Viral advertising is a more cost effective way of engaging customers than other forms of advertising, according to a new Forrester Research report.

Almost 40% of 1,000 UK internet users surveyed said they regularly receive viral emails. 25% of people receiving viral emails like them and 20% send them on. 20% also said that they base what products they buy in the content of viral ads.

The most common reason for sending on viral emails to friends and family was 'because it was funny' and 'becuase I thought they would be interested in the product'.

If you're looking to engage with your prospective client base in a more original manner, give us a call.

Google is expecting significant double-digit percentage growth in its UK advertising revenues to around GBP1.3bn this year.

Internet advertising is expected to grow from GBP1.4bn last year to GBP2bn this year, and Google expects to take two thirds of that spend.

According to GroupM, a WPP company, the internet will this year overtake national newspapers to become the UK's third biggest advertising medium by spend.

We've been hard at work at Elite finishing and launching some brand new websites for clients.

Last week we launched a new site for Stita a Cheltenham based travel company - http://www.stita.co.uk. Stita runs 3 businesses - Farm Tours, Special Destinations and Pathfinders. We have developed a site that acts as a portal for these 3 seperate businesses while still maintaining each businesses own distinct branding.

Prior to this we launched a website for Traverse Line - http://www.traverseline.co.uk. Traverse Line is a new company providing guided trekking and walking holidays in Nepal, India and South Africa. As a start-up business we had to work to a relatively small budget, while still providing a site with a content management system that would enables the site to grow as the business develops.

Our main focus recently has been on search - generating more visitors to clients' websites, and then converting those visitors to paying customers and revenues. Our latest campaigns for Parallel Blue Marine, Armishaws Removals, Steppes Travel and Digicore have resulted in many first page rankings in Google and had a siginificant positive ROI for our clients.

Keep an eye out for SearchPath, launching soon, for more search focused business.

Sorry for the lack of blogging recently. We have been a bit busy, which is good (or bad, whichever way you want to look at it!).

Anyway, lots going on. Look out for SearchPath, which is a more refined version of the Web-Path service we launched recently.

More news soon ...

As you know we are big fans of Seth Godin. He has launched a new e-book called "Everybody's An Expert".

You can download it in PDF form here. Enjoy!

I guess there are two answers to this one.......

Firstly, people generally use blogs to talk about their life or experiences. Sometimes, this insight can be quite interesting and sometimes you think "why on earth would anyone write this rubbish".

Example of a "what is the point" blog post:

"yesterday, I travelled on the bus. I was wearing my blue shirt. Maybe, just maybe, tomorrow I will wear my green shirt. I wonder what they will be like, will it make me feel like the leaves on the trees, or the grass under my feet...blah...blah".

You get the picture........

Now, if you ask why WE use blogs, the answer is simple........

It is all to do with quick information transfer and search engine optimisation.

Give us a call and we will explain all.

Some of you may think this is an easy one, but we have been asked this question quite a lot of the past few weeks, so maybe, a quick explanation is in order.

In very basic terms.......

- "Blog" is short for web log.

- "Web logs" are online diaries or memo repositories.

Next post......Why do we use Blogs?.......

I came across a great article the other day and thought I would share it with you.

Many of you may already know Tom Peters. If you don't he is one of the most recognised and respected management consultant around.

The article is about "The To-Do List" and sheds new light on how this small piece of paper (or however you write it) can make or break you day and your career.

You can read the article by clicking here.

Elite Business Solutions is pleased to announce it has gained Google's Qualified Advertising Professional status.

This means we have met Google's requirements in terms of our Adwords knowledge and experience to provide a professional and profitable service to our clients.

If you would like to advertise your business online, contact us today.

UK consumers bought GBP8.2bn of goods online last year - up 28.9% on 2004, spending an extra GBP1.8bn online last year.

Online competition
25% of all UK shoppers buy goods over the internet, with the online shopping community growing by 25.5% to 14.6 million people between 2004 and 2005.

Online competition had a significant impact on some traditional stores, with UK retail sales growing by just 1.5% in 2005 - the slowest rate since the early 1960s.

Seasonal boom
One of the biggest growth sectors in online shopping is among the over-55s, spending an average of GBP458 per head, up 46.7%, while shoppers aged 35 to 44 are the biggest spenders, accounting for £3 in every GBP10 of retail sales.

Internet shopping among UK consumers soared almost 50% in the 10 weeks before Christmas, spending GBP4.98bn online during the period.

We are very pleased to announce that we have been awarded Accredited Supplier status for the Business Link Catalyst Grant Scheme.

The scheme is designed to help companies use their on line presence to really help their business prosper and grow. The grant is paid to qualified companies to aid them with their website development and provide additional on line functionality.

Please get in touch with us and we will be glad to discuss how this grant can help you and your business.

Even the big guys get things wrong with dire consequences for their business. Recently BMW's German site was removed from Google for breaching its guidelines. BMW admitted using "doorway pages" to boost its search rankings.

BMW used text-heavy pages liberally sprinkled with keywords to attract the attention of Google's indexing system. However, once a user clicked on the link displayed in Google's results window, they were redirected to a regular BMW Germany page, which contained far fewer of the keywords.

The penalty for breaching Google's guidelines is a ban from all Google's listings for that site(s).

Google's quality guidelines require websites to be designed for users, not for search engines. "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as 'cloaking'," Google says.

Google confirmed that BMW.de had been removed from search results, adding that it would not tolerate any attempts to manipulate searches. "The quality of our index and search results is of the utmost importance to Google," the company said in a statement.

The moral behind this story is that if you are considering resorting to so called black hat SEO techniques - don't! It could seriously damage your business.

While on the subject of books and Seth Godin, we'd also recommend The Big Red Fez.

