Casual Articles - Internet and Businesses Online

Using Rainchecks at an Electronic Store
What is a rain check?A rain check is a ticket you receive when an item is out of stock. They are placed at the courtesy counters and all you normally need to do is ask for one.How do I get a rain check?When an item is on sale it normally sells out quickly. When this happens, most people will leave the store in disappointment. But, the bargain shopper will immediately go to the courtesy counter and ask for a rain check.The person behind the counter will fill out a form which has the item # and the sales price. You can then use this form for up to 60 days after you receive it according to the FTC (Federal Trade commission)...This means, once the item is in stock, you can get it at sale price.Why do I want a rain check?As stated above, the main reason to get a rain check is to get an item for sales price even after it has run out of stock.The second and most beneficial reason to ge

ap navigation or flash navigation is one of the worst things you can do for your site ranking over the long term. Taking a hint from SEO stumble #7 above, use text based hyperlinks for your site navigation. The words appear on every page of your site and the embedded links lead to your most important pages, telling the search engines precisely what is on those pages you link to. Try to be more creative with text descriptions than "Products" or "Solutions" and use product descriptions or service names.

Silly SEO Mistake #5) Tweaking your site to rank well on MSN search (between 1% to 15% of referred search traffic) or Yahoo search (between 5% & 20% of referred search traffic) without regard to Google referred traffic numbers (between 50% & 80% of referred search traffic) because "MSN is my favorite search engine." (laughtrack)

If you are in business to make money, you shouldn

The Top 10 Reasons Why My Coaching Business is Not Slow
A mentor of mine recently commented that “coaches keep complaining business is too slow.” In response, I reported that things are the opposite for me, and that I am rarely slow. He asked me to present him with “The Top 10 Reasons Why My Coaching Business is Not Slow,” and here they are:10. I place great emphasis on business development.I get bored easily. (Typical ADD!) If I’m not continually challenging myself with developing new products, new services, new marketing techniques, and new speaking engagements, I get bored. I have a menu of products and services and I continually add to it, based on what my clients and prospects have told me they want and will buy.9. I make the most of my newsletter, which has about 2200 subscribers and grows daily.I give my subscribers valuable information, whether or not they choose to take advantage of my pay services. But I also don’t hesitate to make them aware of what I have to of

Web business owners commit some SEO & ranking gaffes, sometimes without even knowing what they've done. In the manner of a Letterman top ten list, I'd like to offer the worst in the hope that I can prevent you making the same mistakes. The laughtrack is provided by SEO's who understand the humor in these mistakes and see slapstick silliness in similar client mistakes every day.

Silly SEO Mistake #10) Removing a page from your site which gets 20,000 search engine referred visitors a day because, "It's time to change focus and concentrate on our core specialty." (laughtrack)

Capture those visitors with a "301 permanently moved" redirect and SEND them to your core specialty pages. Answer their questions about that missing page and sell them on a better solution. Removing any, even moderately trafficked page, is bad practice. You do KNOW that page gets 20,000 visitors a day because you saw it in your WebTrends report, right?

Silly SEO Mistake #9) Not paying attention to web traffic analytics data because, "I forgot my login and password" (laughtrack)

Worse, you don't have an analytics program or service because traffic data takes too long to analyze or isn't easy to understand. If you are a one man band - LEARN and USE a web traffic analytics program, as it is essential to web business success. If you have employees, make it the job of one person to study that data and understand where traffic is coming from and how it converts to business. Analytics software price is not an issue - Google Analytics is free and it integrates and tracks all PPC conversion and ROI data.

Silly SEO Mistake #8) Never searching for your own stuff in search engines for the most important generic keyword phrases representing your product or services because "We're number one in the pay-per-click-ads." (laughtrack)

We have the top position in PPC - so there's no reason to rank in organic listings. Your searches are intended to find out how you are ranking against your competitors in organic listings - which are FREE after you've paid an SEO to gain top positions. The PPC ads stop sending traffic as soon as you stop paying. Once the SEO specialist has gained top ranking for your site, you needn't pay them ongoing high fees - you are done and the traffic is now FREE. PPC can continue in areas you can't gain organic listings in or to supplement those top ranking phrases.

