The power of gifts

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When my partner first moved to Adelaide, our house very quickly filled up with bottles of lovely wine from various wineries around the Adelaide Hills and the Barossa Valley. It’s not that we are obsessive wine collectors; it’s just that, being new to South Australia, he had wanted to see the sights, so we visited a number of the wineries for which the state is rightfully famous. The thing was, if he had done a tasting and sampled some wines, wherever we were, he was utterly incapable of walking out of the cellar door without buying something. He just couldn’t do it.

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Directory advertising in White and Yellow Pages

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In November last year Marketing Magazine Australia published an article entitled "The death of print: the final days of the phone book" observing that the White and Yellow Pages directories published by Sensis"look likely to go with way of the rotary dial phone" and that "Sensis needs to prepare for the inevitable". We're not advocates for spending money on advertising in the White and Yellow Pages. When we asked around the office "when was the last time you looked in an actual White or Yellow Pages?" the response in every instance was a variation of "so long ago that I can't remember".

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Know your domain details

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We have completed a number of client projects lately that involved working with client Internet domains and domain names. In more than one case we have had to recover domains on behalf of clients who had lost control of them. For a domain name to be registered and used by your organisation, a number of different things need to be done at a number of different places:

  • Someone - the registrant of record -  needs to officially register the domain name
  • The domain name needs to be registered with a domain registrar
  • The address translations must be set up on a name server run by a DNS provider
  • Your website must be built and set up on a web server run by a web hosting provider
  • Your email must be set up on an email server run by an email hosting provider

If you do these things, or have them done for you, it's imperative that you keep track of them. Know who your providers are and have the usernames and passwords that you need to control your domain. More than once lately we have been about to commence work on a client campaign and have asked "where is your website hosted?" and been met with a blank look. "OK, who registered your company domain name?" Blank look. In cases like these, where we may have been engaged to build and launch a new website, sometimes the behind-the-scenes chasing of who registered what and who has the passwords can take longer than the task of actually building the website!

Documentation of domain registration and hosting details should be treated with the same care as business registration papers. Don't lose them. Make sure you have them and can bring them up at the drop of a hat. At Chilli Chocolate Marketing we actually provide a summary document containing all the server and provider information after the launch of an online campaign, so that our clients can have all their vital network information on file.

No more blank looks!

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Thoughts for Autumn

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Many Australian businesses are starting to experience the financial pressure of a recession. In times such as these some businesses "turtle" - they withdraw into a shell, cutting marketing and communications projects. Other businesses "go nova" - they spend up large on something, anything, just for the sake of being seen to be doing something. Neither approach is good for business.

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Email newsletters take centre stage

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Email has become one of the most important communications channels between a business and its audience. The Direct Marketing Association has estimated that every dollar spent on email marketing generates nearly $50 in return.

However, email’s not just about “selling stuff”! This is demonstrated by the way that we’re working with Hayes Knight SA to get the most out of email communications with its clients.

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SEO and why you need it

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The search engine is by far the most effective tool for finding information on the Internet. (Does anyone remember life before Google?). When you are the bearer of the information, that means a search engine is the most effective tool you have for getting your information found. The art of tweaking a website so that it is "findable" by search engines is known as Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO. Effective SEO has resulted in large increases in website visitors for every single client we've worked with. And by "large" we mean "sometimes over one thousand percent".

SEO is a broad task covering website layout, text content and copywriting, technical server management, and partner relationships. Many small businesses don't have the time or technical knowledge to do these things and run the risk of losing important business. Search-engine visibility (how "findable" you are to search engines like Google and Yahoo!) is only going to increase in importance as businesses and users move away from old media such as White and Yellow Pages towards online listings.

Don't be stung by "cowboys" (or pushy salesmen from directory companies) who promise you the earth in exchange for only three or four payments of, oh, several thousand dollars each. There are a number of things that any small business can do to improve the search-engine visibility of its website, and we're more than happy to help. Call us today for a chat!

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