Rock Paper Image

Sad facts of business life

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2011-06-29T05:47:06+01:00

It is a sad fact of life these days that if you don't win enough new business and or you charge far too little for the excellent work you do then you'll eventually run out of money and have to try something new.

Well that time has come for Rock paper Image. After around 3 years in business we've decided to close the door on new business and turn our hands to something that people are willing to pay for.

Lets face it, photography is a pretty personal thing and with so many really great cameras out there now and everyone thinking they're a pro 'tog then what chance have most of full time professional photographers got.

I know a number of other professionals around the Brighton area who are struggling to make a living from photography and having to seek other ways of making up the income.

Oh well I'm philosophical about these things and am moving on with a heavy heart but a smile on my face...

Please wish me luck.

3D photography

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2011-01-19T10:59:32+00:00

Have you ever thought about having a 3 Dimensional image of your product on your website?

Your visitors would be able to "spin" the product in all directions on screen to give them a greater view of the things you want to sell.

Why not ask us for a demo?

Product Photography

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2011-01-15T13:15:33+00:00

Getting the right photographer for your products can be a real challenge. But getting one that fits your limited budget in these "more careful" times can prove impossible.

At Rock Paper image we're offering product photography for small items at a fantastic price of just £5+vat per product photo with absolutely no set up fee.

Check out some of our testimonials to see what our photography clients say about us.

Keywords have had their day!

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2010-07-21T14:41:31+01:00

So what is it about keywords that gets people al hyped up? There is so much discussion about the use of keywords and how they can get you on page 1 of google (top 10 place) but i don't think that is necessarily correct.

Take your average website with a few pages, you'll find a home page with some stuff about the company or person, there may also be an about us page with more stuff about the company (bored already...) a product or services page with a list of stuff full of technical detail about what the products and services are, then you'll have the standard contact us page with a form and a note of the address and phone numbers.

All these pages are in fact pretty useless! Why, because non of them tell us why we should use the company, not in real terms we all understand. We've all heard the expression "sell the sizzle not the sausage" and what this means is tell me what the benefit is not what the products or service is.
now the benefits might well say nothing about the product or service just how you'll feel after you paid you money, well at least how they want you to feel.

So what about keywords, well as you've seen if you get your website content right (sizzle not sausage) your keywords most likely will not have much relevance to your site.

Keywords have had their day, imho, and with the fact that google don't even look at the keyword meta tag of pages anymore and not for a while now. they'll soon be ignoring the page titles and descriptions too.

Start getting ready for "Inbound Marketing" now and you'll be ahead of the curve when it happens.

Call me on 01273 900892 if you want to know more about inbound Marketing.

Inbound Marketing

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2010-07-20T13:56:02+01:00

I've been looking at the standard way that people do marketing which seems to involve a lot of "tele-marketing" phoning potential customers to introduce your company, product or service.

In the main these days this no longer works as well as it used to. You hear people say "oh, it's just a numbers game, call enough people and you'll get some sales...". Well this may still be true I guess if you called the 60 million people in the UK you're bound to make a sale, no matter what you're selling or marketing.

However, we need to think about our ROI or Return on Investment. After all it's not free to call people and tell them about your product or service. It costs real money even if you're making the calls yourself. your time as a business owner is very valuable.

So how do people view these "cold calls" in the new economy?
in my experience cold calls no longer give any where near a reasonable ROI so we need to find another way to get potential clients to take a look at our company, product or service. Pretty obvious I hear you say, well yes but what is the answer.

In todays terms it's called "Inbound Marketing" (oh no, not more buzz words!) which means getting potential customers to come to your website and take a look at the interesting stuff you have available. How you can do this is simple although it does involve some work!

1 - Create great content for your site that will be useful (enough already with the sales blurb all over your site.)
2 - Write some articles that would help your customers for no other reason than that the articles are helpful to your audience in some way
3 - Maybe create a bit of controversy by taking a view on something that is maybe a bit different from the usual view.
4 - offer some insight into your industry sector or the problems for business in that sector

publishing things like these will attract visitors who have an interest in your subject some will be potential clients other will be your competition but overall you'll start to be recognised as a bit of a "know it al"l in your industry. Some "know it all's" are known as Experts in their field which is where you need to be to stand out from the crown and get inbound marketing working for your business.

If you need some articles written about your industry segment then we can help you. Contact us to find out how we can create original content on your industry. We can provide you with four professionally written articles for just £250. Call us on 01273 900892.

Are websites a commodity

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2010-07-07T10:43:13+01:00

Once again I have met a company local to Sussex that offer websites with full content management for a very small monthly fee. Just £15.

I'm really starting to think of websites as so many packets of cornflakes on the shelves of the world wide web !

The last company I met were and still are marketing stater web sites for £2.99 a month again these are build it yourself content management systems.

Is this a good thing I wonder? With the commoditisation of anything comes a cost that is maybe unseen by many,. take corn flakes as an example. Kellog's owned the market at one point, they created a brand and a product that was the best and maybe the first of it's king in the world and so held the unique position. Not so now with store brands coming into play and driving the cost down over time with a relative effect on quality.

I know that if you take the price of the product out of the equation most people will prefer to buy the top brand items because the quality is usually far better than other brands available. But it's price that makes us choose to buy the sometimes inferior product especially in these times of recession and cutbacks when we all need to save a little on our spending.

I think this is true of websites too as they become a commodity. It's pretty easy to find a simple design template that'll work with Wordpress, Joomla or any of the other popular CMS systems but do they really fit the need of your business?
Oh sure you can get used to eating somewhat less tasty cornflakes and having a website that does not quite hit the mark for your business, after all, nothing is perfect is it?

