People power has forced an embarrasing about turn for the US hosting company GoDaddy. After the company announced it's support for the controversial SOPA anti-piracy laws, a mass GoDaddy Boycott was launched, forcing the company not only to drop it's support for the Act, but to begin actively opposing it.

Many big name companies have spoken out against the Act, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo, but GoDaddy stood almost alone in announcing their support for the legislation. In the first two days of the boycott, over 37,000 domains were transferred away from GoDaddy. They responded with a massive PR and advertising campaign, announcing their embarrasing u-turn.

The final straw seems to have been the announcement by LolCat guru Ben Huh, of icanhascheezburger.com fame that the company would transfer over 1,000 domains away from GoDaddy if they continued their support. Meanwhile, GoDaddy had switched off comments on their blog because of the overwhelming negative response that they were getting.

Anyone who thinks that GoDaddy can be trusted after this fiasco is surely deluded. The company has revealed it's true colours - pro-censorship, anti-internet freedom, doesn't care what its customers think, and will cynically change it's stance 180^o to protect itself. At the very least, if they are going to make such a bold stance, they should stick to their values and tough it out.

For the record, Belmont strongly opposes the SOPA legislation, and if anyone wants to transfer their hosting from GoDaddy to Belmont, we will add the rest of your term with GoDaddy to your first year's hosting with us absolutely free of charge. Simply contact us for further details.

The average web page today is 33% bigger than in 2010, according to the HTTP Archive, who bother to monitor such things. The reason is probably that as broadband speeds increase, websites can handle more graphics of better quality.

However, with more and more users accessing the web through mobile devices with lower bandwidth, and with Google and other search engines beginning to take more notice of page load speeds, website owners would be wise to consider reducing the size of their web pages.

Google's Chrome browser overtook Firefox recently to become the second most popular internet browser after Internet Explorer, according to news reports. Chrome had almost 26% of the market, compared to Firefox's 25%.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to be the most popular browser with 40% of the market, although it has been in long-term decline following previous versions that have been plagued with bugs and errors. Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner recently described IE6 as "dead", which was music to the ears of web developers, who have been trying to kill it for years!

So if you're choosing which browser to use, what are the relative strengths and weaknesses of the three most popular browsers?

Chrome

Strengths

• Large viewing area
• Very fast

Weaknesses

• Has trouble running some scripts, so some websites don't run properly
• Displays an error message that says "Aw, snap!" if it crashes, which may make you want to smash your monitor in

Firefox

Strengths

• Probably the most stable browser
• Gives the most accurate and reliable rendering of websites
• Open source - so no anti-competitive protectionism or corporate agendas to pursue

Weaknesses

• Mozilla tend to bring out major upgrades too frequently - 4 new versions in 2011 alone
• Annoying habit of automatically installing updates on opening without asking first - very rude

Internet Explorer

Strengths 

• Good for downloading other browsers

Weaknesses

• Painfully slow
• After the dismal performance of previous versions, who can trust Microsoft to have tracked down all the bugs?
• IE10 won't support Flash, and despite what the Apple Corporation and its legion of sycophants and Microsoft think, many people still want to view Flash on websites

For everyday use, Belmont recommends Google Chrome. It's fast, it looks good and it's uncluttered interface gives you the maximum possible viewing area. Download and install a copy now.

For web developers, the browser of choice is Firefox, with its faithful rendering and splendid range of excellent development tools.

At Belmont, we host all our websites with Heart Internet. Why? There's a very simple reason. Heart Internet's service and reliability is first rate, and the servers are based in the UK (Nottingham and London).

It's not just Heart Internet that say so, either. The results of the PC PRO Excellence Awards 2011 have just been announced, and Heart absolutely creamed their main competitors, putting 1and1, GoDaddy and FastHosts in the shade on every measure. Here's the results:-

How Heart compare with our direct competitors:

So if you value your website, why risk leaving it with a lower rated host?

At Belmont, we are so confident that you will find our service better that we will even buy out your existing term with your current host. If you transfer your web or domain hosting to Belmont, we will add the remaining months that you had with your previous provider to your first year's hosting completely FREE of charge.

