Webinspire on the ground

Timeline for Facebook Fan pages is HERE!

The long anticipated Timeline is here for Facebook Fan Pages and I have to say it’s pretty cool.

As soon as you set it up, as an admin, you will notice that the “Insights’ are newly located at the very top, giving you a quick view of the activity on your page, new likes and general insights via a graph. 

What Fans will see and appreciate is the new found ‘Covers’ which are located at the top. 
‘Facebook covers’ is essentially a banner image that is placed behind an image of your logo.

The advantage of this new feature is that it allows you to more prominently display your business’s branding and even add more information within the image. It’s a great way to promote new products and events. 

The rest of the page is displayed in tiles, in two columns. This is useful as it allows more posts to be viewed within the screen. Additionally, if you think a certain post is quite noteworthy, you can expand its’ presence to take up the full width of the page - certainly making it more eye catching!

The Facebook Timeline also does a good job of organising your posts. It groups together things like other pages your Fan page ‘likes’, Segregates posts by month with clear markings, displays Activity for that period of time.

Over all, the move to Facebook Timeline was easy, fun and the new features make it definitely worthwhile. Additional ‘Advertising space’ (such as the Covers) for yourself is always welcome and the ability to really highlight certain posts makes it quite a powerful tool. I would recommend you try it out in preview mode at least, get a feel for it and if you like it, Swap!

Be sure to share your timeline with us too!!

Brad Powar from http://webinspire.com.au 
Check out our timeline at http://facebook.com/webinspire 

4 common email marketing mistakes

As an online marketing company, we often get businesses seeking us out for solutions to issues that have arisen from poor Email Marketing Practices. We’ve selected the top 4 which we believe are definite no-no’s:

1. Attachments: Emails sent to clients as a part of a bulk email marketing exercise must not include attachments. This places undue pressure on the server and makes the process of sending emails to thousands of recipients a very slow process.
2. Using outlook: Using outlook to send email is poor form. Email marketing these days is about sending email and understanding how your recipients are reacting to your message. Outlook provides no information about how your message was received. 
3. Not providing a way for recipients to unsubscribe: With no unsubscribe button, you message will simply be blocked and marked as spam. If enough people do this, your email address and ip can be blocked by whole ISP if things get bad enough.
4. Huge banner images: Most people have their email clients set to hide images. Sending emails to recipients with large banners would mean the first thing they see when they open your email is large empty spot, until they scroll down. People find the delete button easier to click than to scroll down.

Why Facebook and Twitter is important for any business

When it comes to the internet, the success of your website depends on whether people are about to find it, and when they do, what the space around is saying about it.

Social Media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google+ now which is now one among the masses are all tools which you can use to:

• Assist your SEO results positively
• Listen to your consumers, understand how they are reacting to your marketing efforts
• Influence consumer behavior

Both Google.com and Bing.com have admitted that your visibility on their search engines is positively affected by your Social Media efforts.

Consumers will talk about their experience with your services on these sites, consumers might vent, or praise to their friends or family. Having a Facebook presence allows them to vent to you, allowing you to avert damage that you would otherwise not know of, or help promote your products through user reviews.

Influence consumer behavior through interacting with users, in a public forum.

Social media makes your online presence real, it connects your online realm with users and the real world. Considering search engines such as Google and Bing are primarily driven by relevancy, having a Social media presence is no longer a choise.

4 ways to improve your Google rank

Stats show that more than 90% of websites don’t make the top 3 pages when users search for keywords associated with them, and users rarely go past the first 3 results. Every result page they go down, they perception of relevance and credibility goes down a notch too, so it’s important to be up there. Here’s 4 quick ways to get started:

1. Submit your website into online directories that are relevant to your business and location.
2. Ensure your developer has added the right keywords and descriptions to your website. These need to be different for each page on you website, as each page has a different purpose!
3. Add descriptions to your images, by including “alt” tags. Ask your developer about this!!
4. Link to different pages within your own website! If done properly, Google will appreciate the fact that you can develop content that actually links to other parts of your website.
5. BONUS TIP
   Offer your clients discounts for linking to your website. This is a great way to help you rank.

