Search, Web, Social and Internet Marketing thoughts...

We're an Authorised Google Engage Partner: Spend £50 and get £50 Adwords Vouchers Free!

2012-01-27T02:21:00.000-08:00

Google Adwords is still the #1 Pay Per Click "PPC" service for promoting your business online.

And Google has recently launched a "Small Business" version in the UK aimed at meeting the needs of local businesses looking to ATTRACT local customers such as restaurants, taxi companies, estate agents, fitness centres and other local service providers.

As an authorised parter I am now offering new clients a £50 voucher off of your Google Adwords budget: Which is a nice incentive from Google to get you started!

And spend £50 and I will set-up your new Adwords Express advertising programme for you. In consultation I will write your first Ad, choose the best keywords, set and adjust budgets and track your early results. Simples!

For More Information:

To apply for your £50 Free Google Adwords voucher please Fill In This Form
This is a great video from Google introducing you to Adwords Express:

Further information on the Adwords Express programme can be found on Google's Small Business Centre pages.
Or visit our website at www.primecloud.co.uk

Why I now recommend Nimble CRM for customer engagement

2012-01-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

I’ve used Customer Relationship Management "CRM" systems for too many years in order to keep track of my customer engagement activities: CRM is an essential business tool in managing your customer relationships, contact details, sales pipeline, marketing funnel, projects, tasks, emails and workflows.

But with the rise and rise of social media communications, the contacts and conversations which are important in developing my business are happening out on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook and not within my traditional CRM system and not always in traditional email threads.

Enter Nimble CRM, who with a clean slate to start from, have come up with a Social CRM system for the modern age.

Nimble sits elegantly on top of your social media channels and acts as a Dashboard by aggregating your customers social media conversations right in there alongside your email conversations.

And Nimble CRM searches for and prompts connections to your contacts across LinkedIn, Google+ & Twitter and the GMail and Google Calendar integration is great!

The consequence is that Nimble CRM enables me to concentrate on developing the social media connections and conversations that are all important to me. The numbers follow on...

And the icing on the cake is that Nimble’s pricing is pitched at SME budgets which is going to attract a lot of fans.

In summary, I predict this newcomer is going to have a successful future and will disrupt the traditional CRM vendors.

For More Information

Please Fill Out This Form
Or visit our website at http://www.primecloud.co.uk/crm_advocates

First Steps into Affiliate Marketing promoting Vouchers, Coupons and Promo Codes

2011-09-12T22:16:00.000-07:00

My latest “get rich slowly” project is to develop an online vouchers and coupons website promoting promo codes from UK e-retailers through a new website http://www.vouchersandcoupons.net

Voucher codes are big business, apparently, and offer consumers the opportunity to save money by claiming discounts on their online purchases. Promo codes are promoted by many online stores to attract new business and are redeemed at “Checkout” when ordering your goods.

The value of vouchers are set by the retailers; some use voucher codes to promote company special offers such as “30% off your first purchase” through to “Free Delivery on orders greater than £20” or incentives to sign upto loyalty or facebook schemes.

The Win:Win occurs as the retailer also pays a small commission to the “affiliate” (me) for introducing the consumer to the retailer, which is done by tracking the clicks from the Vouchers and Coupons site. How much will I earn? I’ve no idea! But £100 will be my first Eureka moment as it will validate this business initiative. But how long will it take - again I’ve no idea - but what I do know is that it is going to take a lot of hard work and candle burning including:

Building the Vouchers and Coupons Website: To get up and running quickly, I have chosen to purchase an off the shelf voucher template “CouponPress”, which provides a professional platform on which to build the service. A by-product of this project is that because CouponPress is built on Wordpress, I shall become fluent in hosting, building and configuring a Wordpress.org site.

Importing the Voucher Codes: I’ve also taken the plunge and signed up with icodes.co.uk who are a leading aggregator of vouchers and coupons. Icodes vouchers are automatically imported into my CouponPress site giving me access to all the latest vouchers and promo codes without the hassle of either importing codes manually or writing my own XML feed software.

Signing Up With The Affiliate Networks: The e-retailers (or Merchants) wanting to promote their discounts and special offers sign up with “affiliate networks” whose job it is to manage the relationship between Merchants and Affiliates. There are the best part of a fair few affiliate networks to choose from and sign up with including affiliate future , affiliate window, affilinet, aflite, buy, commission junction, linkshare, more niche, paid on results, profitistic, silvertap, tradetracker, trade doubler, trienta affiliates and webgains!

