Here, I speak a little bit about the advertising that a member of Generation Y sees during the average day. Watch below:
Video Blog: Generation Y & Advertising
November 17th, 2011 by John McDonald
Facebook’s Sub-Par Advertising Management Experience
November 16th, 2011 by Danny Wood
As The Web Shop’s resident PPC ninja, I get to spend the majority of my Internet-Ad-Management time using Google AdWords’ management interface to create and oversee the advertising I am responsible for on the internet. As such, I feel kind of spoiled: their interface is simple and powerful, and almost negates the need for using a 3rd party campaign-management tool.
..And then there’s Facebook’s Advertising Management interface.
Don’t get me wrong in my intentions of writing this post. I don’t mean to say that advertising on Facebook is a bad thing, quite the contrary actually. Facebook presents a valuable and important opportunity for all
I’m on the Wordstream Blog!
November 15th, 2011 by Danny Wood
A bit of shameless self promotion here; a recent interview I did with Wordstream Internet Marketing has been published to their blog. After receiving above average scores in their PPC Grader tool, I was asked to spill the beans a bit on my PPC success, so make sure to take a look! You can see the interview here.
What About Customer Service?
November 14th, 2011 by Chance Hoggan
With so much of this blog turned over to the benefits of SEO and Marketing I thought it pertinent to mention good old customer service. There is no better way to retain customers long term than provide great customer service. When something goes wrong, and it will, it’s down to customer services to straighten things out.
Through search, your customers can research, locate and buy your products online. Social Media allows them to comment on them or the level of service they received from you as a retailer or service provider. Customer Service strives to provide improved customer experience and after-sales support. Dissatisfied customers won’t hang around, and the merely satisfied are already looking for workarounds, alternatives and substitutes. Unless you can engender commitment and loyalty in your existing customers they could easily be lured away with a competitors offer.
15 places you can use QR codes
November 10th, 2011 by John McDonald
First of all a touch of information about QR codes for those that have not been exposed to them:
A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) first designed for the automotive industry. More recently, the system has become popular outside of the industry due to its fast readability and comparatively large storage capacity. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background.
15 places you can put your QR codes
- Business Cards
- Stickers
A class to take PHP shell scripting to the next level.
November 3rd, 2011 by Jonathan Dart
Are you familiar with PHP? Do you find Bash shell scripting to be a special form of torture? If you answered yes to the previous questions then you are in for a treat. I’ve written a class to help make shell scripting in PHP much nicer. Here’s the list of features that were important enough to me to bother including in the class:
- Return Code Checking
- Parameter Escaping
- Streamed Output
- Exceptions
- Object Oriented
- Fluent Interface
Let’s get right into some examples. Here’s basic command:
Cmd::create() ->setCmd('ls -l') ->exec();
Want to allow for a variety of return values?
3f64ce46a52b575c0921960ea4538bea001
SSL Certificates: then and now
November 1st, 2011 by Chris Chatelain
Remember a few years ago when a basic SSL Certificate cost you $300? It’s different now. You can get them for $10, sometimes even less. A few of my peers consider the whole SSL Certificate authority situation a bit of a racket. We were paying them $300 per year for them to tell your browser that we are who we say we are. You can pay them even more money for them to make a certificate that works for all your subdomains. The last one I setup was in the order of 8 times more expensive for that privilege. On their end, it’s not any more technologically expensive to create you a wildcard certificate, or a normal certificate.
What is Yellow Pages Offering for Search Marketing Solutions?
October 28th, 2011 by John McDonald
In order to compete in any industry it helps to know what your competition is offering in the marketplace. As everyone knows Yellow Pages has entered into the online marketing world as they have seen the demand for their printed book in rapid decline.
We have been approached by a number of prospects that have entered into agreements with Yellow Pages that were not happy with the return on investment. In talking to these prospects the scary part was they did not seem to have a good understanding of what Yellow Pages was offering them. If asked they would say that it is search engine optimization. Then I would ask them what terms they were trying to gain ranking for in Google and Yellow Pages could give them certain terms. I would run a ranking report and the prospect’s site and it was nowhere to be found in the natural (organic) search results.
Social Media Policy: Why Your Company Needs One
October 26th, 2011 by Danny Wood
It happens so often; I’m discussing social media with a team member of an organization that is large, prominent, or both, and it comes out in conversation that the company in question is on social media, but does not have a social media policy. The first thing that I always reply to these people is “You need a policy, now!”
Social media presents a fantastic opportunity for organizations to become closer with their customers/leads and potential customers/leads. Conversations can be facilitated, feedback can be harnessed, and your company’s marketing efforts can be strengthened. However, in order to ensure that your social media presence is a benefit and not a liability, a social media policy is necessary.
Knowing Where to Start with your Google AdWords Campaign
October 21st, 2011 by Danny Wood
John recently wrote an interesting article entitled “Is your (AdWords) campaign a donation to Google?” that touched on the issue of making a relatively small investment into an AdWords campaign, and not giving it the proper attention (and spend) it requires to drive leads or sales for your business. Those of you who read John’s article and decided to ramp up your AdWords efforts have probably met with an issue that always presents itself when a PPC campaign is being “fixed”: where do I start?
