IQ Prize

We’re only 11 days into June and what a month it’s turning out to be!!

My freelance business has been successfully rebranded as Web Together. Next, we move into our bright new offices in Ashbourne. Then, we get some really nice weather…

And now, the icing on the cake, we have been shortlisted for the IQ Prize! We’ve been shortlisted for our Freelancer Web Application called Octopied.

249 entries and we are now in the final 8. Happy Days! We now have a Dragon’s Den style pitch to prepare for July 8th but we’ll start worrying about that next week. Last night and today are about enjoying the moment!

Accompanied by Ronan Morris and Michael Flanagan, my associates on this, I went in last night for the shortlist announcement and it was great to meet the guys from IQ Content. They had chosen the aptly named Sky Bar to hold their reception. A great 7th floor view of the city. Great venue for an event.

The Charity auction raised €1,300 for Barnardos which was great. Sale of the night was a €200 voucher for Patrick Guilbaud’s that sold for about €300!

What an unbelievable number of entries to the contest! I hope Enterprise Ireland are watching. It’s great that the Awards have highlighted this potential innovation area which has up to now been pretty much under the radar.

The no-strings-attached-funding prize is a great idea because what normally stops these web application ideas from getting  to launch is the very long lead in times before you start generating any cash.

• First, you need to build your app
• Then, (in most cases) you have to offer a free trial period
• And finally, you have to gradually build up your customer base.

I’m not sure what this adds up to but it feels like about 12 months. The very guys that have ideas like this normally can’t really afford to take the required cashflow hit in order to make it happen.  Anyway, so hats off to IQ Content.

Anyone know where you can get a box set of Dragons Den, Series 1 – 7??? I need to brush up!

Cigars.ie - Screenshot

Cigars.ie is a little side venture I have going with my cousin, Mark and brother-in-law, Yiorgos. Both Mark and Yiorgos are big time cigar enthusiasts, so last year we set up a blog on cigars.ie, concentrating on cigar news and reviews. Content started to follow, traffic trickled in, and comments began appearing… so we decided it needed a facelift. Last night we launched the new look cigars.ie and we also now have a twitter account that people can follow us on.

If you have any feedback on the site or suggestions for future developments, we’d love to hear them.

It’s the first year of the awards set up by Damien Mulley, following the success of the Irish Blog Awards. We’ve made the long list in the Best New Web Application / Service category and we’ve got some tough competition:

Irish Web Awards

• Pix.ie
• PutPlace
• Locle
• Mortgages and Loans
• Nooked
• BookMeetingRoom.com
• Next Action
• Url.ie
• LouderVoice
• Twitterfone
• Zignals
• eWrite
• Album Shopper
• Edenbee
• PropertySwap.ie
• Poll Daddy
• Decisions For Heroes

There really are some great web apps and services in that list. I think it will be difficult to make the short list with such a competitive category. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I felt a little cheated that I wouldn’t get a chance to judge any of the categories in this years awards as we had a nomination. However, I just read on the awards.ie blog that Damien is doing something quite unique with our category. He’s getting us to judge all the other nominees in our category, which will then be added to the other judges scores before the final short list is announced. A great idea Damien.

Well, I just want to wish everyone the best of luck and looking forward to meeting familiar faces and new ones on the night.

When we took over the site late last year, one of our objectives was to increase search engine traffic. By employing standard SEO techniques during the development process (such as compliant code, css based design, naming conventions, search engine friendly urls, etc.) and some help from 2bscene with a targeted link building campaign and optimisation of the site, we are really happy with the results this week. Being no. 2, pushes Blue Sky Mortgages above the likes of GMC Mortgages, Permanent TSB, Irish Mortgage, Mortgage Store, Ulster Bank and Simply Mortgages – to name but a few.

Blue Sky Mortgages also rank very well for other terms such as “mortgage”, “mortgages ireland”, “mortgage broker”, etc. We’re looking forward to analysing the statistical information and improving on the current results. This actually coincides with a new service we will be offering our clients that makes use of PPC campaigns to achieve exceptional results. We’ll have more on that soon.

