I assume many of you are members of LinkedIn, the professional networking site (if we know each other, please feel free to link to me). There’s a good section on this called “Answers” where you can get advice from other members, and I’d thoroughly recommend visiting this occasionally and helping out where you can, because it establishes you as an authority in the field. A recent question was What do you look for in choosing an SEO company? and that’s something I’m taking quite an interest in at the moment.

We’ve been speaking to quite a few people over the past few weeks about our Insider Programme, which is designed to teach you (with our support) how to master every aspect of online marketing. Of course, “SEO” (or “search engine optimisation”) is an important part of this. We’ve been surprised, however, at just how many marketing managers in industry are telling us that they’ve had pitches from SEO consulting companies recently. It would appear that this is a rapidly-growing business, and hard-sell tactics are starting to become commonplace. To me, any business which employs telesales people who won’t take no for an answer should be avoided at all costs, and this is exactly what we’re starting to see from SEO companies.

Before you assume that I’ve got it in for them, I’m not going to advise you against using SEO consultants. If you need some specialist knowledge in a hurry, they’re your best hope of “sorting out” your website. In a previous job, we needed just such advice, and I went to one of the best-known SEO consultants in the world, Eric Enge, who identified (and helped us solve) our problem, something we’d never have done on our own. The best help might not come cheap, but that doesn’t mean it’s not cost-effective.

I’m also not going to suggest that just because some SEO companies seem to be going for the hard sell that all of them are rubbish, because that’s not the case. What I will say, however, is that there are a limited number of good ones (especially in the UK), and there are businesses whose websites turn over far more than the average industrial company’s website, so it’s no surprise to know that’s where most good SEO consultants gravitate. It’s also why their cost will probably (and justifiably) be out of reach of most of us. Finding someone good who’s prepared to work for a more, er, industrial budget, is going to be that much more difficult.

Beware the SEO company which insists on tying you up to a long contract. Surely these things should stand up on their own merits each month? If your service is good enough, you don’t need your clients to make a commitment - they simply won’t want to leave. And walk away from any SEO consultants which just bang on vaguely about “getting you to number one in Google”. Number one for what, precisely? Worst of all - and I only recently came across this for the first time - are companies which claim they will “get you to number one in Google and keep you there as long as you remain a customer”. If that’s true, then their methods are extremely suspect, and at worst, could be disastrous for you.

All this has made me even more determined to get as many industrial companies as possible signed up to our Insider Programme. When it comes to mastering online marketing, I believe the 80/20 rule applies: you can do 80% of it yourself, if only someone will show you how, and you only need the experts to polish off the last 20%, should you ever feel the need to go that far. The Insider Programme is designed to show you how. It’s aimed at marketing managers in industry, and won’t baffle you with science (unlike the reports I’ve seen provided by many SEO consultants). I’m on a mission here. Sure, we’re making a business out of it, but that doesn’t stop it from being a great investment for you.

Now I’ll promise not to do any more commercials for a while, if you promise to go and have a look at the subjects we cover on the Insider Programme. Come on the journey with us and you won’t even think about getting in the consultants.

Sometimes I link to articles in this blog almost as a way of bookmarking them for myself. Now, I’ve got whole books on writing sales letters, and I’ve even read one or two, but once you get to whole-book-levels of detail, you can’t see the wood for the trees. Here then is Ron Brauner’s Blog on 8 Ways to Improve Your Sales Letters. Nothing revelatory, just good common sense in a two-minute read, and all the better for that. Just like a good sales letter, I guess.

Domain names are really cheap, in marketing terms. This morning I registered a “dot co dot uk” for two years for less than ten pounds, and I’m sure there are even cheaper places if you shop around. It was for a domain name I don’t need at the moment, but I expect to find a good use for it quite soon. The main reason to get it, however, was to ensure nobody else did.

Have you got domain names registered for all of your main product lines? You should. If you’re thinking “but it’s a pretty obscure name and product, we’ll register it if we ever need it, nobody else will be interested in it”, you’re taking a gamble. Read Why, Oh Why Didn’t I Buy That Domain Name? on E-Marketing Performance for a tale of woe.

Most of you won’t be redesigning your company website any time soon, and even then, if you’re part of a large corporation, you may get little or no input to the exercise. But it’s worth understanding the fundamentals of on-screen design, and an easy-to-understand article called What is the best screen resolution to use for your website? on the E-consultancy blog is a well-written guide if you want to understand one of the most basic decisions behind how a website looks.

I’m writing this on an iMac with a huge 1,920-pixel-wide screen. You may be reading it on anything from an old 800-pixel-wide monitor (less than half the size) to something as big (or bigger) than mine. Chances are, you’re somewhere in the middle. But whatever the case, never assume that what your visitors see is the same as you do, because it isn’t. And I haven’t even mentioned mobile devices. Your site needs to be able to cope with everything. Can it?

