On Internet Business

Touchnote – personalising the card industry

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources, Uncategorized

Recently I posted about Moo cards, and here’s another simple, effective idea that brings the mass-produced greetings card into the 21st century.

Touchnote is a new concept that uses digital photographs to create cards that you can quickly and easily personalise. The cards you create are then mailed out to your chosen recipients.

The system couldn’t be simpler to use, either you upload your own digital photo to the Touchnote site, or use a photo already hosted on Facebook, or pick one from their extensive gallery. Then add a personal message. Touchnote will print and post the card for you, to anywhere in the world. You can even choose to send postcards rather than greetings cards!

Not only is it a great system for the occasions we all want to send cards for: birthday cards, party invites, seasonal greetings – but it’s also a fantastic way to celebrate a one-off event swiftly, so if you have something to commemorate or celebrate you can upload a photo of the occasion and have the cards ready to wing out within a few minutes.

There are other advantages:

1. The cards cost from as little as £1.99 for 1-4 personalised cards, 5-9 personalised cards cost just £1.75 and prices descend according to the number you order, dropping to only 99 pence if you purchase 25 or more. Bearing in mind that a stamp for such a card would cost a minimum of 45 pence alone, plus the cost of the card, the time it took you to choose it, queue up to buy it, then the time to fill it in and take it to a postbox, this could actually be the cheapest, as well as the most personal and thoughtful, way to keep in touch with people.
2. Because Touchnote uses unlaminated and recyclable paper which is 75% from recycled sources and 25% from workshop off-cuts, all Forestry Stewardship Council)Chain of Custody certified, you can feel confident that it’s been responsibly sourced.
3. Touchnote is also working with ‘Excellent Development’, an environmental organisation that ensures Touchnote minimises its impact on the environment.

There’s an iPhone app, of course, so you can send cards when you’re on the move, and it’s a lot more fun than browsing a shop for something close to what you want, when you can sit in comfort and create exactly what you had in mind!

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Why Google’s Personalized Search matters

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Search

Since early December, Google has been personalising everybody’s search results, unless they opt out of the personalisation service. Why and how and what does it mean?

What is Google personalised search?

Essentially, Google’s search engine now ‘learns’ from your past searching behaviour to tailor the results it produces in a current search by comparing the results with the ones you clicked on in previous searches. So if you regularly click on search results from the TF, or the Daily Mirror, more of those search results will start showing up in future searches, because Google will give them a higher ranking, as compared to other results, because you seem to favour their content.

Any user can easily opt out of the personalisation option, and already most journalists are opting out, because it’s not in their interest to have their search results limited in this way – whether the general public will understand what is happening and how it affects their access to the internet is another matter.

Why does it matter?

A good question, to which the answers, as yet, are not clear. One troubling aspect of the situation is that Google is being coy about the percentage of search results, per searcher, that are being personalised – is it 80% or 20%?

And does it mean that, over time, a searcher will only see results from sites they favour, so if you prefer to buy British, for example, and therefore tend to click on British businesses in a search list, would you, over time, end up ONLY seeing British business results? Google says no because it wants to maintain ‘diversity’, and to ensure that areas of the web are not ‘inaccessible’ to people because of their search history. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be seismic changes in the way online retailers and other businesses find themselves being represented in searches over time.

What is the impact likely to be?

As yet there are only questions, rather than answers, but those questions are crucial ones for the SEO market:

1. Can this effort by Google to drive personalisation, as an opt-out rather than an opt-in feature, be seen as a counter attack on SEO?
2. Will new sites suffer as a result of the creation of a personalised search history; how does a new brand become a favourite and; what could the break-through mechanisms be that would allow this to happen?
3. How can website managers adequately judge their site ranking in Google with personalisation being applied?
4. How confused will users be by the different kind of results they get as they move between computers and find that items that appeared high on their ‘personalised search’ computer don’t show up on the first page of their ‘public’ computer or one they share with other people at home or work?

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What is the best Microsoft PowerPoint alternative?

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources

Perhaps the best looking, and most intuitive alternative I’ve seen is Prezi, a completely new way of creating presentations.

