Archive

Archive for February, 2010

Setting up your Google App (IMAP) email with Entourage Mac

February 23rd, 2010 2 comments

With DzineClub hosting plans, most of the times we set you up with a Google App account. This allows you to access emails via a Gmail interface and also set up your email on Outlook, Entourage, Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird etc

To set up your Account please use the following steps

Go to Tools > Accounts

Click New Mail

Click “Configure Account Manually” down the bottom

Select IMAP from the Account Type and Click OK

Account Setings

  • Account Name > your email address
  • Personal Information
    Name > Your Name
    Email Address > your email address
  • Receiving Mail
    Account ID> your email address
    IMAP Server> imap.gmail.com
    Password > Your password
    Click on CLick here for advanced receiving options and select “This IMAP service requires a secure connection (SSL) > Close this window
  • Sending Mail
    SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com
    Click on Click here for advanced sending options buttons and select
    SMTP service requires a secure connection(SSL)
    Override default SMTP port and enter 587
    SMTP Server requires authentication (Use same settings as receiving mail server)
    Close this small window
    Click OK on the main window.
    You will be prompted to log into your email account. Enter your account password (if not there already), save password and click on OK.

This should set up your DzineClub Hosting email account into your Entourage System. We will put up more docs going forward on how to set up your email with Thunderbird, Outlook, iphone etc.

CRMs – SugarCRM, Salesforce, ZOHO CRM

February 23rd, 2010 No comments

We recently went through a phase of choosing the right CRM for our business. And we looked at the various options that were out there. We tested Salesforce but wanted something more open source, we also tested ZOHO which was great but we thought that if we are using the time and money to customise a solution for ourselves, why don’t we put that for setting up our customised CRM and for that we have chosen Sugar CRM. We will post a comparison post one of these days with our findings.

Free or Trial to Paid Memberships

February 23rd, 2010 No comments

One of the best ways to get more customers is to offer them a free service for a period of time and then ask them to pay if they like it and use it. Companies like Online Movie Rental, Content Providers etc do it very often and well. So what strategies can you use to convert your free or trial Members into subscription/paid members.

  • Offer them a very enticing incentive to join the free program. Sometimes the trial of the program could be the incentive itself.
  • Ask your members what expectations they have from the free trial. Make these categories that 1. segments your members and 2. the key performance indicators of your program.
  • Tag these users separately and track what they are doing and how they are consuming the information and services provided
  • Create a nurturing program that is in sync with what your users have indicated
  • Halfway between the trial, ask your users for their feedback on how the program is working via survey poll etc
  • Review the second half of the program based on feedback
  • At the end of the program build it up to a un-missable offer
  • Offer paid membership
  • Review every 3 months and innovate

DzineClub is a SEO, SEM, Online Marketing and Web Design company in Melbourne, Australia. Ask us on how you can improve your trial to paid memberships by sending an email to info@dzineclub.com

How do you pick the right marketing channel

February 21st, 2010 1 comment

There are over 30 marketing channels in existence today. Traditional marketing, Direct marketing, online marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, mobile marketing etc.

As a business owner or the marketing manager, how do you correctly choose which mediums to engage. Unless you are an enterprise company or have a lot of money to throw around, it is very hard to engage all of these marketing channels.

Do you need to use all of these marketing channels?

No. You should work on a channel(s) which your target audience will most likely interact with.

How do you pick the right marketing channel for your target audience?

 

Do some research on the audience. By research you don’t have to run focus groups, all you have to do is think what marketing channels your target will use.

  • What age-group are they?
  • What social networking site do they use?
  • Do they watch a lot of TV?
  • Would they drive to work and listen to FM on the way?
  • Do they use e-book readers?
  • Are they hip and music oriented?
  • Do they go to pubs?
  • Do they subscribe to newspapers?
  • What can the content of the going to be more interested in?
  • What kind of mobile are they most likely to use?

The more you know about the audience or that target market, the better you can focus your marketing and advertising around channels that they are more likely to be interested in and interact with. If you have a tracking and reporting analytics system on your website, you can get answers to some of these questions through that.

Search Engine Marketing: Yahoo/Ninemsn – Australia

February 21st, 2010 No comments

Tips for running SEM on Yahoo and Ninemsn.

