No More Email Auto Responders

I meant to write this post a while back when I pissed off a prominent Irish blogger with email spam, totally by accident. Luckily my keyword alert radar notified me of his moaning on Twitter! What happened was, my partner was in hospital for a week and for once, I was going to be away a lot visiting her etc..Not sure if some of my clients could cope without me and because it seemed like a professional thing to do at the time, I setup a quick email auto responder to alert people to the fact that I’d not be able to get back to them as quick as I normally do.

I regularly leave comments on other forums and blogs and a lot of these sites now have automated systems which email you when someone has responded to a thread that you left a comment in. When the automated system emails you and you have your responder setup, they will get replies everytime they email you. Some comment threads can get very big so that’s a lot of automated emails flying about and you will not be liked by the forum/blog admin. I’d left a comment on this guy’s blog and he had new comment notification turned on for the thread so he got a pile of my auto responders in his inbox every time someone left a new comment!

The upside is that hopefully he will now remember my business name forever!

Autoresponder

Here’s a few other reasons not to setup auto responders:

  • If spammers know there’s a working email address they’ll spam some more,
  • Sites that send out Newsletters don’t want a ton of auto responders back at them,
  • No one likes getting a non personal email response.

I believe Auto responders are generally useless these days because very few people will bother to hang around until you get back from your lovely holiday to email you again. They’ll either look for a response from someone else in your company or go elsewhere. If you are a one man band kind of business like I am then you really have to check email all the time and it’s easy to do via smart phone or laptop while you’re away.

Mobile Detection & Optimization

As a kind of follow on from a recent article of mine re Optimising your Website for iPhone viewing, I’d like to expand on a few points and talk about general optimisation for Mobile phones and how to detect which Browser or User Agent your site visitors might be using.

I’ve recently added some detection code to my main (Non WordPress) site that basically looks to see which user agent or mobile phone platform my visitors are using and if it’s a non-iPhone phone then they get redirected to my other site ReverbStudios.Mobi, a site I built specifically to render fast and well on most mobile browsers. If they are not on a phone and at a normal PC or Mac then they just get to see the main site ReverbStudios.ie

Mobile Phone

As far as building an optimised site for mobiles is concerned, here’s my best advice:

  • Have very few, if any, Images and Scripts,
  • Make any images you really do need to use smaller than 200px wide max,
  • Specify the dimensions of all images used,
  • Only include basic content such as an outline of services and contact details,
  • Use “Callto:” links on any phone numbers you include so people can click the number to initiate a call,
  • Add links to your main site or social networking precences for users with smartphones.

I use the  WP-Touch plugin for my WordPress blog to allow Smartphone users to choose either a normal view of the site or a simplified version. The plugin handles detection and design.

Here’s the code I’ve used on my main, static site to detect people’s browsers, it’s courtesy of Richard Shepherd but with a few changes with help from Justin Knecht.

Mobile Detection.txt

Identifying WordPress Spam Comments

WordPress users will know that there’s a default spam plugin called Akismet included that is fairly effective for automatically identifying and dealing with spam. If you’ve got comments turned on for your blog posts or pages then you’ll occasionaly get email notification of new comments which you must either Approve, Mark as spam or Trash and links will be provided in the email for each option.

There’s a new breed of spam that escapes filters like Akismet and appears to be a bit more real than traditional spam, ie – no mention of viagra or no funny email or web addresses with foreign lettering. They look and read like a manually created comment by a real person and probably are actually created in this way. Typically they take the form of complimentary comments about your content. Here’s one I got today for example:

“I loved this post. Very informative.”

The commenter added this web address – http://articledominance.com/freereport.html which appears to be a get rich quick offer/site asking for your email address and name, possibly to spam you some more!

My basic, common sense advice when you get comment notifications from your blog is to have a quick look at the commenter’s url/website and see if it looks legit. Also see if the commenter’s text is generic or actually relates specifically to something you’ve said in your post. As another general rule of thumb, if the comment doesn’t contribute anything interesting, related or useful to the discussion on your article then I’d delete it.

