The Godjira Method

Copyright 2010 Godjira Websites Page 1 of 10www.godjira.co.uk

The Godjira MethodA web based marketing strategy for small to medium sized business

Version 1.0.020th July 2010John E Dickens Bsc (Hons)

Table of Contents1 Abstract.................................................................................................................................3

2 Introduction...........................................................................................................................3

3 Why use WordPress?...............................................................................................................3

4 We use WordPress as the engine to power The Godjira Method..................................................5

5 Capturing your customer's information......................................................................................5

5.1 The Fold.........................................................................................................................6

6 An example campaign.............................................................................................................7

7 Creating mini landing pages.....................................................................................................7

8 Links back..............................................................................................................................8

9 News is the fuel that feeds the Godjira Method..........................................................................8

10 Being Human........................................................................................................................9

11 What to write........................................................................................................................9

12 Case Studies.......................................................................................................................10

12.1 STARR.........................................................................................................................10

13 How Godjira can help..........................................................................................................12


1 Abstract

This document describes how Godjira uses WordPress-powered websites as an engine to drive increased website exposure, using social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

2 Introduction

Every website needs both an objective – a reason for its existence - and a way of directing the reader to do what you want them to do when they visit your website. If they haven't got a purpose it's rather like sticking an advert in your shop window and hoping passers by spot it. You need to tell your customers or your prospective customers what you want them to do. You need to guide them and aid them.

For instance, you may wish to direct the customer to the point of sale. The products page on your website with a “buy now” or “add to cart” button or you may want to use the site to capture their details so you can carry on talking to them. A trainer would want to let the user instantly see when the next course was running and let the customer immediately and easily book their place on the course.

What the Godjira Method does is to use social media, increasing the number of people aware of you and your products or services through your website and directing them back to the point of sale or point of capture in a way that seems natural and relaxed, rather than forced and pushy.

3 Why use WordPress?

Google likes websites where things change and content is fresh, so your site gets scanned more frequently, resulting in higher ratings.

Google Page Rank, effectively a ranking based on the “importance” of your page, increases with quality back-links. Having blog articles means that you are much more likely to get people linking back to your site, as blogs include mechanisms for linking back easily.

That's why we build sites on WordPress, a “blogging” CMS. WordPress is capable of delivering next generation websites capable of powering your Social media.

Google loves WordPressWordPress loves Google back.


4 We use WordPress as the engine to power The Godjira Method

Most blogging software and e-commerce sites include an RSS feed. We use the WordPress blogging software as a Content Management System to power the majority of the sites we create. WordPress pumps out RSS feeds and does Google-friendly things like updating syndication and RSS update sites to let them know your blog exists. WordPress categorises its news and content in the same way that Google does, making life easy for Google and allowing you to get more relevant key search words on the page

We use WordPress plug-ins to hook up with Google Analytics and create speciality items that Google likes, like XML sitemaps. We also use other services like Yahoo Pipes and Feedburner to further expose the news and blog articles. We use the MailChimp email mailing list software to to provide additional value.

5 Capturing your customer's information

Squeeze pages are pages placed on the web, designed to capture a customer's contact details, usually in return for a free gift like an e-book.

While stand-alone squeeze pages seem crude and obvious, and are often poorly designed the principle is still good and with good design and careful planning can really work for you.

If you want to get more contact with your potential customers, then you can offer them a free gift or an e-book, in return for them joining your mailing list.

The offer has to be something of value, something that you have spent time on. In fact, something like an e-book on an Internet marketing method is ideal. In fact, you are reading just such a thing now.

You can power your mailing list directly from your RSS feed, as well as create more staged and elaborate HTML email send-outs using MailChimp. Again, using the RSS feed means you have written the content only once and are using it to power multiple outputs.

You can put together more elaborate newsletters if you have the time. For some businesses elaborate newsletters prove a useful part of their marketing strategy, as it helps present a professional and coherent corporate image; but we live in a busy age and experienced Internet Users have had to learn how to filter out the things that are not of interest or of use to them in email and applications like Twitter and Facebook.

We have found that some of our most successful mail-shots have been one-liners delivered in plain text with a personalised greeting. They don't look like selling, they aren't pushy and stand a lot more chance of making it through mail spam filters and the recipients' own filter criteria.


Something like:

5.1 The Fold

The Fold: A mythical Internet design concept that says that all useful information must be above a certain point on the page so that it can be viewed by all readers without scrolling.

The fold is largely outdated hokum, as 90% of users will scroll down a website and for that reason, modern websites use a principle of “striping,” which presents information on one page in easily readable bands. With so many users with laptops or wide screens--so that screen resolutions vary so widely-- the fold becomes not just a moveable feast but also literally impossible to define. Mac users rarely maximise their windows anyway, so designing just with the fold in mind is demonstrably a big waste of time.

However, in an email you don't scroll down much, as everything below the signature is usually some sort of privacy statement or a conversation you have already read. Placing the unsubscribe stuff below the fold isn't actually cheating--more sort of stretching the spirit of the game--but it does make the email look more personal.


6 An example campaign

Let's say you have a new product launch.

You create a page for your productYou write a new article/press release for your productYou use the RSS feed to power multiple other channels:

You follow up on all the interest.

You've only written the copy once, yet you've fed multiple channels

You need to follow this up and build up brand appreciation.

7 Creating mini landing pages

Blogging also does useful things for your Search Engine performance. Traditional SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”) has been about keyword stuffing your pages and directory stuffing to get links back to improve your Page Rank.

Frankly, without a lot of effort or paying for Google Adwords, most businesses are not going to be able to compete for the real top level searches. You can however perform very well within a geographical area, with just a bit of SEO tweaking; but going national or global is going to cost time and effort.

