123-reg.co.uk

While many of us at 123-reg are heading off for Christmas, the office won’t be completely deserted. Our dedicated support team will be sticking around to provide help online and on the phone.

You’ll be able to contact them as usual: from 9am – 7pm, Monday – Friday, over the whole of the Christmas and New Year period.

So we can deal with your query in the best way, there are several ways to find help and get in touch. To see which is best for you, please have a read of our contact us page.

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As a special Christmas treat, we’ve decided to give 123-reg customers who read this blog a sneak preview of our exciting new webmail system.

It’s fully functional, so you can use it to send and receive email and any settings that you configure should remain when we do the full launch in the new year.

Please check it out at http://webmail.123-reg.co.uk. You need to log in with your 123-reg popbox username and password.

Let us know what you think of the new features by leaving a comment here, or dropping us a line at listentomenow@123-reg.co.uk.

Merry Christmas!

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The end of 2007 is just round the corner now, so we’re entering the time of the year that’s crammed with reviews of the last twelve months.

One of the more interesting is Google’s annual Zeitgeist: a look at notable search terms from last year.

It’s rather US-focused but still worth a look. In Google’s own words, it’s “a look back at the breaking news, the big events and the must-have gadgets that captivated us this year”.

Unsurprisingly, ‘iphone’ was the fastest-rising search term both worldwide and in the US, reflecting the remarkable buzz around Apple’s mobile phone.

Rumours of their deaths spawned spikes in Google News searches for several notable names, including Michael Jackson, Criss Angel and Fidel Castro.

Transformers was the most searched for movie, Heroes the top TV show and Rihanna’s Umbrella had people scrambling to search for the lyrics – presumably to work out what on earth the song is all about.

And we’re still preoccupied by the big questions: ‘who is god’, ‘what is love’ and, er, ‘how to kiss’ came out top in the ‘who is…’, ‘what is…’ and ‘how to…’ categories.

You can see Google’s full 2007 Zeitgeist here.

If you’d rather see some UK-specific details, there are lists of the top gaining queries – for the most recent month and previous months (in the archives).

Finally, if you haven’t seen it, Google Trends is also a good way of wasting time online doing valuable research. You can compare the search volumes for different terms over time, and even see how news events influenced the number of searches.

Have a look at this example comparing Led Zeppelin with the Spice Girls to see what I mean.

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I have found that a good place to look for inspiration for topics to write about on this blog is Yahoo! Answers. Here I can see common questions people are asking along with a lot of the misused terminology which helps when you work in an industry and you presume everyone has the same level of understanding.

Some of the most frequent questions I see are “How do I advertise adsense?” and “How do I sell advertising on my website?” It’s clear what they are trying to ask, but the questions themselves show that not everyone is sure about the options available to make money through advertising on small to medium sized websites.

A lot of site owners think they need to contact advertisers to sell them space on their site. Only the largest of sites ever do this, employing dedicated sales teams, and even in these cases, most use a 3rd party to do it for them. To carry adverts on your site, you don’t need to have any contact at all with the advertisers.

Sign up with an affiliate network
Affiliate networks acts as a middle man between advertisers and website owners. All the major online companies are involved with at least one affiliate network and by becoming an affiliate you choose which company’s banners and text links you want to display on your site and if one of your visitors clicks on an advert and then buys something from the site, you earn commission for that referral.

Signing up to a network is free, and is a great way to gets adverts targeted to your site user’s interests. For example, if you run a site that publishes hotel reviews, you can carry banners that advertise hotels.com and so on.

Affiliate networks include:
Commission Junction
TradeDoubler
Buy.at

(Our affiliate manager would kill me if I didn’t mention 123-reg’s affiliate program here. To find out more and to sign up go to our 123-reg affiliate sign up page)

Amazon Associates
Amazon pretty much invented the affiliate channel, and their in-house affiliate program still leads the way in terms of customisation and targeting options. It works in exactly the same way as described above, however, it is worth a mention on its own thanks to the depth of products available for you to advertise.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/

Google AdSense
Google allows website owners to display Google adverts on their website, with the option to show text adverts, traditional banners, or video adverts.