Selecting Categories and Optimising Merchants: With Icodes offering over 6,500 vouchers and offers from over 3,500 merchants to UK consumers, I have decided to individually select and promote merchants and categories.

My merchant selection criteria isn’t rocket science:

- Known high street brands such as Boots, Jet2, Burton and Interflora
- Popular categories such as Fashion, Travel, At Home and Outdoors
- Merchants offering respectful sales commissions!
- Feature vouchers with “value”. ie. I’m excluding low value vouchers such as “free delivery on ink cartridge refills” in favour of “20% off your first purchase over £20”

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Once the site is built and populated comes the not insignificant task of promoting the site using my skills as an SEO consultant. Website architecture, pages names, categories and content have already been setup for optimisation so next will come the long slow task of link building through article writing and directory submissions...

Social Media Engagement: Also on the radar is to invite visitors to follow the service on Twitter and tweet news, new vouchers and merchants. Once the website is built, optimised and producing results, I will turn my attention to re-purposing the whole service on live inside Facebook, but that’s another blog post for another day!

Email Marketing: Signing upto a weekly digest of latest and greatest voucher codes is also on the radar, but I’m determined not to become a modern day mass emailer, dare I say spammer, with a daily deal ala Groupon...

So In Conclusion: There’s not a small amount of work required to launch myself into the new world of affiliate marketing but, hey, it keeps me out of mischief... I’ll write again soon with my further insights into affiliate marketing and progress with www.vouchersandcoupons.net
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FROM social media search TO spam

2011-03-30T09:50:00.000-07:00

I’ve been giving some thought to the potential for social media services to be used for lead generation... IE. If someone tweets “looking forward to buying a new laptop tomorrow” is it possible, desirable and actionable to take this snippet of conversation and turn it into a sales lead?

Is It Possible? The answer is unequivocally “Yes”. I’m running trials with a number of free social media services where I’ve created automated searches for specific key phrases in conversations.

Using Twitter’s advanced search service is a good place to start: http://search.twitter.com/advanced Not only can you search by key phrase but also by location and attitude. So I can search on “buying a new laptop tomorrow” and add “Manchester” and “ - apple”.... Requesting results as an RSS feed turns this into an automated search which are picked up directly by my mobile Google Reader app, thereby providing me with instant notification...

Using Google Alerts also gives me the opportunity to set up an automated social media search across many other social platforms, blogs and forums with the added functionality of emailing results.

Hootsuite is a great social service, enabling me to monitor multiple searches and mentions on multiple social channels. I like using their service a lot and together with their #android app provides me with my every day social media engagement tools.

However. Yahoo Pipes was a revelation, enabling multiple searches to be aggregated into a single report. I then setup an automated response to the searches which I initially thought was very cool.... Using my example, I set up an automated response as follows: “Hi. Noticed you’re thinking of buying a new laptop tomorrow in Manchester. Visit Joe’s Laptops and get a 10% discount with this voucher: http://bit.ly/link_included_here”

But Is This Desirable? To answer this question objectively depends upon your point of view!

My view is that social media conversations are “personal” and need to be respected as such. ie. If two friends were having a chat in a pub and shared a conversation about “which laptop to buy tomorrow”, how would they feel if an unknown third party interrupted their conversation to say “If you go down to Joe’s Laptops tomorrow he’ll give you a 10% discount...” I would suggest their response would be a polite “Butt out: Our conversation has nothing to do with you”...

But less scrupulous people are going to setup automated responses and interrupt personal conversations with commercial messages. In my view this is social media spam.

Uninvited conversations and interrupted conversations need to be conducted with as much tact and caution as if the conversation was happening in person; which is going to be very difficult when all the non-verbal communication signals are not available to the digital conversation maker.

So Is It actionable to use social media as a lead generation service? Within the scope of this blog article I have concluded the answer is “No”.

Social media tools are great for “listening” to the conversations that are relevant and of interest to you, but to directly and automatically respond with a commercial message can easily cause offence. It’s intrusive and spammy and will easily have the opposite effect of the one desired. Eg: the interrupted party could tweet to all his followers: “If you have any sense don't go any where near Joe’s Laptops. They are sharks!”

