According to a survey of 200 IT professionals, two thirds of IT projects fail because the brief changes after the project has begun. Furthermore, two thirds of respondents say they have been involved in IT projects which have not been as successful as they could have been.

Despite IT budgets continuing to be constrained, meaning that when IT projects are given the go-ahead it is even more imperative that they are made a success, still many are failing to set a sufficient brief to avoid failure.

Statistics from the British Computer Society show that between 1998 and 2005 across the European Union only one in eight IT projects were considered successful. The rest were cancelled, suffered significant cost or time overruns.

Thomas Coles, managing director of MSM Software says, ‘Software projects are resource intensive and complex, and have a reputation for being both expensive and risky. This reputation is all too often validated by an abundance of projects failing. Yet, the failure of an IT project due to a changing brief is completely avoidable.’

Coles believes that the success rate of IT projects would be significantly increased if businesses and suppliers worked more closely, and transparently, at the discovery phase of a project.

‘By doing this, long-term business processes can be established and technology designed specifically to support the individual business requirements. Collaborative working in this way is fundamental as the success or failure of a software project can also determine the future (or failure) of a business,’ he adds.

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SEO Positive is expanding once again as the company welcomes a brand new sales manager to its business development division today.

The SEO agency, which is based in Essex, would like to welcome Paul Taylor to the team. Paul has extensive experience within this particular area and is looking forward to bringing his knowledge and skills to a sales department that has grown from strength to strength in recent times.

As expected, SEO Positive has had yet another month of record sales, which has been helped by the recent managerial restructuring within the firm. Staff are now able to work more efficiently thanks to minor tweaks to the existing sales processes.

Ben Austin, the Managing Director at the company, is excited for the expansion and believes that adding to his strong sales department will lead to unprecedented success in the coming months.

We believe were ready for rapid growth, Ben announces. Our business is achieving new great things because were constantly adapting to the industry its second nature for us to adjust our services to suit demand and we believe our sales team really communicate this commitment to new clients.

Since the launch of the companys re-designed corporate website in early January, SEO Positive has been pushing an aggressive in-house marketing campaign to promote its new range of services, which include cutting edge web usability and SEO copywriting packages alongside more advanced SEO options.

SEO Positive was established in 2007 in Chelmsford, Essex with the aim of bringing effective yet affordable online marketing services to companies from all industries and backgrounds. The company offers a huge range of services including search engine optimisation, Pay Per Click management, social media marketing and online reputation control.

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Often the size and sector of business isn’t the factor that holds it back. More often that not, it’s a case of changing the attitude and approach. Just look at Apple, which turned its fortunes around in the midst of the dot.com boom. Whatever your business, it is possible to buck the trend and take control in 2012. By starting the year with the right approach to sales and by implementing the best techniques, the opportunities to win business are endless.

Here are some tips for winning new business in 2012:

• Putting together a prospecting plan. It’s imperative to get the foundation right, to define the sales focus and agree best practice – as well as breaking the large annual sales down into manageable bite sized pieces. Gear the plan towards getting in front of your ideal prospect – it’s a lot easier to go out to find clients when you know exactly what you’re looking for.

• Learn from lessons. Debriefing is imperative, whether a sale goes well or not. If it goes well, analyse why so that lessons can be implemented across the board. If it doesn’t go well, identify what could have done better so that you can practice it thoroughly.

• The ‘people element’. If you sound, smell, look and act like every other salesperson your prospect has ever seen, this is how you will be treated. So from the beginning, it’s imperative you personalise the whole experience. Focus every meeting on listening to them and their problems. Talking about you and the feature benefits of your product is a one-way track to protracted sales, stalling and objections and ultimately, failure. The number of sales you make is proportional to the amount of information you gather, not the information you give.

• Be picky. Unfortunately some people cannot be pleased – and to boot they can take up huge amounts of your time and resources and then pay you very little in return. Sometimes, it pays to be discerning. In the business world, there will always be time wasters; the trick is to spot them early and not let them waste your most valuable resource – your time.

• Relax and enjoy. The sales meeting or the sales calls do not have to be a gritty, hard-won, exhausting experience. You may need to be gutsy for a few seconds at a time, but learn to relax and bring some humour into things. If you enjoy what you are doing, it comes across in your speech, body language and your whole persona.

Believe in your business and your product. We are all human at the end of the day and the whole process is infinitely more enjoyable when the buyer and the seller treat each other with equal business stature. The best sales strategy has a screening process whereby the fit between your prospect’s needs and your solution is a ‘win win’ for both parties.

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Research from ELAS suggests that the combination of wintry weather, commuting to and from work in the dark, Christmas credit card bills and a long wait until the next holiday makes Monday, 6 February the day Britons are most likely to call in sick.

However, according to the organisation the number of days workers award themselves for a bout of fake illness is falling as the economy falters, with most staff now only daring to spend one day away from the office.

Peter Mooney, head of employment law at ELAS says, ’We have been keeping a close eye on absenteeism for years, and there has always been a sizeable number of skivers who, having phoned in sick once, award themselves a second day to make their illness look more believable.

