Happy New Year - Take 2!

So, did you jump out of bed on 2nd or 3rd of January and launch the new year with a spring in your step and a song in your heart? Is your business now humming with activity and the balance sheet swelling with new customers' money?

Did you set your automated marketing system to 'maximum' and start to reap the benefits within days?

Are you snowed under with work and filling your coffers while your customers are bursting to pay you more?

Thought not.

The new year is supposed to be a time for fresh starts and refocused efforts. Unfortunately, customers have hangovers, too. They didn't jump out of their beds on the 2nd January eager to find new things to buy and desperate to give you their money. Apart from the excitement of the January Sales (which probably started in December), spending money is not high on most people's "to do" lists at this time of year.

But a sluggish market is no excuse for not trying. In fact, it's a signal that you need to try harder - history shows us time and again that companies who continue marketing in a slump are more likely to survive and even thrive. So, if you don't have a marketing plan in place or you haven't quite found the impetus to get started yet in 2012...

... HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Time to get up and get going!

Naturally, Cinnamon Edge are eager to help with your marketing so your business can thrive in 2012. In fact, we're all fired up and ready to go!


Roy

Flatpack Furniture Assembly in Bury St Edmunds and Suffolk

Hello again.

A new business has just started up in Bury St Edmunds to offer a service that many people have been asking for - always a good basis for a business - and that's putting together flat pack furniture, equipment and even garden buildings (sheds, greenhouses, etc).

Some people find the assembly instructions for flat packed products incomplete, confusing or intimidating while others just don't have the time, confidence or inclination to assemble flatpack items like wardrobes, chests of draws or garden sheds.

That means there should be a real demand for a service that takes away all these worries and time pressures.

The professional assembly services offered by Flatpack Assembly Suffolk also mean a guaranteed result, usually in less time and with no skinned knuckles, strained muscles or worse. For a modest hourly rate you can have your flat packed item fully assembled for you in your own home or garden.

The end result for all their customers is a flatpack item that now looks exactly like it did in the showroom or the catalogue. The company also offers their services to businesses in the Bury St Edmunds area.

Cinnamon Edge have helped Flatpack Assembly Suffolk with their online marketing for the Bury St Edmunds and Suffolk area they serve. So far, we've put together two websites (a temporary site and now the 'real' one), a Facebook Page and a Twitter account, a Google Places page and several directory listings, with more to come.

The word is spreading and Flatpack Assembly Suffolk already has multiple listings on the first three pages of Google.

More important to the company, though, will be multiple bookings for flatpack assembly services in Bury St Edmunds and Suffolk!

Roy

Why Domination is Good For You...

...as long as you're the dominant one, that is!

Being submissive is a lot more dangerous than you might think, especially if you're a business owner - and this is a business marketing blog, after all.

In business, you tend to win or lose, especially when the climate is getting harder. True, you can sometimes survive in business without apparently 'beating' anyone but if you want to grow and progress you have to do more than just survive, and it's an increasingly competitive world out there. Those competitors are after your business.

In a really competive environment you don't have the option of 'peaceful co-existence' - either you work to win or you accept defeat, and your best chance of winning is to be dominant, not submissive.

To dominate your marketplace your best place to start is where most of your customers are looking - online. Fortunately, online domination is also the quickest and most cost-effective place to start, as we'll show you on June 9th at our Search Engine Domination Workshop.

The workshop will be at The Self Centre, in Bury St Edmunds.

In one packed morning we'll show you all the essential elements to online domination and you will leave us equipped with vital skills and knowledge to put your online domination strategy into action within hours.

By the end of the afternoon, back in your office, you could already have several online domination tactics in place. In a few days you could have started them all, and in a few weeks' time you could be effectively dominating your market online.

This means you will be 'everywhere' online, meaning less room for your competitors, you can have total control of your online reputation and credibilty and customers and clients will be approaching you, rather than you chasing them.

All of that will cost you just £97 (some discounts available) at http://onlinedomination.eventbrite.com or from our Cinnamon Edge website. Or you can call us on 01284 753912.

Online domination - it certainly beats giving in!

Roy

PS There's a special bonus when you register before midnight on Friday 20th May.

It ALL Comes Down to Leadership

There are a lot of disgruntled people around today: disappointed with their results, disappointed with their leaders and fearful for the future.

Some of them blame the cuts, some blame the delivery of services and some blame the messenger.

