Doing the usual rounds in my feed list led me to discover the Thresher’s 40% special offer whilst perusing Hugh MacLeod’s blog.

But due to a combination of not wanting to blog until I’d converted my blog from Blogger to Wordpress and also being too busy neither did I email my circle of friends, clients and business associates to give them the good news - the offer was only from 30/11/06-10/12/06. So I kinda missed the boat on that one, sorry.

The only way you could take advantage of it was to download the coupon, in pdf format, and you’d need to know where to find it. That is, you’d have to find out from the Internet.

 Cue Stormhoek, a client of Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com, who told him about the special offer and how it was only going out over the Internet. Hugh, obviously being a generous soul, posted the news on his blog and with his not inconsiderable readership has become, I believe, part of this success story.

If you’d like to read up on some of the analysis of Thresher’s genius or blundering stupidity - depending on your viewpoint, why not check out Hugh’s update on Why the Thresher’s meme Went Viral

What I found interesting and enlightening about the post  was the combination of factors that led to the successful viral effect of the campaign. Now I suspect the marketing professionals would say the factors are all basic stuff when it comes to marketing. But it wasn’t that thought of it. Oh, and by the way, I don’t believe for a second that this was a happy mistake on the part of Thresher’s, no way!

If it’s any consolation I’ve got the coupon on my hard drive, forgot the deadline and missed out too. :(

Business ICT (part of Success Matrix) hosted a Web marketing and communications day today down in not so sunny Boston.

The line up consisted of Paul McIntyre on Search Engine Optimisation (I refuse to spell it with a z) Phil Crowshaw on Online Communication Tools and myself on Blogging For Business. Does that sound like a jazz trio?

I’d never met Paul before, and although I’ve heard many seminars and attended a similiar number of workshops on the subject it was good to hear someone talking sense about a subject and industry that is not without its critics. To sum up, his talk emphasised the need for good clean code using CSS, well-written content, and then all the usual requirements that make up a properly optimised site. Unfortunately, he had to leave after his talk, because of a heavy cold so I missed the opportunity to get to know him a little better - another time maybe. Paul runs Search High - www.searchhigh.co.uk

I took the floor afterwards in the run up to lunch and then Phil Crowshaw of Digital Media Active entertained us with a personal look into the future of online communications and the sort of tools that are available right now. Phil’s an entertaining and informative speaker so the session went very quickly  - and thanks for the insight into Skype Jyve Pro,

With Skype Jyve Pro experts can charge for their advice on a metered or fixed rate basis. The system manages sessions, tracks usage and handles payment.

Another of Phil’s projects is the ongoing www.expertsonline.tv site that for £27.00 a year gives you access to interviews involving a number of experts, mainly in the business development world.

Finally, Phil talked about the growth of video as an online medium, which is coming to the fore with the increasing capacity of broadband. And as he so elequently put it, ‘I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet’. A sentiment I whole-heartedly agree with.

This is a subject I’ve been discussing with associates for sometime now, and it’s good to see we’re not the only ones thinking along the same lines. When you consider the cost of print advertising, a short video clip placed on CD, or on your website, or even ina video blog can be considered excellent value for money given the amount of re-use it would get.

And only today it was revealed by The Wall Street Journal that CBS, News Corp’s Fox, NBC Universal and Viacom are in talks about creating a video website to compete with Google’s YouTube - a hot subject indeed.

Blow By Blow Productions web site  which we’re re-developing has a lot of information on what can be done with video to help promote a company.

A very enjoyable day - now back to the grindstone. :)

Do you know what really gets my goat when it comes to all this talk about internet marketing?

It’s the incessant messages about driving more traffic to your website. It seems all these "experts" want to talk about is the quantity of traffic, how they can increase flow of traffic to your website.

What seems to be missing is a few words like, relevant, targetted and interested traffic, people who have an interest in what you have to sell or say.

To give you an example, I run a number of sites for testing purposes, and from the results I’ve achieved I can tell you that it is far better to have fewer visitors to your site who are looking for what you have to offer than a whole heap of "sniffers" looking for the next freebie.

A set of results I checked out recently showed that running a banner ad on a general purpose site produced thousands of visits, but virtually no sales, whilst a link (that cost nothing) on a special interest site produced a healthy number of purchases.

Moving on, with Web 2.0 developing at the rate it’s going the website owner now has many more effective marketing tools at hand to drive significantly more relevant traffic to his/her site than ever before, but there seems to be a lack of guidance from the experts who are still promoting web 1.0 (the old style web) tools.

What makes the difference with these web 2.0 tools is that they can put your site in the way of your relevant traffic - thus increasing your chances of doing business with a greater percentage visitors. Now isn’t that what we all want?