Create your own Facebook page

Social media marketing is a fantastic tool which every business should be taking advantage of. It allows a company to build an interactive online presence, completely free of charge!

“There are 500 million active users on Facebook — it’s about time you get in on the action and start a Facebook Page for your business. After all, the best marketing reaches out to consumers where they already are, and people spend more than 700 billion hours a month on the site. Exposure to that many eyeballs could translate to a lot of business for your company.”

Not a techie? That’s not a problem — the process isn’t too technical. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you initiate your Facebook marketing campaign.

Get Started With Google Analytics

From small personal websites to those of large corporations, it is vital that we monitor performance and effectiveness. Google Analytics is a free solution which will do everything you’ve ever dreamed of when it comes to an analytics application!

“There are millions of websites out there, and tracking how people are getting to your site and what’s performing well is a must for being competitive in the online market. Google Analytics makes it easy for anyone managing a site to track and analyze this data. It’s a powerful, free tool that can answer a variety of questions for a wide range of users. Wondering which keywords resonate with visitors? Need insight on what design elements might be turning people away?”

Dive head first in to this article here!

5 Strategies for Maximizing Your Website’s Conversion Rate

As companies turn to social media giants like Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic and gain new customers, there is a growing risk that the website — one of the most powerful sales and marketing tools — will be overlooked.

“It is important for every consumer-facing enterprise to seek out new prospects and drive additional traffic via all available social media channels. Yet too many companies still neglect some basic strategies that could maximize conversion rates for the traffic they already have.”

This article is written by David Brussin, the Founder and CEO of Monetate. Check it out here.

I hope you’ve found this interesting. If you spot another article which is relevant, drop a link in a comment below!

The problem arises in the difference between our live server’s and our local server’s directory structure. Chances are you have placed all the files in a sub-directory within your Apache document root. Yet on your live server the files are probably all placed in the document root. This makes setting paths easier, you can often simply use “../” to point to the root directory. On your local copy, this means it’s looking above the project folder in the directory tree.

Now the normal fix, and the one I’ve used personally for a long time, has been to go through the website files and modify everything to work. And of course modify it all back again when I put it live. There’s just so many chances to make mistakes and break something.

A better solution is to open your httpd.conf file and modify your document root. I use XAMPP, and all I have to do is open up {xampp install dir}/apache/conf/httpd.conf and modify a couple of lines. In my httpd.conf the line numbers are the ones listed below, but they may be different for you. Just look for the “DocumentRoot” and “<Directory ” parts.

Line 183:

DocumentRoot "E:/xampp/htdocs"
  to
DocumentRoot "E:/xampp/htdocs/subdirectory"

Line 210:

<Directory "E:/xampp/htdocs">
  to
<Directory "E:/xampp/htdocs/subdirectory">

When you’re done, simply restart Apache and point your browser to http://localhost/ to be redirected to what was previously http://localhost/subdirectory. Simply edit your httpd.conf again to reverse the change.

Hope you find this useful and if you have a different method please leave a comment.

So firstly we’ll run you through the new features:

Likes now affect search rankings

Well for us this is the most important change, certainly an SEO change which will have an effect upon many websites. Those with popular content such as blogs are more likely to be shown above competitors, irrespective of their optimisation for search engines.

Facebook pages integration

If your search result doesn’t have any likes from your friends but does have a Facebook page, its recent Facebook status updates may appear in your search results.

Highlights content liked by your friends

If your search result is an online blog, all articles which your friends have liked will be displayed below the result. You will be shown the article thumbnail and title. We listen our friends far more than a search engine, as they are real people that we trust. This feature is certainly an interesting one Bing..

Bing’s new toolbar

We found this quite a surprising feature. Bing’s new toolbar will allow you to like any online content, irrespective of whether it has a Facebook like button.

More advanced people search

Bing’s previous Facebook people search allowed you to search a friends name and they would appear in your results. This has been improved by allowing you to search for information related to your friends. For example if you search for something including ‘Lancaster’, Bing will show you which of your friends actually live there so you can ask them. We think this is a great usability feature Bing, well done!

Sharing options

According to Bing, 90% of us consult our friends and family on many decisions, known as the ‘Friend effect’. So to make this process faster, Bing has brought us more sharing options, allowing you to post things to your wall with ease.