Silly SEO Mistake #7) Using embedded text links that read, "Click Here" and link to your most important products information or sales pages because you think people won't understand that those underlined product names are links to the products. (laughtrack)

If your site commits this silly mistake, invest the time to correct it immediately site-wide because that internal linking structure can have a significant impact on ranking for your most profitable products or services. Keywords in embedded hyperlinks are a crucial factor for ranking for your targeted keyword phrases. The same is true of external links from partners, press releases, articles and shared content linking to your site. Get those hyperlinks fixed. You aren't trying to rank well for "Click Here." Resist the temptation to use cutesy trademarked names like "x-pense trakker" instead of proper spellings unless you've committed millions to major media branding campaigns.

Silly SEO Mistake #6) Using gorgeous stylized text on image gif links as your site navigation. Heck, even ugly stylized image based text as site navigation. (laughtrack)

Gif images, especially javascript image swap navigation or flash navigation is one of the worst things you can do for your site ranking over the long term. Taking a hint from SEO stumble #7 above, use text based hyperlinks for your site navigation. The words appear on every page of your site and the embedded links lead to your most important pages, telling the search engines precisely what is on those pages you link to. Try to be more creative with text descriptions than "Products" or "Solutions" and use product descriptions or service names.

If you are in business to make money, you shouldn

Marketing: The Value of Your Own Experience
Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I enrolled in a course titled, "Services Marketing." Among other things, my professor required that we document three positive and/or negative customer experiences we had each week to share with the class.We were asked to include the following:1. Describe what happened.2. How did this make you feel?3a. What should they have done to make your experience better?or3b. What did they do that exceeded your expectations?At first, I viewed this as just another task on my "to-do" list, but soon discovered what a valuable learning exercise it turned out to be! I continue documenting my experiences in a log book (it’s a lifesaver when I want to provide concrete example that help illustrate a point) and recommend this activity to all my clients.As part of my p

use you saw it in your WebTrends report, right?

Silly SEO Mistake #9) Not paying attention to web traffic analytics data because, "I forgot my login and password" (laughtrack)

Silly SEO Mistake #6) Using gorgeous stylized text on image gif links as your site navigation. Heck, even ugly stylized image based text as site navigation. (laughtrack)

If you are in business to make money, you shouldn

Attracting Good Affiliates
Good affiliates can be hard to get. There could be any number of reasons for this, but I am going to focus on what I believe is the one major problem that prevents someone from attracting good affiliates. But first lets look at what the make up of a good affiliate may be. A good affiliate is:Hard WorkingPersistentMotivated to work their businessDoes not need constant reassuranceMakes and implements goalsOvercomes obstaclesRecognizes and takes good adviceAnd Never, Never, Never quits!The question some may ask is, "Where are these people at?" I'll tell you. Most of these people are already successful with their own affiliate program. And they are successful for the very reasons listed above. Also, they did not fall prey to the very problem that many searching for good affiliates are causing themselves. And that is advertising hype. They overlooked that and went into the marketing program wit

ber one in the pay-per-click-ads." (laughtrack)

Silly SEO Mistake #6) Using gorgeous stylized text on image gif links as your site navigation. Heck, even ugly stylized image based text as site navigation. (laughtrack)

If you are in business to make money, you shouldn

Is an eCommerce Web Site Necessary for Your Business?
An ecommerce web site is the main tool that internet-based businesses use to advertise, their products and services, to make their sales presentation, to close sales, and to process orders and payments. Every internet-based business doesn't necessarily need an ecommerce web site. Whether or not an ecommerce web site is needed really depends upon the type of business and the purpose of the website.To decide what type of website you need for your internet business, it is useful to learn about the most common types of websites and their purposes. A very basic website, sometimes called a static website, is primarily used for advertising or lead generation purposes. A static website or lead generation website is a website that aims to generate business leads and this type of website is commonly used by service companies and professionals who wish to provide an overview of their busines

e commits this silly mistake, invest the time to correct it immediately site-wide because that internal linking structure can have a significant impact on ranking for your most profitable products or services. Keywords in embedded hyperlinks are a crucial factor for ranking for your targeted keyword phrases. The same is true of external links from partners, press releases, articles and shared content linking to your site. Get those hyperlinks fixed. You aren't trying to rank well for "Click Here." Resist the temptation to use cutesy trademarked names like "x-pense trakker" instead of proper spellings unless you've committed millions to major media branding campaigns.