Others have vowed to fight on, while a few have probably decided to call it a day.

You, however, are still here, fighting for what you believe in and struggling with all your might to keep the promises you made when you started out.

That's what leadership comes down to.

And that's the way of it in business (and politics, for that matter): factors outside your control affect you just as personally as the things within it; other people's actions get blamed on you and your business is affected by the performance of your competitors.

That's why it's important to be au fait with latest developments and up to date with the options available to your business, starting with the things that have the maximum positive effect for the minimum initial outlay.

That means starting with search engine marketing: the art of using Google, Bing, Yahoo and the rest to give you access to the biggest market for your products and services for the lowest cost yet - in fact, mostly free!

So it's not too late - you can still vote YES for your business, and you can do it today by choosing to join us in Bury St Edmunds on May 11th for our one day workshop on Search Engine Marketing.

At this small workshop you will get, not just the broad brush 'this should work' approach thata you might hear from experts and pundits elsewhere. Instead, you'll get specific and detailed advice to help YOUR business serve YOUR customers in YOUR market against YOUR competition.

In other words, it's your day to vote YES for your business.

See more details and book your place at http://semworkshop.eventbrite.com and learn more about all Cinnamon Edge's business workshops on the Cinnamon Edge website.

Call us today on 01284 753 912 to ask about special deals for sole traders and discounts for multiple tickets - we especially recommend you combine this event with our Search Engine Domination Workshop on June 9th.

We'll be in touch to ask you for your specific questions and challenges so we can give you the best possible deal on the day and the best possible results for your business.

Join us in voting YES for your business!

Roy

Decision Time!

Whether or not you bother to vote today, and whichever way you cast your vote(s), I hope you'll always vote FOR your business.

If you do, you know that voting YES for your business means investing time, effort and cash, in varying proportions. Usually, the more time you put in the less cash you need to invest.

And usually, the more time someone else gives to your business the more cash it costs you.

We like to break the mould sometimes, which is why a whole day of our time, worth umpteen thousands of pounds to your business, will cost you less than £150.

All we ask is that you invest a day, too, and join us at our all-day workshop to learn everything you need to know about search engine marketing. Pound for pound (and hour for hour) SEM is the best investment you can make in your business.

That's why we think this is the easiest voting decision you will make today. The vote FOR your business.

Go to http://semworkshop.eventbrite.com for more information and to vote YES or call us at 01284 753912 to discuss our special deals and discounts for multiple events.

Best wishes, and remember to vote YES for your business today!

Roy

Light Haulage Company Must Go Goes Online

Must Go, the Bury St Edmunds light haulage and courier business has actually been online for a while, but their website hadn't achieved much for them until recently.

In fact they now have two sites, including this one, Must Go Couriers and Light Haulage.

Last week, however, that website site (which I created for them) brought them an enquiry from Bristol, over 200 miles from their headquarters in Thurston, just outside Bury St Edmunds. This is well outside the area they reach through any of their offline marketing channels, demonstrating the value of online marketing for a small Bury St Edmunds business like theirs.

The site I created for them is now on page one of Google for at least three valuable search terms, so it looks likely they'll get more business in the future, too.

Online marketing is just a part of the service we offer our consultancy clients, and websites and SEO are a smaller part of that, but it's always good to hear about real-world results like Must Go's.

Roy

PS. What Must Go's website also demonstrates is that you don't always need an all-singing, all-dancing website to get business online. All you need to do is tell potential customers they're in the right place, make them an offer and tell them what to do next. And you need people to find your website in the first place.

Must Go prefer contact by phone, so the site has two phone numbers, an instruction to call them, their business address, their own YouTube video, and some nifty SEO stuff to get it onto page one of Google. Job done.

You're Bigger Than This

If you own or manage a business in the 'real world' (ie, not an online or Internet business), you might be seeing an increasing number of people approaching you to help you 'get online'.

Chances are, though, that you're 'online' already. And you might be wondering what's so great about having a website and a social media 'presence' when it doesn't seem to bring you any noticeable increase in customers for your business.

The problem is, improving your business is a bigger and more complicated job than any Internet marketing services can hope to deal with. In fact, you could be doing everything right online and still be no better off. Your problems might be online, or they might not.

In that case, it's because your problems lie elsewhere, and fixing problems that don't exist won't help at all. You need to diagnose what the problems really are before you can even begin to solve them.

So when you get an Internet marketer or online marketing expert approaching you to offer you a particular service or package before they've even found out about your business, run away!

