Posts Tagged ‘business’
A few people have asked me in the past as to where I get my business cards printed, the answer is simple, moo.com. They allow you to upload multiple reverse side images, to which I generally include our URL, and then on the front, you can chose a static image and your text details. Below is a copy of the backgrounds I’ve used for my cards, all following the black dog idea.
Business Card Backgrounds
Using Business Cards
As the backgrounds are all different, you do get a few interesting looks handing out business cards. Some people think you are giving their colleague a different / special / secret card, compared with the one they are getting. To be honest I am not a big fan of handing out business cards (and these ones will probably last a year), but in certain circles it looks bad if someone gives you their card and you can’t offer one in return. At the very least the business cards are good for entering competitions in trade shows and at hotels 
For anyone settings themselves up in business and starting out, a few euros and an hour invested in some cards should help.
Right now they have an offer, which only runs until tonight, where you can get 200 cards for about €50, see here. Or to test is about €15 for 50. They have an email list too which regularly sends out offers.
One final moo tip : unless your company is a really focused on the environment, avoid the eco paper cards. The finish isn’t as polished on they as it is for the matt (no recycled card) business cards.
btw. I will be the first to admit that my cards aren’t as cool as these cards, being an ex-electronic engineer I find them really intriguing.
Delivery !
And five days after I’ve ordered they’ve popped up on my door.
Presentation
The packaging
The Moo Cards
Over the last few days I’ve noticed that on some queries on google.ie there new feature added to the SERPS. Now certain search results will result in blending in a listing of local businesses. These have already been active on google.com and google.de for sometime now, and it’s great to see their roll out in Ireland. Right now Google Business Listing are under used in a selection of queries that would lend themselves to listing actual local businesses, see this example for [doctor cork].
Business Listing
So if you were a Doctor in Cork, you could possibly easily get your business listed in the A-J business listing. Just think of the extra number of enquiries/leads that a bussiness could get by having their business appear in such listings. Of course some areas of business areas are already using this to full effect, take the hotels in dublin for example.
Hotels in Dublin
List your business on Google Local Business Listing
Here is a quick run down on how to get your business listed on the google local business listings:
- Go to the Local Business Center
- Login with your google account
- Select Add New Listing
- Enter your business details and link to your website
- Select your business categories and add opening hours
- Verify by phone/SMS/post
When adding your business we would recommend to add as much information as you can. Also think about optimising your company’s name listing to insure that it includes the type of business you operate.
For the US listings, Google has used some 3rd party websites like the Yellow Pages & Trip Advisor to seed the index. And it appears that some of the Irish listings have come through 3rd party sites also. If your company is listed via one of these sites, you can still take ownership by clicking on the link and viewing the full listing and then select “Add or edit your business”.
The Bad of Google Business Listing
Where there is any oppertunity to game google there will be people who will take advantage of it. Right now there does appear to be some SPAM in the listing for some queries like [car hire cork]
Spam in the Business Listings
Right now there doesn’t seem to be a way to report a listing, but maybe Google will add that soon.
Edit : Thanks to JohnMuller from Google I found out how to report SPAM on google maps.
Today I got a new type of spam. So why not share with the audience ?
Hi,
I noticed that you do great things in SEO field and thought that both of
our companies might have an interesting opportunity.
I represent an offshore outsourcing company which is based in Belarus
(Eastern Europe) and we achieved excellent results (have the
biggest SEO department in the country – 15 people and reached amazing
rankings for tons of highly competitive keywords).
Our pricing model is very attractive for a companies like yours if
ever consider using offshore office. Outsourcing is a proven way of
staying competitive in hard times like that. We provide you with
the full-time dedicated SEO Consultant which works exclusively with
your firm for a fixed rate of $1500-1800 per month. Those are professional
people and have profound level of expertise.
Our customers are in TOP10 for thousands of keywords combined.
Email me back if you are interested to discuss this further.
Sincerely,
Lenny XXXXX
I think this is also the first time I was complimented in SPAM.
Though it might only be the first SEO SPAM to get through the SPAM checkers.
Knowing more about your competition and your market than your competitors is of course advantageous for your business. Sometimes we can come too focused on our own data, looking at our own traffic, stats. and conversions. But what about the competition ? Maybe they are also improving, but at a great rate. Getting your hands on their data can be that little bit more tricky.
