With so many forms of online marketing now available to you the key to making the most of everything that you do is to fully harness the potential of each and every piece of material you produce.

Keep in touch - the power of RSS
Make sure that everything you produce has an RSS feed link so that anyone who wants to be kept up to date can get the information they want automatically. This applies to all social media (blogs, social networking sites) as well as your website information. Don’t make people have to find you again. Make it easy for them.

Effective Keywords
Choose the most effective keywords and key phrases to use accross all your online marketing. This will make all your efforts more targeted and effective. Who are you audience? What have you got that they want the most at this moment in time? This is the basis for your keywork search and online marketing campaign.

Social Networking
Are you a member of social networking sites? It is very easy to send information to social networks. For example if you write a blog post you can easily send a link to Twitter and Facebook to let your contacts there know about the new information.

Do you have easy links on all the marketing material that you produce so that people can pass your name on to others in their social networks?

Press release
Announce your press release on your website. Make this the link back target so that when people read about you on other sites they link back to your company website or blog.

All information
When you produce a piece of marketing allow people to follow you in the way that best suits them by having all your contact information available: your website, blog, Twitter, Facebook and site information.

Break it down
Think creatively when using multi-media. Your time and money investment can go further if you look at all the options. For example, if you create an online video, then break it down - use the script as a pdf download, use the audio as a podcast on your site.

Conventional Media
If you use conventional media marketing whether its print, radio or TV advertising, add your online details. People like to look you up.

Great content is what draws in interested consumers. But what is great content? Here are a few tips that will help you create website and blog content that will keep your readers coming back for more.

Identify your readers
You cannot write convincingly if you don’t know who your audience is. Who do you intend to read your blog or article? How old are they? What are their interests?

Identify the purpose
What are you writing for? To get more visitors, to get more sales? Identifying your purpose will help you to create content that is not only interesting for your reader but that is in line with your business objectives.

Interesting
Write about things that will interest your readers. This is the key. This is what will bring people back to your website or blog and help you to fulfil your business objectives.

For your readers
This is the number one rule. You may only have ever started a blog in order to get higher search rankings but you need to forget about this once you start blogging. Concentrating on your audience and then working your strategies around that is what will work best.

Two-way communication
Allow your readers to respond to your writing. This keeps your blog active and you can allow the feedback that you get to inform you as a business as well as give you more ideas for future blogs. Some blogs of course do not allow feedback from readers and this is fine too.

Good looks
What you write has to be appealing. That means it has to be well written and crafted to be read online. That means small paragraphs and information that is concise and to the point. Reading from a screen is much harder than reading from the written page. It will turn readers off if they feel uncomfortable when they read your work.

Go gently with keywords
Of course, using keywords in your writing helps with search engine optimisation but be gentle. Silly keyword stuffing is likely to do you more harm than good.  Not only will readers be put off but the search engines could penalise you for doing it.

Just over two weeks ago Microsoft launched a major rebrand of their online search engine. Live Search has been transformed into Bing with great success so far.

Figures published by Hitwise, the internet research company, show that in the UK Bing has overtaken Yahoo! Search as the second most popular search engine. However, Google, are still all-powerful with 85.6% of the market share. Bing hold 3.11% and Yahoo! Search UK and Ireland are trailing with 2.24%

The new figures are likely to be unnaturally inflated as people will have been drawn to have a look the new site. Bing looks appealing, more modern, clean and fresh and promises to give you ‘better UK results than ever before and will evolve in the coming months to give you a richer search experience through a range of innovative features.’

Currently Bing is in its beta version, it seems slow to download the home page although there is no problem with the speed of the search results. It’s home page image changes everyday which is a great and simple idea and mirrors Google’s occasional change of logo to reflect events and important dates. Bing allows you to have a quick look at sites to give you an overall impression before you commit to clicking through. The name is fabulous: short, fun and very memorable.

In theory businesses and products rise to the top because they are good and better than the competition. Google is so successful that it has become a household name and to ‘google’ something is an expression that is now in the dictionary. Google is prone to continually launching new products in beta version and inviting users to give feedback. This creates a great ‘buzz’ around its brand which Microsoft are now capitalising on too.

However, other search engines trail far behind Google and it will be interesting to see if Microsoft’s Bing will have the impact it expects.  If it does, developers will be tracking how best to ‘work with Bing’ in the same way that they closely scrutinise how to optimise a site in accordance to the Google guidelines.

Google is set to launch its newest tool, Google Squared, they announced at their Searchology Summit on Wednesday.

Google Squared is designed to offer instant information in a ’square’ spreadsheet form. Google has provided screen shots to show what the application will look like but have said that there may be changes implemented before its publication.

 Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, explained in his blog:

‘[I]f you typed in ’small dogs’ then Google would try to return types of small dogs, along with facts like how much they weigh. It’s easy to add a row to the Square, so you could add a row for Lhasa Apso and Google will try to infer the relevant facts from the web. You can also add new columns, e.g. if you type ’energy level’ then Google will look for corroborating facts across the web and try to guess the energy level of each type of dog.’

Google Squared is due to be launched later this month via Google Labs which is a platform designed to showcase Google’s experimental projects.