How Prezi works

It’s a Flash-based tool, which allows for visualisation and storytelling, rather than PowerPoint’s strictly linear presentation system.

There’s a simple editing system that inserts images and text, video, Flash files and allows the user to draw lines to show the relationships between each item. This gives a ‘visual map’ something like a mind map which can be zoomed in and out of, and navigated by clicking into content displayed.

Learn more about Prezi

How to use it

Because it’s designed in Flash, it’s an easy application to use, once you get the hang of the basic concept of a map rather than individual slides. This learning curve can be eased if you use the online video help which shows you how to do some of the more complex actions such as positioning and resizing objects using Zebra.

What it costs

Prezi has three pricing structures: Free, Enjoy (around £37 per year), and Pro (around £108 per year). The difference comes in storage space on one hand, Free has 100 MB of storage on the Prezi site, Enjoy has 500 MB and Pro has 2000 MB, and in privacy on the other – Enjoy and Pro both let you you’re your presentations private and Pro gives you a downloadable desktop softward setup, while Free and Enjoy require you to design online by uploading your content to the server.

Why use it?

Prezi looks fabulous; it’s a much more stylish way of sharing information and it allows each information user to navigate the content in their own way, so it’s much more exciting both to create and to share.

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How a slow web site can damage your internet business

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

Matt Cutts – speed matters

Recently, at PubCon Las Vegas, Google representative Matt Cutts strongly suggested that the speed with which a page loads will be an important indicator for rankings.

Cutts, who is head of Google’s search quality team explains in the video that site speed will likely become a ranking factor in the near future:

“We’re starting to think more and more about … should speed be a factor in Google’s rankings, because … even in AdWords if your site is slow that can be a factor in how much you might have to pay…. Historically we haven’t used it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the Web should be fast, it should be a good experience. And so it’s sort of fair to say if you’re a fast site maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus, or if you have a really awfully slow site then maybe, you know, users don’t want that as much.”

As multimedia and rich media content become more popular online, page load time becomes a greater challenge to webmasters and SEOs. However, it is in a business’s best interest that site performance and site engagement be considered together. So what can you do to support your online business in a speedier, richer environment?

Resources to speed up your website:

• The Closure tool helps developers to build efficient rich web applications with JavaScript
• Page Speed is a tool to streamline your page’s loading from the viewer’s perspective
• Webpagetest does what it says on the tin! This application tests the download speed of your website.

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What is a good conversion rate ?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

Conversion rate is a critical measure in the success of an ecommerce website. Conversion rate = number of orders placed/number of visitors. According to research by Nielsen Online, the US sites with the highest conversion rates for January 2009 (as a percentage of unique website visitors) were:

Schwan’s, which is the premier site for home delivery of frozen foods and dairy products including ice creams, entrees, meats and desserts. It ships right across the USA. Conversion rate = 52.5%

Proflowers is hardly known outside the USA, but is the equivalent of interflora in the UK, you can send flowers for delivery from ProFlowers, or alternatively order plants, roses, and Christmas gifts to be delivered. Conversion rate = 27.3%

Quixtar is part of Amway Global and produces and sells Nutrilite dietary supplements, XS Energy Drinks, personal care, home care, air and water purifiers and Artistry cosmetics, relying primarily on person-to-person referral rather than advertisements for sale of products. Conversion rate = 22.4%

Blair.com – a 100 year old company, originally mail order, selling men’s and women’s clothing and household items, now largely an ecommerce business, it has a conversion rate of 21.8%

Office Depot is both a home and business to business supplier providing office supplies, print, furniture and office machinery. The online site has a conversion rate of 21.1%

Vitacost.com offers more than 800 brands and 26,000 vitamins, herbs, antioxidants, organic and natural foods as well as cleaning and personal care items with such mystifying names as natraceuticals and cosmeceuticals – which harness the power of medicine to the aspiration of personal beauty. The site’s conversion rate is 20.4%

DrsFosterSmith.com – from 1983, when three veterinarians got together to offer an online pet product catalogue, Drs Foster & Smith has grown to well over 600 employees and has a conversion rate of 20.3%

