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!)”

I got married on the 6^th August, and have literally just come back off my honeymoon from a cruise to the Mediterrean and it was fantastic!

Besides this trip being the furthest I have ever travelled – EVER – the views were spectacular. I loved every single minute of it, and can’t wait going travelling again. I have even got a tan!

Plus the break was creatively refreshing, which will be great from my copy.

Many copywriters will tell you that it is important to keep up with your writing, but I feel a break from your work – every now and then – is a great way to prevent writers block.

We have all been there. Staring at a headline, stuck on what to write, but as with any piece of copy. When you take a step back and move onto something else, you will return with a new set eyes and ideas… well they will be flowing.

And for me personally, it was just the break I needed. My mind is now clear and raring to go

Rowena xx

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.

Currently RSS news feed adoption runs at 11% – which I know sounds incredibly low – however, subscribers a notorious for sharing this information with others, leading to more subscriptions and potentially more leads for you.

Okay, so how does this relate to copywriting?

RSS feeds are only as good as the content subscribers are registering for. Give them poorly written copy and they are not exactly going to recommend you to someone else, are they? If anything they will unsubscribe.

For this reason, it is essential when using RSS feeds to use good quality copy to keep them hooked. Not only will this enable you to regularly update your website with fresh new content, but it can potentially enhance your search engine optimisation.

So if you are looking for new inventive ways to encourage more visits to your website, I suggest using RSS feeds. Just make sure first that you are putting it on for the right reasons.

Don’t be deceived by their article appearance – some of these tutorials are pretty good and are a great refresher if you haven’t written for a particular niche for a while. Plus, most of them are free.

I recently subscribed to one – completely free – and I received daily tutorials through my inbox which covered the benefits of SEO, how to generate massive traffic, internet marketing, blogging, keyword article marketing. It was a great read.

If you are interested, the tutorial was by a well know online marketer Titus Hoskins who has established himself in the online marketing arena as a comprehensive copywriter as well as a successful affiliate marketer.

And the information I acquired through reading these emails was incredible. Alongside his tips on how to implement the best marketing tools, he also offered a pool of resources that you could freely download from his site: including SEOElite.

His resources alone are a good reason to subscribe – he has covered every possible problem you could come across when creating a website from scratch, plus shows you how to write powerful copy.

Now the one tip I do suggest you follow when subscribing to these tutorials, is to first check out the author of these courses and also the quality of the course themselves.

I once went on one which basically repeated all the best known tips – essentially tips you can find in any article, anywhere on the web.

Now if you are new to online marketing, reading these tutorials is okay, but if you want to take your online marketing strategy to the next level, it is best to keep searching for higher quality articles.

The key is to focus on one aspect at a time, and progress from there.

Rowena

PS. Here are some decent ones that I have found:

http://www.marketingtoolguide.com/Resources/netwriting_masters_course.htm

http://www.adcopywriting.com

http://www.pandecta.com/copy.html

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.

Let’s look at the points Rand raises first.

Content and Accessibility will Remain Important

I am confident Rand is right about this one. Controlling quality ocntent and managing site accessability is one of the most important roles in SEO, increasingly websites are become very large and complex and it takes a lot of time, planning and expierence to correctly structure sites and keep them accessible to everyone (and bots).

As new trends develop site maintenance will become a larger task and things such as semantic tagging (not LSI) more advanced sitemaps and robots control will be important.

Content will remain an important part of SEO but I expect we will begin to see a more vaired base of content being important. The changes in the last year alone with Google now indexing Flash and Java has shown SEO’s we don’t just have plain text to play with. This technology will only become more capable and accurate meaning web technologies like Flash much more accepted by SEO.

As Rand mentions this has to be an important part of SEO as it’s an imoprtant part of internet marketing in general and the future of the web.

Social Graph Metrics

Rand moves on to discuss social graph metrics and the potential impact it will have on search. Again I agree with Rand on this one on the basic point that it will be something search giants are interested in but the overall effect on queries and results will be small.