Silly SEO Mistake #6) Using gorgeous stylized text on image gif links as your site navigation. Heck, even ugly stylized image based text as site navigation. (laughtrack)

If you are in business to make money, you shouldn

Changes In Internet Marketing Policies Can Now Be Obtained Immediately From A Group of Specialists
A group of internet marketing specialist from a marketing company was assembled to provide one-to-one advise for internet marketers who need advise on how to improve or conduct their internet marketing activities at an affordable monthly cost. The mode of communication is via forum and monthly tele-seminar.Each of these internet marketing specialists has their own specializations in areas such as search engine optimization, copywriting, email marketing, web design, product development, pay-per-click advertising, traffic generation and affiliate programs. These areas encompass the complete spectrum of internet marketing.Why is there a need to seek advice from these specialists where knowledge can be gained from books, courses or newsletters? This is because, internet changes at lightning speed. While books have their merits, sometime it is impossible to include all the details and changes in the book. At times, when the book goes to the p

If you are in business to make money, you shouldn't be making business decisions based on your preferences over what your largest customer base chooses. Right now Google gets about 60% of all searches performed and if you are checking that web traffic analytics software from SEO blunder #9 above, you are very likely to see the pie chart for referral traffic at about 50% (most sites see 70% or higher) from Google searches.

Silly SEO Mistake #4) Having the secretary (who hates her job) provide headlines through the content management system because, "That's why I paid so much for the CMS software - so it would be dimwit-secretary-easy to manage the content." (laughtrack)

You are the dimwit if you don't have an important employee, trained in SEO basics, input new articles, white papers and product descriptions. That task will determine your search engine ranking for the life of your web site on every topic that Sally (I-hate-this-company) Secretary adds to the site. Train your content manager in SEO basics of keyword density, position on page, headline writing, internal linking structure and word order issues.

Silly SEO Mistake #3) Not having a sitemap because, "it's too much trouble to add every new page manually" or because Sally (I-Hate-My-Job) Secretary fails to tick the little "Sitemap" box in the CMS software as she adds the page with a bad title to the site. (laughtrack)

Sitemaps are not often used by visitors to most web sites, but are critical to indexing crawlers and search engine ranking of new pages. Is it possible to make a sitemap visitor friendly? Take a look at: http://www.google.com/sitemap.html

Silly SEO Mistake #2) Using the same title and description meta tags for every one of your 50,000 pages, because your company name and tag line "ACME Products are the Best of the Rest" is snazzy and you like seeing that across the top of the browser window from every page. (laughtrack)

Title and description meta tags are the most valuable real estate on any web page and should address the content of specifically what is on THAT single page. Web sites are NOT about branding, but about selling or gathering leads after someone has come to your site. Your tag line will not bring search engine traffic looking for product or service details.

Silly SEO Mistake #1) The number one SEO stumble and blunder is ... Having your website redesigned by a top web development company for a "fresh new professional look," (that slick web development sales person), changing all the filenames and site directory structure! (uproarious laughtrack) (wild applause)

Either keep old filenames and site directory folder structure in place or use "301 permanently moved" redirects to new pages from all previous pages. I did this for a small client who quickly went from reasonably well placed in the search results - to the very top of the charts for all his important search phrases. Of course, we consulted on file and directory naming conventions and SEO friendly page design options during the redesign process. One smart client.

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Direct mail advertising has three critical components. Creating a standout headline, acquiring the right list, and instigating a two-step sales process are the essential components of direct mail advertising.

In just the last 15 years the wealth of Americans increased four-fold. The number of millionaires is destined to double in the next 10 years. The most significant figure about this runaway trend is the number of millionaires under 30 years of age will triple in the next ten years. Why? It’s all about youth, technology and the right trends.

Don't get started in affiliate marketing until you read this. An honest review of what it takes to start making money with affiliate programs.

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