Social Responsibility

A recent advert on YapYapOK prompted me to write a book review. The advert was for the book The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. This is completely off topic, but it is Saturday!

The book is a powerful story about life in Afghanistan. The story tells much more about the Afghan people under the Taliban, their culture and their integrity in spite living in extreme poverty or escaping to the west having left everything they ever owned.

It brings me back to one of the things my mother has maintained throughout my life, "people are essentially good". Sometimes it appears as if the reverse is true, but if you take the time to evaluate any situation, as a race we shine. We rally together in the face of disaster to help save lives & bring aid to those in desperate need. I am quite a sensitive soul & I believe that if we are in a position of power, then it is our moral duty to give some of our excess resources.

I hope that I have illustrated this in the way that I conduct myself. It is of vital importance to me that YapYapOK provides socially, the curse is really knowing which direction to channel resources.

I used to be a big animal charity supporter. I no longer agree with the way the RSPCA is run. I hated the way they fought a ruling supporting a family member who contested her fathers will. It was unnecessary and inhumane. I should imagine it was also very bad for PR. The RSPCA is one of the richest charities in the world, clearly the British love their animals, but recent events draw me to conclude that the RSPCA conforms much more to goverment standards then it does in representing animal welfare.

I still love animals and with a never ending pot of money I would still support them. Since I became a mother, my priorities have changed. I am now much more likely to support child welfare charities than any other. The problem is knowing which ones.

So, please support us, just join up and list your ads. Its free!

Our website generates revenue from personal numbers, (limited to UK sellers), By implementing this on your advert, we can support others!

We will be generating a similar number system in the US in the future. It is not mandatory, we hope that business who host shops will utilise it. Perhaps they can offer competitive pricing to compensate the higher call costs.

YapYapOK free shop hosting & Classified listing

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Blowing The Advertising Budget

Inevitably the time has come to spend some of our  budgets on advertising.

Social media has played a great part in developing the site while we have been in beta.  It has enabled a slow organic growth where we have identified key improvements.  Feedback has been positive and helped us keep focus. 

We will now put our fingers in several advertising pies & see what happens.  Twitter amongst others has given us a high hit rate and we are delighted with that.  It is however un-targeted.  We welcome anyone to place an ad on the site irrelevant of where you are.  We have a massive US following so there are clear advantages for anyone there expanding their web presence and advertising on our site.  An enormous amount of Twitter traffic comes from the US, since I Tweet every advert then this has huge benefits to our US visitors.

Our advertising will limited for the time being to the UK.  Once we have a significant amount of adverts placed daily then we will launch our .com version for the US on a US server with ads dedicated to the US.

Fingers in the pies and ready, lets see if we can pull out The Plum!

YapYapOK free shop hosting and classifieds

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A Little Light Relief

My last post "Stats, Tracks & Hacks" was a serious blog about tracking your visitors & site security.

I am feeling much more light hearted today.  It was our good friend, Investor Morse's birthday bash, come serious seminar yesterday.  He had a some guest speakers including us.  A huge thanks goes to Helga for a light, concise & professional representation of YapYapOK.

After a very brief but informative seminar we were treated to fantastic food a free bar and some great entertainment.  Fortunately we  had arranged child care so were able to enjoy the event to the full.  It reminded me of previous conferences I  attended when I worked in the pharma industry.  The implication is work, but the reality is far different.  It also amazes me how many people we knew when we arrived, also the mindset of the ones we didn't know.  I suppose when you are in a room full of very successful business men & woman, the room is full of positive energy.  Everyone was there to share ideas, investment etc.  No one had anything to prove, they had done that already!

So I have taken some of this energy with me.  I am still working, but I am feeling much less pressure.  This is also a combination of the website really starting to go.  Site visits are up over 500% on a month ago.  We are amazed how quickly the public are buying into the concept of our shop hosting and classified platform.  But then why wouldn't they.  If we compare it to even paid listing sites then we have superior functions.  If we compare it to free sites, well what can I say??!!

The only way they currently win is traffic, but this is changing.  We are delighted to have so much support.  We will continual to promote individual ads on the huge range of tools at our fingertips.  If you haven't joined yet, then go on, its free, its fun, its interactive.  Be part of a winning team!

YapYapOK free classified and shop hosting

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Stats, Tracks & Hacks

Stats, Tracks & Hacks

Some who know me well we know that I love anything with numbers. I loved maths & achieved the highest results in my class at A level. I am not intimidated by formula. In fact unlike any other subject, you can get the answers wrong and still get great scores. To me that is a win win situation & I think maths get bad press.

So I suppose it is only natural that I enjoy the statistics behind web views. I have a number of tracking codes installed on the site, I am great with viewing the system log. I take great confort in seeing where all our visits are from, where they were referred etc. The system log literally shows every visit & action on the site. I often randomly select IP addresses to see how they correlate with the various trackers that I have. Whilst this is superfluous ,reading the stats, the entry pages and in particular the referral sites is very useful. Yesterday for example someone I am familiar with was reading blogger and clicked on the link for the lotto which was advertised by one of my US users. This is particularly interesting & flattering as these visitors are web designers themselves. Another old friend visited the site and her brother who is a web designer has shown great interest in it, I am being sent many well wishes and compliments on a great web site.

