St James Systems Wins Quality Assured Status

21 November 2009 - Leicester

St James Systems are pleased to announce that they have achieved the full East Midlands Brokerage Quality Assured Status.

This means that St James Systems are an approved supplier for Business Link and the East Midlands Development Agency (EMDA).

Sam Goddard, senior consultant at St James Systems said: "We are very pleased and feel that this shows the company's desire to grow, to approve and to adhere to the highest, externally vetted standards".

Free Stompernet Internet Marketing Test Drive with 40 pieces of Content

The guys over at StomperNet have really hit the ball out of the park: if you go to their Stomper999 site and sign up for a free Test Drive StomperNet account, you can get over 40 pieces of content - no charge! Just click here

Guess when you've got over 1400 training videos in your extensive Library, you can afford to give a *lot* of stuff away.

While you're there, you should also check out their new StomperCommerce software - this thing is *really* easy to use to build a search-engine friendly shopping cart. Take a look here

I hear a rumor that StomperNet is building up for some kind of nuclear weapon drop first part of next week - if I didn't already know about the 11 tools that new members will get I probably wouldn't believe there was anything left!

Happy Internet Marketing

Sam

P.S. Don't forget to go check out the Free Webinar page at Stomper999 - they're having webinars for the next week with the faculty talking about their areas of expertise AND reviewing the new tools:

Click Here

Do You know the Holy Grail of Internet Marketing

My friends over StomperNet have lost their minds!

They're giving away Stomping the Search Engines 2 for free as part of their amazing Stomper 09/09/09 launch.

Click here to go to the launch

This formerly $500 product (priced way too low) is just one of the things they're giving away today.

Don't know how they do it.

But there's no doubt they know this stuff - they were teaching SEO before anybody even KNEW about SEO.

Click here to find out more

Teaching - that's what StomperNet does.

And they also announced something called StomperSyndicator, yet another free tool you'd get if you joined.

This thing is the mac daddy of syndicating and distributing content for SEO.

So go check out Day 3 of StomperNet's launch. If you've missed Days 1 and 2, easy to get caught up while you're there.

Check it out now

Stompernet 09/09/09 - The Internet Marketing Story of the Year

There's only one place to be this Wednesday morning at 9 Eastern:

HERE

I've got it on good authority that StomperNet is reopening for new members for the first time in over 16 months. And they're looking for new Stompers to be part of the Success Story.

Let's face it: for 3 years, StomperNet has given its members a pretty serious leg up on their competitors.

So if them reopening was the ONLY good news, that would probably be enough.

But there's more...WAY more.

The word is that StomperNet is going to be WAY less expensive to join AND offer a lot more (how do those guys DO that?!?)

Apparently they've cut some serious deals and now will have a bunch of great tools included in the membership, to go along with the world-class library of cutting-edge content and the Faculty that just hit 20 strong.

So, get ready to go check it out - only a couple days away now - clear the decks because Wednesday at 9 am you're going to want to see this page:

Stompernet

Once you see it, you're probably going to WANT to be that next Success Story.

Stompernet Live 8 Reading List - What Do the Experts Read

Hello all who attended the Stompernet Live conference or who are interested in finding out what has inspired some of the world's top speakers.

I have been to a number of Stompernet conferences and have always made a note of the reading list. I have found this reading list invaluable & I thought you would do too.

The list isn't complete as I could only be in one place at one time & so I welcome your comments and additions.

Joe Polish:

Jo's story started with the world of offline marketing and charted his life and success as a marketer following turbulent periods of addiction in his late teens. The book he recomended says as much about addiction to ilicit substances as to our addiction to practices and habits that we know are harmful to ourselves, our attitudes and our business.

Change or Die - Alan Deutschman

On the extreme difficulty of changing your habits & engrained behaviours

Dan Thies:

Dan delivered a talk on the 6 things you must know to survive in Internet marketing. The books he recommended related to copywriting, an often neglected part of eCommerce and conversion that can make a significant difference to your bottom line.

