eMail Databases are considered a quick route to successful online marketing. There is no work involved in building the list. It can be bought in and setup in next to no time. So why not go out and buy a ready made list?

Experience

Here at TH UK we have been working with eMail Marketing for ten years now. In a relatively new market, that’s a lot of dog years! A common service requested of our eMail Marketing department is to buy in a list on behalf of our clients and build a campaign around it. However, things are not that simple and we advise our clients to think very carefully about their objectives and what they can expect from a ‘bought in list’.

Types of eMail data lists

There are different sorts of lists which you can buy and some of them are not worth the effort of setting up and sending, let alone the cost of buying the eMail database.

The best eMail lists are without doubt the ones that you develop and nurture in house. These are lists grown from people that have requested to be communicated with. However, it is commonplace at TH UK to be asked for a list that a client can send to, perhaps because they do not have the time to build their own database, or the inclination to.

Costs

eMail lists vary considerably in cost. We have known eMail lists exchange hands for £1,000 per thousand names. Whilst this is rare, it tends to be because the list is very niche, reactive and well looked after.

The next rung of the eMail list ladder, is the proven and responsive list generated by buying habits. These lists can be purchased around the £500 per thousand mark. Although these lists have proven buying trends, be wary of the fact that unless what you are selling is related to their area of interest, the recipients are still unlikely to interact in volume with your message.

On the cheap end of the scale, £100-£250 per thousand addresses, you will find the bargain bucket eMail lists. These could be generated by surveys, or offers, but in our experience, you are unlikely to achieve a return on your investment with them. These recipients are likely to have exchanged their email address for a personal gain, like a freebie, or document, even a competition entry.

In summary, be cautious about paying out for eMail lists, and consider whether or not it may be worth investing in developing your own list - wouldn’t that be a more valuable asset to your business?

TH UK are eMail Marketing Experts that can help you generate in house lists and maximise the potential of the list, Contact Us Now to find out how we can add benefit to your specific business.

At the weekend the Sunday Times business section included a long article on  on Search Engine Optimisationand how its popularity is growing in the UK. Fredrick Marckini, the chief global-search officer at Isobar commented in the article that:

“Research shows 72% of web users click on natural listings thrown up by search engines and not on pay per click ads”.

Thus proving that websites do need to have a presence in the natural or organic search results. This mistrust of paid adverts mean that spending on SEO grew faster than pay-per-click online advertising — also known as paid search — for the first time in Britain last year.

The specialist online site E-consultancy said

“Spending on SEO increased by 68% to £250m in the UK last year, compared with a 56% rise in pay-per-click spending to £1.97 billion”.

With over 200 different factors are used by the various search engines to decide where to rank a website, it is important to have experienced search engine optimizers working on a site to continually to improve the site and also to monitor any changes required by change to the search engines algorithms – which can change on a weekly basis.

An example for one of our clients Legal Services UK, a will writing specialist we managed to increase the visits to the site by 4 times and to achieve page one rankings for some very competitive terms for example “will writers”

APRIL 2007
•    16 page 1 results in the major search engines
•    0 page results in Google UK
•    Visits - 510

March 2008
•    125 page 1 results in the major search engines
•    45 page 1 results in Google UK
•    30 position 1 results in Google UK
•    Visits – 2,232

If You have any SEO questions please contact us via our SEO Page

A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles or other Web sites. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.

Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology. Some blogs are more eclectic, presenting links to all manner of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts.

Generally speaking (though there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:

• A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
• An archive of older articles.
• A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
• A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a “blogroll”.
• One or more feeds like RSS, Atom or RDF files.

Some blogs may have additional features beyond these.

To find out more about Blogs, please contact us on 01234 219119.

First the Science Bit

canonical is a term in mathematics ”The usual or standard state or manner of something”

Computing has borrowed this term and uses it in a similar way to describe problems where working out what is actually meant by something can cause problems.

If you have ever used a website and entered a date and had a problem because the website expected a us date format and you entered a  UK format you will have experienced a canonical problem.

For example using the date format “month/day/year” instead of “day/month/year can cause some nasty problems.

01/05/2006 is the first of May in UK usage but the 5th of January in American this can cause problems so a lot of websites and experienced computer programmers will use a date format like 05-Jan-2006 which removes any uncertainty to what date is meant.

