Book Review: Digital Engagement – Internet Marketing…

Digital Engagement – Internet Marketing that Captures Customers and Builds Brand Loyalty.  Authored by Leland Harden and Bob Heyman. Published 2009.

This is an easy to read book of about 230 pages of text that is well spaced out over 11 chapters. The language is almost conversational and is accompanied by plenty of illustrations to some of the more detailed dialogue the authors create.

It is not a book I would recommend to any competent Internet consultant nor is it a book that will make you a competent Internet consultant. But I do strongly recommend this book for any small business owner that is thinking of creating an online presence or who already has an online presence.

Too often consultants mislead their clients as to what is required or omit to tell their clients of available services as the consultant does not have the necessary skill set to deliver these to you the client. This book gives a brief overview of what you should expect and the available services to market your online presence.

Digital Engagement is a little USA centric at times. But overall the advise is relevant for the New Zealand market but just with different resources, links and organisations.

Chapters cover an array of online marketing  topics including; Search Engine Optimisation, Viral marketing, Video, Affiliate marketing, paid advertising and social media.

In summary this is a great book for any small business but you should still carefully choose a Internet consultant.

The book can be purchased from the usual online book stores and is available at the local library.

Deceptive Internet Marketing Companies

Having a nice and an easy to navigate web site is the first step to being online. You need a way for people to find your web site.

Many companies and individuals claim to be “Search Engine Optimisation” or “SEO” experts. This is usually accompanied by claims that your site will gain top search rankings within days. Sadly many of these so called experts deploy deceptive techniques that will initially gain you traffic or there claims are blatantly false.

The initial traffic is often miss guided web surfers or an act of deceiving search engines to visit your site. Both scenarios are short-term solutions and neither benefit you as the web site owner. The two risks of these tactics is that your site can be blacklisted from search engines and you will be falsely investing money into a web site that is not attracting your target audience.

A certain method to ascertain if your web site has been optimised in a correct manner is to look at your traffic and compare it to the amount of feedback, customer enquiries, sales etc that you receive. If there is a great in balance there may be a SEO issue. A good SEO company will have statistics and analysis immediately available and should already be providing you with at least basic information on a regular basis.

Several other methods to identify inappropriate SEO usage:
(a) The use of words in sentences that may repeat too much to the point that it does not make sense.
(b) Over use of bold text and links to other sites.
(c) Link pages that are not relevant to the original site.
(d) Multiple web site addresses