There are, of course, 100 different ways to do this, this way uses the inbuilt functions of WordPress to run the SQL query.

Get access to WordPress functions

At the top of the page you will need to include wp-blog-header.php

<?php require('blog/wp-blog-header.php'); ?> 

Place this code at the very top of your page, before anything else runs. Note:Make sure the link to this file is correct, it may differ depending on where you’ve installed WordPress.

Blog post function

In your PHP code you will need to add a new function. This function takes parameters like how many posts you want to display, and what you want to pad the link with ($preitem & $postitem). It returns the fuction, rather than echoing it directly.

function DoTheBlogPosts($numberofposts,$preitem=" ",$postitem=" "){
  $args = array( 'numberposts' => $numberofposts, 'post_status'=>"publish",'post_type'=>"post",'orderby'=>"post_date");
  $postslist = get_posts( $args );
  $output = '';

 foreach ($postslist as $post) :  setup_postdata($post); 
 
    $output .= $preitem.'<a href="'. get_the_permalink($post) .'" title="' . get_the_title($post).'">'. get_the_title($post). '</a>' .$postitem.'
      ';
  endforeach;

return $output;
 }

Calling the function

In your PHP you can call the function like

DoTheBlogPosts(5)

to display 5 posts, without any formatting for a list

DoTheBlogPosts(4,"<li>","</li>")

to output the details with LI items before and after, just make sure that you open and close your list before & afterwards.

Both services partner with local restaurants and food trucks to get them in front of the eyes of customers who may not have already tried them out already, or who would otherwise eat somewhere else in the downtown area.

1) Communication methods

Peach is quite proud of their SMS system, which sends you an SMS each day, with a picture of the food and to order you simply need to reply yes. You can also order online, they don’t (as of yet) have a mobile app offering. At the launch in Boston I had some issues receiving SMS’s. You can also see the week’s menu on their website and order directly from there. In my case this was the easiest way to order.

Peach had some issues delivering SMSs to my phone. I’m not sure if it’s my carrier (T-mobile), the SMS sender (probably twilio) or Peach’s fault. Either way the SMSs weren’t getting through, their support staff were helpful and useful.

Fooda emails you daily the details of the menu at your location.  You can also see the week’s menu on their website.

2) Ordering & payment

To order at Peach you need to commit by 11am by replying to the SMS (or ordering online by 11am). Once your food arrives you’ll get a further SMS about the pickup. In my case the food arrived around 11:45am. Your food individually packed up and is in a bag. The bag in turn has a list of names on it. So you get to choose which portion you want.

Concerns: I would have concerns about their ability to keep your food warm and in the condition it was prepared in. Once the food is portioned out and transported to the office it’s likely that these will degrade over time. If I was a restaurant I would also be worried about these issues as well, their last quality control check is when it’s put in a heated / chilled bag possibly 1-2 hours before the customer eats your meal.

Today's healthy lunch. Via Peach #t

A photo posted by Paul Savage (@paulsavage) on Jan 20, 2016 at 8:50am PST

Fooda Popup is a physical stand, in my case it’s in the building lobby, where you can order and pay right on the spot. You can easily customise your order and collect it warm when you want it.

Concerns: The food is served in the lobby of our building. While the food isn’t prepared on site, it’s just portioned out. I didn’t see any facilities for staff to wash hands or any food permit posted. I’m not 100% sure they need this.

Tasty lunch @WeWorkBOS with Firebox BBQ & @gofooda pic.twitter.com/KXVASwC56P

— Paul (@paulsavage) December 16, 2015

Where does the money go

This is all a bit of conjecture so I may not be 100% accurate in my analysis.

Peach does all the payment processing on behalf of the restaurants, and they then in turn pay out the restaurants. Opening up new locations for delivery is quite straight forward.

I did notice that Fooda’s servers were using Square and that the billing was going directly to the restaurant. I’m guessing that Fooda either charges a % of sales or a location fee, or both. Fooda curates the locations on behalf of the restaurants. Controlling the inventory is key here. The effort to open new popup locations is high.

Price points

Both services are discounting their food right now, I guess you have to spend that VC money ;).

Fooda guarantees that there will be at least 1 dish that costs $8, where as Peach have dishes that cost significantly more at $11.72. I think that Peach’s price points are still a little high, the benefits of bulk ordering for a group doesn’t seem to be passed on to the consumers. The only benefit they appear to be offering is the easy ability to order.

Other services

Both operations are targeting bulk buyers like businesses that can pay a portion of the food costs on the employees behalf. Fooda also has a catering arm, which can deal with one off orders.

Human interaction

I did notice that I enjoyed the whole experience of seeing my food being assembled before my eyes with Fooda. You can talk to the servers and find out a bit more about the food that they are selling. These staff are employees of the restaurant / food truck.

