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Ecommerce Websites: 3 Tips To Avoid Liability For Actions of Your Online Resellers

By Chip Cooper in Featured

Recent case law confirms once again: if online agreements are presented properly to end-users, they’re legally enforceable.

This continuing trend is good news for websites that contract with registered users though SaaS Agreements, Membership Agreements, Subscription Agreements, Terms of Sale, Content License Agreements, and the like.

Why? Among other things, this means that important legal disclaimers and limitations of liability are legally enforceable.

But what about liability exposure arising out of customer contracts entered into by your resellers? Are you liable for actions of your resellers?

The Direct Revenue Case

In the case of People v. Direct Revenue, the New York Attorney General in 2008 attempted to nail Direct Revenue for its distribution of software that served pop-up advertising software on consumers’ computers.

Direct Revenue is in the advertising business. It’s software client serves pop-up advertisements to consumer’s computer screens through the Internet. Direct Revenue does not charge fees to consumers. Instead, it charges fees to the companies whose products it advertises.

It’s interesting to note that one line of attack by the New York Attorney General focused on Direct Revenue’s “click-wrapped” (where the user clicks on “I ACCEPT”) end user license agreement (EULA) and Direct Revenue’s alleged deceptive and illegal practices. The court granted Direct Revenue’s motion to dismiss the claims noting that sufficient disclosure was given in the EULA, and the required elements for an enforceable agreement were followed.

Having failed with its first line of attack, New York’s additional line of attack focused on the customer agreements of Direct Revenue’s resellers in an attempt to hold Direct Revenue liable. The result was the same as with the EULA — Direct Revenue was held not liable.

New York conceded that Direct Revenue’s resellers were independent contractors rather than agents. Generally, a principal is not liable for acts of an independent contractor due to the lack of control over how the contractor’s work is performed. In addition, the court noted that Direct Revenue’s software distribution agreement required its distributors to obtain consent of consumers consistent with the EULA and prohibited distributors from holding themselves out as agents of Direct Revenue.

New York argued that Direct Revenue should be liable because it’s servers interacted with the consumers’ computers in the software installation process. The court pointed out that participation in installation was not enough for liability in the absence of participation in deceptive conduct that induced the installation.

Finally, New York argued that Direct Revenue should be held liable for the actions of its resellers on the ground that Direct Revenue ratified the conduct of its resellers. The court ruled that mere knowledge of consumer complaints was insufficient to impose liability on Direct Revenue, especially in light of the fact that when Direct Revenue had actual knowledge of a reseller misconduct, it took steps to remedy the problem.

3 Tips To Avoid Liability For Actions of Resellers

Potential liability for acts of online resellers is a major concern of ecommerce businesses which use reseller networks.

The Direct Revenue case teaches us that ecommerce sites may not be held liable for actions of their resellers if these 3 tips are followed:

1. if you transfer anything to a user’s computer, require your resellers to obtain consent of end-users consistent with your EULA – this means consent in clear and easy-to-understand (not deceptive) terms,
2. prohibit your resellers from holding themselves out as your agents, and
3. if a reseller does engage in misconduct, take affirmative steps to deal with the situation, including termination, if warranted (particularly if the reseller’s actions tend to indicate an agency relationship).

These 3 tips won’t guarantee that you have no exposure, but they’ll go a long way to protecting you from liability for actions of your resellers.

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Chip Cooper is a leading intellectual property, software, and Internet attorney who’s advised software and online businesses nationwide for 25+ years. Visit Chip’s http://www.digicontracts.com site and download his FREE newsletter and Special Reports: “Determine Which Legal Documents Your Website Really Needs”, “Draft Your Own Privacy Policy”, and “Write Your Own Website Marketing Copy — Legally”.

How to Increase Google Page Rank

By Suzanne Morrison in Featured

Visit any internet marketing forum and you are bound to find at least a few discussions on Google page rank. But what exactly is Google Page Rank and what do you need to do to increase it?

First of all Page Rank is a value that Google assigns to a web page based on the importance of the page. It is determined by the number of incoming links to that web page and few other factors including the page rank of the page giving the link to you.

There has been discussion recently asked to the importance of page rank. However one thing to consider is this, if Google thinks page rank is important than page rank is important.

