Happy New Year!

1st Place Design successfully launched our new site on the 1st of January (http://www.1stplacedesign.com.au). To celebrate this launch, we are running a promotion for the month of January. Any new sign ups for our SearchCommander or AdCommander packages are eligible for a 1 month credit. To claim this extra month, please send me an email with the URL you have signed up.

As you will see on the new site, we are now offering our service on a retail level as well as wholesale. We are going to be giving a lot more focus to sales this year. By working at the retail level, we will be able to identify the best possible strategies for selling our service. Our resellers may copy and use any information on our web site to sell our packages. The 'Results' section of our site contains case studies, testimonials and top positions, all of which are invalueable for selling our service.

We've also relocated our data servers, so our resellers should notice an increase in speed when using the online management portal.

If you have any questions or ideas on how we can further improve our service, please let me know.

Adwords Reseller Qualification Update

1st Place Design is now a Qualified Adwords Company. We currently manage around US$500,000 per year of Adwords accounts, allowing us to meet the requirements of Google in becoming a company.

Google have advised us today about whether resellers are able to use the Qualified Adwords Company logo on your site and they have said it will be OK however it does have to link to the 1st Place Design profile page. Resellers can copy the logo image and link from the 1st Place Design web site if you would like to do this.

New Features Now Available

It's been a very exciting time at 1st Place Design over the last month. So far, October has been our biggest sign up month in the last year. With the influx of many new sites, our development team has been working very hard to make our system better for everyone.

There are a number of new features now available on our system:

View Invoices
You can now log into your portal and view your invoice history. The link to view your invoices appears at the top of your 'My Account' page, which is the first page that is loaded after you have logged in.

BCC Option
If we are dealing directly with your clients, you can now choose to have a copy of all emails sent to your email address. To update this option, visit your 'My Account' page and click the 'Update' button. You can then set 'Client BCC's' to 'Yes'.

Request Quote Default
To date, our SEO Assessments have been providing your clients with a fixed quote for implementing SEO changes on their web sites. The quote has been based on the 'Design Rate' that is specified on your 'My Account' page. You can now switch this rate to be $0, which will display a 'Request a Quote' message on all future Assessments. This allows you to customise your quotes to more precisely meet your clients needs. To change your rate, click the 'Update' button.

View Adwords Reports
All Adwords Reports can now be viewed for each client on their 'Service Summary' page. To Access a client's 'Service Summary' page, navigate to the top right of the screen in the portal and select their site from the 'Client Websites' drop-down menu.

There are a lot more features on their way, including more support for sales and the retention of existing clients. If there is anything that you feel would be a good upgrade to our system, let us know.

New Search Engine Submission Service

We are now offering a search engine submission service. The new package is priced at 0.5 units and is added as an extra to any 12 month SEO program. The 2 main selling points for this package are:

1. We are doing submissions by hand for important engines that need image verification, such as Google.

2. We are generating an XML sitemap for each site submitted. The sitemap will allow the website to be crawled more easily when a search bot visits. This feature is not included with most submission services, so it is good to sell this to prospective clients.

New Monthly Reports

Our new monthly reports are now in their final stages of testing. We should be ready to start sending these out within 2 weeks.

The new reports represent a major step forwards in improving our services to reseller clients. The reports will allow for a higher level of feedback and support on a monthly basis. The reports also provide valuable tactical information on how web sites site can be expanded or improved to increase their search engine traffic.

An example report can be found here.