For Peach your food arrives and while there is someone at the pickup location to help with orders, they can’t really offer you any information about the food that’s there.

Final thoughts & concerns

Fooda curates the locations for the restaurants and appears to be more like a hot desk for them. Most of their menus are from food trucks.

Peach is bundling ordering with delivery and making it simpler.

Both companies are opening the markets at the right time of year, namely winter. People are more likely to go for something quick that will help them avoid a frosty walk. It will be interesting to see how these companies get on in the summer time.

As far as I can see both companies haven’t focussed on customer loyalty schemes yet. i.e looking to reward behaviour like multiple visits to a location. This could be due to the fact that margins on food are low. Peach does have a referral system to encourage their growth.

Try Fooda & Peach out.

Of course I have links if you’d like to try either or both.

• Peach: use code PAUL8250 to get your first lunch for $5.
• Fooda: find out their locations on www.fooda.com

One important note: We don’t just look at SEO, our focus is to make your online business more money, by driving traffic that converts at a higher rate. Often changes to how your online business operates are necessary to achieve the full website optimisation experience. Don’t worry we can help you in each step of this journey. Let us do some of the heavy lifting for you.

1. SEO Auditing

It’s important to get a base starting level before any work begins. Knowing what is working and what isn’t working will give you a benchmark to gauge improvements. This also avoid us making things worse once we get going!

Our approach to SEO Auditing has a strong focus on on-page SEO. Our checklists are as long as your arm, we look at everything from raw HTTP logs (if available) to higher level reports from statistics tools like Google Analytics. Our aim here is to find things that are not working as intended. Is your 404 page-not-found page actually giving the right HTTP Status code?

We run the reports to check for broken links, website content analysis, as well as off-page factors like your inbound link profile. These give us a better idea of how your website is performing. We also take a look at your competitors to see if there is any particular strategy they are doing that can also be used.

We package our findings into 2 sections, a high-level overview, which is generally 1 -2 pages about where you are, and what the potential for growth is, the steps needed, etc. as well as well as a more in-depth section which outlines the individual steps to be performed. An auditing period runs over 1 -2 weeks, just so we know we have observed everything. See our typical pricing for SEO Audits. We run these projects on a retainer basis, i.e. you pay in advance, and any funds not consumed during the project are returned at the end of the project.

SEO is not enough

Remember: SEO is not the magic bullet to get your business making more money, it’s one important step, but it’s not everything. You still need to run your online business as a proper business. We let stick to the areas of your expertise like customer support, order fulfillment, product development, etc., while we can take care of everything online.

What type of traffic do you get?

One important part of our audit includes a look at the type of traffic you are getting. If you sell tables & chairs, and you are getting traffic for people looking for lamps instead, we will need to shift the type of visitors you get. We want to get you more visitors who are more likely to buy.

How does your funnel look?

We also look at the conversion funnel. How easy is it for visitors to take that one action on your website? Are there certain stages where people tend to get lost / confused / turned off ? Identifying these holes in your leaky funnel, and patching them, will start to show dividends straight away. Often it may be necessary to run A/B tests to have a quantitate analysis of what works and doesn’t work. We use Optimizely.com for managing such tests.

How does your messaging come across?

Our approach to copywriting has a strong focus on selling. We tell your customers what you can do for them, we talk about what the problem is and what the benefits are and rather than just saying what your product does. The difference is subtle, but telling a customer that you can ‘send email newsletters’ versus ‘send emails newsletters quicker & easier’ helps a customer understand the benefit for using your product.

Other parts

We also take a look at your email copy & design as well as the flow of emails from your system. We’ve experience using many of the major email marketing systems, such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, Marketo and Pardot. We can help you get your brand message across in the most efficient manner.

2. SEO Implementation

From the SEO Audit, we have an action plan, this generally highlights major issues that need to be fixed, while also stating their relative importance. Issues like improper HTTP Header codes would be more important than a few images missing alt tags. Our SEO Audits are a play book that outline what steps you need to take to improve your websites SEO.

Often SEO Implementation is done by the client themselves, as they already have the expertise in-house. Some suggested changes like site architecture can easily impact other running parts of a business, so they need to be assessed internally. In our SEO Audit there is a playbook, of what needs to be done from the technical side, as well as the content side. This generally can be done between 2 – 4 weeks for most projects, but some that have a requirement for programming or special content may require extra time.

Show me the content

The SEO Audit will identify any potential content holes. This could be something as simple as adding your physical address to contact page, all the way up to adding more content on your product pages. We have a team of copywriters that can help build out your content plan. We use the phase content plan, as it’s is something that should be delivered overtime, and on a schedule.