I hope you found these tips useful. If you would like more information, feel free to drop us a line at: 

• http://webinspire.com.au/contact-us.html 
• or call us on: (02) 8014 5612

Rank up!

We don’t know exactly when, but we’re finally ranking on Google’s first page! 

So our 6 month strategy has finally yielded results better than projected. We’re looking forward to analyzing our traffic data and passing on our findings to our clients. 
Next step: to break top 5, yeh baby!

Search Google for “Online marketing Sydney”

New outlook

Just a quick update with the direction of Webinspire.

We will be moving forward with 3 clearly defined products and services hence forth. 

These are:

1. Online marketing
   For all things related to generating quality, relevant traffic to your website, as well as converting that traffic to leads. This will also include Search Engine Optimisation.
2. Web design and hosting
   Our aim here is to provide end to end solutions, from Domain registration, hosting, web design and maintenance & support.
3. Solutions development
   This is all about developing unique web based solutions for our clients.
   This are will be largely driven by WiSecure.

We hope you find that we have moved in a direction that you our clients will come to appreciate and value and we look forward to your feedback.

Kind regards,
Brad Powar from Webinspire - an online marketing agency based in Sydney. 

Google rank goes up!

So all business owners who have an online presence are aware of how much of a positive impact a good presence in search engines has for business.

Generally a good presence is defined by the ability of your website to rank well in search engines for certain keywords. Certain keywords your businesses potential customers might type to find similar products and services that your business offers.

This brings us back to why we are quite proud of ourselves at Webinspire.
You see, we already have 2 of our long-term clients competing successfully on Google for relevant search terms ie

• Financial Spectrum will come first for “financial planners sydney” in Google.
• Dynafurn will appear competitively on the first page for “wholesale chairs” in Google.

But our own website Webinspire.com.au was not doing so well. Around about early June of this year, we were on maybe the 7th page in Google for “online marketing sydney” which was quite depressing for us, being in the internet trade and all.

But this was about to change. We decided to create a plan to get to the first page of Google. We set out a strategy, broke it down into it’s sections that we could implement over a 6 month period and launched the project.

Since then, we have seen a steady improvement in our ranking and today, we’re sitting about midway through the 2nd page of Google for the keywords “online marketing sydney”.

What has this shown us? Hard work does pay. Organic methods work. Common sense prevails and it proves to us, that we invested in the right experts that we now provide to all our clients. 

What this means for you if you choose Webinspire for your online marketing needs? You’re working with an agency that has proven results, not only for their clients, but for themselves as well, in a very, very competitive market! That’s got to mean something right? ;)

Hope to see you soon at Webinspire,

Cheers,
Brad Powar. 

We don’t just do websites

Our online portal for our clients helps them deliver training videos to their customers and colleagues. 
What happens when one of our clients come to us with a video format our systems don’t support?

We bend over backwards and find a solution. That’s what!

The situation

•  Client uses Go2Meeting to create webinars for their customers and employees
• Webinars are saved in a “WMV” extenstion.

The problem

• The WMV version is actually G2M4 format which is a custom WMV format designed by citrix.
• Webinspire servers could not convert this version of WMV
• Neither did some of the top available conversion software available, paid and free
• Neither did most online video sharing, file streaming servers

The solution

• Webinspire technicians found citrix provides a file with their codec’s that can transcode the G2M4 version of WMV to a normal, compatible version of WMV

How it’s done:

1. Goto where citrix is installed on your computer
2. on a 64bit machine its in program files (64)
3. The number of the directory at the end varies (not sure as to why)
4. C:\Program Files\Citrix\GoToMeeting\721 (or some other random number)
5. Copy the files G2M.dll, g2mtranscoder.exe and the G2M4 WMV video file that needs fixing to c:\
6. Click start, type CMD and hit enter
7. Type “cd ..” until you just see “c:\”
8. Then type “g2mtranscoder.exe source=video_file_name.wmv”
9. Hit enter

You don’t see that it’s working, but if your launch task manager, you will see a process called g2mtranscoder hogging your system resources. It takes a while but it works!

Cheers,
Brad from Webinspire.com.au