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I was reading some research recently which indicated that 60 per cent of Online Retailers do not know if they are currently PCI DSS compliant.

So I thought it was worth explaining why PCI DSS is important and how you can achieve compliance, and highlighting this and some of the other security measures provided with Actinic Payments.

PCI DSS
PCI DSS addresses security concerns in relation to the storage of payment card data. It is a single standard supported by all major players including Visa and Mastercard.

Three factors make PCI DSS compliance important for your business:

• PCI DSS compliance is compulsory for all merchants who accept card payments.
• You must be compliant whether you handle, process or store payment card details, on computer or on paper.
• There are severe penalties if card information is compromised as a result of non-compliance.

You can become PCI DSS compliant in one of two ways.

1. You can become compliant yourself. In practice, this is rather complicated, difficult and expensive.
2. You can have your customers and staff enter card details only into sites and systems supplied by a third party who are themselves PCI DSS compliant.

If your buyer enters card details into a page of your own web site, your web site must be PCI DSS compliant even if those details are passed to a compliant payment processor. This is because any compromise of your web site could lead to a rogue third party being able to acquire the card details.

Using Actinic Payments ensures that all servers where you or your
customers key in payment card details are PCI DSS compliant. The Creditcall infrastructure (which powers Actinic Payments) has been accredited by qualified assessors to the highest possible standard available under the PCI DSS scheme.

3D Secure
3D Secure is the online equivalent of Chip and PIN. Buyers are required to enter a password whenever they use their card online. The password is sent directly to Visa (Verified by Visa) or to Mastercard (Mastercard SecureCode) for approval or rejection.

Just as a Chip and PIN card can't be used without a pin number, a card protected by 3D Secure cannot be used without the password. The banks are so confident in the system that they accept the risk even if the cardholder claims not to have taken part in the transaction.

Actinic Payments is fully compliant with the 3D Secure standard.

The 3rd Man Fraud Prevention
The latest release of Actinic Payments also provides automated fraud screening by the 3rd Man for every order you receive.

The 3rd Man is Europe's leading fraud screening company. They automatically check card orders against a wide variety of factors and provide a simple red or green traffic light to indicate whether an order is safe or not, together with supporting data.

Video Presentation
If your company is serious about online protection for your customers' data, you will benefit from this short video presentation of Actinic Payment and its integration into the Actinic ecommerce range:
http://downloads.actinic.com/Payments-Flash/actinic-payments-demo.html.

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Now that the Bank of England has announced, to no-one's surprise, that the UK is 'probably' in a recession, there is even more pressure on businesses to get prepared. During the downturn, selling online should become even more attractive. There are a number of reasons why the internet is the best place to do business in a recession.

1. Lower costs
   It's possible to start selling online for just a few pounds, and the degree of automation means that running costs can be kept to a minimum as well.


2. Continued growth
   In contrast to the high street, the online sector is still growing. Year on year growth in UK online spending was 15% in September, and is expected to continue at that level right through the Christmas period (IMRG).


3. Global reach
   The internet enables businesses to connect with a far wider audience, offering the potential of greater reach, greater market share and increased sales. Even language need not be a barrier, because English is the most widely used language of the web, and English language sites are read and used by people all over the world.


4. Presentation
   The internet enables even a very small company to present itself as though it were much larger. Admittedly this is an advantage for scammers, but it's also an advantage for genuine businesses looking to gain the confidence of online shoppers.


5. Targetting
   The internet is particularly good for niche businesses and highly targetted marketing campaigns. Through cultivating relevant web links and focussing on search engine marketing, you can attract highly targetted visitors to your site at relatively low cost.

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Google has certainly caused a flurry of excitement with it's new Chrome web browser. But could this be their opening salvo in an all-out war with Microsoft?

Here's why I think it could be.