This part of our SEO approach can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months to be implemented fully. Ideally this is an ongoing effort.

Keep building useful content

You still need to be producing some level of new content on your website. We recommend fewer, longer form blog posts. Instead of 15 blog posts a month with 600 words, we’d like to have 3 high quality x 3,000 word blog posts. While this content is more difficult to produce, we’ve measured a marked increase in the benefits of longer form content. Review cycles should be performed to make sure your website is up to-date, and that reading level is sufficiently high enough, for your target market.

3. SEO Monitoring,  Maintenance & Content

So we’ve done a plan and we’ve started implemented it, then next stage is to monitor fluctuations on a monthly basis. Here we are looking at metrics like the number of keywords you are ranking for, so called keyword diversity, the number of visitors, the % of goal completions, among others.

While we do look at keyword rankings, it’s just one part of the picture. Ranking for longer keywords like ‘how to rank build a 3 legged chair’ as well as shorter ones like ‘chair design tips’ are monitored on a regular basis during the month. One issue is that search engine positions can vary widely based on your previous searches & clicks, and it’s necessary take these stats with a grain of salt. We also look at the ‘net position’ where we see how the sum of your top keywords are fluctuating.

Generally we work on a retainer basis of 5 – 20 hours per month and typical engagement contracts run between 6 – 12 months at a time.

The problem

I wanted to remove part of the string that was unneeded, it was sometimes in the middle of strings and surrounded by brackets. Enter in regex to the rescue to search and remove.

A typical string looked like

Xinyi (Guangdong), China
San Jose (CA), United States
Jacksonville (FL), United States

and I wanted it to be

Xinyi, China
San Jose, United States
Jacksonville, United States

My code

// regex
//remove anything inside () in string $into[$row]['city']

$re = "/\\(.*\\)/";
preg_replace($re, '', ($info[$row]['city'], 1)

Uses

Code like this can be useful for removing

• prefixes in phone numbers
• comments in brackets in text paragraphs.

Some other quick points

While searching for some resources to do with Regex I came across https://regex101.com a really useful resource for text regex code.

If you’d like to generate your own XML sitemap, to feed to google or other search engines, you just need to make sure it’s in the following form.

Through BloggingSupport.com we offer services to maintain WordPress sites. Often customers come to us when their website has been compromised, due to failing to upgrade for a long time, or having insecure WordPress plugins.

Knowing you are hacked

Often customers don’t know they are hacked until something more serious happens, like they start to loose web traffic or their domain gets banned from sending email. We recommend that you do a domain search on google with site:yourdomain.com to see if any additional pages have been added to your website.

In the case that the hacker is using your site to send SPAM, make sure that bounce messages are sent to some address that you monitor on a regular basis. These hackers can send thousands of emails an hour via your compromised website and will get you on a blocked list. You can check the status of your server IP address or domain name on these two websites SpamHaus Lookup & MXToolBox Blacklists.

Update your WordPress plugins

As a general rule we recommend that you only use the minimum amount of plugins, and make sure that the plugins you or your web-developer has chosen are actively updated. It’s often the case that vulnerabilities are discovered in these plugins and hackers blindly test your website to see if you have the certain plugin installed.

Update your WordPress site

It goers without saying that you should also keep up to take with WordPress updates. Updating is straight forward (or you can hire us to update it for you), but you do need to check if everything is still working once you update. We do a run through of a website’s main features, like checking the contact form, search functions, commenting , etc.

WordPress powers over 20% of the internet, and for this reason it’s an interesting attack vector for hackers.

Cleaning WordPress

If your website has been hacked, the first step is to change your password, and to check to see if any extra users have been added to your site. Dashboard > Users > All Users.

Check to see if there are any new plugins that you don’t recognise. Plugins > Installed Plugins

Often these hacks will add some extra files to your WordPress installation. The easiest thing to do is to re-upload a safe version of WordPress. We recommend that you delete the contents of /wp-admin/ & /wp-includes/ (often there are rough files named ‘admin.php‘ , ‘options.php‘ that might be here. Delete all the PHP files in your main directory except for wp-config.php.

Check file edit dates

If you know your way around an FTP client, it’s worth checking folders. Keep an eye out for files that have an unusual update date. Generally your WordPress files should all have a similar update date, where as rogue files will probably have been added at a different time.

Check your /wp-content/ folder for any extra files. It should only contact 1 file, index.php & subfolders /plugins/, /themes/, /upgrade/ & /upload/ check these for files that have been edited or added at strange times.

In /wp-content/themes/ you should remove any themes that you no longer need. You should also check  the contents of these files for PHP code the has hidden what it does search for functions like ‘base64_decode’ or ‘eval’. 