I know which social sites refer not just the most traffic but also the most relevant. Twitter is great as a numbers game, clearly excellent for rankings, but very little of it is relevant. Other sites require a tiny amount of work and drive high volume target traffic to the site. These are particularly rewarding but the small amount of work is limited because of imposed restrictions.

So whilst numbers, stats etc can be dull for many, they are vital in measuring and driving traffic to any website. If it fills you with dread, then start by looking at the maps, then the IP adresses. One of the programs I use actually gives me the name, address, telephone number and email address of the user. We have in the early stages been a victim of hack attemps. This is an invaluable tool if site security is an issue. Every action is recorded by the system log within the individual website. Our hack attempt was recorded on our website log with the actual IP alongside. It is important that if this is evident that pictures, or screen shots are taken as evidence. You can then match this IP using various free tools on the web. Hackers will often "throw" their IP to another country, as they did with us. However in our case their server provider was not disguised. Foolishly they had a dedicated server and we had undeniable proof with a screen shot of the attempts, the site, the system log and the various tracking programs we used.

Hack attempts are rare but a real threat to this industry. The law is harsh, & rightly so on offenders. If like us you are fortunate that this happens early then you can use it to your advantage. We were able to tighten up security on the site, we were also able to trace the offenders easily. Our developer was employed as a site hacker for some of the largest global banks & this has been an invaluable advantage. Hacking attempts are intended to be destructive, if, like us, this is more of a nuisance than a catastrophy, then learn from it, work with it. Who knows, you may even get to love the stats!

YapYapOK - Free UK classified & shop hosting

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Up Up & Away!

Sometimes good news seems to bounce around as if its total internally reflecting toward you.  If anything far from suffering any "seepage" we seem to be magnifiying more and more.  Help often comes from behind when you least expect it and from whom.  That seems to be my recent experience at least.

Friends from my past are promoting my website having seen it on various media sites.  I am hearing stories of old friends publishing this on the Facebook news feeds as well as promoting by word & mouth. 

There is no alterior motive, in fact I am hearing this from others after the fact!  So this is a monumental thank you for all your support.

I feel like a good luck magnet!  That perhaps is a little arrogant but seemingly true.  Adverts are pouring in, rankings are going up.  In the US we are ranked 774 000.  The USA must have the most sites of any nation in the world and ours is ranking at under 1000 000.  Ironic that we are a UK based site attracting such a huge amount of American traffic.  We are also attracting adverts fromm the US, well why let our UK domain address put you off when so many of our site visitors are across the pond. 

All our ads, irrelevent of origin receive the same social exposure.  For a start how about these Boston Terrier Puppies in Mallory or maybe this unique lotto system based in Minneapolis.  Wherever you are, be assured that your ad is Twittered, randomly Stumbled, Blogged, Bleeted or Dugg from our administration center. 

So in the spirit of goodwill, why not join up and maybe some of our new positive energy will stick to you too! 

YapYapOK - FREE classified and Shop Hosting

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The Only Way Is UP!

Today is a good day!

YapYapOK is getting amazing hits and there is a lot of positivity both personally and professionally.

The sun is out and we are hoping to finish some crucial developmental work before we start some real marketing.  Social networking has proved immensely successful in establishing the YapYapOK brand.  Our hit rate continues to grow and adverts are appearing regularly.  This gentle progression has enabled us both to identify where we need to position ourselves & to see where we need to concentrate our development efforts.  Our revenue stream is established and we need to do a little more work in incorporating it before we go for the big push.

Having a restricted budget has at times been frustrating.  It is only with the benefit of hindsite that I can see that it was absolutely critical.  We have been able to see the glitches in the system which have required a little polishing, we have been able to strengthen and secure the site against hackers and we have been able to implement minor changes to the upload process to make this system easier to use.

So a big thankyou to everyone who has helped and supported us so far.  

My brother -  for coming up trumps and supporting us when we need it most, thankyou Shane, my mum for all her help and input, my friend and co worker Helga seriously the most talented developer and psycholgist, genius!   I'd like to thank Tracy for her believing in us  & Iain my oldest friend for his advice and encouragment. 

Ok Oscars over, now is the time for some serious work! 

YapYapOK free shop hosting and classified website

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To Share Or Not To Share? That Is The Question

Its been a few days since I last reported on my blog.

I become a little complacent after my massive rise in hits.  My Tweet Adder was working brilliantly until a storm wiped out my internet connection and I inadvertently loaded the wrong version.  This deleted all my Tweets after posting which meant that they stopped posting and my click rate bottomed.

I thought it was because I had nothing new to say and my followers were not clicking.  They are not that fickle.  I now have nearly 1800 followers and a click through rate of over 1000 every day on twitter alone.  This is having a positive effect on the site which is now getting more and more exposure globally. 

For our advertisers we feed every advert with a direct link into our rotating Twitter feed.  Soon we will program every advert to post directly onto Twitter automatically.  We also have the ability to feed online catalogues via an RSS feed straight on to the system free of charge.

We are now weighing up our options.  Do we allow the site to continue to grow organically or do we seek investment to market the site in the UK which will guarantee its place in the world wide web!

Once again, answers on a postcard!

YapYapOK

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