E.g. You have 8 months left with your current provider. We will add that onto your first year with Belmont so your hosting account will not be due for renewal for 20 months.

Simply contact us to ask for more details.

Researchers have discovered that the mood of the general public, as reflected by Twitter, can predict the direction of stock market movements.

The discovery was made by accident after researchers decided to monitor Twitter feeds to see how the public mood responded to changes in the stock market. Using aggregating software to automatically monitor the frequency of positive or negative words and sentiments in millions of random Twitter feeds, they wanted to see whether fluctuations in the market made us all more or less happy.

However, to their surprise they discovered that our mood swings occur 3-4 days in advance of corresponding swings in the values of stocks & shares. The theory goes that as all analysts have access to the same information on a particular investment (insider trading aside), whether they overvalue or undervalue stocks depends not on their financial wizardry, but on something much more mundane - their general mood.

The correlation between the mood of the public and the next change in the stock market is around 86%, which is enough to make a big difference. An unnamed financial institution has been quick to take advantage of the new technology. By basing their investment strategy on the information about general levels of positivity and confidence, they have been able to outperform the market by "a significant margin".

Although it may seem astonishing, really this research is confirming something that we already suspected - that the value of markets has very little to do with the underlying performance of the economy or the skill of the traders, and everything to do with subjective levels of confidence and optimism.

So come on, cheer up! And then blether on all over Twitter about how good you feel - you'll be doing your bit for the economic recovery.

Everyone knows that Christmas is the busiest time for retailers both online and off - but when is the busiest day for online retailers?

Although each of likes to believe that we are individual and unique, human beings are basically herd animals, and in large numbers our behaviour is extremely predictable. For the last few years, the busiest day for online sales has been the same. It's the day on which UK shoppers spend a million pounds a minute on the Internet.

Surprisingly, whilst offline retailers are usually busier at the weekend, the busiest online shopping day is on a Monday. It has become known in the e-commerce world as "Manic Monday" or "Cyber Monday". So when is Cyber Monday? And why is it so predictable that more people will shop online on that day than on any other?

Cyber Monday occurs when it does because it is the first Monday after the last payday of the year - so it's simply the week when people are feeling most flush as they fritter away their disposable income on gifts for others. People want to shop as soon as possible so that gifts arrive in time to be wrapped and, in some cases, posted in time for Christmas.

Since online retailing began, every year has broken the previous year's records for online sales. PayPal have predicted this year that online sales will soar by up to 60%, with the peak being expected on Cyber Monday - last year's was the busiest ever.

This year's Cyber Monday is 28th November. Online retailers would be wise to organise promotions and special deals around this date, and promote them to their customers using well-planned email marketing and social media campaigns, in order to grab their share of the massive amount of money that will be changing hands in just a few weeks time.  

Following in the footsteps of Apple, who took the decision not to support Flash on the iPad, Microsoft have announced that they will not support Flash in Windows 8.

Neither Windows 8 tablets, nor the new Metro user interface which comes with Internet Explorer 10 will support it. What this means is that any websites which use Flash will throw up errors in the new browsers.

This is bad news for anyone who has invested money in creating Flash for their websites. Many video players deliver videos in Flash, and these just won't play on the iPad or in the new Windows 8 browsers.

Personally, I find Internet Explorer to be the worst browser around, and I stopped using it a few years back in favour of Firefox, and more recently Chrome. So far neither of these browsers have expressed any intention to abandon Flash.

The problem is compounded further because different browsers use different methods for displaying HTML5, the alternative to Flash. The situation creates a lot of problems for developers and website owners. In order to ensure that content displays on every device, developers have to implement several different methods of displaying the content depending on the device.

This pushes up development costs. Web owners who have invested in Flash for their websites are now having to pay for additional development, just so that their content can be viewed on all devices.

Phasing out one technology in favour of another is one thing, but unilateral decisions from powerful manfacturers to refuse to support a very popular technology is quite another. It's just one more reason not to buy an iPad, or it seems a Windows 8 tablet.

Wayne Rooney has joined Carlton Cole and Ryan Babel in being the latest footballer to be censured by the FA for comments posted on Twitter.