Google Chrome's multi-processing feature, which enables misbehaving web processes to be isolated and closed without shutting the whole browser down, is potentially quite useful when surfing; But it's of far greater use, and probably indispensible, for running web applications. And who is the current king and major exponent of web apps for the average user? Well surprise, surprise - it's Google! In fact, Google openly touts the provision of desktop shortcuts for web apps as a key feature of Chrome.

If Google Documents and Spreadsheets is ever to supplant Microsoft Office as the business application of choice, something like Google Chrome was necessary and inevitable. So forgive me for thinking that this is it's true raison d'etre.

Google and Microsoft have been sniffing around the periphery of each other's businesses for some time, but this is the first time that Google has taken on one of Microsoft's core applications head to head. It will be interesting to see just how far they can go with it.

The one thing Google still lacks in its portfolio is an operating system. Oops, I almost forgot. The first mobile phones running their Android OS are coming out this year. And Google co-founder Sergey Brin has already indicated that elements of Google Chrome will form a key part of Android in future(http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10031318-92.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20).

So Google now has the capacity to cut Microsoft right out of the mobile party.

Both Chrome and Android make use of Apple's open-source Webkit; and Chrome also uses elements of the Firefox code. So Google have already hung their flag on the open-source mast. Adapting Android for the PC would be a huge development - but could we yet see a version of Linux with a Google-built front-end, to take on Windows on the desktop?

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Will Actinic integrate the inline preview with Chrome? The multi-thread handling of process could resolve a lot of speed issues compared to using the IE engine

# posted by  Anonymous : December 23, 2008 7:36 AM

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For online businesses in general, and online marketing in particular, web analytics is one of the most important things to know about. Even a free analytics package such as Google Analytics can give you crucial information about the performance of your site and how to improve it - which can make a significant difference to the bottom line.

One of the most-used statistics that analytics provides is the 'bounce rate'. If you're not familiar with the jargon, a bounce is when a visitor arrives at a web site, views the page they land on, then leaves without clicking through to any other page. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who bounce.

A bounce can indicate many things, from a poorly designed web page to a mis-directed search, and every site will experience them. The question is, what bounce rate ought we to expect? Unless you know what's reasonable and what's unreasonable, it's hard to know what a bounce rate of x% actually means.

So I did some searching around and came across this very useful survey that produced some average bounce rates for different types of site:
http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/03/typical-bounce-rates-survey-results.html

The writer doesn't indicate the sample size or how the survey was conducted, so I don't know how scientific it was. But it's definitely better than no information at all.

Our site has a bounce rate of around 47%, which is average for its type. Average is not really good enough for us, so there's still work to do. But knowing roughly where we stand helps me to set realistic targets, and to prioritise the work against other tasks that offer more (or less) promise for improvement.

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I think it is important to know your traffic, how it is finding you and which pages they have visited on your site, this helps you to improve your site and your bounce.

# posted by  affiliate marketing : September 23, 2008 5:53 AM

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Traditionally the use of video in marketing has been quite costly and beyond the range of most businesses. But YouTube and similar video-sharing sites have brought this medium within the reach of even the smallest.

Firstly, these sites impose very tight limits on file size, and therefore on quality. This levels the playing field technically for everyone. With a budget digital camcorder, a copy of Movie Maker (a free download from Microsoft, included with recent versions of Windows) and a bit of practice, almost anyone can produce a YouTube video that stands up alongside all but the very best.

Secondly, sites like Digg, Facebook and Myspace make it extremely easy for users to share videos, particularly from YouTube. This means that if your video is in any way interesting, amusing or fun, it can start circulating virally at no extra cost to your business. You don't even have to pay to stream the video - YouTube handles it all.

The hard thing is coming up with a creative idea that people are likely to circulate, and that subtly promotes your business and enhances your reputation. This is what companies pay ad agencies millions of pounds for. But you might actually achieve similar results using creative family members - or maybe by working with the creative department of a local college.

The cardinal rule is to be up-front and not pretend the movie is something it's not. Several companies have been burned when they tried to pass off their professional marketing videos as amateur, and got found out.

