Livezilla – get more interactive with your website visitors

LiveZilla is a live-chat component for assisting website visitors. This is one of the many solutions available for providing your website users with live chat assistance. Installation is not easy, but thanks to the video tutorials available on the website it really isn’t hard. The first thing you need to do is create a LiveZilla web server using the wizards. Once you’ve done that, you simply paste a little HTML code on your website. This code will be the clickable button that will load the chat window.

The clients will connect from their web browsers and the server will forward all the chats to the LiveZilla app running on your desktop. From there, you will have a list of connected users and open chats. You will also see the visitors to your website.

The system even supports GeoTracking, which is a nice feature that shows you where your users supposedly are located. I say supposedly because you can’t always know for sure only by using Internet tracking.

The system worked well and we are using it on our store demo site . Setting the server up was very fast, and I was gladly surprised when I saw that LiveZilla automatically uploads required files to your website via FTP. There are a few test features to make sure that everything works well. A sample chat was easy to answer and complete. There even is support for web cameras.

If you would like to set up Livezilla on your site and need help please get in touch with us by filling in the form at the bottom of the page and we will glady assist you.

One of the most important tasks for a small business is to maintain contact with its customers. Developing a newsletter program with a solid audience will prove to be a very important marketing asset for you.

Think about how on any given website you only have a few seconds to capture the attention of a visitor before they are gone forever. Developing a strategy to attract new customers and retaining existing clients is crucial to successful marketing. Maintaining a company blog is a great way to get your personal message out to many viewers. But a blog is a passive effort, meaning a user must navigate to it in order to get the message. Transforming a passive blog into a pro-active newsletter program is a logical step.

Researchers have shown that users have mentioned three reasons why they prefer to receive email newsletters:

1. Email newsletters  keep users up-to-date with informative content.

2. The convenience of Email newsletters delivered straight to the user’s inbox is attractive; users only need a  simple click to access the information that is of interest to them.

3. Email newsletters have timely content and real-time delivery.

Newsletter programs that take advantage of these benefits have a sustainable future. However they must constantly deliver specific and current information that helps readers with life or work issues.

A well thought out and regularly published newsletter will give your company the unique experience of getting to know your customers and, more importantly, give them a chance to get to know your organization. After several issues of your newsletter you can begin to learn what is of interest to your audience. It is easy to monitor which articles are being read by keeping tabs on which links are clicked. In future issues, be sure to include topics that are heavily read.

So how do we start building an email campaign for free?

The first thing you need to do is to start building an email list. To start with use a program such as Microsoft Excel to keep a track of you email list. Start by going through all your existing customers and adding their emails to your spreadsheet. Secondly go through all your emails that you have ever received to find additional email addresses. These could be potential customers as they have emailed you for one reason or another in the past. Thirdly make sure you collect business cards where ever you go. Every Time you obtain a business card get into the habit of adding it to your spreadsheet. You will soon find that your email list will start to grow rapidly.

Once you have an email list it is time to decide how you are going to market your email. Are you going to send out offers (an in your face approach) or are you going to send out an informative email on a topic which may end with an offer you have relating to that topic (a bit like this newsletter)?

At wey2creative we tend to use the latter. Once you have decided your approach write an article on your blog about your topic or if you do not have a blog create a page on your website and add the article to that page. In this case free email marketing, a few hundred words should suffice. Why are we writing the article on our blog? Simply because we do not want to put the whole article in our newsletter. Your newsletter should be an enticer for the reader to click to your site to read the whole article. When they are on your site, who knows what else they may look at!!

REMEMBER

Your email newsletter is such a huge representation of your company, which is why design truly matters.  We have spoken with many people that have told us they just don’t have the time it takes to put out a newsletter that looks professional enough to put their logo on.

Once we have our article written we need to get it out to our email list. So what are our options, remember we are going to do this for free.

Option 1

Use your default email program and send from that. A lot of people use this method, but it may not be beneficial to you. There may be sending limits on your account but most importantly you cannot track what your email list is doing with your newsletter. Are they reading it or are they simply deleting it? How many are clicking through to your site? This is where a more professional solution comes in and it is still free!!

Option 2

Mailchimp

Ever heard of  Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is an online email marketing program and whats more it is free to sign up. With the free account you can have up to 1,000 email addresses in your list and you can send out an email to all 1,000 subscribers 6 times a month. This is more than enough for small businesses.

Mailchimp also provides some basic email templates that you can use for you newsletter. More importantly Mailchimp will track all the emails that are sent out so you can see which campaigns are more effective.

Other great features of mailchimp are that if you have a WordPress website, they have a plugin that you can download and put on your site for newsletter registration. When someone registers for the newsletter on your site their email address will automatically be added to your Mailchimp account.

If your website has an RSS feed you can create a newsletter based on that, so your latest blog posts will be added to your newsletter automatically, this will save you time.

Mailchimp is, in our opinion, an essential tool for your business.

We hope you found this article interesting.

Next month PC world and Currys are bringing out their own branded 7 inch Tablet on the Android operating system (google open source operating system). The price is as little as £130.

The tablet has WI-FI and runs on Android 2.1 , They are also releasing a 10 inch tablet that with an integrated web cam and 4GB of storage.  The higher spec model will cost £250.

They will go on sale on the 1st November

If you are a blogger that has many different accounts on social networks then ping fm is a great on line application to use.

What it does

Basically from your ping dashboard you can send a message that is then spread to all your social networks in one go.

Below is a list of all the networks that you can add, think of the potential of all that traffic you can drive to your website just through one account.

WordPress

If you run a wordpress account there are also plugins that you can use so that when you create a new post, the post is sent to ping and distributed to all your social networks.

PingPressFM

Allows you to spread your blog to 30+ social networks via ping.fm. Now with support for scheduled posts and custom triggers.

Publish 2 Ping.fm

Publish new post or post update notifications to Ping.fm. You can share you’re blog with 30+ social services.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is a tablet-style handheld device that runs version 2.2 of the open source Android operating system.

It has a 7in TFT-LCD (thin film transistor-liquid crystal display) touchscreen, has a a 1GHz processor and weighs 380g.

Simon Stanford, managing director of Mobile at Samsung UK and Ireland said: “The Samsung Galaxy Tab brings a very unique proposition to the tablet market and from 1 November, gives consumers the ultimate in connectivity and portability that they have been waiting for.

Read the whole story here

The PlayBook will have a 7-inch screen, making it half the size of the iPad, and weigh about to the iPad’s. And unlike the iPad, it will have two cameras, front and back. RIM didn’t say what it would cost, but said it would be in the same range as the iPad, which starts at $499.

The PlayBook will be able to act as a second, larger screen for a BlackBerry phone, through a secure short-range wireless link. When the connection is severed – perhaps because the user walks away with the phone – no sensitive data like company e-mails are left on the tablet. Outside of Wi-Fi range, it will be able to pick up cellular service to access the Web by linking to a BlackBerry.

Read the whole story here