Keith Shirley

My wife, Sylvia Shirley, will be taking part in a Special Olympics Ireland fund-raising event this coming weekend. The Mind Body and Spirit fair will be taking place at The Dolmen Hotel Carlow – 1^st March 2009 12 – 5 pm

I see a hot towel shave listed…..I wonder will Sylvia allow me to grow a stubble to test how good it is. I have a special kind of beard that seems to defeat electric razors – so I’d love to see how good a job a real cut-throat does. In addition there are all sorts of people/activities such as:

• Beautician (Completely unbiased I can say Carlow’s Best Cosmetic and Wellness Atelier will be there)
• Health Food Suppliers
• Clearing and House Blessings
• Homeopathy Practitioners
• Animal Healers
• Tarot and Angel Card Readings
• Yoga
• Body Massages
• Acupuncturists and herbalists
• Angel Healers
• Reiki
• Crystal Healing
• Personal Coaching
• Tai Chi
• Manicures

The Special Olympics Ireland – Carlow Fundraising Team has a fundraising target of €100,000 by the end of May 2009. The Dolmen Hotel have waived the room hire fee as their own donation to the campaign.

The organisers also have other events arranged including a Tug of War between County Carlow and County Kilkenny.  A Nintendo Wii Fit competition, a Treasure Trail in May, a Garden Party in the Delta Centre and a Carlow Garda Dinner/Dance on 3 April 2009 at the Seven Oaks Hotel.

Further Information about Special Olympics Ireland & Special Olympics (Co Carlow)

Note: This is copied from their distributed info

Did you know 58% of people with a learning disability in Ireland have no friends of their own?

Special Olympics Ireland is a national charity based in the 32 counties in Ireland and  will run a major all-island fundraising initiative from January 5th to June 5th 2009, called `Changing Lives’.  The money raised during our short campaign will support the 12,000 athletes and 18,000 volunteers in 420 clubs and also enable the recruitment of NEW athletes so we can realise our goal of reaching out to more people with a learning disability.

There are 943 people with an intellectual disability in County Carlow/Kilkenny but only 160 of them are County Carlow athletes in Special Olympics Ireland. Money raised will go towards providing sports training and competition for those athletes and to reach out to the clearly significant number of people in County Carlow not already involved.

The Special Olympic Athlete’s oath is “Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt”  and in our brief 5 month campaign period we in County Carlow intend to work very hard to provide children and adults with an intellectual disability who participate in Special Olympics to develop improved physical fitness and motor skills, greater self-confidence and a more positive self-image. They grow mentally, socially and spiritually and, through their activities, exhibit boundless courage and enthusiasm, enjoy the rewards of friendship and ultimately discover not only new abilities and talents but “their voices” as well.

Special Olympics Ireland changes the lives of people with an intellectual disability by giving them a real opportunity to achieve in life, through sport.  Belonging to Special Olympics has a powerful impact, not only on people with an intellectual disability but also on their families, volunteers and the wider community.

The World Games are held every 4 years – 2009 will see the Winter Games in Boise, USA and the next Summer Games are in 2011 in Athens, Greece. To be eligible to participate in Special Olympics, athletes must be at least six years old and identified by an agency or professional as having one of the following conditions: intellectual disabilities, cognitive delays as measured by formal assessment, or significant learning or vocational problems due to cognitive delay that require or have required specially designed instruction.

Whilst athletes can commence training at six years of age, they must be eight years old before participating in competions. Our Irish athletes participate in Alpine Skiing, Aquatics, Athletics, Badminton, Basketball, Bocce, Bowling, Equestrian, Football, Golf, Gymnastics and Table Tennis. In addition there is a Motor Activities Training Programme offering cycling, kayaking, pitch & putt and tennis.

Special Olympics Ireland is sponsored by The Irish Sports Council and Eircom however in today’s tough economic conditions Special Olympics Ireland – Co Carlow Team couldn’t meet the needs of our own potential athletes without the generosity of supporters like you. Many Thanks!

Geansai Gorm – The Background

In connection with the Geansai Gorm competition I ran a Google Adwords campaign. It fit very nicely with a Google Adwords training I was providing and I thought it would be fun.

The competition finishes on Monday 1 Dec at 15:00 so I thought I’d prepare some details of the results I achieved and add my personal conclusions.

Keep in mind that I have not actually maintained the ads so please don’t take anything here as a “best practice” example. Maybe a “wasted opportunity” example. I guess that’s the first lesson:

Lesson #1: Make sure before starting a Search Engine Optimisation and/or Adwords campaign that you are going to have the time to maintain it.

The Geansai Gorm Ads

I created the initial ad as a joke and then decided it might actually produce some interesting results. It was along the lines of:

I nearly got sidetracked into creating ads to see how much bad language I could sneak into Adwords but that’s a project for another day.

Lesson #2: Even if Google policies say no – you should experiment. You might get away with it.

What surprised me was how quickly people started clicking on the ads. I guess there was a general curiosity to really see what gobshite was spending money on ads that linked to Geansai Gorm and had no incoming revenue associated with them.

Lesson #3: Keep your ads interesting and catch people’s attention.

