Simple Strategies for Promoting Your Website

Link Building is still key

There are good and bad links so - beware. First, the links have to relevant to your website from relatable, legitimate high traffic sites and, in particular, from the individual pages that have traffic from real people, rather than machines. 

Be aware that some websites that Google’s recent 'Helpful Content Update' (HCU) affected appear to have rebounded after cleaning up their link profile, you likely want to be particularly careful about the quality of links pointed to your site, and the linking text.

Of course, all of the usual caveats in terms of ensuring that links are from reputable sites that have links pointed to them apply as well.

Industry or Local Contacts

If you have a good relationship with other website owners in a similar industry, suggest to them that links to each other 's website would be beneficial to you both. For example, you may own a Mexican food restaurant in your town and could recommend a Cajan restaurant in the next town (and vice versa, obviously). Ideally, these links should have similar words on the linking page and the destination page.

Perhaps the businesses in your locality bear no relationship with your offering other than a 'support local business' element. Again, enhance the quality of the link(s) by using words from the designated landing page within the paragraph containing the link. 

Social Media, News and Blog Posts

If the websites have News pages, links can be incorporated in a post on the website(s) otherwise the information can be submitted to blog sites, as appropriate to your target audience. These may include WordPress, Substack, Tumblr and, of course, Google. 

You should take advantage, if you haven't already, of free publicity in the form of Facebook, X-Twitter and LinkedIn. Instagram doesn't link to websites from its posts. Videos and image slide-shows can also be uploaded to YouTube and TikTok. There are other social media apps, the most popular are covered here.

Need support? Let us know in the comments.

Videos can help with your Marketing

Our recently watched YouTube videos average almost 6,000 views per month, globally. In the UK, there are 300ish views per month (10 views per day). 

One of our videos has been watched just shy of 60,000 times, no doubt helped by being accessible from the front page of a client's website. 

Today we published a quick-fire video, required urgently, as shown here: 

This video comprises a series of stills and messages, rather than shooting a movie with a smart-phone or from a drone. Given more time, that would be our preferred option. However, the pace of the video is critical - too slow may lose your viewers early but too fast means they can't blink or they'll miss something! I prefer faster rather than slow - you can always run it through again.  

Of course, everyone is on YouTube now - and Google is loving it! And you don't have to be a vlogger or podcaster if your primary reason is to market your 'widget' company. It's better for your products or services to be seen a little than be invisible.

If you want more information regarding the property above, visit Alexander Bond in Knebworth or go to the abc properties website.

Increasing your views on YouTube

Here is a YouTube visits chart from the past year, showing new (blue) and returning (green) visitors: 

A good many of the visits originated in India (mostly males, aged 25-40) so I checked and found that this is in line with general YouTube visits: 

 

As much as our target audience is the UK, this is a 'numbers' game therefore any hits could be considered worthwhile.

This is the breakdown by country:

1 year :July 2023 - July 2024

During the past year, there were almost 3,000 visits from the UK to our YouTube channel 

However...

10 years :July 2013 - July 2024

For the past ten years, the average of our UK visits per annum was around 5,550 and the Indian visits - excluding the past 12 months - was negligible, not even an average of 100 visits each year.

So, in fact, our UK average had been about 100% higher in prior years. Why is this? Well, the most popular video (more than 50,000 views) features a currently available product. The next three are not current (uploaded 2013-2015) and have had a combined total of 55,000 views to date. It's also fair to say that we have only uploaded 3 videos in the past 3 years so, yes, our viewing figures were bound to suffer.

So, why else might the YouTube views reduced? The answer is probably Meta. More people than ever are using Facebook, about 500 million more than YouTube. However, Over a billion hours of video are watched on YouTube every day, which is more than most other video media combined. 

If you already have a YouTube channel with existing videos, how can you increase their views? Well,  don't waste time asking Google - all their suggestions involve paying them! Here are our top ten tips for you to consider:

◻ add a watermark 

◻ enable embedding 

◻ include subtitles - videos are often watched silently at work 
◻ make the title interesting, include keywords  

◻ choose or create an interesting thumbnail
◻ create a playlist so that the video following yours is... yours    

◻ consider adding a transcript  

◻ encourage sharing, especially from other blogs and websites   

◻ email your contacts with the embedded video or link

◻ personal preference but, for a silent video, leave it so. Don't add free music!

   

These are the basics just to start you thinking. There is more help all over the internet but, remember, if your video is too long, not to the point (especially if the point is entertainment) or just plain boring, you will lose viewers' interest within seconds. Make a good start and maintain that level throughout.

Lastly, some current facts: Music videos account for more than a third of total YouTube views and, believe it or not, Peppa Pig is currently the UK's most popular video! 

Social Media Stats Update

There are approximately 8 billion people in the world (give or take a few) which makes interesting reading for the Social Media stats, below. Take the following 'facts' with a pinch of salt!

Top of the list, as always, is Facebook. Statista shows this platform as having 3,065,000,000 (probably rounded to the nearest million) meaning that 3 billion of the worlds population uses it. We are aware that many people have more than one account but it's likely that a quarter of the world's citizens are active on Facebook at least once a month.

Top Ten Social Media Platforms 2024, according to Statista.com

Other popular platforms are YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp, each with 2bn or more active users. All of these top platforms are owned by Meta, except YouTube which is from Google. 

Accordingly, X (formerly Twitter) has 600 million monthly active users with competitors Threads at 100 million and Mastodon and Bluesky  fewer than 2 million. However, according to an NBC report, X's share is falling and was roughly 174 million earlier this year. 