YouTube cross-promotes videos, and you can take advantage of this if your competitors advertise there too. See this excellent blog posting to find ou how to piggy back on your competitors videos - or how they could piggy back on yours! http://egil.biz/highjack-youtube-marketing-videos/

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Thanks! Interesting article. Maybe we should look into this. As you say, producing videos nowadays is a piece of cake ... now all we have to do is come up with a visual idea as daft as the written ones on our Blog :-)

# posted by  Keith : August 19, 2008 3:25 AM

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Microsoft released some research recently that seems to promote the value of banner advertising when combined with search.
http://advertising.microsoft.com/uk/advertising-case-studies-display-search-together-more-effective-finance-uk

The research, conducted with comScore for a leading high street bank, compared the effectiveness of banner advertising and search advertising when used separately and in combination. Search advertising proved twice as effective as banners. But the combination of banner and search was three times more effective than search advertising alone, and seven times more effective than a banner ad without search advertising.

The results no doubt leave MSN's ad sales team rubbing their hands with glee, but they need to be treated with great caution, for several reasons.

1) The adverts were specifically for financial services, and there is no guarantee that the same results would be repeated in other sectors
2) Microsoft only has about a 3% share of the UK search market. The market leader, Google, does not accept banner advertising. So the results are only relevant to a tiny minority of traffic
3) Both banner and search advertising were on Microsoft's own sites - so the results cannot be applied to banner and search advertising generically
4) The advertising was conducted by a recognised household brand, and would undoubtedly have been much less effective for a smaller, less well-known business

All in all, most companies will - and probably should - take the results with a huge pinch of salt.

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Affiliate marketing specialist Affiliate Window recently announced the release of a new Facebook application called Wishlist, that will enable retailers in the Affiliate Window network to promote their products through the UK's most popular social networking site:

www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=13696735276

So is this good news for retailers - and how will it be received by users?

Facebook has already shown how it intends to monetise its massive user base, by introducing discrete adverts into its pages and feeds during the course of last year. So far there has been little push-back from users, who no doubt recognise that they are getting a lot of functionality for free, and have mostly accepted the inevitable. But neither has there been much response to the ads. Recent research suggests that it is currently the least effective form of advertising in general use.

The Affiliate Window application, however, uses a more subtle approach. By enabling users to create both a wish list of their own, for friends and relatives who might like to buy them gifts, and a list of recommmendations to others,it creates a much better fit with the whole social networking ethos. The enormous growth of this medium in recent years means that it has the potential to be the next big thing in online marketing.

If you are not using Affiliate Window already, then the Facebook application alone will not repay the cost of joining - at least until it achieves critical mass. But if you are, and if you have the kind of products that young people gossip about and recommend to their social network, it may well be worth giving it a go.

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On the 8th May, Google announced that they are now using landing page load time as a factor in assessing the quality score for Google Adwords ads.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/05/landing-page-load-time-now-available-on.html

This means that it you advertise on Google Adwords, it may cost you more to maintain the same ranking on Google if your pages take a long time to load.

It also suggests that the same may well be true for Google's organic listing. So even if you don't advertise, now would be a good time to check your page load times and try to make improvements.

Firstly, you can use a tool like the 1&1 Site Checker, http://sitechecker.1and1.co.uk/analyze/?ladezeit, to find out how long your pages take to load and compare them with your competitors.

If your performance is poor, you will need to find out why. There are several factors that may be involved.

1) Latency
If your web site is on a server in a different country, the pages will take longer to load because of the distance and, more importantly, the number of different steps in the connection between your customers and your web site. Consider relocating your site to a server that is in the same country as most of your customers - even if it costs a little more.

2) Server performance
Cut-price web hosting that crams a large number of sites onto a single server is a false economy. Performance will inevitably be affected, especially at peak times. Upgrading to a proper ecommerce web hosting package will greatly improve the browsing experience, and almost certainly increase sales.

