Internet Marketing: Are You Penny Wise And Dollar Foolish?
January 15, 2008
It never ceases to amaze me how many people set-up a web site, without any type of plan or clue about how to promote it–how to write a sales letter–how to write an ad–nothing! Fact is, nowadays, anyone can have a web site. But once you get one, then what? How are you going to make money with it?
If you don’t know what you’re doing, then do the smart thing and consult with an Internet marketing expert.
What? You say you can’t afford an Internet marketing expert? Well, believe it or not, there are other ways you can obtain the services of an Internet marketing expert, besides paying an expensive flat rate or hourly fee.
Did it ever occur to you that you can obtain the services of an Internet marketing expert by simply buying his products? So, why should you buy his products?
Because Internet marketing experts are masters at marketing. They’ve already arrived at the place you want to get to. They also derive great pleasure from sharing their incredible knowledge. They have the answers to every single one of your questions. All you have to do is ask them.
Without Conversion Rates You Don’t Know If You’re Mickey Mouse Or Mickey Mantle
January 14, 2008
I couldn’t agree more with the headline of this article and it’s one I’m afraid I can’t take credit for. I found this line in Paco Underhill’s book, Why We Buy – The Science Of Shopping, and found myself comparing many of the things he has measured in the retail world to the tests I’ve done with online, visitor-based activity. The conversion rate on a website is easy to measure. Unfortunately, businesses too busy concentrating on their bottom line most often overlook it. The point of this article is to define what a conversion rate is and show you how you can begin to start improving your own website’s conversion rate and therefore your bottom line. At the same time, I will relate my observations to Paco’s on offline retailing.
In Cyberspace No-One Can Hear You Shop
Do Authors Need a Website?
January 13, 2008
"I am a writer, not a business-person. I don’t want to have anything at all to do with business," you might think. But how mistaken you can be. As a writer of two books, I discovered the amazing opportunities available to someone who has a website.
What are these opportunities? Here are just seven of them:
1. An online presence shows that you take your work very seriously and are prepared to market to the world!
2. One of the most useful things a website can do is that it can save you time and money for postage, envelopes, paper and photocopying. In today’s internet world, more and more publishers are willing to consider submissions using the internet.
3. The moment you have a website up, you have the amazing opportunity to publish your own articles. How may times I have heard people say, "I don’t mind not getting paid. I just wanted the publicity!" What better way to get free publicity than to publish articles on the internet?
4. This one is particularly for those who are interested in writing for publications online ? having your own website shows that you have the ‘know-how’, where the internet world is concerned.
What A Newbie Webmaster Should Know About Domain Registration
January 12, 2008
What A Newbie Webmaster Should Know About Domain Registration
by: Dana Goldberg
Domain Name Registration
Affordable domain name registration was extremely difficult to be found in the past. In fact, all domain name registrars used to charge a flat fee of $70 which was to register your domain name for two years.
Now there has been an explosion of companies that offer affordable domain name registration. Some will register your domain name for less than $15 a year, especially if you are registering multiple sites for a number of years at the same time. Be aware that you may have to have a number of variations of your ideal site name as you often find that the more popular terms have already been registered or reserved for future use.
If you are serious about your online presence then it is essential to consider a bulk domain name registration. The most obvious benefit of having a bulk domain name registration is that your site will appear higher on the search engines. That may be incentive enough but registering as a .net, .biz, .co.uk, .la or other domain names too has a far greater benefit which many people do not think about.
Choosing A Domain Name
January 11, 2008
–About Domain Names–
Choosing a domain name for your web site is a major step for any individual or organization. You need domain names that are sticky, short, meaningful, easy to remember and at the roll of your tongue!
It is very easy to choose a domain name but difficult to find a good name, simply because of the fact that most of the good domain names are taken up by organisations. These domain name organisations take up hundreds of thousands of domain names and treat them as investments. It is not as easy to choose a good domain name. Sometimes, even web professionals spend hours at their computers to find good domain names!
Domain name registrations are cheap to maintain and subscriptions typically last a year. The subscriptions are renewable and paid to registrars by the design companies.
The most common domain names end with .com, .net, etc. Country specific domain names will end with com.au, co.uk, .co.jp, etc. For organisations, domain names will end with .org or be country specific- .org.au, .org.uk, etc.
Not sure about domain names and web sites? Seek web professional help.
Web Hosting: Which Is The Host With The Most?
January 10, 2008
So you want to publish a web site do you? Welcome to the club. These days it seems that almost everyone has a web site of some kind, and thousands more continue to be launched every day. It’s challenging enough to design a site and fill it with interesting content, but when all is said and done another challenge still remains - where to host it?
