I spoke to a nice chap called Sam at the Applegate Directory today, who very kindly offered to give all my blog readers, Twitter followers and anyone else who cares to ask a 30% discount off their new Mercury Listing.

The Mercury Listing gets you this little lot:

• List your business in the top section of an UNLIMITED number of product/service headings
• Create as many new categories for your company as you require
• Include a flash animated colour picture of your products or logo on your entry
• Encourage buyers with an UNLIMITED number of words of information about your company
• Include as many deep links and linked images to your website as you require
• Email Link for any enquiries
• Modify at any time during the year

Clearly this is pretty handy for SEO, and you can see how it’s being used by some companies here and here. I have found Applegate to be quite handy for several of my clients, although I’m not guaranteeing it is the right thing for everybody – depends very much if you have the kind of business suited to that directory (primarily business-to-business), although the SEO benefit of lots of keyword-rich deep links to your site from a PageRank 6 domain can’t be denied for any type of website.

The cost? Usually £595 +VAT, but with the 30% discount, £416.50 +VAT. Note that you can’t get this online – you will have to call Sam on 01271 852 000 and quote reference IanLockwoodSR2.

Please feel free to Tweet, email and generally spread this discount code to anyone you think would benefit, it isn’t dependent on knowing me personally!

I’m pleased to announce that along with my good friend Ann Stanley of Anicca Digital Solutions, we are delivering Figaro Digital magazine’s Digital Marketing Academy.

This is a series of training workshops, held at London’s rather swish Hospital Club, based on the Customer Acquisition, Conversion & Retention model. The workshops will provide a holistic view of how to use online marketing techniques to achieve each of the stages in the customer buying cycle, so you can expect to learn about SEO, PPC, Analytics, conversion rate optimisation, social media and email marketing. You can pick and mix from the days on offer at £495 per day, or take all four days at a discounted rate of £1485, giving you one day free!

Click over to the itinerary here to understand more about how the Digital Marketing Academy can help you. Warning: There is a mugshot of me further down that page!

I received some very nasty spam allegedly from HMRC titled “Reminder: Please Resubmit Your Refund Payment” today, as you can see below:

Rather than open the attachment, I saved it to my PC and had a read through the source code, as it’s a web page. The HTML revealed nothing much and references various online.hmrc.gov.uk URLs, until you get further down and spot that if you actually submit the form, it will be sent to this address: http://www.radio-rocket.eu/licznik/ndex.php

The page then goes on to grab various image files (security-related mostly, e.g. credit card logos) from sites including abbyparty.com, rbsworldpay.com and argos.co.uk. I’m sure they’ll all be delighted to know their bandwidth is being used to power phishing spam…

Don’t get caught out by this phishing scam – I’m sure most of you wouldn’t, but just in case you’re tempted by a refund from the taxman, resist!

I’m speaking at the Metafocus “Driving Global Trade Through Internet Marketing” forum on 27th May at the Novotel Nottingham, J25 of the M1. To quote the marketing:

This forum has been developed for decision makers in International & Export Companies to help them use the Internet to reach overseas markets, expand their business and drive profit.

The event starts at 8.30am and lasts until midday (slightly earlier actually, to allow time for networking). The cost is £55 inc. VAT and the itinerary is:

9.00 Andrew Schlich, AST Language Services – Successful Communication with your Overseas Customers
9.20 Anja Nelskamp, Metafocus – Why Languange and Culture Matters
9.35 Ian Lockwood, Internet Consultant – The Importance of Ongoing Online Promotion
10.05 Alan Clements, Metafocus – Why You Need a Global Internet Marketing Strategy
10.50 Panel Q&A – Joined by Thomas Schaal (International Trade Advisor for the UKTI)

As you can see, my slot isn’t strictly international-focused, but it is relevant to all online marketing. If you have any interest in marketing outside of the UK, I strongly recommend attending – Metafocus have developed a real reputation for specialist knowledge of international online marketing.

You can book online here.

I received an email from the nice people at Train to Gain/Business Link last Friday, informing me that they have lowered the staff requirement for businesses to be eligible for the Leaders First funding. To quote from the website:

Leaders First gives strategic decision makers within an organisation, the opportunity to develop valuable strategic skills to drive their organisation forward.

So, if you are an owner or manager in a business with at least three full-time employees (or two if you are a limited company), you can apply for funding for training and skills development in any area of your business, including online marketing.

The funding is up to £1000, split so that the first £500 is “free”, in that you don’t have to match the amount. The remaining funding must be matched 50/50, so you could receive as much as £1500 of training at a cost to you of £500. Full details of the programme, including a brochure, are available here on the Business Link website.

