Meet The Team : James Web Developer

James nearly joined the Royal Navy before luckily deciding that his career lay in online marketing (Phew!)

Qualifications: BSc Hons Multimedia Computing at Staffordshire University

Work experience: Prior to joining the Soula team, James spent a year out in Munich, Germany (during his sandwich year) working for the IABG, a Ministry of Defence contractor. Required to maintain and develop their department’s internal staff information portal, James worked on numerous other projects including improving communication between departments.

Joined Soula: 2008 as a Developer

Hobbies: An avid follower of extreme sports, James can’t seem to get enough of them. From exercising at the gym to playing football, if he could he would go snowboarding all the time. Outside of work, James likes listening to music and messing around with graphical design and digital art – anything do with multimedia

Some interesting facts about James: “I have got so many stories it’s scary. To sum up my best one though: I nearly became a fighter pilot in the Royal Navy; I once fell asleep while running home drunk (never a good idea); the first time I did a skydive my parachute failed and I once ate a fruit pastel sandwich – yum.”

Thinking on James when speaking to a female interviewee: “Yeah, I do the same as Chad, but better (flirt much!)

RSS Feeds – Why do They Matter?

You could easily argue that this niche is completely outside my field, but in many ways it is not.

You see, RSS feeds are a great way to increase the number of subscribers to your website. Either through subscriptions to your newsletters, news stories or to your online marketing campaign as a whole, RSS feeds can help you to create a solid base of subscribers who will happily spread news of your website across the internet. Continue reading

The Benefits of Copywriting Tutorials

If you are looking for ways to improve your copywriting techniques and learn all the ‘no no’s’ of the business I thoroughly recommend trying any of the numerous e-marketing and copywriting tutorials that are currently on the web. Continue reading

Future of SEO

Hey Guys,

There has been a lot of talk recently about the Future of SEO, there has always been the “SEO is dead/going to die” side of discussions which obviously we don’t agree with, i’ve never seen a half compelling argument for this and while ever search exist search optimisation will be needed.

This isn’t to say changes are in store however, Rand did a post Friday over at SEOMoz looking at his opinion of the future of SEO and I thought I would give my professional response to Rand’s ideas as well as some of my own.

Here’s the video for you to watch first, it’s less than 10 minutes long so don’t worry about a lecture. Continue reading

Headline Templates – are they really worth it?

I am always looking for new and inventive ways to make my articles, email marketing and online campaigns stand out from the rest of the competition, so it is not surprising that I spend a lot of time researching into headlines and ad techniques.

Yet the most frustrating thing for me is the use of ‘templates’ by online marketers. Continue reading

Conquering Photoshop

Even though my job role primarily consists of writing web content for our clients, I love being given the opportunity to experiment in other facets of online marketing.

Recently we have been re-designing our email marketing strategy for one of our clients – Property Mentor – and as part of our reformatting I have been able to play around with Photoshop, which has been great for helping me learn how to modify graphics. Continue reading

Digital Branding and Social Media Fraud

With more and more companies embracing digital and social media as a marketing tool, it is more important than ever to control your digital identity because chances are if you’re not, someone else is.

There have been numerous examples of digital identity fraud in recent months e.g. Phil Spector was allegedly Tweeting from his jail cell; Tony La Russa, manager of baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, successfully sued Twitter for an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation; Kanye West wrote an amusingly irate blog entry about being misrepresented on Twitter. Continue reading