It took 3 hours to get from Peterborough to Stonehenge, 4 hours to get back due to the M25 being chocker, and despite not being able to find any promotional codes and having to pay £6 to get in and visit the site (£6 to look at rocks ???) it was actually a great day out and I thoroughly recommend taking the time to go and visit if you haven’t already. I don’t really have any meaningful insights into the history of Stonehenge that isn’t available on their website (http://www.stonehenge.co.uk) so i’ll just jump straight to the pictures I took.

Kelly Frew - Sponsorship Update

In my last post I mentioned that one of our team Kelly Frew was looking for sponsors for her London Marathon run in return for Tshirt advertising. A big thanks to everybody who has donated so far and if you haven’t already, join the likes of Bras.co.uk and Newquay Hotels UK and claim your T-Shirt Advertising now! (Full Details Here)

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     :o)

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.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40,  maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

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.

The actual not drinking of alcohol has been relatively easy. There’s been no real urges for it, no cold sweats and shakes in the middle of the night so on that front I’m going strong. What’s been real awkward has been other people’s take and perception of what I’m doing. It’s been an eye opening two week’s, so here’s some of the highlights:

Eliminating People’s Previous Perceptions
Everyone in my life knows I like a drink. My family, my friends, the people I work with, even our clients whom I’ve had many a nights out with know I’ve never been one to turn down a pint. So it’s been a job explaining to these people that I’ve given up for no other reason than I decided i drank too much and though I should do something about it.

This of course is never an acceptable answer. Have you got liver disease? Have you found god? Are in attending AA? Ive got some leaflets if you want them? Are you joking? are all thing’s I’ve heard in the last 12 days. A real eye opener as to how people perceive me, though not completely unexpected.

Apologizing
In the last 12 days I’ve had to apologise to 6 different people who I’ve met up with and they’ve got me a pint in before I’ve had chance to explain I’d given up. So apologizing has become a bit of a daily habit, along with the pre-empting phone call to everyone I meet now where I slip in that I’m not drinking anymore.

I even had to apologise to the barmaid in my local who pulled me a pint when she saw me talking to someone on the way in knowing that’s what I’ve had every time I’ve been in since I moved to this little village…

Friends
For the last year I’ve met the same friend in the same bar on the same day at the same time every week for an afternoons / evenings / nights drinking. So wanting to keep this important social event I decided we’d give this a go with me not drinking. What I didn’t expect was for her to not drink as well, so our usual slosh out turned into an orange juice fuelled deep and meaningful about the meaning of life. i must admit, I think I enjoyed it more not drinking.

Family
So Sunday lunch with my family was an interesting one. My old’s like a drink and had bought drink especially for me. I think i spent most of the afternoon saying thank-you but it’s something I’ve decided to do and I’m not going to drink, even to the point where the magners came out being waved in front of me… cheers for the help in this one guys! haha.

Weight Loss
In the last 12 days I’ve lost 6lbs (that’s nearly half a stone people).  Down from 13 stone to 12 stone 8lbs, something I’ll keep an eye on but I’m hoping this will slow down soon. Weight loss at that rate can’t be good. Did you know there are almost 250 calories in a pint of cider? Nor did I until I started looking into why I’m losing so much weight.

So yes, it’s been an eventful 12 days, it’s been strange not having a pint whilst watching the football or on a Saturday night as these were habitual, but all in all, still going strong.