Pitch Persuasion

EveryCity Support Comic Relief

I’m pleased to say that we are supporting Comic Relief with their campaign.

Comic Relief Status App

 The Comic Relief Status donate application which lets you donate your status to Comic Relief to allow them to post a message each day to help raise awareness.  The application also helps promote the FunnyForMoney application which was the winner of the Hackathon (see below). 

The app was created by iPlatform who do great things integrating isolated brands social networks/hompages with Facebook, MySpace and other apps.

Facebook Developers Garage Hackathon

Not long ago there was a Comic Relief Facebook Developers Garage Hackathon. Three teams came together on a Saturday at Microsofts office in Knightsbridge to compete to create an application which would help raise money for Comic Relief.

The winner, FunnyForMoney, is an application which allows users to create jokes which get ranked according to how many votes they get.  For a user to vote they need to donate £1 to Comic Relief.

You can find more information and videos from the event @ www.comicrelief-hackathon.com

How we are supporting Comic Relief

EveryCity has been supporting Comic Reliefs facebook efforts by providing on-site support at the Hackathon as well as free hosting for the ComicReliefStatus App & FunnyForMoney application.

Who Else is helping

London Facebook Developers Garage - The London Facebook Developers Garage have been promoting the Comic Relief Hackathon as well as promoting the cause.

Adknowledge - A worldwide banner network they have donated 5 million ad impression to help promote both of the Comic Relief applications

Add comment March 10th, 2009

SEO & PPC Tip of the month: Landing pages

Landing pages are an incredibly effective SEO & PPC tool when creating websites. Especially if you have a certain aspect of your company which you would like to promote.
Two things that you might want to promote:

• A product/service range
• A specific service/product

Two reasons to create landing pages:

• It will increase your search ranking if done properly
• You will sell/promote more product, for free or less than its currently costing

Put very simply it is:
“Creating pages for individual products and tailoring the content for both the product and how your visitor has reached your page”

Landing pages for SEO

Let us take an example simple website: http://www.greatpeople4events.co.uk

This site has four pages: Welcome, about us, event staff & contact us.

Across these there is probably a limited scope for optimising against lots of different keywords. However by adding lots of sub-pages this company could appear on lots of searches.

Consider the following, the company may operate in one geographic areas, say London, and from the list of staff types at the bottom they have seventeen different types of staff. It might be sensible therefore to have the following:

A landing page for each type of staff in each geographic area:

• /london-registration-staff/
• /london-ushers-and-stewards
• /london…

These could be linked from the bottom of the first page on each of the job types. This would mean that anyone googling to the site would land an a page describing exactly the type of service that they want. This is proven to lead to higher conversion rates.

Landing pages for Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

If you are paying Google/Yahoo/MSN.. for search you should definately have landing pages for each of your keywords. Consider the following examples assuming that you have paid for an exact phrase match on “London Registration Staff” and that you have a custom ad for it rather than a generic company one.

Example 1 - No landing page
Sponsored Google Ad:
London Registration Staff
We offer professional ad-hoc registration staff anwhere in London at short notice, click above to find out more. www.staffingcompany.com/event-staff/

Your visitor will be taken straight to your home page or maybe even your ‘Event Staff’ page.
Problems:

• They will not get a message which is customised to what they have clicked on
• Google will find your ad less relevant and may charge you more, lower position, higher cost

Example 2 - Landing pages for each service
Sponsored Google Ad:
London Registration Staff
We offer professional ad-hoc registration staff anwhere in London at short notice, click above to find out more. www.staffingcompany.com/london-registration-staff/

Your visitor will be taken to a page which details the service that they are looking for, hopefully with lots of relevant information which will make them want to buy from you.
Advantages:

• They will get a message which is customised to what they have clicked on
• Google will find your ad relevant and may charge you less, higher position, lower cost

Final considerations

Finally you may want to consider creating separate pages for the SEO & PPC landing pages. The reason for this is that your SEO’d pages are likely to be much more permanent than the PPC pages. PPC campaigns can change from month/week/day to month/week/day whereas SEO can take weeks/months to achieve your goal.
This theory can apply to any type of site from an e-commerce site to a site promoting a brand.

I hope you have found this useful!

Legal Disclaimer: I/We take no responsibility/liability for the results of implementing any of the actions suggested above. It is possible to reduce your google rankings as well as increase them and if you are in any doubt I would suggest talking to an SEO expert.

1 comment March 10th, 2009

EveryCitys New On-Demand Scalable Hosting Platform

It’s very rare that I talk about my work on this blog and indeed I think it might be the first time ever. We have launched a new on-demand managed hosting platform, so below is a quick pitch of what it is.

Why do I need scalable on-demand hosting?

If you are running a campaign/website/application that could get very busy then you face two challenges, unpredictability of visitors & cost.