What many of us don’t realise is that the conversations we have on Twitter, Facebook and other social sites are “public” and not at all “private”! Social media tools exist that can listen in on all these conversations, but great care and judgement needs to be exercised in deciding how we want to respond and engage with the conversations which are of interest to us.

My website has now gone mobile using Drupal tools & themes.

2011-03-04T09:39:00.000-08:00

Having climbed on board the mobile revolution back in January with the purchase of the awesome Google Nexus S mobile phone, one thing which has hit me right between the eyes is just how hard it is to browse websites and make e-commerce transactions through a mobile phone.

Try buying a book on Amazon through your mobile browser: I did, and by the time I’d unpinched my fingers across the screen, slid the screen sideways and downwards, clicked on the web form, logged in, completed my purchase and pressed “Purchase” I felt like I’d run half a marathon!

Then I decided to download the Amazon App from the Android market and I completed my next purchase thru their app. The difference was obvious & immediate: The user experiences as different as taste testing Galaxy against Morrison’s cooking chocolate…

So I’ve been wondering "Is the website is dead??" RIP! Are Apps the future? Maybe…. But there are many thousands of small and mid sized companies whose website has never seen the inside of a mobile browser: Do they have to “ditch everything and start again” by developing iphone apps & android apps? Or is there a less painful evolutionary way ahead?

Developing a “mobile site” is going to be a great solution for many small and medium sized businesses. I’ve just implemented a mobile site on my website, and although the outcome isn’t perfect, it’s a good start to thinking about how my business is going to exist in a mobile world.

The worldwide community that is Drupal.org never ceases to impress; I’ve been using their Content Management System for a couple of years now, and whenever I’ve had a website challenge you can be sure that “Drupal has a module for that…”

I chose to implement Drupal Mobile Tools (http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools ) and in half a day Voila! my website at primecloud.co.uk now detects whether the visitor is coming in through a mobile device (iphone, ipad, ipod, android or blackberry) or mobile browser (Opera Mini) , and redirects them to a mobile theme which strips out all the fluffy design, banners and optional goodies (Twitter, Online Chat etc) and presents the visitor clearly with the main content of each page. Simples!

And what have I learnt so far?

That a website already built in a content management system like Drupal is a great platform on which to add mobile functionality – it’s certainly a lot easier and less time consuming than if I was starting from a raw html site.

That in html terms, I realised that I had to to separate the “content” from the “presentation”. Ie. The same content is being displayed through both the main site and through the mobile site, but the presentation of that content is very different. If I’ve lost you, take a look at http://bbc.co.uk/news and then look at the same page through a mobile browser: http://bbc.co.uk/news/mobile : Same news – but completely different presentation.

That Drupal Mobile Tools works just fine (if not a bit tricky to learn) , but I had to experiment with 3 or 4 different mobile themes before settling on using the Drupal .mobi theme (http://drupal.org/project/mobi ) the main reason being that it supports “Content” blocks, so that I could control which blocks are displayed on which page ( ie. back to separating “Presentation” from “Content”)

So "Thank You" Drupal, and "Hello" mobile world. Now my website is mobile I am already thinking about a "mark 2" to better integrate it with the inbuilt features of my mobile phone: There are "microformats" to be able to add contact details from the website directly into the address book, play with geo-tagging & Google Maps and HTML5 to get my brain around...

SEO Case Study: Using Images to improve SEO

2011-01-04T12:04:00.000-08:00

If you do a Google search for, example, “Wayne Rooney” it’s interesting to see which information Google chooses to display on page one of their search results:

1. Top rankings are given to Google News articles be it from the BBC, national newspaper (Guardian, Timesonline, Telegraph etc) or online portals such as Yahoo sport.

Getting content into Google News is an industry in it’s own right!

You can choose to publish your press releases using an subscription based online newswire service such as PRWire, RealWire or Pressroom.
And there are free to use newswire services paid for with PPC advertising such as www.free-press-release.com, www.freepressindex.com and www.openpr.com
But if you can get your story published by a regional or national newspaper then you’ve cracked it!

Remembering the old adage that “yesterday’s news is chip paper” Google News has a very short shelf life, so it may not be an appropriate channel for many B2B businesses in improving your SEO.

