FastSMS

The NetSecrets Website Success Plan

When you venture into the fast-paced world of the Internet with your website you will face the challenges that come with it. Keeping your site up to date, not only with content but with the surrounding mechanisms that will make it a success is one such challenge. If you choose to do this yourself then it will either take away much needed time from your business or it simply won't get done.

The NetSecrets team hold a great deal of experience in making a website a success - and understand that this is a constant process. As time goes by things change - and it isn't long before your site can become obsolete. NetSecrets operate at the heart of the industry and are constantly learning new ways to optimise sites and stay ahead of the competition. The NetSecrets Success Plan means that strategic action is taken on a regular basis ensuring a site doesn't get left behind by prevailing trends or simply lack of maintenance.

Our experience comes from the fact that we don't just build websites, we build businesses and understand that the creation of such a tool as a website is not a one off job, it is something that needs constant attention if it is to be a worthwhile investment.

To find out more about the NetSecrets Success Plan and other Web Development and Promotion Services click here, email info@NetSecrets.co.uk or give us a call on 01386 792 972

FASTSMS Use Case: Housing Associations

Recently we have been doing a lot of work with UK Housing Associations, so I thought it was time to share with you a little about the type of service they are now using...

Housing Associations of all sizes, share many of the same day to day challenges. They need to keep levels of arrears down whilst maintaining occupancy rates; they need to be mindful of staffing costs whilst being responsive to requests from tenants; and they need to be able to access properties for inspection and maintenance at short notice without getting too many broken appointments.

Many have found that text messaging is the best way to communicate with their tenants, colleagues, workmen and waiting list. Mainly because it's universal - nearly everyone has a mobile phone; it's instant - messages are delivered in 10 seconds or less; and it's reacted to by most people, more so than letters, emails or phone calls.

So they are texting their waiting lists with details of newly available properties; inviting prospects to open days, viewings and other events; and sending SMS reminders for rent arrears, appointments for visits as well as general news broadcasts.

It's working the other way too - tenants are texting in problems with the property, issues with other tenants and even just general queries that are then routed to the right person avoiding clogging up switchboards.

As it has been so popular, we have developed our HousingText service specifically for housing associations, for more information click here or give us a call on 0800 954 5305

Developer API: getting the edge

These days more and more people are wanting to build SMS functionality into their applications to give them that much needed edge over the competition or simply to enhance a program being used within the business itself.

What many people don't realise is how easy this is to do with the FASTSMS API...

FASTSMS are more than just an SMS provider. We build software applications ourselves using SMS and other technologies - this means we have knowledge of the developer's world. With access to our well documented and supported API (Application Programming Interface) developers can connect directly to the FASTSMS Message Platform via HTTP.

As an alternative to the API, sending via HTTP from within applications is as simple as generating a HTTP request that contains the relevant variables and sending them to the FASTSMS gateway, this can be in the form of a HTTP POST or GET.

The FASTSMS HTTP gateway has been implemented into many different business solutions including server monitoring & alert systems, contact management databases and many other advanced applications. And of course Email to SMS adds SMS functionality to any application that can send emails.

There really are endless opportunities to let SMS enhance your business as well as customer experience.

To find out more about our API click here or give us a call on 0800 954 5305

Mobile Marketing Campaign: Simple Vote

It seems that at this time the culture we live in revolves around public opinion more than any other to come before it. At times it seems a bit insane but we vote on everything from our favourite flavour of crisps, to who we think should run the country, to who we think should get kicked out of a bizarre multi-coloured house in Hertfordshire.

Whatever the subject, people love having their say - and it is a great way to market a product or service as well as gather invaluable data; not just hard data such as phone numbers for future campaigns but when you're planning on selling something to the mob, its a good idea to find out what they think at some point!

A simple vote campaign from FASTMMS was born for this kind of stuff, in the past this type of campaign has been behind everything from Big Brother & Pop Idol to government opinion polls on smoking and driving habits.

By running a few keywords simultaneously you have the makings of a really successful simple vote campaign...

Simple Vote Example: A well known reality TV programme invites viewers to vote for evictions as follows:

To evict Charlie text VOTE CHARLIE to 80010

To evict Godzilla text VOTE GODZILLA to 80010

Simple Vote Example: A radio vote on a topical issue of the day might want to collect listeners' opinions on using mobile phones whilst driving. They would ask their listeners to:

Text BAN to 88010 if you want to ban any use of mobile phones whilst driving

Text HANDS to 88010 if you think hands-free kits are safe enough

Text OK to 88010 if you think mobile phones are safe under any circumstances.