Remember Google gets over 65% of all the search traffic on the Internet every day. If you were to take 10 websites that were all optimized for the same keywords, typically you would find that the page with the highest page rank would rank higher in the search engine results than the other pages.

So what are the best ways to increase your Google Page Rank?

1. One of the first things you should do is aim to increase the numnber of backlinks that you have pointing to your website. This fact alone can increase your link popularity and ultimately increase your page rank. Combined with that is the fact that the more back links you have pointing back your website for more potential traffic you will get from it.
2. As well as increasing the quantity of links to your website you should also try to get your links on high quality web pages. This means getting your link on pages that are ranked as high or higher than yours. When you do this some of their page rank can be transferred to you which ultimately helps increase the page rank of your site.

There are lots of ways to increase your page rank, but the most common methods are posting in discussion forums that have a high page rank, article marketing, submitting your site to directories, commenting on blogs and distributing press releases.

You should also try to get some deep links in addition to the links to your home page. Deep linking means linking to internal pages on your website as opposed to always linking to your homepage.

There are many other methods that you can use to improve your page rank, but any time you spend on getting links is well spent!

It is worth noting that the page rank displayed on the Google toolbar is not up to date. Although Google is always internally updating the page rank of web pages, the toolbar page rank is only updated every few months.

You should also be aware that just because a web page has a low page rank it doesn’t mean that getting a link on that page isn’t worthwhile. The page rank could increase on the next toolbar update.

Finally, it is worth remembering that a good Google Page Rank on its own is not necessarily going to mean lots of traffic. You also want to ensure that you have chosen good keyword phrases and have optimized your website.

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Visit Suzanne Morrison’s Higher Search Engine Ranking website and download her SEO EBook for more SEO tips

Reader Rescue: How can I check keyword rankings reliably?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

A client asked me to check results on about 30 of her company’s list of search terms, (terms like breast augmentation L.A.; breast augmentation Beverly Hills; nose job L.A. etc. etc.)

Question: am I going to get reliable results by just typing those terms into a Google search box on my computer — 90 miles away from the client — and noting the SERPs?

Charles

————————————–

Hi Charles

With Google Personalized Search, Google Social Search and Universal Search thrown into the mix, these days the SERPs that one person sees may not be the same SERPs another person sees – even if they are located in the same room!

If your client wants to know specific rankings, make sure you are logged out of any Google accounts and then run the checks. It might be faster if you use an online rank checking tool – you can find these listed under the tools category at SearchEngineWiki or by running a Google search.

BUT, if I were you, I would run those search terms through keyword research tools to make sure your client is targeting the right terms in the first place. Try some of the keyword tools I mentioned in my post about how to choose keywords.

It might be that your client is targeting terms that very few people type into search engines, OR terms that are too competitive for her to achieve high rankings. Your keyword research might pinpoint better choices for her.

Good luck!

Kalena

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Strategies for Effective Twitter Marketing

By Phyllis Zimbler Miller in Featured

Effective Twitter marketing strategies are NOT one size fits all. It’s important to consider your goals when planning your own Twitter marketing strategies.

Effective Twitter marketing strategies for a mommy blogger:

Imagine you are a mommy blogger and your Twitter participation goal is to increase readers for your mommy blog. Some of the steps you would most likely take are:

• Use Twitter and third-party search functions to search for people tweeting about subjects you write about, such as childcare, home schooling, behavioral issues. You would then follow these people.
• Include links to your blog posts in your Twitter updates.
• Tweet links from other publications for articles on these topics.
• Ask questions on Twitter as to what are the most pressing questions of parents raising young children today. (Then try to answer these questions in your blog posts.)

Effective Twitter marketing strategies for a book author:

Of course many of the strategies are similar to what a mommy blogger would do on Twitter. Except in this case you want people to buy your book – not just read what you’re written and made available for free. So in addition to following people who might be interested in your topic and sharing information connected to your topic, you might:

• Tweet a link every so often to a chapter of your book.
• Offer a discount on the book price to people on Twitter.
• Do a joint project with another author in which a certain number of people get your book free when buying the other author’s book and vice versa – a certain number of people who buy your book get the other author’s book for free.