3) Images
Large images greatly increase the amount of data that has to be delivered before a page is fully loaded. Use smaller images that open larger versions when you click on them. Make sure that jpegs are compressed as much as possible, consistent with the image quality you need to achieve. In general, 5% compression will not produce noticeable loss of quality, and will significantly reduce the file size. Anything over 20% is likely to be highly noticeable, and won't deliver much saving in size.

Wherever possible, use CSS styles instead of images for the site design. A lot can be done with CSS to add background colours, borders and other effects, without the need to use images.

4) Code
If all else fails, go through the code and eliminate unnecessary content such as Comment tags. For Actinic-based ecommerce pages, make sure Actinic is set to Compact the code before uploading.

In general, a tableless CSS-based design will be noticeably more compact and faster to load than an equivalent design using more traditional methods. Some effects that in the past required Javascript, such as pop-up menus, can now be achieved far more efficiently using style sheets.

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Whenever I ask delegates on our Search Engines and Online Marketing course which is the most important search engine, they invariably name Google. But they are always surprised when I show them exactly how important Google is to their business.

For example, web-tracking company Hitwise announced recently that in March 2008, over a third of all traffic to UK web sites came from a Google-owned site. 36.55% to be exact. That's an increase of over 6% compared with the previous March - and it's an awful lot of traffic. (www.hitwise.co.uk/press-center/hitwiseHS2004/uk-google-websites-one-third-uk-traffic-28042008.php)

When it comes to search, Google's dominance is even more impressive. Hitwise state that in the same period, about 88% of all searches in the UK were carried out on Google. That's even higher than figures published last year by Forrester Research. (www.hitwise.co.uk/datacenter/searchengineanalysis.php).

Given that search engines in general are the number one source of new visitors to web sites (and therefore, of new online customers), getting prominent listings on Google should still be the online marketers first target.

For some hints as to how to start doing this, check out Actinic's Search Engines White Paper; or buy or download our free Top Tips book and read tips 37-47.

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This is a nice posting . I really like this post .

# posted by  Amit : July 25, 2008 12:12 AM

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Google recently announced that it is changing its policy towards trademark holders. In the past, if an Adwords advert for a competitor appeared in searches for a trademarked term that you own - such as your brand name - you could submit a complaint to Google, and they would remove the ad. From 5th May, that will no longer be the case. See www.google.co.uk/tm_complaint.html for Google's official statement.

The change follows a High Court case brought against Yahoo! for exactly this type of advertising, in which the case went against the trademark holder. For a summary of the legal ruling, see www.out-law.com/page-8916.

Although companies in the UK and Ireland will no longer be able to stop competitors from advertising against their trademarks, Google does still offer some protection in the form of its Quality Score. Competitors' landing pages will, by definition, have low relevance to searches for someone else's brand, and Google takes this into account in ranking the ads. To outrank the trademark owner, the competitor would have to compensate for this by significantly increasing their bid - probably to an uneconomic level.

Shutting competitors out

In the case of Actinic, we have already seen a couple of competitors trying to take advantage of this change. But in our case, we not only bid on our own name, we allow any of our recognised partners to bid on it too. Because their sites are also relevant to the search, they have a better quality score than the competitors - and the competitors appear at the bottom of the list.

The mathematics of this means that if you and nine partners such as resellers or affiliates all bid on your brand name, you can push your competitors completely off the first page of search results.

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A broken link is a link on a web page that points to something that doesn't exist. This can be caused by an error in the link; or by the removal of (or failure to upload) the object it points to.

How much do broken links matter? One broken link on a large site may not seem to matter all that much; but it matters to the person who clicks on it! Left unmanaged, though, broken links will multiply over time and can significantly degrade the quality of the site.

Broken links = lost business

In the long run, broken links result in lost business, because they have several negative effects on the site.

