Internet Retail Sales Now 10.5% of all Retail Sales.

Latest UK Figures Internet Retail Sales

Internet retail sales now account for approximately 10.5 per cent of all retail sales. This is the highest proportion since the series began. In comparison, in November 2009 this proportion was 7.9 per cent.

On average, weekly internet retail sales in November 2010 totalled £660 million compared with the average weekly value for all retailing at £6,300 million (excluding automotive   fuel).

Month on month changes

During the period October to November 2010, the average weekly value for internet retail sales,   non-seasonally adjusted, grew by 37.5 per cent. In comparison the average weekly value for all retailing grew by 10.2 per cent.

Year on year changes

Between   November 2009 and November 2010 the average weekly value for internet   retail sales, non-seasonally adjusted, grew by 36.6 per cent. In   comparison the average weekly value for all retailing grew by 3.4 per   cent.

Historic

Over the past five years the last Monday   in November and the following week has seen a peak in retail sales made   over the internet. This period is not included within these statistics   but its impact will be seen in the December 2010 data released on 21   January 2011.

Coverage

The ONS experimental internet   sales statistics used is part of the Retail Sales (RSI) statistics.   Retail sale of goods made over the Internet are collected and included   as part of the monthly turnover data provided by businesses. RSI is a   monthly survey of approximately 95 per cent of the retail sector in terms of turnover in Great Britain.

 

 

http://www.xtmotion.co.uk/latest-uk-figures-internet-retail-sales/

Using LinkedIn Effectively

Growing Your Professional Network

You've likely heard of LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking website that many people use for keeping in touch with business associates, clients, and former colleagues. But is this LinkedIn's only use? Or can you use it in other ways to grow yourself professionally and help your organization to network more effectively? In this article, we'll explore how to use LinkedIn for personal, professional, and organizational development, including how you can use it for networking and recruitment, and for keeping up with trends and news in your industry.

What is LinkedIn?

Linkedin is a business-focused social networking site that launched in 2003. Its main purpose is to help people network professionally. The basic service is free. The site lets you find other business associates, clients, and colleagues whom you already know. You "connect" with them through the site, and they then become part of your network. Once you've connected with a person, you will then have access to their list of connections – this is called your "extended network." You can request an introduction to people in your extended network through your mutual contact. LinkedIn also provides other features including the ability to set up and join groups, and a jobs section where members can advertise open positions or apply for jobs.

LinkedIn Definitions

Here are a few useful terms you should know when using LinkedIn: Introductions – Introductions are when a third party introduces two people who weren't currently connected. For instance, your colleague Sue and your client Dan don't know each other. You think Sue could help solve a problem that Dan is having with one of his projects, so you introduce Sue and Dan through LinkedIn. Introductions are simply a way to bring people together on the site. Connections – Connections are other registered users who you know personally on LinkedIn. Although you can invite anyone to be a connection, they will need to set up an account to use the site. Second-degree connections – These are the connections that your connections have. For example, you're friends with Bill, who is directly connected with his boss. Bill's boss is a second-degree connection for you. Third-degree connection – Any connections from your second-degree connects are third-degree connections. So, Bill's boss's connections would be your third-degree connections. Profile page – This is your personal page on LinkedIn. All registered users with LinkedIn can view it (unless you set it to be a private page). Your profile page can list your education, past work history, current and past projects, groups and associations, and more. Users can also forward your profile page to contacts on their lists. You can also make your profile page "public" so that anyone (even people not on LinkedIn) can view it. Recommendations – Your connections can write recommendations, or testimonials, for your profile. These can be a powerful testament to your business and professional skills.