Here's the link to the previous Social Media Stats post.

New Website Launched for Client

We are pleased to announce that our client, Signcraft, has signed off their new website design and it has been launched today, 20th June 2024. 

They have taken great care with the presentation of images and the descriptions of their main services, with high reliance on letting their project photographs do the talking for them. There are image galleries that will grow as new photographs are supplied.

The website is launched to coincide with a major news announcement, a strategic partnership with Clean Air by Resysten.

The Signcraft website is created by The BPc Ltd - Professional Solutions using WordPress.

2024 Social Media in the UK - Stats & Strategies

The UK has one of the highest rates of social media users world-wide, per capita. It has become popular for the millions of businesses using various platforms to connect with potential clients and to promote brand awareness.

Social Media has become increasingly important, particularly since 2020 (Covid & Lockdown), not only for social interaction but for commercial reach, both B2C and B2B. Here follows a collection of statistics regarding Social Media today, with a focus on business use in the UK.

In total, the annual growth in active social media users is almost 9% - that's 57 million of the total population of 68 million, almost 60 million of whom own mobile 'phones. Just over one million people in the UK don't use the Internet, which is a significantly low percentage (approximately 0.02%). As an aside, we'll assume that the majority of these may be very young, old or in some way unable (homelessness, comatose) to be Internet users but what of those who choose not to? Interesting, but a different topic.

Across the age groups, active female users outnumber male users except for work-related social media where male users are dominant. 

For example, LinkedIn is meant to be B2B and, therefore, is not strictly social media. Nevertheless, it is the 5th most popular platform with almost 20 million users. You'd think it would be perfect for businesses to connect and push their brands but, if you actively use LinkedIn, you will see that success rates for creating new, lucrative business sales are rare. People who post are more discerning than on, say, Facebook but LinkedIn has it's fair share of humorous posts. It's also considered a good platform for companies who are recruiting. 

Meta's Facebook, still leader of the pack with almost 50 million users in the UK, is used by businesses to  encourage followers and to sell to consumers, although some of the advertisements have received scathing reviews. Meta's Instagram is a fast-growing medium and is heading towards 40 million users. X formerly known as Twitter has 30 million active users. After LinkedIn, X-Twitter is the platform that boasts a reasonable number of active male users (more than females). 

This could have been a different story - more than 30% of users considered leaving when Elon Musk acquired it, re-naming it as X. Interestingly, the most popular Twitter account in the UK is BBC news with around 37 million followers from around the world. Other popular social media (not covered in this post) include Pinterest and Reddit. TikTok, Tumblr and others are way down in the rankings.

But what of YouTube? Its users are also more than 50% male. Worldwide, YouTube is second only to Facebook for numbers of users, with Instagram and WhatsApp (both Meta) in joint third place with two billion users each. The UK does not feature in the top ten countries, which are: India (heading for half a billion users), The USA (over a quarter-billion), Brazil and Indonesia (more than 100 million), Mexico, Japan, Pakistan, Germany, Vietnam and Philippines (more than 50 million). However, Per Capita, the UK is in third place, with 391 billion views, and in top spot, worldwide, with 5,750 views per person for the last year. 

Undoubtedly, whilst most YouTube content is leisure viewing rather than business, there is a significant commercial element - YouTube ads. In the last quarter of 2023, these generated around $8bn in revenue for Google's YouTube arm, almost $2.5bn from the UK (whether advertisers were happy with the results, we can only surmise that, if they're not, Google's revenue will eventually decrease). 

Interesting note - the longest YouTube video is over 570 hours of a slide show of many, many photographs of a user's trip to Chile!

According to Alexa, the most visited websites in the UK are Google then Amazon then Reddit. Google is also the most popular search engine in the UK, with over 90% share. 

See later post for updates

Blogging replaced by Vlogging?

A blogger noticed that views have declined rapidly. Their stats (immediately below, with permission) are for 12 months and total in excess of 6k so let's remove the Singapore views for this exercise and we are left with a total of well over 1,000 views a year.

Total blog views in 30 days (above) = 81

As an ongoing average x 12 months = 972 per year

- OR -

removing Singapore = 8 per month, let's say 100 per year 

(less than 10% of the previous year)

Based in the UK, the blogger is surprised that

THERE ARE NO UK VIEWS DURING THE PAST 30 DAYS. 

Time to check The BPc blogs and see how they compare 

Blog 1 https://thebpcuk.blogspot.com/ 

Over 1,000 views in the past 30 days, almost 13,000 views in the past 12 months - steady average. 

Here's the odd bit - just under 50% of these views came from The Isle of Man!! Really, Google?

Blog 2 https://myportfolioltd.blogspot.com/ 
Over 1,000 views in the past 30 days, almost 23,000 views in the past 12 months - declining average? 
More than 90% of these were almost equally divided between The USA and Singapore.

Other blogging hosts 

Wordpress & Tumblr have not, in the past, been as successful as blogger/blogspot. Indeed, we struggle to make any headway whatsoever with the latter. 

YouTube

The BPc's YouTube channel has had almost 3.5k views in the past 30 days and almost 18k in the past year. This indicates that views have improved and, on further analysis, we see that visits in the second half of the year increased phenomenally: 

Our conclusion is that... we don't know the reasons for any of these fluctuating stats. We'd be delighted if anyone can explain in simple terms. 

Other hosts for social media video include Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Good luck out there!