Welcome to onemillionpixels.co, a world-wide advertising platform and charity initiative based on past models to sell 10×10 pixel segements from a website in exchange for the chance to see visitors to your own website rise in a very dramatic fashion.

Where this model differs is that once all pixels have been sold off, a total of $500,000 will be raised for charity purposes which the world wide web can vote on to decide who gets the money.

So, why buy the pixels?

If you buy a segment of pixels from onemillionpixels.co, you will have an image and a link to your website on the homepage which has the potential to be seen by and clicked on by millions of people. The concept has worked in the past and has seen visitor numbers to advertisers websites soar and increase turnover. The idea is to create the first 1,000,000 pixel website that also helps charity and not just satisfy the interest of the social media world that we live in.

The success of other websites doing a similar thing to us is very evident. It promotes:

• 40-50% increase in sales
• 400% increase in website hits
• A great cost for 10×10 pixels v’s other marketing techniques based on site traffic to onemillionpixels.co
• A far greater return on initail investment.

We hope that this website provides a great return for your business and as a result, we will also be able to provide our own testimony of raising $500,000 for charity.

There are many factors to consider when sending out an email campaign, and by default, many ways to measure the success of a campaign, but here, we are just going take a quick look at the basics:

Simply speaking, the question for your email campaign should be this:

“Am I getting the right message to the right person at the right time?”

This can be specifically broken down into the following areas:

The right message

• Is it the right offer?
• Is it the right product?
• Are you providing the right incentive?
• Is the tone relevant?
• Is the creative approach relevant?
• Is there the right call to action?
• Is the format relevant?

The right person

• Is it going to the right demographic?
• How can the email be tailored to my chosen demographic or sub-group?

The right time

• Is it being sent in-line with the customer buying cycle?
• Is it being sent at the right time of year, month, week or day?
• Is it being sent in-line with another event?

Being clear about all of these items will help you when it comes to the personalisation of a relevant marketing campaign.  Rather than simply blanketing everyone, you may find it more useful to split your marketing data into smaller, relevant sub-types and begin crafting relevant email campaigns to suit those sub-types.

Stay tuned and we will shortly reveal some hints and tips to create a great email marketing campaign which adheres to the Email Marketing Council Best Practice Guidelines.

Henry Wallace, the US Vice President once said that there was no such thing as a free lunch.  Someone always ended up paying for whatever you consumed, be it yourself, or the retailer.

In today’s e-commerce market, why do we complain about paying for delivery on goods bought over the Internet?  Why do we expect them to be picked, packed and delivered free of charge?  It’s a bit cheeky if you ask me.  However, the overwhelming competition against retailers is forcing them to think about offering this as a solution to compete with their online rivals.

Retailers have begun offering free delivery, but it is not cost effective to them when people are buying low value items – so what can they do to combat this?

One solution that I have seen working really well at the moment is to give the customer an optional question to answer – “how fast do they want their purchase?” – if they want to have it the very next day, then give them the option to pay for that, if they want it in the next 3-4 working days, then let them have it for free.

You would think that everyone would opt to have their item delivered later and therefore spend less, but you would be wrong.  Recent research suggests that people who order online want their items the very next day and are willing to pay for it.  This is great news for the retailer and well, it just goes to show the online buyer that there really is no such thing as a free lunch anymore, that is, unless you want it to go a bit cold and wait around for a while.

There was once a time when e-commerce websites were relatively few and far between and companies who set one up appeared to have secret knowledge into the depths of Internet retail that others were just unable to fathom.

With PayPal now in its 12th year, we have seen this payment gateway giant continue to grow in size and stature since its early beginnings.  One core reason behind its continued growth is Trust.  As an established payment gateway and featured on some rather large websites such as eBay, its market share is through the roof, leaving many others behind.

Time and time again, I now find myself having conversations with new e-commerce businesses that have recently launched their website with PayPal and now realise that their outgoings in terms of their payment fees are equally increasing in a dramatic way.

So what can be done to reduce this?

Companies such as SagePay (the merger of Protx and Sage Accounting) often appear out of e-commerce owners leagues and therefore stay with the FREE, quick and easy to set-up PayPal, when actually, they could be saving themselves a lot of money by taking the time to find a good website developer that can hold their hand through the set-up stages of their website.

Too often, people want their e-commerce website all too soon and therefore, cannot wait for the length process often involved in setting up an internet merchant account and secure payment processor.  But sooner or later they will hit a point where they see their sales on their website growing, but their sites selling fees expanding too at an alarming rate.

Now, do we just stop using PayPal?  Or, do we try and balance the two payment gateways together?

Research shows that shoppers are still more drawn to PayPal – the younger generation of online shoppers seem to prefer it, because they have seen it grow over time whereas, the more senior members of the online world seem to place their trust more with gateways that assign themselves with banks or accounting systems.

Does there need to be a new kind of payment gateway – one which has a balance of speed and price?  I know that many online retailers would certainly try anything to help their margins in today’s financial market, but they want things to happen fast.  Surely we can do both?

Now I don’t know about you, but the recent development of Google images for Mozilla FireFox seems to lack in the user-experience department.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some positives which are great – like the hover-over state of an image allows you to see a larger version, but the main thing that bugs me is the non-uniformed layout that makes distinguishing the individual images extremely difficult.

For once, I who try and avoid Internet Explorer at all costs, now find myself drawn back time and time again when searching for images on the web.

The concept I like, but maybe this is something that should be developed for the iPad viewer, where they can drag their image search results around the screen to lay them out how they wan  As it stands, they are just too close together and I feel the need to try and space them apart.

I will be interested to see what the general view of the new layout is, and wonder if Google are looking to roll this out across all platforms?