Here is the first paragraph of Ballmer’s letter:

In all the talk about the economy, one term that comes up more and more frequently is something called “the new normal.” I like this phrase because it speaks to the fact that economic reality has undergone a fundamental shift over the course of the past 12 months.

Both ProjectPier and OpenGoo appear to be forks of ActiveCollab but the only hint at their common ancestry is the installation process. All three platforms have a somewhat different features and very differnt user interfaces.

ActiveCollab: Not Free - costs approximately $499

ActiveCollab does not offer a demo version to “download” but you can sign up for a free 30 day trial with their online demo platform. Having done that now I can’t speak about the installation process. However, the interface is every bit as good, if

Project Dashboard

not better than Basecamp. It also over comes to MAJOR shortcoming with Basecamp (at least from my perspective) which are the ability to create Project Templates, and the ability to process unsolicited inbound email turning it into notes and tasks automatically. This latter feature really increases client adoption rates.

While the product is not free, over the long term it is less expensive to operate than Basecamp. If I had to make a switch from Basecamp then I would move to this platform because of these two core features.

However, if price is an issue for you then have a look at the following two solutions based on ActiveCollab.

OpenGoo: Free

OpenGoo aims to be more of an Office Suite on the web allowing you to manage projects and all of the associated collateral such as phyiscal document storage and the ability to write “web based” documents. It is not a replacement for Google Docs though as it does not have presentation or spreadsheet capabilities.

Dashboard

The installation was extremely simple having only the need for a database, user and password. No errors encountered during the install!

The default (and only theme) is very clean and simple - well thought out. What I really like about the interface is that along the left hand side you can create a “workspace” - which I’d setup as client projects. Each “workspace” has all of the features in the platform filtered for that project. As a result the UI is extremely nice and simple.

From a project management perspective though - I find that the added features cause the project management aspects of notes, tasks and milestones to become lost. As a result it may be more difficult to obtain client adoption using this platform. However, that remains to be seen!

Overall - I really like this solution. It’s feature rich and easy to use. But it is lacking inbound email handling and does not have project templates.

ProjectPier: Free

Installing Project Pier was also simple and did not produce any errors for me. Several themes are provided out of the box and you’ll want to change it from the default which is not very well designed. The single largest shortcoming of this platform is it’s lack of fullscreen mode - ie centered in the middle of the page. This causes the UI to be a bit cramped.

Dashboard

It has all of the project management related features such as notes, attachments, outbound email notification (no inbound), tasks and milestones.

Out of all of the platforms this one was my least favorite because of it’s inferiour UI and lack of inbound email handling (at least as replies).

However, it does a very good job with the features it does contain.

Conclusion
Of all of the platforms ActiveCollab is the clear alternative for my needs. It contains the two core features that Basecamp is missing (hint: basecamp - add these features) - inbound email handling and project templates. However, it’s not free and thus there is a cost for licensing it.

If cost is an issue for you then OpenGoo is the clear second choice. I recommend you test them all out see for yourself!

If you know of web based project management / collaboration platforms beyond these four that I’ve mentioned please post a comment here. I’d love to try them out and write a little review of them.

Having managed many web design and development projects I know there are two phases in particular that can delay a project. They are the design process itself which is stick handled nicely to completion by exceptional web designers and competent project managers, and the second is copy writing which is another story altogether.

Many times clients feel the need to save money by writing their own content but for a small company this decision can often bring a project to a stand still for months while they try to squeeze this into their already busy routine of running their business. In a larger company there may be marketing teams who are responsible for such activities and it works out fine. But for those who don’t then hiring a competent copy writer is the single best investment they can make.

Why is this important?

You have to go back to the original purpose of producing a new website. It’s usually to attract new business by presenting your current product offerings in a current professional design. Any delay in the website is a delay in reaching this goal. A such, a modest investment in a competent copy writer is a sure way to ensure you reach this goal much sooner!

At Spark Internet Marketing we specialize in producing outsanding web design projects that are on time, on budget and result in happy clients. We have many years of eperience in all the complex aspects of a design & development project and bring this experience to bear each and every time.

For your next web project I encourage you to do the same and seriously consider engaging a copy writer to work with you. If you need a referral - please post a comment here and we’ll be more than happy to connect you with our fabulous team of freelance writers.

Investing money in online advertising always carries some level of risk. Whenever you increase a bid price, it is a calculated risk that the additional spend will produce more profitable sales. 

 Of any form of advertising, PPC carries the least risk since success metrics are available almost immediately. Even so, there is a temptation to minimize all risk.

Even though the following 5 tips are all low-risk & high reward, they are often considered too risky by weak-kneed advertisers. 

 These are the exact risks you should be taking if you want to strengthen your profits.

1. Be liberal with your daily budget

Are you making direct sales through PPC advertising? If so, what use do you have for a campaign budget? Keywords often have seasonal and/or news-related spikes in traffic. When setting a conservative budget, you risk missing out on the revenue this additional traffic would generate.

The potential sales loss of a constrained budget poses more risk to your bottom line than some crazy clicking event of unqualified traffic. You can always scale back your bids if the traffic decreases in profitability. An unexpected surge in profitable traffic, on the other hand, is usually hidden in historical reports of lost impression share. Your budget should probably be at least double your average daily spend.

