How to Get a Good Deal on a Hard Drive
June 14, 2007
How to Get a Good Deal on a Hard Drive
by: Mac McClellan
Computer equipment is one of the hardest things to buy if you are not at least somewhat competent in the market. Many people are willing to take advantage of someone who doesn’t have a clue what he or she need. Take the MarketPro Shows for example. Many different vendors frequent the shows in order to sell their wares, and on one occasion, this writer thought the Motherboard had gone on my computer, but I was also interested in upgrading my hard drive as well. One vendor quoted a price of approximately $350 to replace the Mother Board and include a hard drive of 2 Gb It seemed like a good deal at the time until shopping in various computer stores showed that a whole system with an 80 Gb hard drive could be purchased for not much more than that. Interesting thought, isn’t it? Why is a person going to pay $350 to get 2 Gb of hard drive memory when for approximately $599, one can get a tower with an 80 Gb hard drive, 512K of RAM, a keyboard, and sometimes even a printer depending on the sale that is being offered at the time.
Ten Unobvious Ideas To Pull Visitors to Your Real Estate Agent Web Site
June 13, 2007
The number one key to getting business in the real estatehome sales market is to be people’s first contact. TheNational Association of Realtor’s last three surveys between1999 to 2003 said 66% of buyers stayed with the first realestate agent they contacted yet only 6% of this number camefrom web sites. This number is rising as people become morecomfortable finding their information on the Internet.There are three ways to show your uniqueness on theInternet: words, pictures, and interactive activities.
What is pulling prospects to visit your web site? You havethe obvious — strategic alliances with lenders, title reps,home inspectors, appraisers and attorneys. Here are tenideas that aren’t obvious.
1. Use balloons besides at the open house. Print an actionslogan on the balloon along with your URL — web siteaddress. An action slogan is very important, otherwisepeople will not know what the URL is for. When attending anoutdoor event, like a fair, carry them, place them on yourchildren’s arm so you can find them, and hand them out.Take the balloons to the kids baseball games or othersports. If traveling with balloons is difficult, call theshow’s event office and find out if there is going to besomeone there with the equipment for balloon blowing. Whenyou get there, give them a few dollars to blow a few up foryou. You can order all sizes and balloon shapes:http://www.gopromos.com/store/category.asp?CL=101A1276A1292
eMarketing Sabotage - Top 10 Steps To Kill Your Search Engine Marketing Practices
June 12, 2007
We at America Web Works find ourselves amazed at the amount of effort people spend trying to fool or manipulate their positioning in search engines. People seem to focus on the shortcuts to success and NOT on their Web site or the true value their content provides to their prospects.
In the spirit of educating marketers about best practices, we present this list of ten things you can do to sabotage your search engine marketing project in a “New York” second.
1. Invisible (Ghost) Text
You have kept a good secret! Your visitors might not have noticed, but all search engine crawlers have been trained to be on the lookout for this obvious technique, last fashionable circa 1997. The search engines may very well purge all your pages from their index due to deceptive practices.
And, if you are feeling really frisky, you can make this technique even more effective if the invisible text has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the page it sits within.
2. Frames Usage
Getting A Solid Internet Marketing Foundation
June 11, 2007
As we look at building our online businesses, many of us acknowledge, early-on, that we don’t know it all. Those who don’t, are almost certain to fail because they often attempt to apply techniques that simply don’t work online - to their online businesses. The quickest way to online success is to model those who are already successful at what you want to do. It’ s that simple.
Of all of the chores involved in building your business, marketing is usually the most critical. Poor marketing is also the reason so many businesses fail. You need to learn to properly market your business or hire someone else to do it for you. I’ll give you a few recommended resources to help jumpstart your education in a minute.
A second extremely important skill that goes hand-in-hand with marketing is generating publicity. You can have the greatest product in the world, but if no one knows about it, it may as well not exist. If no one knows about you, then you won’t make any sales!
Let’s look at generating publicity first…
The Power Of Online Auctions As Traffic Generators
June 10, 2007
The Power Of Online Auctions As Traffic Generators
by: Brian Sakamoto
There are thousands of online auctions on the internet. People love them because they can usually find great bargains. If you have an online business, you can use them to increase traffic to your web site.
You could create an electronic book or report that relates to your online business, then auction it off at an online auction. You could increase traffic to your web site by placing an ad for your web site in the electronic publication. Some online auctions will even allow you to link directly to your web site.
Electronic publications won’t cost you anything to ship. You could send them via e-mail or allow people to download the electronic publication from your web site. You can also auction them off for a lower price. When they visit your web site you could offer them a higher priced product.
You could also get traffic from people who don’t bid or don’t get the winning bid. You could direct them to your web site to download and read a free sample of the ebook or report before they bid. If they want more detailed information about the ebook or report, you could also direct them to your web site.
