Learn to Sail: Bay of Islands Yacht Club

March 7th, 2010 • Comments Off Events, Social media, Web media

Every Sunday morning, come rain or shine (though we prefer shine), parents and volunteers take their children out on the water, teaching them the basics of sailing in Optimist dinghies. Several of the parents have taken coaching courses – you don’t have to be an amazing sailor to be able to teach the right techniques. The photo below shows the last race of the day – it’s the parents turn to take the helm! Click on photo thumbnail below to see more. Each day ends with a sausage sizzle, $2 a sausage, to help raise funds for junior sailing.  The Bay of Islands Yacht Club is always looking for funding opportunities to improve the quality of the fleet, to maximise the number of safety boats on the water and to make sure we can keep on providing affordable sailing to the Bay of Islands community and excellent facilities for boaties throughout the area.

Follow our Facebook page for Learn to Sail or keep an eye on the Bay of Islands Yacht Club website for more information about club activities.

Learn to Sail March 2010

A blogroll frenzy

March 3rd, 2010 • Comments Off Copywriting, Marketing, SEO, Social media, Web media

Don’t trust me! I’m a blogger.

I just learned here that it’s unlikely I’m going to have a mental breakthrough (hmm, too close to mental breakdown, how about an epiphany?) as a result of what I’ve read in a blog. Fair enough. Most of what I find online is utter flim flam.  But there are nuggets of genius out there. And when you’re working from home and all alone, you need input from like minded individuals to remind you why you decided to quit the office. But where do you start? Though I hate to admit it, Twitter’s helped me out.

…but I’m good at finding the blogs you should read

In an inspiring 20 minutes I have stumbled into some really useful blogs, all from one click on one tweet (Copyblogger’s of course) that has led me into a spider’s web of links and leaps through all the online marketing genius you could wish for. Well, if not genius, at least some very down to earth marketing/business blogs which I will henceforth follow as though they were my slightly superior office colleagues on whose words I might hang like an overwrought kitten.

Audience. Audience. Audience.

First up, Joe Hall has contacted a bunch of business marketing gurus and they say this about The Most Important Thing for New Entrepreneurs to Understand (his title, not mine – such a teutonic approach to capitalisation makes me scratch nervously). Also  I question the adjective ‘New’ here – you either are or aren’t entrepreneurial by nature surely? Anyway, it’s a motivating read. Go have a look now, don’t worry if you click it won’t take you away from this page (do I look stupid?).

Chicks online.

After that I found Outspoken Media which is like an all-female rock band but with more than just a pretty face and loud noise to recommend it. I like their style.

Why is everyone’s else site better than mine?

And just when I’m weeping into my boots because everyone’s blogs are so much cooler than mine, along came the solution in the form of this guy who is clearly a Wordpress genius and who (obviously) has a way better Wordpress site than I do. I want one. Can I have one? Can I? Yes, if I listen hard to The Most Important Thing for New Entrepreneurs to Understand and make a bit more money so I can afford to pay Langford Ink’s web developer to build it for me. Gah!

Happy reading. Come back for more untrustworthy blogs soon. I’ll try not to disappoint.

Goodcopybadcopy

February 25th, 2010 • Comments Off Copywriting, Social media, Web media

To obfuscate: /ˈɒbfʌskeɪt/, /ˈɒbfəskeɪt/

Clare Lynch gets a lot of mileage out of poking fun at corporate speak in her blog goodcopybadcopy. When you’re writing for business it’s tempting to fall into the comfortable cliche of those intelligent sounding words and phrases to make something sound bigger and better than it really is or to disguise what you’re actually saying.

Here at Langford Ink we eschew obfuscation! (that’s a fumblerule by the way.)

And here at Copyblogger you might learn how not to obfuscate, how to feel generally rubbish about your writing abilities and the failure of your blog to attract thousands of followers (and dollars), but more comfortable in the knowledge that you are not alone.

And guess what? You can follow them on Twitter here and here.

Tweet to woo?

February 24th, 2010 • Comments Off Social media, Web media

Believe it or not, this is work. I need to get my head around the phenomenon that is Twitter. I can’t help thinking it’s a pointless, mind-numbing way of limiting our thinking to soundbites. That makes me over 30 for sure. However, social networking is a powerful 21st century “marketing tool” and I know a few businesses whose target market falls slap bang in the middle of the Twitter community. So here I go on a journey to tweet. Sorry if it’s dull, uncool, irrelevant. I think it’s meant to be irrelevant actually, so scratch that. Hey, you can follow me if you like; there’s a button somewhere you click…or something. Definitely need another one of those pilsners.