‘But in the past 12 months, a combination of the stuttering economy and managers finally grasping the nettle over absenteeism has seen that particular trend end.’

While the number of people suspected of throwing sickies continues to grow steadily, the length of time they’re off work is falling fast, adds Mooney.

Based on its monitoring of absenteeism nationwide, the company estimates that as many as 400,000 UK workers will ‘throw a sickie’ on Monday.

Mooney continues, ‘You might expect that those people lucky enough to have a job in the current economy might do everything within their power to keep it, but our research has found that that’s not the case.

‘If anything, the constant doom and gloom about struggling businesses and public sector cuts seems to make people more likely to treat themselves when they can – and an unofficial day off work is one perk many people feel they’re entitled to from time to time.’

Latest News | small business news and advice

Amazon.com, which is moving in multiple directions vis a vis local, has agreed to buy TeachStreet, the service for matching teachers and students. Amazon’s interest appears to be less in TeachStreet than in the underlying ecommerce platform for SMBs. The platform already is being used by The Washington Post for its Service Alley SMB leads service.

TeachStreet had raised just over $ 3 million from Madrona Venture Group, Bezos Expeditions, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and others. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has obviously been involved form the beginning of the company.

The connection between Amazon and Teach Street is partially personal. TeachStreet founder David Schappell previously worked for Bezos from 1998-2004. GeekWire reports that the entire TeachStrret team has already joined Amazon Local, which is now in 40 markets. It reports that TeachStreet itself is being shut down.

Schappell also told Geekwire that he’s pumped to be “working on things that millions of people use.” At TeachStreet, he said they had been “pushing the peanut up the hill for a long time.”

In 2008, Schappell told BIA/Kelsey that he eventually expected TeachStreet evolve into all kinds of expert services. “We’re helping to find local experts near you,” he says. Categories could include a full range of advisory services, such as career counseling, or kitchen remodeling. “You might need someone to guide you through some of the steps. Or you may want some help negotiating to buy a car.”

Local Media Watch – BIA/Kelsey

Best answer:

Answer by Jane E
If you want to know if the company is building links, you can check for yourself by using yahoo site explorer to see the links pointing back to your site. Bear in mind that some links will take a while to get indexed, so will not appear.

The second way you can see is to get them to send you a spreadsheet with all the links they have built, and you can go and check them to see if they exist.

Also, are they building links to increase ranking for a particular keyword? If so, you can use rank-tracking software to see how your site is positioned in google for a particular keyword, a package such as this http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/ enables you to see how your site´s position in google varies over time for multiple keywords.

Finally, I recommend you contract a local service that can give you references for previous work done, that you can go and speak to in person. It will be more expensive, but you will get results, and you can go to their office and shout at them if they do it wrong. Plus, they will be able to explain to you exactly what they are doing, and set some decent metrics for your seo campaign.

SEO is a complicated and confusing business, and there are a lot of sharks out there, so if you take your business seriously you should invest the time and resources to find a good agency.

Give your answer to this question below!

You thought they were gone. Those pesky, annoying, experience-destroying things. Yes, I’m talking about iFrames.

Popular a decade ago, they’ve made a few appearances in the past several years. The once-popular Digg, for instance, turned to them to implement its DiggBar.

But now they’re back.

As detailed by Brent Csutoras on Search Engine Land, the company responsible for bringing them back is popular social discovery service StumbleUpon:

…on all content pages within StumbleUpon, you have a single button saying ‘Stumble This’, which when clicked takes you to an iframed version of the content.

Not only are they now iframing all content from the site, but if your logged into StumbleUpon, they are not even offering a way to remove the iframed toolbar, leaving you in stuck in the iframed version of the site. If you are not logged in, then there is an option to click X in the right side of the toolbar to remove it.

Csutoras observes that there hasn’t yet been an uproar about StumbleUpon’s change, despite the fact that iFrames have caused so much angst before. In the case of the DiggBar, to placate angry users, Digg founder Kevin Rose was forced to backtrack and admitted, “Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet.”

Is the lack of widespread anger here an indication that StumbleUpon’s relevance has declined? Perhaps, even though unique visitors are apparently way up year-over-year. But regardless, there are more than a few publishers who still get a meaningful amount of traffic and link love from StumbleUpon. And they can’t be too happy about this.

At the end of the day, you have to hand it to the iFrame. While it does have uses, it has arguably been one of the most abused ‘features’ of HTML. But you can count on companies ignoring internet history and using it in the worst ways imaginable.

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Best answer:

Answer by makersonline
It won’t hurt. In particular ‘Provide text alternatives for any non-text content’ will help as this will enable search engines to index non-text based content such as images and Flash which will help with search engine optimisation. Generally, these guidelines are geared towards helping people not search spiders and so largely they are irrelevant – but if the time is taken to ensure that the content is accessible by all people, then it’s very likely that it will be accessible by search engines too.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!