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Archive for the ‘New technology’ Category

How to optimise a PPC campaign

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

How to optimise a PPC campaign

First, a little bit of background about me – My name is Tom Andrews, and I work for a company called Successful Businesses. We provide SEO solutions for many companies, including Top Left Design. We work with our clients to make sure that their amazing websites are seen by as many people across the internet as possible!

Welcome to my first guest Internet Marketing blog!

In this post I will attempt to explain how to ensure that your PPC campaign is well optimised. I’m notorious for going into far too much detail so I will try to be as brief as possible!

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Communicate by Community – embracing new ways of being connected!!

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

A selection of social media communities and other fascinating Web 2.0 examples – people seem more and more inclined to let the world know what they are up to!

(with thanks to Betti Moser for her help on this post!)

Foursquare

foursquare.com
You can make lists of your favourite things to do and share them with friends. Foursquare will keep track of the things you’ve done, help you create To-Do lists and even suggest new experiences to seek out…. As you check in around the city, you’ll start finding tips that other users have left behind. After checking-in at a restaurant, you may unlock a tip suggesting the best thing on the menu. Checking-in at a bar will often offer advice on what your next stop should be. Every tip you create is discoverable by other users just by checking-in.

A bit like a mixture of Twitter updates, GPS search to locate people you know and ‘Dungeons & Dragons’.

Plancast

plancast.com
A service for sharing your upcoming plans with friends – a social calendar of sorts. Just submit the things you’re thinking about doing in the future, and your friends will be able to hear about them – and maybe join you, too!

TechCrunch calls it “a ‘Foursquare for the future’. The main idea is that while many people use Foursquare and similar location-based services like Gowalla and Loopt to share where they are, Plancast is about sharing where they will be.”

It looks very similar to a Twitter timeline, but the focus is on what you’re planning today, tomorrow, next week, next month etc. This is how it works in action: plancast.com/mark

Blippy

blippy.com
“Blippy allows you to automatically share your credit card transactions as you make them. This includes the place you made the purchase, the amount, and in some cases, the item. This is all placed in a social stream where other Blippy users can comment on and ‘like’ the various items.”

This is still very new. It looks similar to a Twitter stream, but the updates are automatic via a link from your credit card to Blippy. (Hmmmm…)

Last fm

www.last.fm
“a music service powered entirely by its community of listeners.”

Completely interactive music-based community. Plugs into all other social media platforms. Listeners automatically stream the tracks they’re listening to onto Last.fm, thereby creating their online profile.

Spotify

www.spotify.com/en
“peer-to-peer music streaming service that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums, with virtually no buffering delay.”

A monthly subscription gives access to millions of songs to download. Spotify also has profiles on Twitter and Facebook.

Listverse

listverse.com
“a website dedicated to lists of trivia from a variety of categories – the most popular of which are lists of misconceptions and human oddities.” Full of curious stories, all presented as a “Top 10 most…” list.

Hunch

hunch.com
This is a pretty cool site. It uses artificial intelligence concepts to help people with everyday (and not so everyday) decisions! Try it out and let us know what you find!

Petrol Prices.com

www.petrolprices.com
“Find the lowest UK petrol price in your area! 9,537 petrol stations and 8,000 daily updates.”

Just enter your post code and find the cheapest petrol station near you. Compares prices in real time. Also available as iPhone app.

3 useful Web 2.0/Social Media resource blogs to keep you on the ball

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

We wanted to highlight a selection of blogs and websites that keep you up to date on all the latest news in social media, web technology, plug-ins, gadgets and tools. (Thanks to Betti Moser on her help on this article)

Mashable

mashable.com
We love this site – it’s the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news as well as handy how to guides. Also a must follow on twitter (@mashable)

Techcrunch

www.techcrunch.com
One of the leading blogs which profiles and reviews the latest internet products, companies, software and gadgets. This site also gives you constant blog updates on the latest web applications and social media plug-ins – if you are so inclined! It’s worth checking out!

Social Media Today

www.socialmediatoday.com
This is “a moderated business community for marketers, bloggers, PR, and media professionals” Great site for news updates, views and blogs on everything to do with social media and marketing (and it also has a version in French!).

Twitter in Plain English – from Common Craft

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Have a look at this video, from a company based in Seattle, Washington called Common Craft who create simple training videos about social media topics.

