A Chat About Social Media Marketing

I recently helped out with a college project – the aim was to look into Social Media marketing, particularly it’s use by one company based in Inverness. I had my best shot at answering the questions, and thought they might well be useful to others. Have a look below – I hope it’s helpful! Can you briefly describe what it is you do in relation to social media marketing? I use social media marketing (SMM) to promote my own...

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Grow Your Email List: The Best Ways to Create Easy, Effective Opt In Forms

Over the past month I’ve been doing a lot of work on Opt-In forms, trying to capitalise on my growing traffic. Since it was requested in the forum, I thought I’d share it in a blog post. I’d love to hear what works for you with regards getting people to sign up to your mailing list – leave a comment below. But to the project, what was I looking to do? My Aims In the past I’ve always had an optin form or two dotted...

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What is Design? Is it a Problem Solving Process, Needing Clear Definitions at the Start?

I was recently asked to debate the following statement: Design is a problem solving activity that requires a precise definition of the problem at the start. While I know most will agree wholeheartedly with the above, and think it doesn’t need debating, I thought it was worth sharing. Partly because I think a lot of people struggle to define design, and partly because I had fun thinking about it! I’ve recorded the debate here so you...

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Getting Your eCommerce Category Structure & Category Pages Right

One of my regular Digital Marketing clients is going through a bit of a site rebuild at the moment. A big task in this is carrying out a full review of their ecommerce category structure. They run an eCommerce site selling very high quality, quite niche merchandise, and in the past they’ve had a very diverse range of products. Recently, though, they’ve started to concentrate on just the high selling products, getting rid of the...

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Time Tracking Tools for Both Online and Offline Work

I’m often asked digital world questions by clients, friends or colleagues, and sometimes I think they’re worth sharing with the wider world. This is another in the series of Digital Q&A. If you have a question, send it in! Q. You mentioned a while back that you use an online tracking system to record your hours – is it free? I’m guessing you’ll have found a good one, can you recommend it? Can it simply be log on/log off...

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Choosing the Best eCommerce Platform For Your Business

It’s a question that seems be coming up more and more: “What’s the Best eCommerce Platform for Me?” It seems to me that we’ve reached a point where small businesses all over the UK are realising that if they don’t get online, they’re about to be left behind. They might survive on the high street for a while yet, but their competition is starting to sell online, and that slice of the pie is being munched...

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Chiasma Events: What Are They & How Do They Kick-Start Innovation?

Since I started working on my PhD late last year, a lot of the research has tied in really well with my web design and online business development activity. One of the most interesting cross-overs is between the Chiasma events we’re developing and the consultancy work that I’ve long done around developing the online aspect of small businesses. First things’s first though, I can almost hear you from here: What on earth is a...

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Opencart Development: Adopt an Adaptable Ecommerce Platform

A huge amount of small businesses are continuing to discover how valuable it is to get into the ecommerce game. With the number of online shoppers continuing to grow at a rapid rate, if you don’t offer your products and services online, then you’re missing out on sales! There are a large range of shopping cart systems out there, and while some have their limitations, there are a number of great options to choose from. Let’s...

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eCommerce, Branding and Internet Marketing – The Beer Vault

The Beer Vault was conceived as a new style of ecommerce outlet, selling quality craft beer to that rapidly growing market. It was centred around a membership scheme and a craft beer club, so it was designed primarily to capture visitors details to allow the owners to put them through a sales funnel, hopefully ending in a customer subscription. This project involved branding, ecommerce development and a great deal of internet marketing...

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Content & Media Management – The Podcast Host

The Podcast Host was conceived to tackle the current dearth of quality Podcasting Hosting platforms. Existing Podcasting Hosting sites are often extremely out of date, lacking in features and, most importantly, really lack in support. When things go wrong, or the system goes down, many hosting platforms are consicous by their absense. We were tasked with designing a new Podcast Hosting platform which used cutting edge technology – the...

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