• Lost Page Rank. A link is the means by which one page donates page rank to another. If a link points to the wrong place, the intended destination page won't inherit any page rank from the page the link is on.


• Search engine penalty. A page containing a broken link may have its page rank reduced. A site with a lot of broken links may be downgraded by the search engines as being of poor quality.


• Lost listings. If a link is faulty, search engines will be unable to follow it to the next page. This may result in the search engine not updating its index for that page, or worse, not listing the page at all.


• Lost visitors. Search engines are the number one source of new visitors to web sites. Anything that damages your profile on the search engines will reduce the number of new visitors you attract.


• Lost customers. Visitors to your site who click on a broken link will be redirected to your error page, if you have one. If not, they will just get a 404 'Page not found' error. Most of them won't waste time hunting around your site for the thing they wanted. They will go and look elsewhere.

Dealing with broken links is quite easy. You can either download and run a software link checker like Xenu's Link Sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html), which is free and widely used; or you can use an online service that does the same job – such as the one provided by Webmaster Toolkit (www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-checker.shtml),, which can also check for missing images.

If you've never done it, you may be surprised at how many broken links your site has, and it may take a while to work through and fix them all. Done regularly, though, it is not an onerous task; and will improve both the quality of your site for visitors, and its search engine performance.

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Your online brand is under threat from people who want to use your hard-earned brand equity for their own profit - or just want to cause trouble. But with some simple precautions, you can eliminate 95% of the risk. The other 5% probably isn't worth worrying about.

1. Trademark your brand
Trademarking your brand protects your legal ownership. The biggest name on the internet, In the UK, trademarked terms are protected online under law, and the law has teeth. The biggest company on the internet, Google, was unable to use its 'Gmail' brand in the UK because someone else already owned the name here. So if you haven't already done so, do trademark your brand.

2. Brand your domain
Your www. address should ideally be the same as your brand name. If that domain is taken, choose another that contains your brand name. Purchase relevant 'top level’'domains, such as .com, .co.uk, and .eu, to prevent 'cybersquatting' - their use or abuse by someone else.

When PricewaterhouseCoopers rebranded themselves Monday a few years ago, they only bought the domain introducingmonday.com. For years, introducingmonday.co.uk displayed a photocopy of a hand performing a rude gesture, and proclaimed 'We’ve got your name!' Don't fall into the same trap. On the other hand, don't be conned into purchasing loads of obscure domains that you don't really need.

3. Lock your domain
'Locking' your domain with your domain registrar prevents unauthorised transfer requests. Otherwise, someone else may gain temporary control of your domain by persuading your registrar that you have left the company and they have taken over.

4. Block the hackers
Being hacked can harm your business and damage your reputation. If hackers gain access they may deface or replace your home page, or delete files on your site - which could include your latest batch of orders.

Make sure your web server is always up to date with the latest security patches. Use secure passwords that are not in any dictionary; make them hard to guess, and don't write them down. If any staff leave who know your passwords, change them. And use a secure ecommerce package for ordering, so that credit card details are encrypted. Then if your site is hacked, your customers will still be secure.

5. Stake your slaim
Claim your brand, and demonstrate your intention to protect it. Include your brand name and logo on every web page and in every downloadable document, and use the TM or ® logo where appropriate.

6. Protect your copyright
Put a copyright notice on every site page, and every downloadable document. Search Google for unique phrases used on your site, to see if anyone has copied them. Unless they are partners or resellers, contact them with instructions to remove the content. If they refuse, get a solicitor to write a legal 'cease and desist' instruction.

One online vendor copied images wholesale from The Gentleman's Shop (www.gentlemans-shop.com). When challenged, he insisted they were his own. Site owner Robert Johnston pointed out that the image sizes and names were the same as his own originals. "The show stopper," Robert explains, "was that some images had our garden as a backdrop!" Faced with the evidence, the offender removed the images.