Rooney apparently threatened one of his Twitter followers after he took offence at something his follower had posted. He subsequently withdrew the remarks and tried to play them down as a bit of harmless banter. Which is quite believable, considering he referred to the follower as a "little nit". Ooooh! He knows how to wound! Maybe he started with a longer word, but had to trim it down to get his insults into 140 characters.

Liverpool's Ryan Babel was fined £10,000 for a Twitter post in January which linked to a mocked-up picture of a referee, whilst West Ham striker Carlton Cole accepted an FA Twitter charge regarding some xenophobic remarks he posted during England's 1-1 draw with Ghana at Wembley in March.

What this demonstrates is the importance of taking care with your online reputation. You might not be a Premiership footballer, but if you are in business you can be sure that someone somewhere will be Googling your name to see what comes up. So it's important to ensure that anything you post online represents how you would wish to be seen by your customers.

Six days ago Sony's PlayStation network went down in mysterious circumstances, with Sony blaming an "external intrusion" for the failure.

The term "external intrusion" implies some outside interference, but the interesting thing is this - it wasn't the attack that shut down the network. Sony shut it down themselves, presumably to protect customers' data from further attacks.

However, there's no guarantee - yet - that security details haven't been compromised. Sony Computer Entertainment Japan spokesperson Satoshi Fukuoka said the company "has not yet determined if the personal information or credit card numbers of users have been compromised, but that Sony would promptly inform users if it found that was the case."

As the network enters its sixth day of downtime, the latest post on the PS Blog from Patrick Seybold, Sony's Senior Director of Corporate Communications & Social Media, which appeared yesterday, says that there is no "update or timeframe to share at this point in time". In other words, the network is down until Sony think it's safe to put it back online. Rumour has it that they are having to rebuild the entire architecture from the ground up. That could take a while.

So does Sony come out of all this looking good, for taking a devastating pre-emptive measure to protect customer data, or bad for having the security holes in the first place?

The image of legions of gamers staggering blinking into the sunlight this weekend, bereft of their consoles, and having to spend the whole holiday playing with a hoop and a stick, or whatever it was we used to do before computer games were invented, may provide the answer to that question.

The mood on the blogs is ugly, and although Microsoft are no strangers to network problems, I can imagine there's plenty of sly, maniacal cackling going on in Redmond today. Their 2007 outage was as a result of record numbers of new users overloading the servers, not security vulnerabilities.

An interesting situation to watch.

Everyone wants their business to get to the top of Google, but recent eye-tracking research has revealed some surprising truths about where people actually look when they browse online - and it's not where you think! You can download the report here.

Bournemouth University have launched a new eye-tracking service. This technology is not just for websites, it is also proving invaluable for researching where motorists place their attention and even how accurate eye-witness testimonies are by comparing what people say they saw with data about where they were actually looking during an incident.

There is a networking event to demonstrate the eye-tracking service at the University on 16th March. Click here for more details.

Online retailers have had another record Christmas. While High Street retailers suffered in the snow, online sales were up by 25% over 2009. By contrast, offline sales were up by just 2% on the previous year.

However, despite these high levels of growth, experts predict that in 2011 online sales will continue to see double-digit growth.

This time last year, online sales were predicted to grow over the full year by 13%, but actually increased by 18%. This level of growth is expected to continue throughout 2011 despite continuing uncertainty about the UK economy, which is expected to hit consumer demand. Retailers who are not already online could do well by expanding onto the internet.

UK shoppers spent £6.8bn online in December alone (source:IMRG). Boxing Day was the busiest online shopping day of the year, with sales of over £300m, and even Christmas Day saw sales of over £150m.

The highest growth this Christmas was seen in clothing, which grew by 40% as everyone bought more clothes to combat the harsh weather, and alcohol at 36% as we all got properly stuck in to the party season.

Nothing like a new coat and a few tipples to take the edge of the winter chill!

It's good news for recruitment consultants as the Monster Job Index recorded an 11% year-on-year increase in online job demand.

