As the current economic downturn takes its toll many businesses are bucking the trend by turning to the Internet to increase their sales.

Virtually all businesses supply products or services that can be sold or advertised on the Internet yet an astonishing 36% of businesses don’t even have a website.

The good news is that this makes advertising on the web easier for the rest of us and whilst there may be lots of competition online one thing is for sure, if you’re not there you’re certainly NOT going to get a share of the rewards.

Here at Eye4Design we see many businesses whose turnover has been chipped away year after year as their competitors move online and more and more of their customers use the Internet to source their products.

On a positive note its never too late to get online so don’t leave it another day, call us on 01709-373911 and lets discuss how we can help increase your sales.

Setting up and managing a Google Adwords account is no simple task. There are so many features both in configuring your account to start with, then with ongoing management that most people will only get a good return on investment by attending a Google Adwords Training Course

A good training course will guide you through the setup, step by step and ensure you can manage the account on an ongoing weekly basis. Done correctly the rewards can be extensive.

If the thought of running your own account all sounds a bit too complicated or time consuming you should consider having your Google Adwords account managed.

If you’re on a tight budget, or perhaps you run a voluntary organisation where funds are limited there is still an excellent way to create a professional looking website quickly and easily, for less than ten pounds per month.

Site Builder Gold is an online site builder with hundreds of templates in a choice of colours. Because its 100% web based you can make site amendments from anywhere with an Internet connection. Ease of use comes standard with Site Builder Gold, in fact if you can use Microsoft Word you will have no problem using Site Builder Gold.

So for a low cost site builder that will have you up and running within minutes choose Site Builder Gold.

For details visit: www.sitebuildergold.co.uk

Spread The Cost Of Your Website Over 24 or 36 Months!!!

In the current economic climate it makes sound business sense to reduce the strain on your cash flow wherever possible. To help we’ve teamed up with a leading finance broker to enable our customers to spread the cost of their websites over 24 or 36 months.

So now there’s no need to delay that website project that you’ve been desperately keen to get started.

For more details call Jayson Gray on 01709-373911.

Online marketing is pointless unless you can effectively monitor how effective it is.

Whether its a listing on a directory such as KellySearch or Yell.com, a banner advertisement on Facebook or a monthly search engine optimisation campaign its impossible to quantify its effectiveness without sound and accurate monitoring (web traffic analysis).

Elements such as:

• Which sites or search engines traffic is coming from
• What search phrases are being used to reach your site
• The geographical location of visitors
• The ‘reach’ or ‘visibilty’ your site has
• Which pages are popular and which are not
• Daily and hourly usage statistics

are all important factors that need analysing effectively when running a successful website. Good analysis can help you eliminate poorly performing advertisements so you can spend effectively in areas producing a good return.

At Eye4Design we use various web statistics software and have specialist tracking software for monitoring advertising efficiency. For further details please call us on 01709-373911.

Marketing by email is probably the most cost effective advertising method you will find. At the push of a button, thousands of (potential) customers can receive your latest offers, news, updates, price lists etc for a nominal cost.

And yet the fact is, many companies fail to take advantage of this technology. Most don’t realise that they could have an entire email campaign up and running for as little as £25 + Vat per month ready to send out to their existing customers or potential customer base.

However, the real benefit of quality email software is in its ability to record which customers open which emails and even what links they click on. It’s a powerful marketing advantage to be able to see which recipients opened your email and what products they were interested in.

At Eye4Design we offer our Clients highly featured email software that can send out text or attractive HTML based emails to an unlimited number of email contacts, can track which users open those emails and even which links they click on. This gives Eye4Design customers a huge advantage over their competitors.

For more details on Eye4Design email solutions please call 01709-373911.

You won’t find many people who will disagree that Affiliate Marketing is a great way both to increase sales and aid search engine optimisation.

The beauty of only paying for results and the huge increase in back links that a good affiliate network can bring can really lift a website to an altogether different level and make the difference between a ‘fairly good’ site and a ‘hugely profitable’ one.

But how do you set up an affiliate program? How can you monitor sign-ups, clicks, sales and commissions?

Well the good news is there is lots of software available on the market to take care of it all. A good affiliate software will automatically create an account when an affiliate signs up, it will generate unique image/text ad code that affiliates can simply add to their websites to promote your products. It will record real-time impressions, clicks, sales and commissions that both you as the website owner can control/authorise and your affiliates can see in their control panels.