Web Copy that sells - Maria Veloso

Catalog Copy that Sells - HG Lewis

Lisa Lang:

Lisa & Brad Falon spoke on the importance of using the Theory of Constraints in developing your business. The greater the throughput, the more money you can make and the better your company is positioned to be able to offer what the competition cannot. Books relating to Brad & Lisa's talks are below:

The Goal - Eli Goldratt

The first of the Theory of Constraints books. It's written as a novel & is very easy to absorb. It's a brilliant & through-provoking read that provides all sorts of excellent analogies for the Theory of Constraints.

It's Not Luck - Eli Goldratt

The follow-up to The Goal. This books takes the thinking of The Goal to the next level. It is again written as a novel and is extremely engaging.

The Critical Chain - Eli Goldratt

This book applies the Theory of Constraints to project management and is essential for anyone who wishes to plan and execute any kind of project in a way that will save them time or money. Whether you're designing & building a website, or working on a planned expansion for your business, this is a great read.

Brad Fallon:

Brad's talk was a fairly high-level analysis of business and business practices. As well as talking aobut the Theory of Constraints, brad also mentioned the following books:

Sway: The irresistable Pull of Irrational Marketing - Ori Brafman

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions - Dan Ariely

The Only 3 Questions that Count - Ken Fisher

Twitter in Denial of Service Attack

For those of you who searched for Twitter today & found that it wasn't there, the site was taken down by a denial of service (or DDOS) attack.

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," said company co-founder Biz Stone on the company's blog.

It is estimated that there are over 45 million users of Twitter, making the service on of critical importance for people, businesses and Internet Marketing companies alike.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users." said Stone.

UPDATE:

The Register reports that the attack was the result of a JoeJob spamming campaign.Joejobs are spam messages that are designed not to push Viagra but to induce someone to click on a link in the hopes of harming the site being linked to. Essentially, millions of people get an email that says something benign like "Please click the link to my blog"; the link points to Twitter rather than the blog & people clicking on it are not aware of the harm that they're causing.

Increase your Twitter following

There are myriad tools on the market that can increase your Twitter following. Some of these tools are better than others, some are free & some cost a lot of money.St James Systems have tested a large number of Twitter tools over the last 12 months with varying degrees of success. Many were excellent but only one could tick all the boxes. This was Tweet Adder.

The features that we are after as Internet marketers may well be a useful benchmark for those who are looking to build their Twitter profile & following. We are particularly interested in the following:

• The ability to use multiple accounts quickly and simply
• The ability to follow users who have mentioned a particular keyword or phrase in their tweets
• The ability to follow users who mention keywords in their biography
• Follow people within a certain distance of a geographical location
• Automate the process of following people who are relevant
• See statistics on the effects of this automated following in order to find the most successful following techniques over time.
• To cease following when the following/followers ratio gets too high.
• Automatically unfollow.
• Maintain a 'Safelist' of users who are never to be unfollowed.
• Send posts.
• Schedule posts.

The results of using TweetAdder were impressive and the speed at which a following could be built up, when compared to the risk that the user was taking in following unrelated people was exceptional.

St James Systems were able to build up a following of 2,623 followers in under 2 months with an 18.3% conversion rate of following to followers.

For more information, visit the TweetAdder site: www.TweetAdder.com

Peterborough Cathedral Website Live

St James Systems have just launched the new Peterborough Cathedral website. The site, which is the largest Cathedral website in the UK, has been a labour of love and a test of project management skills. 12 months went into planning and developing a site that aimed to showcase all that the Cathedral has to offer in a way that was not bamboozling to visitors.

The aim of the site is to attract visitors and to provide useful information to tourists and regulars alike.

The new website is built using a content management system that allows Cathedral staff to create and manage their own content, news articles, images, news and press releases.

We feel that the site showcases our web design skills and shows our ability to manage large and complex projects.

The site can be viewed here: www.peterborough-cathedral.org.uk

Sam Goddard to Feature in The Net Effect Magazine

Samuel Goddard, Senior Consultant at St James Systems is to be featured in The Net Effect magazine. The magazine's communicaitons team singled out the contributions of St James Systems and the company's online success as well as its novel Internet marketing techniques.

