I’ve just heard that StudioPress are raising the price of their Pro Plus subscription on 31 January 2012.  I always wondered when this would happen.  These themes have become so popular and have proven to be the best range of WordPress premium themes that I could find.

The current price for the Pro Plus package; which includes all 44 StudioPress child themes, plus every child theme design they make in the future, is only $299.95.   There’s a 10% discount if you purchase through my affiliate link and use the promo code TEN.

Click here to order (and don’t forget promo code TEN)!

Discount is only valid until Monday 30th January 2012.

I used the StudioPress child themes for all of the sites I’ve developed over the past 2 years.  The Trident Hotel site shown here uses a customed StudioPress Genesis child theme.  The themes are easy to use and the folks at StudioPress provide great support.

The above article was original published at Discount on WordPress Premium Themes from StudioPress on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

Usually I am tweeting about bad email marketing examples I see in my Inbox, but today I am delighted to share a good example!

I coach my clients to plan interactions with their prospects and customers  (whether by email, phone or social media – depending on the situation) at many points along the way: first interaction, meetings (planned or casual), point of sale, after sale and hopefully return business. Email marketing is a great tool for after sales follow-up.

I booked a hotel stay via SuperValu Getaway Breaks and the day after my return, I received an email “Welcome back – we hope you enjoyed your break”. It was personalised (nearly) perfectly with my name, address and the location of my break. It ended with a nice “We hope to see you again soon”.

The downside is that the body of the message boringly recapped the way the Getaway Breaks programme works, which I know because I just went on one. OK, I said ‘good example’ not ‘perfect example’.

How could this have been a perfect follow up?

• Invite me to their Facebook Page, which I know they have, and any other social channels they may have, to comment about my trip, maybe even post pictures, etc.
• Give details about some of the other breaks on offer for Easter, Summer, etc. that I may be starting to plan for now for return sales opportunities. If you are selling a product this is a good chance to sell accessories and other related or similar products, etc.
• Ask if I had any feedback — link to a survey or feedback form. Your customers want to be heard and want to think that you care about how they feel about your business. Even though they know that, really, your priority is to get more business from them; they are more likely to give business to a company that takes on board their feedback.

Many businesses don’t ask for feedback because they are afraid of what they’ll hear or assume that people will tell them without being asked, but in most cases if you don’t ask you won’t get it.  I stayed in a hotel last week and I filled out 3 different comment cards that were provided to me — with positive and negative, but honest, feedback on the hotel in general, the spa, restaurant, etc. (As a person who works in customer service and who deals with hotel owners and management, I know that they do want to get the feedback directly so was thorough in my comments.)  For the trip related to this email, I provided no feedback to the hotel.  There were no cards supplied and no follow-up email, yet.

The main reason for asking for feedback early on, is so that you can address any bad points early on — before they make it on TripAdvisor, some other review website or all around town – or social media channels – via word of mouth.

Because SuperValu Getaway Breaks has all customers in their database with contact details and dates of breaks, it is easy for them to automate this kind of follow-up. Smaller businesses may have to do this manually, but as it is easier/cheaper/more effective to market to existing customers so very much worth doing manually or setting up an automated system.

Get the wording and tone right.  Don’t appear greedy or that you are sending this just to sell, sell, sell.  By asking to post on Facebook or complete a survey, you have a good excuse for getting in touch.

Get your timing right. In this case I thought it was nice to get the message the day after my return and, if they asked for feedback or had a survey, the information would be fresh in my mind. Their push for me to book more breaks when I still haven’t unpacked from this one is a bit lost at this point.  Another email in a few months — or if they had enticed me specifically for a break in the future, I may have had a look at the site.  If you are selling a product that wears out or offers an upgrade, these are good times to follow-up. The timing will depend on your product/service and your clients.  As I always say, you need to know your target market and what is right for them.