Strongest growth was in Transport & Logistics, IT and Marketing, PR & Media. Sadly, the Banking & Finance sector slipped into decline, reflecting ongoing uncertainty surrounding the industry. So spare a thought for the poor bankers!

There was a slight slowdown in growth during December, which may have been caused by the weather, but could also mean that employers are holding on to see how 2011 shapes up before committing to new recruitment.

If that's true, expect to see continued growth as those jobs are advertised in the early part of the year.

Click here to read the full Monster Employment Index report.

1. Being Boring

The subject line should grab the reader's attention and motivate them to open the email. The copy should be brief, using short sentences. Talk about what's interesting to the reader, not yourself.

2. Overselling

Do you like being sold to? Thought not. Nobody does, and emails that do nothing but sell are a big turn-off. Email marketing is about building a relationship with existing and potential customers, establishing your credibility as a source of useful information and valuable content.

3. Poor Targeting

Email marketing is not about bombarding everyone with emails about everything under the sun. It's about emailing people with what they want, when they want it. The more that you are able to focus your email campaigns according to your customers' preferences, the better.

4. Intrusive emails

You must have permission to send an unsolicited marketing email to someone – that's the law. If you have a business relationship, including enquiries, then that counts as implicit permission to send emails on related topics, but don't assume that your emails will be welcome. The law aslo requires that you make it easy for someone to unsubscribe from your emails. It's good practice anyway – why would you want to email someone who doesn't want to hear from you?

5. Impersonal emails

Write as if you are writing to one person, not writing a sales brochure. Use a system that allows you to personalise the email with the reader's name. Research has proved that this will improve results.

6. Expecting Instant Gratification

Email marketing is like driving a steam train – you have to shovel some coal before you can build up a head of steam. So don't expect instant results from your email marketing. Be patient and persistent, and you will get results.

7. Using Low Quality Servers

ISPs, the people who supply your internet connection and email, work hard to protect you from spam emails. They monitor the reputation of the servers that send emails. If you send from a server with a poor quality reputation, your emails stand less chance of getting through. Worse still, if you send from your own email account, your ISP might cap your emails, or you might get your domain blacklisted. The only sensible option is to use a commercial service for your marketing emails.

8. Using too many images

Many email clients, such as GMail and Outlook, have images turned off by default. If you have too many images, your emails will look terrible to your readers.

9. Not Measuring Results

If you don't measure the results of your emails, you won't know how they are being received or how to improve them. Using a professional email marketing system will provide you with invaluable information about who reads your emails and what they do with them.

10. No Call to Action

Every email you send should invite some action from your readers. It is a great way to get people to visit your website, so make sure that your emails contain clear “call to action” to inspire your readers to do something. You can find out more about quality email marketing campaigns here!

If you have customers or clients who book appointments, a simple but often overlooked way to increase your business is to enable them to book online.

An online booking system can increase orders by up to 40%. With more business being done online, buying decisions are often made instantly. Give your customers the ability to book on the spot, and you could see a huge upsurge in your business

If your competitors don't use online booking, you could be the first in your market to offer this service. For example:-

• Restaurants can take table bookings online
• Beauty salons, dentists and physiotherapists can let customers book specific treatments with named professionals
• Garages can allow customers to book services and MOTs at a time to suit them
• Theatres and music venues can take bookings for performances

Combine online booking with a well-targetted email marketing system aimed at past customers, and you'll have a fully automated system to generate repeat business for you!

The days when online booking systems were expensive and complicated are long gone. With today's modern methods, it's easy to add a booking system to most websites. With a bit of training, anyone with basic PC skills can manage the system using a simple web-based interface.

Online booking systems cost much less than you may think, and you don't have to redesign your website to use one.

To find out more, go to www.belmont.uk.com/online-booking.

Spring's a great time to take a fresh look at your website. But how do you know if your web designer's any good? Here's 10 Awkward Questions to help you find out.

Who owns the code?

You paid for the site, you should own it. You should be able to move the site wherever you want at any time, and your web designer should co-operate to help you do that. Holding your site hostage is no way for your web designer to win your loyalty!

Is it “Open Source”?

Open source code is free, yet some companies write their own. That's more expensive and usually not as good. Open source code is well supported, stable and secure and benefits from free updates.