So how does this effect my ranking in search engines

With websites there can be problems with search engines  when a website has multiple domains how to work out which is the definitive domain? Humans are smart and can normally work this out but computers are really dumb! and can get confused

For example a site we recently worked on has a lot of domains

http://www.photonic-products.co.uk/
http://www.photonic-products.com/

they also have another 8 different domains

When Google or any search engine sees this as 2 or more different websites this can cause the different versions of the website to compete against each other this can cause the sites to perform poorly compared to just a single site.

Also each version of the website will have links to it some may link to the .co.uk some to the .com as the number of links to a site is a major part of how search engines decide to rank a site in their search results – its obvious that splitting your links across more than one domain is a bad idea.

Also website will often respond both to the version of the site with the www prefix and the one with out for example.

http://www.photonic-products.com/
http://photonic-products.com/

so in our example there are  20 Versions of the website.

To solve the problem you should configure the website to tell browsers and search engines what the definitive name is.

This is done by using a permanent redirect which in layman’s terms says

“hey Google this website is no longer here its over here now – please update your records”.

When you browse a website that is redirected you get sent to the correct (or canonical) version of the website. The same things happens when a search engine reads a site it gets told exactly what the definitive version of the site is.

It is vital to use the permanent redirect and not a temporary one. 

Each websever will have a way of doing this for a system based on Unix/Linux this is normally done using  mod rewrite and .htacess (this is normally already installed) for Microsoft web servers a separate third party piece of software (an ISAPI filter) has to be installed

For our experience after all the multiple domains have been redirected it take up to 2-3 months for the full effect of redirects to show up in the search engine results.

There is also the issue of which domain is appropriate for the target .co.uk or .com  for example we blogged about geolocation issues  a while back here

In the past there has always been a formula for the correct amount of money to be allocated to a marketing budget, whether it be by whatever can be afforded at the time or as a percentage of turnover, whichever, it never seems to be enough, However when it comes to a web-based company, the marketing budget generally tends to be forgotten or at best extremely miniscule in its relevance and amount.

Obviously it is important when building a new site, to ensure that it is search engine friendly and optimised to encourage easy access and to be found quickly. Now, although this is absolutely essential, it is quite often forgotten, especially blogging on a regular basis, or the site is designed in such a way, even utilizing the most up to date Flash designs, that these can quite often deter from encouraging this easy access, enabling the site to be found.

If one was to open a new shop, for example, it would be commercial suicide to design and fill a shop with beautiful things but forget to put in a front door. Perhaps this is a bit harsh, but many good ideas and great designed websites become the worlds best kept secrets. This being said I see it week in and week out where advertising budgets just do not exist and companies tend to not advertise or launch their company sites correctly if at all.

At THUK Online Marketing Limited, we are, not only vastly experienced in building websites, but we are able to fill the marketing gap usually left by either inexperience or naivety. Why not give us a try as I know we will be able to ensure that everyone knows that there is now somebody at home!!!

1. Basically, the more you blog the more the search engines will recognise your site, so try and add a blog everyday, if not, at least a few times a week.

2. A fresh site that is being updated frequently always encourages visitors and search engines to come back and shows the company is active.

3. Good subjects for your blog: News about your company is always useful because not only is it informative but you can also add in the name of your company, for example ‘TH UK‘ or ‘Online Marketing’ which increase your keyword density and the search engines will find you easier.

4. Look out for any current stories that are relevant to you in the newspapers or on the T.V. These are great because you will show up in the search engines for even more terms.

5. Always make sure you link your blog to the relevant categories i.e. a ‘Website Development‘ blog should always be linked to the ‘Web Development‘ category. As this will help the search engines find you quicker.

6. Try and add in the keywords of the blog as much as possible for example if you have a blog to do with Search Engine Optimisation, try and add that term in to the text and link it back to the ‘SEO’ category page. To do this: copy the url of the category page, then going back to your blog and highlighting the term you want to link e.g. ‘SEO’, click on the link tool and paste in the url and ‘insert’.

7. Google Alerts is a good source for articles in your blog. You will come across useful sites whilst using Google Alerts, bookmark these sites as they will probably be useful for subject matters in the future.

This may sound a lot at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy peasy. Have fun blogging!

Email marketing offers several advantages over traditional direct mail, most notably the ability to track the progress of the campaign in real time.

What can email marketing do for you?

