writing a blog and link from your blog to your main website! We’d recommend having the blog on the same url as your website, for example our blog address is www.elmnet.co.uk/blog, rather than www.elmnetblog.co.uk.

The reason for this is that although having external links to your site is a good thing, the value of each of these links subsequently decreases if they are all from the same url. If you have ten links from your blog to your main site then every link counted after the first link is worth considerably less in Googles view.

It therefore makes sense to write good, search engine friendly copy, and then to host this on your main website domain and let other sites link to you because your content is interesting. This means that you now have many more inbound links from different sites all pointing to your domain, and Google can’t get enough of that!

We thought we would try a little experiment! We’ll write a new blog post based on the most interesting idea suggested to us, and in one month’s time we’ll see how it does when a Google search on the subject is performed.

You can suggest a topic by leaving a comment, dropping us an email, or  via twitter.

E-commerce is the buzzword at the moment. Along with social networking it’s one of the main activities going on in cyberspace today. At elmnet we speak to lots of people every month who want to sell online and set up their own web store, and we always give the best advice we can based on their own circumstances.

It sounds too good to be true! Your own online presence where anyone in the world can view your products, order them and pay for them from the comfort of their own home. Everybody wins – the customer gets what they want delivered to their door with minimal effort, and the vendor makes an unattended sale. It’s almost perfect!

Almost. There are certainly a few things to consider before you dive in setting up your own online store. I remember when I set up my first e-commerce site selling photography online. My work was already in a few galleries, and I found that quite a few people were looking me up on my website after seeing what I was producing. My first ever sale came through around a week or two after setting it all up, and I was very excited. It was for a 40″ x 6″ panoramic print and it was to be sent to Perth.

When I realised that it was to go to Perth in Western Australia rather than Scotland the euphoria quickly died down. My postage and packaging rates never took into account sending items abroad, and the sheer logistics of packing up a panoramic print to go half way around the world via air mail quickly made the whole transaction fairly worthless. I stuck with e-commerce for a while after that, but it never really worked for what I was selling. Customers understandably much preferred to visit a gallery and see the work framed, behind glass and on the wall before parting with their cash. The lesson here is that some items simply don’t suit being sold online.

Promoting an online store is crucial. You need to be able to tell people about what you have for sale, or you won’t sell a single thing. The best way I can think of explaining this is to consider an artist painting the most incredible picture ever. It’s a masterpiece, and it’s worth a million! The artist puts the painting on the wall in their house and then adds a price tag to it, informing all who see it that it’s up for sale. The artist then get’s a cuppa, sits down and waits for it to sell. And of course it doesn’t, because no-one knows that it even exists.

Another thing to consider is the value of the product (or the margin made) and the time taken to package and ship. If after Royal Mail have collected your parcel you have made the princely sum of £1 then it’s time to ask yourself “is it really worth it?”. You may have spent half an hour packaging the item, and another ten minutes popping up to the post office and waiting in the queue.

Add into that the time it’s taken to add the items to the website and you may find that it’s actually costing you money. If you sell fifty each day then you can perhaps take advantage of economies of scale. If you sell five a week then it will quickly become an inconvenience.

The final thing to consider is do you have the time available to keep your online shop up to date and respond to your customers in a timely manner? An online shop with one hundred items will take more time than you think to set up. You’ll need to have a photograph of the item you are selling, and it will have to be a good one. You’ll need to add the item to the shop, and include a title, a short description, a long description, a price and full postage and packaging details. You’ll need to check your email constantly so you can act on any orders that come in. You’ll need to tell the system new stock levels as you sell products in your physical store (if you have one). You’ll need to keep the online shop up to date with special offers, and you should also take the time to market your store to potential customer via email newsletters. Obviously you’ll need to use Twitter and Facebook regularly to help things along, but you should be doing this anyway whether you are selling online or not.

