8 Things Website Owners Can Learn From Gordon Ramsay

Gordon Ramsay is a well-known chef around the world. He has set up many successful restaurants, but his success is mainly based on his television shows like "Hell's Kitchen" and "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares," and the swear words he uses in these shows.

In "Kitchen Nightmares," he comes into a restaurant, which is usually almost bankrupt and barely attracting any customers, and helps save it. Strangely enough, looking at that show can help you a lot when optimizing your website. Think whatever you want about Ramsay and his swearing, but he knows what he's talking about.

It turns out running a website is just like running a restaurant. Let's take a look at some lessons we can learn from Gordon Ramsay.

Clean up Your Menu

Most restaurants Ramsay visits in his "Kitchen Nightmares" have extended menus. The owners try to put up as much food as possible, with as much variety as possible, to give their guests as much to choose from as they can. Ramsay always cleans up the menu and focuses on only a few dishes and making these special.

Most websites have the same problem. There are so many sites out there which are so full of information that you can't find what you're looking for, even if you try. These sites often also have a hard time ranking because search engines simply can't place the content.

Too much varied content won't help your site, so start cleaning up your menu. Focus on the really important areas for your potential visitors and create landing pages for those. Make the specials interesting for your guests!

Find Your Niche

There are many restaurants out there, which means a lot of competition. To stand out from all the competition, Ramsay looks for a niche. Is there no fish restaurant? Make a fish restaurant. Is there no "original burger joint"? Create one.

Ramsay is looking for niches, and so should you as a website owner when optimizing your site. Why try to rank for that one high volume keyword which also has a lot of competition? Aim for the long tail and find keywords that will make your website stand out.

Redecorate

Most restaurants you see on "Kitchen Nightmares" are horribly decorated. My grandmother wouldn't even bother to walk in because they look so old fashioned. So Ramsay decides to clean them up and redecorate.

Many site owners should consider cleaning up, too. You can optimize a site all you want, but if it doesn't look appealing to your visitors, you can rank number one forever without converting.

Get Your Kitchen Sorted Out

In watching the show, you see the horrific state some kitchens are in. If guests saw how their food was being prepared in these areas, they would instantly walk out. A restaurant that runs well needs a kitchen that runs well. Without the right material, no good food will come out of the kitchen.

The same goes for a profitable website. If you have a bad CMS, if the technical part of the site is failing, you won't rank. So make sure your "kitchen" is in order: check and optimize your site speed, make sure there are no frames, and have a technical SEO look at your CMS.

Cook What Your Guests Want to Eat

They say restaurant owners are stubborn, and that they tend to think they know what's best for their customers. You often see those restaurant owners ignoring the things the visitors are actually asking for, which leads to customers not returning to the restaurant.

Well, if restaurant owners are stubborn, most website owners are even more so. I've dealt with many clients pushing elements on the site they liked very much, without listening to the (potential) visitors.

I've heard the phrase "it's my site, I'll put on it whatever I want" way too many times. My answer has always been: "it's not your site, it's your visitors' site.

This goes for design elements, but also for SEO elements. Using keywords that nobody is searching for is still a huge issue on most websites. Listen to Gordon Ramsay here: focus on what your visitor wants, not what you think is best.

Get the Right People in the Kitchen

Have you seen the shows in which the restaurant owner was also the chef, the head waiter, and the host all at once, but he really couldn't cook or wait at all? These restaurants are usually doomed. Ramsay tries to get the owner out of the kitchen as soon as he can and tries to find a real chef to run the kitchen.

Things aren't much different with websites. There are way too many site owners out there who think they can run both the technical, content, and search marketing part of the site, when they actually don't know what they're talking about.

Site owners must make sure to get the right people to do the right jobs. A professional SEO or a professional technician can make all the difference when it comes to ranking.

Give Your Potential Visitors a Taste of What They Can Expect

On every show, Ramsay tries to find new visitors for the restaurant. He goes out and talks to people, but he also takes the "improved" employees from the restaurant out on the street to spread the word on the "new and improved" restaurant. They usually give the people on the street a taste of what they can expect -- something small, but delicious.

A website owner should also go out and give potential visitors a taste of what they can expect. This is easier for a site owner than a restaurant owner -- after all, he can get his titles and descriptions right and he can use social media to go out to where his potential customers are and give them a little taste of what to expect.