The unseen effect of commoditised websites on your business could affect your income from on line sales and enquiries by as much as 68%. It's not so much the design that of your site that will affect your business it's the overall usability and linkage to your overall business processes that will really hurt your business.

So how do you as a business owner avoid your online presence becoming commodity product? Well you can still use one of the free or very low cost CMS platforms to enable you to edit and update your website content and in some cases these will really help your visibility on the web but do make sure that you've considered your business process in relation to your website visitor experience (user experience) and make sure that the design fits with the best of usability guidelines.

For more information on getting a website that really works for you and your online business and to find out how you can make your website more visible on the search engines drop an email to "SEO Steve"

The Future of Websites

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2010-07-03T11:39:33+01:00

I've been doing a whole load of reading lately out there on the web and social media sites and can see a time when all this great "content" will be merged together to form the real information age. In my minds eye I can imagine that when any of us write anything or post an image on the internet on any of the websites, blogs, twitter facebook or Google Me sites it'll get immediately indexed and compared with all the other content out there and matched up to form a cohesive mass of information and rather scarily it'll probably offer up some sort of conclusion.

Imagine a scenario where perhaps you're on your holiday away from home and you take a few snaps as we all do and post them on the web someone else maybe locally or on their holiday too takes some shots of the and uploads them. We all put titles and make comments about what going on and all the photo's most likely have Geotag info and we're all saying in our comments that we really like this place. Extrapolate that scenario a million times and you get a system that could come to a conclusion that the place in the photos is a good place to be. OK so not too far fetched so far. Microsoft are already matching up images people post on line.

Imagine now that because you uploaded your pictures through a log in (maybe Facebook or the like) the systems have your demographic adn that of all the other people uploading and commenting.

Now there's little old me thinking about where to go for my next holiday. I happen to match the majority demographic that like "that location" and hey presto, you have the basis of geo-demographic-location advertising.

Sort of good sort of bad.

Maybe I'll get to go on holiday to some place I never even heard of before.

What do you think?
next 5 years, 10 years, 20 years NEVER Happen?

Rebranding

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2010-06-29T14:47:32+01:00

For over two years from the birth of the company we've been called Rock Paper Image which we think is a really great name for a business especially when you take a look at the logo along side the name.

We're not getting rid of the Rock paper Image brand or name but we are creating a really focused and targeted SEO Brand.

After several weeks of struggling with various names and tag lines where we looked really closely at or core business and what we do best for our clients. So what did we come up with?

Well we feel that we're in the Expert category for SEO or Search Engine Optimisation for businesses based in and around Brighton and Sussex. We provide SEO and Internet marketing advice and services to those businesses from various segments of the business community. Given that we're focused on being the best in our segment of SEO we naturally came up with a new name and web address for the internet marketing and seo arm of the business.

Say Hi to:
Segment SEO

our new web address is:
http://www.segmentseo.com

Our new email address is:
info@segmentseo.com

All our other details stay the same and the well loved name and info for Rock Paper Image will remain as the overall name and brand for the company.

Look out for out new site coming soon at:
http://www.segmentseo.com

Segment SEO, Freshly Squeezed internet marketing in Brighton

New SEO Client

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2010-06-21T19:31:10+01:00

Picked up another new SEO client today (well, pay per click really) after a little wait while they considered my quote. Seems that their current web designed did them a favour and rebuilt their site for them in something called wfxSiteBuilder. Since then my new client "Dave the Fence" has not had any traffic to his website from hiw ongoing and previously successful Google Adwords campaign.

Seems google now considers his pages to be less than good in terms of his target market. He's one of a very few (he says he's unique) electric fencing contractors in the country.

Dave has been in the electric fencing business for over 25 years and travels the whole of the UK mainland supplying and installing electric fencing to keep animal in and foxes out of places.

I'm currently trying to unpick what's been done so he at least starts to get some enquiries or click though from is adwords campaign.

Who'd have thought a simple redesign and build of a website could destroy someones business lead generation!

Great News from a Client

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2010-06-18T15:51:28+01:00

Just had a call from a client (Mark at Job Mortgages) www.jobmortgages.com saying thanks for the SEO work on their site. They're #3 and #4 on Page 1 of Google for their search phrase "Police Mortgage information". The Police Mortgage business is quite a competitive market with just over 1.5 million pages for that search. Who knew!

Well I'm really please that they're getting the benefit of out quick and simple SEO service. Going from page 3, 4 or 5 to page one cost them just £150.
Here's a screenshot taken a few minutes ago

Video on your website? SiteMap it!

steve@rockpaperimage.co.uk — 2010-06-16T08:33:42+01:00

Some of you may have taken up the opportunity to put video on your website to create a more modern look and feel and to offer your visitors a better experience when they visit your site. Well tat's a really great idea and I encourage you to make some short videos if you have not already.

But how does google know what the content of your video is and how are google going to index your video to help them provide better and more relevant results for people searching. Enter Video Sitemaps!

I guess most of you will have at least heard about site maps and how useful they are for letting google know about your sites pages. Video sitemap is just the same and can be included in the standard sitemap with the following code (example):

xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.0">

http://www.yoursite.co.uk/videos/your-video-page.html

http://www.yoursite.co.uk/video-01.flv
http://www.yoursite.co.uk/videoplayer.swf?video=123
My Excellent Video
http://www.yoursite.co.uk/thumbs/videothumb-01.jpg>