Its nearly 10 weeks till christmas

Has everyone started there christmas shopping yet, aarrgghh!

Saint Michaels Hospice Midnight Walk

Saint Michaels Hospice Midnight Walk in Harrogate takes place on July 4th 2009, It will be a fantastic event for all involved and a great fundraising opportunity for the Hospice

Click here for more information www.midnight-walk.org

Using Twitter for Charity Fundraising

There is a great article here that is of use for those wanting to improve there non profit fundraising by using twitter

http://www.sofii.org/active%20site/Members%20area/Article17MarcPtwitter.html

Cheers, Iain

Does anyone use PPC bid management anymore

I looked into bid management a couple of years ago and i found it a highly complicated process particularly if you where doing it over multiple search engines, the systems never seemed to work that effectively, I always couldn’t help thinking that if google or yahoo or msn, changed there API setup overnight that the system would also come crashing down without giving you any prior notice, has anyone used this more recently with success, I would be very interested to learn?

Pay Per Click PPC Tips No 1 – Simplicity

PPC campaigns in my experience need not be highly complex creatures, in the three years i have been managing them, I have discovered that a large part of traffic for most business’s can be easily driven off one campaign, unless you are targeting many products are brands then this generally will work fine and time spent adjusting will generally need keeping to a minimum. Hours spent every day fine tuning these campaigns, will be time lost for most campaigns where you could be doing something else much more productive

Car Changes Updated

my last blog post claims i have updated from an astra to a clio, things have moved on a bit since then, I changed the clio for a polo 1.4 which was great fun, a nice little car but, then i swapped the polo for an Suzuki RF600 motorbike which was really good fun but a little unreliable, i think it was just a problem with the spark plugs to be fair, it went through them a little too often. So we sold that on and now I have a primera 2.0 16 valve auto, which despite being slated by jeremy clarkson, as a lovely car, always starts on the button and is really smooth and easy to drive, I thoroughly recommend it, not as an exciting car, but as reliable and comfortable transport. Its winner

Car Change for me, Astra to Clio

I have just changed my car from a 2.0 Astra to a 1.2 litre Renault Clio, Lets just say I am never going to have to worry about overtaking again as I strongly suspect it is no longer an option, these things are supposed to be bulletproof reliable however so hope fully that should make up for the probs with my astra which had done 125k miles and was burning more oil than petrol!!

Google Adwords Prices going up

Is it just me or is it a general pattern at the moment that the competition is increasing across all marketing sectors in google adwords and driving the cost of paid marketing up by up to 50% increase in the last year and in some cases even more than this.

Is it genuine increases in competition or is google doing something with their algorithms that are making it more difficult to get a cheap clicks, its a god time to take special care looking at page relevancy and other issues to do with your quality score

End of the line for Bid Management on PPC?

Here is an extract from the SEW blog which has some very interesting views on this subject, my personal opinion and experience with 2 different tools have been very unsuccessful

Are Bid Management Tools Still Useful?

By Eric Enge

June 12, 2007

Given the changes in the search marketing landscape, especially the move toward quality-based bidding, the question on the minds of many SEMs is “Are bid management tools dead?” During the recent Search Marketing Expo two teams of search marketers took sides in a formal debate on the topic.

The session intrigued me, because I quite recently interviewed Efficient Frontier’s Anil Kamath, and also wrote up a case study of Travel Zoo’s experiences with bid management.

Arguing that bid management is dead were Misty Locke, president of Range Online Media, and Peter Hershberg, managing partner of Reprise Media. On the “not dead” team were Robert Ashby, formerly the director of search for Expedia, and Chris Zaharias, senior VP of Efficient Frontier.

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Misty Locke started by presenting the case for bid management being dead, and then Robert Ashby performed a cross examination of Misty. Next, Chris Zaharias got up and presented the case for bid management being alive and well, then Peter Hershberg cross examined Chris. Next was a rebuttal by the “Dead Team” of Misty and Peter. This was then followed by a rebuttal period for the “Not Dead Team” of Robert and Chris.