These really are easy to setup and run, with the data easily exportable into a spreadsheet, you can even get qualitative data as well, where people can text HANDS followed by their reasoning to 80010 - this really engages your audience maintaining or improving your relationship with who are effectively your customers.

To find out more about simple vote campaigns or mobile marketing in general click here or give us a call on 0800 954 5305.

Corporate Blogs - If you're reading this, then they work...

There are now over 600 million blogs in existence. Although the majority are still of a personal nature an increasing number of businesses are utilising this exciting medium to promote themselves and to communicate with clients, employees and other stakeholders.

These business are able to promote themselves in a way never before possible by building brand image and awareness, releasing news quickly and most importantly boosting traffic to their main website through increased search engine exposure.

Big businesses easily find the resource to utilise blogging at a level that yields noticeable results, however SME's can find it difficult to put the time in whilst simultaneously running a business.

NetSecrets' corporate blogging service makes this possible. We'll set up your blog, make it match your site's current branding and configure it to make it look good and easy to use so to attract visitors. You can post to it as frequently or as infrequently as you want or can manage, and it'll still work wonders!

Our content delivery team can also advise you on how you should post, how often and what about making sure you get the most out of it.

You can have your own blog, hosted by NetSecrets for the equivalent of just £8 a month - so if you think that could work for you, give us a ring on 01386 792 972 and we'll talk you through your options.

Alternatively click here to find out more.

FASTSMS Use Case: Estate Agents

With major changes in the national housing market, estate agents are among those who have to find new ways of doing things, many of which who have already turned to FASTSMS. Estate agents have seen major benefits since incorporating SMS into their communications - helping them to coordinate their team by sending them appointment details by text as well as marketing their properties to prospective clients in a way that really gets them to take notice.

Coordinating staff directly from your PC

Communication is key to having an organised, effective and above all efficient sales force. With staff spending a lot of time tending to prospects, whether through scheduled viewings or consultations they need to make sure that they always know where they need to be and what they are doing.

With appointments being arranged and changed at short notice they need to be able to send their team (or often themselves) information such as name, address, file number and contact number and they need to be sure they get it - with SMS they enjoy a facility that is direct, concise and immediate going straight into the hands of their staff.

Effective marketing solutions from FASTSMS

SMS marketing is currently the most effective way of getting details of latest properties directly into the hands of prospective clients - offering redemption rates far greater than traditional advertising and promotions. Studies show that people are much more likely to read and respond to a text message than any other medium making it great for letting people when new properties come on the market.

The following are just some of the ways our estate agent customers are already using SMS to market their properties...

• Campaigns: Clients text a property code to their system and the automatic reply contains details of that property (great to put on for sale signs or in the property pages)
• Promotion: Text prospects about new properties, upcoming open days and special offers
• Competitions: Gather opted-in subscribers for a mailing list for future SMS campaigns
• Enquiries: Many have taken advantage of a FASTSMS Virtual Mobile Number, which gets published with their other contact details as a 24 hour 'textline' extending their office hours so prospects can request call backs and specific information when they want to.

Because so many have been benefiting from these sort of uses, we are now offering a FREE 1 month SMS keyword campaign worth £99 to all estate agents who want to try it out for themselves.

For more information on FASTSMS click here or give us a call on 0800 954 5305 and we'll talk you through your options.

NetMessenger: robust with inherent reliability

NetMessenger is the FASTSMS browser based platform for web SMS and it is also a the heart of our other systems, such as desktop software FASTSMS Sender and SMSLook - so you can guess its pretty important to us. We are often guilty of describing NetMessenger as being robust with inherent reliability, but what does that mean to you...

robust: full of health and strength; vigorous. Powerfully built; sturdy. (although literally it means made of oak)

reliability: an attribute of any system that consistently produces the same results, meeting or exceeding its specifications.

(dictionary.com)

These are things that we constantly think of when we think of NetMessenger and why it was created - just like the fable of the man who built his house upon the sand, NetMessenger is our rock. Without waffling on about all the neat features it has to offer, we'll jump straight in and tell you about what you get.

One of the whole points of a browser based piece of software such as this is that it is completely accessible from anywhere in the world providing you have access to the internet, all you need is your username and password. This has eliminated any issues of downloads or version control that other providers have to deal with.