Networking – combining online and offline

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

We wanted to share our tips about Online and Offline networking and encourage you to use them in conjunction.

Networking can be interpreted in many ways
but activities should include:

- going to networking events, parties, trade shows, and other gatherings where you meet new people
- making sure you keep in touch with those people
- connecting those people with other people you know, where it would be of mutual benefit
- meeting people again for “1-2-1s” and finding out more about their businesses
- Joining a group such as BNI, NRG, Business Junction, Athena, or Chambers of Commerce where you meet regularly to continue to get to know other members.
- Building relationships with other business people and showing yourself as an expert in your field as well as a nice reliable and helpful person.

All of these are typical of traditional networking.

What we are seeing now is that there are a lot of online groups as well. These have been around for many years and their usage is growing. Examples include Ecademy, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

There are many benefits to making proper use of these:

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Why we love Favy

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

UPDATE on FAVY – now Cognitive Match: Alex Kelleher has now rolled Favy into his B2B service Cognitive Match (www.cognitivematch.com) – using the same technology of matching individuals with content in real time.

You probably haven’t heard about Favy yet – but that’s because it’s not been OFFICIALLY launched yet. We are able to have Favy on our browsers because we have connections – we know the man behind Favy – Alex Kelleher. Great guy!

Simply described in my own words – Favy is an add-on toolbar which attaches to your browser and allows you to bookmark favourite sites with tagging technology.

There is a whole “smart” element to it where it can track your taste in bookmarks, but I haven’t really tested this bit yet.

It’s really handy and easy to use.

What I love about my Favy toolbar

I love that I can tag a website with different keywords and it comes up in different folders

I love that I have a whole new fresh modern set of favourites which is a lot easier than going through my old list and checking every link

I love that there are 5 search engines – Google, Wikipedia, You Tube, Dictionary.com and Favy search – all handily included.

If you want to learn more about Favy, visit http://favy.com/home and request a free invitation!

Video Formats – researched and explained

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

(by Alicia Bell from Top Left Design)

It’s tough to figure out which video format works best and why. Which one is the most accessible, which one has the best picture and which one offers the best “streaming”?

(Web streaming can be defined as “a technique for transferring data such that it can be processed as a steady and continuous stream”).

We’ve looked at some popular options; Flash, MPEG & AVI, and this is what we’ve found:

AVI files are limited to 320 x 240 resolution, and 30 frames per second. This means that it is not adequate for full screen or full motion video. However, video in windows doesn’t need special hardware, making AVI the easiest format to use (although the quality is much lower than other formats). This format is used mainly because it allows businesses to sell their products and reach the largest base of consumers. Although AVI is the most common format for on the PC, the Flash player is actually installed on a higher percentage of computers than any other video format.

This means that more consumer sites are moving towards the Flash video format – because it is more likely that your site visitor will have the correct player. Another advantage is that the flash video format works well across PCs, Macs & Linux.

The MPEG format is hardware-assisted. This means that you need a board to play MPEG files without dropping a lot of frames. There are software decoders available but they require a lot of processor power on your system and usually support MPEG video only (missing sound). The good thing about MPEG files is that they provide excellent picture quality. For these reasons it seems that the MPEG option is better for those that are very serious about digital video but not ideal for quick and easy web viewing.

Overall, Flash seems to be the best option for the web. Compared to other video formats, the flash format is small, fast and ideal for web streaming. It is popular (installed on more end user’s computers), uncomplicated and offers a consistent picture.

Sources:

http://www.videozilla.net/formatscomparison.html
http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2007/10/video-format-comparison-flash-wmv.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/streaming.html
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/V/Video_for_Windows.html

Google have done it again

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Google have now released a browser with faster yet simpler browsing. They say that it’s a new age browser derived from a combination of other browsers but only using the useful stuff to handle modern day websites. Features include multithreaded tabs and a built in search engine making tasks easier and quicker.

Google Chrome is open source so others can learn from its coding and can improve on it. It seems to have received good responses since its beta release on Tuesday the 2nd of September 2008. There is a comic showing what Google set out to do and how they went about it. It’s taking browsing to the next level and you should check it out.

Link to the comic:

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_00.html

Link to download Google Chrome:

http://www.google.com/chrome

Vimeo.com

Monday, September 1st, 2008

Just found this great website for sharing video files – one of the videos is below – enjoy!


Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.