Regular newsletters or newsletters that you publish when you have news or special offers can do very well for you, but an email that is perfectly timed based on customer/prospect interactions will be the best tool for for your business as it will work much better at building community, getting feedback and driving repeat sales.

Do you use email marketing for after sales follow-up? or other events related to specific interactions with your clients?  What system do you use to automate these messages?

The above article was original published at Email Marketing for After Sales Follow-Up — and other important points of interaction on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

I’ve just signed up for RescueTime, which is a time management application that sits on your computer and monitors your activity and provides reports on your productivity.  You start by indicating which activities you consider productive and which non-productive and it uses this information to rate your activity as you go along.  You can also set up alerts if you spend more than a certain amount of time doing something unproductive.

As I said, I’ve just started, so I am not sure if this really is going to have an impact on my own productivity, but I thought it sounded like a useful application and was worth trying out with the current 50% discount which got me a 1 year for $36.

If it turns out to be useful, I’ll be upgrading to a business account and setting it up on all the computers.  I don’t want to go all “Big Brother” on the staff – no one has given us any reason to worry – but I do think it’s important to see how much time is being spent on what activities/applications. Besides giving insight into individual productivity, it will also be a good way to evaluate the applications you are using and to see if you may need to replace some with more effective/efficient applications.

Click here to check out RescueTime via my referral link
& get 50% off (good until 6 January 2012)

Have you tried RescueTime or another time management application?  How has it worked for you?

The above article was original published at RescueTime, Trying Out This Powerful Time Management Application on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

Any regular user of WordPress knows that you can customise your URLs under Settings – Permalinks in the control panel.  Here you can indicate to use the post/page title for the pages URL (aka slug) which is more SEO and user friendly. There are still some limitations, particularly when you have sub pages and WordPress insists on including the parent page slug in your URL.  If you have sub-sub-pages etc. the URL then gets very long. (i.e. http://e-business.ie/parent-page/sub-page/sub-sub-page).

I’ve looked and looked for a way to change WordPress or theme settings to avoid these lengthy URLs but it seems the only way around this is using the Custom Permalink WordPress Plugin.  When using this plugin you have complete control over the slugs for pages, posts and category archive pages. Just install the plugin and you will then have more control over editing post/page slugs on the edit screen, in the usual area to do this under the Title.  There will be a new option for this when adding/editing a category.

When using this plugin, you still need to customise the URLs via WordPress’s own Permalink settings, but you will then be able to customise the slugs further via this plugin.

This is particularly handy when you enable the Network function for WordPress using sub-domain.  If your site has been set up for awhile before you do this, it automatically adds “/blog” to your posts to avoid any conflict with the network pages using the subdomain.  If your site is indexed by Google you don’t want all your urls to change suddenly.  You’d need to change each post/page, which could be tedious.

Do you use the Custom Permalink WordPress plugin, or do you use another plugin or technique to control permalinks to the extent that you need?  Please comment here if you have any experience in this area.

The above article was original published at Custom Permalink WordPress Plugin on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

Great news today! Nimble CRM now includes integration of Facebook Pages and Google+ so you can monitor your contacts’ interactions in all of the key social channels.

You can add your Facebook Page under Networks and monitor activity on your page while you are in Nimble via its own tab or in the ‘All’ stream with your other networks – Twitter, LinkedIn and personal Facebook account. One downside is that you can only add one Facebook Page, as far as I can see, but remember Nimble is brand new and I think that all of these features will be tweaked and probably not too far in the future.

You can also indicate Google+ accounts for your contacts and now see all interactions they have on Google+. The downside is this — it makes it even more obvious when your connections post the same thing across all their networks all the time.  Bo-ring people! Also, there isn’t a Google+ tab to monitor activity.

CLICK HERE TO START USING NIMBLE TODAY! 
No credit card required. 
Simply complete this single step!

