So for the final time here is our plea, Kelly is running to raise money for the Cardiomyopathy Association. Cardiomyopathy, which literally means “heart muscle disease,” is the deterioration of the function of the myocardium (i.e., the actual heart muscle) for any reason. People with cardiomyopathy are often at risk of arrhythmia or sudden cardiac death or both.

Kelly has currently run 20 miles in training, and besides worrying about where the extra 6.5 miles is going to come from on the day, is all but ready to complete the run. We have in the past offered the opportunity to purchase t-shirt advertising on Kelly’s and all of our team’s (who will be there supporting Kelly) t-shirts, we are getting these printed on Saturday 17th April so you still have time to get your logo on her shirt if you wish.

All we are asking is that you sponsor Kelly Frew for her run, any amount you wish, and you claim your space. I’ll also chuck you a fair few links back from this blog as a way of saying thanks. T-shirt advertising and links! What more could you want?

If you are interested please sponsor Kelly here: http://www.justgiving.com/Kelly-Frew and then email me your logo and site details: paul@ozido.com

Again a huge thanks to everybody who has already sponsored Kelly, I’ll report back how the run goes afterwards.

So let me start by saying you can sponsor Kelly Frew here: http://www.justgiving.com/Kelly-Frew

Cardiomyopathy is a weakening of the heart muscle or a change in heart muscle structure. It is often associated with inadequate heart pumping or other heart function problems.  You can find out more here.

Kelly has to raise £1500 minimum to enter the marathon which is no easy feat, so we thought it was time to get creative. Firstly every company / website / individual who makes a donation will recieve a logo printed on Kelly’s running T-shirt, I’ll also be down in London along with the rest of our team who will be wearing the same logo’d up T-shirts, so it’s a nice bit of exposure.

Secondary, everyone who donates will be plugged in my next 10 posts giving a fair bit of exposure and a few good links, T-shirt advertising and links? What more can you ask for.

No minimum donation required, every penny will be going towards the Cardiomyopathy Association
so it really is a worthwhile cause.

Interested? Make your donation here: http://www.justgiving.com/Kelly-Frew and email me at paul@ozido.com and let me know you’ve done so, we’ll take it from there.

Thanks for reading     )

Sponsorship Update

We have our first sponsors who have claimed their space on Kelly’s running T-shirt, so a big thanks to the following:

George Marshall who runs the Bras website Bras.co.uk

Joe Conner who runs the Promotional Codes website cantbarsed.com

It’s not been a bad year for the GGUK site. We built the site in late November 2008 and have left it virtually untouched until October 2009 when I added a bit of content and built a few links for it to see if it had aged well enough within the mighty G. Some of the content we added got some good results so I decided to push the site further over the last couple of months and have achieved some pretty decent results.

The site generated about £60k revenue for merchants across all networks with an AdWords bill of exactly £82,06 for the last quarter of 2009. Nothing to write home about in comparison with the big players in the industry but for little me, that’s a healthy profit margin.

So with an eye on the natural SERP’s where most of its traffic is generated I can see the site is on the verge of some decent generic rankings, and this is enough to spur me on and make the site one of our main projects for 2010.

Things to come will be personalised gifts category or mini site, we need to firm up the experience days section and get some real content on there and we recently added the gifting community which is starting to take some shape. I’ve a couple of ideas which I’ll reveal more about once we’ve developed them, but all in all, I’m happy with the results for this final quarter given the effort. I predict if we work on the search rankings for most of 2010, this time next year I’ll be reporting 10 times this figure, that’s the aim I’ve set the guys anyway.

If I don’t post again beforehand, Merry Christmas all and a Happy New Year!

Now I often listen to random people who I’ve never met, so I took his advice and registered hannahwaterman.net. 30 minutes of Dreamweaver later and we have a one page masterpiece devoted to this young lady’s DVD. now this is an affiliate site and the links are pointing to play.com through Affiliate Window tiny URL’s (very clever btw guys).  So my maths is looking something like this:

Domain: £10
Hosting: Dumped on a server I already had.
Design Fee’s: Really not worth paying for.
Time: 30 mins at 11.30 at night whilst watching family guy, i’ll write that off as time well spent.