Email marketing can provide a variety of services that are simply not possible with more traditional mail marketing techniques.

• track how many (and indeed which) recipients open the message
• provide links back to your website and which recipients follow these links (known in the trade as Click-Throughs)
• automatically remove the addresses of recipients who no longer wish to receive communications from you

At TH UK we sent over 200,000 emails on behalf of our clients during the last quarter of 2007. A little less than 13½% of the recipients opened the email, and of these a little over 13½% followed the links through to the clients’ website or landing page. Or, put another way, about 2% of recipients (or around 4,000 people) visited our clients’ websites as a direct result of the email campaigns we ran on their behalf.

What about content?

You can have pretty much anything you like in the email: regular newsletters, one off special offers, or even ad-hoc messages. Just before Christmas one of our clients even asked us to send out a change of address card, complete with a link to Google Maps to help their customers find their new offices.

At TH UK we encode your email in HTML, giving us a lot of flexibility with regard to layout and content. This enables us to produce an email that looks exactly the way you want it to, including text, images and links back to your website – all we need from you is a basic design.

Who can you send emails to?

In general explicit consent must be obtained from individuals before you can them send promotional emails, but this can be implied for people you already have a business relationship with (i.e. your existing customers) but only for the promotion of similar products or services. You must also to provide, on all promotional emails, a simply way for the recipient to exclude him/herself from future emails. For more detailed information you should view the Advertising Standards Authority Code of Practice.

At TH UK we normally ask you to supply us with a list of emails address, sourced from your own customer base or obtained for the purpose (e.g. by asking people to fill in a contact form on your website), to which the emails will be sent. On the email we always include a link back to our own server for the recipient to unsubscribe themselves from future emails and store the address in a suppression list against which we clean all future email lists you send us.

Contact us

Check out our website or contact us to find out what email marketing can do for you.

Numerous women-oriented sites like Avon.com, Brides.com, and Komen for the Cure successfully use soothing, pastel colours to create a calm, inviting place to linger and browse. But they don’t stop at just using colours women like. The sites are well organized, provide interesting content, and let users personalise their experience.

Don’t fixate so much on pink that you ignore the larger role colour plays in determining mood, purpose, and trustworthiness. Ideally, colour choices should be based on your site’s purpose and products.

Common colour associations include:

• Trust: blue and white
• Dependability: blue and black
• Danger: red and black
• Cheapness: yellow and orange
• Fun: yellow, red, orange, and purple

Even if women do most of the shopping for children’s toys at your site, a pastel colour scheme conflicts with the site’s purpose. Colours appropriate for a toy site (red, yellow, and orange) would not be appropriate for a stock tip or medical information site.

Get more information about colour choices by reviewing the results of Joe Hallock’s Colour Assignment study.

Here at THUK Online Marketing we cater for all fresh design needs, whether your part of a large organisation such as Audi Nationwide or just starting out such as Pogo Direct we will create the perfect design for you and the modern world wide web.

However, it appears that the algorithm is serious a factor to consider when estimating the value of your website or blog. A good example is Website Value Calculator http://www.websitevaluecalculator.com. To estimate that value, the script  uses data from the most popular and recognized statistic systems available on the Internet - Alexa Traffic Ranking and Google Page Rank and the amount of links to the blog/website. For example, Google.com…

• Alexa Traffic Ranking: 2,
• Google Page Rank: 10,
• Average of 57,950,000 backlinks from major search engines.

The script calculates indicators of potential profits, all sites have a potential of earning money, Google.com can earn approximately $5,825.895 per link per month from selling text link advertisements and approximately $9,135,000/Month through creative product placements, by placing relevant affiliate links on the site, could earn approximately $32,366.07 per month. Based on the fact Google.com is worth $1,561,822,935… Nice…

How much is your website worth? To improve that value, please feel free to contact our SEO team.

The new version is so fresh that after installation, it redirects to the site on the Mozilla server which doesn’t exist yet. The Interface is very similar to the one we know from Firefox 3.0, however the latest version archive is much smaller, therefore in comparison to the 3.0, the Firefox 4.0 functionality has been reduced.

During our short test we noticed that Mozilla Firefox 4.0 is very stable and loads websites as fast as Firefox 3.0.

Preview of TH UK Online Marketing in Firefox 4.0.

A nightly compilation of Mozilla Firefox 4.0 can be downloaded from Mozilla ftp server: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/