Aim for High Quality

One thing makes Ramsay (and all great chefs) so much better than most others: quality. Ramsay always aims for the high standards. Trying to stand out is what makes a restaurant successful.

Site owners must be that chef who aims for high quality. Half a site won't attract many visitors, it won't rank and it certainly won't convert. You have to give it all the attention it deserves.

What you put into your website will come out of it. So aim for high standards and high quality and you can be the successful chef of your website.

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Crawl, Index, Rank, Repeat: A Tactical SEO Framework

SEO can be boiled down to three core elements, or functions, in the current era of Google: crawling time (discovery), indexation time (which also includes filtering), and ranking time (algorithmic).

Distilling SEO to these core factors allows SEOs to construct a framework for their work around the activities the engines are conducting, without having to understand the underlying specifics of these activities. This is a good thing, because search engines are secretive beasts... er, robots. Robot beasts?

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Google PPC Advertising Sacramento

Expand Your PPC Reach With Google's Interest-Based Advertising

Google AdWords quietly began a beta program in March 2009 in the content network called interest-based advertising. Unlike many other AdWords rollouts, the program came out of beta with virtually no fanfare about a month ago.

Maybe it's because interest-based advertising isn't new: display networks have offered similar programs for years. However, there are a few big differences between those networks and the Google product.

CPC Pricing

I've heard many a pitch on display advertising. While each program has unique selling propositions, almost all of them have two common threads: CPM pricing and a high minimum spend.

CPM pricing means you pay a set cost per thousand impressions. In essence, every time your ad is displayed, you're charged -- even if nobody ever clicks on it. While this is great for branding and exposure, it's not always great for ROI. Most direct-response advertisers, including PPC advertisers, need to get a decent return on their ad spend -- and CPM usually isn't the best way to get it.

Google's interest-based advertising, on the other hand, is priced just like all of their search and content products: on a CPC basis. While that doesn't guarantee ROI (you still have to target the right audience and use the right ad copy), it means that you don't pay unless someone clicks on your ad.

No Minimum Spend

Nearly all of the display ad pitches I've heard in the past two years required a minimum spend -- often as much as $10,000 per month. That's a drop in the bucket for big brands, but it can be an entire online budget for the average PPC advertiser. Couple that with the ROI question mark, and it's difficult to justify a test.

There's no minimum spend to participate in interest-based advertising. You can test it for a few hundred dollars a month -- and you can kill it at any time if it doesn't work. Advertisers of any size can test the waters for a low risk.

Text or Image Ads

Traditional display ad networks use only image-based and rich media ads. While it's well known that image ads cut through the clutter in a content environment better than plain text, not every advertiser has the resources to create (or pay someone else to create) image ads.

Interest-based campaign ads, like Google content network ads, can be either text or image. Google also has the advantage of their free display ad builder, so even novice designers like me can put together an image ad with some copy and a JPG file.

It isn't necessary to create image ads, though. Interest-based advertising using just text also works. The old PPC adage applies: test, test, and test again. Try text and image ads, and see which works better.

Site Exclusion

With traditional display ad buys, it can be challenging to exclude poor-performing sites. Often it's a challenge just to get reporting on individual site performance. Interest-based advertising offers all the same features we've come to know and love from Google: Placement Performance reports, and site exclusion.

Individual site performance can be gauged right in the AdWords interface, and underperforming sites can be excluded in seconds. Just like content network campaigns, a few bad apples can spoil the whole campaign's ROI. Reviewing and eliminating these sites helps bring things back in line quickly.

Conversion Optimizer

Google's Conversion Optimizer is available to qualifying interest-based campaigns. With a well-crafted campaign, it doesn't take long to accrue enough conversions to turn on Optimizer. With this great tool in place, conversion rates for interest-based campaigns are similar to search campaigns, with the added bonus of tens of millions of impressions boosting exposure at no cost.

If you haven't tried interest-based advertising yet, give it a try -- and let me know how it goes! Or if you have tried it, leave a comment about your experience.

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Sacramento Search Marketing: Content Analysis

The Link Builder's Guide to Competitive 'How-To' Content Analysis

When entering a new keyword space with content-based link building, we like to know all that space's "how-to" content. Why? How-to content speaks broadly to an industry's pains. Solving pains with content leads to links and targeted traffic.