Having said all this, e-commerce is undoubtedly a good thing. The opportunities are huge if you go about it in the right way. If you are a busy person then select a simple, profitable, easy to package range of products to start the ball rolling rather than attempt to put every item under the sun on your store. Get into a routine of checking emails, and set aside a time to bulk process orders as efficiently as possible. Consider selling gift vouchers for your physical store, this is a great way to easily sell online without the hassle.

If you want to take those first steps to becoming the next ‘Amazon’ then why not give us a call. There is a lot to think about, but we have been there any times before. We can certainly give you an overall e-commerce strategy rather than just provide you with the selling facility.

There are many annoyances on the web, and one which really winds me up is email chain letters.

I received one last month which was sent to me (and nine other people) from a friend of ours. The letter sounded authentic enough, and spoke about a boy suffering from cancer who wanted to be in the Guinness Book of Records for having the largest collection of compliment slips in the world. There was a London address included to send your compliment slip to, and you were also asked to pass on the email to ten of your friends.

Unbelievably this hoax is now twenty years old, and the ‘little boy’ has been declared clear of cancer for the last eighteen of them. Goodness knows how many letters have been sent to the address in London. There’s more info on this hoax, and variations derived from it at the Guardian’s website - click here to take a look.

There have been some classics over the years, here’s a few of my personal favourites:

• Bill Gates is sharing his fortune
• Good Luck
• Bloody Mary Curse (my favourite – forward this email OR YOU WILL DIE!! Nice!)
• Irish Friendship

So what’s so bad about them? Well, for a start along with spam mail they simply clog up the internet and slow everything down. It’s the classic, tell two friends, they tell two of their friends situation, and before you know it you’ve been personally responsible for a few thousand pointless emails flying around the web for no reason. Most importantly, what you have just done is added your email address to an ever expanding list which is just waiting to be collected and used to send you information about online casinos and viagra.

Generally, the best bet is to avoid them and don’t add to the already huge amount of internet traffic which is basically useless. If you are not sure then use Google and search for the title of the letter. It will more than likely turn up as a scam, and you won’t feel half as daft as you would when your friends tell you you’ve been fooled!

I receive around 50-100 legitimate emails every day. My server’s junk filters do a pretty good job of filtering out the undesirable ones.

However, a few pretty convincing ‘phishing’ emails always make their way through, and normally I can spot them pretty quickly. The one I received earlier today though had me fooled for a couple of seconds before common sense quickly prevailed and the delete key was hit.

It looked convincing enough. It was apparently from HM Revenue & Customs and it was great news! Out of the goodness of their hearts they had emailed me to tell me that I was entitled to an income tax repayment of £1500, and I should log in to my account by following the link and submit a repayment request. The reason that this scam was a particularly effective one was that it combined a number of features which all worked together and on first impression just made sense.

Firstly, the timing was right. Anyone who fills in a tax return generally needs to make a payment on account by the end of July. This email arrived in the middle of August, just a fortnight after deadline. The email looked official, it was sent to the same email address that I have registered with HMRC, and it was possible that I had made a mistake with my return and the tax office had picked up on it, right?

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth I quickly noticed the holes in the scheme. The first thing I thought was that surely HMRC couldn’t possibly know that based on the information I had sent them I was owed money. Their online system works the whole lot out for you, so saying I was entitled to a refund effectively is the same as telling me that the online system doesn’t work! Highly unlikely! I’m also not entirely convinced that the HMRC would be particularly quick to tell me that they wanted to give me money back.

You also tend to find that email scams have imperfect grammar. This one told me “Click here to submit you tax refund request”, and “A refund can be delayed a variety of reasons”. So, a ‘you’ instead of a ‘your’ and the word ‘by’ missing from the second sentence. Small things maybe, but a legitimate email probably wouldn’t contain basic errors like this.

But the clincher had to be when I hovered the mouse over the ‘click here to submit your tax refund request’. I right clicked the link and copied it to the Mac’s ‘Text Edit’ application. The url was a completely different one to that which the email claimed to be sent from. So, unfortunately it was all a hoax, but for a second or two I was having a really good day!