Here I will show you some tips on learning about search trends, changes in search patterns and popularity of websites, with a few nice examples. These should be a great way to start to look at your competition.
Search Frequency
The tool of choice is,Google Trends . It allows users to compare trends in search which is very useful to see how search frequency is changing. Here is an example of the difference in the search frequency between blackberry’s two new products (bold and storm) over the last month.
The values presented are relative (and possibly on a logarithmic scale) as opposed to absolute so it is a little difficult to exactly quantify the difference in the searches frequency. But you do see which one is a clear winner. Also Google has the possibility to show the related news frequency, so you can see how hot the topic is, and find out the reason for a specific increase in the number of searches about the topic.
Knowing the search frequency can help when you are running seasonal campaigns. Have a look at the comparison between Christmas and Valentines search traffic. Here you can have a great idea when you should start your PPC campaigns for example.
Website Popularity
The send part of Google Trends is what they called Website Trends. This is really a website popularity tool, which shows an estimate of the traffic going to websites of your choice. As usual it’s always a little bit easier with an example. Here is the comparison between myspace.com and facebook.com .
As you can see there was a cross over in popularity at the end of last year. Facebook is still gaining numbers of visitors, while myspace is starting to decay slightly.
Google trends really comes into it’s own where we can now look at the regions, again looking at myspace and facebook, but this time the data is based on Irish information.
We see that the crossover in terms of traffic happened more around the middle of September 2007. With advertising programs on both Facebook and MySpace, I know which one I would be targeting more and more as a business.
Comparison between Irish Newspaper websites
The whole reason for this study was that I wanted to see what was the most popular online newspaper in Ireland, and to see there has been any changes in the last year. Here is the data for some Irish newspaper websites, and interestingly enough we can see some important events.
First off we can see the rise in the use of the domain irishtimes.com from July 2008, this was due to the Irish Times separating the news from the ireland.com domain. It remains that the Irish Times and the Independent are the top 2 most read Irish newspaper websites, and there seems to be little movement for the others in the field. Also we can see that over all the number of people visiting these websites is increasing.
Give Google Trendsa whirl and let me know if you come up with some interesting trends.
Just checking on my google reader (reader.google.com) this morning and I was surprise when I checked the details tab on CopyBlogger (www.copyblogger.com). Google have now added some more stats. Before you were only able to see the number of subscribers (no sure how accurate it was) and the post frequency. Now google is letting us know a little more, and also looks at how you read this particular blog.
How many times a day they blog
Number of blog posts over the last 30 days
At what time of the day are the posts published
So here we see that google has metrics on usage of blogs. They are building up patterns of usage for the users. I’m guessing that they not only use this data to show us something nice, but that these factors could be fed back into the Google Machine and taken into account some way.
When you think about it, especially for blogs, having a usage profile it quiet interesting. It could be considered that these blogs that say, have a higher reader frequency, have a consistent blogging frequency would be more important/trusted. These profiles could also be used for identifying splogs (spam blogs) or could even be a factor in ranking parts of a website. Google has access to a whole load of information from services like Google Reader, Google Analytics and FeedBurner. Now I am wondering if there is a feedback loop that effects your rankings in some little way. Sure why not ?
So if you don’t have a blog already, maybe you should think of getting one !
Damien has set in motion a little competition for SEOs. This competition has a little Irish spin on it, aimed at Irish businesses and Irish individuals. Where he is looking for people to rank on the PFI (Pages from Ireland) on google.ie for the keyword “geansai gorm“. The phrase in English means “Blue Jumper” but to avoid the pollution of the index, he has chosen an Irish word so not to knock the people who produce gorm geansais, out of business.
There are a few rules (so don’t forget to read them), and it will be interesting to see how closely they are adhered to, I can already (in the space of a few hours) see that one person is breaking rule #3.
I’ve decided to take part, and will be hoping that mybluejumper.com will come to the fore and will win. Either way it’ll be a bit of fun. I’ll be twittering my ideas under the name gorm_geansai, so feel free to follow me. I’m not sure how much time I can devote to this, but I will give it a go.
And while I am on the topic of twitter, I finally got around to using my account, feel free to follow that also. It’s at twitter.com/savagepaul.