The above article was original published at Facebook Pages and Google+ Integration for Nimble CRM on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

I am very excited to announce our new partnership with Nimble, the next generation of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications. Nimble brings together not only the contact details of your current email contact list and your social media connections, it allows you to view conversations from your email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all in one panel.  Then you can set tasks, reply, whatever you need to do to move that conversation to a sale for your business!

Since I started managing social media campaigns, our own as well as for clients, I felt the one thing that kept us from making sales rather than just networking, was the missing link between our existing CRM with prospect information and all the data online for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I searched and searched for a solution to this.

We first tried SugarCRM which had no social media focus at the time, then they added a Twitter account field which was populated from the name field — with a space between the first and last names.  They obviously did not understand social.  You can imagine my emails between support on that topic.  What burned me was that they made me feel like a troublesome, ignorant client and didn’t seem to feel that this was an important issue. After two years with SugarCRM we never had our data in and clean as it wasn’t as integrated with existing systems so always an extra chore for someone.

Then we tried SalesForce.  Now it was just a trial, so I may not be the best judge of the system, but can only tell of my experience in relation to what I wanted from the system. I hadn’t considered SalesForce before because it was more expensive, but when I was looking for an alternative to Sugar, there was a cheaper option. (I missed the small print that it was a special offer price, so after awhile the cost would go up — Sugar did the same thing.) Of course, with the cheaper option you don’t get all of the features that you really would need to use your CRM properly.  I decided to give it a try as I had heard that they were adding social networking channels into the mix, but in my trial I couldn’t find this. So again frustrated after setting up the trial, uploading data, etc.

We had recently switched to using Google Apps with GMail as our main email application.  I use other Google products heavily and we were looking for ways to reduce cost and also reduce the drag on our computers that applications like Outlook do. Frustrated from my interactions with these CRM applications — and especially the sales reps from these companies, I looked to see if there was a product that worked with Google apps that could at least help with sharing contact information across members of our team.

That’s when I found Nimble, which at the time was still in Beta with only a few of the features it has now.  When I saw that it would truly integrate the information from my social networking contacts with the existing business contacts — and give the ability to share with the team — I was over the moon.  I signed up for a trial straight away.  I couldn’t wait to set up the account and upload and integrate the contacts, so excited to see all the information in once place!  The interface was so easy! When I did have a question their support team was back to me very quickly and when I shouted out to them on Twitter, they were so cool too.  I had a chat with Founder/CEO Jon Ferrara about his family connections to Cork — and that he better set up his EMEA office in Cork when the time comes! All of the Nimble team are on Twitter and LinkedIn, showing that they really get what social media is all about.

I knew I had made the right decision when I was able to get access to the new features they would be rolling out in the full version of Nimble with more control over sharing, better views of conversations and ability to make tasks out of them. When I started with the Beta version it was all free (which was a great incentive for me to try it), but with the roll out of the full version in January 2012 it will still be free for a single user, but $15/month/user for a multi-user account.  Still not a bad price for a solution that is really going to increase your sales.

After a couple of conversations with the Nimble team I have signed up as a Solutions Partner, marrying up my social media marketing expertise with this excellent product.  I only partner with and recommend products that I use and truly believe in and I believe in Nimble and that using Nimble will improve the effectiveness of social media campaigns. What’s even more exciting is that this is just the beginning for Nimble and as the first real SocialCRM product there will be new features rolling out.  I will be sure to provide my feedback and suggestions along the way.

To get more results for your business from your social media activities, I recommend that you sign up for the free single user account and you will see how great it us, then upgrade to multi-user to share across your team.

Click here to view more about Nimble Social CRM

The above article was original published at Nimble Social CRM – A New Partnership for Real Results with Social Media Marketing on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

Coder Dojo Christmas Party
Cork Coder Dojo
NSC Campus, Mahon, Cork
17th December, from 11:30am

Asking all attending to bring something to share, but….
Pizza sponsorsed by Dominos Douglas Village!
(if you are interested in sponsoring something, leave a comment below)

Hopefully you’ve read my post about Coder Dojo and what a great initiative it is for kids and the others involved – mentors, parents, supporters.  Well, attendence and support is growing and growing and to celebrate we are having a Christmas party and inviting all interested.

