How to Start a design company (Flyer Design)

November 20, 2015 By: trafucomment

This article is based on exactly what the team at LeafletGo did, they are a flyer design, print and distribution company. This is how they set it up.

Businesses are looking for solutions. Not services.

We know how in demand advertising and printing business are. Every business around them needs their help and services. In order for you to become known and acknowledged in the market, you should exert effort in making a name in the limelight. All rising business needs flyers for their promotion. They usually have it printed before their grand openings and if there are promotional sales that need to be announce to the local public. Giving out flyers is one of the inexpensive ways to promote an even or happening which you want to invite a lot of people to come over and attend the event with you. Leaflet Design Print Deliver

In planning to start out a business, you should know your target market. When you choose to have a flyer and distribution company, you should know where you should focus in order for you to come up with your own campaign and get the attention of some companies to come to you and check what they can avail from you. Being unique is important and setting an enough amount of capital is a part of your game plan. Skills can be learn through a bit of tutorial or hire someone who has the skills and learn from them. You should purchase the right material and machines you will need in your business. A starting business should be ready to meet the demands of the market. Since you are in a printing and advertising industry, you are expected to have your resources at hand to start up with your operation.

You should hire credible workers to work for you. You can manage the marketing in the initial phase of your business and you should take charge of your daily operation. It is the time that your business become vulnerable since it is still building its name and you should be the one to find the leads where you can promote your services. Establishing a price list for all your services is necessary and you should do it prior to doing the marketing. You may add up some promotional prices for bulk orders. Flyer distribution should be well coordinated with the courier you will get a tie up with. The pricing should be base on the zip codes that it will get into before it reaches its destination and on top of it is your labor fee on top of your expenses.

Sort your legal services before you go live! We utilised Parker Bullen in Andover but you can utilise anyone who has a good track record, but its always better to get a solicitor than to find out you’ve breached a trademark or something else as bad 5 years later!

Before you start your operation, you should study the nature of your business. You can have the research first for you to have at least an idea on what you should expect especially on the negative side. Businesses have their own struggle and you should be ready for this. If you are quite confidence with your operation and getting some of the loyal clients to have regular orders with you, you may set up a website for online clients. There are thousands of potential customers worldwide and you can showcase your services to them through hiring a web designer and professional SEO consultant to optimize your page.

How to Write a Good Digital Marketing Resume

October 27, 2015 By: trafucomment

Even if you’ve put together some outstanding ads, social media campaigns, etc. as a digital marker—truth be told, if you don’t have an outstanding resume, you’re going to miss out on some great job opportunities. What’s important is that you showcase your skills and experience, and get recruiters to see your resume. The good news is that you can take some tried-and-true steps to write the best digital marketing resume possible. Here are some of them:

Have a strategy for your resume

Like when creating a social media campaign, it’s important to have a strategy for your resume. It’s important that you try to connect with the recruiters who will be reviewing your resume. You can do that by creating a message like you would when making an online marketing campaign. There are many issues to think about. Which keywords are the ones that your target employer will be searching for? What’s the best structure to spotlight your uniqueness as a digital marketer? What’s an idea design and layout to stress your message?

Keep your target audience in mind

As when creating an online marketing campaign, it’s important to think about the people you want to reach. Many of the other logistical decisions you need to make about which words to choose, which social media outlets you should use, etc. fall into place once you’ve figured that out. You should take the same approach when writing a resume. Think about the time of company you’d really like to work for, whether it’s a big or small company, A small company might want to use social media to boost their sales, while a the marketing department of a huge nationwide corporation might focus on analytics. You should also consider whether the company is a traditional or contemporary type of company.

Quantify your results as a digital marketer

It’s important to use your skills and knowledge of measuring/analyzing to effectively share your work experience. It’s highly advisable when including figures that you avoid rounding too many of them. The reason is that it will seem more realistic and precise. This is even true if it’s just a different of 1%, and depending on the type of figure you’re stating, that could be a large quantity.

Be persuasive as if you were doing digital marketing

Like your work as a digital marketer, it’s important that you use your skills/knowledge about what prompts people to buy stuff. However this time you’ll basically be selling yourself instead of a particular product or service.

