A team from our local secondary school, Aboyne Academy, reached the shortlist for the Vodafone Challenge as part of Digital Day 2018 during which we ran a workshop with the pupils.

In this short video Julie explains the three ways that blogging is a lot like running.

I'm walking down a street in Windsor. It's Tuesday the 11th of December, and I'm here to see a new client to do a workshop with them so I can get a deeper understanding of their business. Importantly, I need to establish what they want to achieve from inbound marketing, search marketing, paid search, and so on.

Pay Per Click or PPC advertising and specifically Google Ads is a potent tool for generating visitors to your website and from there business leads or enquiries. But people often get it completely wrong and finish up deciding to stop doing it. By following these THREE tips you'll fast track to PPC success.

As well as running a digital marketing agency, I'm also a retained or on-call firefighter. This means I wear a pager and, when my services are required, my pager alerts me and I respond to it. I do this because I live in a rural community and want to help protect the people with whom I live.

Working with a digital marketing agency should be a fantastic experience for both the agency and the company or client, but that's not always the case. Sometimes with digital marketing, the relationship with the agency goes wrong, and it's usually when the agency and the client are not on the same page.

Video Transcript

It's the end of the week and on Friday afternoons we finish early. I tend to hang around. Get the office to myself, get stuff done, tidy up at the end of the week. The thing is on Friday afternoons I quite often find that, although I'm here working on my own getting things done the phone keeps ringing. And it's people calling up trying to sell me something.

Everyone wants their website to appear on the first page of search engines so that they can grab the lion's share of the traffic. As we have mentioned many times on this blog, moving up to page one is a long, slow process that takes time, patience and effort. But what happens when you need traffic fast?

You keep hearing that you should be blogging but it sounds like a lot of effort for just another page on your website that nobody is going to read. You're busy and you have better things to do with your time, like getting more customers, for example.

More and more companies are embracing digital marketing including SEO, PPC and content marketing. However, based on my experience there's a big difference between what digital marketing costs and what people think it costs. In this post I'm going to explore and explain that.

I'm a fan of Mercedes-Benz cars but my experience with them as a company over the last few months leads me to the conclusion they are confused when it comes to using digital technologies for marketing. A bold statement I know so let me explain.

If you embrace them, the digital marketing agency you choose to work with can play a pivotal role in your business growth plans. That's why it's a great idea to build a trusted partner style relationship.

I'm going to tell you a story. It's a true story and it has a happy ending. So... are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

A good mate, Steve, asked me a question today about a previous blog post I'd written. I was talking about SEO, for a change, and he said the post made it sound like SEO wasn't cheap and it was far from guaranteed to work. His point was, if, as a digital marketing agency, we wanted to attract clients why would I be so brutally honest.

Every week we have conversations with potential new clients that don't go anywhere. The reason for this is, primarily, cost. They think hiring us is going to cost circa £150/month when the reality is our SEO services start at 10 times that amount. There's no meeting halfway with this kind of differential.