So at Play.com’s 2% commission rate on a DVD selling at £12.99, I need to sell a grand total of about 40 DVD’s before i’m profitable, that or hope they buy other stuff too.

I don’t think i’m going to be able to retire on this one, but it might make some extra beer money for Christmas, i’ll let you know how it goes.

Let me take you back to Friday afternoon, 3 days ago, about 4pm to be precise. Now we had well and truly given up work for the day and found ourselves somehow in a pub discussing how to develop our gifts review website further. Whilst enjoying my lovely orange juice (27 days sober!) the conversation turned to building a gifts related community, helping people who are stuck for a gift idea to find the perfect gift and such. As the night wore on and the alcohol flowed, the ideas for the community flowed too well into the early hours of Saturday morning.

So I’ll fast forward to Monday morning when I received a link from one of my developers to our spangly new Gifting Community, completely tested, integrated into our current website and ready to roll.

So the forums are phpbb which is a ready made script, I appreciate that. But the script is pretty basic and I’m looking at complete design integration, search engine friendly URL’s, title tags, Dynamic META data, custom affiliate mod, quick reply integration, XML sitemaps, RSS feeds and a wealth of other mods on top to get them up to a required standard. Whats more by the time I had seen the integration, the PR girls had already started adding posts and drumming up conversation….

I sit here at 3am in the morning suitably impressed with what has just happened and thinking, that’s how development should work. I’ve seen companies take 3 months to change a title tag, how long does it take you to implement your great ideas? It’s worth thinking about.

What I’m Reading Today: Julian’s Puppies Will Destroy The Earth theory.

Lets get this straight, the workers know exactly what they are doing by striking at this time of year. On the first day, mail centre staff and drivers will strike. The next day it will be delivery and collection staff meaning maximum disruption to service whilst each employee only loses one days pay. Whether these workers are right to strike or not isn’t for me to involve myself in, it’s how it has been dealt with by the leaders at Royal Mail that really frustrates me.

There are over 2.5 million unemployed people in the UK, a good majority of who would give an arm to get themselves back into employment, and we’re accepting these people walking out and striking over conditions THEIR union agreed to previously? If it were my business, anybody who walked out would be out on their ear with the option to reapply for thier jobs along with the rest of the unemployed people.

Sadly it isn’t as simple as that as the Royal Mail is owned by the government, a government who are badly struggling to stay in power come the next election and to take such a stance would probably mean the little hope they have left of staying in power would be out of the window, a sign we should privatise the Royal Mail maybe?

But what have the Royal Mail actually done to resolve the strikes? 40 days of solid chat with the union hasn’t resolved the issue so are they expecting another 40 days of chat will? The time for chat is never over, but you need to also take action. Bringing in unskilled tempory staff (which would have come in for Christmas anyway) has done little to stop the millions of letters / parcels stacking up in the extra warehouses they’ve hired to do little more than store them in.

When a business has such a monopoly on a sector (in this case mail delivery) like the Royal mail has, it has to do something pretty dumb to lose that overnight, something the Royal Mail are going to educate the world as to how to achieve at this rate. Whilst the Internet, particularly email, has been blamed for the problems facing the Royal Mail in recent years, it’s actually the Internet and the emergence of Ecommerce which has kept it going with such strengths, but maybe the royal Mail haven’t understood this and adapted?

The strikes have meant that retailers just won’t send their parcels through Royal Mail with the likes of Amazon, John Lewis, Tesco and a mass of other major retailers have simply switched to alterior courier companies, many of whom are cheaper to send with then the Royal Mail.

Here’s how I’d have handled it, rightly or wrongly…. I’d have simply stopped all services to EVERYONE other than my business customers. No pick ups from post boxes, no non business services at post offices, nothing.

