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Energise your enterprise

Friday, 29 August 2008

By Chris Thomas

With thanks to Amanda Gome (and the fine folks at the Victorian State Government), I was kindly invited to speak at the Energise Enterprise event at the Melbourne Town Hall yesterday.

I spoke with Peter Williams, (Eclipse) Jason West (Websalad) and Amanda Gome (SmartCompany). It was quite a tough assignment – four huge topics, in 10 minutes!

Topics I covered were:

1.  Future trends in search.
2.  SEO and web design (development).
3.  Google AdWords.
4.  Affiliate marketing.

I could have spoken on each of the topics for at least two hours each (the audience would have loved that!).

Amanda kicked things off with an inspiring talk about the success of SmartCompany; she and the team have built something quite remarkable.

The recipe?

1.  Register a domain name.
2.  Get some webhosting.
3.  Upload a website.
4.  Add great content every day.
5.  Season to taste.

So easy, anyone could do it!

Peter spoke on “getting other people to help build your business online”. He shared a couple of case studies with us and gave some hot tips on how to leverage social media websites like YouTube to build your brand and your business.

While Peter and I focused on various methods of delivering traffic to your website, Jason talked about ways to convert the traffic once it arrived. Jason’s maxim is “test, test, and test some more” using A/B Split Tests (or if you’re really serious, multivariate testing). Let your users guide you, rather than rely on straight up guesswork about what’s working on your site and what isn’t.

Users will soon show you which version of a webpage they like the best by converting in higher numbers.

The main benefit of all this work can mean you’re able to bid higher at Google AdWords because you can be confident the traffic coming through your website will convert at a rate that is likely to be higher than your competitors. I like that.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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