Nearly two million more Britons have come online during the last year, over half of which are over 50, according to new research.

The UK Online Measurement Company (UKOM) found that the net audience now stands at 38.8 million, up from 36.9 million at the same time last year.

The majority of internet newbies were made up of over-50s, with more men than women joining up.

“The internet is getting older in more ways than one. Not only is the medium itself maturing but the audience is shifting towards older age groups,” said Alex Burmaster, speaking on behalf of UKOM. “There is a still a perception that the net is youth-centric but this is clearly not the reality,” he added.

A lot of Internet services are increasingly targeting the older generation which may have contributed to this increase in web usage.

Source: BBC Technology

The launch of Apple’s iPhone 4 also marks the end of unlimited Smartphone data plans from major UK mobile phone companies.

O2, which was Apple’s exclusive UK partner for the iPhone, has introduced a monthly cap of up to 1GB (gigabyte) for data on new contracts. This mirrors a similar recent move by rival Vodafone, and Three has also today announced a 1GB monthly cap.

Some observers expressed surprise at Three’s decision to impose a limit. Ben Wood, a mobile phone analyst at CCS Insight, said: “We had expected that Three would seek to differentiate its offer from rivals by offering bigger data bundles. “It has obviously realised that this approach would see heavy data users signing up and clogging up its network.”

Orange has always imposed a 750MB monthly “fair usage” policy since it started to offer the iPhone in late 2009. But some networks vary their data bundle between 500MB and 1GB per month, depending on the cost of the contract a user chooses.

A 1GB cap amounts to approximately two to three hundred MP3 song downloads in a month. And a message on O2′s website says that a user with a 500MB cap could send 1,000 e-mails with photos attached.

But data consumption can grow very quickly when users start to stream video on their Smartphone.

Source: BBC Technology

The other day I downloaded a free trial copy of Web CEO.

It’s a really good software package of twelve tools that promote, maintain and analyze your website. And it’s a free trial, so there’s no reason not to give it a try if you have a website that you need to promote.

Some of the key features of this free trial version of Web SEO include:

• You can promote as many websites as you need to.
• You get Free SEO training with every copy of Web SEO.
• You benefit from free and fast technical support.

This great free trial software can help you to tweak your web pages to get free traffic from search engines, it can also monitor your rankings, submit your site and analyze your links (very important for high rankings in search engines – see our SEO article – Getting Inbound Links ). Also, you can find and fix errors on your site like broken links and missing images and can learn almost anything about visitors to your site using a great real-time traffic analyzer. The traffic analyzer is very good for ad campaign and Return on Investment (ROI) tracking.

All in all, this software was a lucky find! Be sure to check it out for yourself by downloading this free trial software from Web CEO.

Here’s a great YouTube video to help you build your very own PC. It’s fairly up to date as well, using a SATA hard drive and a separate PCI graphic card.

Enjoy!

When it comes to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising there are only two ways to decrease your spending. You can lower your cost per click (which will lower your position and your click through rate (CTR)) or you can improve your PPC advertisements (which will increase your CTR and your position).

Great ads will attract more clicks for a given amount of impressions, which will be rewarded by Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing with lower bid prices or higher rankings.

The real secret to writing the most popular PPC advertisement on the page is to ruthlessly test and track multiple ads – which is called split testing. By doing this, you will improve your advertising skill over time, and will eventually have a great performing ad with a very high click through rate (see our article Pay Per Click Marketing).

To get a high click through rate your ad must be designed in such a way that it attracts the eye of potential customers so here a a few tips on how to design the perfect PPC advertisement.

Create an attention-grabbing headline

Nothing in your advertisement is more important than your headline. The problem with PPC ads is that you don’t get much space for it. For example, Google allows ad titles to be only 25 characters long.

Write ads for small groups of keywords

You should try to get your keywords to appear multiple times in your ads so that you can take full advantage of keyword grouping. You could even include the keyword in all four lines of the PPC ad for maximum effect. But make sure this does not detract from the advertising message you are trying to put across.

