Monthly Archives: January 2010

Free Waterford Links Directory – Irish Links Directory

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Just a short blog to let you know that upthedeise.com has a new links directory at the following URL

Waterford Links Directory

This directory has an impressive root Google Page Rank of 5 and so anyone with a website in Waterford (and a bit of sense) should submit their site to it as soon as they read this!!!

Another free directory, which will soon become popular is LinkLusters.com, an Irish Links Directory

They are both moderated directories and so only quality links will appear on them which means your own site can only benefit from being on it.

Promote Your Website Programme – Waterford City Enterprise Board

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Waterford City Enterprise Board are now running the Promote Your Website Programme.  This involves one to one search engine optimisation training aimed at small to medium businesses that have (or intend to set up) a website and are new to the opportunities that the internet offers.

The individual sessions will offer a ‘checklist’ of the basic requirement for good website design and a general introduction to website promotion. This overview, over two three hour meetings, will help you become familiar with the many routes to market that the internet offers and the opportunities that are at your fingertips to grow your business.

I have personally used the techniques outlined in this course to promote products such as ‘The Model Dictionary of Wexford Slang’ over social networks such as Facebook. Over the Christmas period we managed to sign up approximately 2000 people, predominantly from Wexford, to our Wexford Slang Facebook page, which meant that we did not need to go down the traditional marketing route.  The end result was that we sold out all of our stock of the book before Christmas eve!!!

This is just one of our success stories and UTD Web Design is registered with this programme and is available to talk you through all aspects of online promotion.

Here is the proposed content of the mentoring sessions:

Part I – Understanding the Web (primer)

  • Overview of how the web works basic technologies such as HTML & CSS for creating and styling web pages, HTTP for transferring pages between server and browser etc.
  • Outline of some of the major web programming languages are PHP, ASP, JSP, Javscript
  • Introduction to database technologies such as MySQL, SqlServer
  • Front end technologies such as Flash and Javascript
  • Content Management Systems and their importance
  • Integration of third party components on websites such as galleries, video and audio players etc.
  • Domain names (.ie or .com etc.) and hosting options (shared, dedicated, platform and pricing) and how they work together
  • What you can do with a good hosting platfom
    • Manage email accounts, create and manage databases, install third party applications, create subdomains, FTP access etc. practical example
  • Social Networking, Blogging, Content Sharing etc.
    • FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bebo, YouTube, FlickR, ISSUU etc.
  • Common third party web applications
    • eCommerce: osCommerce, virtumart etc.
    • Blogging & Content Management: WordPress, Joomla etc.
    • Discussion: phpBB, vBulletin
    • Other platforms: OpenRealty, phpList, Movable Type etc,
  • Fighting spam using web forms, captcha, hiding email address etc.
  • Accepting payment online (PayPal etc.)

Part II – Driving traffic to your website

  • Practical examples of how to use blogging, social networking, email etc. for viral campaigns.
  • How to use services like LinkedIn to create a business network
  • Registration with key directories and websites e.g. DMOZ, Wikipedia, WaterfordBusiness.com, ping-o-matic etc.
  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
    • Stressing the absolute basics of title tags, heading tags, page naming, meta description tag, site content, site links etc. (basic understanding of html is needed to understand this)
    • Understanding the importance of the Google Page Rank algorithm
    • Importance of good inbound links to your site and how to increase page rank and as a result improve traffic from search engines
    • Importance of Sitemaps and link structure of site
  • Online Advertising
    • Pay per click advertising on Google using Google adwords
    • Choosing good keywords
    • Getting good PPC value
    • Banner ads on third party websites that reach your target market (how much you should expect to pay etc.)
    • Directory listings (paid for links)
  • Webmaster Tools
    • Using the Google Keyword Tool to identify the most valuable search terms for your site and spotting gaps in the market!
    • Using Google webmaster tool for setting region and other key settings for your site
    • Using Google analytics to generate reports on your hits in order to continuously improve a website’s performance

Depending on your business we can tailor these sessions to your needs.

Please visit http://www.waterfordceb.com/promote-your-website-programme.php for more information on these mentoring sessions. There is a nominal fee of 100 euro payable to the enterprise board, which is a fraction of what these sessions might cost otherwise.

What is a Blog???

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I was delivering a presentation to a group of start ups just before Christmas and one of the class members asked the dreaded question…

“What is a Blog???”

Hmmm, I suppose if she asked it then others were thinking it too.

My simple answer was that it is an abbreviation of Web Log, but of course this is just the label and explains nothing.

In a nutshell a blog is simply a website that facilitates the publication of articles.

According to Wikipedia, a blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog).

Blogs are generally organised by date and into user defined categories.  Often blogs present an RSS feed to the web. A RSS feed is a file that contains a synopsis of your latest articles and the links to those articles.  RSS feeds are automatically generated by tools such as WordPress. Other users and sites can then subscribe to the RSS feed in order to be notified of updates to your blog. A podcast is related to a blog in that it presents media to the end user instead of text. I will explain podcasts in greater detail in a subsequent post.

Blogs are a great way to promote your company website as Google likes to check them regularly for updates.  Also, by writing a blog you will get more traffic to your site because you are more keywords and phrases that google can potentially match user searches with. So if you have a company website, you should set up a blog ASAP that you can write about interesting topics that are related to your business.

The best way to learn about blogs is to simply register on wordpress.com and create a blog for yourself to discover all the really cool features inherent in modern blog systems.

What Email Marketing (Newsletter / eZine / Mailing List / Mail shot) Software Should I Use???

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Recently I have had to evaluate several email marketing management tools and two stood out from the crowd for me.

From an open source point of view phplist is excellent. It is a well maintained newsletter application written in the php programming language. It does take a certain level of expertise to install this mailing list software on your server, and then configure it and set up newsletters etc., but should be within the capabilities of most web masters.  Visit http://www.phplist.com/ for download information, demo etc.

The best email marketing product I’ve seen out there for the mass market is MailChimp, which is really easy to set up and unlike phplist, it is managed on mailchimp’s servers and does not have to be installed.  Within minutes you can have  a list set up, imported from your Google contacts or csv file generated from outlook. You can pick from loads of lovely templates and develop your ezine/newsletter campaign online also. One thing I found brilliant was that you can upload your logo or an image and it will analyse the colours in it and develop a template for you automatically… Sweet!!!

You can test emails before sending them to your email lists/groups and after sending you can check statistics to see who has received/opened the emails and how often etc. All in all it’s an amazing little piece of kit and for most small businesses it is free because you get to create a list of up to 500 members and send 3000 mails per month absolutely free!!!

There are many other packages available out there and all of them beat creating your newsletter and trying to manage lists in your email client such as Outlook.  I would definitely recommend giving mailchimp a try.