The value in presenting people with “super personalised” results is minimal and just like in Rand’s example you are not always going to want to see the thing people around you are talking about top of the SERPs. Rand is also correct in the fact the system is too easy to game, if SE relied solely on community interaction to predict what people want in the SERPs quality would plummet for both them and the communiteis themselves.

I personally see this evolving more as a supplementary search option, similar to “images” or “video” a section almost themed “what my peers think” is a possibility. I’m not sure how this will be presented but i’m confident it will not encrouch into the main algorythm.

User Metrics

User Metrics is more of a complicated point. There are a lot of theories stating these already have an impact on ranking. Rand suggests that they will be incorporated into SEO and ranking algorithms more in the future.

I think while this makes sense and it is likely Google will use Analytics data to influence rankings it will never be a major factor for one reason, not everyone use analytics.

It would be impossible for Google to sort out all the websites into ranked order if only 30-40% are giving the the data they need. It would also mean that “having analytics” would give you a statistical advantage or disadvantage in the SERPS (depending on your site and how they work it) and therefore people would have alternative motives to using it.

User metrics can be valuable however and I think that in the long run you may at least start to get WMT feedback on issues that can harm site rankings.

Verticalis

The major point Rand ends on is the concept of verticals developing in the SEO world or at least becoming much more prominent.

This is something a lot of people in our office have been discussing recently, we are increasingly seeing people waver away from Google on long tail industry specific searches and move to websites that are almost guaranteed to answer their query.

This means that businesses are now wanting to appear in new searches, not just Google, Yahoo and Bing. With this new trend developing it easy to see that it will become competitive however I am sceptical at how much some of these sites can actually have optimisation done for them. Many work on exact matching or showing the oldest/newest entries and you can’t actually do much about the way it brings results back.

Of course manipulating titles and putting the right “tags” will have positive effects but each site is it’s own ball game and it could become very hectic very fast.

There is also Googles reaction to consider. They are not going to let all those searches go without a fight and with there increased range of search projects (such as books, base, etc) will be challenging people for these customers.

Conclusion

SEO is going through a lot of changes at the moment, we can expect the next year to be a very interesting time for everyone in the search marketing industry but the practice is far from dead and is actually growing way beyond the “search engine” barrier to become just “search”.

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

In one article I read recently, I was confronted with 9 easily adaptable headlines that have been used – over and over again – for the last 40+ years – I know since the 1960’s! And the most worrying aspect to this article was how prevalent all these headlines still are.

Take a look and you’ll see what I mean: http://www.infomarketingblog.com/9-headline-templates-that-have-a-prayer – you can find any one of these ‘headline templates’ on the internet, being used and modified for a variety of different markets.

Now I understand the reasons behind why the man who created this article did this. His ultimate goal was to show online marketers – like you and me – what type of headlines work, and how they can easily be adapted to every niche available.

And also, I cannot deny that these headlines do, do their job – they grab you hook, line and sinker, and make you want to keep reading.

I suppose what bothered me most about this article is the whole lack of creativity. For me, personally, I love playing around with headlines and experimenting, and with these 9 templates there is none of that. If anything they are highly repetitious.

Take the following example he provided.

Original: ‘For golfers who are almost (but not quite) satisfied with their game – and can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong:’

Examples provided:

• ‘For Internet Marketers who are almost (but not quite) satisfied with their conversions – and can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong:’
• ‘For mutual fund investors who are almost (but not quite) satisfied with their portfolios – and can’t figure out what’s missing:’

See what I mean? Now obviously this headline is more suitable for offline publications, but the impact is still the same. It is the same headline being recycled over and over again.

Now maybe I am looking into this too much. But this article does get you thinking about all the different headlines which are currently being used – and recycled – across the market. It is surprising how little variance there is.

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.

You see, for one of my emails, I needed to modify a flow diagram which had previously been used on one of our landing pages. But before I could use it I first needed to alter the copy within the flow diagram to make it appropriate to the subject matter of the email, and also change its colour to make it distinctly different to the landing page it originated from.