Let's look at the process for quickly creating your list of must-have "how-to/tips" content and then how to use this content for developing links to your site.

1. Select Appropriate Keywords

You will use two or three high-level market defining keywords (MDKWs), as well as one or two informative content descriptors such as ["how to"], [tips], [guide to], [Top * Ways], etc...

2. Construct Your Competitive Content Analysis Queries

For a quick check, only create one or two queries. If you're building out a bread baking site your queries could look like: ["bake bread" "how to"] and ["guide to" "baking bread"]. In these cases, the MDKWs are "baking bread" and "bake bread," while the content descriptors are "how to" and "guide to."

Once you have an idea of how the process works and you're ready to really dig into your space, consider using 10 or more carefully grouped queries that are appropriate to your niche (note: not every industry titles its informative content with "how to").

3. In Advanced Search, Set Your Search Engine to Deliver 100 Results

Before or after searching your queries, set your favorite search engine to deliver you 100 results on a page.

4. Copy and Paste the Organic SERPs into a Text Pad

Once you conduct your search, carefully select all the title and snippet content from the organic section of the SERPs. Copy this content and paste it into a text pad. Repeat this process for all of your queries, being careful not to paste over your previously pasted SERPs!

5. Count Phrase Occurrences Within the Ranking How-To Content

To identify what topics occur most frequently in the ranking how-to content in your space, paste all of the content from your text pad into the Phrase Occurrence Content Analysis Tool. Look at the most commonly occurring six-, five-, four-, three-, and two-word phrases from your SERP set.

6. List Your Informative Content Titles

By adding 200 SERP listings from these two searches ["bake bread" "how to"] and ["guide to" "baking bread"], we find common phrases, such as "beginner's guide to baking bread" (11 times), "a guide to whole grain breadmaking" (six times), "bake bread on the grill" (five times), and "bread without an oven" (six times).

We also uncover some important bread-related concepts, such as "bread the five families of bread" (six times). Who knew bread had five families? Well, the content experts in your space knew that. Now you do too and you can research and then reference them when creating your how-to content on baking bread on the grill.

7. Create Better How-To Content

Simply rewriting the how-to content that exists won't cut it. Once you have your content list created, go back and review the content that's ranking well for the titles you selected.

Now, how can you one-up this content? See what's missing such as great pictures, a video, a group interview with industry experts on how they solve this how-to problem, an intuitive organization, exhaustive detail, a downloadable spreadsheet, a simple tool/widget that makes a process easier, etc... Then start creating content.

8. How to Find Link Prospects for Your How-To Content

There are several ways to source prospects for your how-to content. The first is through backlinks to competing content.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer or Open Site Explorer to find out who links to great bread-related how-tos out there. The second is through link building queries such as [(MDKW) intitle:"round up"] (finds round up writers in your space who consistently link to notable content), [(MDKW) "blog list"] (finds lists of bloggers who write about your topic), and [(MDKW) Twitter users] (shows you lists of Twitter users related to your subject).

Also see "29 Queries for Content-Based Link Builders." If you're willing to part with your content, you could potentially publish it on other peoples' sites as guest content with links back to your site. Finally, explore methods for discovering broken how-to pages on your competitors' sites, and then chase down links from people who have dead links to this page.

Analyzing the most frequently occurring how-to topics in a search engine result set can frame an industry's primary pain points for you. The content topics you find this way are "must-have" and industry-standard topics. If you trump the existing how-to content -- and then promote it -- you'll find yourself consistently developing more and stronger backlinks.

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Search Engine Marketing Sacramento

The Small Business SEM Survival Guide

One of the best things about the rise of the Web, Google, and search marketing is the degree to which it has levelled the playing field for smaller businesses. No longer do you need a budget in the millions to reach a national or international audience. Or do you?

Naïve misconceptions about SEO and search marketing notwithstanding ("I've spent $100 with you, why aren't I number one for 'digital cameras' already?!"), anyone who has taken the time to learn even a small amount about it will realize that it can be a long, tough road. Desirable keywords are often extremely competitive and expensive (in the case of paid search advertising), with the top spots dominated by a few highly entrenched players.
SMB Survival Strategies

* Focus relentlessly on a few key areas
* Ignore hype and distractions
* Know who your competition are (and who they're not)
* Pick the fights you know you can win (save the rest until you're bigger and stronger)
* Integrate search marketing into the day-to-day running of your business

So is the playing field really that level after all? Can small businesses compete? Absolutely.