7. Monitor search advertising
Your competitors may pay search engines to display their own advertisement to everyone who searches for you by name. This can be confusing for customers, as John Sollars of Stinkyink (www.stinkyink.com) discovered. "At one time, if you typed 'Stinkyink' into Google, an advert for one of our competitors appeared at the top", he recalls. "We had customers phoning up asking where their order was, when they had ordered from the competitor."

In the UK you can prevent advertising against your registered trademark, and Google, Yahoo! and MSN have procedures for dealing with infringements.

8. Top the rankings for your brand
Unless there are bigger organisations using the same name in different markets, you should be able to come our top in search engines listings for your own brand. Optimise your home page for your brand name. Use it at least 3-4 times in the text of the page. Include it in the page title, meta description and meta keywords tags, and in text links pointing from other pages to the home page. And make sure

Protecting your brand is important to building your reputation and maintaining trust. So don't let the pressure to win more customers and make more sales push it right off the agenda. Give it the priority it deserves.

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The first Christmas trading results are beginning to come in, and it looks like another bumper Christmas for online businesses, and more misery for the high street.

An email poll among our own users – mostly small and medium businesses in the retail sector – found a 27% rise in the number of people buying online, and a 46% increase in revenue (www.actinic.co.uk/news/080102.htm). So not only are more people shopping on the web, but they are spending more as well.

Other results suggest that small and medium businesses did at least as well as their larger counterparts. DSG, representing Dixons and FotoVista, reported a 31% rise in online sales – somewhat less than the smaller businesses represented in the Actinic poll. And Next, who at the time of writing have yet to report their online results, recorded an overall increase of a miserly 0.3% (www.internetretailing.net).

The biggest rise of all was reported on Christmas Day itself. Research by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) found 4.4 million people spending £84 million ordering goods online on the 25^th December – up a massive 269% on the previous year. (www.imrg.org).

In comparison, the high street may have done appallingly badly. Both DSG and Next recorded an actual fall in like for like sales in their stores in the pre-Christmas period – of 0.3% and 1% respectively.

So however you cut the statistics, the message is the same. The future for retail business is bright – so long as you’re online.

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One of the great things about the Firefox browser is the huge range of add-ons available, including several that are very useful for Marketing purposes. In this respect at least, Internet Explorer doesn’t come close. These are the ones I use regularly – feel free to comment, and add any others that you find particularly helpful.

1. SeoQuake

Invaluable for competitive research, it displays useful information about each site underneath its entry in Google’s listing -- like this:



Information provided includes the age and size of the site, links, traffic, and the number of people who have bookmarked it. You can select which items you want displayed, and you can also have the results on the page sorted according to different parameters. Great for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your site in comparison with your main search competitors.

www.seoquake.com



2. Google Global Firefox Extension

Allows you to compare your search performance on different Google regional search engines. Right-clicking on a Google results page allows you to display the results of the same search, as seen in a range of different countries. By default it offers the USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; but you can add any Google regional domain to the options.

www.redflymarketing.com/blog/google-global-firefox-extension



3. Social Media for Firefox

In the browser status bar, shows how many times the current page has been bookmarked in the main social bookmarking sites, and allows you to post to each of them. Currently supports Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Very useful for social networking and link building.

www.97thfloor.com/social-media-for-firefox



4. Google Blogger Web Comments

Allows you to see quickly whether any comments have been posted on Blogger about the current page, how many, and what they are. A right-click on the Web Comments icon brings up the first few words from each blog; allows you to click through and read what is written; and allows you to post your own comment to Blogger. Can also pop up a box automatically with the list of comments.

www.google.com/tools/firefox



5. IETab

A Firefox add-on that allows you to use the Internet Explorer rendering engine from within Firefox . This enables you to ccompare how your web pages will display in both Internet Explorer and Firefox by simply toggling between the two in the same Window.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419


6. SearchStatus

Displays the Google Page Rank, Alexa Traffic Rank and the Compete Rank for the current site in the status bar. A pop-up menu offers an array of information about the current page and its site, including Whois information, robots.txt and meta tag listing, nofollow links and keyword density.