Write ads with your audience in mind

When you write an ad, ask yourself “what is my audience looking for when they search for this particular keyword?” If you can write an ad that ‘solves a problem’, people with that problem will be instantly drawn to your ad.

You do have much space when it comes to writing your ads description as Google limits the two description lines and display URL to 35 characters each, so every single word you use is important.

Give the ads some visual appeal

This takes some additional creativity and planning, but can really help your PPC ad to stand out. For example you could make each line progressively longer (or shorter) for a cascading effect or you could alternate lengths to create a visual “arrow” or “reverse arrow” shape within your ad.

Ask the audience a question

This is definitely a good strategy for certain markets. If you can work a question into your headline or description, test it out and see how it performs. If someone is searching for something, and then you confirm what they are searching for, they are far more likely to click on your ad.

Use specific numbers

Numbers create interest and specific numbers create curiosity. They won’t always perform better, but try to test the impact of including numbers in your advertisement. Always include whole numbers such as 31% rather than numbers including decimal points, like 31.13%. In other words, round up or down rather than using decimal points.

Emphasize the benefits of your offer

Your audience doesn’t care how many features your are offering or how great they are – all they want to know is “What’s in it for me?” If you can tell them, you will likely have a hugely successful ad.

Use words that evoke emotion

If you can get people to feel emotions when reading your ad, they will probably feel compelled to click it. The list of emotion words is very long, so here is a nice wikipaedia guide to emotion words.

Test multiple versions of your display URL

You can certainly experiment with capitalization (i.e. “DomainName.com” vs “domainname.com”). You should also experiment with “www”, sub domains and pages.

Including your keywords in your domain name can often increase your CTR. You can essentially do this one of two ways: “Key-Words.DomainName.com” or “DomainName.com/Key-Words.”

Be cautious with prices

Although prices do have their place as negative qualifiers, they will usually be detrimental to your CTR. Unless your price is definitely the lowest on the block, it’s probably best to leave it out of your PPC ad.

Include a call-to-action

Sometimes, the most effective way to get someone to do something is to simply ask them to do it. That’s the principle behind the call to action. Because you have such limited space in a PPC ad, the call-to-action might not be beneficial, but it is at least worth a test. Just including something like “Click here to receive this benefit” or “Get your free copy now” is more than sufficient to test this idea.

Don’t waste space with useless words

The space available to you in a PPC ad is extremely limited. Although your ads should be grammatically correct, they do not need to be sophisticated sentences. Keep them simple and concise so that it is easier for the reader to quickly understand what you are offering.

Use negative keywords

Negative keywords permit advertisers to specify when ads should not be shown, such as when a keyword has multiple meanings or is part of other popular queries. You will be able to do this from within your PPC interface.

Although negative keywords are not directly related to how you write your ads, they are important. If you don’t use negative keywords, your ad is going to be triggered by keywords that you did not plan for. When this happens, your ad will not match what the consumer was searching for and will result in lower CTR and a lower placement.

To find out more about negative keywords see this Google page – How can I find the right negative keywords to benefit my campaign?

Make the ad relevant to your landing page

Although your landing page does not affect the CTR of your ad it can affect what you receive from it, in terms of a product sale or in sign ups for your service. It is therefore very important that you make your ad relevant to your landing page.

If a visitor reads a particular offer or benefit in your ad, they are expecting to find it when they click through to your landing page. Give them what you promise in your advertisement and you will experience a higher conversion rate.

So there you have it. Just a few tips on how to write killer PPC Ads.

Microsoft Office 2010 is the first version of Microsoft Office that will ship with both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions.

If you are currently running a 32-bit version of Windows, you can only use the 32-bit version of Office. However, on a 64-bit Windows platform, you can decide to install either the 32bit or the 64-bit version of Office.

Microsoft recommend installing the 32-bit version of Office, even on a PC running 64-bit Windows, unless you have special needs that require the use of 64-bit Office apps. For example, 64-bit computing is useful when you work with large (over 2GB) Excel or Access files.