2. As you can see in the screen grab, Google ranks Video very highly, so if you are not already embracing multimedia to communicate with your audience, then you need to start thinking about using YouTube videos as an important weapon within your SEO armoury.

3. Google Images are also right up there, illustrating the impact an image can have on SEO, providing it is relevant, has a good description and is correctly tagged for keywords.

I have been experimenting with using the popular Flickr service to improve SEO for a commercial online shopping site and am not convinced! I got my knuckles wrapped when including a link to an commercial e-commerce site from a Flickr Gallery: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eroticisland

"Don't Use Flickr for Commercial Purposes Flickr is for
personal use only. If you sell products, services or
yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your
account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr
technologies (including APIs, Flickrmail, etc), or Flickr
accounts must be approved by Flickr."

On a technical note, when I viewed the html source code for the flickr site where the gallery is hosted, I saw that Flickr had automatically converted all of the url links to "nofollows", which really does make it pointless to use Fickr for "Google juice": Clearly Flickr doesn’t want it’s excellent service sullied by commercial interests...

So I decided to create an image gallery on my own website from the “Links” page which I optimised for SEO:
http://www.mxworks.net/eroticisland/erotic_image_gallery.html

I ensured each image is optimised for SEO by ensuring (1) the image filename contains targeted keywords (2) I used all the html tags to ensure clear and accurate descriptions using html “title” and “alt” tags and (3) I included a target link into the online shopping site from each image.

I'm currently spending time exploring the potential for Google's Picassa Web Albums: As far as I can see links to external websites do not include a 'nofollow'....

Attractive design and usability should never be sacrificed to SEO so I also included a javascript based gallery feature which I selected from dynamicdrive.com: The popup feature image also includes an inbound deep link to the product description page on the online shopping site which will also great for SEO.

So in summary, my advice, year to date, is to have your image gallery built into your own website, ensuring it uses good design, has targeted descriptions and clear html markup to get your images into Google Images.

I’ve migrated and upgraded my Virtual Hosting

2010-10-14T00:27:00.000-07:00

(and been reminded that in this internet world you pays your money and takes your choice!)

I hadn’t been happy with my hosting provider 123-reg for a while: For running both my Drupal website and SugarCRM services the limitations of the virtual hosting package offered by 123-reg had started to niggle me.

Speed of applications loading is so important: And having to wait 20-30 seconds for applications to load up wasn’t good! I can appreciate that virtual machine environments have to do their thing, but it doesn’t stop the feeling of frustration as you wait for the application to load: Imagine how my clients would be feeling!

Why don’t you have “shell” access? was a question I was repeatedly asked by my system administrator. Not being able to configure and setup stuff at the Command Line stopped me delivering more advanced hosting services – I wasn’t happy.

Support was another touchstone of “wanting to be treated as I want to treat my clients”, and having to accept email based canned responses wasn’t good. When I needed support, I needed support, not “that’s answer 5-H from the knowledge base”...

And wanting a Service Level Agreement to underpin my SugarCRM cloud computing service wasn’t too much to ask was it? Apparently it is with 123-reg....

As an internet consultant, what also galled me is that 123-reg failed to understand that my questions were opportunities to up-sell me with additional services. Not once did it register in their auto-provisioned world that here was a customer wanting to take their hosting to the next level...

So As Jason Fried says in his excellent business book, Rework, “Scratch your own itch”: I decided to take the plunge and migrate my LAMP virtual hosting to a higher quality, professional hosting service provider. I selected Gladserv through personal recommendation.

But I was pretty unimpressed when I was informed by 123-reg Support that the DNS TTL is set to 24 hours and could not be changed. That caused me all kinds of customer service challenges as it meant my services needed to be down for 24 hours whilst the domain names were updated... (I ended up doing the SugarCRM migration on a Bank Holiday and website migration in sync with planned downtime)

The rest of the migration went according to plan, including moving my IMAP email using Mozilla Thunderbird, and at all times I had the reassurance of a real support consultant from Gladserv on the end of the phone and email to ensure all went smoothly.

So I’ve now successfully migrated all my services and am looking forward to developing my Web Apps cloud computing offer. And reflecting what Jason Fried says in “ReWork” - “I think you’ll love it because I love it”...