An in-house CMS is expensive for your developer to maintain and support, and may be subject to instability and security risks. Someone has to pay for that in the end - usually you!

There's no need to take chances with so much good quality, free software about. If your web developer's not using open source software, they are carrying an overhead that they could do without.

Do you get a Content Management System (CMS)?

Websites used to have a fixed number of pages, and you had to pay your designer to make changes. Today, quality websites allow you to update your own site with a CMS.

If you haven't got a CMS on your site, your web designer will usually charge you every time you want to make a change to your site. A competent web designer should be able to fit a simple CMS to any 10-page website for less than £100 (unless your site is designed entirely from Flash, in which case you're stuck with it!)

Is it modular?

Developing functions like booking systems or quote generators from scratch costs thousands. With modular sites, you can add them without spending a fortune.

Ask your web designer how much it would cost to add an e-commerce module or a calendar that users can log into to upload their own diary entries. If the answer's in the hundreds, chances are your system is modular.

If there's much sucking of air through teeth and theatrical cheek-blowing, and the quote runs to four figures, your developer is using laborious methods to write everything from scratch. Very expensive!

Is the code certified?

Search engines give higher rankings to code certified to W3C standards, so certified code is essential.

Where will the site be hosted?

Sites hosted abroad are subject to data bottlenecks, and search engines get confused about where the business is based. Support is in a different time zone, and money leaves the UK economy. A quality UK host is the best option for UK business.

Will it be designed in-house?

Some designers outsource to India or Eastern Europe. They add their profit margin, and so does the company arranging the work. It costs just as much, but with a fraction of the control.

Can you personally brief the designer?

It's important to speak directly to the person designing the site. Otherwise, how can they possibly know what you want?

If there's a chain of people between you and the designer, there will inevitably be misunderstandings and to-ing and fro-ing before they get it right. If you can brief the designer personally, you can tell them exactly what you want.

Is it custom-designed from scratch?

Some designers use cheap templates or site-building software. Quality designers create your design from scratch. If your designer tries to restrict you, you'll get a site just like everyone else's not the site you want.

Has everyone involved got real business experience?

Designing a website that sells is a marketing challenge, so real-world experience running an off-line, non-Internet  businesses is essential.

Can your designer advise on email marketing, blogging, SMS text marketing, social media, pay-per-click marketing and search engine optimisation?

Your website's just the start. For it to be found, a structured Internet Marketing campaign is essential. Your web designer should be able to advise you on how to do that properly, otherwise you'll waste time and money.

Summary

If your designer answers these questions well, you're in safe hands. If he shifts uncomfortably, makes excuses or stares at the floor, it's time to look elsewhere.

Being able to trust your web designer is so important. Pick the wrong one, and you're in for trouble. Get it right and your web design hassles will be over.

Whilst High Street sales continue to suffer with low single digit growth, online sales hit a new record this July, with UK consumers spending an incredible £4.2bn on the Internet, according to recent figures from the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG).

Almost 1 in 15 of us made a purchase online during the month, and all the signs are that this trend will continue. While the first six months of 2009 were static for High Street sales, online retailers clocked up £23bn in sales.

Year-on-year growth in July in online sales was an incredible 16.8%. Where else in the UK economy can you find that sort of growth in today's climate?

There can be no doubt that online shopping is here to stay, and retailers are gearing up for the biggest ever online Christmas

This is good news for UK business as a whole, as online sales lead the economy out of recession.

It often can be tempting to use US hosting services to host your website.  They might be cheaper, or have a flashy site themselves.  Or they might claim to be a UK solution, but actually be renting servers overseas.  But it is vital that UK businesses have a truly UK based hosting solution.

Firstly, search engines might conclude that US-based sites contain American content - and that's hardly unreasonable.  But this means that customers searching specifically for UK sites (as I'm sure you will have done from time to time) will find it harder to reach you.

Furthermore, making your website travel under the Atlantic means it could be subject to bottlenecks due to the large flow of information between the two countries.  This could slow your website down.  And if you do start experiencing problems, all your technical support will be based in a different timezone.