We are currently in process of writing a whitepaper that helps you understand how to make the most out of SEM in Yahoo/nineMSN network in Australia. Please stay updated and subscribe to the blog to know when this whitepaper is available.

Some of the information that will be included are:

  • Should you use content networks
  • Should you use advanced match or standard match on your keywords
  • What is the most you should pay for your keywords
  • How to track your ads and conversion back to your site

DzineClub SEO(Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM(Search Engine Marketing) Solutions allow you to

  • Use Search Engines Effectively as a Lead Generation tool
  • View how these leads are converting into sales
  • Accurately ascertain how much profits you are making from this paid traffic

Please view services under our site to see what current solutions we have to help your company’s SEO and SEM.

Piwik – Open Source Web Analytics

February 15th, 2010 2 comments

While testing out free and open source analytics platforms (and the open-source alternative to Google Analytics) we have now integrated Piwik – Open Source Web Analytics into DzineClub. The installation was fairly easy and the system is now integrated into the website. Just the website at this stage and not the blog.

piwik - open source web analytics - alternative to Google Analytics

We are also using Google Analytics but The reasons why we picked Piwik as well are

  • Data Ownership 
    Piwik will give us more flexibility around the data gathered and exporting it. Also we can be rest assured that they don’t access or use the data.
  • Plugins and Extended Functionality
    We want plugins and Extended functionality. We haven’t included anything on it yet but it’s just a matter of time
  • Real Time Tracking
    We love the real-time tracking functionality that it provides. Although you can do some workarounds around Google, but its not real-time tracking. Knowing how the website is responding to a campaign within the first 5 minutes can sometimes be a key in success and failure of that campaign.
  • Hosted Locally
    It is hosted locally, so it will not go down unless our server is down. Plus because of this we can be rest assured that if a provider decides to charge for a system down the track or discontinue it, we still have the upper hand.

Here are the first 5 minutes of impressions:

  1. The graphs are not as fancy as Google Analytics but very usable
  2. There is an amazing Adobe Air app that lets me track what is going across the site
  3. I like the plugins-report. It tells me if my users are using flash, silverlight, cookies, realplayer, quicktime, windowsmedia, java, gears, director and PDF plugins

We will be testing it thoroughly and updating the blog with what we find. Let us know if there is anything you are particularly interested in finding out.

Social Media Sharing Options on the Blog

February 15th, 2010 No comments

like a blog post? Do you think your friends or colleagues will enjoy it too but you don’t want to be too intrusive?

DzineClub Blog now has Social Media Buttons that help you quickly share the blog or its contents to social media easily. Here are the list of social networks supported and a brief explanation of what they are.

The sharing buttons appear on the left bottom of the browser and you can click on any button to share what is on the page.

Supported Networks

Newsvine:
Newsvine is a news portal updated by users. In their own words, it is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment.
http://www.newsvine.com

StumbleUpon:
StumbleUpon helps users discover and share great websites. They deliver high-quality pages matched to a user’s personal preference, which have been explicitly recommended by the user’s friends or one of their 8 million+ websurfers with shared interests.
http://www.stumbleupon.com

Digg:
Digg is a user driven social content website. Users submit content and other users “Digg” the content that they like best. These most “dugg” content make way to the front page for all the visitors to see.
http://www.digg.com

Delicious:
Delicious is a social bookmarking website. Delicious allows you to store your bookmarks online and synchronize/access them from different computers. You can tag your bookmarks to make it easier to sort and find and you can pass them on to your friends.
http://www.delicious.com

Linkedin:
Linkedin is a professional social networking site, that allows professionals to network with each other. Make mostly for professionals, it allows you to add more contacts, join groups, connect with other professionals, look for jobs etc.
http://www.linkedin.com

MySpace:
MySpace is One of the world’s leading social networking website. It was the most popular social networking site from mid 2006 to early 2008 when facebook took over.  
http://www.myspace.com

reddit:
reddit is a social news website where users post links to content on the Internet. Other users then vote up or down on the links causing them to promote to the front page or bury down the archives.
http://www.reddit.com

Technorati:
Technorati is a search engine for blogs.
http://www.technorati.com

Facebook:
Facebook is the largest social networking website. Users can connect with friends, send messages, share media, update their profiles and interact with each others status and contents.
http://www.facebook.com

Twitter:
Twitter is a social microblogging service. Twitter enables quick mass communication to groups and users. Twitter is based around tweets (messages that are 140 characters or less) and users can follow other users to receive their tweets and stay informed.
http://www.twitter.com

RSS Feed:
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to publish frequently updated content such as blogs, news, audio etc. An RSS document contains full or partial text plus metadata information such as author, date of publishing etc. This enables readers to subscribe to these feeds and get updated content without having to go to the source.

