UrbanStrides site coming soon.

See Andy at Movit2008.

What a mover!!

Google Analytics helps you work out what people want from your website. In this case the Blog!

The Google Analytics set of tools has a very useful feature called site overlay. See this image below where we have compared a section of the IMRE website home page.

The image on the left shows the normal view, this is how most people would see these links. The image on the right shows the site overlay feature in action. This graphic tells us that 38% of the home page visitors go straight to the IMRE blog.

Now as a business what action would you take? Well we are at it….

Psst….

We just had a potential client phone us up to say that they had looked at our website and our Blog. They also told us that many of their peers had websites made for them where actual site was ok, but the long term support was lacking. They had read our posts on our Dell experience and could see our attitude towards customer service. There you go. That is the power of a Blog. Forget the clean, massaged, clinical and polished website pages….. your potential clients want to understand what you are really all about.

The man at the RBS should know all about the R word. Right?

One of the business networking events I attend is called Connect 4 Success, C4S, and we meet once a month in Marlow. This group tends to be a bit more IT focussed with representation from solicitors and the occasional banker.

Members of C4S were invited to a presentation held at Wycombe Wanderers, on February 7th, and co-hosted by the Wasps. The evening was divided into two with a talk from the Wasps CEO and a speech by an Economist from the RBS.

The talk was good, with lots of detail and a picture was painted of a world economy with many unbalanced  elements. I scribbled a few notes in an attempt to retain the key messages.

So what did the man from the RBS say?
Well his last slide was full of legal mumbo jumbo and disclaimers that basically said that what ever I or we heard was not said! Thank you RBS so you will sue me to hell and back will you?

Now for the serious stuff:

World picture, slow down not slump
World GDP has doubled (India and China).
Huge Chinese trade surplus of 1.5 Trillion Dollars. (China won’t want the dollar to collapse)
Huge US deficit, house prices are going downwards in the states.
US banks exposed in a similar way to the 70s and 80s with Latin America exposure.
The US economy is in recession for sure.

The UK economy is a different story
The UK finished 2007 in good shape with good growth. (Probably too good)
The UK can grow at  2 2.5 % without too many problems.
Last year we saw inflation pick-up and the Bank of England take action.
Interbank rates are under control.  (Well past the Northern Rock debacle)
House prices are moderating.
We have more employment.
The corporate sector is ok.
We are not alone, the EU seems to be ok also.
Asia seems ok.

There are some issues to be worried about, in the UK at least
The interest rates are coming down to help business.
The public sector costs are going up.
The consumer does not feel too good. (energy prices and debts)
The taxes for the consumer are likely to rise.
Income growth and house price inflation were at odds with each other and were not sustainable.
The savings rates are too low and need to rise.

So what will 2008 bring?
More volatility.
The era of boring solid growth is over. (Things will be more exciting for economists nice to know that)
Imported deflation is over. (The prices of manufactured goods can only go upwards now, the end of falling prices)
The US banks. Ah the US banks. What else are they hiding?  If all the dirt has been exposed then 2008 will be a difficult year. If there are more skeletons then we can expect severe problems.

My reading of all of this?
Not as doom and gloom as the media would have us believe. They like all this bad news as they get to fill column inches. The UK should be able to weather this storm and perhaps we are starting to see the US being decoupled from the rest of us. Remember Japan? They were in severe trouble and we seemed to hardly notice. Perhaps we are moving into an era where need to worry more about China and India? China has yet to sneeze.

Google, dont be evil…… so they say

Yesterday I posted about the Google 20% freetime…

To my amazement, the post was listed in the Google indexes within 15 minutes! You have trouble believing this dont you? Take a look at this screen shot.

Stone the crows! I still cant believe it.

What are the lessons to be learnt?

1. If you are not blogging…… why?
2. If you are blogging, well then get on with it, share your experiences, boost your profile, let people find out about you and your business. Let the Blog show your passion. Show people how you can help them.
3. Uncle Google will then help you by accelerating the discovery of your pages.
4. You will be up there and found on the pages that have no Google adwords. You will be a part of the long tail of keywords searched. (Save on SEO and SEM costs)

I was convinced about Blogs before, but this discovery of an almost instant Google inclusion just blows my mind away……

Some of you reading this post will not be convinced. I can hear it already. (To tell the truth I was also thinking it) By some miracle of events… I just happened to make a post prior to a Google bot visit etc etc etc etc. I can even hear someone bet me that the experience is not repeatable. Well it is. This very post you are reading was saved and published. A few minutes later it appeared on the search results. Again take a look at the screen shot.

Update from IMRE 10/Feb/08
Our client Studybed.co.uk had noticed this also. In their case, they had made an update to their Blog and an hour later they noticed their post had made it into the Google search results.

Google 20% delivers its first result for IMRE blog customers

Earlier on we posted the fact that IMRE was a keen follower of the Google 20% free time philosophy. We asked the question. Can a small company compete with the larger mastodons? Well we wanted to find out…..

We are happy to report that we are now able show some results. The image below shows a widget developed by Adam to make blogs more interesting.

In fact this idea is actually a double win. The widget can be changed to display a random message and a corresponding link. In essence this means that a reader that has landed on an old post within the blog can be transported to other areas of the site and thus along a conversion path.

We have noticed that Blogs are capable of receiving up to twice as much traffic as an ordinary brochure type website. So anything that can help carry some of these extra readers to the corporate site can only be a benefit.

The Google 20% time has not only created a new product offering for IMRE but it has also given our clients a little something extra to help them make their websites work harder.