The Net Effect is a publication that has a worldwide readership of 18,000 Internet Marketing professionals.

The Heckington Show - Contract Won

St James Systems are proud to announce that they have won the contract for the redevelopment of the Heckington Show website.

The Heckington Show is the largest village show in England and attracts 30,000 visitors per annum: It has been running since the 1860s and boasts many truly startling stories. For example, the world's first bike race was held at the show and it is now the home of the world's oldest cycle race.

The show is a quintessentially English affair, a weekend in the sun enjoying truly English pursuits and having a great time with a uniquely friendly and helpful community and St James Systems are proud to be involved.

The mockup of the new site can be seen in the portfolio album on our Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/St-James-Systems/20350889982

Website Promotion

Who do you know who has a website on the Internet that sells products?

Who do you know who wants a website that sells products?

St James Systems are looking to get in touch with companies who are interested in making the Internet work for them and who want to make more money and find more customers than ever before.

Our Internet marketing and search engine optimisation programmes have increased our clients income substantially.

Our results:

We have increased the turnover of one of our clients by 9 times within four months

We have increased the number of people visiting our clients' websites by up to 10 times

We have a number of means of working with clients including:
Building, marketing and managing a client's website from scratch
Working with existing websites
Working for a fixed fee or for a commission

If you know anyone who might like to increase their website traffic and turnover, please refer them to us and we will be happy to help.

We include one such letter below:

Having dabbled with Search Engine Optimisation techniques ourselves over the past year and to no great avail, we finally decided to hire the services of St James Systems. Soon after, a report was produced along with a list of suggested improvements that could help our e-commerce site increase targeted traffic and, more importantly, turnover.

Over a period of just 2 months, our turnover has increased from just £350 a month to £1800. In that time we have been introduced to a variety of exciting Search Engine Optimisation techniques. We have worked closely with Sam at St James Systems to improve our website, not only improving its search engine ranking, but also focusing on the customer experience and usability issues.

Our visits have increased from 289 in June to 1,061 in August. St James Systems really do seem to have the 'black art' of Search Engine Optimisation sewn up, and we look forward to working with them over the next few months to further increase the success of our store.

Richard Lang
Digital Design Manager
Tintisha Technologies
www.tintisha.com

Facebook - Are you a fan?

St James Systems are one of only a handful of firms around the world whose search engine optimisation and Internet marketing is focused on social networks. These social networks like Facebook & LinkedIn attract millions of loyal users every day. Facebook has over 100 million daily users, many of whom use their network of friends and contacts to find the products and services they are looking for rather than the search engines.

St James Systems recognise that the perception is that these social network groups are a colossal waste of time but the number of people who use them every day eclipses the number of people who use the search engines. The next person to find your website is far more likely to do so through social media than through the search engines and there are not many people who are making the most of this opportunity.

If you are a user of Facebook, why not come along and take a look at the St James Systems Facebook Page?

A Facebook page is a very simple means of interacting with your clients, fans and potential customers, of getting their feedback and of entering into a conversation with the people who are most likely to buy your products and services. Fans of your Facebook page will get updates of your latest news and additions and you will be able to build relationships with your customers quicker and more cheaply than ever.

If you are looking to build up strong relations with customers, Facebook can be a dream come true.

Would you like a Facebook page for your business? If so, please get in touch with us and we will be happy to help.

Saving Time

Recently, we uncovered a shocking statistic:

The average parent spends twice as long with their email as they do with their own children.

Let's give you an example of how you might be losing time and not realising it.

If opening an email using a keyboard takes 3 seconds (Press CTRL+O) and closing takes the same amount of time (ALT+F4 - go on, try it!) then opening an email by taking your hands away from the keyboard, moving the mouse, clicking, and then putting your hands back on the keyboard might take 15 seconds. The difference is 12 seconds. If you have to open & close 100 emails a day & create & send 50 emails a day, then 12 seconds * 300 clicks = 1 hour.