Professional Use

There are several ways to use LinkedIn to help you grow professionally: Networking – LinkedIn allows you to network with people and professional organizations in your industry. This helps you stay up-to-date with industry trends and share information with others who do similar work to you. In addition to networking with people in your LinkedIn extended network, you can also set up and join specific groups to discuss ideas and share industry news. This is a great way to build your professional network further. Asking and answering questions – Many people use a service on the site called LinkedIn Answers as a kind of think tank or open brainstorming session. By offering your expertise to those in your network, you establish trust and improve your reputation as an expert. You can also use your profile's status update to ask questions to people in your network, or share news or insight. (Your status feed on LinkedIn works in a similar way to a Twitter timeline.) Research – You can use LinkedIn to find out more about the people and organizations that you do business with. For example, imagine that you're about to meet with an important potential client. You do a quick search on LinkedIn and discover that the person went to the same university as you. In fact, you know several of the same people. You now have a valuable conversation starter that will help you build rapport with the client.

Tip 1: Remember that your boss, and others at your organization, will be able to see your LinkedIn profile. If you update it extensively, you might want to let them know in advance. People new to the site may confuse your profile with an online resume, so you don't want them to think that you're looking for a new job! Tip 2: It's an obvious point, but it's one that people forget: don't get carried away while sharing information. Make sure that you respect confidentiality, and don't give away information that could harm your organization.

Organizational Use

You can also use LinkedIn in the following ways to help your organization grow: Increase visibility – LinkedIn gives your organization increased visibility for its brand, products, and corporate goals. Potential customers, clients, and suppliers can research your company on LinkedIn to see if they're interested in doing business with you. This is especially useful if your organization sells services or products to other businesses. Conduct research on other organizations – LinkedIn also works the other way. You can use the site to research your competition, potential partners, or new suppliers. Tell your company story –  Special applications, like video, allow you to create a multimedia experience with other users. (Setting up a profile for your organization will be useful here.)

Tip: Make sure that organizational use of LinkedIn is aligned with your organization's overall strategy, and its other communications.

Recruitment

You can also use LinkedIn for recruitment and job-hunting. For example, if you're looking for a new team member with a particular set of skills, or prior experience in a certain industry or company, you can post jobs on LinkedIn, or search for specific people who have the skills and experience that you're looking for. (Check people's profiles first to make sure that they're happy to be approached with new job opportunities.) You may find this more effective than more traditional recruitment methods, depending on the position you're looking to fill, and your industry. Many potential recruits also use LinkedIn as a research tool. For instance, suppose a person had two good job offers. Which organization will be a better match for them? What will their new boss or colleagues be like? What is the corporate culture like? LinkedIn can help them to find out. So, as well as keeping your organization's profile up-to-date, also make sure that you own personal profile reflects yourself and your organization positively.

LinkedIn Etiquette

Remember these guidelines when using LinkedIn: Use introductions carefully – Success on LinkedIn relies heavily on reputation. Be careful when you ask for, or make, an introduction, and do so only if you truly think everyone can benefit. Always tell the truth – When discussing where you've worked and what you've accomplished, be honest, and don't oversell yourself. Don't gossip – Don't spread any company or personal gossip through LinkedIn. You never know who's going to read it, or where it will end up. Be professional – LinkedIn is used mainly for professional networking. So, stay professional at all times. Use other sites like Facebook for personal posts.

Tip: If your organization approves, add your LinkedIn profile page address to your email signature. When you email colleagues, clients, and suppliers, they'll see your link – and if they're on LinkedIn, they may connect with you. This will further expand your network and exposure.

Key Points

LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking website. Although some people use the site for job searches and recruitment, it mainly helps you to get in touch with past colleagues and potential clients, and expand your professional network. With tools like LinkedIn Answers and groups, you can establish trust with those in your network and improve your reputation, while keeping up-to-date with industry news and trends. LinkedIn can also help your organization increase visibility for its products and brand, and can provide information on other organizations such as potential partners, customers, and competitors. http://www.xtmotion.co.uk/using-linkedin-effectively/