A highly featured affiliate software will also support a number of payment options to calculate commissions due to your affiliates and perform automated or manual payments.

In fact, once set up, a good affiliate software will run automatically with the minimum of attention.

As established web designers with many customers running affiliate programmes we need a highly featured and robust affiliate software that our customers can trust which is why we recommend Affiliate Trail.

If I had a penny for every time I’d been asked “Does Google Adwords Work?” I’d certainly be a wealthier man.

The question usually derives from a bad experience where someone has tried setting up their own account, spent a bucket load and sold next to nothing. Sound familiar?

Well, like most forms of advertising the fact is that Google Adwords does work for some applications, and for some it doesn’t.

When Adwords campaigns fail it tends to be for one of two reasons:

1) - The campaign was set-up and managed poorly.
2) - The product isn’t suitable.

1) - The campaign was set-up and managed poorly.
Google Adwords provides 2 methods for a user to achieve high positions for their ads. The first is to optimise the search keyword or phrase (this involves creating optimised ads and landing pages).
The second method is to pay more per click. As many users fail to optimise their ads they pay more per click than many of their competitors.

Additionally, most users fail to:
a - Optimise the correct keywords
b - Lock down their keywords
c - Configure correct campaign settings
d - Make best use of negative keywords
e - Use Analytics or the Diagnostics tool
f - Split test their ads
g - Maintain and update the account

Without doubt Adwords is a powerful advertising tool but its only as good as the person using it. If you plan to run your own campaigns you should attend a 1 day Google Adwords Training Course.

However, if the hand on approach is not for you then you should consider having your Adwords account professionally managed.

2) - The product isn’t suitable.
Not all products are suited to Adwords. The sheer volume of keyword competition and low profit margins can make some products impossible to market effectively with Adwords. In such circumstances there are various other forms of online marketing to try.

If you’d like to discuss the possibilities of using Google Adwords to advertise your website please give us a call us on 01709-373911.

Established since 1996 Eye4Design Active Media Ltd is one of Yorkshires most experienced web design companies.

When it comes to entrusting your web design project to a web design agency it makes alot of sense to select one that has all the skills and expertise not only for the initial build but also in areas such as:

Search Engine Optimisation
Email Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
and
Social Media Marketing

Working with our customers we have been able to develop their websites into highly profitable businesses and in many cases their online sales now exceed their traditional sales.

Our ethos is based around an all encompassing high quality service which has resulted in an impressively high customer retention rate. In fact, we’re proud to say that we still work with many of the same customers that joined us in 1996.

It’s true to say that there will always be a market for cheap bottom end ‘template’ based solutions, where quality and performance are compromised.

However, for serious applications, when serious results are required - there’s Eye4Design

To discuss how Eye4Design can help you develop your online business please call us on 01709-373911.

It has long been assumed that your server IP address was taken into account by Google when establishing PageRank (PR). The theory being that the broader the spread of back-links from sites with different server IP addresses, the more genuine the recipient site.

After all, if it was simply just a matter of the sheer quantity of back-links, a webmaster could easily set up hundreds of satellite sites all on the same server and link them all back to a main site, artificially increasing its PageRank.

However, until we concluded our own trails we couldn’t be sure just how important it was.

We took our own website (PR5) that was hosted on its own dedicated server and whose back-links were predominantly from our own client base and we moved it to our client server so all sites sat on the same server IP address. As a control we also placed a second website (PR3) on the same client server. However the back-links to the PR3 site were largely Internet wide and not from sites on the client server.

No other factors were altered.

After 2 months the control site with a PR3 remained at PR3. However the site with PR5 had dropped to PR3. Whilst a 1 point drop was perhaps to be expected from the Sep/Oct 2008 PR update we should not have seen a 2 point drop.

This indicates to us that when back-links originate from the same server as the recipient site those back-links are severely diluted and the PageRank value is significantly reduced.

If we are correct we should see our test sites’ PR3 increase in the the next PageRank update expected around March 2009.

Watch this space!

:: Eye4Design are specialists in web design and online marketing and can assist you in promoting your website.
Calling 01709-373911 is the first step to driving traffic to your site and creating a successful online business.