I have a huge confession to make. I’ve not had business cards since 2006. Any self-respecting networker or business owner would think i’m mad by not having had any, but i’ve held off for one very good reason (actually two). I paid through the nose for a few hundred cards in 2003 when I first set up one of my businesses… which I then promptly rebranded four months later, with a new logo and the lot. My business cards were bin-bound. I then ordered some more when we moved into our first offices, complete with our new office phone number, address, the lot. 8 months later we ran out of space and had to move offices – and we couldn’t keep our old office phone number as we were on an internal exchange. Business cards once again rendered useless. I stopped bothering after that.
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Someone I haven’t seen in a while – even before my move to London – is Conor Lynch, the founder of online / offline social networking business Connector.ie. Which makes me feel extra bad, considering he seems to be turning into one of the most active networkers in Ireland! I first met Conor in 2005 (I think), at the IIA Net Visionary awards. We had planned to meet up for a pint at the awards after some emailing back and forth, but the ‘pint’ at the awards turned into many more after Conor promptly won an award for ‘Internet Marketer of the Year’. At the time he was heading up the online marketing department for Rabodirect, Ireland’s first online bank.
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Blacknight Solutions are a domain registration / website hosting company based in Carlow. They’ve grown quite fast over the past couple of years, and according to Webshosting.info, have a massive percentage share of the Irish market when it comes to domain registrations. And it’s easy to see why. Their newest sales tool – dropped.ie – is a great way to search for and stumble across ‘second hand’ .ie domain names. As someone who used to spend hours trawling the deleted domains list on the IEDR website to find little domain name gems, sites like dropped.ie are a godsend.
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by Hugh on November 25, 2009
Ex-RTÉ journalist and current Fine Gael TD George Lee must not be content with being a shining, rising star within the Irish government. Clearly he’s become tired of Enda Kennys regime, and is seeking out further opportunities to push forward his career in politics. I’m sure Enda Kenny won’t be happy when he finds out his superstar TD has been double-jobbing!
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by Hugh on September 29, 2009
The internet has been paying my bills for over a decade, and in that time i’ve seen email marketing tools come and go. From open source to paid, there have been massive developments in the space over the past few years, and now the choices are greater than ever. Recently, however, I took the step to migrate all my email marketing lists (double opt in of course!) to Mad Mimi, a fantastically easy web app for managing email lists. Here’s why.
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by Hugh on August 18, 2009
In the last two years or so, the classified listings directory market in Ireland has been hotting up, with the launch of Vazumo.com, and Yourlocal.ie. Both started out by pretty much using exising data (Vazumo.com the business listings from Eircom, and Yourlocal.ie using information from the Independent Directory), and both have been ramping up their sales efforts of late. Essentially they provide the same service – a generic Ireland-wide business directory, where you can search for something (a taxi, doctor, whatever) and the search engine will throw up relevant results in your area. In the case of Yourlocal.ie, users can rate and review businesses, and both sites charge for enhanced listings. Both sites have been taking chunks out of each other of late, in the hope of eventually taking chunks out of the Golden Pages. However they all now have a serious competitor to deal with in the guise of Qype.
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It’s 2.43am and i’m back in my rented gaff in Dalkey, Dublin, Ireland after my first Friday night out following my first two weeks living in London. To be honest i’m gagging to get back to the UK asap to get back to what is now becoming a taste of reality after a big dose of Celtic Tiger horseshit. We, as Irish, have been living the high life over the last ten to fifteen years, totally taking for granted our financial offerings from the EEC (now the EU of course), and the help so many states have given us since our formation as a nation in 1922 (1937 if you want to be pedantic about it), and we desperately needed a kick in the hole. Now we’ve had it.
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Sometimes it’s good to step back and appreciate what you do for a living. When I was younger I used to spend my days playing with my computer, and luckily I managed to find a career doing something that I love.
But then again, so did Bill Gates. Check out this cheesy pic!
Wahey! Google have finally released a feature which allows Adsense publishers to change the default font size in their ad units. This is probably the biggest improvement in the service – ever. Why? Because you’ll get vastly increased clickthru rates on your formats, translating into extra revenue. It’s also a sign that Google is giving smaller publishers the same tools larger publishers have access to.
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If you’re a blogger or digital publisher, you’ll generate your revenue from loads of places. Once of the most consistent revenue earners is Google Adsense, which i’ve discussed several times already on this blog. However if you’ve optimised your ad colours and placements, and have your eCPM’s and clickthru rates optimised to the hilt, what more can you do to increase your earnings? There is at least one thing you can do – not just to your adsense placements, but to your whole website – play with the fonts!
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