You can read more about these features over on Bing’s blog

Our opinion

We like the way Bing is going with it’s personalised search results. This is possibly the way search results should be with the amount of personal details we list online. Whether we like it or not (no pun intended!) Facebook is becoming a large part of our online lifestyle’s. We’re certainly interested to see if these changes will convert some any of Google’s fans. We believe that the success is dependant on how Bing markets these changes. For us though… we wont be switching.

Let us know what you think!

So now we have an e-commerce site to show off with and sell ink cartridges. I’ll be putting it in our portfolio as soon as I find a spare minute.

About Discount Inks

Here’s a bit about Discount Inks taken from the home page:

Epson compatible ink cartridges at very affordable prices. Based in Lancaster, UK. No need to worry about last-moment tagged on extra postage or packaging costs, and VAT is already included on all products. Postage is and will always be free!

Discounts via Twitter

We’re selling cartridges at £1.99 each, and £5.99 for a standard set, and we’re going to start tweeting out coupon codes on twitter for even cheaper prices. Follow @discountinks on twitter to receive the latest coupon codes. We’re kicking it off with a coupon code for 15% off!

1. The Register is great for scanning lots of stories quickly. Tiled headlines, lots of choice, it’s great! This has to be my personal favourite!
2. BBC Technology usually contains news about the big players in the internet field like Microsoft and Google. Sometimes it yields an interesting story and is certainly worth checking if you’re looking for some big news.
3. CNET News is an interesting one. It contains stories of mixed focuses, whether it’s the latest gadgets, OS or websites. Definitely worth a check in the mornings!
4. Google News has a technology section which is worth a read. It’s a compilation feed, so it pulls in Tech News from various different websites. Worth a quick read.

Prefer your own sources? Let us know below!

1. Go to http://yourdomain/cpanel (e.g. http://cenix.co.uk/cpanel). You will be prompted with a login page.
2. Enter your username and password. If you are unsure of these then please get in touch.
3. Once loaded, you will see various groups of icons. Scroll down to the fourth set, and select “Awstats”.
4. You should see all of your domain names listed in a table. Select the main one (e.g. cenix.co.uk).
5. Click the view button.
6. Detailed statistics will be displayed. Take note of the number of visitors, unique visitors and pages viewed. However if you have 5 minutes free one evening, why not read through the whole page? You’ll find interesting information like how long your visitors spend on the site, the most popular hours in the day and the keywords used to find your site in search engines.

For more information about how to use cPanel, feel free to ask.

Have a go here

You can publish your scores to Facebook or Twitter by using Free Rice 2.0. And don’t forget to let us know how you get on below!

Well thanks to this poster (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=750d52d4e1a2a835&hl=en#fid_750d52d4e1a2a83500047ea1dc5797e3) I now can! And I wanted to share this handy little tip with more people.

Simply open up chrome and go to Options, then under the Basics tab click Manage under the Default search section. Click Add to open the Add Search Engine window. Then type in the Name (I’m Feeling Lucky or whatever you like), set a shortcut key in the Keyword field (I use “\“ for convenience) and paste this into the URL field:

{google:baseURL}search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s&btnI

And TAH-DAH! From now on, just hit your shortcut key and you’ll be able to search like this:

Note that this cool custom search engine also supports Suggested Results! That’s the bit I was really impressed with, and made me want to share this tip. Now go and enjoy your marginally faster searching!

1. The number one piece of advice anyone can give you is to keep your blog up to date! A stagnant blog which hasn’t been updated since February of last year probably won’t be useful to anyone. An entry every week or two will work wonders for search engines, they can’t seem to get enough of that fresh content!
2. Make it interesting! Will it add value to your site? Will people actually find it interesting or useful? If the answer to either question is no, then don’t waste your time. Instead, think of something which is going to be interesting to your target users.
3. It’s all good and well writing some kick ass blog posts which should generate lots of quality traffic, however what’s the point if your blog isn’t robot friendly? Ensure you have a tidy link structure – main navigation, sub-navigation, content. Simple right? Well don’t complicate things then!
4. Use catagories in your blog. You need to make browsing through articles as simple as possible for the user. So what better than to utilize tags? They only need view what is relevant to them. You can also take advantage of an archieve function to aid those who only wish to view recent posts.
5. Stick to the point. An article which covers various topics is useless for SEO. If its about wireless adapters, talk about wireless adapters, not how bad your ISP is! You can also check that your article’s URL contains the keyword you are attempting to optimise for. For example if we had an article about Cenix being awesome, our URL could be ‘http://cenix.co.uk/how-awesome-are-we/’.

Good luck optimising!

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