You need an in-depth consultation, a diagnostic assessment of your business - with no cure-all services for sale - to find the real cause of your business' pain before you spend any more money on marketing services. Just as a good doctor would, we run tests, consider the symptoms and assess your business' overall health before we offer you any 'medicine' at all.

Only then can you be really confident that the treatment you're offered will be the best treatment available to get your business thriving. Often, it's a complete surprise.

Contact us on 01284 753912 or via the Cinnamon Edge website to find out more and book your one to one diagnostic consultation.

Roy

More Online Marketing for Bury St Edmunds

Not content with getting our Solicitors Bury St Edmunds website onto page one of Google for two excellent search terms, and the similar success with our site for Dentist Bury St Edmunds, we now have another new website already onto page two.

This one is for the best accountants firm in town, so we named it Best Accountants Bury St Edmunds. There are a lot of accountancy firms in and around Bury, let alone the rest of Suffolk and East Anglia, but there can only be one best accountant in Bury st Edmunds.

The only question is, who is that to be?

Roy

PS. Search engine optimisation isn't all we do, by any means, although people do find it easier to label us in that way. What we really do is help you find ALL the profit leaks, marketing mistakes and underused resources in your business. That usually takes us a minimum of two hours with you, the business owner, maybe more.

In that initial consultation we promise there will be no sales pitch, no quotes for services and no cheques accepted as a deposit for our services. In other words; no selling at all. Just listening, probing and taking notes. Then we get back to you, probably about a week later, with ideas, suggestions, recommendations and, if we think we can work with you, a proposal for our initial price and our ongoing fees.

Fees are based on your company's size and earning potential and the amount of work we expect to have to do. No two companies are alike and so no two quotes will be the same.

The point is, can you afford NOT to increase your profits by 10, 20 or 30 percent or even more?

Email me at roy@cinnamonedge.co.uk or phone Cinnamon Edge on 01284 753912 to arrange an initial consultation.

NB. We can only work with one company per sector per area so there can be no conflict of interest.

Site Update: Solicitors Bury St Edmunds

Our site for Solicitors Bury St Edmunds appeared on Google's first results page today, at number seven.

This is roughly on schedule and very pleasing for the clients who will be taking over the domain in the near future.

Once the new owners take possession they will be able to maintain and even improve the site's position with standard SEO methods and reap the benefits of an optimised site on page one of the world's most important search engine.

This latest result is yet another success for our online marketing in Bury St Edmunds.

Roy

Online Marketing Course Update

Part 6 of the online marketing course for business owners is now up on the Marketing manual blog.

There have been some important changes in SEO in recent months that not every SEO 'expert' has caught onto yet - and ceratinly not all website designers!

Go to the Marketing Manual Blog for latest news on that.

Naturally, our online marketing services in Bury St Edmunds are bang up to date!

Why This Website is Number One

'This website' being our Cinnamon Edge site, which is number one for the competitive term 'online marketing Bury St Edmunds', since that's what we do and that's where we are.

A few months ago, due to an, erm, technical hitch, we had to hastily rebuild our website on a new domain. We decided to use the opportunity to concentrate on getting it to number one as quickly as possible, as a test for ourselves and to prove to you we could do it.

And we did, within about three weeks. The site is still at number one for the key phrase we targetted, but because of the speed with which it was built we didn't really trouble ourselves too much with the design and appearance. So we also proved that, as far as SEO is concerned, design in that sense doesn't matter.

But how did we get to number one? The same way you can; by following the steps outlined here, on our Marketing Manual blog. Steps one to four are there now, with more to follow.

In fact, not only did we get to number one, we even got to positions two to ten at the same time, so we actually held ALL of page one of Google for a time - just to prove we could.

We'll be rebuilding the Cinnamon Edge site again in the next few weeks so it will be a site we can be proud of, but for now it serves to prove a point - online marketing, in Bury St Edmunds or anywhere else, is about much more than building pretty websites.

Roy

More Online Marketing Clients

A busy few weeks of ahead for us in Bury St Edmunds as more clients have sought our online marketing help to promoting their businesses.

Once again, we're looking beyond Bury and our new clients are in very different sectors, but the basic 'rules' of online marketing are the same for any business.

If you're planning to promote your business via the Internet, pop across to our marketing manual blog for some free advice on how you can do it yourself.

Roy

Online, Internet, or Search Marketing?