In this book, Godin views website visitors as monkeys looking for just one thing: a banana. If that banana isn't easy to see and easy to get, your visitor is gone with a quick click on the 'back' button.

Do visitors know what they're supposed to do on every page of your website? If not, give us a call - we can help.

We have a few favourite web marketing authors, and one of the best is Seth Godin. His books are well written, concise and, crucially, the advice is spot-on.

Godin has a new book available called Knock-Knock. As he says, "It's a short take on how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively."

Download the ebook free at salted.com and read Seth's excellent blog here.

Google has announced that it is now taking into account the 'content and the layout of the pages linked from your ads' and is incorporating this into its recently introduced Quality Score in order to determine minimum bids for keywords.

Now it is even more important to send your Adwords visitors to the appropriate landing page. If you are setting up your campaigns carefully and appropriately then you shouldn't notice any changes but any attempts to take short cuts when running Adwords campaigns are now likely to cost advertisers more then ever.

If you're looking to advertise online, give us a call - we can help, or if you're already advertising online, let us help you maximise your campaign's impact.

We would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very merry Xmas and a prosperous New Year.

Let's make 2006 a great year.

Google have recently implemented a site map programme to help their search robots know when to crawl your site.

The site map file includes all the pages on your site and indicates which pages have been added or updated. The file also tells Google how often you update your site, so the robot knows when to check back. From a technical perspective the site map file needs to be in XML format.

Google currently have this programme on a beta trial. However, we think that from now on if you want to be ranked well on Google you will need a Google site map.

Need help in implementing this? Just get in touch and we will be glad to do it for you.

Elite Business Solutions are proud to announce the launch of their latest client site. The site has been produced for Steadyco, producers of the Steadycup and a range of tableware for toddlers.

The site is designed to serve as a marketing and shopping engine for the public, an access point for retailers and distributors, and an information source for healthcare professionals.

A online e-commerce system has been fully integrated into the site. Future developments include an interactive media centre, secure login area for distributors and user forum.

The site can be viewed at www.steadyco.com.

More than 10% of net users are going online with the Firefox browser, show figures from analysis firm One Stat. The global average of 11.5% is the highest percentage of users that the open source browser has ever reached.

The research also reveals that Americans are the biggest users of Firefox at 14.1%. In the UK usage is 4.9%.

However, Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates with an 85.5% market share.

It is thought that continuing news stories about security problems in Internet Explorer are helping to fuel the move away from Internet Explorer.

Firefox is free, and can be downloaded from their website.

If you have changed page names on your site recently and some of those pages where high in the search engine results, you need to do a 301 redirect, nothing else will do.

Call us and we will talk you through what essential things you need to do to ensure your customers (and the search engines) don't leave you.

A close friend of one of the Elite Business Solution's team passed away recently, after suffering from cancer. This has inspired EBS to put together a team to take on the Three Peaks Challenge to gain something positive from this recent tradegy by raising as much as we can for Breakthrough Breast Cancer.

The Three Peaks Challenge involves scaling Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon all within 24 hours - a considerable challenge! We will be taking this challenge in June 2006.

We have a number of sponsorship opportunities available - if you would like to sponsor the team, or would just like to donate some money, please email us at info@elitebusinesssolutions.co.uk.

UK online ad values could surpass GBP1bn in 2005, up 62% on 2004, driven by take-up of broadband internet connections. More is now being spent on online than billboard adverts for the first time.

Quicker connection times and more competitive price packages are boosting Internet usage while people are spending more money online.

Make sure you're not missing business opportunities - we can have online ads running for you within 24 hours.

A recently conducted study (Cornell University) examined the links users followed on the search engine results page. They found that 42% of users clicked the top result, and 8% of users clicked the second result, confirming previous studies that the number one result gets many more clicks than all other results.

What does this mean for your web site?

It confirms the importance of being listed on the first page. Another study found 75% of searchers never look further than page one - without a first page listing, web surfers are unlikely to see your site.

If your site is lurking beyond the first page of search results, you are losing potential business. Give us a call & let us show you what we can do to help.

We all go to exhibitions sometimes, have a walk around, grab a coffee and a few freebies. Every now and then we even talk to an exhibitor!

Sometimes, just sometimes we even find something of interest. We then take the big step of giving the salesperson our name and business card.

"We will contact you", they say.

Then what happens.....nothing. No call, no letter, not even an e-mail. How many times has that happened to you? Almost everytime, right?

If you think your company (sometimes) does this, give us a call. We may be able to ensure that the money you spent exhibiting gets some return on investment. Just a thought!

Sometimes, only the phone will do........

We have many different ways to ensure that you are attracting new clients. However, always remember that if you want to get Mr. Smith at Smith and Co. on your client list you need to CALL him!

By all means send him a letter first about you and your company's services, etc. But, the only way you are going to get him and his company on your client list is by telling him why he needs you.....he is not a mind reader!

If you still don't want to make that call.......then ask us, we will be happy to do it!

A robot.txt file is essential in helping search engine robots navigate through your site. This file tells the robot where it should and should not look on your web server.

After your home page the robot file is usually the most accessed on your web server. All search engine robots try to access this file before they crawl your site.

This file is very impotant in search engine optimisation and can help to train search engine robots when to access your site i.e. tell them how often you do updates or add new pages.

Lastly, there are many files and pages on your site that you may never want to be access or indexed by search engines. The robots.txt file can tell the robot what not to index too!

Don't have one? Contact us and we will be glad to help and advise you.

Today Elite Business Solutions launched its website blog. Here you will find regularly updated news, information and items of interest about the company, industry and related topics.

Please come back here on a regular basis....we will do our best to make it a worthwhile visit!