MA in Digital Media Technology

Whilst thinking of things to write, I thought I’d mention that Im finishing off an MA in Dig Media Technologies which is run out of DIT Aungier st. All in all a very good course. In terms of content, there’s some core modules that you complete – which are Digital Design Principles (you produce a design spec and  artefacts for a business (logo, identity, Ad campaigns – print & TV, Stationery, Cards etc..), Two Authoring modules which breakdown into – Flash Animation and Flash Action Script (building websites with Action script using different types of media files), and finally a general Technology course, which gives a looks at different technologies, software and hardware, used in digital media and how they work – you produce and present a multi-media pdf with video, audio, stills on a subject which uses digital media in innovative ways .

In terms of elective modules – there are four, which break down into; Audio Tools (using pro Tools, studio set-up (including mic positioning etc..), recording musicians and producing master tracks, use solid state recorders and digital composition; Screen Tools, which is capturing DV (Camera, lighting, mic work), Non-Linear Editing (Premier or Final Cut Pro) and DVD Authoring (DVD Studio Pro or Encore), scriptwriting and storyboarding too; Dynamic Web which breaks down in DHTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL; and finally there’s a module on Motion Graphics using Adobe After Effects, PS.       

There’s also Media Law and Project Management modules (which is the pre-cursor to the major project/thesis)

And then there’s the final project, where you use a combination of the skills learned on other modules. I chose Dynamic Web, Screen Tools and Audio Tools as my electives – all three were great – the emphasis is on project work – so for each module on the course there’s a project to produce (which is basically a digital artefact accompanied by presentation and Report)

My main project is to digitally narrate the urban history of Dublin over the period 1700 to 1850 taking the liffey as the main axis of the city – using a combination of archival material (maps, plans, lithographs, artwork, engravings, sketches, historical writing etc…), video and audio interviews (with experts in the field – urban geographers, art historians, historians, architects, cartogrpahers), animated sequences, user interactivity – and the platform it will be delivered on is a website.

Its been a very interesting course to do, and I have learned a huge amount and thoroughly enjoyed it – give me a shout if you have any Qs on it.

SEO – Again..

I suppose Im like a lot of online businesses in that I get bursts where I review the site from an SEO perspective. I’m in the middle of one of those at the moment. Anyway, I’ve been trawling around looking to get some advice – looking at all sorts of videos and articles – written by various SE/SEM experts.

To start with, I use a tool called IBP which I found good to start with and that helps you start SEO’ing your site. One of the functions that I use, is where you compare your site against the top 10 sites in your competing area. The tool looks at your competitors and then analyses your site with theirs and makes suggestions as to how you shoud modify your content so that your site should get better rated.

One of the things it concentrates on is the meta keywords – and checks the frequency and density of these within the body text of your url. However, listening to a whole load of SEO heads, this apparantely isn’t that relevant now. The feeling being that you can stuff your keyword tag with a load of keywords that just aren’t relevant.

However, what IBP and the experts do have in common is the need for a title tage that accurately describes your business (with keywords). And also a meta descritption tag that is meaningful and acts as a “compelling call” to potential customers. The snippet that is displayed in the search Engine is a very important part of your call card. You need to get it righto to make sure you get the right people clicking through and that it offers them a reason to do so. There’s an interesting video by Matt Cutts on youtube on this topic.

Other important factors are external links to your website – thats one of the things we all know – but don’t do enough to get quality links – the consensus seems to be DO not buy links or use link factories – Google don’t like it – as is evidenced by Matt Cutts and videos that can be found, again, on Youtube.

One of the things that Matt does say is worth doing is to start a blog and get involved in whatever coversation that is of interest to you and (pertains tangentally to your business). Google loves blogs – and he seems to particularly like wordpress. You can get a wordpress blog up and running and integrated to your site easily – and apparently version 2.3 aggregates blog postings - which google likes.

Another SEO expert (whose video I saw on YouTube) says that he doesnt concentrate anymore on fiddling around with keyword densities etc.. that instead he researches the correct keywords that businesses should use (and he seemed to suggest that he spent the majority of his time at this). He also focused on optimising digital PR for SEO using keywords – and pushing it out to thebest wire agencies. And of course quality link building – 1000 poor ones are not as good as 10 excellent ones.

On keywords – it takes time to realise what works well – setting up your googleAdwords account and analysing results is a useful way of getting a feel for what people are searching plus there’s a whole load of tools to use.

Thats all I’ve time for this evening – hope this was of some help.