It's a question of knowing the game well enough and playing intelligently enough. And this isn't just about picking up the crumbs swept off the giants' table, in the form of a few long tail keywords and some residual traffic.

Your best bet is nearly always to find a search marketing agency with a lot of experience working with small businesses (you can't be an expert at everything, after all). But even if you hire an external agency, it still pays to know as much as you can about the field.

Know Your Competition

I'm sure you've heard this message, frequently blasted out by lazy marketers and the lazy press:

"zOMG, there are like 10million+ new pages published per day, thousands of new sites, zillions of new blogs and they're ALL your competitors!! All your visitors are going to these sites instead of yours! How are you going to STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD!?!!1!"

This is nearly always accompanied by a picture of some little blue men with a slight bigger red man in the middle, standing out from the crowd. Or by someone shouting into a megaphone. Take your pick.

It's all rubbish, of course. The vast majority of this "new" content is spam. Of the remainder of it, little will have anything to do with your business.

For the purposes of search marketing, your competitors are the relevant sites that show up on Google on the first page for whichever search terms you're targeting. In social, they are the small handful of companies in your market niche that make a favorable impression on your preferred social networks.

And that's it. If you concentrate on those few companies and ignore everything else, a huge mountain of a task suddenly seems a lot more manageable.

Analyze each of your competitors frequently -- work out which tactics are working for them, which are their popular blog posts, and where they're getting powerful links. Learn from their tactics, but don't copy outright.

Stay Focused

Search and social marketing experts are always telling us that there are dozens of tactics to implement, hundreds of blogs to read, bucket loads of communities in which to participate, and thousands of three letter acronyms to memorize. Not to mention that it's changing all the time. Just how do you stay on top of it all?
Learn More

* Rethink Your Web Strengths
* Get Started on the Basics
* Keep it Simple
* Get Started With Keyword Research
* Some Tools to Help Along the Way

The simple answer is, you don't. Pick the few areas you're going to master, and focus on them relentlessly. You don't buy a dozen rare orchids, knowing you only have the time and energy to look after one. You just buy the one, and you nurture it.

By the same token, it's easy to become distracted by all the new stuff that's coming out all the time. Some of it you might be able to work into your existing processes, but most of these distractions are just that -- distractions.

Stay focused on your core strategies and tactics. Don't chuck out that orchid on which you've lavished so much attention just because a slightly fancier one has just come along.

That doesn't mean you should let your nose get so close to the grindstone that you lose touch with what's going on in the world around you. Learning and being exposed to new ideas is always a good thing. It's great to reassess your strategies and try new tactics, but alongside your existing focus, not as a distraction.

And if worst comes to worst and your prized orchid is keeling over whatever you seem to do, of course it's time to move on. To mix my metaphors, it's no good flogging a dead horse.

On the flip side, once you've truly mastered your chosen key areas, you can grow by expanding your focus (e.g., once you're dominating one small group of niche keywords, try adding some new ones to the mix; just don't add too many at once).

Pick Your Fights (and Win Them)

For most small businesses, ranking at number one for any highly competitive, generic search term is simply out of the question. Trying to go viral can be a pot-luck, expensive business (just like trying to win the lottery). Getting picked up by major blogs just isn't going to happen (unless you're extremely lucky -- again, not the kind of business plan to take to the bank manager).

But these aren't problems for you, it just means that you have to be careful to pick fights you know you can win.

For example:

* Getting long tail traffic to your site is easy (and don't let any search marketeer tell you otherwise). Just keep adding quality content to your site on a regular basis -- running a blog is ideal. This takes discipline and a few hours of work per week, but you have complete control over the process and it's a low cost investment compared to the thousands of incoming links required to target a generic term.

* Find out who your happiest customers are, and turn them into your social media evangelists (official or otherwise). Pick a social network or a forum that already has an active community around your niche and send your new recruits out there as well as getting stuck in there yourself. Do this the right way and you can completely dominate a network for your niche, at virtually no cost. (Quick case study: show up on Twitter and ask what the best SaaS accounting package is, and the same answer will almost always come back. Try it!)

* If you run a local business, work on your local and maps listings. It's still the Wild West out there, plenty of land up for grabs (not for long though!).