Currently most agencies plan for busy sites by paying for lots of
servers to be set-up which costs lots of money.

The way to avoid this problem is to use a scalable on-demand platform.

What does this mean?

Simply said we are able to scale your websites & applications very easily and in a large number of cases, without you even having to change any code.  The most important part to you is that you don’t have to do anything as this is a fully managed service.

What we are offering

The solution to agencies, applications & businesses who want to harness on-demand computing and make use of flexible contracts to help their businesses save costs & improve service.

Classic vs On-Demand

Under a classic model if you had a 3-month campaign or busy period then you might have to buy a full load balanced infrastructure.

Cost Comparison

What it looks like - Classic vs. New

Our on-demand service works just the same as a normal dedicated server with additional benefits.
In the On-demand diagram the two extra servers are whited out as you can use them as needed.

Advantages

Flexibility

• If you need to upgrade you let us know and restart your server
• You can change your infrastructure on a month-by-month basis
• Add zones/instances to scale whenever you need

Cost & Time Reduction

• Pay for what you need when you need it rather than x-times more
• Rather than having to plan months in advance, decide on the day

Zero-Hassle

• We offer a fully managed service, set-up, monitoring backups..
• A team of experts are available to help you with your app/site

Disadvantages

• You won’t get to sign off those huge hosting budgets anymore

Add comment March 10th, 2009

ScaleCampLondon - Planning & delivering high traffic websites

Last week we ran an interesting event called ScaleCampLondon in our offices at London Bridge.  The theme of the event was to address and educate people about how to build websites & applications which could potentially become very busy or grow quickly.

There are a few key principles that account managers & project managers need to understand in order to ensure that their developers or agencies are doing what is needed.

Who needs to scale (or plan to scale) and why?

If you anticipate growing, plan the growth but don’t go overboard with infrastructure. Work out a rough number of visitors you expect on your site, and the period you expect they will visit over.

Do you need to think about scaling equation:

Number of visitors expected per day / number of hours you expect them to visit in.
e.g. 100,000 visitors / 5 hours = 20,000 visitors per hour

Most typical servers can cope with around 20,000 ~ 50,000 visitors per hour depending on how efficient the website is. If you have over 20,000 visitors/h you may need multiple servers to cope with the load.

I’ve heard that load balancing is the solution, is it?

This depends entirely on what your goal is and what risk you want to mitigate.

I just want to protect against lots of visitors:

Usually most sites can get away with simply splitting up what each server does. I.e. having a separate Database server and a Web server. Servers are extremely powerful these days, and a well written website can cope with a large load. However if your application is highly dynamic, and each page request incurs many database queries, you may need to consider spending time optimising your website. Alternatively, it may be quicker and/or more cost effective to simply use more powerful servers. If this isn’t enough, you may wish to spread the load over multiple servers by utilising load-balancing.

I just want to protect against lots of visitors & against server failure:

If you are investing heavily in a campaign, you may wish to hedge against server failure. To do this, you will need a load-balanced solution, that will spread traffic across two or more servers. There are a number of ways this can be done, some are cheaper than others. It also may require code changes to make your application load-balancer aware.

I want to have video & large images on my site

People believe that video and images are a challenge to put on a site and often envisage needing many servers and spending lots of money to do it. This is simply is not true.

There are currently two main ways of putting video on your site:

A - Use a service such as YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Flickr..

These are generally well known and I recomend Googling if you haven’t heard of them.

Advantages: Often free or near free
Disadvantages: Slower page load times, may lead your audience away from your site, less professional

B - Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN), in conjunction with your host

A CDN (of which there are many) is the Rolls Royce of delivering content very quickly to your audience irrespective of where they are. CDNs provide a network of global servers, and requested content is served locally, rather than potentially across the world.

Advantages: Allows you to deliver any video/image content including HD
Disadvantages: Costs slightly more, usually £0.25 ~ £0.35/GB

Is there any way that I can test the capacity of our site?

Yes there is. You can conduct load testing, either internally, via a dedicated load testing firm, or with assistance from your hosting provider. The idea is to mimic lots of users using the site at the same time to ensure that everything is sufficiently optimised for your needs. This usually incurs a fee which can vary from £250-£1000+ depending on how comprehensive the testing is.

Some of our sites load slowly, what can we do?

There are a number of ways that you can improve this and it could be for a number of reasons. A few quick easy fixes are below:

• Get your developer to add caching to your site (watch video below for more info)
• Use a CDN
• Get a more powerful server

Videos from ScaleCampLondon

Below are some of the videos from the event, some are a little technical but they should give you a good overview of the technologies you need to know about if you’re building big websites.

Caching & Content Distribution Networks (CDNs)


Load testing

Add comment March 6th, 2009