Jakob Nielsen has been one of the gurus of internet usability since the early days of the net. Even now, his websites sacrifice design flourishes for the sake of clarity, and look oddly simplistic. But they get the message across, and when Nielsen writes something, it’s normally worth reading. He’s just done a report on email messages, and although the $119 report might well be too in-depth for most of us, the summary article, Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages, on Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox is worth looking at.

Nielsen says that - especially when emails are text only - little thought is given to their “design”. Their layout is often a function of the software used to create them, and does not help them achieve the function they are designed for - in other words, to be opened, and to get a message across. Put the important message at the top, he argues. Get specific information into the subject line. And think about the “from” line too: people simply don’t open messages that don’t have recognizable sender information. We can all learn from this.

In WWW or Non-WWW, That is the Question on Industrial Search Engine Marketing, the question is asked: Is http://www.mysite.com better than http://mysite.com? - and there’s a good discussion which you might like to read.

But there’s a more fundamental question which everyone should ask, right now: does my own website work for the alternative way of typing in the address? For most of us, that means, if the “www.” is missed off, does it work? It ought to, because many, many people now just bash the last part of a website address into their browsers (e.g “bmon.co.uk“) without the “http://” or the “www.” and you don’t want them to think you’re no longer around. It’s a two-minute job to fix this and it shouldn’t cost you anything because any decent website manager should have had this working from the start.

Here’s a nice article which claims to be for very small businesses but which could, I think, teach much larger ones a thing or two. Taking Baby Steps in Marketing: Or Eating the Elephant One Bite at a Time on Branding & Marketing gives you a way of creating a marketing programme for next year, even if the idea of having a “marketing programme” is something you’ve never had the time to entertain in the past.

It gives you a few questions to ask yourself now, as well as a plan you can complete in a few minutes. Then it requires you to assign someone (possibly yourself) to tackle each task, and suggests you have short regular meetings throughout the year to check on progress. I think anyone could have a go at this.

“If you sold Widgets, and a Widget-buying customer walks into your store, can’t find any Widgets on her own, and when she asks what aisle they’re in you remain silent, would you fire yourself?”

Has your website got a site search box on it? No? Then you’re missing a big opportunity. There are two types of people who will use it: compulsive searchers who will always pick this route over any form of “navigation”; and visitors who couldn’t follow your navigation and expect search to be there as an alternative. You’ll lose both sets if you don’t have a search box. And there are loads of ways of adding one.

OK, so let’s assume you’re happy with your website’s search box. Now it’s time to read Tweaking Internal Site-Searches into Buying Opportunities on the Conversion Rate Experts blog, which says that “There are many ways that search result pages can be optimized to provide visitors with an easy means to find what they are looking for - or at least something that will keep the visitor moving through your site” and gives a few ideas to get you kicked off. Remember, people expect your site search to be as good as Google, so don’t let them down.

I remember writing over ten years ago “beware the corporate redesign, because it often tells you the company has run out of ideas”. But in this age of branding, it’s worth considering creating an “image” for even the most basic product lines; just don’t spend too much time and expense on it. A professional logo on a product and its sales material isn’t pretentious, it’s something the product ought to deserve.

That said, do the product justice. Please don’t design the logo yourself in Microsoft Paint. Get a graphic designer to do it, but just agree a sensibly low budget beforehand. And tell the designer that you’ve read Why Logos Should Be Designed as Vector files and Other Suggestions for a Quality Logo on the Rethinking Marketing and Branding blog - and that you expect them to have read it too.

One of the articles I referred to last week suggested the economic crisis hasn’t reached many of our businesses (although that wasn’t the point of the article), and a reader here emailed me to ask “what planet is that guy on?”

I’d actually run a seminar a few days before, attended by marketing managers from UK industrial companies, and I have to report the outlook was - perhaps surprisingly - upbeat. I guess it just depends on what business you’re in. It’s not boom time for readers in the construction sector, I’m sure. And even if business continues to surprise you, it’s got to be good sense to plan for a downturn in the next couple of quarters, even if it hasn’t hit you yet. That’s why I’m suggesting that if there’s ever going to be a time to rip up your marketing plans and relaunch them based around your website, now is that time.

Anyway, the Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog reports on a survey of over 600 members which suggests that cuts are already happening. Marketers Expecting Cuts During Economic Crisis says that 52% of marketers are already making changes to plans and budgets and 65% expect negative effects on marketing overall. Even more, 75%, say the impact of the crisis will extend through 2009 and into 2010.

Whilst the respondents to this survey are from a wider base (geographically and business-wise) than most readers of this blog, I doubt there’d be a dramatically diferent response from UK industrial marketing. However, a recession is the least expensive time to increase market share, so it’s crucial to remember that marketing is not a discretionary expense. And online marketing can be the most efficient element of the marketing mix - because if done right, it should be the least speculative part.