* Find and target a handful of niche terms that can collectively drive a reasonable amount of traffic (these are to be found somewhere in the wasteland between the long tail and the highly competitive, generic terms).

Every business and niche will have its own unique strategies and tactics that can be put to use here. Ideas in the comments please!

Make it a Part of Your Process

Just like traditional marketing, search marketing of any form isn't a one off. It's an ongoing process. And to work best, it has to be fully integrated into your business.

Bring it into your weekly team meetings or your daily to-do list. Make sure you take some kind of action around it every day, or at least several times a week. You'll be surprised how these small actions add up and how quickly and easily search marketing can become a part of your regular routine.

As a small business, you also need to be on the lookout for quick, high impact wins, and this is where running your campaign in-house can really come into its own. You might not have the time or budget to build thousands of links manually, but you can e-mail all your suppliers asking them for a link (with a great testimonial from your business, of course). You can add a link request to the order confirmation e-mails generated by your e-commerce software. You can get regular guest blogging gigs within your industry.

Again, there are loads of ideas here, many of which will be unique to your business. If you have a regular team meeting, add a mini-brainstorming session as an agenda point, with the goal of generating at least one viable idea applicable to your search marketing efforts every time. If you work by yourself, set aside time for some lateral thinking every week and do the same.

If you're employing an external agency, the same goes. Make sure you have regular contact with them (at least weekly, if possible), and make sure that they know as much about your business as they can. If they're diligent and properly involved, they'll spot no end of new opportunities.

Summing Up

Search is a long-term investment, there's no doubt about it, and it can be tough, especially for small businesses. But by being canny and playing your cards right, the challenges are far from insurmountable.

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Sacramento VSEO - Mobile Search

Mobile Search: Time for a Hearing and Vision Checkup

During BIA/Kelsey's November Interactive Local Media conference in Los Angeles, Google Product Manager Surojit Chatterjee asserted that the mobile device has eyes, ears and, in some cases, touch.

His point: Why not utilize these features? It's a philosophy that has shown through in much of Google's mobile product development. Goggles, for example, takes a picture with your phone which is matched to image databases to return information on the object in question.

Though Goggles has ways to go, it's indicative of the mobile innovation we're starting to see beyond the Googleplex walls. This includes voice search, barcode scans, augmented reality, and other search "inputs" more intuitive than the typing that ruled the PC environment.

Augmenting your senses

Say It

We'll see this concept increasingly apply to product innovations and monetization strategies in the coming months. Mobile pay-per-call, for example, is being developed by Google and others to take advantage of the obvious fact that the connected device is, after all, a phone.

Augmenting your sensesVoice search is likewise accelerating on the mobile device. AT&T's YPMobile app last month integrated voice search for category and business name queries -- a format to which directory assistance has long familiarized consumers.

Meanwhile, voice search start-up Siri specializes in natural language search (i.e., "Where is the closest liquor store?"). It was acquired by Apple last month for a rumored $200 million, further signaling Apple's desire to deliver content and search on its flagship device.

Microsoft earlier this week launched a voice-powered mobile navigation app powered by Tellme and available on Windows Mobile (6.x) devices. This was Redmond's answer to Google's navigation app, launched with the Droid and available on Android (1.6.x) devices.

Google meanwhile continues developing speech-to-text processing on iPhone apps and embedded deeper in the Android OS. With Google's scale -- and speech processing's natural tendency to get smarter over time -- these products will only improve.

And in addition to local search, Google is thinking globally with ambitions to tackle languages such as Mandarin Chinese. Due to the complexity of typed character sets in such languages (not to mention the size of the Chinese market), this is an opportune area.

Scan It

Augmenting your senses"Visual search" is likewise developing, tied to improving smartphone capabilities. In addition to Goggles mentioned above, bar code scanning software allows you to scan 2D bar codes in traditional media using the phone's camera, to receive more info or promotions.

UPC product code scanners are also gaining popularity due to the format's ubiquity in retail environments. The opportunity is to push information, promotions, and advertising to consumers whose proximity to the point of purchase indicates higher levels of buying intent.

This information includes specs, reviews, and even point of sale inventory for nearby stores that might have better prices. Monetization hasn't been fully developed, but this inferred buying intent is a foundation for premium ad inventory of various formats.