Use WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin

WordPress Exploit Scanner is a useful plugin that will perform many of the steps we’ve highlighted above. It will also check the database that runs your site. We recommend that you run this on a regular basis.

WordPress is a great platform to use for websites, but like any software it needs to be maintained. Failing to keep the software up-to-date means that your website is more likely to be compromised which may result in you having to take your website offline for a bit of time to fix.

After applying for a ticket, but not wanting to pay the €2,750 ticket price, I watched quite a few of the presentations online. I also had a bit of extra time on my hands this week as I sliced open my hand on Saturday and got 6 stitches ! Here are a few of my favourite talks that I saw and are definitely worth checking out, if you have any talks you particularly liked do share them in the comments.

Bill Gross at DLD

I really liked Bills statistics based approach into looking why some businesses are successful and some are not.

Andrew Keen with Mike Butcher at DLD

This is a lively discussion between Andrew and Mike who talk about where the world is now with the internet. Andrew is calling for a regulation on the internet, for the good of the whole society. “What about the Arab Spring?”

Scott Galloway at DLD

Scott looks at the future of Amazon/Apple/Facebook & Google. How online shops will need to look at physical stores in the future. How social media is shifting to more visual networks and how Google’s share in search is declining and shifting to Facebook. One of my favourite quotes was “Google glass is not a wearable, it’s a prophylactic”.

Stewart Butterfield at DLD

The founder of SLACK [slack.com] talks about the future of work. He talks about how their timing has been key to their success, and how short messaging is the future for sharing information.

Oliver Samwer at DLD

My first time watching one of the Samwer brothers speak, and I must say, compare to what you hear about them in many media outlets, the guys seems to be quite reasonable. He talks about the recent IPO, life and some of Rocket Internet’s approaches to launching products.

Max Levchin at DLD

Max talked about his company Affirm www.affirm.com, a company that wants to revolutionise banking. One of their first products can offer fixed rate loans for online purchases right at the shopping cart stage of buying.
{video not yet available}

Our limited-edition @thenovogratz family blanket is available for exclusive pre-sale on Twitter. Offer ends today! http://t.co/7FQmzDsFvG

— Old Navy Official (@OldNavy) December 2, 2014

into

now there is an added button to buy the product. Clicking on it shows the user a dedicated shopping page for the promoted product.

and selecting the buy now button brings you to a beautiful Stripe implementation.

Twitter shopping on mobile

After checking via a VPN (www.vpn.ie), on iOS 8, it appears that these offers are only showing on desktop clients.

The future of shopping

Shopping couldn’t be easier.

Of course the question is how strongly will these tweets be promoted, and whether people are in the shopping mood when they are on twitter. Either way it will be interesting to see where this could go. For brands that are seeing decreasing returns with Facebook ads & Google AdWords, we are sure they will start to test the ROI of such ads.

We guess that these ads are generate via twitter product cards and promoted via their advertising centre.

• something that’s short – the longer it is the more likely they will misspell it. Shorter URLS are just more memorable.
• makes logical sense – that the domain name doesn’t have dashes in it (unless you are German). Or you should at least register versions with and without dashes.
• is spelt the way you expected – spellings like kidz with a z instead of an s seems to be unnecessary complicated
• without numbers, i.e. is it 1916.ie or nineteensixteen.ie ? take2.ie or taketwo.ie or taketoo.ie ?

Choose wisely

In all of these cases, if you have a ambiguous domain name you should consider also buying the plausible alternatives. For example I own dog.ie (singular) and dogs.ie (plural), and I redirect users to the plural of the website. This year alone, over 1,000 visitors will come via the the singular of the domain. The fee to keep the domain live, is a lot less than I would pay for ads to get the same amount of visitors.

Register a .IE or .COM or .whatever ?

We are still in a world where .COM is king, if it’s possible to get the .COM you want, I would keep it simple and just go for that. In the case that it’s not being actively used I would approach the owner with an offer to buy the domain from them. It may be smart to go through a broker if you want to avoid that the seller will bump up the price because someone at a corporate enterprise wants to buy the domain.

If the case is that someone is already using the domain for a business elsewhere, I would make sure that you are not infringing on other business’ trademarks. Do a search with the USPTO and WIPO.

If your business is primarily in Ireland, and only attracts Irish customers, then just a .IE is also another way of getting a nice, short, brand-able domain name.

Covering your brand

If options exist to purchase alternatives like the .NET / .ORG / .IE for your .COM I would also recommend that you do this. It’s much cheaper and less stress to pay a few €uro’s every year to register these, than having to fight someone legally to get possession of these domains.

Other strategies to keep in mind

You should also buy familiar alternatives to the domain. For example if one of the words is spelt differently in the US and in Ireland, then you should have both, i.e. colourlovers.com & colorlovers.com.