2. Play in the same pool with your SEO

There's enough traffic for both PPC and organic listings. Some advertisers are afraid they'll waste money if they bid on keywords that rank well organically -- such as their brand or product name. Yes, you will probabably pay for some clicks where the visitor would have otherwise clicked on your free listing. But you will also get some additional clicks where the visitor would have clicked on a competitor ad or another organic listing.

The result of bidding on your organic keywords is typically a net profit. If you aren't convinced, do your own test. Bid on your organic keywords for a week. See how many additional visitors came to your site from those PPC keywords versus the organic counterparts. Take the PPC cost for these keywords and divide it by additional conversions you got. If this is still an acceptable CPA on the marginal sales, continue the practice.

3. Keep optimizing your sales funnel

A profitable sales funnel should be considered a starting point, not finish line. Yes, that new ad might decrease your CTR. Yes, that new landing page might decrease your conversion rate. Yet if you are consistently keeping the good and throwing out the bad, you will ratchet up your success to increased profitability. Don't be afraid to test new things.

4. Bid on competitor brand & product keywords

It may seem obvious, but the word "competitor" comes from the word "compete." This is the same terminology used in professional sports. The goal of the competition is to win (get the sale). Yes, sometimes the opposing team gets mad when you make an interception. The ball was, in fact, meant for their own team. Yet there is no disputing that interceptions are perfectly within the rules of the game.

Don't be a PPC pansy. This is a real life competition and the strong survive. I'm not advocating breaking the rules or doing anything unethical such as putting on the other team's jersey... that would be a trademark issue. But if your ad wins fair & square for a competitor keyword, you've done well.

5. Be willing to delay your profit until the backend

On highly competitive search terms, you may be tempted to wonder how your competitors can afford those bids and still make a profit. Well, most of them can't -- at least not on the front-end sale. In fact, many advertisers plan to actually lose money on the initial sale. How can they afford this? They've got a profitable backend sale funnel.

If you can cover your marketing costs with your frontend sales, you are doing well. Now that you have a relationship with these customers, additional sales over the next days, weeks, and months are essentially free money (after your fulfillment costs, of course). Build up your backend product offering. This is where the big profits are made.

When your customer value increases, you can afford to increase your bids to fuel the additional traffic & sales.

We've got a few additional strategies to make your AdWords advertising drive more response & profit. Our CEO, Timothy Seward, has prepared his top 3 "undercover" tactics that we consider the cream of the crop. (Hint: there's a large-screen eight minute AdWords training video when you opt-in).

Get the three free AdWords strategies here!

If you’re at all interested in application development, you have to listen / watch to the FLOSS interview with David Heinemeier Hansson as he speaks passionately about learning to program, developing basecamp, working with 37Signals and also producing the Ruby On Rails framework.

One word of caution is that this episode unlike others has a bit of Adult language as David speaks out passionately about his craft.

Google is always on the march to improve it’s position in all areas of content. Video is one of those areas that continues to grow in popularity. Recently Google added HD content to YouTube and they can certainly benefit from stronger video compression. The On2 acquisition will help them obtain that technology and bring even better video services to the general public.

I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of this new $106 million dollar deal!

Read More: Google to Acquire On2 Technologies

Tempers are rising around the apparent suicide of an employee at an Apple supplier in China two weeks ago: it’s thought he jumped to his death after an iPhone prototype was stolen from the company.

The New York Times reports that 25-year-old Sun Danyong, an employee in the logistics department of Foxconn Technology, jumped from his 12th floor apartment after allegedly being interrogated and beaten by the company’s security team. FoxConn received 16 prototypes in early July, one of which went missing.

The finger of blame appears to be pointed at Foxconn’s treatment of the worker, but questions are also being raised over the extreme pressures on suppliers to maintain the secrecy of Apple’s planned launches (the upcoming Apple tablet being the latest example). Worker rights groups, meanwhile, implore Apple to stamp out abuse in the Chinese factories that build its devices.

While Foxconn denies allegations of beating Sun Danyong, his family received $44,000 in compensation; his girlfriend, who received an anguished text message on the night of his death, received a free Apple laptop.

When I learned of the update, I (mistakenly) assumed that the policy referred to active ads only. Lately, I have started finding out that my initial assumption was very wrong.

I'm in the process of working with a client who has dozens of different domains in their AdWords account to migrate those domains down to one central domain. To implement the migration, I started pausing their ads to preserve the history, duplicating those ads, and changing the display and destination URLs before taking them active.

I posted phase one of our domain migration yesterday, and all of my new ads were immediately disapproved.

Let me reiterate that all of the active ads in each ad group were sending traffic to one domain. However, there were multiple paused ads in the same ad group sending traffic to old, outdated URLs.

All active ads in all of the affected ad groups were disapproved, because essentially, the ad group was violating the updated URL policy for containing ads, active or paused, that sent traffic to multiple domains.

I checked with my Google rep on this, and he let me know that from now on, all ads in ad groups with more than one domain will get disapproved. Further, he said the best thing to do would be to delete any non-conforming urls.

Another way to get your ads running again would be to pause entire ad groups where you're testing ads with new domains, duplicate the keywords and negatives, and add your new ads to a new ad group. Neither way is ideal, because you're not keeping the established history that your ads and ad groups have built up.

I found the disapproved ads because I was checking back on my implementation. Unfortunately, there is no notification when ads are disapproved, so we just have to be on the lookout for it. You can use the filters feature in the new AdWords UI to find all ads that have been disapproved at once.

If you've tested multiple domains in the past, it might be a good idea to check your account to make sure your ads are still running!