Building credible inbound links using article sites

2010-09-06T12:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.articlebeach.comThrough my eBay shop I recently won a 12 hour piece of SEO work for an online classified ads site, foxads.co.uk, which has taken me into unchartered waters...

The challenge, as it hit me, is that the Foxads home page has no content to optimise. Because it is dominated by free classified ads which are user generated content (UGC), I found it difficult to employ my tried and tested SEO model of optimising the static content on the main landing pages using my SEO 101 Techniques (see previous blog post "Taking the plunge into search engine optimization").

But running Foxads through the online web assessment tools at alexa.com and websitegrader.com gave me an insight that the Foxads site lacked inbound links. But this wasn’t what my eBay listing was advertising: I’m good at content optimisation but lacked experience in link building – my dilemma was whether to hand the money back in order to preserve my 100% A star feedback or dive into unchartered waters...

Over the last twelve months I’ve signed my own websites up to a couple of link exchange sites who do it all for you, but in truth, I don’t believe I achieved any tangible improvement in my page rank what so ever! I was pretty convinced that I’d received a slap in the face from Google for using automated link building services.

Article sites saved the day! Through investigating where competitors have successfully created inbound links I have discovered the wonderful service that article sites provide: You submit a bona fide information based article of between 250-400 words, and once it’s approved, voila! You have created a valuable inbound link back to your site with a page rank of between 6 – 8.

The article sites I’ve discovered so far are at:-

http://ezinearticles.com
http://www.acmearticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://www.articlesbase.com
http://a1articles.com
http://www.articleclick.com
http://www.articlesphere.com
http://www.aardvarkarticles.net
http://www.amazines.com
http://www.1articleworld.com
http://www.articlebeach.com

Try them – they work. In conclusion, my view is that there aren’t many short cuts worth taking when it comes to building link partnerships. Which is why link building costs what it does.....

Why does internet marketing take so long?

2010-06-27T02:47:00.000-07:00

Why does internet marketing take so long? After all, once you've created a website and sorted out the search engine optimisation, surely there's nothing much left to do is there? Wrong!!

Because my internet marketing presence is to “engage the client through an increasingly digital purchase journey”, it's important to have an online presence which informs, educates, excites and establishes trust in the services I offer.

And the longer I thought about my objectives to using social media services including Twitter, Google AdWords, Facebook, this blog, website, slideshare, delicious, eBay shop and PayPal, the more it reminded me of some early sales advice I received over twenty years ago when I was first starting out:

When meeting a new client: First - Sell Yourself
Second - Sell your organisation or company
Third - and only when you've achieved the above, Sell your product or service.

And when I applied these principles to my use of social media services it all added up!

This revealed to me why it just takes so long to manage an effective internet presence - it's a lot of work!!

moving my business communications into the 2.0 world

2010-05-28T07:43:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading lots of online blogs recently from the great and the good commentators in how to best use the social web for business benefit.

And as a result I’m going to be changing how I manage my communications: I’ve always paid close attention to how I communicate with business colleagues & clients and pride myself on the quality of personal service I provide, but it appears a good email and phone manner aren’t enough any more!

And actually, the reasons are fairly obvious: Given the amount of content & opinion available on blogs, wikis, google, yahoo, twitter, linkedin, facebook, youtube & tripadvisor (phew! to name a few) we have all changed how we want to be communicated with and how we make decisions...

So I’ve been asking myself “what does this means to my style of business communications”? Here are a few thought provoking quotes I’ve jotted down:

“ Don’t Broadcast: Engage, Encourage, Excite”
“ Add value: Involvement > Interaction > Intimacy > Influence”
“What can we share about ourselves that will make our clients more informed / interested?”
“How can we be the people to help out?”
“Start listening and stop shouting…”
“Provide expertise to help solve problems”
“Engage your customers appropriately online”
“Engage the consumer through an increasingly digital purchase journey”
“Harness brand interest by syndicating content that empowers the consumer”
“Online purchasers increasingly want marketers to help them make smart decisions. They don’t want to be subjected to the hard sell – they expect marketers to engage them, not dictate to them”
“Marketers are required to manage a staggering amount of content to support products, segments, channels & promotions”…

So as a consequence I’ve signed up to a few of the most popular services around to develop new skills & knowledge.