There is potentially one hour you could be saving a day just by learning how to use your computer more effectively.

We have been musing on these statistics and have been working on a solution. What we have come up with is twofold. Firstly, we are offering free cheat sheets for Windows - lists of shortcuts that save you time & effort. Please contact us for a copy. Secondly, we are offering some touch-typing software for £35+VAT. Let's look at another example.

Yesterday, I wrote 5,000 words worth of reports and articles.

At 30 words per minute this would have taken me 2h 47 minutes.

At 60 words per minute this would take 1h 13 minutes.
If I spent an hour each evening for two weeks using some touch-typing software and increased my typing speed from 30 - 60 words per minute (it is possible) then:

I'd be able to gain the time I spent learning within 10 days.

I'd save myself an hour and a half per day from then on.

At £35+VAT, this software is cheaper than a secretary and it helps with matters that secretaries can't deal with (emails, personal matters, etc).

We hope that this article is of interest to you. If you are finding that your knowledge of Windows shortcuts and your touch-typing ability is constraining you, then please ask for a free cheat sheet and let us provide you with some inexpensive touch-typing software that will help you to type quickly, in an entertaining way and at your own pace.

Microsoft's Non-advertising Advertising with Jerry Seinfeld

In an attempt to distance themselves form almost everyting, Microsoft have released an advert featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. The advert is like the Seinfeld observation about the advert for Dockers that didn't mention the product.

The advert does not mention any of Microsoft's products and features a rather wooden Bill Gates. That Bill Gates is prepared to appear in a rather wooden fashion looking rather geekish is something but otherwise the advert is completely pointless.

Whereas pointlessness was the point of the Seinfeld comedy series, Microsoft is facing stiffer and stiffer competition and, despite its near monopoly is having a job justifying its operating systems and office suites in a time of increased possibilites made through the web.

Apple has done a good job of beginning to take back market share form Microsoft in recent years. As their handheld devices work and work well, so the public's trust in the Apple brand increases. Likewise, Google is muscling in on Microsoft's turf with a new free browser. Furthermore, Linux is becoming more important as an operating system platform.

In short, Microsoft's market is being eroded and the need for packaged software products are dwindling in an age where more and more applications are web based and Microsoft has a shrinking share of the web.

With this in mind, does a quirky, pointless advert just make Microsoft appear quirky & pointless?

What do you think?

Google's Real Problems

As search engine optimisers, we get the impression that a search engine's biggest nightmare is the work we carry out. Not only is this egotistical but it is also untrue. Most optimisers try to give the sites they work with the best possible rankings for what they have and, in so doing, help to show the sites that are serious about their web presence, and make sites more accessible to the search engines and to people with all abilities and disabilities.

'Black Hat' search engine marketers might cause Google to miss a step occasionally as they find ways to fool the search engines but these efforts are short-lived and the brainpower of Google's 100 Doctors of Philosophy are either a step ahead or ready to react quickly.

In truth, Google's problems are much more mundane than industrial espionage or seditious optimisation practices: the main problem is that of scale.

Scale has been a constraint for all kinds of organisations and empires throughout time - the Romans were hampered by their limited mathematical abilities and could not grow beyond the limits of around 100AD and the British Empire found itself becoming the world's policeman, a title that came at a tremendous cost. Likewise, Google's size gives it tremendous problems. Here are a few that you may not have considered.

Breakdowns: It is estimated that Google runs 500,000 servers. At any one time there are going to be several machines that have gone down. Mechanical problems mount up and even if 1 in 1000 servers fails completely in a given year, that's 500 to be changed. With our experience with computers, things go wrong all the time & Google might expect 1000 servers to be down at any one time.

