DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

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I was at a networking event a few evenings ago and I got intensely irritated by the behaviour of one of the attendees.  He was working the room, walking around chanting. “I’ll do your adwords, your keywords, your SEO, yourSEM your PPCâ€.  It was clear that he had no idea what he was saying, could probably not explained it if he was put on the spot and intended to pull the wool over the eyes of other people at the event in order to get a sale – AGGHHH!!!

You see for many small businesses, as they grapple to understand what a successful website is and how it is achieved, there are plenty of people out there willing to take advantage.

Now I’m not knocking the majority of SEO specialists out there. There’s an enormous skill and a great deal of work involved in optimising a website (properly). What I am driving at is that if you own a website and you want it to succeed, you need to have a pretty good understanding of this yourself.

The sort of knowledge I am talking about is freely available and should be learned for no other reason than to stop an SEO company trying to pull the wool over your eyes.

A good place to go and get a grasp of the basics is at the comprehensive market samurai website.

While you there, sign up for the free trial. I’ve used three other keyword tools and this is by far the best

http://www.marketsamurai.com/

In recent months, with several office moves and a flurry of new meetings to keep on top of, I was starting to wonder if I would ever find a way of keeping on top of my meeting notes and business cards. I’m also big on lists, scheduling and writing things down when Ideas come to me in silly places.

The answer it seems was staring me in the face from the very beginning. I’d seen onenote on versions of windows mobile for a while but seen it more as a bundled annoyance that I would one day get around to evaluating. When I finally got around to firing it up on my laptop, I was annoyed I didn’t do it earlier (just as the blurb said I would be). Now I use it all the time and to be honest would struggle without it. All my notes get scanned and convereted into one note via the sheet feed scanner. Easy. If you haven’t tried it, give it a while, it comes with the more comprehensive versions of office. This post isn’t about one notethough, it’s about a little tip I learnt when I finally started using iPhone recently.

The power of onenote is in having access to your information and notes anywhere which is why iphone is a frustration. Luckily I found a solution that allows me to onenote on my iphone.

It comes in two form, cloud syncing and desktop syncing. I went for the desktop version because for a $10 fee it didn’t make sense to lock into an ongoing monthly contract.

There are essentially two apps, one downloadable from the istore and the one you install on your PC. There is a bit of configuration to do but nothing that can’t be done by the average user.

If you’re a user of onenote and iphone you might like to find out more at www.mobilenoter.com

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

If you want to invite your website visitors to take action, then chances are you are considering using a web based form. There are a number of added advantages to using a webform, that may not have already crossed your mind. For starters, spammers crawl the internet looking for  email addresses published on the site. They not only use it to spam your inbox but quite possibly sell your email address to make sure you ger even more!

It’s obviously better to use a web form to reduce the amount of spam. A webform also allows your visitors to quickly contact you from their browser, without having to sign into their email or start a new application.

Perhaps, most importantly though, a webform is the first stage in your site visitors journey through an engagement with you. To put it another way a webform can be used to put your customer data to work where you want it. If you design the form correctly you will have all the right information to get off on the right footing.

I’m going to introduce you to 3 different methods of creating webforms, all of them are low tech. Your choice will depend on what you want ultimately to do with the information once you have it. If your a programmer, you are probably used to spending half a day or more designing your own form and you may not like the idea of people doing it themselves in a fraction of the time.

Email Marketing Engine

Let’s start with Aweber. If you’re unfamiliar with Aweber it’s a low cost reasonably sophisticated email marketing tools with follow up capability. Like many email marketing engines, it has a form builder. The form builder in Aweber will allow you to build forms with full control over the fields, background and so on and will even allow light box effects and pop up forms like the one on this blog. Building a form is as simple as stepping through a wizard, which results in a snippet of code that you give to your webmaster or put on the site yourself. Easy. Because it has a follow up capability, you can use the form wizard to create a registration form for some give away content. This can be a simple but effective way to build a list around your topic area. You will also recognise this technique used in my giveaway area. The follow up email is a series of emails sent in a sequence that you configure and control. This means that if particularly useful technique also.

Web form to SugarCRM

The increasingly popular Customer Relationship Management solution has a form builder build into it from the community edition upwards. This is appropriate where you want your sales and marketing team to service leads from the web an bring them straight into your CRM system. The advantage of this kind of approach is that that you can qualify the lead and then assign the lead to a sales person on a round robin basis. The lead can be tracked and reported with the rest of your pipeline and you can also see by lead source where the lead originated from and how your website is performing.

Web forms for Joomla!

This is an extension for the popular Content Management System, Joomla! This is one of the simplest ways to build forms into your website with the added advantage of CAPTCHA. (those annoying code that you have to fill in to verify you’re not a robot) RS forms will allow you to work on your form from your Joomla admin consol. RS forms will simply send a notification to a specified email account with details of the enquiry. This is sufficient if you have a low level of enquiries but can become cumbersome if you then have to copy and paste large amounts of these to your other systems during the day.

These three methods are so low in cost and so easy to do, it’s hard to see why some web developers still insist on doing things the old fashioned way in code. If you’d like to know more about any of these methods, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

For those that are new to Key word analyis, there is no better place to start than with one of the many videos by market samurai.In this video Ben explores SEO competition. Put simply, this is all about understanding the sort of websites that competes for given keywords and pulling apart the factors that influence their success inserving that keyword.

If you want to rank highly on the from page of google for your keyword for example, this approach allows you to massively shorten the process of searching and analysing the top ten for that key word.

More importantly though, this approach will tell you something far more important- should you bother in the first place!

For example, if you would like sell a particular product online and you can see that the competition has well established domains, tens of thousands of links, you may deem this to difficult to compete, depending on the resources you have available and sale price x volume of the item.

Anyway, I leave the rest to Ben to explain but it you’d like to see more of these kind of videos you can see them here

http://www.marketsamurai.com

Ben, over to you

Congrats guys and some humour for the rest of us.

Are you password protected? | GDS Publishing.

Do you protect your passwords?

Are you doing enough to protect your business by having secure passwords? And do you have different passwords that can’t easily be traced?

Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 7.

A quick share of this SMH article. Looks like the race for smart phone market share just got interesting.

As the world’s IT press set out to publicise the alleged flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, some IT departments are now looking at alternative browsers until the next patch update comes through.

As this article points out, switching and supporting browsers could create some teething problems as users discover all of those little things that IE can do but Firefox can’t

Now seems like a good time to point out a little plugin for Firefox that lets me run apps like Dynamics CRM and Sharepoint with little fuss.

It also allows me to keep each new window neatly under a tab and avoid the barrage of pop ups that Dynamics CRM (current version) is known for.

In Firefox go to Tools > Add ons >

then search and install the ‘IE tab’ add on

When your done, don’t forget to add the location of the sites and application that you want to use in IE mode.

Its under Tools > Add ons> IE tab > Sites

Enjoy!

There’s a stack of new video available on the pre-released version of Google Chrome OS.

Chrome is designed for small netbooks with a live internet connection. It loads in seconds and provides access to the web, web based apps and cloud based resources. All of which means I wont be using this on the train on the way to work in the morning.

More info at

http://www.youtube.com/user/googlechrome

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANMrzw7JFzA&channel=googlechrome

Some business systems may well be redundant or costly…. so why do we still run them?

A great reminder via IT news.

How to kill the orphans and move on: Gartner – Software – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.