Finally, isn't it better to keep money in the UK economy while we are in an economic downturn?

One of the crucial decisions to be made when running email marketing campaigns is when during the week to send out your newsletters.  With so much focus on the 'to', subject, and content of emails, timing is a factor which is easy to overlook.

So what makes for good timing?   It really depends on whether your emails are business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2c).  If they're B2B, then there are a couple of rules around which there is broad consensus.  Firstly, you should not send on Mondays or Fridays.  On Mondays, inboxes have not been checked since Friday and are therefore pretty full.  People are more likely to be ruthless when it comes to deletion.  And on Fridays, people are too busy looking forward to the weekend and being able to finish work to be that responsive (and they may not even be there - there will be many who take Fridays off).  The other rule is not to send overnight.  Again, there is a problem with inboxes being full with other emails in the morning, but in addition most SPAM is sent overnight.  Your email might be mistaken for it.

Between Tuesdays and Thursdays, and regarding time of day, there is less consensus.  Some will argue that Thursdays are the best, as people have begun winding down towards the weekend and are therefore more responsive.  But seems to run opposite the reasons I mentioned earlier for not using Fridays.  Tuesdays and Wednesdays are likely to be the safer bet.  And what about time of day?  Well, between 10 and 2, when people are not dealing with full inboxes and may have the time for a quick coffee break or lunchtime read, are often regarded as the best times to send.

If your emails are B2C, then timing depends much more on what you are trying to sell.  In this case, Fridays and weekends may be much better times to send, for obvious reasons.   Sunday evenings is when the largest number of people are online - although remember that this might not make them more responsive.   On Friday evenings many will be in a good mood - although you have to catch people before they go out.  Think about who your market is and when they will be interested.  There may not be a set perfect time - it could be subject to seasonal change depending on the industry.

Mark Brownlow suggests some interesting innovations with email newsletter timing, such as sending emails at the time that the person registered for the email.  However, as is pointed out in a comment, this might be putting too much long term emphasis on one event.   People's behaviour changes, and it is vital that you adapt.

As with all things, it is important to test what works for you.  Try different times, and see the response rate.  Do split-testing of your newsletter.   Remember to keep updating your research and responding to changes in behaviour.  If too many other firms agree with you that a certain time is the best one to send, then inboxes may fill up then and your response rate may go down.   You therefore have to balance the need to build trust and expectancy by sticking to a regular newsletter time with the need to keep ahead of changing behaviour.  And remember; although perfect timing is good, getting your email read is only the first step.

The two biggest bulk emailing services, iContact and ConstantContact, are both based in the United States.  However, this has several disadvantages for UK based businesses.  Aside from the inconvenience of having to do business with those across the Atlantic who work on different business hours, there is also the issue of SPAM filters.  Surveys have estimated that 86 percent of all spam comes from the United States, with some saying that as much as 95% of all spam originates there  (this is a little odd, by the way, as the US has far more restrictive regulations in the form of its CAN-SPAM legislation, although perhaps we should give it more time to deal with the problem before we point that out).

But anyway,  what does this mean for email marketing?  Given that most spam comes from the US, it is hardly surprising that SPAM filters are harsher towards email originating from there.  Marketing emails from US based servers are statistically more likely to be unsolicited, and are therefore more likely to be identified as junk by spam filters.  The answer?  A UK based service with strong anti-spam credentials means increased deliverability.  And that means better communication with your customers.

Google AdWords is simple to set up and easy to use.  You can get a campaign up and running in a few minutes, and bring new visitors to your site minutes later, subject to Google's approval of your ads.

You have a lot of control over how much you want to spend and when and where your adverts are displayed.  Google AdWords is a revolution in advertising, providing a quick, simple and easy method to advertise to millions of people online.

However, there is one thing that Google AdWords does better than anything else, and that's to shovel money out of the pockets of advertisers and into the Google coffers.

Yes, AdWords is simple, but deceptively so.  In reality, there are 10 straightforward actions that every Google advertiser should be taking, but which very few actually are.

If you are not taking these actions, one thing can be guaranteed - your AdWords campaigns are underperforming, costing you too much money and not getting you as many clicks as they could.