Here’s a few things, specifically to do with the commenter’s website that I would delete or mark a comment as spam for:

  • Overselling something,
  • Get rich quick content,
  • Asking for signups/email addresses,
  • Advert heavy sites,
  • Sites with tons of Google adverts,
  • Completely unrelated site.

Leon.

Business Quiet Poll?

I’m just wondering what business owners do when sales are quiet as they most likely have been for a lot of companies recently. I’m hoping no-one sits around moaning and waiting for something to happen or considers closing the business. Here’s a few things I try to do with free time: Learn a new skill or piece of software, Do some Blogging/Online Networking, Marketing, Research new trends in my business area, Go out and meet people.

What do you do?

iPhone OS 4.0 Quick Tips

I downloaded the new operating system (OS 4.0) upgrade for my iPhone last night and it went fairly smoothly. I was eager to try out some of the fantastic new features outlined including: Multitasking, Folders, Camera Zoom and Orientation Lock. Post upgrade, the new Home Screen Wallpaper feature was immediately visible as was the new iPad style reflective footer shelf for the default apps. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to use some of the new features so here’s how for those of you wondering:

Multitasking/Orientation Lock:

To acces the Multitasking screen just press the Home button twice. This brings up a bar at the bottom of the screen which lists your currently running apps. If you swipe all the way to the left you’ll see some cool new iPod controls and the button for locking the screen in either Portrait or Landscape mode. A very handy feature that will prevent unwanted rotations in bed!

Orientation Lock/Multitasking

Folders:

To create new folders, simply hold down on any app to enter the edit screen and drag an app on top of another one to create a new folder pair. You can then name this new folder and drag more apps into it.

Folders

Digital Zoom:

I know digital zoom is kinda silly and low quality but it might come in handy the odd time. To access the new zoom features, tap just above the Take Snapshot button and you’ll see the zoom slider appear.

Digital Zoom

Hope this helps.

Leon.

Social Networking Survey Results

Below are some results from a recent study undertaken by Sarah Diffley, Research Masters Student at Letterkenny Institute of Technology:

The total number of respondents who started the survey was 1,145.  Of these respondents, 829 completed the survey.  This constitutes an overall survey response rate of 72.4%.  However, a quota sample of 376 was determined to be sufficient for the research at hand and so this amount was utilised for the research based on the judgement of the researcher as,

In quota sampling researcher judgement is used in establishing the categories and choosing the sample from the categories

(Wrenn et al., 2002, p.167).

Findings from the survey highlight the following key statistics:

Overall:

  • 73% of respondents use SNSs to connect with current friends, 65% to connect with old friends and 28% to make new friends.
  • 67% of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that the SNS they were most active on had become an important method of communication for them.
  • Facebook is the SNS that respondents had been most active on in the last 30 days (53%)
  • 30% of respondents had over 200 friends on their most active SNS, 25% between 100 and 199 friends, 20% between 50 and 99 friends, with 25% detailing they had less than 50 friends on their most active SNS.
  • 84% of respondents have joined a group on a SNS.
  • 51% of respondents have visited a company profile page on a SNS.
  • 26% of respondents have completely public profiles on their most active SNS.
  • 22% of respondents have had a negative experience on their SNS, which include viruses, unwanted friend requests, spam, online predators and bullying.

Product and Marketing Findings:

  • 17% of respondents make comments to friends about products on SNSs.
  • 37% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they would make comments to their friends on the SNSs about products if that product was of interest to them.
  • 52% of respondents outlined that when a person is a close friend offline, they are influential on a SNS, 40.7% highlighted that they are influential when they are members of their family.
  • 51% of respondents explained that they would discuss products with friends on a SNS to provide friends with product information relevant to them and 41% to voice their opinion.
  • 40% of respondents have clicked on an advertisement on a SNS.
  • 24% of respondents with agreed or strongly agreed that SNSs have become over-commercialised.
  • 57% of respondents highlighted that they notice advertisements on SNSs but 53% detailed that they do not like the presence of advertisements on their SNS.  Furthermore 43% of respondents noted that they do not trust advertisements on SNSs.

