3 weeks ago McDonald’s ran a Free Coffee promotion to capture back a bit of the market. I heard from people on twitter and in my neighbourhood that the coffee was better then Tim Horton’s. I also heard from McDonald’s staff that sales were way up for breakfast.
This video shows the results 3 weeks after no more free coffee…
Was it what you thought?
Last week we created Landing Pages for our top 3 inbound links to shape the actions of our traffic. If you did not do this then I suggest you go back and see how to do it now. This week we will look at how to push traffic from countries to a specific page or site. This can be useful if you want certain country prices to be shown or if you have only certain services that are available in specific countries.
To do this project we will be using the MaxMind GeoIP Country Database. You can purchase the IP database for $20 a month and can access their database through an API.
After you have purchased the GeoIP Web Service from MaxMind you can use the following code to redirect for a specific country…
<?php
$ipaddress = getenv(“REMOTE_ADDR”);
$license_key = “yourlicensekey”;
$query = “http://geoip1.maxmind.com/a?l=” . $license_key . “&i=” . $ipaddress;
$url = parse_url($query);
$host = $url["host"];
$path = $url["path"] . “?” . $url["query"];
$timeout = 1;
$fp = fsockopen ($host, 80, $errno, $errstr, $timeout);
if ($fp) {
 fputs ($fp, “GET $path HTTP/1.0\nHost: ” . $host . “\n\n”);
 while (!feof($fp)) {
   $buf .= fgets($fp, 128);
 }
 $lines = split(“\n”, $buf);
 $country = $lines[count($lines)-1];
 fclose($fp);
} else {
 # enter error handing code here
}
if ($country==’CA’)
{
header(“Location: http://www.bluefur.com/canada/”);
exit;
}
else
{
header(“Location: http://www.bluefur.com/index2.php”);
exit;
}
?>
Place the above code into your main php index page (index.php). You will need to move your current index.php page to index2.php for this script to work.
If you get stuck let me know in the comments.
A cartoon created by artist Rob Cottingham.
If you have an idea for a future comic or would like to submit your own BlueFur cartoon let us know in a comment.
It’s another fine Friday so that means it’s time for another tour of the blogosphere. This week, we hit the virtual road and travel down a few paths with some of our favorite bloggers. Let’s see where they’re heading.
Miss604 might be best known for her Vancouver-based area code, but she had the opportunity to go on a San Francisco photowalk, since she was in the town with the Golden Gate Bridge for WordCamp. Who said you can’t mix work and play, especially in a city as gorgeous as San Francisco.
Tyler Ingram was somewhat of a tourist in his own town, grabbing his trusty camera and shooting a few snapshots at Deep Cove’s Grey Rock. This goes to show you that you don’t need to break the bank to have a good time, because there will usually be a fair bit of beauty and enjoyment right within your own city. Just go explore it!
InvestorBlogger goes on a slightly different kind of adventure, discussing traffic of a different kind. He discusses how to get more traffic to your site or blog in four basic steps. I think we all want to have more people visiting our sites, so check out when he has to say about that.
Mubin Ahmed continues with the net-savvy theme by describing how to automate your blog posts to post on Twitter. When you go for a trip, you may timestamp a few posts in WordPress, but you want to share those with your Twitter followers too, right? Automate everyone and you can have a worry-free vacation. Just don’t forget your passport.
The Simple Dollar wraps up this week’s roundup by weighing the options for the family vacation. Is renting a car worth it? While it may not be quite as worth it for the single guy bandying around his own town, it seems that long road trips with multiple passengers will usually work out in favor of renting a vehicle. Think about the gas, depreciation, maintenance, and other costs that could be involved if you used your own car.
Over the next couple of articles, we’ll be optimizing our server to serve pages/files to our visitors faster. By making a few simple changes, we’ll be able to reduce waiting time for our visitors, which is always a good thing. We’ll accomplish this by enabling gzip and setting more appropriate cache response headers.
However, before we can start on this, we need to add a couple of modules to Apache. We’ll be adding mod_headers and mod_expires, which will allow us to serve custom response headers.
If you didn’t delete the Apache download from before, cd into that directory (if you did delete it, redownload it, extract and cd into it). Now, run the following commands:
./configure --enable-so --enable-rewrite --enable-deflate --enable-headers=shared --enable-expires=shared
make
make install
Once those are finished, we need to edit our httpd.conf file to load our new modules.
nano /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf
Add the following lines after the line where we load the libphp5.so module:
LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so
LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so
Save and close the file. Then restart Apache:
apachectl -k restart
Now that you have recompiled Apache with these new modules, you’re all set for next week’s article.
Contrary to what some people may lead you to believe, email is very much a viable form of communication and promotion. If it is appropriate for your company and for your niche, it may be worthwhile to offer a free customer newsletter of some sort via email. For example, Dianna Booher
It’s up to you how often you would like to send out a company newsletter of some kind. Depending on the audience, a monthly schedule like that employed by Booher could be the most appropriate. For others, a weekly newsletter could be best. That said, some people may be hesitant to subscribe to a daily newsletter, so you’ll need to weigh your options carefully. Also, the content of these newsletter will vary according to audience, demographics, niche, industry, and other considerations. Here are a few sections you may consider.
Company News: If you are presenting a newsletter to stockholders and other people who may have a stake in your business, this section would probably be the most useful to them. Even for your customers and clients, they may be interested to hear if you are opening a new store or developing a new product.
Current Specials and Promotions: If the main objective is to increase sales, clearly promoting your current sales and specials will be of the greatest value to you. This is the tactic that stores like Best Buy and Future Shop employ, making sure that all potential customers are aware of any “deals” that are available. If you have an online storefront, this is even more valuable.
Useful Resources: If the goal is to develop the strength of your brand and your perceived value in the marketplace, providing subscribers with useful articles and other resources is a terrific idea. This will reinforce your position as a trusted expert, much in the same way that a blog like this can do.
Do you subscribe to company newsletters? What type do you prefer?