Get a Free Website

I keeping getting asked by friends in construction, landscape gardening or similar trades "How much for a website that I can stick photos of my work on?"

Well if you just want something simple to get you up and running then it's free (almost) and really not that hard to do. So for all those who've been asking lately, here it is:

1. Sign up to http://www.blogger.com/, a free service that allows you to create a Blog (like this one) that you can easily update yourself.
2. Buy (only a few bucks) a domain name (web address) from somewhere like http://www.godaddy.com/.
3. Set the domain to point to your Blog from your GoDaddy admin.
4. Text your photos to your Blogger account.
5. You now have a website displaying photos of your work that you can use to promote your business. And it cost sweet FA.

Blogger.com allows you to publish photos via your mobile phone by simply sending a picture message to your Blogger account.

You can include your domain name in your business stationary, even stick it on the side of your van, and whenever someone visits that web address they will find your new website.

If you want me to do it for you, it'll cost you a few beers...

Creative Search Phrases Using Puncuation

Search engines, with a few exceptions, purposely ignore puncuation. This is a vital component in good copywriting because it makes it possible to create search phrases that wouldn't normally appear in "real" writing.

Quite often, people search for keyword location, even though that's very unnatural and a phrase unlikely to appear in naturally written copy.

So, there's a lot of searches for property Norwich, but it's much more common for us to write "Norwich property."

Knowing that search engines ignore punctuation, the copywriter can end a sentence with the keywords and then start the next sentence with the location i.e. "blah blah property. Norwich blah blah."

The search engine will strip the full-stop, leaving the unnatural phrase property Norwich intact.

Free Link on a PR7 Site

Here's an easy way to get a free link on a PR7 site. Get yourself over to LinkedIn.com and add your businesses profile and voila! you now have a link on a PR7 site.

Forgetting link popularity for a second, the site is actually a great tool for networking and has many industry leaders listed.

So get over there... and don't forget to add me to your network if you think we can help each other.