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

About a week ago I was under the impression that everywhere in the UK had suffered dramatic snow falls, or at least that’s what the news was telling me. So as you do when trains are at their worst I decided to pack up my stuff for the week and head down to Newquay to see what it had to offer in the winter months.

After looking over Newquay Hotels UK I booked my hotel and the above picture was taken from my hotel room window. As you’ll undoubtedly notice, not a single snow flake in sight. The Newquay winds had kept the snow away, but deceivingly so as all the villages and towns surrounding Newquay were covered in the white stuff meaning we were actually snowed in.

13 hours to get there, 11 hours to get back it was a long old journey but it was great fun.

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!

In the end we went for a simple logo, by adding a Christmas hat to the first ‘G’ in the www.giftsguideuk.com logo (see it on the site). I like the logo, I think it suit’s the very simple logo and it definitely says Christmas.

I’ve also been over-ruled that the falling snowstorm javascript we’ve added to the site, which as you’d imagine simulates a snowstorm is a good idea. I love the tackiness of the effect, I like the fact it says Christmas, but I do also feel it’s too much.

So your opinions please, can anyone get away with falling snow on their website? Or should it be locked away to the archives of the 90′s?

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.

Essentially the aim of our product pages are to get the user to click through to the merchant site and buy the product, so it’s positive to see that users are indeed doing this. Like every industry the merchants we feature pay different commission rates, convert at different levels, run promotions, etc. So being able to divert a user through to a specific merchant whilst keeping choice available should products go out of stock and we not notice, means we are able to maximise our commissions.

The learning’s we’ve taken from our heatmap experiment:

1). You can’t really see because it is cut off at the top, but very few people click the big product image. Maybe having this link through to a high res image rather than the merchant and giving the user clearer direction will encourage this link to be clicked more. We will run an A/B split test to determine this.

2). We put a logo in the middle of the product description of the merchant we’re trying to encourage clicks too on the basis that the majority of users won’t get to the end of our copy. This has proven to be effective with a large majority of clicks going through this link (yellow gadgetshop logo at the top).

3). The biggest learning we took was from the logos we run across the bottom of the article to tell the user where to buy the product. We’ve always ordered these from left to right (as the eye reads) in order of which merchant we want the majority of users to go to. However we can clearly see that the majority of users are clicking the far right logo, with very few people going through the far left logo. We’ve tested this further today and switched these three logos around and regardless of which logo is where, the majority of users are clicking right to left. This is a big learning for us and will certainly allow us to divert our users more effectively in the future.

4). As we’re tracking every click a user makes you’ll see lots of random dots not on links, initially we put this down to user error, but maybe there’s enough clicks on the consumer review (grey box at the bottom) showing to think the user thought they could click that box to see more? I’m not sure on that one and will have to investigate further.

This is one days data on one page, we’re tracking the entire site so we’ve a lot of analysis to do and if anyone’s interested, I’ll share more of our learning’s going forward.

Now just because i’m a nice guy, you can find the click hotspot script we installed here:
http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html

It’s free to download and use and we had it installed and gathering data in less than 5 minutes. If you use the script let me know, and I’d love to hear some of your findings from your own sites.

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.

Hi there,

let me introduce myself – my name is Taz and I work for a gadget company called RED5. Our company was founded by Jonathan Elvidge who also co-founded the original gadget shop in the UK.

I noticed that you mention the Bladefish Sea Scooter range in one of your posts. We have just received a delivery of both the lower end models and hope to be getting the higher end models soon.

I wondered if you would be interested in putting a link to our page in your post as I notice that IWOOT does not have them in stock as of yet (I believe that we are the first in the UK to get the new models in stock).

You can view our product page here:

http://www.red5.co.uk/Bladefish-pr-826.html

Many thanks, hoping to hear from you,

Tasmin Harney | Customer Services | RED5 Retail Ltd

So on first glance this may not seem to be anything special, but lets look at it closer. Taz hasn’t come to me and said “hey feature all our products and plaster our banners on your site”, she identified a clear opportunity on a specific product page for a mutually beneficial relationship.

It’s also clever on Red5′s part because in the SERP’S for the product name, we sit second to IWOOT, whereas Red5 don’t appear on the first page for the product name, meaning if we did link to them, they’d have an instant presance. What impresses me even further is that it would appear Taz works in customer services, putting shame to many marketing departments out there!

Working at IWOOT for 3 years I obviously know of red5, but I’d be honest enough to say I haven’t featured them on giftsguideuk.com for no other reason than I forgot about them. Revitalizing my interest through such a simple way would certainly get me featuring them more.

I named this post too good / too bad, because there was no happy ending. Having whipped an email back saying yep, if you have an affiliate program let me have the details andI’ll get a link up for you, Taz replied telling me her colleague would be in touch, and one week later, still no contact from said colleague.

This is canny marketing at its best and I wish more affiliate managers would look for genuine opportunities like this, even if Red5 only did half the job it’s a good start guys, just follow up the opportunities your creating for yourself or surely it’s wasted effort?