A popular choice for newbie webmasters, and even experienced ones, is to secure a free hosting plan with a company such as Yahoo! Geocities, Tripod or Angelfire. While these are easy to setup and free of charge, they do have limitations. Most free hosts don’t offer all the nice features that paid hosts do such as FTP access, CGI-BIN, or your own personal domain name. Instead you’re stuck with minimal features and a generic URL such as www.freewebhost.com/marcswebsite. This somewhat limits your web site’s potential. Most free hosts also require you to run banners or pop-up ads on your web site to make it worth their while - these banners and pop-ups can obstruct the view of your web page and ultimately annoy visitors and drive them away. Lastly, most free hosts have a daily bandwidth limit that is very small, so if you do get a lot of traffic you’ll most likely exceed the allotted bandwidth and your site will be temporarily disabled. Overall I would recommend free web hosts for people that are new to web hosting and want to get a feel for how it works. I’d also recommend them for web sites that are personal in nature (such as an online journal) as well as web sites that don’t plan to generate any revenue. Free web hosts are a great stepping stone to paid web hosts - I myself starting building web sites 4 years ago using free hosts, and today I run several high traffic web sites that are hosted on paid web hosting plans.
Whats Wrong With My Website?
January 10, 2008
I ask myself that question about once a month.My website looks fine to me, but what are otherpeople seeing? And what are the Search Enginesseeing? Here’s a checklist of 10 ways to optimizeyour website for peak performance:
1. Browser Compatibility
The first thing is to look at your website throughother people’s browsers. I do this regularly and I’vesometimes been shocked at what I saw!
ANYBROWSERhttp://www.anybrowser.com
2. Broken Links
About 5% of all links on the Internet are broken. Asite that contains broken links gives a bad impressionto visitors and is a frequent cause of lost sales.Also, the major Search Engines and Directories will notlist your page if it contains any broken links or missingimages.
Here are some free link validators:
LINK SCANhttp://www.elsop.com/linkscan/quickcheck.html
NET MECHANIChttp://www.netmechanic.com/maintain.htm
WEBSITE GARAGE DEADLINK CHECKhttp://websitegarage.netscape.com/O=wsg/tuneup_plus/index.html
3. Web Safe Colors
Are the colors on your web site displaying properly onother people’s browsers? You may have a beautifulshade of lilac on your index page but it could lookvery strange on someone else’s computer.
There are only 216 colors that you can safely use onthe Web. These colors display solid and consistent onany computer monitor or web browser that is able todisplay at least 8-bit color.
Why You Should Learn HTML
January 9, 2008
Do you have a website or are you planning on creating a website in the near future? You owe it to yourself to at least learn some basic HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language). Even if someone else is creating and maintaining your website there are some basics you should know. What if that person is not available and you need to add or make changes to your website? I’ve always believed if you have a business, computer, website, or whatever, you need to know how it works. Don’t depend on someone else. Besides why pay someone else when you can do it yourself free of charge.
In this article I will explain some basic HTML formats for you. Believe me it will come in handy at one point or another. I, myself, have only learned some of the basics and I have been able to add, change, and make corrections on my own website by myself.
The Long Sales Letter: Should You Use it In Your Advertising?
January 8, 2008
If you’re a web marketer and you’ve done your homework, you’ve probably come across the Long Sales Letter in your internet travels. Top web marketing experts like Yanik Silver, “The Copy Doctor” Michel Fortin and countless others use it to pitch their comprehensive instructional kits. You may have even made a purchase based on what you read in one of these letters.
Powerfully persuasive, the Long Sales Letter employs carefully targeted copy to draw the reader in, emotionally identify with them, create a need for the product, and incite them to make an immediate purchase. The Long Sales letter, in all its verbosity and sensationalism, gleams with promise. It appears the surefire way to make sales come pouring in.
But is it? Should you fork your hard-earned cash over to a copywriter who will create a hypnotic and riveting sales letter that goes on for pages and pages hyping your product? Should you grab for your credit card and buy one of those comprehensive teaching packets that tells you everything you ever wanted to know about writing a Long Sales Letter yourself?
Answers often come in the form of questions. Here are some questions I typically ask my clients:
Toshiba Satellite Laptops - Which One?
January 7, 2008
Toshiba Satellite Laptops - Which One?
by: J Zuniga
The first decision you have to make is whether or not you will buy a satellite laptop or a traditional one. Once you have decided to purchase a satellite laptop, then you have to decide which one.
You can purchase Toshiba satellite laptops for as little as $600 and as much as $2,500. There are several models to choose from including the A100 Series, A105 Series, L20 Series, M45, M50, M55, M60, and M65 Series, and R10 and R15 Series. Each of them is unique in their own respect. Once you clearly document what you will use your new computer for, then, and only then should you begin shopping through the different models.
Most home users can get by with the M50, the beginning price Toshiba. It starts at $799.20 and goes up from there if you decide to further customize. However it does not come with Microsoft Office software. It’s inexpensive partly because it comes with an Intel Celeron M Processor 370 and 40 GB of HD. The rest of the M series is more costly. The M45 starts at $949.00, but only has the battery life of an hour. The M55 starts at $1,149.99 and is getting vastly better reviews if you look around, the M60 starts at $1034.10, and the M65 starts at $1,299.99.