CMS (Content Management Systems) for Small and Medium Websites

February 14th, 2010 No comments

What is a CMS?

A  CMS is a content Management System. A CMS allows you to manage your digital content. In terms of websites, a CMS will allow you to manage all your pages, images and documents that form part of your website.

Small And Medium Websites

Small and Medium websites are usually built using static pages. The pages use HTML, Javascript, Flash files etc. The pages are stored on a web server. Usually making changes to HTML requires special knowledge and/or software. A Client is usually not able to go and make a quick change to a spelling mistake, image or add a new product or service easily. Usually the process is to ask your web-developer to make the change and this can be very time consuming and at some cases expensive.

The low-cost solution – A Content Managed Solution

The low-cost solution is to plug in a content management solution on to your site. In a CMS system, you will be able to log in yourself and make changes as you would do to a Word Document. The CMS also allows you to store all your images as assets, so that you can re-use them over time and also allows you to index all your documents, so that you can drop them into the website whenever you please.

This way, you will be able to efficiently cut down on turn around times and costs and make changes to your site quickly.

What features should a decent Content Managed Solution Have?

Depending on your needs and your budget here are some basic functionality any CMS systems should provide

What you Need

  • Change Text on your page, add new text and delete existing text on a page
  • Change images on your page, add new images and delete existing images

What you should want based on your needs

  • Store all your images in a library so that you can pick and drop them in as you choose. This means that you don’t have to upload your images to the site everytime you want to change them
  • Store all your documents (PDFs) in a library, so that your brochures, product whitepapers can be dropped into the website as you please without having a local copy
  • Allow you to make changes to the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) content of your page so that you can get better visibility on Google
  • Allow you to add new pages to your site, these new pages already have your branding and a link is automatically created for you
  • Search Functionality so that users can now search for things on your site
  • A Backup functionality so that if you mess something up, you can revert back to the original

The power in your hands and advantages

  • You can now update your pages quickly and efficiently and have more control
  • You keep the costs of changing smaller things on site low
  • Your site is more flexible in generating new content
  • You have a library of images and documents that works as a backup and also allows you to drop content on your site quickly

With great power comes great responsibility

There are also some pitfalls on having the power in your hands. Here are some of the things you have to understand

  • Once you make a change and publish the page, it is live for everyone to see. So if you make a spelling mistake it will be on the site. So you have to make sure you have a good approval process
  • You should stick to the colours and branding of your site. Sometimes we see clients putting all sorts of colours and sizes to make the page look more appealing. This can more often than not make the site look less professional. Unless that is your branding, then it’s fine.

The DzineClub Content Management System:

We also provide varying levels of CMS and customisations to our clients. Drop us a line if you are interested.

New Year, New Logo, New Offerings

February 6th, 2010 No comments

What better way to start off the new year than with a fresh new logo. Presenting the new dzineclub logo. We think its fresh, its funky and its fantastic!

dclogo

Let us know what you think. We are thinking of making a habit of changing the look and logo every year.  Also in 2010, we are coming up with a new CMS system, an online store and much more.. Make sure you subscribe to our blog to be updated. 

How do you subscribe to our blog posts?? There are two ways.

  • Via RSS: Click on the Rss link on the top right corner of this blog
  • Via Email: Click on the register link on the meta section (right hand sidebar bottom), enter a username, email and check the subscribe to posts button. This will also allow you to comment on these posts.
  • via Twitter: Click on the twitter link on the top right hand of this page and follow us. Please note that you need to have a twitter account for this. Instructions on setting one up are here

We will put up another post with more detail on how you can subscribe to the emails and RSS.

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