Hot ideas for the web.

So recently I had the challenge of creating a ‘has_many through’ relationship across two databases.

“Why would you do this?” you may ask. Well quite simply I am in a team building a new data management system to sit on top of a legacy system with its legacy database. All the new code is new, shiny and streamlined and the old code is… well… crap but we have to keep both systems running concurrently so we have various tables in the legacy database we need to access from the new system. As it happens we need to access the legacy users table in a ‘has_many through’ from the new ‘orders’ table.
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As anyone who’s ever made an e-commerce system knows, money is everything. No, really if you don’t get your financial sums right then you can’t hope to build a successful online business (and may find yourself creating potential legal issues with the tax man).

So here’s a rundown of the top tips I can give for making your financial calculations that bit easier.

1. Always Work in Minor Units

I can’t stress enough how much this helps in terms of accuracy, rounding and speed. Working in major units may look better to you as you don’t have to reformat the numbers to display them but I hope I can make the case here for minor units.

a. Integer arithmetic is much much faster than floating point arithmetic.

Remember that even a single decimal place makes a number a float as far as your computer is concerned and all the processor overheads that go along with them suddenly arrive. I know it’s not a lot slower but in a complex financial system it all adds up believe me.

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Friday 31st October… mark that date in your diary, preferably with pink high-lighter, because it’s the 2008 Wear it Pink day organised by Breast Cancer Campaign, the funding body that supports national research into breast cancer.

We’ll be doing our bit here at Setfire to raise a few quid, although some of us may need to search hard for something pink to wear. Hopefully we can get some photos posted!

When you get successful, you may find that you move from someone else looking after your hosting, to running a complete rack (or racks) yourself. Standing with that shiny new rack towering over you, there seems so much space and flexibility, and anything not quite right now can be fixed later, right?

Correcting a bad installation will be extremely difficult, disruptive, or just impossible to do once you are up and running. Follow these tips in planning your rack before the first piece of equipment goes in and you will save not only time later, but you will be thanking me when the sh*t hits the fan.

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I’m an address bar guy; I don’t use bookmarks and barely use a link toolbar. And somedays, my typing could be better - if/when the new gTLDs come in, the owners of ‘facebook.comk’ and ‘google.comk’ will get a good 50% of my surfing time and a catch-all on ’setfiremedia.comk’ would receive all of my internal emails. I’m just as bad with .co.uk - the amount of traffic I send to ‘news.bbc.co.il’ and ‘news.bbc.co.yj’ is shocking.

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There are many ways to build backlinks. There are many ways to waste your time building backlinks too. Anyone who has ever been involved with a prolonged linkbuilding campaign will tell you that it’s hardly the most glamorous of jobs, nor is it particularly inspirational. Days go by in a blur of emails and weeks tend to endlessly slide by in a blaze of IM chats, forum PMs and phone calls. All this and it can still take months before the fruits of your labour are manifested in better organic rankings.

Let it be known: building links is not easy. Therefore, it makes sense to invest your time and effort in something that just works. And for me, that means guest posting.

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How do you measure the true return on PPC ad spend when phone leads or phone sales are not being taken into account?

If we take a typical e-commerce store as an example, up to 35% of sales can be taken over the telephone. Accurately attributing these sales can make a big difference to how you optimise your PPC campaigns, and have an effect on the overall ROI from paid search marketing.

Most web analytics solutions do a great job of tracking where sales come from, be it from organic search traffic, direct type-in traffic or PPC traffic. However, the source of telephone orders is one area that site owners often choose to ignore because it’s difficult to track.

Here’s a few ways to track PPC traffic that generates orders over the phone.

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I’ve seen all manner of overtly commercial sites trying their luck with linkbait, only for it to flop. You see, linkbaiting your e-commerce store is a difficult thing to do and unless you have built your brand from the ground up to infiltrate integrate on social media sites, successful linkbait and the bounty of oneway goodies it affords may continue to be nothing more than a dream.

I suppose in one way it is our own fault for perpetuating this fallacy of marketing. Reading through the plethora of posts about linkbait makes this particular technique seem like some crazy next-generational solution to marketing any site. The reality is, however, very different. You’ve got to work incredibly hard to make linkbait on a commercial store work and be prepared to sustain your efforts even though many of your baits get no traction and go precisely nowhere.

There’s little doubt in my mind that Digg et al have moderators and systems in place to identify commercially motivated linkbait, and even if they don’t, the community itself definitely doesn’t want to see our ’spam’. The good old days of pushing ‘10 Cooking Tips From Holywood’s Hottest Celebs’ to help promote some recipe book store are long gone.

Don’t get me wrong: linkbait is here to stay, but we must progress. The broader SEO community may have only recently caught on and crowned linkbait as the white-hatted linkbuilding prince, but we’re only getting started down the road of punchy titles, angles and hooks compared to our friends in the traditional mainstream media.

So if you are responsible for marketing an e-commerce store and want to try linkbait, be prepared to work harder than you have before to create unique, interesting, timely and resourceful content that real people actually care about and want to read.

Here at Setfire Media we specialise in building online stores. So as ‘Head of Search’ I’ve been in the trenches for long enough to hone the process of linkbaiting an e-commerce store and can say with surety that there are things you can do to help improve your success rate on social media sites - a checklist if you will.

Here are a few things I’ve learned that you can apply and hopefully find more success.

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There are times when your website might experience short periods of very high traffic. This could be the result of TV exposure, or your linkbait just hit the front page of Digg. The worst thing that can happen at this point is that your site can’t cope - this becomes a huge missed opportunity.

Here are some tips to help you plan to stay online and available.

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Email marketing to a subscribed list gives businesses a fantastic return on web marketing spend. A quality email list partnered with a targeted, well written email can out perform SEO, PPC and just about any other marketing activity every time.

The key to successful email marketing is building up your list of newsletter recipients. The equation is simple, the more people you email the more sales, and response you’re going to get. Every subscriber counts, and if you’ve got your analytics rockin’, and measure the sales you get from email marketing, you can attribute a per subscriber value to your list.

Here are 15 ways you can increase the number of people signing up to your mailing list:

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