Power: Google has 3 main datacentres, each of which chew through power at around $5000 per hour. Such massive power usage causes massive headaches. Google has recently invested in solar power and put time & money into RE

Revenues: Furthermore, search is a costly area with an estimated 85% of searches being non-commercial and thus difficult to wrap advertising around. Google only has one tried-and-tested means of making money - advertising. But for that, they do not have a business. With the advent of social networking sites like Facebook, with the rise of other media like Video, more and more people are interacting with the Internet without needing search engines; they can get their information and products by interacting with friends rather than by asking a search engine a limited or clunky question. Google has to try hard to preserve its revenue stream - it has grown fat on search revenues and shareholders will demand that they continue to grow and do not get syphoned off by other Internet companies.

Costs: There are massive costs involved in search. Apart from the employment costs (of Google's 100+ doctorates), the costs of machinery, power and research are limiting.

Data: Google's index has grown to 20 billion pages, a gigantic amount. It takes 6 weeks for them to index the sites on the Internet. This amount of data, however, is dwarfed by the 1 trillion pages that they know about. If your dataset is 2% of the data that is on the Internet then you have to ber VERY good at indexing the right data or else searchers will go elsewhere. Google has to be sure that it provides the results that people will find useful very quickly or else users will go elsewhere - too much information and there will be spam and drivel in the index and too little and searchers will miss out on the Internet's variety.

Furthermore, the Internet is growing massively. With Web 2.0 applications like blogs that allow people to quickly & easily publish their information on the Internet (this blog is just one example), the Internet has grown exponentially. Around 140 million people were online in 1998 when Google Inc started compared to 1.4 billion today according to internetworldstats.com and all of them have access to publishing tools that were not available 2 or 3 years ago. There is the problem that the amound of information online might grow in excess of Moore's Law (the rule of thumb used by the founder of Intel in 1965 which basically stated that the number of transistors on an integrated surface doubles every 18 months). This means that if the amount of information on the Internet doubles in less than 18 months, Google either takes longer to compile and analyse the data or it must invest in more & more computing power.

Even more troubling is the problem of infinite scalability. I do not know the limits of technology but there must be significant software problems in co-ordinating the data on 500,000 servers and there must be a limit to the complexity of such a system. With a rapidly growing dataset with which to compute, Google is at the limits of the possible as far as computing is concerned.

These problems of scale mean that Google spends more and more time and money worrying about physical constraints than about giving the best search results that get the most advertising revenues. Will the company be able to continue to grow beyond these constraints and keep searchers & shareholders happy? Will they be able to continue to try to take market share from companies like Microsoft on browsers that do not earn them any money? Time will tell.

Thanks to Leslie Rhode & Andy Edmonds for their opinions.

Enough of the new search engines - how about a new browser?

There have been a number of interesting search engine offerings over the last few months and we wanted to write about something new.

Increasingly, we are finding that customers are interacting with the Internet in different ways and that their next purchase might not necessarily come from an interaction with a search engine. Video now dwarfs search with 10 billion pieces of online video were viewed in December 2007 & with 141 million Americans viewing video online every month (did you ever wonder why Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube?) as does social networking (with over 100 million people using Facebook alone). The common elements to all of these facets of customer interaction is the brpwser as everyone needs a browser to use video, social media and the search engines.

If the aim of the game is to influence people as early as possible during their Internet experience then the browser hould be one of the most important things. Browser wars, however, are old hat - Netscape bowed out of the race years ago and today Internet Explorer & Firefox have the market sewn up between them (IE had 72.15% of the market & Mozilla 19.83% in August 2008 according to hitslink.com). In this environment, a move by Google came out of left field. That said, moving into the browser seems like a logical step for a company like Google which needs to protect its advertising revenues.

This move could have real repurcussions for Mozilla which, until now has had a close relationship with Google (their offices are across the road from Google's) and, as such, might show Google's intent to topple Microsoft's dominance. If this is the case, then the next logical step to influence people beofre they are online is for Google to release an open source operating system. You heard it here first.

Atacama Audio - Contract Won

St James Systems are pleased to announce that they have won the contract to look after the Atacama Audio website. The company aims to increase the profile of the Atacama company online and to increase the conversion rate of Atacama's companion site which sells its products.

The agreement sees St James Systems working with another of Leicester's largest manufacturers and comes as very good news.