The adverts are “contextual” which means the ads shown depend on the content of your website i.e. Google literally reads your website, and then decides which adverts are most appropriate. You earn money for every click or page impression depending on which option you have gone for.
http://adsense.google.com

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)
This is Yahoo’s equivalent to AdSense and works in almost exactly the same way. The advantage of carrying both AdSense and YPN adverts at the start is you can identify which network is carrying the most profitable ads for your site.
http://publisher.yahoo.com/

Terminology:
AdSense
This is simply the name of the service Google runs for website owners to sign up to in order to carry Google adverts on their website.

AdWords
Again, just a name of a service, in this case where advertisers go to write and publish their adverts

Contextual advertising
Ads are selected and shown automatically based on the content of the website. Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network use this method, and Amazon offers it as an option.

CPM: Cost per thousand impressions
How much an advertiser pays for their advert to be displayed a thousand times

CPC: Cost per click
How much an advertiser pays each time their advert is clicked on

EPC: Earning per click
This shows how much on average an advertiser pays out to their affiliates per click. Affiliate networks use this to show an advertiser’s performance to help you pick which ones to use.

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The BBC’s taken the wraps off its redesigned homepage and made it available to the general public. It hasn’t replaced their existing homepage yet, but you can see the beta version here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/ 

We’re not usually in the business of linking to websites just because they’ve had a redesign, but every now and then a site makes some changes and it’s worth taking notice.

The BBC’s site is one of those. Rightly or wrongly, it’s a real trendsetter online. Where the BBC goes, others tend to follow. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard “it’s how the BBC does it” used as justification for making a change to a website.

We’ve had a quick look in the office and a few things jumped out at us:

• The width of the page has grown, so now it doesn’t look like it’ll fit into a web browser window if your screen resolution is 800*600. If this change goes ahead, expect to see lots more sites dropping support for 800*600 screens too.
• The colours of the page change when you click the links under the main homepage image. It’s a bit disconcerting at first and I can’t quite see the point of it.
• You can personalise the homepage to see the content you’re most interested in. Try dragging and dropping the the white boxes or clicking ‘Customise homepage’ at the top to find more content.

As well as trying out the page, you can read a blog post from the BBC’s Acting Head of User Experience explaining the rationale behind the redesign.

What do you think of the page? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Hot on the heels of the November report from Nominet, VeriSign – the global registry operator for .com and .net domains – has released its quarterly report into the state of the domain name industry.

Ever wondered how many domains there are? Examining the third quarter of 2007, the report reveals there’s now a total of 146 million registered domain names worldwide. That’s an increase of 6 per cent over the second quarter of this year.

As also mentioned in the Nominet report, .cn (China) is now the fourth largest TLD (top level domain), having just leapfrogged .uk. Year-on-year, it works out as a 467 per cent increase in .cn registrations. No, you didn’t misread that. I really did say 467 per cent.

The huge growth might have something to do with a promotion which the .cn registry has been running. It means it currently costs the equivalent of about 6 pence to register a .cn domain for a year. The offer finishes at the end of 2007, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens in 2008.

An area which hasn’t grown enormously is domain renewals. By and large, people are hanging onto their domains; almost three-quarters get renewed before they expire. That figure hasn’t dipped below 70 per cent for a few years now, and is reflected in the fact that 87 per cent of domains point at an active website.

Still, the flipside is that around 25 per cent of all domains don’t get renewed. Many of these will become available on the open market again (you can search for domains on 123-reg). So as we’ve discussed before, there’s still plenty of choice out there if you’re in the hunt for a catchy domain name.

If you have a few minutes to spare, it’s worth digging a bit deeper: read the full VeriSign report here (300KB PDF).

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Towards the end of November, Nominet – the organisation which runs the .uk domain registry – released its domain name industry report. This is the first one they’ve produced – the stated aim is “to share information and insight about trends and developments within our industry”.

It paints a fairly interesting picture of the state of the UK domain name industry, including information about how many domain names get registered, renewed and cancelled.

You can view the full report here – it’s a 28 page PDF weighing in at around 4MB.