By making NetMessenger completely customisable through the preferences and offering multi-user functionality our hope is that you, our customers have the means to manage your communications in the way you want to, and not the way some rigid interfaces dictate.

Like I said, this post isn't about listing all the features and what each one gives you - its about a window into what NetMessenger is all about and our inspiration for it all - you.

For more information about NetMessenger and other FASTSMS solutions click here or give us a call on 0800 954 5305

Mobile Marketing Campaign: Subscription Manager

A subscription manager campaign is one of those that really does have a lot of subtle potentials, some that are not always directly attributable to an incoming revenue - a marketing nightmare, how do you justify something when you can't place upon it a definite return on investment.

By showing you how a subscription manager campaign might be used we should be able to highlight some of the benefits...

Subscription Manager Example: A sports TV channel offers news updates for a range of sports. Viewers text in with the sport(s) they are interested in to receive regular goal flashes, score updates, team news, club announcements etc.

A classic example, and one that is very much in use. It's great as it can be largely automated, requiring little supervision and you can choose to have it reverse billed, making the cost to you extremely minimal. You also gain invaluable opted-in data for future campaigns for people who are genuinely interested.

Above all of this is the unmeasurable human factor - used correctly a subscription manager campaign can dramatically enhance your other products and user experience ensuring you maintain a loyal and active customer base.

To find out more about subscription manager campaigns and other mobile marketing strategies, visit our dedicated site, FASTMMS or call us on 0800 954 5305 to find out what could work best for you.

Video SEO: PlanetStream guide and best practices

As the world of online video has grown it has become a necessity for business, an expectation for visitors and a challenge to website promoters. The question is raised - how can you and your business utilise the power of online video to drive organic traffic to your site? The answer, Video Search Engine Optimisation (Video SEO / vSEO).

Video SEO at its core is about the discoverability of your video content through search engines such as Google Video (or any of the other 1000's of video search engines out there). The ultimate goal is to get your video content to the top of the relevant search engine rankings - within the standard search results page and video search results page. This guide attempts to cover both areas, and it should also be noted that while Video SEO is still in its infancy what actually works and what doesn't work is still being developed.

Each of the items discussed are tailored for video, and just as with standard SEO, Video SEO is all about driving organic traffic to your site - each of the below methods focus on these core elements...

Page Content

As with standard SEO it is important to have relevant and keyword rich text surrounding the video content in order to highlight the subject. The content should be descriptive of what the video contains - it is crucial to understand that this content should be written for the visitor and not for search engines. Outside of the pure text the page should also link to content that is relevant to the video such as photos, audio and news - this not only helps with your Video SEO strategy but enriches the user experience.

Linking

Inbound and internal linking are fundamental to SEO and how search engines determine relevancy and rankings. The best way to get good relevant links is to have good content - having good content will always launch a link building campaign as people will always want to share / post / link to content they find interesting. For the purpose of this guide Video SEO linking can be broken into inbound, internal and anchor text...

- Inbound links: There are many ways to get inbound links when it comes to Video SEO, too many to go into in this brief guide. However the most immediate and beneficial way for getting inbound links (outside of the content itself) is to allow visitors to embed your videos into their websites, blogs, profiles and social networks. Giving the option to embed videos allows anyone to copy a few lines of code into their chosen environment. The real benefit, beyond branding and traffic, is that you can provide a HTML wrapper which enables you to utilise SEO optimised anchor text, linking back to your website.

- Internal links: This is the navigation within your website. Even though internal links are not as valuable when it comes to rankings they still have their part to play - they help determine relevancy and they help search engine spiders crawl / find your content. Spiderable links like video playlists, related links and breadcrumbs not only help search engines build a good picture of your websites infrastructure but can aid your visitors with content discovery.

- Anchor Text: Simply put, anchor text is the clickable part of a link and search engines use this to help determine the relevancy of a website. Regardless of where the link is coming from, the anchor text helps search engines determine what the link contains (more relevancy). Ideally all inbound links will have optimised anchor text related to the content on the page it is linking to.

Social Media

The promotion tool many websites overlook is the phenomenon of social media. Allowing visitors to share, bookmark, rate and comment on your videos allows visitors to engage with your content on a whole new level and can have major Video SEO benefits. Adding the sharing component is easy, most sites will offer a button to be added to your video page template - let your visitors be your viral marketing team and spread your content across websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook and MySpace. The most important component of Social Media Strategy for Video SEO are blogs - creating blogs revolving around a specific topic will not only generate additional traffic and brand awareness but give a website more opportunities for cross linking.