There are a number of new, niche Top Level Domains, like .pub , .wiki , .club, that have recently been started which might suit your business needs better.

Startups are now using .co & .io with a lot of success. But you should keep in mind about the results that return for searching for your name plus the .COM.

Some other thoughts

Your domain is something that you are going to be (hopefully) using for a long time. Spending a bit of time and effort up front to research a good domain name might save you pain at a later stage.

Buying a domain name at a premium like can also help reinforce your brand. One Irish example is the sale of Teamwork.com for €500,000 last year. With a purchase like this they are clearly putting themselves out in the forefront of the project management software world.

3 ways to find nice .IE domains

The IEDR publishes a list that’s updated daily at 1pm GMT of recent dropped .IE domains. The list can be a bit unmanageable as there can be hundreds listed in there.

You can also take a look at dropped.ie a site provided by Blacknight.com, which is searchable by keyword and by length of a domain name.

I tweet some of the nicer dropped .IE domains with the hashtag #IEDRop
#IEDRop Tweets

So there you have it some tips to get you started on your search for a domain name. if you have any other tips, then please share them in the comments.

• helping to bunch certain pages together that are actually the same. Like query parameters that sort results on a page.
• security :  to anonymise user data & their parameters
• cleaning up views and goals to make them easier to track

Here’s an example of a clients messy Google Analytics account.

An unnecessarily messy GA view

Removing URL parameters

You can find this setting under

Admin > View > View Settings >> Exclude URL Query Parameters

One quick tip

One thing to keep in mind in Google Analytics is that you should have a comma and space between individual parameters. For some reason without the space it won’t work.

When it comes to removing parameters you should aim to remove as little as possible as you don’t know when you will need them in the future !

Another thing to also observe is if you suddenly get a traffic spike. Maybe you’ve done something particularly well with respect to SEO or you have gotten a new bit of coverage that’s sending you lots of traffic. Tweaking your website to take advantage of these traffic spikes can help you capitalise on this new found traffic better. It may be as simple as adding a graphic or text along the lines of ‘if you’ve come looking for product X that was featured on TV, click here to view it’. Small changes like this can dramatically improve your conversion rate.

Here’s a trick I’ve been using for a few years, which has alerted me to both positive and negative traffic changes faster than I would have realised.

Google Analytics Custom Alerts

1) To get started with your Custom Alerts go to your Admin panel on Google Analytics

Admin Google Anlaytics

Admin >> View

Custom Alerts

Alerts listing

Alerts setting

I select that I want to compare it to the same day from the previous week. This is important in the case that you have significantly different traffic levels during the week compared with the weekend. You can also consider adding weekly or monthly alerts also, but if you do I would also keep the daily monitoring active as well.

And as a bonus I also have created an alert if the traffic grows more than 20% in one day too. You can of course change these numbers, personally I would keep them between the 10%-30% range, but it’s best to test this out for yourself.

I’ve planned to do these for two weeks at a time, with the ultimate goal of it being that I would then tend to keep the new habits up once the time period is done. Creating better habits is the goal of this, but to do it in such a way that it’s fun to do and easy enough that it can be achieved without too much effort. My focus so far has been mostly daily challenges, but I guess this can be done with less frequent ones too.

I think that I’m more likely to give up if it’s not fun or quirky, and if it takes too much time, it will just be delayed until the end of the day. The net result of doing these little things is that you feel better for having accomplished some little task, for doing something thats put you in a better place.

tracking my 6 glasses of water consumption a day

G-G-T-T-R-R

• G – Goal – set your realistic mini-goal
• G – Go – and do it, and have fun doing it if possible.
• T – Tell – tell people about what you are doing. The act of telling someone else builds in accountability and ultimately you are more likely to be successful if you’ve told someone what you plan.
• T – Track – have a piece of paper on your desk or somewhere that you can track your progress
• R – Result – finish out your goal, don’t be distracted if you fail to hit your daily target, just start off again the following day. But make sure you get the result you want.
• R – repeat – repeat the challenge, and repeat with other challenges.

You can pronounce this like get’r

Challenges I’ve done so far:

• do more exercise
• drink more water (see image above)
• avoid social media sites and only check them at specific times
• learn something new each day
• enjoy a proper breakfast
• take time to do something just for myself every day

I don’t think you  to do more than one challenge concurrently, in fact I would say just do one at a time and achieve it. You may find yourself incorporating little parts of these changes into your life just as a bit of habit. The idea here is to build better habits.  

If you have any suggestions of mini-challenges, I’d love to heard it in the comments on on twitter @paulsavage.

apachetop in action

This evening in my search to see what was causing the latest traffic spike, I came across this article which showed a great way to check all domains on a Plesk server at the same time.