So if you have been thinking about coming in with your kids, or dropping by to help as a mentor, this is s great chance to stop in and meet the gang.  I know it’s a busy time, but we’re right next to Mahon Point Shopping Centre.

Dojos have opened all over the country and spreading abroad, but it all started in Cork and we’re getting great support from the local tech community – from Hackerspace to Cork Open Coffee and other contacts that James and Bill and others involved have got in.  The kids have done a lot of great things – not just Harry Moran making headlines as Apple’s youngest app developer, but the start of many more games and websites — and budding tech giants.

We are asking everyone to bring something to share, but are really pleased that Dominos in Douglas Village  is sponsoring pizza — many thanks to Cathal McDonnell for that!  If anyone else is interested in sponsoring any goodies, please leave a post below.

Unfortunately our regular mentor Will Knott cannot attend because he’s doing a carol-athon in Dublin this weekend.  We’ll miss you Will!

I believe that children are our future, treat them well and, well you know how the song goes.

Hope to see you on Saturday! Hey, anybody got a karaoke app?!

The above article was original published at Have Yourself a #coderdojoxmas! on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/

Internet experts and analysts have been prophetizing for years that the next big thing will be the mobile web.  2011 is the year that this has finally become a reality. The iPhone brought about mobiles with the facilities of a desktop computer and more. Cheaper android phones brought this to the masses.

A larger and larger percentage of people will be viewing your website from their mobile phones.  Have you checked to see what your own site looks like on a mobile.  Many sites today will look fine on a mobile phone or tablet, but is it fully functional and easy to use? In many cases posts will be awkward to read or it will be nearly impossible to post a comment.

On the last redesign of this blog, moving it into WordPress, I moved the sidebars to the right so that mobile users didn’t need to always scroll over to get to the main content.  Even with this change, users would still need to resize and scroll to read a post.

I noticed a few WordPress sites that had a completely different format when viewed on a mobile. The format was perfectly suited to the mobile screen and made it easier to read and navigate.  I researched how this was done and found on Google+ from Chris Brogan, who also uses the Genesis Theme Framework, that he was using WPtouch.

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to touch mobile visitors, without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.

The theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WPtouch view and your site’s regular theme.

There is also a Pro version that I haven’t tried yet. Prices are from $39 for a single site on up for multiple sites and developers licences. The Pro version includes an iPad friendly version as well. You can see the details at http://www.bravenewcode.com/wptouch-pro

The above article was original published at WPtouch Makes WordPress Sites Mobile Friendly on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/

Back in June we held a social media conference here in West Cork and one of the speakers was a man I had met a year before at another conference.  He looked like a different person – had lost a bit of weight and, although he had good energy before, it seemed even stronger in him at this meeting. He had been tweeting about his weight loss, so I thought it was OK to mention it and he merely said, “Four Hour Body” and that was it.  So I went off and researched and found that there was a diet sensation I hadn’t heard about the “4-Hour Body” devised by Tim Ferriss who had previously had great success with his book “4-Hour Workweek”.

I’m still struggling with the “4-Hour Body”, but I found a copy of “4-Hour Workweek” in a local bookstore and have been reading every spare moment I have.

The premise of the book is that you shouldn’t wait until retirement to take the time to follow your dreams.  You can make the time to do it now.  There are specific tips and strategies to make your work more efficient, as well as independent of time and place; so that you could work just 4 hours a week and be so successful that you can do whatever you dream of doing in your new spare time.

Ferriss has done this himself so is one of the main case studies, but he gives examples of many others.   The newest edition is updated to include even more case studies that he has heard of since the book was first published.  This is beneficial because he is a young, single man who is particularly driven; and now there are examples of people with different lifestyles that have used this strategy with success.