I must admit I was a little concerned with getting lambasted by Damien Mulley for messing around with his competition and was relieved when he left a comment on the blog. I might still get a telling off when he sees that I used his name as one of the keyword phrases. It’s a big no no to use someone else’s name/trademark in that way. I’ll buy him a pint the next time we meet and beg for forgiveness – hopefully you’re open to bribes Damien.

Lesson #4: Don’t break trademark rules – you’ll seldom get away with buying a beer and saying sorry.

After the bad language ads I had something a little different:

This actually did pretty OK for something I put about 10 seconds work into – I was getting a click through rate of 1.56% (i.e that percentage of people actually clicked on the ads). At that stage I added some extra variations and decided to stop messing with the ad and see how it ran over time:

That’s when the campaign started to fall apart. The number of impressions (how often the ad was displayed) was increasing quite rapidly but the click through rate was dropping. If I was doing this for a real product then I’d need to start tweaking my ads.

Lesson #5: Keep tweaking your ads and try out different variations.

So why were the ads “failing”? Maybe people misunderstood my sense of humour and thought they would be linked to an inappropriate site. I suspect that the number of people searching for Geansai Gorm was actually quite low and the ad had been seen by most who were interested. The large number of impressions was most likely people refreshing the pages to see if their position on Google had changed. It’s quite possible I’d reached some form of saturation and without doing something to reanimate the “target market” my ads would continue to fail.

Lesson #6: Never loose focus of who the ads are trying to attract.

I didn’t change the ads afterwards which means my totals were not as good as they would have been for a properly maintained campaign. If nothing else this experiment made it clear to me how important it is to maintain the ads and make sure they stay focused.

The Geansai Gorm Ad Results

The ads were started on 6 Nov (a little over a week after the competition started) – what are the results?

Upto Saturday:

- 9895 Impressions on the search network
- 112 Clicks

- 54341 Impressions on the content network
- 20 clicks

At the end of the competition today (Monday):

- 11,233 Impressions on the search network
- 126 Clicks

- 63,209 Impressions on the content network
- 24 clicks

I used just 4 keyword phrases – picked because they were the first things to spring to mind

- Geansai Gorm (118 clicks – up 14 since Saturday)
- Ireland SEO (3 clicks)
- mulley.net (3 clicks)
- Damien Mulley (2 clicks)

Conclusion

Not exactly what I would call a stellar success rate. A total of 150 clicks with a CTR of 0.20 percent. I’m glad I was not actually selling anything. Of course – how do you measure success? If I just wanted to get my name displayed then I can say it was a success if someone remembers the ads when I meet them at some business event. In that case the total cost of €28.36 €33.52 is a bargain.

I just hope they don’t remember my name and the word gobshite at the same time.

As for the competition – as far as I know the rules exclude me using this blog so I can’t enter. Having said that – this blog did appear at slot 77 at the closing bell. You can’t be lazy when it comes to SEO – it won’t get you anywhere.

Image via Wikipedia

Working on your own can be a challenge at times. Before returning to Ireland I had spent about 13 years working in a busy office environment. SOLINET is a relatively small company in terms of the number of people that work there but the atmosphere is very much corporate in terms of the amount of stuff going on.

When I returned to Ireland I started working from a home office. It was initially fantastic – I noticed a big increase in productivity without the constant phone calls or exigencies that needed to be dealt with. After a while though I noticed that there were a number of creative activities that were suffering without the benefit of social interaction. Even problem solving was a little more difficult. The process of describing problems was often enough to help me find my own solution. And lets be honest – I miss the craic.

Back in May I spoke to Michael Kelly, Carlow CEB CEO, about the potential of them providing hot desks for very short term use rather than longer term offices. Carlow CEB have an incubation centre at Enterprise House on O’Brien Road in Carlow. They provide office facilities on a medium term (generally up-to 3 years I believe) to startup businesses. They will soon be building a new premises and I thought that reserving some space for ad-hoc space would be useful – and importantly for them would not conflict with commercial offerings in the town. Carlow Chamber of Commerce have some furnished offices which are a start but I think don’t go quite far enough. Actually my brother has a place there offering Building Energy Ratings. For a start – there are no hot desk facilities. By hot-desk I mean somewhere where you can hire a desk for a short amount of time to do some work from. I can’t say if they would be commercially viable but I do think they would be very useful.

If Carlow CEB are to do something like this they need to know you are interested. I thought it would be interesting for the following situations

• Seasonal work – At certain times of the year businesses need to be able to take on extra people for a short period to deal with order etc
• Short term work packets – Sometimes I need to work with someone closely for a few days. Currently I have to travel to their offices – it would be nice to be able to offer something here
• Home Emergencies – Sometimes you just can’t work from home.
• Business Idea Testing – I imagine there are people who are interested in testing the market for some business idea but are concerned with signing up for long term leases. Even just having an office for a few months would be useful.

This morning I received a tweet from Evert Bopp. He is going to start up his own Co-working/techhub/start-up centre – presumably near his home in Nenagh. I met Evert for the first time last July when he organised the Open Coffee BBQ. The event was great and really highlighted for me how important the exchange of ideas and peer review can be. Evert is looking for comments from people for things they would need from a co-working environment. If you have any ideas then please click on the co-working link above and add a comment.