FTD.com bears the familiar Interflora logo but is in fact Florists’ Transworld Delivery a floral wire service, retailer and wholesaler – it actually bought out the Interflora cooperative in 2006. It has a conversion rate of 20.2%

Amazon is a Fortune 500 company and is considered to be the global leader in e-commerce. It sells everything from books and electronics to tennis rackets and diamonds and boasts a conversion rate of 17.2%

CDW is a reseller of technology products and services for individuals and business and has a dedicated arm that sells computers and associated products to the American government. CDW recently agreed to be acquired by a private equity firm for a value of over 7 billion dollars. Conversion rate = 16.9%

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Best Custom Business Card Site

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources

I just love this site! To me it shows how ordering business cards can be turned into a fun experience. The Moo experience offers:

• Smart and well laid out website
• Simply to use customisation process with a full preview
• Value added features like unusual and stylish pre-designed templates.
• Easy ordering

But it’s not just about good business cards – the ability to customise cards to this extent allows all businesses to be innovative about how they present themselves and to personalise their approach to the marketplace. This month I’ve already seen people using these small cards as inserts for handmade Christmas crackers to be given to customers and as speed-dating tools at a business networking event: in that case the tiny cards were put under wineglasses and those attending played wine-glass bingo – they matched up the cards with a bingo sheet and when they had a ‘line’ of other business people they’d spoken to they got a prize like an hour’s free consultancy with a business banker or some blank stationery to personalise.

Brilliant tools allow entrepreneurs to demonstrate their own brilliance and to support their business growth in a wide variety of ways, and that’s good for everybody.

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Top Link Building Tools

Posted by Michael under Search

Following the sad demise of Marketleap.com tools, on 15 November, which was highlighted on its website as follows: As of November 15, 2009 all free Marketleap.com tools will be discontinued. We would like to thank you for the years of devotion to our tools and recommend the following sites as resources for viable replacements: SEObook.com, SEOMoz.com. Thank you.…. What are the alternatives?

Hub Finder is free web based software which looks for hub pages using the Yahoo! API. It allows you to find sites which link to common resources that you manually enter, or resources that rank well in Yahoo! for a specific term. You can manually enter sites you want to cross check, or grab the top ranked results from Yahoo! Search.

Linkscape claims to provide never-before-accessed link data on over 54+ billion URLs across 230+ million domains and that this allows you to analyze your competitors to see what they’re doing successfully and how you can emulate their success as well as judging the quality of potential links to your site and measuring the success of viral marketing and link bait campaigns

Costs around £35 a month but regular attempts to up-sell the current client base new add-ons and frills might annoy those already up to budget and not wanting/able to invest more. Linkscape is ‘backed up’ by add-ons from the such as:

• Competitive Link Research Tool – Find critical sites your competitors are getting links from but you aren’t
• Linkscape Visualization and Comparison – Visualize and compare the link profiles of two web pages and get actionable suggestions on improvements.
• Backlink Analysis – Fast access to lots of your most influential anchortext and backlinks

Majestic-SEO says it is the world’s largest backlinks and anchor text database with proprietary robots that have crawled over 137 billion webpages and found more than 1,137 billion unique links and their anchor text. This information is available in detailed reports, where links and anchor text are shown in order of importance, based on their backlinks. Each website’s backlinks can all be downloaded as ‘.CSV’ file.

There’s a complex pricing system that depends on credits (the cheapest of which is £2) to buy backlinks information for the domains you’re interested in exploring.

Yahoo! site explorer

Since the recent beta rebuild, Yahoo!’s free site explorer has become more like Google’s offerings, although Google still seems to be more forthcoming about information like queries your site ranks for; inbound link anchor text pointing to your site; crawl management. However the new Yahoo! data are more concise and better organized than the Google data dumps. Of course, to a certain extent Yahoo! search optimization is no longer that popular and many businesses say they get little or no traffic from Yahoo! – but it’s the third most visited search engine, used by around 60,000,000 people each month which is a lot of traffic to be ignoring, so Yahoo! might be a good place to start reinvesting in SEO.

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