If you follow Microsoft’s advice and install the 32-bit version of Office 2010 on your 64-bit Windows Operating System, you can still decide later to swop to the 64-bit version. However, the 32-bit version must be uninstalled before you install the 64-bit version.

Microsoft has published a detailed article which can help you to make an informed choice about Office 2010 and its two versions – 32-bit and 64-bit.

Fourteen hours into a 24-hour experiment with background imagery, Google’s homepage is once again stark white.

Design guru Marissa Mayer confirmed that Google was ending the experiment early due to what she called a “bug”. The bug erased a link underneath the search bar on google.com that explained why Google’s famously spartan home page had taken on a colourful look. Apparently many searchers on Thursday morning missed the company’s blog post on Wednesday, and were confused and annoyed at the change, turning “remove google background” into the seventh-most-popular search on Google on Thursday.

Last week Google announced that it would begin providing its users with the option of setting their own background image behind the home page, but last night it forced an image to appear for all users signed into a Google account to highlight the feature. That didn’t sit well with many grown used to Google’s clean white design, especially when Google’s explanation of why it was forcing this look vanished from the homepage.

It also gave fans of Microsoft’s Bing search engine a chance to crow, given that one of Bing’s most noticeable features is a striking background image behind Bing.com that contains links to searches about the image.

Source: ZDNET

Microsoft issued three critical security bulletins on Tuesday (8th June), plugging 10 holes that could allow an attacker to remotely take control of a Windows computer via a malicious media file or streaming content, or malicious Web content viewed through Internet Explorer.

Overall, this Patch Tuesday release involves 10 bulletins fixing 34 vulnerabilities affecting all supported versions of Windows, Office XP, Office 2003 and 2007 Microsoft Office System, Office 2004 and 2008 for Mac, Excel Viewer, and Sharepoint Services 3.0.

Also plugged are holes in the Windows Kernel-Mode Drivers ; the COM (Component Object Model) Validation in Office; the OpenType Compact Font Format Driver; Excel, Internet Information Services and Microsoft .NET Framework.

“This is the largest Microsoft patch release of 2010 and ties the record for the most vulnerabilities ever addressed in a single month; a record set in October of last year,” said Joshua Talbot, security intelligence manager at Symantec Security Response. “This month’s release also features the largest ever single bulletin, with 14 vulnerabilities in Excel being addressed together.”

Source: CNET

The first service packs for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will see a beta release in July, Microsoft announced at its TechEd 2010 conference on Monday.

The software maker did not disclose a date for final availability for the service packs at the conference, held in New Orleans, but it did go into detail about what customers can expect to see. The relatively minor updates add a few new features and concentrate on improving desktop virtualisation support for the server operating system. The beta’s will also provide a roll-up of hotfixes and updates for the desktop operating system.

Source: ZDNet

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that is free to use and is available to everyone. But there is a certain degree of etiquette involved in any type of social networking, so here are a few suggestions about how to promote your business by using Twitter.

Set up an Account with Twitter

The first thing to do is create your twitter account and then populate it with interesting tweets, which is Twitters way of describing a micro-blogging post containing no more than 140 characters.

Before you get to involved with this new account and all the tweets you intend to do, take some time to choose or design a customised Twitter background for your business page. Far too often individuals and even businesses go for the common default ones provided by Twitter. Here’s a really good blog post that’s all about twitter backgrounds and why you should keep away from the default ones – mashable.com/2009/05/23/twitter-backgrounds

Once you start to deal with your tweets, retweets and a growing list of followers, its best to use a free tool like Tweetdeck to help you with your Twitter marketing campaign. Tweetdeck is a desktop application that allows you to review and post updates to your Twitter Account. You can even use this tool to update your Twitter and Facebook pages at the same time!

Tweetdeck lets you sort the people and businesses you follow into groups and allows you to limit the number of tweets you view at any one time. It also lets you remove all the tweets you have seen with just one click.

Adding Interesting and Informative Tweets

By adding tweets that are interesting and relevant about your products and services, you can keep your tweets current and therefore popular with Twitter users. You should also add relevant news about your ‘industry’ to keep your Tweets interesting and varied.