What blogging can do is create mini-landing pages for the secondary level or corollary searches


Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Email

Product page

News Article

that are normally not targeted in traditional SEO.

Writing about what you do and where you do it would automatically and naturally place keywords on to a page in a way that you would not be able to plan.

I was approached by the BBC to do an interview because my site performed very well for Twitter Expert Wiltshire. This was due to two separate blog articles about Twitter and an “Ask the Expert” webinar session I did. Put the two together with my geographical location and I got a hit--and an interview.

Users are much smarter about their searching these days , they don't want a plumber in Newbury when they searched for one in Melksham. They might even search for a female plumber in Melksham, or one that specialises in household plumbing, or one that's Corgi registered or even one that works evenings. You can't cover all the bases with a static site. And you really can't second-guess the searches. Regularly pumping out news will significantly increase your search engine performance.

8 Links back

Google page rank is the measure of how important Google thinks your site is and it is an essential part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The higher your page rank, the higher up the list you appear in Google search results. Google Page rank is heavily influenced by the number and quality of links back to your site from other important sites, those with a high page rank.

Traditional SEO stuffs your site with keywords for indexing and then stuffs directory listings with links back to your site.

However, Google say they are a bit fed up with directory stuffing. They seem to be taking more interest in the blogosphere and social media. Using the Godjira Method will mean that your news article will be linked back by some real high-value sites. Google and Bing are now indexing Twitter and Facebook, links back from those sites are of real value and are a great way of directing more visitors to your site.

Making comments on other people's blog posts creates another link back. If you can talk with authority about a subject and show yourself as an expert, then other readers will follow the link back to your site. Many of the blogging sites out there will also do things like repeat a link to the last blog post you made on your site, too.

9 News is the fuel that feeds the Godjira Method

The objective with using Social Media is to lay lines back to your point of sale or point of capture

If Networking is Farming and Sales is Hunting, the Godjira Method is more like Fishing, but it's fishing where you are trying to charm the fish all the way back to the net at which point it loves you so much it jumps in.


The news, blogs, tweets and updates are all ground-bait designed to generate interest in your products or services. You need to stimulate a conversation amongst your fans, friends and followers that raises that interest above and beyond the broadcast mechanism. You need to engage with your fans, friend and followers in order to prove that you are a human that represents your company. Just “broadcasting” is not enough.

What you ideally want is to stimulate a conversation in the social media about a blog post that you have posted, so that those who are not directly following you can pick up on that and follow the trail back from the Tweets to your blog post and then to your point of sale and capture. Getting re-tweeted or talked about will mean you are hitting not just your followers, but your followers' followers as well. This is the ripple growth that we want to achieve in order to make contact with people who will be interested in what you have to offer.

You can replicate these methods in Facebook and LinkedIn as well. Facebook allows your fans or “likers” to make comments about your posts and blog items. LinkedIn lets you join wider groups and start forum discussions that can fuel the conversation.

Just chattering isn't enough; you need some substance or subject matter to talk about, and it needs to be something that links back to your point of sale.

10 Being Human

Every business is different, and every business needs to present the right image. I would say that a solicitor or banker needs to present themselves with more dignity and reserve than a website guy does. But the important thing is that your online persona must present some of your character and must be likeable. People do business with people they like. Being helpful, friendly and approachable helps people to like you. So, answering questions and showing how you add value in your services goes a long way toward getting people to do business with you.

If you behave like a noisy machine and just broadcast and post links, you will be treated like a noisy machine; that is, ignored, complained about and eventually switched off.

11 What to write

Write about what you know.Write about what is interesting.

The advent of Facebook has changed the way in which people use the Internet; they are now more interested in People and stories.

As a result, you absolutely must have biographies and photos on your “about us” page, your readers are looking for that. You need to include something about your interests and hobbies so your customers can engage with you. They are probably more interested in your hobbies than


your actual business, but that is still a topic you can talk about with them and yet another reason for them to like you.

If something is interesting or useful then it will be re-tweeted or repeated. Marketeers call this “viral growth” or the “ripple effect”.

If you have 600 followers on twitter and you get ten re-tweets, you can end up getting 6000 extra page impressions.

12 Case Studies

Writing about what you have done is easier than writing about what you do. It's also more engaging.

Everything is news and everything is sales.

A new product, a special offer, a new customer or a new installation are all stories you can tell. The copy doesn't need to be huge on the web and you don't need to agonise over it. We use a Case Study writing method called STARR.

12.1 STARR

STARR stands for:

Situation What was there before you started

Task What the customer wanted you to do

Action What you did and how you added value

Result What the customer got and what they thought of it

Reference Get a quote from the customer

STARR makes it easy to write a case study, by following the formula you can write interesting stories that tell people much more about what you do by demonstrating how you do it and how you add value. Remember: what people are looking for on the Internet are people and stories.

Far too often people slap up testimonials on their websites that are out of context and mean very little. Putting them in context with what you actually did makes much more sense and tells a story. It's also easier to get a one or two line testimonial.


13 How Godjira can help

As well as being experts in building sites using WordPress, Godjira offer a range of packages design to support the Godjira Method.

We offer a £100/month blog package, called The Blogulator which includes two news articles per month written by our copywriters. Our copywriters phone you for the subject and create neatly crafted blog articles that can then be fed out to the media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and your mailing list

We can also offer:

• Our Twitter Turbostart package• Twitter Mentoring and support.• Facebook Business Page• Link-up all your Social Media to your blog feed.• MailChimp Mailing lists• Ongoing support packages to help.

For more information, call Godjira now on 01225 436109 or go to our website at http://www.godjira.co.uk


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