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pitfalls

Bringing someone to your website is just the first step. Unless they complete a task you have wasted time and money. The Google homepage is one of the most poorly search engine optimized websites on the Web. If you search for "search engine" (There are 6 million such searches every month.) then Google appears way down the list on the second page of search results. Alta Vista (the king of search engines in the mid-Nineties) appears third. Google is doing a lot wrong. SEO experts tell their clients that Google loves content. Well, not on its own homepage it doesn't. Last time I counted there were 39 words on the entire page, and not a single one of them contained the phrase "search engine". It gets worse. If you look at the title tag for the Google homepage it says "Google". That's all. Just Google. That has got to be one of the worst title tags ever written. In the world of search engine optimization, Yahoo is a much better homepage. It has hundreds of popular words and over a hundred links. Search engines just love Yahoo. So, why is Google so appalling at search engine optimization? They don't need it, you might say. They're Google. Yes, but Google wasn't always a giant. It was started by two students and from the very beginning it had a really simple homepage. So why is Google so successful? Because it understands one very important rule:

Bringing people through your website is more important than bringing people to it.

It is more important to focus on helping people complete the task they came to your website to complete than simply bringing lots of customers to your website. The ultimate search engine optimization and marketing strategy is to try to help your customer complete their task quickly and easily on your website. In an age of social media, happy customers tell other customers. Happy customers are more likely to link to you. Jill Whalen is one of the most sensible people you can listen to when it comes to search marketing. In a recent article she talked about the truly horrible practice of writing "SEO articles." According to Jill there is a widespread belief that "writing keyword-stuffed articles is somehow an SEO requirement. They don't know why they might need these articles — only that, for whatever reason, the Google Gods want them. And so they write articles that nobody would be interested in reading, but which are stuffed chock-full of the keywords for which they would like Google to show their site. And then they wonder why it's not happening for them." Jill goes on to explain why writing purely for the search engine is such a bad idea. "If you were looking to buy Product Part A, which page would you rather find in Google? The one with the product part information, the price, choice of color/size, information on how to purchase it, and an 'add to shopping cart' button? Or the one that tells you the history of said product part?" Always optimize for the searcher (the customer), not the search engine. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pitfalls

Precious vs. Professional: Are Your Work Standards Reasonable?

“Can’t you just do it anyway? Help us out here!” A client said this to me last week, and I did help them. Sort of.

 

The client wanted me to write content for the company website, which is due to launch in a few weeks. The thing was, they’d only given me content for about a quarter of the site’s pages, and most of those weren’t top-level pages. No more content would be forthcoming before the launch, but they needed “something” to launch with.

I could foresee numerous problems with this scenario — I’m sure you can too — but in the end, the client just wanted these few pages written. Yes, the site would launch with barely any content, and “coming soon” holding pages at every turn — many on top-level pages. But that didn’t matter to the client: at least the company’s internal web team would have “met” its launch deadline.

Every freelancer has projects that go awry. But sometimes it seems like the most difficult challenges are the ones that, while they’re not completely off the rails, require us to compromise our professionalism somehow.

Sometimes, as in this case, freelancers can get caught up in situations where our hands seem to be tied. In the end I felt I was doing the client a disservice by giving them a handful of low-level pages with which to launch the site. By compromising my professionalism, I felt I was compromising theirs.

Precious, or Professional?

At times like this, client discussions can get intense. Before you know it, you’re being heavied — or begged — to do something to “help” even though you know that fulfilling the request will only help your client undermine their own credibility.

Very quickly, you can begin to wonder if you’re just being too precious about your work. After all, writing content (or developing websites, or designing brochures) isn’t exactly brain surgery. My writing these few pages for my client wasn’t about to lead to an international incident; it wasn’t even difficult. In fact, they’d love me for it. And it would earn me some income. Was I being too precious about the job?

The flip side to this argument is pretty clear to me. Firstly, if I’m in the business of professional communications, it seems ridiculous to complete work that I believe runs counter to that basic goal.