Please join me, link to me, follow me, add me as a favourite or give me the thumbs up as I embrace the social web.

Thank You.

DOs and DON'T of Social Media

View more presentations from InBlackandWhite.

Optimising Your Online Potential

2010-05-23T07:23:00.000-07:00

This is the presentation I gave at the Destination Staffordshire and Go Leicestershire annual tourism conferences in which I covered:
- Top tips to effective website design
- An introduction to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
- Web 2.0. TripAdvisor. YouTube.
- Pay per Click adverising (PPC); Google Adwords

Optimising Your Online Potential

View more presentations from steveprimecloud.

SEO 101. Taking the plunge into search engine optimisation

2009-11-19T08:55:00.000-08:00

So once you've created a great looking website with good design, easy to use menus and built using the latest content management software this is not time to sit back, relax and be content with your work!!

Your next challenge is to get your website noticed... There is a lot of myth and legend surrounding the mysteries of search engine optimisation, but, actually, it's all pretty straight forward.

Here are my top tips on getting the SEO basics right:

1. Start by checking out your competitors! Goto their websites, read their content, titles, headings and main text and assess how well they are getting their message out.

If you want to delve deeper, use the "View Source" menu item to look at the HTML of the webpages and jot down page titles, meta description and meta keywords that you will find listed in the top few lines .

2. Then start thinking about content optimisation of your own site - write down your USPs (unique selling points) - and list the keywords and key phrases which appear most frequently in your list of USPs.

3. Now here's the clever bit, run your keywords and keyphrases through Google's Keyword Tool and it will tell you how popular / good your key phrases are and will rank alternative suggestions for you to consider:

4. Once you've identified your key phrases, then the next task is to embed these into your web page HTML. If you are happy to do this yourself then repeat the key-phrases in titles, headings, text and behind images uses ALT tags.

5. and write the key phrases into your content using the guidelines listed in the slide.

If all this is a bit daunting, then now could be a good time to contact your web designer or seo consultant...

6. I also found the seo tools listed on the Build-Recipricol-Links website to be very useful in refining keyword density and checking your page rank.

SEO tends to be a very iterative process, so once you've got some results then go back and refine, refine and refine again:-)

There are also handy tools to report on Page Rank and assess Link Popularity, but I'll write more on this my next post.

Please contact me if you would like a copy of the full powerpoint slides previewed in this article.

Deciding on a new website design..

2006-05-29T02:32:00.000-07:00

One of the major cost factors in creating a new website is having one designed. ie. A bespoke design = lots of creativity, technical skill & most of all - time! There are many web design companies setup to deliver this, charging between 750-3000 GB pounds to put a very nice site together.

But. If you want to take a step down from a bespoke design, consider choosing a template which you can add your own words & graphics too. I did, and to help me decide which design suits my business best, I asked my friends & business colleagues to vote on the following 4 designs. by reading the comments, you can see the decision was almost unanimous!

Online directories, translations, newsletters, blogs & surveys

2005-11-18T10:43:00.000-08:00

There are a whole bunch of ways to promote your presence on the internet; from producing e-bulletins & newsletters through to signing up to local directory listings & search engine tuning.

Online Directories: As a small business, I’m not that interested in seeing myself at the top of the Google Search rankings – what is the point in receiving an enquiry from Australia anyway! Google Local looks good though: It locates businesses in a specific geographic location so you can find a post office within walking distance. Go visit www.google.co.uk > more > LOCAL for all information.

The more local web based directories & vertical market portals you can free list in the better. www.yell.com is a mandatory start!

Online Translations: Whilst talking about Google, they also offer an interesting online translation service which makes it very easy to produce a multi-lingual website. Other services also worth a mention include www.freetranslation.com and www.worldlingo.com – definitely worth considering if you want quality translations as they do real human edits at reasonable prices.

E-Newsletters & Bulletins: As demonstrated on the MXworks homepage, I invite guests to subscribe to my monthly newsletter. This triggers my pro-active marketing activities by:
Keeping subscribers informed with news & updates.

Scheduling distribution of bulletins & newsletters (built in calendar).

Managing the subscriber email lists (opt in, opt out, de-duplicate, etc).

Analysing interactive graphs / results / reports.