If you’ve ever tried navigating a photo gallery on somebody’s bebo, myspace or facebook page, you’ll know what a headache it can be. With this application installed, you click an icon on supported images and it loads all the images into a cool interface that shows all the images on a “virtual wall” that you can skip along quickly, zoom in, zoom out, start a slideshow, and more. It’s hard to describe how it works but the best thing I can suggest is to just try it. For Mac users our there, it’s like looking at images in cover view.

My First Implementation

Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall
This got me thinking about the application of such a tool into my every day life and I’ve come up with my first implementation. I subscribe to css galleries to keep a fresh of new techniques and designs. I put the collection into a little web app for my viewing pleasure. However, it’s not that easy to browse and find what I’m looking for so I decided to integrate PicLens into it. I’ve come up with a cool Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall that I can quickly flick through, find a site I like and open it directly all from within PicLens. You can try it out for yourself but make sure you are using FireFox and have the PicLens extension installed as I haven’t configured it for IE or Safari yet. I’ve got a number of ideas floating around for this in my head but I imagine any site I create in the future that has a photo gallery will have support for PicLens or similar apps. I can’t see me ever browsing a gallery using standard pages if I can use PicLens instead.

Using PicLens for Web/Stock Image Searches

There’s a built in search facility that allows you to search for images on Google, Yahoo, Flickr and DevianArt. The results show up in the app and when you find a pic you like, you can click a button (top left) and it will bring to the page it is from. Way cool! We were chatting on Irish Webmaster Forum about the app and James came up with a great use of the app. I, and a lot of other designers, love iStockPhoto for images for our websites. It can be very annoying and time consuming trying to find the right image so instead of using iStockPhoto’s built in search, you can use PicLens to search Google Images for “site:istockphoto.com business” and you’ll get business related results. You can quickly browse them and open the iStockPhoto page that has the image for sale. I’m sure this same technique could be used on countless other websites too.

Well, that’s it for now. Hope you like the app and let me know what you think with a comment below. Any other good uses of this tool you can think of? Tricks? etc? To finish… Here’s a few screenshots of PicLens on my Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall. 2 thumbs up to the guys at who created it! Superb!

Screenshots

Well over the past few months, I’ve been working hard with a couple of the guys on my team to launch a new website called ourmemoryof.com. This website is aimed at people who may have just suffered the recent loss of a friend or family member, and will allow them to create a memorial website in their tribute. The website they create will allow visitors to view messages from the family, photos, videos, messages of condolence and contribute to the site with their own messages of condolence.

We’ve just moved into alpha testing and we’re welcoming people to sign up for the beta test or to be notified when the new site goes live in early Spring 2008. You can visit the website by visiting the link below.

Memorial Websites

If you like to know more about the project or have any feedback at this early stage, please do not hesitate to contact me directly or leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading! Rgds, Dave

Note: Under Google SERP’s (search engine ranking positions), (com) means google.com results, (ie-ww) means google.ie world wide results, and (ie-io) means google.ie ireland only results.

Note: This information was gathered using Google Analytics and is for the 4 week period, 26th April 2007 to 23rd May 2007 (i.e. prior to new site launch and new website promotion techniques) and the 4 week period, 24th May 2007 to 20th June 2007 (i.e. first 4 weeks of the new site).

Marketing Targets
These were the marketing targets that I had set for the site. Did I achieve them? Well, see below and why it did/didn’t happen!