If you do take these actions, you can increase the response rates of your AdWords campaigns and reduce your bid costs, resulting in more clicks for less money.

So here are the 10 Most Important Google AdWords Actions.

1.           Carry out extensive keyword research.  Don't just go for the keywords that you think are most obvious.  There is no need to guess when Google provides free tools to find out exactly what people are searching for.  An ideal keyword is one on which there are many searches but little competition.  Use as many relevant keywords as you can find, it is better to bid on many low cost keywords than on a few high cost keywords.

2.           Include negative keywords.  These are keywords that some users type into a search that have no relevance to your search terms.

For example, if you were selling Apple products, then you would want people who searched on "Apple".  By inserting negative keywords on words like "pie", "crumble" and "turnover", you would avoid displaying your ads to people who were looking for recipes.

If you do this you will preserve the relevance of your ads. Google rewards relevance, and this is measured by the click-through-rate (CTR).

This is the number of times the ad is clicked divided by the number of times it is displayed.  Google combines this figure with scores for the relevance of your ad to give a Quality Score.  The higher your Quality Score, the less you have to pay compared to other advertisers.

3.           Set up different Ad Groups for different groups of keywords.  This is vitally important.  The closer the match between your keywords, your ad text and the landing page (see below), the higher your Quality Score and the lower your bid costs.

4.           Point each Ad Group, or even each separate keyword, to a specific page on your site.  For example, if you are selling a particular brand of trainers, make sure that the keyword for those trainers goes straight to the page on your site where the customer can add the trainers to their shopping cart.  This will increase the likelihood of making a sale.

5.           Use "landing pages" wherever possible.  A landing page is a mini-website, usually just one or two pages, to which a visitor can be taken instead of the main site.

One of the benefits of doing this is that the landing page can be tightly themed to the particular Ad Group, thereby improving the Quality Score.

Another benefit is that you can use the landing page to capture a visitor's email address for future marketing purposes, as long as you follow the proper anti-SPAM opt-in procedures.  A landing page used in this way is called a "squeeze page".

6.           Run two versions of each ad in each Ad Group.  Rotate them evenly, and observe the CTR for each advert.  Cull the advert that does less well, then write a new one to try and beat your "control" (the remaining advert).

This is called "split testing".  It is at the heart of any successful direct marketing activity, and if done consistently will ensure incremental improvements to your CTR and Quality Score.

Google rewards high Quality Scores by giving your ads higher rankings, enabling you to rank higher than other advertisers who bid and paid more money for their ads than you did for yours.

7.           Ruthlessly cull underperforming keywords and Ad Groups.  Don't be sentimental!  Even if it's your favourite keyword phrase, if it doesn't get the clicks it is costing you money!  By taking out keywords that don't work, you can keep improving your CTR and lowering your bid costs.

8.           Experiment with changing your Max CPC bid.  Increasing it will give you a better chance of ranking higher, and may improve your CTR, but it won't necessarily bring you more clicks.  You can sometimes get more people to your site by lowering your Max CPC bid.

AdWords allows you to experiment with these values in the Traffic Estimator in the "Tools" section.  This gives you an indication of how many clicks you would get and at what cost for the new values.

9.           Use conversion tracking.  AdWords can place a cookie on the users computer and then match that up with final results, so that you can not only see which keyword phrases get the most clicks, but which result in the most sales or conversions.

In fact, the most relevant statistic that you can use from a Google AdWords campaign is Profit per Impression - in other words the total amount of profit made divided by the number of impressions.  This statistic combines CTR and conversion tracking into one number.

10.      Spend time every day learning more about how to use AdWords.  The Google AdWords Help Centre has some excellent training that you can do in 5 minute chunks at your own pace in the AdWords Learning Centre, and online webinars, all totally free.

The best book on the subject is "The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords" by Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd.

FURTHER ADVICE

If you would like some further advice on optimising your Google AdWords campaign, email Belmont Internet Marketing at service@belmont.uk.com, and we'll be pleased to conduct some FREE keyword research and provide you with a summary of how your campaign could be improved.

Best Wishes

Murray