To build up a following you should begin following people and businesses who are also using Twitter. As you follow others, most of them will follow you back. This is an important step as a blank Twitter account will not attract anyone.

You can use Twitter to point people to content on your website perhaps to articles you have written or the products or services you want to sell.

Bear in mind that Google indexes Twitter so your Twitter business page can appear in the organic search results.

So how can you follow others?

The best way to follow others is to do some research.

Go to Twitter.com and run a search by using keywords that are related to the industry you are targeting. For example if you are trying to sell an application for Apples IPhone you would search using the keywords such as Iphone, Iphone App and Iphone Apps and anything else that might find people who use Twitter and own an IPhone.

If your tweets are interesting to your readers you will find that other people will begin to follow you as they stumble across your Twitter business page.

Another way to pick up followers after you have logged-in is to click the Find People option at the top of the page and then enter keywords, related industry’s, locations or other details to locate potential followers and begin following them.

Always respond when your followers tweet you. If you do not keep up with you hard earned following it may begin to crumble. If you have a large following to maintain outsource you retweets or assign the task to one of your employees. Also make use of twitter tools like Tweetdeck to help with your twitter marketing campaign.

As you develop your Twitter marketing campaign you need to keep your followers engaged so you will have to tweet often, preferably daily or weekly.

Ensure that you retweet relevant tweets from other Twitter followers. If they then start to follow you will begin to benefit from all their followers. Retweeting is certainly one of the fastest ways to build your own Twitter followers.

By checking search.twitter.com frequently you can look for your brand name to see what customers are saying about your company. You can follow these tweets whether they are good or bad and get involved in the conversations. Your customers will be thrilled when you thank them for their kind words or even rectify a problem for them.

The ability of your customers who use Twitter to contact your management team is an invaluable resource. This one to one exchange permits you to keep close tabs on customer viewpoints, concerns and interests and is a great way to tap into social networking to test new ideas and to ask for customer feedback.

Avoid Spamming your followers

Beware – if you start to spam your followers they will quickly un-follow you. Spam activity includes things like only tweeting about your own products or services or retweeting the same URL time and time again. To many frivolous tweets can also be classed as spam.

It’s best to avoid these sort of tweets if you want to continue to build up and retain your Twitter followers.

Google’s Chrome browser continued to carve away a share of worldwide browser usage from rivals in May, new statistics show.

Chrome rose 0.3 percentage points to 7.1 percent of share, said Net Applications, which monitors browser usage on a network of Web sites. The statistics reflect activity, not the number of people using a browser, as people load up about 160 million pages each month on sites Net Applications monitors. Because web usage is still rapidly increasing, the absolute number of people using a particular browser can increase, even if its fractional share of usage drops.

The share losses came from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which dropped 0.3 percent to 59.7 percent, and Mozilla’s Firefox, which dropped 0.2 percentage points to 24.4 percent. Fourth-place Safari from Apple rose 0.1 percentage points to 4.8 percent, and Opera rose 0.1 percentage points to 2.4 percent.

The browser market has become hotly competitive with new features being built in to support new Web standards. Even Microsoft, long considered a technology laggard, is back in the game with aggressive work developing on Internet Explorer 9.

Source: CNET

Mozilla has announced the first 64-bit Firefox builds for Windows, offering an FTP site for those who want to download it, although the software is not for mainstream users yet.

The builds, announced by programmer Armen Zambrano Gasparnian on Friday, do not yet have an installer, though that work is under way. The software is still one of the very raw “nightly” builds for developers. Support for 64-bit processors is one of the planned Firefox 4 features. Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 4 by the end of November.

The transition to 64-bit computing often offers a modest computing performance boost, but the main reason for the transition is getting around the 4GB memory limit of 32-bit computing. Since relatively few applications today require that much memory – or even whatever fraction remains after the operating system and other applications claim their share – the 64-bit change for desktop computing has taken years.

Source: ZDNet