Major themes of the Dead Team were:

1. The inability to bid for placement in a direct manner makes automated bid management much harder to do
2. The biggest issues in your campaign now are your ads, and your landing pages. Bid management tools don’t help you with these, and they can in fact lull you into a false sense of security.
3. Brand building keywords don’t necessarily convert that well into business. But many businesses will want to buy the keywords most closely associated with their business, regardless of direct ROI. If these keywords are “bid managed” they may well be turned off.
4. First visit search queries (e.g. sports car) don’t result in immediate sales. If someone searches on “sports car” it’s likely that they are in research mode. They may visit your site many times before making a purchase. Bid managing these keywords is also very difficult to do, and could well result in turning these keywords off. Yet they may be a key part of the overall site profitability.

Major themes of the Not Dead Team were:

1. There is too much complexity in managing large campaigns, and bid management can help you scale.
2. They agree that ad copy and landing pages are incredibly important, and point out that a bid management tool does not prevent you from focusing on that.
3. Deal with brand building keywords and “first visit search” keywords by keeping them out of the bid management tool

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As the discussion matured, it did in fact come to a consensus. The panelists ultimately agreed that bid management is a useful tool, but that in today’s advertising environment you need to do much more in addition to what the bid management tool can do.

A solid strategy for your PPC campaigns will have the following elements:

1. Use a bid management tool to manage the long tail of your campaign.
2. Stay focused on your ad copy and your landing pages, because they can dramatically influence the cost and conversion rates of your campaigns.
3. Take significant brand building terms and manage them separately
4. Take significant “first visit search” keywords and manage them separately as well.

Ultimately, I view bid management as a critical tool in your PPC campaign toolkit. For many businesses, there is a large amount of money to be made in the long tail, and it’s an environment that tends to be less competitive than the major keywords. To take advantage of this opportunity can often require you to implement thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of keywords.

There is no practical way that this quantity of terms can be managed effectively by any non-automated means. Ultimately, you need to have help.

Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide.

Business Heat Recycling

heat recycling – savings of up to £4800 per year*

Recycle your heat and save yourselves thousands

Recycling your companies heat

The basic principle behind this idea is very simple

In the top of your warehouse/office space during the winter months there is a great deal of redundant heat that you could save yourself potentially ¼ of your total heating bill. We can using our cost saving system recycle this hot air in the top of your building by venting back in to the bottom of the building during a time period when you would ordinarily have the heating on.

For example:

Outside Ambient Temperature -3 Degrees Celsius

At 6.00 am on a work day a 200kw Heater comes on in order to pre- heat the warehouse before occupancy at 08.00 , the building will absorbe the heat generated, as the building has been closed all weekend.

At 11.00 am there is enough heat to maintain the ambient temperature of 16.5 degrees Celsius at ground level where the heater is positioned, however the energy generated to give 16.5DegC at floor level means that the roof void and top mezz floor is around 30DegC. So if you distributed the heat from the top of chart to low level; the building would remain warmer for a longer period two hours without having to have the burner running for that time. This can then be repeated later in the afternoon again after the burner has been running for a while again. So there is the potential to save quite a bit of heating energy during the course of the winter.

During the summer months the ducting can be reversed to vent straight to outside in order to pump out the excess hot air therefore giving a cross flow of cooler air and maintain a good ambient temperature in the top half of the warehouse where the majority of the summer heat sits. This will increase the workforce effort due to the increased comfort of the ambient temperature.This knock on effect of people not being as hot means less toilet breaks and water drinking and increased effort and speed therefore saving a lot of wasted workforce effort over the summer months

Example: Bob is paid £7.50 per hour for working an 9hr day with 1/2hr lunch break and 2No 15min snack breaks. Bob works on the top mezzanine floor, where the temperature in summer with an outside temp is around 35degC, the inside temp will have increased to around 45degC.

Bob has no drive and is irritable due to excessive heat. So Bob drinks large amounts of liquids for which he walks down stairs for.

• Walk down the 2No flights of stairs – 5min

• Fill up water bottle and go to toilet – 10min

• Walk back up stairs and rest due to the cool environment at a lower level and an excessive amount of heat hitting you as you assend up on to the mezzanine floor – 10min

• Twenty three minuets wasted possibly 4 times a day excluding snack and lunch breaks, for five days a week, for 16weeks average every year.

• 1hr a day wasted x 5days = 5 hrs x 16 weeks = 80Hrs 1 man

• 80hrs x 8people on that floor = 640hrs @ £7.50 hr =£4800.00

for details click here