• Increase Google Page Rank to 5 on next release
  Well, Google hasn’t released it’s new page ranks yet, but I expect the sites up at 4 at the moment. With a bit more link building, I’m sure it can get to the 5 target before the next release.
• Increase Backlinks 10 fold.
  Ok, I only doubled it and that has been due to lack of time on my part. I have a list of sites that I was supposed to go through and add links to but didn’t get a minute. I’ll keep working on this. 10 fold was a bit ambitious I think.
• Google Keyword Ranking Targets:
  – web design ireland: at least page 2 Got it! Really happy with this! Page 1, here I come!
  – web design meath: top 3 results Still lagging behind on Ireland searches. Need more backlinks I think!
  – web design navan: top 1 result Again, Clickstream hold the top spot. More backlinks should knock them off the top.
  – web development ireland: top 10 pages Got to page 2. Good start!
  – web marketing ireland: top 10 pages Again, page 2. Next targets will be page 1.
• Increase visits per day to 250
  Well, got this up to 306 for the 4 week period but I expect it may die down after the traffic spikes I described in part 2. Will need to keep link building to keep this figure up.
• Increase page views per day to 750
  Didn’t quite make the 750 with only a 630 result. Due to the site not being sticky enough and the low amount of pages per visit. Need to work on increasing that to get more out of the visitors I get.
• Treble the blog subscribers
  Actually, very ambitious here! Only managed a 50% increase. Glad people are reading though and hopefully I can provide some interesting reads and get more people to subscribe!

Summary
Well, that’s it for this part of the marketing strategy. I’ll report again in a month or two on how the site is fairing out. I’ll get the head down and do a load of link building and see if I can get the site on to the first page of Google for the chosen keywords as well as keep building the visitors and page views. I might even give a monthly snap shot of how things are going and what I’ve done in the past month to help push things further. Hopefully, someone will benefit from this information on how to market and build on their website. If you have any questions or comments, would love to hear them, so drop them into the comments below.

Slán anois!

So, what’s been the main changes in the past week, I hear you say? Well, here’s a quick summary of some of the stats from the past week in comparison to the month previous:

• Website Stats for Past Week
  - Visits: 4,454 (compared to average of 168 for previous weeks)
  - Page Views: 10,425 (compared to average of 352 for previous weeks)
  - Page Views Per Day: 1,489 (compared to 50 for previous weeks)
• Google Ranking for "Web Design Ireland"
  - on google.com: was 46th, now 23rd
  - on google.ie (worldwide search): was 55th, now 24th
  - on google.ie (ireland only search): was 37th, now 19th

Ok, that’s a massive jump in usage in comparison to the previous month. Basically what caused this was a temporary traffic spike to the site. This website was featured on the likes of cssmania.com, w3csites.com, mostinspired.com, screenalicious.com, and a few more. Other smaller sites pick up feeds from these sites and have also begun to link in. Actually, I think I only submitted the site to cssmania.com and all the rest picked it up from there. The visitors that have been coming to the site over the past week have not necessarily been the target visitors I am ultimately trying to attract to the site (and I mean that with total respect to you all). This is evident from the high bounce rate. However, a fair portion are, and I’d like to say thank you to all the people who have commented on the new site or dropped me a message. My aim for this site is to advertise the services that I provide as well as open my knowledgebase to whoever might want/need to use it. Along the way, I hope to pick up a client or two as well!!!

As I mentioned, this was a traffic spike and as the days go by, less and less visitors have been coming from those sites. However, what this is helping with is more inlinks that Google picks up, which in turn pushes the site up the rankings. The higher up the rankings the site goes, the more likely a potential client might find the site through the targetted keywords. Already, this has become evident with a jump up the rankings as shown above.

It is now time to get more and more of these websites linking in so that it pushes the site up higher in the rankings on Google. I’ve got a few plans for this and it’s going to take a lot of manual effort, visiting directory type websites, filling in the website details and getting a link in return. I’m planning on doing this over a couple of evenings in the next week and hopefully get a lot more backlinks than there is currently. I actually don’t think this process will end as there are so many websites out there you can get links from, it’ll take forever to do. I do however have a list of about 1,000 websites that competitor websites are linked from. It is this list that I’ve started to work off as well as try and find some other good quality inlinks. At the end of the day, it’s not always about the quantity of links but the quality of the links. The main one I got above was cssmania.com. The site was featured at the top of the page for about 3 days, and further down the page for another 2 days. Also, cssmania.com has a Page Rank of 6, which doesn’t hurt matters at all.