Feeds

There are two types of feeds when video is concerned, RSS and mRSS - both are similar and easy to create with the right tools. RSS feeds allow a visitor to subscribe to the content on your site and updates them whenever there is new content. There is not direct relationship between Video SEO and RSS feeds, but should be implemented in an overall traffic building strategy. mRSS feeds however directly impact Video SEO by allowing video search engines to have direct access to your websites video content. mRSS feed components contain the standard RSS elements like meta data, URL to content and thumbnails - but the key differences are ones that can impact rankings. These elements that include video ratings, play count and tags should be included whenever possible. Each of the video search engines that accept mRSS feeds have different requirements, but the best example is from Yahoo and can be viewed at http://search.yahoo.com/mrss

Video Sitemaps

The importance of sitemaps in standard SEO is still up for debate, however when it comes to Video SEO and video sitemaps - Google does not accept mRSS feeds, but they do accept video sitemaps through their webmaster interface. Video sitemaps use the standard sitemap protocol but contain video specific tags - Google's video sitemap guidelines can be viewed at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=10079

Title and Meta Tags

As with standard SEO practice meta data should be used to its fullest extent. For video pages the focus should be entirely on the video content. The title should contain the name of the video and video specific keyword sets. The meta description should be a brief summary of the video that occupies that page, as standard it is important to keep the meta data as unique and descriptive as possible for each video page. Header tags should be used to call out the importance of page content

Navigation

Your navigation should have two purposes, to make sure spiders can easily crawl your website discovering all your content and you want your visitors to find it easy not only to find your content but discover new content. When videos are concerned a simple video playlist can accomplish both of these - the key thing to remember is that you want them to be crawlable and relevant to the content on the page. As previously stated when discussing linking this is also a great opportunity to bring in related content, including: articles, photos and audio. All of these contribute to relevancy as well as enhance the overall user experience.

Page URL

Another core SEO component is a static, and therefore SEO friendly URL - The URL for a video should have limited dynamic parameters, contain relevant keywords and have a succinct file structure.

Video File Nomenclature

As with all aspects of Rich Media, how you name a file can have a positive impact on your SEO efforts - wherever possible you should name your video file in a keyword descriptive manner instead of a random database / CMS generated name. Video File Nomenclature is just another way to help video search engines define your page relevance.

Measuring the success or failure of your digital efforts and the impact Video SEO has on your website's traffic is as important as everything else. PlanetStream offers NetTracker at just £20 a month to all packages to better measure how well your video content is doing.

As with standard SEO, Video SEO is not about setting it up and then forgetting about it, it is a continuous process involving constant reporting and analysis.

For monitoring your standard website traffic we highly recommend the HitsLink application which is available through our parent company, . Start benefiting from all and PlanetStream has to offer by calling us on 01386 792972 or email info@planetstream.net

FASTSMS Use Case: Sales Managers

As we did last week with service managers we'll be using car dealerships as a basis for a common use of the FASTSMS system - sales managers...

SMS Marketing is currently the most effective way of getting your latest offer directly into the hand of your prospective client - and it offers redemption rates eight times greater than traditional advertising & promotions. The following are just some of the ways car dealers are already using SMS to bring in those much needed sales...

• Promotion: Texting prospects about upcoming open days, launches, events and special offers
• Competitions: Used in such a way as to gather opted in subscibers for mailing lists to be used in future promotions
• Enquiries: By publishing a 'textline' with their contact details dealers have been able to extend their office hours for potential customers.

With over 80% of adults in the UK owning mobile phones, text has quickly become the preferred method of contact for many. It really is a great way to quickly easily and cheaply get an effective marketing message directly into the hands of your prospects.

"We were delighted with the FASTSMS campaign we ran recently, when we sent a message on a Friday evening to existing customers to advise them of a special short term offer we had available on a number of new cars. The response was amazing and by 4.00pm on the Sunday we had sold 5 new cars and by the Tuesday this had risen to 9 as a direct result of the SMS invitation. Stunning ! Thank you!"

Rob Haylett - Marketing Manager, Payne's Ford Dealerships

For a limited time only we are giving away a FREE 1 month SMS keyword campaign worth £99 to all sales managers who open a new account.

To find out more about campaigns available from FASTSMS call us on 0800 954 5305 or click here to visit our dedicated site.