Secondly, freelancers are largely in charge of our own work product; our key satisfaction lies in producing good output that exceeds the client’s goals and their expectations. That’s what we build our businesses — our livelihoods — on. By discarding that goal, I remove the most basic, essential potential for satisfaction from this job.

The client’s request also changes the nature of our relationship; it limits its potential. It shifts my role from trusted provider to content vending machine — and that’s not what I’m here for. Although my client might see meeting their launch deadline as the most crucial issue, I see their industry reputation as more important. And I believe that perspective is valuable.

Drawing the Line

It can be very difficult in the heat of the moment to decline requests for “help” from clients who are under the pump and want you to be as happy about cutting corners as they are — even when you have strong reasons for doing so. Where do you draw the line?

For me, the line-drawing usually comes after the fact, when I have a little breathing space to reflect on the experience. I practically never say no to the client’s request at the time. Perhaps I’m just a confrontation-hating walkover, but in tense times, I usually want to help reduce the client’s stress. And, as I said, copy is rarely a life-and-death issue.

But it never ends there. Inevitably, once the moment has passed, I’ll begin to think about whether I should keep working with the client. Perhaps I’ll decide to meet with them to get a clearer understanding about the project, their expectation of my contribution, and my possible role within their future projects. To put it another way, if this client really just needs a content vending machine, then it’s best that I identify that now, rather than keep working with them in the hope that they want something more.

I’ve never been able to turn down a request from a client to do less-than-ideal work in order to help them out of a jam. Have you? How do you handle those kinds of situations?

 http://www.xtmotion.com/news_article.php?newsID=70

Event Websites: Conference Websites & Exhibition Websites

Event Websites: Conference Websites & Exhibition Websites

The internet offers the opportunity for many innovative ways of tackling event and exhibition planning, management and bookings. Whether you need to submit abstracts online, process bookings for short courses, seminars or three-day events, take payments or send out event marketing emails, we can put together a tailored system for your organisation.

Our easy-to-use event administration solution will also make it easy to store, retrieve and analyse the information for your event or exhibition. This will save on the tedium of data entry and payment processing, which can all be automated. Within the XTmotion team we have a pool of experience in the events industry and are thus very familiar with the challenges around successful event management. We will bring our experience to the both the planning and the development process, an added bonus which you will not get with an off-the-shelf event website solution.

The construction of a well-planned event & exhibition website solution will streamline your event, conference or exhibition, allowing you to focus your time in the most effective manner, for your organisation. Some of the features of our event web solutions included:

Event Management Solutions

Conference Management Solutions

Event Content Management System (Event CMS) Conference Content Management System (Conference CMS)
Event Online Registration Conference Online Registration
Event Web Solution Conference Web Solution
Online Event Solution Online Conference Solution
Event Exhibitor Solution Conference Exhibitor Solution
Event Visitor Management Event Delegate Management
Event Marketing Conference Marketing
Event Digital Marketing Conference Digital Marketing
Event Email Marketing Conference Email Marketing
Event Search Engine Optermisation (Event SEO) Conference Search Engine Optermisation (Conference SEO)
Event Pay Per Click (Event PPC) Conference Pay Per Click (Event PPC)
Event Social Media Conference Social Media
Event Web Development Confernce Web Development
Event Web Support Conference Web Support

Our Event & Conference Clients Include:

Event & Conference Clients

Monitor Your Brand With Social Media

To find out what people are saying, whether it’s good or bad, you can set up a few things to monitor what is going on online, try the following –

Google Alerts – You enter your own search terms and then Google will send you an email with information on where your search terms have appeared in news, other websites and people blogs.

Social Mention – You can use Social Mention to monitor over 100 different social media platforms, these include; Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Digg etc. Plus you can have updates directly sent to your email once a day.

Twitter Search – For instant access to what people are talking about then I suggest you download and use Tweetdeck or Hootsuite for your twitter accounts. You can use either of these programs to set up a search for certain keywords or phrases, you’ll then be able to see what people are saying and it is constantly updated.

