On Monday 15th of March a few of the Propellernet team travelled to the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel in London for an evening of glamour, cocktails and posh nosh and came home with a cube-shaped bright pink Travel Marketing Award (which happens to look completely at home in our colourful office.) Judged by movers and shakers in the travel, creative and marketing industries; the Travel Marketing Awards recognise, reward and showcase the best and most innovative work across the sector. The Flourishing Family campaign we ran for Sovereign Luxury Holidays was the winning entry in the Search Engine Optimisation category and judges were impressed with the results we achieved with our unique blend of SEO PR. In a nutshell, here’s what we did… Read the rest of this entry...

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The holy grail of SEO, a self-feeding SEO machine, and all that jazz... When the quirky meerkat Aleksandr Orlov appeared on our screens in 2009 to inform us of the difference between Comparethemarket.com and Comparethemeerkat.com, some brilliant linkbait was born. The spin-off site Comparethemeerkat.com (where you can compare thousands of meerkats), has attracted nearly 10,000 inbound links, from people compelled to spread the meerkat word. By linking the spin-off site to the main price comparison site, Comparethemarket.com will have been able to pass on valuable link-juice and gained some well-earned Google-love. Simples! So what is linkbait? According to the head of Google’s Webspan team and SEO-guru Matt Cutts, linkbait is anything “interesting enough to catch people's attention". More specifically, linkbait differs from viral content in that it's not just designed to be spread around, but to be linked to aswell. And while the primary purpose of linkbait is to...

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At the start of the summer I wake-boarded to work. My friend has a boat, we left at 7.15 am from the Marina, I shot past the two piers at 7.30 am and waded to shore still in my wetsuit with my office clothes in a waterproof bag on my back, James Bond style. When I got to work my PR colleague Stella said I looked different. No, it wasn’t the fact that my hair was wet, no it wasn’t that I didn’t have any make up on, I just looked ... chilled.  I was feeling like a Sunday morning on a Thursday and I’m still talking about it! This type of activity sparked our idea to start a wellbeing team with the sole aim to make everyone here happier and healthier and our results are paying off. We’ve just been shortlisted for the BAHBA Healthiest Workplace Award, which makes us one of the total 37 finalists of some of the best companies Brighton has to offer. So how did we do it?  By injecting a healthy dose of ‘life’ into our ‘work’ with fun activities, providing healthy...

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I recently told a friend of mine who is a journalist that I was doing online PR. “Ah”, she said, “you’ve become the enemy!” We had a good old giggle, but this illustrates perfectly the love-hate relationship journalists have with PRs and why it is such a challenge for us PRs to pitch to them. Just to explain how it all works, here is what I do. As a PR, it’s my job to ‘manage the flow of information between an organization (my client) and the public (target market)’. Just like with offline PR, I need to create personas, or target market segments, find out which publications they read (in my case websites) and then get their products onto these websites, for free. Some people think this means pushing out an offline press release on a news wire, but it is much more than that and with online PR particularly, the relationship with the journalist is key. Read the rest of this entry...

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Five ways to influence the minds of your potential customers - with web copy. Ok, so you've got a super-slick design for your website and your marketing campaigns are sending a nice number of potential customers to browse its attractive pages - but what happens once they've arrived? Just like a sales person in a shop can employ verbal sales techniques to convince someone to whip out their credit card, the words on your site (or web copy) can act in the same way, all year round - and you don't have to pay them a salary! Apart from applying some basic principles, such as good grammar (!), interesting and informative content and the inclusion of keywords, there are five clever, mind-bending tricks you can employ to tap into the minds of your potential customers and influence what they do on your site. Read the rest of this entry...

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