What Hosting Companies Dont Tell You, Could Hurt You?
June 9, 2007
Did you know that hosting companies overcrowd their servers despite all the issues caused by servers running hundreds of accounts? Are you aware of what happens if your website is hosted on a server that’s overcrowded? You’re probably thinking to yourself, "what do you mean overcrowd their servers?" Overcrowded servers mean big money for your hosting company, but also big problems for your website.
Hosting companies are willing to sacrifice the success of your website in order to build their own profit. The more accounts hosted on a server, the more revenue they can generate. Greed takes priority to a hosting company. Sure the plans they offer sound good, but do you really know what’s going on behind the scenes? After they take your hard-earned money, what happens next? Unless you’re a system administrator or network engineer, you probably have no idea how your website functions on an overcrowded server.
If you’ve reviewed or researched hosting companies you will notice they all look the same. They offer similar packages, claim they provide support, and appear to have a network worthy of the highest caliber websites. But what they don’t tell you is the type of disk space or bandwidth your website will be using. They don’t mention possible security risks. And they especially don’t mention how many accounts they create per server.
Sales Versus Customer Oriented Websites
June 9, 2007
Should Generating Revenue From A Website Be The Prime Motivator?
A pure sales site has only one purpose… to generate as much revenue as possible at any cost. In other words, your experience–good or bad–is inconsequential to the ultimate goal of the site and may well sacrifice customer satisfaction to make a sale.
How many times have you gone back to buy from a website you’ve had a lousy experience with? My guess is not very often. I know I don’t. How many times have you gone back to buy from a website you’ve had a great experience with? What was the difference between the two experiences? Do you think the website you had the great experience with was a customer oriented site? And, might it be the other website you had the bad experience with was a sales oriented website?
A business can’t survive very long if it’s prime motivator is purely focused on sales and revenue. Sure, it may last for a while, but not long-term.
As webmasters and marketers, we must strive to create a long-term business relationship between ourselves and our customers so that they will continue to buy from us for as long as they have a need or desire for our products or services.
Converting Web Site Home Buyers to First Contacts
June 8, 2007
According the National Association of Realtors(R) (”NAR”) surveys completed between 1999 and 2003, 66 percent of all home buyers stick with the first real estate agent they contact. The number one reason stated was that buyers perceive all real estate agents to be the same. This means that two out of every three contacts that you receive when you are the first contact, you are most likely to get the business.
There are two major items that get in the way of this not happening. First, if you don’t show them how you are different from the other realtors and if you don’t have a formalized conversion system.
The NAR news is good news if you are the first contact. But what do you do if you aren’t? What can you do is a more accurately way of asking? Agents know there is a wide difference between experience and competence. This doesn’t really matter though, agents main target isn’t selling to other agents.
The key is to create a marketing process that pushes you in front of the line of other realtors.
How to Explode Your Database Marketing And Back-End Sales To Increase Your Bottom Line Profits
June 7, 2007
Set up multiple simultaneous marketing campaigns with database marketing automation email software that get results exploding your internet business marketing while growing multiple optin lists, prospects consistent follow, increasing Back End Sales, and bottom line profits.
When you don’t follow up your prospects or customers with additional information, you are allowing valuable customers and prospects to skip from your grasp, go to your competitors, and satisfied their needs, at the expense of what should have been you’re your profits.
Those are customers that may have been very interested in your products, but simply lost your information, or were too busy when your information was sent. Some customers will purposely wait to see if you find them important enough to follow-up their inquiries. When they don’t receive a follow up message, they take their business elsewhere.
I don’t know about you, but just about everyone doing business on the Net been in that position, because of failing to automate their follow up. Though it’s been found that customer follow up at preset times with pre-written messages, dramatically increases sales.
The exception, those who automated their marketing campaigns, their list and database management, and automated their follow up with personalized email marketing software; and, they dramatically increased their back end sales and bottom line profits.
Budget Web Hosting - Are They All Created Equal?
June 6, 2007
Choosing a budget web hosting company can be overwhelming. In fact, choosing any web hosting company can be a challenge due, in large part, to the fact that there are so many of them. Do a search for “web hosting” with the quotes around the keywords on Google, and it’ll return over 5 million documents! That doesn’t mean there are 5 million web hosting providers but there very well could be at least 1 million! That’s a lot of web hosts. How can you choose one that meets your need?
What is Budget web hosting anyway?
Budget web hosting is generally defined as any hosting service that is below $10 per month. The budget comes from the low price. Now, most companies in the budget web hosting category only offer one year plans. Most budget web hosting companies however, will quote you the monthly fee you would pay if you divided the annual fee by 12 months. Keep that in mind when you are comparing one company with another. The other thing to look out for is the setup fee. Do they charge you a setup fee to get started?
Evaluate your general impression of the company.