So I was able to see what was sending 40+ requests a second & block them via my firewall. Of course I checked to see if it was legitimate traffic.

To install apachettop

to install apachettop you can do it via

• yum install apachetop
• sudo apt-get install apachetop

Block bad IP addresses

to block via .htaccess file you could do something like
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} ^37\.59\.71 [OR] RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} ^188\.165\.13
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.fuckoff.com/$1 [R=301,L]
which would lock all IP addresses starting with 37.59.71 or 188.165.13 and send them to the domain fuckoff.com. You should probably send them to a domain that doesn’t actually exist, so not to overly burden another website with your unwanted traffic.

Include text & hash tag

If you block Twitter you are not ready to be a member of the #EU. #cdupt14 #withJuncker #EP2014 pic.twitter.com/42fIUzNcO3

— Jean-Claude Juncker (@JunckerEU) April 5, 2014

Here is a great example, it adds a hash tag text as well as the text content of the tweet.

http://t.co/hK5lh2Ouq3 just revealed his latest project: a smartwatch. http://t.co/oUn36FF1TB pic.twitter.com/gFO7OwETq4

— Mashable (@mashable) April 5, 2014

Here an image isn’t really necessary, but by being there it catches the readers eye better.

Other times to use images

Images in your tweets can also be useful in other situations. For example, it’s not a good idea to link directly to something when:

• the link might not be safe
• it’s likely to be removed in the future

Here are two such examples.

Great to see that twitter added a safety notice about dodgy links pic.twitter.com/LzOJNggJB0

— Paul (@paulsavage) April 3, 2014

.@DCMS responsible for "making sure press, digital, broadcast and mobile services are….responsibly managed" #fail pic.twitter.com/ffVFWJmg3J

— Luciana Berger (@lucianaberger) April 5, 2014

How many images ?

Since last week twitter has now enabled tweets with up to 4 images in them.

Test tweet with 4 images. pic.twitter.com/cEtvb76YHl

— Paul (@paulsavage) April 5, 2014

Note : For some reason, right now you can only add 4 images on their iPhone application and not on the web application.

Twitter Cards

Twitter also has the facility to add extra information into your tweets. By specifying extra META information on your webpages, when they are tweeted you may see some extra information in the tweet.

blog : make yourself more retweetable http://t.co/9aC6CTJuzI

— Paul (@paulsavage) April 4, 2014

For more on this check out Twitter Cards documentation.

4 retweetable tips

• When tweeting links include authors twitter handles
• When mentioning brands include their twitter handle
• When sharing links mention the twitter handle of how you saw it
• When sharing another tweet add your own commentary on it. Instead of just clicking the RT button, use a quote instead

By taking these steps you are more likely that someone will re-share (what twitter is in the process of renaming retweets to.

Twitter planning on calling Retweeting just sharing ?? pic.twitter.com/MRBAGXMyqy

— Paul (@paulsavage) April 2, 2014

Having other people share your tweets is one of the fastest ways to to grow your twitter audience. Of course it goes without saying that you should really only share things that you yourself are actually interested in.

Some of my examples

This DevOps job has been seen 200+ times in just 3 days https://t.co/6RICh2YGUP on @irishjobsHQ its free to post your salary jobs #jobfairy

— Paul (@paulsavage) April 4, 2014

RT @mneylon: Half day Facebook & Twitter workshop with @Blacknight & @damienmulley in Carlow http://t.co/QPR6kC0twy on 9/4/14

— Paul (@paulsavage) April 4, 2014

Mobile apps cash: Freemium is king, but in-app ads are growing fast http://t.co/2wctScZoz5 > the future of mobile apps ? cc @donal_cahalane

— Paul (@paulsavage) April 2, 2014

]]> http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/quick-twitter-tip/feed/ 0 http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/ultimate-seo-guide/ http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/ultimate-seo-guide/#respond Tue, 01 Apr 2014 07:57:55 +0000 http://www.blackdog.ie/?p=1154 From time to time we do some SEO consultancy, and to help some of our customers we’ve put a guide together, an e-book that outlines the main way you can get some extra traffic for your website. We’ve put this e-book available free for download, but we would love a tweet or a like if you’ve found the book useful.

Download our Ultimate SEO Guide

SEO-guide 4.9MB / version 1.1

Share

If you know other people who should read this, then please share !

Getting some great early feedback on my SEO ebook http://t.co/tfiK3Iv4qS >> it's free to download.