I’ve been suggesting this book to my clients and in presentations I’m giving on setting out an online marketing plan because he provides great advice on working more efficiently.  So even if you aren’t looking to get down to a 4-hour workweek, you can still be more efficient in your work and get more profits as well.  The two main points (and I’m only about half way through the book) that I feel will help anyone with their own businesses:

• Analyse your list of clients and determine which are the most profitable and which are the most trouble (likely to be least profitable) and plan to spend your time with the most valuable and fire the troublemakers if you can’t get them to get ‘inline’ or at least raise the price so much that it’s worth the trouble (or so you can outsource the trouble, see outsourcing below).
• Outsource any functions that are not part of your core business or that could be done more effectively/efficiently by others. Sole traders may be better off having a virtual assistant to answer their phones missing calls or being uninterrupted when doing important work themselves. This person could also chase debtors, research prospects and take on other time consuming tasks that aren’t core to what you do.  Ferriss provides great advice on determine what to outsource and how to choose an outsource company. If you are looking for a virtual assistant in Ireland, I highly recommend Waterford based The Virtual Office.  The staff are very professional and reliable and have taken on several projects for me. Since reading this I’ve noticed a few other tech entrepreneurs that I communicate with are using virtual assistants to book appointments and handle similar matters. The cost is much less than you may expect and definitely worth it if it allows you more time to do things at your higher professional rate.

With this Ferriss went from 15-hour days to his 4-hour week. From spending hours a day dealing with clients around the world in different time zones, he focused his time on the most profitiable, which was about 5%, fired the most difficult, got the other difficult ones to fax orders in and follow the procedures and got even more sales out of them.   He outsources the customer service function as well as having a virtual assistant to organise many other things.  He spends his free time traveling around the world, winning tango and martial arts tournaments, learning the Irish sport of hurling and anything that he sets his heart on.

I’ll let you know how I get on. If you read the book and try out any of these techniques please let me know how you get on or ask any questions you have here in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook.

The above article was original published at The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Google Webmaster Tools is probably one of the most overlooked, but most valuable, tools available to analyse the performance of your website. Most web developers will know about it and have it set up, but only the most dedicated or obsessive (he he) will actually check the information on a regular basis.   Most site owners, that don’t do their own development or are very ‘into’ the performance of their websites, don’t even know this tool exists.

This service provides information on:

• keywords the site is shown for, position on Google searches and clickthroughs
• keywords the site appears to be targeting
• links into the site
• loading speed of the site
• indicate location of Google sitemaps
• technical issues detected (malware, crawl errors, etc.)
• html suggestions; issues that may effect search results (i.e. repetition of titles, descriptions, etc.)

Google has added a significant number of new features in the past year showing that they consider it an important tool and it will be here for the long term, so worth your time to sign up and learn how to use it.

How to access Google Webmaster Tools

• Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and sign in with your Google Account. If you don’t have one click the link “Sign Up for a New Google Account”.
• Click the link to “Add a Site”.
• Verify Ownership of the site by either linking to your Google Analytics account (which will give you more date in the Webmaster Tools) or one of the following: upload an HTML file to your web server, add a meta tag to your site’s homepage or add a DNS record to your domain’s configuration.  The latter choices may e beyond your technical ability.  If your webmaster handles all of these things for you, you should at least gain access to your Google Analytics because you should have access to that information and it will allow you to have access to these tools as well.

Google’s own help pages — there’s a link at the top of every page along the way — are very straightforward and should be able to guide you along the way to setting up the account, adding a site and viewing the information about your site.  My motto is “All answers can be found on the web.” This is especially true when you are looking for information on how to use a Google product.

Do you use Google Webmaster Tools?  Do you have any other tips on using it or are there any other tools that you recommend for these purposes, especially if they are easy for site owners to use without the need to refer to their webmaster to access?

If you use this post to set up Google Webmaster Tools please let me know how you get on or ask any questions you have here in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook.

The above article was original published at Google Webmaster Tools on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.