If something major is going on in your industry then you need to know about and then react accordingly. You can use your blog to tell your customers what they need to know.You should be aware of the local/ national/ worldwide news and current events as these things can change your strategy or even affect your business. For example if a news story comes out explaining that the last toy is spontaneously combusting, then you can reassure customers that your product is safe or, if its true, apologise and recall the product and ask your customers to send it to a certain address.

Having a Facebook Page can encourage people to ask questions, you can then respond and maybe start a conversation with someone. The same applies to someone giving feedback on your product, you can say thank you if it’s positive, or help rectify anything that has gone wrong for them. It is very important you handle yourself fittingly and professionally here as others can read what you are saying and can also comment. It also shows that you’re are active within the community and easily available to contact people’s queries or questions.

With Twitter being so instant you can almost guarantee that if something has gone wrong for you, it will have gone wrong for lots of other people and they will all be talking about. For example, this Monday morning, after the clocks had gone back, my iPhone alarm didn’t go off until an hour later. I was then late for work, and I certainly wasn’t the only one judging by the amount of twitter updates proclaiming the same thing! Apple is now desperately trying to rectify this before the Americans clocks go back next weekend.

When has there been an easier way to reach people all over the world within seconds? This is the easiest way to get you and your product out there to the masses. You are no longer restricted to advertising locally or even nationally, social media allows you to publicize your products and news to the world, and the best thing is that the world can talk back to you. You can still advertise locally, but you can now tie it in with your online presence. If you made a short advert for local TV, you can now upload it to YouTube for the rest of the world to see too.

You can sign up to any number of these sites completely for free and get going on you own social media adventure. You obviously need to invest a lot of time and effort to learn the ropes and find out what you can do with it, but there are many tutorials and others who can help you with that. Once you find your target and start to carve out a niche for yourself, your return on investment will be fantastic!

 

http://www.xtmotion.co.uk/product-monitoring/

http://www.xtmotion.co.uk/services/digital-marketing/social-media/

How to Create a Google Sitemap

A Google Sitemap is a small XML file that sits on a website and provides information for Googlebot when it comes to visit. Is this file useful? What does it do? How do I create one? How do I get Google to find it? Well, let me tell you.

A Google Sitemap is, essentially, an XML file that contains information on all the web pages in your site. You create this file, submit it to Google, and Google will read it. What Google does from there nobody really knows. You can specify certain parameters in the file such as the location (URL) of your web pages, when they were last modified, how often the pages are updated, and what each page’s “priority” is.

Perhaps Google is relegating these Sitemap submitted results to a secondary index where they compare the results to their live index. This might let them know how people use (and abuse) the program. It is my opinion that the vast majority of participants in this program are website designers and marketers who are trying to give their clients a teenie-weenie leg up on the competition within Google. That’s not to say that there isn’t any value, though.

It is possible that by telling Google where all of your web pages are you can improve your web page saturation in their index. This may indirectly improve your rankings by getting an unlinked or deeply linked page into the index that wasn’t previously there. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to know if Google is even using Sitemap information in their live index.

1. Firstly, you need to create your XML file. Don’t bother doing it yourself. There is an excellent free online utility atwww.sitemapbuilder.net I tend to use Inspyder Sitemap Ceator.

2. You must now submit the Sitemap to Google. Visit Google and login with your Google account. Don’t have one? Don’t worry – that’s free, too. Once you’ve logged in you can add as many Sitemaps as you like.

3. Don’t forget – whenever you update your website (by adding, removing or relocating web pages) be sure to repeat this process. You won’t need to resubmit your sitemap to Google, though.

To see a sitemap just add /sitemap.xml at the end of any root URL.

Google also has a Mobile Sitemap program. I will write on the mobile web sitemap as well as video sitemaps in a future post.

 

http://www.xtmotion.co.uk/how-to-create-a-google-sitemap/