I’d have visited my top 1000 customers and guaranteed them that their mail will be delivered without delay as usual, communicating to the rest of businesses that services will be as normal for them. Why? Simply because now that John Lewis, Amazon and everyone has left, who’s to guarantee that they are going to come back when there are cheaper services with the same convenience available to business customers? So if the Royal Mail only serviced it’s business customers, mail would be at a manageable level, I’d have just about the right number of experienced staff to keep it ticking over and we wouldn’t have these warehouses dotted around the country full of undelivered mail from a week ago.

As a consumer I’d rather Royal Mail had taken this action. At the moment I can send something, but never know if or when its going to get there, I’d rather than just stop accepting mail, that way I know where I stand.

Me, you and anybody who wants to send a postcard or a birthday card are going to be pretty annoyed by not being able to send it through Royal Mail, but other than a handful of people who will take it to heart and never use the Royal Mail again, we would return to them once the strike action was resolved simply because it’s convenient. Throwing a letter in a postbox is the everyday, it’s cheaper than alternative deliverers and we would return to doing it straight afterwards because of this, the alternatives just aren’t as convenient.

The only way a successor to the petrol car is ever going to work, is when it can be fuelled just like a petrol car, or as conveniently…

There would also be a massive pressure then on the staff at the Royal Mail who are striking because their friends, family, associates wouldn’t be able to use a service their working for…. because of their strike action. It would completely turn the tables on the strikers because the royal Mail would have a manageable workload.

No I wouldn’t be popular, but i’d be running a profitable service and I’d be being honest with all of my customers by saying “sorry guys, but whilst these strikes are going on we just can’t take your mail”, honesty goes a long way you know.

I love the domain, I think it’s completely brandable and am keen to get cracking with a site on it, but I’ve hit a bit of an unexpected stumbling block. I can’t find a picture of a solitary baked bean anywhere! There are indeed plenty of baked beans with their little baked bean friends in the shots, but I’ve been through all the stock photography sites I know now with no joy.

So i’m sending out an SOS, can you help me find a picture of a single baked bean? It needs to be high res, have a plain white background, something like this:

Before anybody chimes up, yes that’s a coffee bean and not a baked bean, it’s the style of shot I’m demonstrating. If your handy with a camera and think you could do this shot for me, I’d be most grateful and am sure I could sort you out with beer or good old sterling. My own efforts to take this shot myself weren’t good.

So that’s my SOS, do you know where I can find a baked bean?

Dear Paul Smith

Hope you are well and enjoying the lovely weather we are experiencing at the moment.

At Pinesolutions we would like to try and make your lives that little bit easier. Writing unique and interesting content for your site can be such a tedious task, so why not let us do it for you?

We are opening up our creative writing abilities to all of our affiliates, so if you would be interested in a regular supply of furniture related content whether it be reviews, articles or buying guides etc; drop me an e mail and we will get the ball rolling.

My e mail address is chris@pinesolutions.co.uk,

If anyone has any questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

Regards

Chris

As an affiliate one of the biggest labours of love is adding unique content to websites and any help given from merchants is always appreciated and should in this case be applauded, as it doesn’t happen often enough!

Good job Chris, Good job Pinesolutions.co.uk

First up on the series was inventor Rupert Sweet-Escott who entered the den looking like he’d just invented the first ever aeroplane, strapped to his back no less. It turned out to be a pedal-powered hang gliding accessory and was one of a handful a number of aviation inventions Rupert Had Invented.

Rupert made a huge mistake by trying to demonstrate his product by having a friend in the harness hang underneath a stepladder, if your trying to make people laugh this is acceptable, but if your looking for £80,000 investment, this might not have been the best idea.

Rupert’s inventions included the pedal-powered hang gliding accessory (the airbike), A wind turbine that looks like a chimney pot, some kind of folding beam mechanism (which wasn’t explained very well so I don’t quite understand what it did) and a further aircraft with short takeoff and landing which he hoped would go into military or search and rescue.

Rupert received one offer for 49% of his business which he accepted from James Caan who decided one of his inventions would probably come off one day and he as a person was worth a punt.