So what do the people who send these emails out have to gain from it all? I imagine that on following the link I would be asked to enter the details of the bank account I wished the reimbursed funds to be deposited in. You can probably guess what would happen after that!

I’ve seen a lot of this kind of thing throughout my years spent online. Most of them are fake emails from banks saying that my account has been suspended and I must act within 48 hours or it will be closed down. This scam adds in a time element to try to make you act quickly. Emails from PayPal are also commonly imitated, where you are told about alleged security breaches and how you must log in and authorise your account – of course on a fake website.

So what’s the best defence? Well, a good rule to start with is the classic “If it’s too good to be true then it probably is!”. Next, if it appears to be from a bank or institution informing you of a security breach and a requirement for you to verify your account then never log in to your account via the link on the email. Go to the company website direct and log in there, or call customer support and speak to a human (get the number from the website, not the suspect email).

Finally, for suspected scams then Google can be your friend. Type in a phrase from the email and you can be sure that if it’s a hoax then it will be reported on the web somewhere. Just make sure that you look it up on a reputable site, as sometimes the dubious website that is returned in search results is what can infect the unwary users PC.

The web can be a dangerous place, even for those who are familiar with it and have been using it for years, but generally by following a few simple rules and applying common sense in all situations you shouldn’t go too far wrong.

People have a fascination with Google. The most common question we’re asked is “Will my new site appear in Google?”.

We agree that a good ranking in Google certainly helps things along, but it’s really only a part of a bigger campaign. It’s all got to be backed up with a bit of advertising, some networking (both in person and online with social networking applications) and, most importantly in our opinion, a database of relevant email addresses.

Email marketing, when carried out properly, is an extremely effective form of marketing. The difficult part is getting the list of contacts. You can purchase a mailing list of 10,000 addresses from a reputable company, but that’s really just the same as printing 10,000 leaflets and sending them around the doors. A typical response rate for this is around the 1% mark, so if you send enough out then you may actually do alright, but we think there’s a better way of doing this.

For the most effective long term strategy you need to begin collecting email addresses from interested customers now. You need to have a ‘subscribe to our mailing list’ function on your site, you need to be able to add addresses manually, and you need a way of managing these contacts and communicating with them via some form of mass mailing system. It’s a slow burner, we have a customer who we advised to start building a database of contacts around 5 years ago. Today they have over 11,000 contacts, every one of which actually asked to be kept up to date with news and special offers. We can expect a far better response from this than from the 1% response rate from a leaflet drop!

The best systems include features like auto-responders where a specific email is automatically sent out after a user subscribes, and link tracking where you can view which hyperlinks within the email a subscriber followed. You can then target an additional email to specific subscribers based on this. One company who is particularly good at this is Dabs (http://www.dabs.com) who sell computers and IT equipment online. They continuously profile their customers depending on the links followed in previous newsletters, so that when new newsletters are sent to you they contain all the items that you are more than likely going to be interested in. Have you followed a link to the ‘monitors’ section of their website from their email newsletter? If you have then you can bet that a relevant email telling you about monitor special offers will be on it’s way to you very soon!

So, what packages are on the market? We can recommend a very good third party system that does all of this, and we can install it for you if you’re not sure about doing it yourself. It’s not cheap at around £300, but it’s very, very good. Alternatively, we could custom build an email marketing application to integrate into your existing content management system. If you don’t need the system to do absolutely everything but have a specific list of requirements then this can be a cost effective way of getting started. At the other end of the spectrum are the basic systems that allow you to collect email addresses via your website, send out an email to all these contacts, and that’s it! There’s no link tracking, no autoresponders, nothing custom coded and nothing fancy, but it works. Every elmnet web hosting customer has access to a system that does this as part of their hosting plan – there’s no additional charge for this.

Whichever way you decide to go we think it’s vital that email marketing to a targeted database of interested contacts is something that you simply cannot overlook. We really think that it’s more valuable than a Google number 1.