Many thanks to all those who took part in the survey.  It is greatly appreciated and contributed significantly to my research.

Sarah Diffley

If you would like to contact Sarah in relation to these survey results, please leave a comment.

Leon.

Speed Up Your Website for Google

Since Google and other search engines take the size and download speed (among many other factors) of your site into account when deciding where to rank you in results, it makes sense to make sure it’s fast! It will also give your impatient visitors a much better experience. Here’s a few things you should consider doing:

  • Make sure your hsoting server is decent/fast.
  • Build your site with CSS/DIV’s rather than with Tables.
  • Be efficient, tidy and semantic with your HTML and CSS code.
  • Validate your code.
  • Compress all images as much as possible.
  • Avoid Flash/Video/Audio files embedded on the home page.
  • Don’t use to0 many unnecessary fancy scripts or widgets just to show off, eg – Facebook, Live Chat, Google Gadgets, etc…
  • Merge your external CSS files into one (the less external file calling the better).
  • Merge your scripts files into one (as above).
  • Place script calls at the footer of your page so they load last – WordPress Plugin.

Compressing via Gzip:

I’ve just done this belatedly for both my main static site and my WordPress blog. To turn on Gzip for a static PHP page for example, I’ve used this code:

<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER[‘HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING’], ‘gzip’)) ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”); else ob_start(); ?>

Your server and the visitors browser both need to support compression for the above command to work. Test whether your site is compressed or not here:

www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

For my wordpress blog I’ve used the WP HTTP Compression plugin. There are a few excellent Caching plugins for WordPress such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache which both handle compression too but I found both of them a bit over the top and they played havoc with my auto publishing to Twitter and Facebook.

Try this website page speed tester to see where you’re at now!

www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

Leon.

Using Facebook Ads

I’m focusing on the Facebook Advertising system for this article mainly because I’ve tried a lot of others from Google AdWords, to Linkedin Ads to Banner advertising to Offline, etc.. and I just find the Facebook system to be the simplest and potentially most effective given the number of people using Facebook regularly these days (about 1.5 million in Ireland alone).

To create an ad in Facebook, login and click “Ads & Pages” in the left menu of the home page.

Create an Ad:

Click “Create an Advert” top right and you’re presented with a simple form/wizard to guide you through the process. You will have a choice of creating an ad from scratch or ‘advertising something you already have on Facebook’ like a Business Page. For a new advert you are asked for a Destination URL, Ad Title, Body Text and Image and as you type you see how the ad will look to others on the right hand side.

Design your Ad:

Be creative with your ad text, title and image, after all you need to catch people’s attention! Facebook doesn’t allow too many capitals or symbols so just say something interesting. The Destination URL is important in that it is where ad viewers will end up after clicking your ad. You need to make sure this page relates to what you have said in the advert and is easy to read and navigate with perhaps a large ‘call to action‘ button or link to get people to buy your product/service or just contact you.

Targeting options:

This is where Facebook advertising is really interesting for me. You can set the ad up to only show to Facebook users in a certain country or even city or group of countries/cities. You can also target people by Age, Gender, Relationship Status, Birthday, Language, Likes & Interests, Education level, Facebook Friends, Fans of a Page/Event/Group, etc.. The cool thig is that as you make these selections, Facebook tells you exactly how many people you are targetting based on your choices so you get to see your ad reach as you go!

Spend:

Finally, choose your ad duration and max daily spend to avoid getting an unexpectedly high bill and choose a cost per click that gives you a realistic chance of your ad being pushed to the top and actually seen. You will be asked whether you want to pay for Impressions or Clicks. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to pay just for the ad to be shown when there’s no guarantee people wil actually look at it. Better instead to just pay for actual clicks surely!?

Analytics:

One of the main benefits in using online advertising channels like Facebook over traditional methods like print and other media is that you will have access to detailed statistics on the performance of your ad. Everything from the number of times your ad was shown to how many times it was clicked on to average cost per click and total spend is available so you can evaluate how effective the campaign was.

Just remember to ask inquirers where they heard about you!

Leon.