M50 Enterprise Programme

A quick note on the M50 Enterprise Programme that is run out of the Institutes of Technologies in Tallaght and Blanchardstown. I did it last year for a 12 month period. I know it’s back up again and I think they are either looking for businesses to participate or have already filled the positions. Anyone interested should get in contact straightaway and find out what the situation is. 

I found the programme to be really helpful as well as being a great source of ideas and camaraderie with the other participants. Patricia O’Sullivan who runs it is very cool – and very helpful. 

It basically operates by providing workshop type seminars where you discuss various aspects of your business and look at ways of developing. These are very useful and it’s nice to participate in a group scenario. There also one on one sessions which go through all aspects of your business directly. 

The programme works with EI, and a lot of participants get CORD funding (but administered and adjudicated by EI directly)

Anyway, most definitely worth a look into

 

 

 

Tradeshows

As I was saying in the last post we did a trade show in November 2007. It was held down in the RDS but run by an outside events company. It was expensive enough to take a stand. The one that we took was approx, 1250 + vat for a 4 by 1M stand. Long and narrow. They company who were organising had a reasonably good PR \ advertising blurb but in reality I am not so sure how much of it got implemented. The problem with these shows is that they want to get you signed up and paid and then not spend the budget and scrimp on essential things like promotion.

The result of them not spending the money was that footfall was low in comparison to other shows down in the RDS. They were also a bit tight on spending on the floor as it were. The lighting was poor. So everyone had to stump for extra lights.

Also, the wireless connections down in the RDS were not working so you couldnt access internet (a bit dodgy if you are trying to process txns online)

Between the jigs and the reels the footfall never really picked up, and even though we were in a good position sales were way below expectations. After the show, I got on to the organisers to let them know I was not happy – they weren’t that concerned – I think they were happy to have it over and done with and to have made some cash. But the reality is that on the discussion forums to which we all look/participate there was a lot of chat about how unimpressed people were with it and that they would not go back next year. So the upshot is, don’t allow yourself to be sucked in to marketing\sales nonsense and go with your head. If an organiser has not done it before and is very expensive – BEWARE. Look before you leap is definitely the way to go.

Be interested in hearing other peoples experiences

 

 

 

Back to Blogging

It has been a long time since I’ve been blogging about the travails of baba beag. Intend to resume blog again to discuss ups and downs of an Irish retail online site. 

Apologies for absence, will hopefully make amends over coming weeks and months.

First real post will be on Retail Trade Shows – did one in November – very mixed bag, maybe provide some insight for other people displaying at such shows

 

Payment Gateways

When setting up the Baba Beag website, one of the initial things I needed to do was to decide how to process transactions. If you’re only an online seller the likelihood is that you won’t have a machine to process transactions. Although Ive talked to a few seller who do. You need to ask yourself what kind of experience do you want users to your site to have. That being, do you want them to be taken out of your site environment and branding to be processed by paypal or world pay or some other payment provider or do you want to do it within the structure of your own site. For my site, I felt that paypal et al didn’t suit the business. I dont like being re-directed to externals even if they are bona fide (that maybe a personal thing) also, making your customers register with someone else before they can purchase never seemed to make sense to me.

I decided to go with Realex, which is an Irish company that handles payments. In fairness they have been good re: customer service – depending on volumes of transactions it may or may not make sense for small businesses. They charge a flat rate every quarter – and if you’re transaction numbers correlate to the amounts they allow for within this payment, then you’re getting a good rate – I think its 20 cent per txn, but if you have few transactions then your costs can be high. So you need to think about how many transactions you are likely to process and then examine the packages that each of the providers offer.

You also need to get a merchant account set up to in order to process your txns in to your business account. But that can be the subject of another post.

Advertising on third party websites

Initially when I launched bababeag.ie everyone was giving me advice (for all sorts of things) but especially on how to market and advertise the site. Everybody who I talked to was of the opinion that you had to get your site listed with all the big content providing sites that were relevant to my business. In our line of business that translated into sites such as rollercoaster.ie, magicmum, irishhealth, EUMom etc… all the parenting sites. Initially, it was probably right that I advertised on these to get the name out – but I have to say as time went on the conversion rates from these sites is very low. And as the likes of rollercoaster stick more and more listings in their product pages the throughput keeps on dropping. But the funny thing was nobody mentioned to me about SEO and real online marketing (because people, especially small business owners, just dont have a lot of understanding or experience in these areas).

I stopped advertising on these content sites around June of this year – and it has done nothing to my traffic. Instead I focused on trying to get my site optimised to get free organic listings from google et al. Im not saying i’ve done a great job but I’ve increased traffic whilst saying myself a few grand in advertising costs.