Effective Twitter marketing strategies for a business:

In your case we can assume that your goal is more than a one-time purchase. You want to create relationships with people who will hopefully be your customers/clientele over a long period of time.

For you, effective Twitter marketing strategies include many of the above steps plus a clear-cut demonstration of your knowledge base. This knowledge base can be demonstrated by:

• Responding to questions asked on Twitter in your area of expertise. You don’t have to give away the entire store, but you do need to try to answer the question and/or provide a link to where the answer can be found.
• Tweeting links to information provided by people in the same field as you are. This indicates a willingness to share while demonstrating that you are comfortable providing information from others in your same field.
• Offering special discounts to people on Twitter.

In conclusion, you cannot follow these strategies only for a couple of weeks and then give up because the strategies haven’t produced massive results. You have to sincerely commit to consistently implementing your strategies long-term if you hope to have effective Twitter marketing strategies.

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Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant. If you liked this article, you’ll love her FREE report on “How to Become a Twitter Marketing Expert” – grab your report now from www.millermosaicllc.com/free-twitter-report

7 Ways to Encourage More Blog Commenting

By Bill Wynne in Featured

Interactive blogs are the most successful and plenty of quality comments is a good indication that your blog is healthy and that it will be successful. There are many reasons why people may not make comments on your blog posts and we will cover a number of ways to make it easier or more attractive for people to leave comments on your blog. Of course this is assuming that you do have a steady flow of traffic to your blog and perhaps even a following of people that appreciate the valuable content that you share. Let’s get started on the 7 ways to get people to leave comments on your blog.

1. Ask for blog comments – Sounds too easy but a lot of bloggers don’t ask for comments and people are not sure they should comment, no one wants to be the first to comment or there is no value in commenting. We will talk more about making commenting valuable for people more in the following points. The end of your post include text or a blog comment icon to stimulate blog commenting or something else that will indicate the desire for leaving comments.

2. Attract numerous people with request – The way you request people to leave a comment will encourage or discourage people from leaving a comment. For example, people love to be a pro and let people know they have something to share because of their ego. Give them the opportunity, ask them to share and let them know when they do share that you appreciate their comments. You can try to leave text like, “What do you think?”, “Do you agree?” or “Are you for or against?” can encourage people to leave comments.

3. Dofollow blog comments – Not all links on the Internet are equal. There are “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. Dofollow links have more value to webmasters because dofollow links are backlinks that search engines will count as popularity to your site and will increase your page rank. On your blog you can change the code so that the links in the comments box are set to “dofollow”. This will attract people to leave comments to get the backlink. This will also attract spammers but if you have something like Askimet or other spam blocker you should not have any problems. The blog software will also allow you to set the criteria on comments so they will only be approved by keywords or other criteria.

4. Get the ball rolling – If you have a friend that follows your posts you can ask them to “get the ball rolling” by making the first comment on your blog post. Once people see the blog post comments they are more likely to leave more comments. Many people don’t want to be the first to leave comments on blogs.

5. Incomplete post - If you are so thorough to cover everything with your post then there really is nothing to share except to say, “Good job” or “Thanks for the post”. Leave something for someone to fill in. Develop the desire to share information and experience. Consider your post subjects as well. Some topics are not the kind that people have opinions about. Choose some hot potatoes in your niche to write about to get people commenting.

6. Blog comments hidden – Is your comments box obvious or do you have to hunt to find it. The layout of some blogs is counter-productive in this aspect and should be corrected.

7. Register to leave comments - If you force registration in order for people to leave a comment you may not get comments. People like to be free to comment and not comment to a registration. With so much spamming online people are hesitant to comment if they have to register.

Implement some or all of these ideas to increase commenting on your blog. Visitors really like to socialize and interact with each other and this will help. I wish you success.

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Read more great articles at Bill Wynne’s blog. Get useful ebooks and other gifts for free. Bill has been a successful internet marketer for over a decade. Read articles on Add Comments to Blog and Read more great articles at Bill Wynne’s blog. Get useful ebooks and other gifts for free. Bill has been a successful internet marketer for over a decade. Read articles on Add Comments to Blog and Online Article Marketing

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