www.quirk.biz/searchstatus

Labels: add-ons, blog, blogging, blogs, bookmarking, browser, competitive, engine, extensions, linking, links, marketing, media, networking, optimisation, plugins, research, search, seo, social

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Alexa ranking has its own significance in the ranking position of website in the search engines. The ranking in Alexa.com serves as a criteria for the Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If one depends on link or site selling as a form of monetization one will definitely want to increase their Alexa rank because it’ll increase bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing. Here we are taking into account the ranking of Social media. Social media is an Internet media that allow people to interact in some way. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet Forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. The basic services provided by these sites are interactive connections. The 10 social media sites stated below are ranked high in Alexa.com. These are:-

1. Yahoo
2. Microsoft Network
3. Google
4. You tube
5. MySpace
6. Orkut
7. Facebook
8. Hi5
9. Blogger.com
10.Friendster

Like Orkut.com is the online social networking services operated by Google. Here people come into contact with each other and build up relations whether personal or business.

# posted by  Anonymous : February 14, 2008 10:46 PM

Only IETab and SearchStatus are currently compatible with the new Firefox 3. Hopefully the authors of the other extensions will update them shortly.

# posted by  Bruce Townsend : June 18, 2008 4:55 AM

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Used properly, email can be an effective, low-cost way of communicating with customers. It also gives you the ability to direct the recipient to a relevant page of your web site with just a single click.

On the other hand, junk email is a huge turn-off. The trouble is, one person's junk is another's treasure. It's all about relevance. Email that is targeted towards the recipients' interests or needs is more effective for the sender, and avoids irritating the receiver. Here are a few suggestions for using email in conjunction with data about your customers' purchasing behaviour, to identify likely interest and maximise possible sales opportunities over the Christmas period.

1) Target last year's shoppers

Customers who bought Christmas gifts from you last year, assuming they were not dissatisfied, may have a higher propensity to purchase gifts from you this year. Send an email specifically to that group of people, with information on this year's Christmas range and links to your site for more details. Obviously, you must exclude any who have opted out from receiving your emails already.

2) Reward your biggest spenders

Higher spending customers are your best friends - their Christmas orders are likely to be worth more than the average. An email offering a free gift with their order may encourage them to come back to you rather than looking elsewhere.

3) Target by product interest

People tend to give presents that they themselves would like to receive. They also tend to acquire friends who have similar interests. So it's a good strategy to target people who have already bought specific types of product - like DVDs or perfume, for example – with related Christmas promotions.

The Mailing List feature in Actinic Business enables selective export of customer data according to all these types of criteria and more, for use with your email client (in the BCC field), GroupMail, or another mass email package. To see the options available, select 'Mailing Lists' from the 'Marketing' menu.

4) Use hyperlinks to trigger offers

Many sites manage offers and discounts by giving some customers a 'promotional code' which they type into a box at the checkout. Unfortunately, this tells other visitors that some people are getting a better deal than they are - which can increase cart abandonment and leads to lost sales. Use email links to trigger offers, and you can reward whom you choose, while keeping the others blissfully unaware.

5) Set time limits

Customer procrastination costs you orders. Putting an expiry date on every offer will encourage customers to make a decision now, rather than putting it off in favour of something that seems more urgent.

6) Encourage the price-sensitive

Price-sensitive shoppers are looking for low prices and high value. You, on the other hand, are looking for the most possible revenue and the best possible margin. You can serve the interests of both parties by offering a little more to those who spend a little more, with offers like '3 for the price of 2' and '10% off orders over £xx'. This gives more value to the purchaser, while increasing your overall revenue. You can offset the reduced margin by selling more and getting a better deal from your suppliers.

Special offers are managed in Actinic Business through the 'Discounts and Surcharges Settings' option in the 'Marketing' menu (you must first select 'Product Groups' and set up a group of products that each offer will apply to).