— Paul (@paulsavage) April 1, 2014

What other people are saying

@paulsavage the best SEO guide of the year so far

— Gianni Ponzi (@gianniponzi) April 1, 2014

enlightening @paulsavage =)

— Niall Ó Gribín (@nogribin) April 1, 2014

Het leven zoals het is -> "Free Ultimate SEO Guide" by @paulsavage : http://t.co/3e36i7pk4M #SEO #eBook #Download

— Dave Lorrez (E-tail) (@davelorrez) April 1, 2014

Great – I read it all at once! RT @paulsavage: Getting some great early feedback on my SEO ebook http://t.co/D2z09YVetl

— Oliver Zenglein (@oliverzenglein) April 1, 2014

@paulsavage Amazing book. Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down

— Dylan Varian (@dylanvarian) April 1, 2014

@paulsavage Excellent guide Paul! Easy to read, understand and implement! I give it 4 stars!

— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) April 1, 2014

]]> http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/ultimate-seo-guide/feed/ 0 http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/delete-wordpress-revisions/ http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/delete-wordpress-revisions/#respond Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:38:13 +0000 http://www.blackdog.ie/?p=1143 Here is another quick code snippet that might help you clean up your database a little. As you may know WordPress saves copies (actually diff’s) of your posts, so that you can easily roll back to a certain version of a page if make a mistake. Overtime this might get to be quite a bit of data, especially for large sites.

I tend to do this when launching a new site, as there might be placeholder information that might confuse people if seen.

Query to delete WordPress revisions

If you run the following query, all previous stored revisions will be removed from the wp_posts table.
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";


Delay autosave interval

WordPress by default will auto save your post every 60 seconds, you can extend this by editing wp-config.php file in your root folder of your WordPress install. The following code will push this interval to 5 minutes.
define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300 ); // seconds


Disable post revisions

Should you want to disable post revisions completely (not that we recommend it) you can add this line to your wp-config.php file.
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

]]> http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/delete-wordpress-revisions/feed/ 0 http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/robots-txt-wordpress/ http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/robots-txt-wordpress/#respond Tue, 11 Mar 2014 09:11:07 +0000 http://www.blackdog.ie/?p=1135 Currently I’m doing some research for BloggingSupport.com, a product that will manage people’s websites that run WordPress. One of the interesting problems I’ve seen from clients sites, and my own, is that content that can easily be blocked by a robots.txt file, simply isn’t.

This can lead to a whole host of problems including:

• sensitive content being indexed that shouldn’t
• back links given from your site to plugin authors
• negative SEO attacks
• duplicate content from search pages issues
• high number of indexed pages with thin content

It’s best practice to have such a file and I recommend you add one.

robots.txt example

Note : This example assumes that your blog is in the root folder of your domain.


User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ # prevents backlinks in plugin folders
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /search/ # prevents search queries being indexed
Disallow: /*?s

You can see our robots.txt file here http://www.blackdog.ie/robots.txt.

To install a robots.txt, simply put a file with this name in the root folder of your domain.

Google indexing robots.txt

If you do a search on google from [site:mydomain.com] and your robots.txt or sitemape.xml file appear high in the results, you may want to discourage google from indexing those pages too. The difference here is that you want them to be read & process by google, just not indexed to appear in the search results.

]]> http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/robots-txt-wordpress/feed/ 0 http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/questions-to-ask-clients/ http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/questions-to-ask-clients/#respond Tue, 14 Jan 2014 09:10:47 +0000 http://www.blackdog.ie/?p=1098 Before starting off a new project it’s important to know what the client wants and to make sure they have thought out some of the fundamental key points in their project. I’ve had numerous versions of this template over the years, and here is the current version of it. I try to ask about the goals, funding and deliverables while also trying to find out about the market and current stack. I try to find out as quick as possible if it is a project I can do or not, as I don’t want to waste either their and my time.

Most of my inquiries come via referrals, so there are multiple relationships that need to be maintained. For this reason I try to get back to each inquiry with 12 hours.

Knowing these key answers will help you see if you can actually help a client like this, and whether their goals are realistic. Depending on the size of your business you may not want to take on a €1,000 contract, or balk at the idea of doing €100,000+ projects.

Choosing a client

Whether it’s a family member, a friend or a corporation, I try to ask the same questions. To get them in the mindset that it’s a business transaction. Some clients want more training on a system, or want you to be onsite, while others just want the product done & delivered. Most of of initial requests come with very little information on the project, and for this reason you will need to delve deeper into the details.

Client questions

I make a point of letting the potential client know that this is a general email, as it may not be the case that all the questions apply.

Can you tell me a little more about the project so I can know if my skill set works with this. Here are some general questions I ask all clients before we start:

• Can you tell me a little more about the goals of the web project ?
  • It’s for web traffic & sales
  • It’s a branding exercise
  • It should deliver support
  • It should this X audience / Y market
  • Other
• Do you have a planned date for the project ?
• Is there a specific budget you are looking to come in under ? And do you plan for maintenance after the project is complete.
• Is is updating an existing system ? If so please can you tell me a little more about it.
  • How long is the current version live
  • What are the particular limitations of it / known issues you’d like to fix
  • Can you send me the URL and login details for it ?
• Do you have in-house expertise to run the website after it’s launched (technical, copywriting, graphic design, etc.) or do you need support or help finding someone.