I’m somewhat surprised that the star product here was missed by the dragons and they were distracted by the aviation products. A wind turbine that looks like a chimney pot, simple, yet completely in line with today’s energy conscious consumers.

Add to that the planning restrictions councils instill on properties stopping them from having such energy saving devices in built up residential areas due to the “aesthetics” of the area, and quite frankly this is a winner that is going to go a long way.

James may well have stumbled into something of a great deal without realizing it, or he may have been keeping it quiet to get a good deal, either way a canny investment.

Katie Olver came into the den with a range of saucy / romantic novels which substituted the names of the main characters and other details for your own. Katie didn’t receive any investment from the dragons but I’ve since seen her products featured on Firebox.com, so she didn’t do too bad from the experience:

http://www.firebox.com/product/2319/You-Star-Novel

Probably the best invention on the first episode was the environmentally friendly patio heaters from Eddie Middleton, delivering 50% less carbon emissions that regular patio heaters.

Eddie initially refused to give his wholesale price to the dragons on the grounds of it being “sensitive information”, which truly riled the dragons. Understandably so, how can anybody expect people to give £255,000 when your not prepared to give a 2 year old wholesale price?

He finally relented but by this time had lost the majority of the dragons.

Eddie was offered the money he asked for in return for 48% of the business in a combined bid from Peter and James, but turned down the offer on the grounds that the equity stake was too high.

I’m somewhat surprised Peter and James didn’t negotiate more with the deal given that this will be the future of patio heaters and is already a huge market in the USA. Yet another example where Ego’s stand in the way of business being done and profits being made.

Next was Apocalypse, a scary theater show, for want of a better description. Apocalypse wanted £200k in return for 20% of the business to launch their new show “The Sickness”.

I’ll cut this short with a sigh, no sales, no bookings, no theater, just an idea. A business value of £1million for a theatrical idea? I’m sure you’ll be able to judge yourselves whether they got the money or not … no, they didn’t.

The final investment we’ll look at for this episode is Steve Smith who was looking for £100k investment in his business Truecall, for 7.5% equity.

In a nutshell, Truecall checks every call you receive before letting the telephone ring and identifies whether or not you know the caller. If their not on your preferred list they are asked to leave their name and you can then accept or deny the call.

Interestingly, until Steve revealed his past business history which showed he was successful in selling previous businesses, there didn’t appear to be much interest. Success breeds success, the dragons know this.

This is nice and I do like it, yet I don’t think it’s a a complete product yet and needs some rethinking. Peter Jones walked away with the deal and given his history in the telecoms market, I’m sure he’ll do the product justice by working it into an initial handset so there is no further fee after buying your phone.

That’s all peeps, a great kick off to the series, i’ll get around to giving my thoughts on episode two shortly.

Said employee (Craig) decided that my post was negative to the Findel brand (which wasn’t my intention at all) and made two very long responses to my post in the comments section. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but what were the consequences of doing so?

Up until the responses were made in the comments section (a good two weeks) this blog had attracted 2 visitors through the search engines with either “findel” or “kitbag” in in the searched for keywords.  Since the dialogue in the comments section this blog has received over 600 visits from the search engines with either “findel” or “kitbag” in the searched for keywords.

There were 46 keyword variations driving traffic, some of which had only been achieved because of the extra content that was added in the comments section.

So lets re-look at the scenario. A Findel employee comes across a blog post which they feel is negative to the brand. In deciding to respond publicly they have unwittingly made the blog post more visible to the world (due to search engine algorithms) and attracted more visitors through their comments.

If they’d have said nothing at all very few people other than the 2 people who had visited the site through the search engines previously would have seen it…

I show this example not to mock Findel or Craig, but really because I think it’s a learning point that all brands should take on board. Protecting your brand is obviously important, but knowing when to respond to feedback in the public eye and when something is dead should be managed and advised by your PR experts, they’d have known this blog was too small to worry about.

Sometimes saying nothing at all can be the better solution…