In the past this kind of job would have gone to design, but in order to ensure that the email went out on time, I needed to make these changes myself.

And I did it!

Borrowing the advice of the design team, I learnt how to copy this flow diagram through a screen shot, modify its colour scheme using Photoshop and Ctrl + U, and re-insert it back into an email – Something in the past that I would have needed help on!

The satisfaction of being able to make these modifications myself plus enhance my Photoshop skills is incredible. I now have got access to a readily made template that I can use over and over again within my email marketing strategies.

I can’t wait to apply these new marketing tools to other email campaigns.

Rowena xx

To say that copy is undervalued on many websites wouldn’t be an understatement. The number of websites I find daily that are poorly punctuated, poorly laid out and actually tell you nothing about the company or the product you are investing in is astounding.

The problem is many online marketers rely on the show, rather than on the tell; the features rather than the benefits and as a result their copy suffers.

What they forget is that by supplying just a few strong paragraphs of copy which discuss the values of their product/service, that they could in fact turn a consumer’s interest into a real, profitable sale.

Consider it for a moment.

If you went into a shop looking for sun tan lotion, the first thing you would do is read the label. Why? To see what makes this product better than the product sitting next to it.

Without this copy, there is nothing for the consumer to use in order to differentiate which is better.

This is the same of websites. The only problem you have got here is that this time consumers have got nothing substantial to touch. All they got to rely on is an image provided by you.

Yet by adding a few strong paragraphs of copy, detailing all the perks and benefits your product has got to offer, you can tell them why your product is better; why your product is why and most importantly why they should choose you.

So take the time to tell your story properly. Do that and your ‘show and tell’ combo will work.

Rowena x

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.

Brandjacking is prevalent in social media because it’s easy to set up accounts and find an audience. Couple this with the social media boom and downturn in the economy and people have both the resources and the increased motivation to participate in such practices. The sheer reach of online marketing is enough of a lure. Last year’s BrandJacking Index from MarkMonitor.com illustrated that not only is cybersquatting continuing to dominate methods used by online fraudsters but it also rose by 18% over the year with the outlook for 2009 being even worse.

You can read the report in full here.

So what can an online marketer do about brandjacking?

1) Run an online audit of your brand :: Use a site such as knowem.com to see if your username is taken across a multitude of sites, who by and what they are using it for. If you have only one brand which is also your company name then this should be a fairly simple task – if you have a multitude of brands then it may be a bit more lengthy.

2) Prioritize your Username :: Think about your clients – what do they call you? What would they search for if they were looking for you on their social network? Then grab that username – If your brand has already been registered then look at who has it and what they are doing with it. All of the major social networks such as Myspace, Facebook and more recently Twitter have a good track record at returning banded domains to their rightful owners, so don’t be afraid to contact them if your brand is being misrepresented.

3) Prioritize Your Network Selection :: Although it is a good thing to have brand presence on each social network, especially to hinder brandjackers, having an incomplete or unused profile on an active comunity can be almost as detrimental as having a fake one or none at all. Using a tool such as Quantcast can help you find the most relevant sites for you based on user demographics. Whatever you do ALWAYS leave a link back to your homepage on every profile you create. This will not only help visitors who find you get to your main site, but will also help with search engine rankings by providing high page rank backlinks to your site.

4) Stalk Your Competitors :: Choose a few competitors who’s success you want to emulate and find out where their online presence is. What sites are they active on? What sort of content are they posting? Then consider weather or not it’s worth you joining them on that community if you aren’t already a member.

5) Don’t Overthink It :: It may seem an obvious thing to say, but social media and social networks are first and foremost – Social. If what you’re saying isn’t interesting or useful to the end user/’follower’/'buddy’ then you will simply be ignored/unfollowed.

Finally a little note about the power of social networks – @StephenFry may be able to drive 1000′s visitors to a site just by sending a tweet out, but that’s because he’s Stephen Fry – Don’t base your whole marketing strategy around setting up a Twitter profile and sending out one tweet. Social networking is just another string to the online marketing bow – not a substitute.