A bit about online marketing

December 6th, 2009 • Comments Off E-newsletters, Marketing, SEO, Uncategorized, Web media

Online marketing is perhaps the easiest kind of marketing to get into and potentially the cheapest form of promotion, but also the most elusive in some ways and certainly the most mind boggling for its vastness.

It’s easy, because you don’t have to actually talk to anyone (although I suppose it does require a modicum of internet savvy to get started) and somehow putting an electronic facimile of yourself out there is less excruciating than direct sales in person.

It’s cheap, because you’re not paying for expensive print runs and one good website will act as an anchor around which your work can be done – although how much you spend on the website itself is a “how long is a piece of string?” question.

Elusive, because it’s not a physically tangible thing and also the success of online marketing can be hard to measure, which isn’t to say it’s not being effective, it’s just difficult to quantify its effectiveness. But a bit of time spent looking at the capabilities of Google Analytics can help you understand who’s visiting your site, which pages they like and when, historically, you have had most hits – analysing these results over time will refine your approach and skills so that your online marketing is optimised for your own business.

Mind boggling, because that’s the nature of the web; trying to grasp the extent of the world wide web is a bit like trying to grasp the extent of our universe.

What I like most about online marketing is that it is totally customised to an indiviudal’s business. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. Granted, there are a number of core essentials – a search engine friendly website is at the top of the list for which some standard procedures apply; registering your site with search engines, including appropriate keywords, regularly updating your website with value content, obtaining appropriate links and so on. And, by the way, this is just a minuscule introduction to the 21st century Holy Grail (a.k.a. Search Engine Optimisation).

Apart from these givens, how much you do in the way of promoting your business online and the particular way you do it is down to the needs of the business itself: the type of industry, client’s ambition, time available and, of course, budget. What’s guaranteed is that there’s something to suit everyone. And regarding budget, it doesn’t have to be a big budget; you can pay for listings in multiple sites and spend thousands, but a bit of research and some canny placement can achieve the same results for considerably less cash output.

So where to start…?

For example, this case study is a very simple online marketing campaign that doesn’t even require a website. What would make this campaign more effective is to include an embedded link to the website taking you to a page that is regularly updated with new menus, events etc. so that those people interested might bookmark that page, send it to friends and become a regular customer of your website and your establishment.

Web marketing is an area I address with clients, week-in week-out, in one way or another – but I am rather flummoxed about where to begin describing ‘how to’ as it’s such a vast area. Let me think about it and I’ll come back to you next time with another case study to illustrate how you can apply some simple online marketing strategies yourself.

In the mean time, if you’re feeling brave here is a maze rich in resources on the subject of search engine optimisation, including linking, keywords, copywriting etc. Danny Dover is a Seattle-based SEO consultant. He might be King Arthur too.

Enewsletter case study

October 22nd, 2009 • Comments Off E-newsletters, Marketing, Uncategorized, Web media

Waikokopu Cafe is extending its opening hours – chef Hughie Blues is introducing a divine evening menu, available from 6pm from Thursday to Saturday. Waikokopu is a bit of a local institution and generally they don’t need to advertise or market too heavily – partly because reputation does most of the work and partly because of their location at the Treaty Grounds – almost every visitor to the Bay comes to Waitangi to see the Treaty House and invariably they want to be fed and watered at some stage of the day. Waikokopu is the dedicated spot.

However, on this occasion, Waikokopu needed a bit more than the power of word of mouth or excellent location to communicate their evening timetable, so we decided on an email newsletter. Employing the skills of a graphic designer we put together a simple graphic that could be embedded as a jpg in a regular email and sent out to the Waikokopu contact database along with a copy of the evening menu. We gathered a list of all the local motel operators and also sent the e-newflash out to them. Et voila! One mini marketing campaign complete.

It’s a cost-friendly way to talk to you customers. There are many more sophisticated methods of sending out enewsletters than using an image in Outlook; in fact there are countless software programmes and companies dedicated to this kind of e-marketing. But for first timers with a manageable contact list, this method is fine. You don’t need to be flash to marketing your product successfully. You just need to put in a bit of thought.

Note that there are some rules to e-newsletters.

Firstly, you need to make sure you have something to say and then make sure you are using this method of marketing legally – your email database  should be honestly gathered from correspondence or individual selection. More on the rules of spam and the ways to set up a contact database next time.