It’s definitely worth a look, even if you only have a causal interest in the subject. Here are a few facts from it that jumped out at me. All these were correct at the time of the report’s publication:

• 48% of all domain names end in .com
• There are around 140,000 .uk domains registered each month
• There are 23 domain names for every 1,000 people on the planet
• China’s become one of the largest domain name markets – there are now more .cn domains than .uk ones, and they’re still being registered at the rate of about 1 million per quarter.
• The most common starting character for a .uk domain is ‘s’ followed by ‘c’, and over a million domains contain a hyphen.

As well as checking out the full report, you can read about its background over on the Nominet management blog. They’re after feedback too, so if there’s something you’d like to see covered in the future then let them know.

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I’ve just spotted a good article in the New York Times bemoaning the way websites get named these days.

The article’s writer, David Pogue, reckons there’s a real lack of imagination. He puts it down to laziness:

“These days, startups take the lazy way out: they choose goofy-sounding nonsense words. They think they’re being clever by being unclever.

“These are all actual Web sites that have hit the Web in the last year or so: Doostang. Wufoo. Bliin. Thoof. Bebo. Meebo. Meemo. Kudit. Raketu. Etelos. Iyogi. Oyogi. Qoop. Fark. Kijiji. Zixxo. Zoogmo.”

I won’t pass judgement on any of those, but it has left me wondering how exactly you pronounce ‘Bliin’. Anyone?

It can be tricky to come up with a name that’s catchy and – crucially – still available. Although lots of decent domains have already been taken, the sheer number of permutations means that plenty of good ones are still to be claimed. You can use our domain search to see if the one you want is free.

How much trouble did you have finding a good domain name? Did you manage to get the one you really wanted, or did you have to compromise?

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So you’ve started selling online and you want to maximise your sales. Here are 6 tips that could help:

1. Use clear descriptions and good pictures. If you sell a physical product, it’s important people can see exactly what they’re getting. Describe the product in detail and include clear, well-lit photos – with large versions if possible. If you sell complex items, like electronic equipment, make sure you include the full specification too.
2. Get the fulfilment right. Once someone’s placed an order, make sure you ship the item in good time and keep the customer informed of what’s going on. Delivering an item quickly is an easy way to impress customers and encourage them to purchase from your site again.
3. Be comprehensive. Make sure you include information about shipping, extra charges, order changes and cancellations, returns and more. Think about what might stop a customer buying from you, and address those things in your FAQs or help content.
4. Make it easy for people to contact you. Give your online business a presence in the real world by publishing an address on your site where people can contact you. Supply a phone number and email as well, and try to answer queries in good time.
5. Don’t make payment difficult. Accept as many different forms of payment as you can, and make sure all online transactions are handled securely. Customers are more likely to buy if they can pay using their preferred method rather than the one which best suits you. Our ecommerce package lets you accept lots of payment methods, including credit and debit cards, PayPal and Google Checkout – in up to 9 currencies.
6. Keep an eye on your statistics. A web analytics package like Google Analytics can help you see how visitors are using your site. Look out for pages where people seem to drop out of the order process, or leave your site altogether. Why is this happening? Try making some changes and see if the figures improve.

What’s worked for your online shop? Leave a comment and let us know.

Previous top 6 lists:

• Books to read to help with your website
• Tips to improve your site copy
• Ways to increase conversion
• Online marketing misconceptions

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I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting to get ranked that high in such a short space of time (123-reg is #1 and WebFusion is #2). It’s worth noting that there aren’t any commercial rivals for this search term so both 123-reg’s and WebFusion’s page rank will have helped a lot. 123-reg has a PR of 7 and webFusion 6, which explains why 123-reg is ranked higher

Although this is a really basic test, hopefully it helps to show the importance of each of these basic and controllable web page elements:

• Title tag
• Page URL
• Body text
• PageRank (Number/ quality of links)
• Anchor text

For search terms related to your site it will be very (very) rare to get such dramtic effects so quickly, especially if you are competing with large sites or for a popular search term(e.g. “Shopping U.K”), but by ensuring you have researched and planned all the elements above, you will see your site ranked a lot higher than if you only spend a couple of minutes on them or ignore them altogether.

To research the most popluar keywords and the variations people use surrounding it, the most commonly used tool is http://inventory.overture.com. If you have a Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search or MSN adCenter account, they also offer keyword list generator tools.

(Why “Monkey shine on tree”? No idea!)

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