Know what makes you a unique applicant

It’s important to share with the target audience what makes you a uniquely valuable candidate. Think about the fact that you have a unique mix of job skills, experiences, and characteristics that make you different from every other applicant for a particular job. When writing a resume it’s important to learn and keep that mix in mind. What makes you 100% different from all other digital marketers? It could be skills related to viral videos, search engines, content, or analytics.

This post was written by Tom Hannemann, an Australian professional resume writer with http://www.advance-yourself.com.au/.

Recommended UK SEO Companies

August 24, 2015 By: trafucomment

I’ve had a lot of questions in the last 2-3 weeks about what companies I recommend when it comes to digital marketing / SEO. As you should know by now I’m an affiliate search engine marketer and don’t have any reason to get back into client seo services. Saying this there is a lot of poor information on who to hire. So I’ll just give a quick shout out to who I recommend and more importantly WHY I recommend them.

The seo company is called HQ SEO Cardiff, I’ve worked with a few members in the past, such as Tom over at SEO Oasis, he’s a very good SEO. As well as the people behind HQ SEO who stay nameless for the most-part. The reason I like these guys so much is they will take on £300 / month local clients as well as the huge £5000+ global corporations and they can do this because they have a PROCESS in place to rank clients, it’s not all run around and hope for the best, which is unfortunately what you get with most SEO agencies.

Another reason I like them so much is they run case studies, such as the powerliftinggymcardiff.co.uk one they are currently running, a simple local case study targeted to ranking for Cardiff gym phrases (obviously.) The reason they run these is due to the sheer relevance of potential clients. If a gym client comes to them thinking, can we trust these guys… Well um they ranked a site, in a competitive area, on page 1, a brand new site (and its pretty bare too)….I’m pretty sure they could rank your gym….Or at least that’s the thought process.

Reason 3 and maybe the biggest one of all, is all their SEO proposals are based on potential ROI for a client! They even quote on the homepage that if they can’t make a 300%+ ROI for a client in 6 months they don’t take the business on. That’s a solid promise if ever I heard one. Not the cheapest company but in my opinion probably the best. Anyway that’s who I recommend, so if you’ve asked me and I’ve directed you to this post, this is why 🙂

Best Place to get an Local SEO Citation

August 18, 2015 By: trafucomment

LOCAL SEO: All you need to know

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or SEO means to make the most out of a website to have a rank in an industry at a certain area. For example if a business only has a single location then that certain business will only want to have customers in the area where it is located. There is no point in nationally campaigning for your SEO because the highest possible return of investment would only be ranking high in locational keywords.

Local keywords have a general format which is “industry location” or to search for a local service in your area. An example of this format would be “real estate London”. There are different varieties for these keywords but since search volumes usually tend to be low for the local industries, getting the highest possible rank for this kind of keyword format is a primary target.

You need to be careful when you choose your keywords. In any SEO campaign, keyword research is among the important parts. Why? These keywords have the ability to make a campaign or break it even before it has begun. If you aim too high you might end up losing your money and investment. But if you aim too low, you might get no traffic even if you have managed to rank for all of your keywords since no one is searching for them.

Instead of aiming to rank with easy keywords, go for ones that will be most profitable for your industry and location. This will make a bigger ROI when you increase your rank. SEO has gone beyond being just a knowledge or time game. If you do not have any budget for your SEO campaign, then you will end up working a lot of hours trying to achieve the rankings that you want otherwise, you will not get any rank at all. Wisely calculate your ROI and create a money and time budget before you start campaigning.

Ranking Factors for Local SEO

Business signals refer to information that is typically in your website like type of business and location.
External location signals refer to name, address and phone number.
On-page signal refers to the text and code on the website.
Link signals are backlinks that point to your website and the relevance and quality of the sites they are from.
Review signals are important. The review that you get from the Google business page will determine a small part of the rankings.
Social signals are only a small percentage of the ranking, but it is still important to have accounts on social media sites.
Mob or Beh signals refer to the click through rate of the website that you have and its mobile optimization. Make sure that you have a site that is optimised for mobile use. It is also good to have titles and a description that can get one’s attention. If you do, people are more likely to choose your site over your competitors even if you are not listed as number one.
Search results that are personalised.

Calculate Local SEO ROI and Value for Clients

June 29, 2015 By: trafucomment

How to price SEO – This is quite a difficult skill. Some companies say to price as low as possible and take on as many people as humanly possible….Others say its better to have 2-3 people paying you £2-3k a month and you have less of the client-hassles such as calls, emails etc to deal with. For local seo clients this is a very important medium too. If you haven’t already read our guest post on local seo 101 then we recommend you check it out, even if you’re only a small business owner, if you have 5-10 hours a month you can drastically increase your rankings.