What IS in a name?

My surname, for instance, means either 'mighty as a boar' if it's from Saxon Germany, or 'native of Evreux' in what is now northern France, if it's Norman.

My wife Jacqui's surname is French-speaking Swiss, via Jersey. I'm still amazed at the series of coincidences that brought us both to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk.

Anyway, I recently posed a question on Facebook:

'If you promote your business on the web, which do you use - online marketing, Internet marketing or search engine marketing?'

What I was trying to get at was not so much, 'Which do you use' as, 'What do you call it?' because the three terms are to most people virtually interchangeable. What I really wanted was a clue as to what search term I should optimise a website for.

But the people who answered tended to choose one type over the others, so I had to re-think.

Now, I still think 'online marketing' is interchangeable with 'Internet marketing', but they both cover a wide range of marketing strategies that happen to employ Internet-based technology. Emails, for example, or direct mail sending people to an otherwise obscure website.

For instance, Andrew Reynolds doesn't bother too much about optimising his sales pages for the search engines because he knows he can rely on exceptionally good direct mail to send visitors to them.

So if you're not on Mr Reynold's list, you might not ever stumble across one of his promotions in time to take advantage of it.

Whereas what we specialise in, under the broad title of 'online marketing' is in fact search engine marketing, or even just 'search marketing'. We get our clients' websites higher in the search results and we add a few more useful listings as well, so our clients don't so much show up on Google as invade it.

Much like the Saxons and Normans invaded England, actually. Maybe it's in the blood.

So that's what I've been doing with some of my time: invading Google and daydreaming around quotes from Shakespeare. How very English.

Roy

Online Marketing Beyond Bury St Edmunds

Just to show we're not limited to Bury St Edmunds, we've undertaken an online marketing exercise for a client in Littleport, Cambridgeshire.

Not a million miles away but a whole new set of keywords and a very different customer profile.

The latest beneficiary of our Internet marketing experience is The Utopia Centre, which specialises in footcare and weightloss for Cambridge and the surrounding area.

Why combine the two? Because foot and weight problems are often closely connected. And there's no better person to help you with both than Elizabeth Dutton who's a certificated weight loss coach and fully-qualified foot care professional.

The Utopia Centre also has a brand-new blog, courtesy of Cinnamon Edge (and Blogger.com), which also focuses on weightloss and footcare for the Cambridge area.

So, go to the Utopia Centre blog for latest news and to the Utopia Centre Website for in-depth information, and for a thoroughly professional service visit their beautiful oasis at Littleport, near Ely.

Roy

Online Marketing Project in Bury St Edmunds

One of the tactics you can use to get you onto page one of Google is an online news release, or several news releases.

We had great results for our marketing test using Pressbox, which offers a free service. It got us third place on page one with this item about the online marketing services we offer in Bury St Edmunds.

It's probably only slipped lower on the page because we took another eight places as well!

So think about using online news releases for marketing your business. It doesn't have to be earth-shattering news. If you're unsure about how to write a news release, we'll be happy to help.

Roy

Online Marketing in Bury St Edmunds

If you have a business in Bury St Edmunds or Suffolk, Cinnamon Edge has some good news.

In fact, it's probably good news, wherever you are, if your business could do with some marketing help, even though we've labelled our project 'Online marketing in Bury St Edmunds'.

That's because we're based in Bury St Edmunds, not because you have to be.

But the online marketing part, that's for anyone. The great thing about the Internet is that it's essentially free. Free to add your business to and free for customers to access.

So marketing online is a bargain, but that's just one advantage.

It's also amazingly powerful, because it can be very local AND because it can be global - whichever suits your business.

It's also always 'on' - meaning it's there whenever you choose to look, and whatever you want to look for. And you only find what you're looking for. If you search for an accountant in Bury St Edmunds, for example, you won't usually see an advert for used cars or information about stair lifts. So it's incredibly, almost perfectly, targeted.

That's why most people search online these days, including for local products and services.

Which means you could be found online at any time by exactly the people who want what you offer. And you won't waste a single penny trying to sell your stuff to anyone else.

So, if you have a business, almost any business, and you're not taking advantage of online marketing yet, can I ask why not?

Roy

PS. It's not too late to get online. In fact, it's the perfect time! We can even supply you with a FREE WEBSITE, just to get you online ASAP. Just visit the website at http://www.cinnamonedge.co.uk/ to find out more.