The message I would send out is that if you’re launching a site, of course look for ways to get the name out there  – and that probably means paying for it initially. But dont fear experimenting with advertising channels when you build up a client base  - and especially focus on optimising your site if you’re an online business (sounds obvious but lots of businesses don’t) which is great because for those that do, there’s a big pay off.

Courier Services in Ireland

When I started looking at selling products online one of the initial operational items that you need to sort out is how you’re going to ship the products. Obviously you need to decide how you’re going to fulfill both Irish shipments and overseas. I thought the only way to ensure on safety, security etc.. was to go with a courier company. I found that a lot of online business seem to use Fastway couriers. I got in contact with them and discussed with the area manager about volumes etc…and he came up with a price per shipment. The way they work is that you pre-buy booklets of labels which you attach on each order. I bought a lot of booklets at the start (too many to be honest). Anyway, after they ran out I found that when I went to re-negotiate the price – it wasn’t as keen as the first time around. I thought to myself why do I need to courier deliver low bulk childrens products around the country. For items such as clothing, surely I could use the An Post network. I tried it out – I came up with a matrix for postage based on number of items people bought. It is much cheaper for my customers and I have had no problems with An Post at all. The An Post network is great for small non-damagable items. In fact I have more problems with Fastways than I do with An Post.

On a number of occasions deliveries have gone missing with Fastways. And they are slow to honour any mishaps on their part. I only use Fastways for bulky items where An Post would be more expensive or when customers explicitly state that they want it courier delivered.

So my advice to people setting up online businesses is to consider An Post and not to reject them out of had – it may make sense for your business and customer love lower postage prices.

Advertising…what works?

Obviously when you are starting a business you’ve got to look at ways of promoting it. Initially, people think that word of mouth will get them a load of business. It’s a very Irish thing – everyone knows everyone, therefore by spreading the good word that should equal a lot of business. It doesn’t work like that – that said networking is clearly really important and telling people about the business (without boring the s out of people – they’ll only listen so much) – but you have to look at lots of ways at promoting the business and pay for it too.

It obviously depends on who you are trying to attract. In terms of Baba Beag the target market is primarily female – as women tend to do the lion’s share of kid’s clothes and gifts shopping. On the Baba Beag site the customer base is 95% female who purchase – In terms of marketing and advertising – the site needs to focus on generating interest amongst this market. Initially we focused on both PR and advertising. Re: advertising we had to decide where best to spend the cash. Because god knows there are enough advertisers willing to take your money (with the risk of very little return from ill thought out choices).

In terms of spend you have to decide on where to split it for online and offline spend. My experience was that initially the offline spend definitely got eyeballs into the site. It’s always a very good idea to insist on some editorial when you are taking out any advertisement. Don’t listen to these guys who tell you they only give out independent editorial – it’s not true – well not in magazines or supplements. If they want your business tell them you want some editorial. Then you need to look at some online spend – obviously GoogleAds is there – and you should use them as it does get eyeballs into the site. But you should also try and track and set conversion goals that are trackable( i.e. sales) through Google Analytics. This is something that I haven’t done so well but am making a concerted effort to do so now. Then there’s lots of interest sites – for my business obviously there are parenting sites where parents hang out and discuss topics and look for information. Try these and track what they generate. My experience of directories (sites with a façade of information but really don’t provide any meaningful info) are a total waste of money – so be careful where you spend your cash

More anon

Search Engine Optimisation

Just a quick note on this for the time being – will be coming back to this regularly. When I first started the website I was told that google wouldn’t really start ranking me for a few months. And this was my experience. For the first six months I wasn’t coming anywhere in the top 10-20 for my keywords. However, after that I started getting ranked and coming up in the first page for quite a few of my main keywords.

 

Up till this point my google referrals had all come from pay-per-click. Once I saw how effective the organic search could be I started to play around with it. And within a few weeks I started coming in in the top 3 for a lot of keyword searches. I used a tool called the IBP – International Business Promoter. The part that I really used was the function which compared my site to top 10 sites with similar keywords. It then told you how to change your own site to replicate their success. It’s quite tedious but really worthwhile. You see an immediate pay-off in terms of traffic and I also think that people trust a site that comes up high on the organic searches rather than just the pay-per-click. A lot of people I talk to say they don’t even look at the pay-ads and that they purely focus on the organic searches. I’ve seen some stats where they look at the click through rate of the top 3 and it makes an enormous difference to be number 1. So that’s where we should all be striving for.

 

Anyway, more on this later.