If you would like to arrange a call this week we try to work something out.

Right now my schedule is a little hectic, so I’m not sure if I can help you, but once I know more about the project I we can see if it fits both my skill set and your expectations.

I also put a clear call to action about moving to a phone call, once I know the basics of the project, talking on the phone (or better face to face) can help you gauge the interest of a client and perhaps they can tell you some details over the phone that they can’t put in writing.

The closing line offers both parties an opt-out in case they feel that their expectations fail to match.

Do you have any other questions you would ask ? Please let me know in the comments.

My Status

One final note, that this post isn’t a call for clients, in fact I display my status about looking for work on my homepage. This again helps to save both my time and a potential clients’ time.

]]> http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/questions-to-ask-clients/feed/ 0 http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/testing-email-subjects/ http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/testing-email-subjects/#respond Wed, 08 Jan 2014 08:29:04 +0000 http://www.blackdog.ie/?p=1076

our email newsletter

Yesterday we ran an interesting email campaign, we decided to add some A/B testing into it in order to optimise for ’email openings’. The title of this site is “Smarter IT” and we wanted to apply that to how we send our emails. You should be watching closely the percentage of opens to your campaigns. With MailChimp you are able to run A/B tests to a subset of your list, and depending on the results you can automatically send the better performing one to the rest of the list. By default MailChimp recommends you send the two versions to 25% of your list, and send the remaining amount to the better performing version. Sadly these A/B campaigns only differ in respect to the email subject and you can only test 2 subjects at a time. 

Why are you sending emails ?

We had recently relaunched JobsInIreland.org and we thought it would be a good time to touch base with all our previous customers. We’re not in the business of sending a lot of emails just for the sake of it. When we send a campaign we want to provide some real value to our customers. Before sending any email campaign I encourage you to think about your main goal(s) for sending it. If you are repeating yourself from a previous email, it’s better not to insult your reader for assuming they didn’t read your first email. If it can be merge with a later email, then you are probably better off just wait and to join the two emails together.

There is a balance, as you want to make something short enough and too the point, so that the users’ attention is held, and they will perform the actions you want. Wasting customers time is one sure way they will hit that dreaded ‘unsubscribe button‘, and after going to the trouble of getting them on your list, you want to keep them there for as long as possible. Open and unsubscribe rates are two of the main quality factors in your list, you may need to reconsider your email campaigns if there is a sudden dip in this quality.

Sending an email campaign is one sure way to get people to unsubscribe from your list. People generally don’t search back in their emails 3 weeks to fish out your email to click the unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing is a quick gut action, and it’s the harsh reality every time you send an email.

We highlighted the following 4 main objectives for our email:

1. to inform the user about our website relaunch
2. to let them know about our new monthly jobs tips newsletter
3. give them a special offer code
4. get them to post their current job openings

Our goal was to do all this in under 300 words (in fact we managed only 232 words).

A/B Email Subjects

Our two subjects were:

• JobsInIreland.org has relaunched
• JobsInIreland.org has closed

Here we wanted to have a stark contrast between the titles, one showing something more positive than the other. You could say it was more to shock the audience, but at the end of the day, you want people to open the email, and take action and hopefully interact a little.

A/B Email Results

Sending them to over 200 users we got

• JobsInIreland.org has relaunched – 24.8% open rate
• JobsInIreland.org has closed – 31.1% open rate

While it’s not a significant difference, on our list size this should result in an extra 40 users opening the email, when the rest of the list receives it.

Further stats

Digging further into the numbers I can see that users who opened the email about us being closed, where 87% more likely to click a link email where we said we had closed. So it’s just not the fact that someone opens, it’s clear here that the users’ interest has been has been piqued.

A/B testing is a game of inches, little changes can make a small difference, but ultimately they will pay off and have an effect on your bottom line.

If you need help making your email campaigns a little more awesome our email campaign help might be the thing for you.

]]> http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/testing-email-subjects/feed/ 0 http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/nissan-trying-new-ads/ http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/nissan-trying-new-ads/#respond Tue, 07 Jan 2014 15:44:53 +0000 http://www.blackdog.ie/?p=1082 This video shows a great example of how Nissan targeted ads based on search results for a house hunting portal in Dubai. What’s smart here is that they identified similar problems that user had at the same time, namely a new car and a new house, when moving to Dubai. Putting these together they were able to get many more people agree to take a test drive while looking for a new home.

]]> http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/nissan-trying-new-ads/feed/ 0