If you are interested in receiving one-to-one online marketing training (SEO, pay per click, Analytics, conversion optimisation etc.), please get in touch to discuss your requirements. If appropriate, I have a referral form I can send to Business Link for consideration.

Usually, the eligibility criteria is at least five employees and I have been told that the funding for smaller companies is very limited, so this opportunity may not be around for long.

I received a forwarded email from a client this morning, apparently from adwords-noreply@google.com (the usual AdWords notification email address), telling us that “Your Google Adwords Account has stopped running this morning.”

Obviously my client was a little worried, but a quick scan of the email made it clear that this was a phishing scam, no doubt designed to extract your credit card/bank details as you “verify” your account. Two things gave it away:

1. Far from great grammar/spelling:

Some of the ads have stopped running today (Monday, 12 April 2010).

If you want to get your ad back up and running you need to optimize the campaign to improve the CTR. The link below has some helpful tips, but, in a nutshell, you need to look at your keywords and your ad text. Make sure your keywords are jighly relevant and then make sure that each keyword in the ad group makes sense in terms of the ad text associated with this ad group (usually this means you need to create more ad groups with a smaller number of keywords). Having a tight connection between keywords and ad text helps improve CTR, which should fix your problem.

2. Hover over the links to “Click here to get your ads back up” or “verify the status of your account” and you will see it directs you to adwords.google-rs.com/ads/signin.html – very similar to Google’s own AdWords address, bar the “-rs” of course. Indeed, try to visit the site (I don’t recommend that!) and you will see Google blocks it as a suspected phishing site.

Now whilst phishing email scams aren’t rare (how many emails have you had from banks that you’ve never had an account with!?), this is probably only the second or third time I’ve seen it for AdWords. I’ve seen eBay, PayPal and various other ones over the years. Remember to check those links before you click!

I’m pleased to announce a discount on attendance at SMX Advanced London on May 17 & 18 2010. Using the discount code IANLOCK010 when registering will get you a 15% discount on the price. Early bird rates are in operation until 28th Feb, so get in early!

The full programme hasn’t been announced yet, but I’m sure it will be packed with useful search marketing info and they have a strong “no sales pitches” policy.

Let me know if you’re going!

As you might expect, I have a lot of friends who work in the web industry, from programmers to graphic designers, SEO experts to pay per click wizards. In a strange and unconnected coincidence, I have three different friends all with a pretty high degree of experience looking for new opportunities in the web development arena.

So, if you’re looking for a web developer to join your team right now, drop me an email and I’ll put you in touch. Their experience in all cases is in excess of six years, many more for some and by and large they are all front-end developers with some scripting skills, so they can do graphic design, layout, HTML/CSS and implement some JavaScript, ASP, PHP etc. They have a fair bit of management and client liaison experience too, so these aren’t techies with no social skills.

I also heard from a client today looking for a junior web manager, someone who can do a bit of graphics manipulation, HTML, SEO, AdWords etc. Some of that can be provided as training, the key is that you understand the web and have some basic skills to start with. Again, if you know someone, drop me an email.

Thanks to all of you who attended the Online Marketing Conference 2009 on Thursday, organised by the Business Link eBusiness Programme. We had over 500 delegates attend and it was a pleasure to deliver my “What’s New in Search 2009″ presentation in the morning.

Special thanks to Diane and the team for their organisation and to those of you who took the time to speak to me during the day, your comments and compliments were much appreciated.

Those who want to relive the experience or who couldn’t attend, there is some online coverage, firstly on Twitter using the #ebizconf hashtag and also in these places:

eChampions Podcast (see video on right hand side)

Susi O’Neill’s Highlights (“uber-nerd of tech search”!? Blimey).

Red Creative Moves notes

Remember if you attended, you will be able to download the slides from me and from Susan’s afternoon Social Media Marketing presentation, via the eBusiness Programme website (username and password required).

RedBubble is a website where you can browse images and writing created by users, then buy the artwork/writing in a number of formats, say t-shirts, calendars, cards or posters.

Why am I writing about this? Well, my fiancee (Helen Foster Design) has just put some of her cute characters up as t-shirts, which you can see here: Helen Foster Pid T-Shirts.

I really like this model, as it allows creative producers to get their work out to a large audience without a huge cost, hopefully demonstrating demand and leading to greater things. That’s certainly what we hope will be the case for Helen. Meanwhile, consumers get access to unique products away from the mass-market high-street me-too stuff most people have, which really appeals to someone like me.

Please have a browse and leave some feedback and don’t be afraid to buy something if you like it! Helen will be adding greeting cards and other artwork later this week.