St James Systems welcome Atacama's ambitious plans for their websites and look forward to helping them in any way they can.

The Assault on 'Party Products' - The High Seas Part 3 - The Press Release

A press release can be an important part of any PR campaign. It can open up your product or service to markets all over the world very easily. There are a number of ways of doing this including writing to local media outlets, writing to interest groups over the Internet, writing on your blog and sending a press release through an Internet portal.

In this instance we are using PRWeb, an online company who make press releases on your behalf. The cost of a submission is around $200 but, if you have the right product to sell, the coverage can be invaluable.

In the press release we have written, we have talked up the size of the Party Catalogue and that it does not rely upon advertising to gain its income.

Press releases must be written in a particular way so that the news media can quickly pick up what you have to say and so that your headline and a quick summary can be posted across the news and the web with the greatest of ease. Anyone interested in writing a press release would be welcome to contact us for advice.

it is always worth consulting with a professional before you send off your press release. At $200, you might be wasting your money and, with copy and content the most important considerations, you want to do it right.

The release is scheduled for 12.05AM PST. Wait & see what happens.

The Assault on 'Party Products' - The High Seas Part 2 - Lines of Attack

You may remember that we have been trying to get The Party Catalogue to the top of the search engines for the keyword Party Products. It's steady as she goes this week with the website sitting in the smae position but we have made a number of decisions.

We will be attempting to lift The Party Catalogue in 5 ways:

- Changes to the site
- Link building
- Social Networking and Social Bookmarking
- Article writing and article submission
- Good old PR

Each of these attempts will enhance the reputation of The Party Catalogue and, through the provision of well-written content, will help to deliver increased, targeted traffic in the long term.

Onsite changes will include a rewriting of the META data on the site (this is information that tells search engines about a particular webpage but remains hidden to viewers), a rewriting of the cop on the site and an increase of the copy on the front page and a restructuring of the site to ensure that the search engines focus on the fact that The Party Catalogue is a place that sells party supplies rather than anytihng else.

Link building will involve a campaign that will ask webmasters of sites in the gifts industry if they would consider linking to our site. Links act like votes in the search engines and each link on another person's site is an exit form their site and an entrance to yours - this is a very powerful tool.

Social media work will involve making the most of the new applications that the web is being put to. With over 90 million people on Facebook, with over 10 billion pieces of video media being viewed per month and with people quickly and easily communicating with each other in ways that do not involve the search engines, it is important to have a social presence.

Article writing is a way to enhance the reputation of your brand and to get targeted customers to visit your site. This is a matter of writing good content and finding good content partners.

PR is the art of figting a guerrilla war through the media to get the maximum exposure for the minimum of effort.

Over the next few weeks, you will find out how we use these tools to gain favourable positions for our clients. Stay tuned to find out more.

The assault on 'Party Products' - The High Seas Part 1

We thought you might be interested in a serialisation of how we mount an assault on the search engines. This might give you ideas about how to promote your own website as well as giving you a chance to gague our own success. We've been working with a company called The Party Catalogue recently and we've picked out a number of keywords that we want to see them rank for. For this serialisation, we've picked two keywords for the homepage, party products and party supplies.

We hope you enjoy reading about the rise & fall of the company on the high seas of Google & look forward to seeing what happens. We've done a bit of preliminary work on the website & the site has begun to show up - a Google UK search currently reveals position 85 for party supplies & 19 for party products.

Search Engine optimisation is shrouded in mystery and we aim to remove that mystery & we hope you'll be interested in the results. From our studies, we know that being on the front page of Google can mean getting five times as many visitors as being on the second page and so there is the potential for revenues to increase by 5 times. That said, the top spot on Google can have 3 times as much traffic as lower spots on the first page and so competition is fierce.



Some Cold, Hard Facts:

On average, there are 595 searches a day for the keyword party supplies and 160 for party products.

We are competing against 15,700,000 & 21,200,000 other sites respectively & so we're not doing too badly to start with.




If you'd like to help and you have a web page or a blog, please put the following code into it:



and lo, we might make a difference.