Hello

Suzanne here at HotScot with the HotScot April newsletter. News of an online mailshot tool, a new online payment system and hints on marketing your own website........

• Royal Mail online mailshot service
• Good Web Guide
• Google Checkout online payments
• Microsoft Update Problems

• Marketing Hints and Tips
• And Finally
• Feedback
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Yes we are all supposed to be "paperless" but sometimes you want to send a marketing initiative by mail to customers. To help small businesses take advantage of the potential of direct mail, the Royal Mail has launched Mailshots Online - an online service that allows you to put together an entire direct mail campaign in just 60 minutes - Find out more

Sonia Marshall from Culdearn House Hotel has drawn our attention to this website that offers a good guide to the best websites out on the Internet www.thegoodwebguide.co.uk , Sonia finds it particularly useful for books:

"It gives one an idea of the book BEFORE paying out for a years subscription. I have only just found this. You probably already know about it but it might be worth a mention to others"

A new online payment service, Google checkout http://checkout.google.com is now available in the UK

This is going to rival PayPal and is cheaper to use, FREE until 2008, from then on it  is 1.5% + 15p, Sales of up to 10 times your monthly AdWords spend are free. Fully featured with shopping cart integration or "Pay Now" buttons.

There are some useful features not offered by other online payment providers. For instance if your customers sign up for their own personal checkout account, your Control panel enables their card to be charged only if you have decided whether to accept the order, and you can also do part payments. There is a facility to mark as shipped and client gets a notification email. Google checkout account holders only have to enter username and password, Google holds all other details for automatic completion of forms.

Interested? Integration of a Google Checkout account into a shopping basket would cost £195 plus vat, addition of a "pay now" button would be £25 plus vat. Contact us on 01397 700924 if you want more information.

There have been reports of some clients experiencing problems with Internet Explorer corrupting and showing images and links incorrectly after installing recent automatic updates from Microsoft.

There is no easy way of resolving this until Microsoft issues a fix, which should install automatically at your next update. In the meantime if you have been having problems we recommend you install Firefox as an alternative browser, it is free and reckoned by many to be faster and more secure than Internet Explorer. You can get the free download here. , we use it extensively ourselves and can highly recommend it.

Watch your competitors Keep a close eye on what your competitors are up to on their website and use this to formulate some ideas for additional work on your own site. Just make a few minutes of time every week to have a browse around the opposition and if you have some ideas for improving your site ring us up on 01397 700924 to see what can be done.

Start a Blog this is a useful way of keeping clients informed of what is going on in your business and if you put in lots of links back to your main website it can help your rankings. You can set up a blog for free on sites such as Blogger www.blogger.com or we can do it for you for a small fee. If you want to know more contact us and ask for our free Blog Factsheet.

Get lots of links to your site This is the easiest step you can take to help yourself, get links to your site from as many quality websites as you can. Set yourself the target of getting one new link every day! It is usually as easy as emailing the site owner and making a polite request to exchange links. If you can negotiate a link without having to give a reciprocal link so much the better as one way links are more valuable.

How many sites link to me? If you want to know how many sites link to you put this string in to your selected search engine link:www.mydomain.co.uk . However take care interpreting these results, Google only shows links back from sites with a page rank of 3 or over, while MSN shows all links. To be effective you need to be showing at least 100 links on Google. Just for interest our own site www.hotscot.net is currently showing 494 inbound links on Google but 8,647 on Yahoo! If you want a FREE link checking tool try this out , useful for comparing your site links with your competitors.

1. Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.

2. The word Tips is actually an acronym standing for 'To Insure Prompt Service'.

Any ideas on articles to include in future Newsletters - ring us on 01397 700924 or email us on

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