Treating scans as a form of search, for example, a bid marketplace could develop where advertisers bid on scans the same way they currently bid on search keywords. Sponsored results could come in the form of banners, text ads, or actionable coupons.

So far the leaders in the space include Scanbuy, ShopSavvy (on Android), and Red Laser (on iPhone), which this week announced 2 million app downloads, 50 million scans, and nearly 1 million active users.

Pimp My Reality

Augmenting your sensesAugmented reality (AR) is another form of visual search getting lots of attention. For those unfamiliar, it displays the physical world around you (through the phone's viewfinder) with graphical overlays representing different data sets like public transit or merchant details.

This can mean holding your phone up to a busy street and seeing floating icons with storefront information or promotions. Though this has sex appeal, the reality of augmented reality is tied to myriad technical and logistical challenges such as data aggregation.

But the underlying technology is making strides. Out ahead is Amsterdam-based Layar, with iPhone and Android AR apps. Yelp's Monacle (iPhone only) is another, which overlays geotagged listings and reviews on the viewfinder screen to show the closest merchants.

All of the above technologies will continue to be applied to new areas as they mature on the smart phone and beyond. This will eventually include other mobile hardware, wearable technologies and even biometric interfaces in the long term.

But back to the foreseeable future, innovation will continue to be fueled by one giant feedback loop between users, ODMs, and app developers. Through this, mobile software will more substantially "grow into" the inherent capabilities of the hardware. Finally.

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Sacramento Local Video Search Engine Optimization SEO

handling all aspects of internet marketing and specializes in full service Sacramento Search Engine Optimization, Sacramento Pay Per Click Programs, Sacramento Search Engine Management, Sacramento Local Search Engine Optimization, Sacramento Video Search Engine Optimization, Sacramento Social Media Optimization and Google Analytics Sacramento and taking their business to the TOP of ranking for search engines sites

is serving San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, Sacramento, El Dorado Hills, Roseville, Granite Bay, Rocklin, Lincoln, Loomis, Elk Grove, Natomas, Citrus Heights, Folsom, Fair Oaks, Auburn, Placerville, Lodi, Stockton, Modesto, Galt, Tracy, Plumas Lake, Marysville, Yuba City, Chico, Redding, Red Bluff, Vacaville, Woodland, Davis, Dixon, Fairfield, Nevada City, San Jose, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Reno, Sparks, Tahoe, Lake Tahoe, South Lake Tahoe, Truckee, Toledo, Oregon, Cleveland, Detroit, Charlotte, Cornelius, Gastonia, Concord, Hickory, Salisbury, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point, New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami

How to Collect Data Without Alienating Clients

The topic of data collection has been playing on my mind since December last year, before I joined as a contributor to SEW, when I wrote a white paper on blogging.

The guide was free to download -- we wrote it for many reasons but not for profit. We wanted to show our clients the importance of blogging, to enhance our brand and credibility, and to encourage links -- the same reasons we blog.

However, "Carlos" made a good point in the comments:

"Prompt readers for their email/info before they download the white paper. Since it's free to them (us), it's fair to hand over a bit of data to help build your database..."

Good point, Carlos, I thought, it is a fair exchange. So what other best practice rules should we stick to in order to gather data without offending visitors?

Know Your Plan

What data do you want and why are you collecting it? It's important to work this out from the start -- you risk wasting a great deal of time if you don't actually need the data you're gathering, and you also need to be able to tell visitors why you're taking it if they ask.

Don't Ask Too Much

Most people are willing to give their e-mail address, some people are prepared to give their home address, but few people are willing to give a business their phone number.

For the majority of people, it's just too intrusive. So it's worth considering whether you really need their number. If it costs you one-third of the people who would otherwise have given you their e-mail addresses, for example, then give some thought to whether that's a fair price to pay.

If you rely on numbers to sell your services or product, then it's probably worth it -- work out your business' position.

Offer a Fair Exchange

People are happy to exchange their e-mail addresses in return for something of value.

The trick is finding that value. It might be the chance to download a guide, enter a competition, listen to a podcast series -- anything so long as it's something people want, an incentive that works.

Know the Law

It's of key importance that you understand your legal obligations when collecting and using data. Breach the law and, at best, you forfeit clients' trust. At worst, you could end up in a court case that destroys your business.

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