The video below is really good at explaining exactly what ROI is to an SEO campaign and why its important to price your services based on ROI and not simply competition of an industry, location or keyword.

Local seo valuations are pretty similar too, you want to calculate how much the lifetime value of a customer is to a specific client and you also need to calculate an approximate conversion rate for the website. Now remember this conversion rate will be based on extremely targeted search engine traffic, and hence should be (I say should as it isn’t often the case) very high.

In an example we can take a search volume of 1,000 per month for “seo consultant” and an average lifetime value of a client at £1,000. If you ranked 1st for this time, you would likely pick up around 40% of the total search volume traffic, giving you a figure of: 0.4 x 1000 = 400 monthly visitors.

Now although these visitors are super targeted we might only have a 1-2% conversion rate. If we take 1.5% we can see that we would expect to receive 400 x 0.015 = 6 new clients a month ~ LVC of £1,000 = £6,000 in new earnings and revenue every single month!

This means its worth investing a lot of money to get to this point, as even if your ROI is negative for the 1st 3-6 months, it will be extremely positive after this. (500% + ) And its all about the long game in business and especially in search engine optimisation.

I hope you enjoyed this article and I highly recommend checking out the video above. If you’re looking for more information on this subject. Feel free to visit auto pilot SEO, an seo company basing all quotes and proposals on ROI.

Thanks for reading.

Harry.

Local SEO 101

May 5, 2015 By: trafucomment

Hi,

This post is just on local SEO and the 3 things you HAVE TO do if you want to succeed at ranking for terms with city or county parameters.

SEO For Local Small Businesses

1. Google My business / Google Plus – This is one of the most powerful and frustrating ranking signals, you must have both your “google my business” and Google plus set up and integrated in the correct form for your business. This means putting your business name, address and phone number EXACTLY as it appears on your website. A side note on this, you must have this on your website. I recommend in the sidebar or footer but if not it must be on the contact or about pages.

2. NAPS/Citations -NAPS or citations are places where your business Name Address and Phone number is listed on another website. For example yell or yelp. This is more of a quality over quantity issue too. If you can generate 5-10 high quality NAPs that perfectly match your google business and website information, you will see a bump in your local rankings (both the google maps and the normal organic results too).

3. Relevant location backlinks – These are generally the hardest part of an SEO campaign but its important to try and generate at least 5-10 HIGH QUALITY authority domain backlinks, that are relevant to your business, niche and location. To be honest if you can get half of that quality I would recommend getting the link, but if you can get all 3 of the authority, relevance and locational from a link, then that’s perfect!

Obviously don’t forget your website structure and the on-page signals. On-page is still the biggest ranking factor, so its important to remember that a perfectly optimised website from the start makes the off-page process that much easier.

All of this is perfectly explained in the video below by Tom of SEO Oasis.

5 Quick Tips and Tricks on SEO

March 15, 2015 By: trafucomment

5 Really Easy tips and Tricks you can implement on any website to improve its ranking in the search engines

1.) Images

Optimise your images correctly. This is so simply but I see so many people do it wrong that its physically painful! There is a few quick things you should do with your images. 1.) write titles for them, including your primary keyword. For example if my keyword was SEO tips for this article I’d have an image below with the title seo tips 2. have a longer explanation in the image alt tags on what the image is, include relevant keywords here too. And third if you want to have a caption, include a personal phrase and less optimisation here, go for user experience over anything in the caption

My favourite SEO tips and tricks

2.) Titles, URLs and H1 tags

These are the 3 biggest ranking factors and in my opinion if these 3 are correctly optimised it accounts for 80% of on-page SEO! Yes I did just say 80%! Crazy I know but its true if you ask me! Use the 2 out of 3 rule that Jerry West is always banging on about (Hi Jerry!) But don’t over optimise (I use to do that.)

3.) Relevancy in linking

Don’t about the nofollow/dofollow tag, just get relevant links when you are starting up. I’m a very big advocate of relevancy over everything else! And a huge huge huge advocate of relevancy FIRST, before authority! That’s how it would work in the natural world and this is what we are trying to do with our SEO anyway.