Blog: Also as demonstrated throughout this site, reaching your audience using a blog can be very effective. Not only are they built to encourage interaction with visitors, but they have built in visibility potential. The blogosphere is apparently growing at 1 x blog per second and updates are automatically picked up by search engines using traditional keyword searching!

Two features at the bottom of this topic prove the interaction point:
- ‘Post a Comment’ is the straight forward feedback mechanism.
- Also note the Email icon: This enables visitors to forward articles to friends & colleagues. This may not have an immediate impact on your site, but it enables others to publicise your blog for you: This is good stuff.

E-surveys, E-polls & e-Quizzes also encourage visitors to give their opinions; there are a number of free services which can be easily added into your Blog which are all documented in www.blogger.com > Help > Add-ons. Watch this space as I’ll be experimenting with these later…

Thinking about broadband security

2005-11-15T09:26:00.000-08:00

Once you plug your PC into the internet full time - all hell can let loose - unless you put some basic intrusion detection in place. I'm sure I don't have any unique comments on this subject - other than to say that you had better do this...

I am encouraging my Father-in-law to stay on his aging Windows 98 with dial-up modem for the time being!! Bearing in mind all he wants to do is check his email and do some web browsing, I just know that going to Windows XP and broadband will be more pain than gain in the short term - right now I'm thinking he should go Mac.

The moral of this story is simple: Protect & survive. Sorry - you have no choice:

Content Management meets Blog

2005-11-08T09:23:00.000-08:00

I admit it; this site is an experiment as it combines two of my favorite web services:

- Content Management. Which makes web page creation & editing really simple.

- Blogs. Which show the views expressed to be personal, and invite visitors to add comments and therefore contribute to the quality of the views expressed.

Also, blogs are very actively spidered, meaning that there is a fair chance that using a blog will pull in visitors and encourage them to link back to your website.

The one issue I have with a simple blog is that entries are presented in a diary / chronological order… As I want my entries categorised by topic, I have added a menu system enabling readers to also navigate these pages by topic.

The blog service is provided courtesy of www.blogger.com which is the only service I’ve used to date. It’s free, easy to use and I like it – so why look further!

Email Defence Service

2005-10-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

All the main service & email providers such as Hotmail & Yahoo do a good job filtering out SPAM & viruses from your emails long before they reach your Inbox.

MXworks is no different; you need this Email Defence service when stepping up to having your own domain name email. But don’t worry; I use one which is great value for money which:

- Blocks over 98% of spam while also eliminating viruses, worms and other unwanted threats.

- Ensures up to date email protection by constantly checking for, and updating the anti-virus pattern files.

- Filters all emails prior to reaching your inbox: Any suspect SPAM messages are moved to a junk mail folder where you can safely read the message and decide whether to accept it or blacklist it forever!

- Blocks fraudulent, yet official-looking, emails designed to deceive you into disclosing your credit card numbers, passwords and other personal and sensitive information.

- Gives you full administrative control to manage filtering policies, access message quarantines, view message traffic and user reports, and manage all other aspects of the service through a web based control panel.

Like any security system you need to secure the perimeter as well as the doors & windows, which means there is no getting away from having your PC’s secured also. (See PC Stuff)

From domain names to e-commerce

2005-10-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

Registering domain names is easy - anyone can do it. But finding a domain name which is catchy, appropriate & marketable is also important. I sort out registrations, disputes, redirection and anything else you need, without you having to worry about it.

Many folk aren’t aware just how many domain extensions there are available from which to build your internet identity.

If you are in the hotel, travel or hospitality industry, you may want to consider using the new .travel domain extension. As it is industry specific there are some rules & a procedure to get one which are all explained at www.tralliance.info

Hosting has also become a commodity epidemic with gzillions of providers providing websites free of charge. But when I lost my site for 10 days, and with it a shed load of prospects, I had a serious re-think about what I needed from a reliable hosting provider.

I've chosen a provider that uses webservers located in multiple co-lo providers across multiple cities! These servers back each other up every night ensuring real tangible website security. Big bucks are usually charged for providing this level of high availability & disaster recovery, but I do it at commodity prices.

Websites can be as simple or expensive as you like; bespoke graphics design is the big item that drives up the cost.

I've invested in Dreamweaver & Paintshop Pro so can put a basic web site together. I’m no expert, but I get by, and am learning new techniques every week; examples of work I have designed or participated in include:

the day job...

