Welcome to the Escape Blog

If you read half the books I read, you would be surprised anyone places any print adverts anymore.

For that reason, I took a bit of convincing when Escape Client, Truly Scrumptious Beauty, wanted to place specific adverts in a column in the local paper.

I must concede that my initial fears were soon allayed as the phone rang and the web site took on extra subscribers.

Not only did we increase real sales (the adverts more than pay for themselves), but we drive traffic to the web site, which in turn gets subscribers, who we can start talking to on a regular basis.

Conclusions:

• Balance your marketing mix
• Make sure online and offline media work together (not independently)
• Measure the results and see what works
• Be prepared to try new things

Debbie Weil discusses how the birth of blogging, may also mean the death of blogging.

Even more reason to make it relevant and compelling. It’s like web sites. Maybe people are clinging onto that line from Field of Dreams:

‘If you build it they will come’

You’ve got to make it worth coming for! And that takes a little work.

You have a book about ideas - innovative. Luckily Seth Godin has just pointed lot’s of people to your site (which is always a massive help).

But people want to see the goods before they buy… so you give them a thirty page preview as a downloadable PDF with no tie-in.

Would you do that for your services or goods?
If not, why not?

If so, how?

Now, you may well all know this, but I only just found it and I want to share it anyway.

Google loves a page that changes on a regular basis. The more you change, the more relevant you must be (as long as the content is relevant).

Very basically, Google doesn’t want to waste time coming back to your site if it doesn’t think it’s worth it. It’s got much better things to do with loads more sites to spider through.

Here’s the interesting bit

Go to Google and type in your company name in Google to find yourself. Then, have a look at the button saying cached.

(click on this image to see sample).

Here’s the link to The Escape information with all the relevant details of when the page was last checked.

Even more important, as far as Google is concerned is a text version of what Google Reads.

Our web site is accessible and changes regularly which means Google can read quite a lot - it can clearly see all the links so it will go off and check those as well.

Try it on your site and see what happens.

Marketing Tom points me to Matt Cutts who has a write-up about Google and BMW in Germany.

Apparently, they have broken the Google guidleines so Google booted them off!

A lesson for us all there.

If you want to do better with your web site, concentrate on the content; making it compelling and interesting. As web users we want to trust but when people tell you something different, then it’s a bit annoying.

Read on my personal blog what I think of that…

AOL and Yahoo have both announced that they are to start charging to send e-mails from their Free accounts, the BBC reports.
Although
this sounds bad, it is a result of the fight against spammers who
target these type of accounts to assault the in-boxes of the millions.
It
is becoming harder and harder to e-mail market which is why the right
kind of permission-based opt-in system is needed. This doesn’t
guarantee 100% however.
The move towards RSS feeds is more promising but as discussed by Debbie Weil at Blogwrite CEO, it is still not simple enough to use.
That
day will come though, and then the job will become harder. Harder to
get people to buy into what we have to say. That is, of course, unless
we have something worthwhile listening to!

Thanks to Daryll from Noggin for pointing to me this article at Business Week:

Blogs will Change Your Business

"Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political
mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice:
Catch up…or catch you later"

Courtesy of some Forum Members over at laymyhat.com, See this cool little free tool for checking out some interesting facts about your web site.

Find out what the Search Engines really think about you!