Author: Graham Jones

To be featured in The People

The People – a major tabloid Sunday newspaper – is to feature me this coming weekend as part of a spread on “keeping up with the Joneses”. It’s about inflation and I was interviewed as an example of a successful Jones….!

How central is user testing to your business?

Experts in “usability” gathered in London today to discuss several issues surrounding this topic. The meeting had been called by TechSmith, the producers of Morae the leading usability testing software. It became apparent during the discussions that usability testing is often seen as something that is performed at the end

General

What do Tony Blair, Lance Armstrong and Mark Zuckerberg all have in common?

Lance Armstrong, Tony Blair and Mark Zuckerberg all have at least one thing in common. They are amongst the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time Magazine. If you have been living in a time warp, Lance Armstrong is the world’s most successful professional cyclist who beat

Online businesses need more refined targeting

Online business owners need to target their offerings in a much more refined way. Evidence is mounting daily that Internet users expect web sites to be devoted to their specific needs. For instance, let’s say you offer software on task management. You could have a site devoted to managing tasks

Blogging could cure your ills and boost your staff health

Writers who have physical trauma heal faster than people who do not write. Strange as it may seem, studies have shown that physical problems heal more quickly if you write down your feelings. No-one is quite sure why, but the evidence of a mind-body link is so great that even

Psychology

Imagine the brains of your readers and wonder what they make of your web site

Your web site visitors can be manipulated. Indeed, successful web sites do this with great care. They lure you in, almost hypnotically, and get you to do whatever it is they want, such as buy something from them. Copywriting expert Joe Vitale is the pioneer of “hypnotic writing” in which

Social

Social networks are the place to be

Researchers at the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California have just published their report on the consequences and benefits of children going online. However, embedded within the report are some interesting facts that every online business needs to think about. Firstly, the annual study shows

Internet marketers need to get inside each customer’s head

You will make more money if you get inside each customer’s head; really get inside and start to think exactly like they think. We all know that marketing is about providing what people want, but new research, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests that we need to do much

Why the Google advertising change doesn’t matter

Google quietly changed it’s terms and conditions for advertising yesterday. Up until now, advertisers using Google AdWords have been banned from using the brand names of their competitors in their adverts; now they can. This has spawned all sorts of suggestions as to how businesses might capitalise on the change.

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General

Internet training courses might not help you

Trainers are available on all sorts of Internet subjects. Want to learn how to do “SEO” (search engine optimisation)? well, there’s a course on it. Like to discover how to “monetise” your web site? There’s a course on that too. Perhaps you’d really like to learn about corporate blogging. Well,

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Online Business

The Internet World is all about relationships

Your friends like you; honest, trust me, they do. If they didn’t like you, then you wouldn’t like them and, hey, you wouldn’t be friends. Web sites are the same; if they demonstrate they like you – by providing exactly what you are after – then you like them. It’s

The World Wide Web is just a baby

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, claims today that the technology is merely in its infancy. It’s almost 17 years since the first ever web site was published (6th August 1991), so you’d expect the web to be a spotty teenager. The first British newspapers can

Social networking may be in your genes

Some people are avid social networkers and build up huge numbers of “connections” and “friends” online. Take a look at Thomas Power, the Chairman of Ecademy, for instance. He has over 15,000 contacts in Ecademy and almost as many in LinkedIn. Does he really know all those people? If you

Joined-up marketing is essential online

BBC Radio FiveLive carried an interesting item on the news this morning from Sony BMG that they are making their entire back catalogue available as a “free to listen” service. Wow – that’s great, you might think. But this is another example of how big business still has not understood

Can u undrstnd this? U mst b

Teenagers write more now than ever before. Just think about it; when you were a teenager you probably only wrote at school, doing your homework and then on thank-you letters your Mum made you write. All your other communication was spoken. But things have changed significantly and dramatically. Nowadays, teenagers

A simple bit of psychology is all you need to be a blogger

Bloggers are not special people, though if you look at some blogs you might be amazed at the output of these individuals; when do they sleep? Some bloggers write several very long articles each day; others blog with loads of little posts throughout the day. It seems as though all

Where do all the Internet profits go?

Billions of pounds is traded everyday here on the Internet – do you see any of it? Probably not much. If you do make money online you don’t get those billions, I’m guessing. So who does? Well, the vast majority of the money that is spent online goes to just

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General

Did you do anything for the “global” Earthday?

Today is the worldwide (apparently) Earthday. You knew that this morning if you strolled along to Google to discover the logo had changed. In fact for every Earthday for the past seven years, Google has changed its logo in honour of Earthday. The idea behind Earthday is to mobilise people