An e-learning portal.

a previous php bespoke design.

One common complaint is that customers have been stung by the cost of 'updates', the service web design companies charge for editing & updating web pages.

To overcome this, I'm increasingly using & recommending the use of a Content Management System as it puts you, the author and editor, in charge of all content:

- You choose a design template from over 100 professional designs.

- Using the online editor (you don't even need to know HTML), you get to add all the content ie. your words, pictures, multimedia and make some layout decisions.

- Using the customisable forms & tables enables you to produce a unique look.

The results are surprisingly good: you get to produce, maintain and update your own website with its own unique look. All at a fraction of the price (hundreds, not thousands of pounds) of using a bespoke design agency...

I also use NetBanx or WorldPay to integrate e-commerce & online shopping into my Content Management System.

This is an example of what can easily be produced.

I’m no techy - but I’m no novice either

2005-10-18T11:41:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, and I do mean a-long-time-ago, I came out of university with a Computer Science degree, and immediately shunned a sensible career in programming, systems analysis, project management or consultancy.

I went to work for a hardware vendor, Olivetti in fact, and subsequently spent 20+ years gainfully employed within the IT industry following the money into sales, marketing & business development. I know computer architectures, internet appliances & network infrastructure really well, but until recently, had never earned a penny by being in front of a keyboard (so be warned!)...

After taking a sailing sabbatical in 2000-1, I decided to leave the world of quotas, targets & sales management behind and head towards the ‘be your own boss’ world of self employment.

As it's my own money I am spending on improving my home & home office PC security & online presence, I have sought out a select few low cost, high quality service providers which I am happy to share with you upon request.

Why IMAP Email is better

2005-10-15T16:15:00.000-07:00

I have discovered that IMAP offers a quality of service that regular POP based email just can't offer. With IMAP your email is stored on a central server, not merely passed down to your desktop or laptop from your ISP.

Think about it: If your email is stored 'on the internet', you can access your INBOX from home, office, PDA or mobile phone and by regular client software (outlook, mulberry, thunderbird), webmail & Pocket PC, etc. etc.

The big benefits are:

- That your email cannot be stranded "on the other computer" - which is great for home office + on the road working.

- Pocket Outlook has an excellent IMAP facility, making access from your PDA / mobile device really easy; I certainly don't need Blackberry!

- You can also stop worrying about crashes and other disasters: With your mail safely stored on an offsite central server, it doesn't matter if your PC crashes or email program "becomes corrupted"...

- Plus. You can use your own domain name for your email address as well, and can stop giving away free advertising for someone else's business. Does your business card look like this?

In this day & age you no longer have to use your domain for web address, but use your ISP's domain for email!

I've found the main pre-requisite for IMAP is broadband; otherwise it is a real pain having to dialup & login every time you want to read email...

Having said that I really like 'offline' mode, when you can email from anywhere: airplane, beach, or mountain-top. With synchronisation, you work on a copy of your mail -- reading, filing, deleting, replying -- then all your actions are played back to the server when you connect.

A quick introduction

2005-10-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

For a while, I've wondered how the good people of the world who aren't PC literate manage to make computing work in their home and home offices...

In the evenings, after I've done the day job, I've pulled up a chair in front of my computer and learnt to tame the beast which is called an "internet connected personal computer network".

I started by making my 2 x PC's, 1 x Apple iBook and 2 x Pocket PC's all work with a home network & broadband internet; along the way I've discovered the need for broadband routers, a firewall, anti spam & anti spyware software.

Plus. I've started experimenting with a wifi wireless network which is fascinating; it is changing the way we use computers throughout the home and together with broadband, I think is a revolution waiting to happen!

Then there's my internet presence to develop; I've learnt to produce websites, get up the search engine rankings, analyse web traffic, provide my friends & family with a good email system, syncronise & share calendars, use skype VOIP to reduce phone costs, publish this blog and generally try to make everything safe, secure & reliable...

This blog & website is therefore, my contribution to encourage friends, family & colleagues to use their PC's & internet presence more effectively. If I can help you also, then so much the better!

Search, Web, Social and Internet Marketing thoughts...

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moving my business communications into the 2.0 world

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From domain names to e-commerce

I’m no techy - but I’m no novice either

Why IMAP Email is better

A quick introduction