Saturday - A Good Day for Business

Local businesses will get a timely boost on Saturday when we give away seven of the eight books we've published this year! The other one will cost you less than a pound - but only for one day, Saturday 11 Feb. Here's our news release explaining everything:

Although our part of the country has fared better than most regions during the recession, there are still a lot of anxious business owners who will be grateful for some free help to alleviate their business worries.

That’s why local marketing firm Cinnamon Edge has pulled out all the stops and published not one, but eight business books online in the last few weeks – and why they’re making most of them available for free this Saturday.

The books cover business topics ranging from basic search engine optimisation for your website, to email marketing, how to start a small practice from scratch and even how to run workshops and seminars. All the books have been written by Cinnamon Edge partners Jacqui Carrel and Roy Everitt.

“The books are available from our website now,” says Roy, “and they’re not expensive anyway, but we decided we can reach more people by making them free for a day.”

Only the seminar and workshops one won’t be free – but it will cost less than a pound!

Six of the books are available via Amazon for Kindle (and you don’t even need a Kindle to read them, just a free app that you download easily for your computer or tablet). The other two books are PDFs published by Bookboon, who specialise in free ebooks for businesses and professionals. These can be read on any computer.

You can find links and descriptions for all the books on a special page on Cinnamon Edge’s website, at http://www.CinnamonEdge.co.uk/publications

Remember, they’ll only be free for a day!

Roy adds, “I hope people will take full advantage of the chance to download our books while they can.”

With experts telling us the economy is likely to be sluggish for some time, anything that can help a business do better while saving them money has to be a good idea.

 We're hoping the local press will pick up on our offer and spread the word, but feel free to pass it on yourself - there's a Tweet button on the right of this page!

Roy

Really Simple SEO for Business Owners

Our latest book has just been published on Amazon and this one carries my name, so I'm very happy to announce the launch today of Really Simple SEO for Business Owners.

 

In the book you will learn about the techniques I used to get SEO Suffolk onto page one for at least four major keywords in less than a week. Those are the same methods we've used to help Flatpack Assembly Suffolk to multiple listings on page one and it's a major factor in helping The Foot Care Centre Kings Lynn and the College of Foot Care Professionals to dominate the search results in their markets.

You might be wondering how that could be "really simple", but you won't know until you read the seven powerful steps in the book!

Really Simple SEO for Business Owners is a short book that costs less than £2 and you don't even need a Kindle to read it - download the free app and read it on your PC or iPad.

After the launch yesterday of How to Become a Foot Care Professional we were thrilled to see it's already a best seller in its category. We're obviously doing something right, which is why you should think of us if you're planning a book of your own. We can help you write, edit, format and publish it. In fact, we could even do all of that for you. Visit the Cinnamon Edge website to see more about our witing and publishing services .


Roy

Reasons to be Secret about SEO Suffolk

Since I built our new website SEO Suffolk on Friday evening I've been delighted to see it rising quickly in the search results, for lots of reasons.

For example, while being successful with our own SEO obviously demonstrates that our SEO system works, any delay could have looked like failure and been embarrassing and possibly damaging to our reputation. It's one thing having SEO success for a client who sells foot care, another entirely to have the same success when we're selling SEO!

As soon as we start building links from social media the whole undertaking becomes very public, especially to our local audience of Suffolk business owners. Without quick success we could have looked a bit desperate posting those links. Thankfully, success did come quickly and it was achieved over a weekend, so we could tell people on Monday morning that we were already on page one or two for at least three of our main search terms.

We might have taken a more cautious route and avoided social media altogether while we built less conspicuous links from directories, article sites, news releases and the like. Success might have taken longer but any delayed success or 'failure' would then have been a private affair.

But there's another question about being so public with our SEO methods - are we giving the game away to our competitors or our potential customers (so they no longer need us)?

Well, yes, we are giving away our secrets, but they're really not so secret to an SEO 'expert' who really knows what they're doing (although not all of them seem to). And we find the best clients for us aren't so much ignorant of what's required as uninterested or just too busy. Busy is good - it usually means they can afford to pay us!

So we use Social Media Marketing as part of our Search Engine Optimisation and as a big part of our Search Engine Domination, too. It's not secret, but it is wonderful to see it working!

Roy

PS. If you want to know even more about the Search Engine Optimisation techniques that got our new SEO Suffolk site onto page one inside three days, watch out for my new book to be published on Kindle in the next day or two. It will be called something like "Very Simple SEO for Business Owners" but there are a few wannabe SEO experts who can learn from it, too!

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

This SEO Stuff Works

Hello,

Proof, if proof were needed, that SEO really works was the page one listing I got for this blog, thanks to the previous post. Within hours, if you'd Googled 'Lucid SEO', you'd have seen RoyEveritt.com at number five.

I've always said that blogs are by far the easiest sites to optimise, and when you pay some more informed attention to key words and related words and phrases, it's even easier. Of course, I wouldn't have done so well if I hadn't paid attention to David Congreave's report, Lucid SEO on Trial.

Google loves Blogger blogs, and it loves fresh, readable and relevant comment. As long as you can string some reasonably intelligent sentences between the keywords, it's got to be the easiest way to grab a front page place!

Roy

PS. The labels help, too, so always have the keywords in there as well.

Proving SEO is Easy...

...When You Know How!

Hello again,

Recently, I've been asked by a few people to help them get more traffic to their websites, and I've come up with a few tailor-made recommendations for how we can do this.

Most people want quick results and don't have the time to do much work themselves, so I often recommend buying targeted traffic, using PPC. What I tend NOT to recommend is spending too much time on Search Engine Optimisation, because it's not usually so quick and it's something of a 'black art'.

David Congreave would beg to differ, I think, and he's convinced me that SEO is something we should always consider for every website we have a hand in.

To prove his point, David has published a free report 'Lucid SEO on Trial', detailing his campaign to win the SEO ranking contest for the recent Focus Marketing Seminar in London. And win it he did, handsomely, despite being banned by Google almost as soon as he'd started!

The report gives you a very good overview of how Mr Congreave's Lucid SEO system works, and it's worth grabbing, just for that. Plus, he nails a few misconceptions about optimisation (and he helped me modify my recommendations) with this well-written report.

I met David again at the Focus Seminar, and he was looking pretty pleased with himself, as well he might - he even beat the official Focus Marketing Seminars website on almost every major search engine - including Google.

Oh, here's Lucid SEO itself: http://www.lucid-seo.com/?rid=1713

Congratulations, David Congreave and Lucid SEO, and congratulations to you if you take a few of David's optimisation tips and transform your website's rankings.

Roy