In 'Discounts and Surcharges', select 'Cart Contents' and set up your offer. Tick 'Requires Coupon Code' and enter a code, then 'Copy URL to Clipboard'. This generates a hyperlink that you can paste into your email, which will trigger the offer when it is clicked. To set time limits for the offer, go to the 'Restrictions' tab.

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Whenever people ask me how they can get higher rankings on Google for their web site, the first question I ask is, "Higher rankings for what?" Anyone could get a high ranking in Google for 'Purple venusian cucumbers' - but what's the point? They don't exist, and nobody is looking for them.

Rather than wasting time on guesswork, the first step in achieving better results on Google is to find out what 'key phrases' people actually use when they search for the type of things you sell. Incorporating these phrases in strategic places within your web pages will greatly improve your chances of attracting visitors who are searching for them.

1) Build A Seed List

There are a number of tools that can help you, but first stage you need a seed list - a very broad list of all the words and phrases you can think of that relate to your business and products. This should be as comprehesive as possible, and you will need to think a bit outside the box to be sure of covering all the bases. For more ideas, check out Aaron Wall's article on the SEO Book site.

2) Find The Most Promising Niches

Next, take a look at Wordtracker, http://www.wordtracker.com/. You can use the free version at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. But £14 will give you access to the full version for a week. This will give you more comprehensive results, and also automate parts of the process and save you hours of time.

Wordtracker searches its own Thesaurus and also interrogates the search engines of your choice to find literally hundreds of search phrases that are relevant to your business. It finds out which are the most popular key phrases, and also counts the number of web pages that each search term returns. In this way it identifies niches where there are plenty of potential customers, but not too much competition.

SEO Book (http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/) is another tool that can provide relevant UK-based search data, but for Google and MSN it only delivers estimated results.

3) Where Is The Money?
Having identified which key phrases are most popular, and which ones attrach the least competition, you need to decide which ones will deliver visitors who are most likely to make a purchase. You can probably make a first pass through your list and eliminate some that are clearly irrelevant, or seem unlikely to represent a potential customer - searches that are plainly of an academic nature, for example.

4) Check Out The Competition

Next, you can do a bit of competitive research. What terms do your competitors think are important? Go to Keyword Count (http://www.keywordcount.com/) and type in the web address of your main competitor, and it will tell you which words and phrases are the ones most used on his home page. Take the top ten or so phrases, then repeat for a few other competitors and make a master list. Compare this list with the one you got from WordTracker. Look for popular phrases that seem relevant to what you sell, that are not widely used by your competitors. These will hopefully point to a quiet but profitable niche where you can start establishing yourself. (You might choose to take on your competitors head to head for the most popular terms, or you might want to wait until you are in a stronger position).

5) Get To Work On Your Pages

Choose some relevant pages and optimise each one for 3-4 key phrases, optimising your home page for the most important ones. A good place to start is to search Google in the format 'site:www.yoururl.com key phrase'. This will list all the relevant pages of your own site, ranked for that phrase. Other things being equal, the easiest page to optimise for a given phrase will be the one that ranks highest already.

Provided you also have a reasonable number and quality of links pointing from other relevant sites to your own, this process should significantly improve the traffic you get from the main search engines.

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http://www.keywordcount.com seems to have stopped working. Well it isn't as of now! Shame.

# posted by  Jenny : October 3, 2007 9:27 AM

Hi

As with WordTracker you can also try the KeywordDiscovery - Keyword Research Tool which has a much larger keyword database. Great for tail end and niche keyword research.

Cheers
Nicole

# posted by  nicole : October 11, 2007 7:10 PM

For your keyword research try using KeywordSpy.com - a keyword research technology that will help you know what keywords your competitors are using and how it generates money for them, you can use those keywords to drive traffic to your site and give your business the exposure it needs. It offers Free trials.- http://www.keywordspy.com/

# posted by  michelle : March 5, 2008 7:54 PM

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