4.) Authority links

Once you begin to rank, usually page one for the majority of your local terms, its time to get the big guns out. However you are planning on generating your links, whether you are a full white hate nazi or you are more of a in the middle guy like myself, go for authority now and you will begin to explode your rankings.

5.) Co-citations and other links

Linking out is something that’s forgotten quite a lot nowadays there are a few boxes that I recommend ticking. Linking out to governmental and educational sites. These can be Universities in your local area and maybe your local Government. As well as these links you want to link where RELEVANT to other sources. If I quoted a phrase by someone or used an image I would link back to their site, or if I think its relevant to a piece of content I’m writing and I believe that my readers would find it beneficially then that’s what I will do.

On a personal note (SEO related still) so I’m still gonna mention it here. I’ve moved to Cardiff UK and started working pretty closely with Tom Buckland over at Ghost Marketing. So I’m throwing him a link as he’s a top bloke and given me a lot of advice, I’ll sure you will get a notification, you deserve it.

Hope you liked the article!

5 Quick Hints on Print Marketing

March 12, 2015 By: trafucomment

5 quick hints to remember when you are doing a print marketing campaign.

Design is everything – Don’t be cheap on your design as it will cost you more in long term. Go with a custom freelance designer or a branding agency with a strong emphasis on good design. There are many “digital marketing” and “web design” agencies that offer a brand graphic creation for your print marketing campaigns but these are absolutely terrible. Ensure you find someone with good reviews and emphasis on conversions.
Link your print – To your other marketing campaigns. Tom did a good campaign on linking print to seo, you can also link it pretty easily to social too.
Distribute correctly – Don’t try and “JUST send” your leaflets. Ensure you have a strong research campaign so you can find the most targeted leads and areas for your campaign. Research prospects carefully and use the saved money on DESIGN!
Target – Target your audience correctly. This includes the design: colours, simplicity vs information and also your distribution which includes time of delivery, how it is delivered, presentation and who it is aimed at. Personalised print (outside of the food industry) gets only a 1% response rate on average, whereas semi-personalised prints get nearly 5%, obviously this is more expensive and takes more time but the conversion rate increases must make this useful!?
Calculate profitability – Always use your research and optimisation to calculate the ROI and how profitable a campaign with be. Conversions are everything if you spend £10,000 but expect a ROI of 200%, this is a successful campaign. But if your predicted conversions we wrong, you will end up losing money that could have been used in other marketing material.

Introduction and about Me – SEO, PPC + Previous Life

February 11, 2015 By: trafucomment

Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Harry Ford and I’m a simplistic lover of search marketing. My design skills are a bit lacking but when it comes to search engine optimisation, pay per click marketing and conversion optimisation I think I know what I’m doing. So I guess this post is a bit of an about me page.

Previous Employment

Weirdly I started off in the financial world, initially working for Lewis Alexander in the failed IVA department. This wasn’t my thing from the start but I liked the idea of working in the marketing department of a finance company. So I was then employed by Tom Buckland in the seo for financial advisors division, which although was good, didn’t have exactly what I was looking for.

Next I looked into a few other SEO options and began to learn about seo and ppc. Working in the Cardiff SEO division, before moving to work for the London corporate branding agency and then moving again to Swindon to follow the search engine optimisation bandwagon. But again I found myself moving around too much and wanted to settle down with the mrs and start a family. So we eventually moved to Salisbury where I settled into my own freelance seo role.

I learnt SEO and PPC

In 2014 I began to learn SEO and PPC, mainly from my previous jobs but also on the side, reading up on what worked, what didn’t, learning to glaze over the myths and BS and actually following the right people in the industry. Paid advertising or PPC is something that is underutilised by so many businesses nowadays, many either don’t use it enough, do not scale it correctly or don’t actually even use it all together. SEO is a different kettle of fish, it takes time and money and hence most smaller companies simply don’t get involved in it, they hire people that cold email them and simply don’t know what they are doing, when they should be doing it in-house as SEO is the most profitable marketing method in the world. Bah only viral marketing, which is now included in the content marketing/SEO genre.

What to Expect?

What should you expect on this blog? Well, I’d say I will post once a week but I might be lying and depending on readership and how much people enjoy the content it might be more frequently or less frequently at times. But the content I will be posting will mainly be on opinions in the digital marketing world. SEO advice and training that small business owners might find helpful or even profitable.