So, what’s the lesson for this week… get a nicely designed website using CSS (tableless) coding and get it featured on as many CSS Showcase websites as possible. Usually getting on to the top ones will allow the smaller ones to pick you up and they’ll add you themselves. Here’s a list to get you started: cssinsert.com. Please remember that the traffic from these sites will be a temporary spike and the majority of visits will be once off, but it will increase the inlinks to your site and help push up your search engine rankings, and that’s the name of the game in the end.

Well, that’s the update so far. I’ve a tough week of link building ahead of me and I expect a significant drop in the numbers to the site compared to this week unless some other top quality css showcase websites features this site for a couple of days. I don’t mind though. I always knew it was a traffic spike and I’ve heard of them being described as being addictive… once you have one, you just want more, more, MORE!!! I think I’m beginning to feel like that already

Any comments or suggestions are most welcome and maybe you’ll subscribe to the RSS Feed, if you haven’t already.

In honour of this, I’m going to track the campaign here in the blog. I don’t know how other web design companies are fairing out with traffic but I’m going to open up some of my stats on where davidbehan.com is, what promotion is being done and how it is effecting traffic. Ok, so to start, here is a brief account of where the site is at the moment. To gather this information, I’m using Google Stats, Google Webmaster Tools, Web CEO, PopURI.us, Feedburner and it is accurate as of launch of the new site last Thursday.

Links and Search Engine Analysis

• Google Page Rank: 3
• Google Back Links: 627
• Google Home Page Back Links: 171
• Google Keyword Ranking Positions:
  - web design ireland: 46 (com), 55 (ie-ww), 37 (ie-io)
  - web design meath: 12 (com), 27 (ie-ww), 21 (ie-io)
  - web design navan: 4 (com), 6 (ie-ww), 6 (ie-io)
  - web development ireland: n/a (com), n/a (ie-ww), n/a (ie-io)
  - web marketing ireland: n/a (com), n/a (ie-ww), n/a (ie-io)
• Yahoo Back Links: 630
• Technorati Links: 74
• Del.icio.us Bookmarks: 0
• Alexa Rank: 843,100

Note: Under Google Keyword Ranking Positions, (com) means google.com results, (ie-ww) means google.ie world wide results, and (ie-io) means google.ie ireland only results.

Website Statistics Analysis (Past 4 weeks)

• Visits: 673
• Visits Per Day: 24
• Page Views: 1,410
• Page Views Per Day: 50
• Page Views Per Visit: 2.10
• Average Time on Site: 00:01:40
• Bounce Rate: 67.46%
• Percentage New Visits: 81.72%
• Traffic Sources: 9% (direct), 35% (referring sites), 56% (search engines)
• Blog RSS Subscribers: 14

Note: This information was gathered using Google Analytics and is for the 4 week period, 26th April 2007 to 23rd May 2007, i.e. prior to new site launch and new website promotion techniques.

Marketing Targets

• Increase Google Page Rank to 4 if not 5 on next release
• Increase Backlinks to 1,500.
• Google Keyword Ranking Targets:
  - web design ireland: at least page 3
  - web design meath: top 3 results
  - web design navan: top 1 result
  - web development ireland: top 10 pages
  - web marketing ireland: top 10 pages
• Increase average visits per day to 250
• Increase average page views per day to 750
• Treble the blog subscribers

Note: These targets are for the next 4 weeks (although some may not get updated for awhile after) and results will be posted on Thursday, 21st June.

Summary

OK, stop laughing!!! I know those stats aren’t really the best and could be a lot better… and that’s what this is all about. It is difficult to work on your own self promotion and marketing when you are working on so many client websites. I’m sure any other web marketing individuals reading this will agree but I’m determined to change that here. For now, you have the current state of affairs, the targets and soon you will have the results. I’ll keep you posted throughout the next 4 weeks with an update as to the positions and the techniques I’m using to do the promotion. If anyone has a comment or suggestion they would like to add, they are always welcome. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to sign up for the RSS feed to get notified of updates.

p.s. Wordpress logged me out during this post so when I went to publish it, I lost almost the entire thing (everything except the first 2 paragraphs). Agh!!! Lesson learned… write it in notepad and do a copy and paste