I'm now recommending the Adcore all-in-one SEM platform

Follow this link to visit the Adcore website to learn about their all in one SEM campaign management platform:

For online retailers who wish to drive traffic back to their ecommerce websites, using PPC to advertise their hundreds or thousands of products, the challenges of setting up and running granular PPC campaigns on Google Adwords and Google Shopping just aren't getting any easier.  

Google makes hay by charging retailers high CPC rates on popular Brand & Category keywords.  

To reduce PPC (pay per click) rates, online retailers should consider running Brand, Category AND Product level PPC campaigns. This requires automation support, as how else can retailers create and manage the ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) on hundreds or thousands of individual product level ads. There just isn't enough hours in the day!

Hence me using Adcore - which offers a great all in one SEM (search engine marketing) platform that gives ecommerce retailers the automated bid management tools to enable management of their Product level PPC campaigns at very reasonable price. 

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ps: Please be aware that I am signed upto the Adcore Agency affiliates programme.

Why I now recommend Nimble CRM for customer engagement

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

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

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.

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

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

(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”...