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By George Torok in Featured

A recession does not mean the end of your business unless you navigate those rough waters blindly. Here are three rocks that can sink your business ship unless you avoid them while navigating the dangerous waters of a tough market. You might get wet but no need to capsize.

Cut expenses across the board

Cut marketing. Cut staff. Cut all expenditures! This siren call is the most common and foolish mistake. It’s common because it is a knee jerk reaction that requires no thinking. It’s foolish for the same reasons. Making across the board cuts is a political response. It’s not a smart business strategy. If cutting across the board in tough times was smart then raising all expenses in good times would also be smart.

Instead, review all expenditures and categorize each line item into A, B and C categories in terms of ROI. “A” items are those expenditures where you can measure a strong return. Continue spending and maybe even increase these investments. “B” items are those that you believe are good but you haven’t yet developed an accurate measurement. Continue these activities, improve the tactics and improve the measurement. “C” items are losers. Stop these completely.

Cut your prices

You will be asked to cut your price. Don’t act like that is a surprise. And don’t pretend that this is the first time. So prepare for an onslaught of such requests. Prepare to deal with the price issue strategically not as a prisoner. Don’t cut price – without an equivalent exchange in value or a reduction in your costs. For example you might allow a discount for early payment or a larger order.

Another way to deal with price resistance is to introduce a lower value product. At the same time introduce a higher value product so the original product which is now in the middle looks more attractive. This is a variation of the good-better-best positioning. If you can’t afford a Lexus you can always buy a Toyota.

Hide

Imagine how it looks when you stop attending trade shows, discontinue your advertising, shelve your newsletter, stop meeting with clients and avoid networking events. Imagine what your clients will think, what your competitors can say and what prospects might believe. None of it will be positive for you or your business.

When times are bad, people need to hear from you more often. Especially make a point of connecting with your best clients and advocates more often. Make your connections more personable so they can feel your confidence.

For the rest of your clients and contacts find efficient ways to stay connected. Maybe it’s a good time to launch your newsletter – or publish it more often. Explore the tools on the Internet that allow you to stay in touch with people easier and more cost effectively. It might be a good time to launch your blog, build your FaceBook page or post videos on YouTube.

A recession can be tough. No need to panic. It’s time to think and act smart with your marketing. Keep your business off the rocks while aiming for the deeper waters beyond. Don’t stop paddling until you are clear of the rocks.

© George Torok is the co-author of the bestselling Secrets of Power Marketing. It’s published in at least seven countries. He helps small and medium businesses gain an unfair advantage over the competition. Get your free copy of “50 Power Marketing Ideas” at http://www.PowerMarketing.ca Arrange for Torok to speak at your conference by visiting http:///www.Torok.com For media interviews call 905-335-1997

By Sharon Housley in Featured

Google is sometimes thought to be the bane of the Internet, and it certainly can be a thorn in the side of search engine marketers. Many fail to look beyond the search of today, toward what the implications of indexing and storing information will have on future generations. Forget the slogan “diamonds are forever” — “Google is forever” is more accurate in regard to the Internet. And if not Google, then some other search giant will be able to retrieve information from previous years within a few seconds. If something is online, it does not just “go away”. Like it or not, the entire world is being indexed and categorized, and will be searchable for years to come.

Individuals today have a personal brand. Employers and colleagues will search on your name, so it is imperative that you keep this in mind when posting online. You must control your online reputation.

The web is not always a friendly place, so what do you do if you are not using an alias and someone is posting derogatory information about you, your company, your products, or your brand?

Monitor Your Brand

The first step in monitoring your brand is to setup automated notifications within the various search engines, either via email or an RSS feed. This way, you will know when you are being discussed, either in favorable or unfavorable terms. For example, the “Google Alerts” feature is a free service that will send email notifications to you when specific words or phrases appear in new search results. Simply use your name, company name, product name, or brand as the phrase being monitored. Ego Feeds work in a similar fashion, except the alerts appear in a custom created RSS feed that updates whenever new mentions occur. For more information about Ego Feeds, see a related article at http://www.feedforall.com/ego-searches.htm

Control Your Brand

The second step in protecting your brand is to take a pro-active approach to appearing in the top search results when your name is entered into a search engine. You can do this by offering interviews, reviews, SEO, and writing articles or posting blog entries. At the very least, make an effort to control the top search results for your name. This will ensure that when your personal brand is searched, those items will be listed in the top 10 search results.

Damage Control

If you find something that is damaging or harmful, do damage control. Control your responses, and behave in a professional manner so it is clear that you took the high road when the exchange is viewed by others at a later time.

Social

The final bit of advice is to simply keep personal things personal. While the social sites are great for maintaining friendships, they are not helpful for people who have an occasional lapse in judgment. Refrain from posting pictures that show anything that you would not want your mother or future grandchildren to see, or saying anything when you are mad or upset since we often say things “in the heat of battle” that we regret later.

The Internet is preserving and archiving personal history in a way that has never previously happened. Control your online reputation for posterity.

Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition
Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.

By David Jackson in Featured

article writingOne of the most powerful and effective ways of promoting your business is through the method of article marketing. However, like any other marketing method, in order for article marketing to be successful, it has to be executed properly.

This article will teach you how to properly execute the method of article marketing.

In order to get the absolute maximum potential out of your articles, they must not only be appealing to potential readers, they must be appealing to search engines as well. Therefore, this article will discuss both the research you must do before writing an article, as well as provide an outline on how to actually write an article.

Before writing your article you must:

By Chip Cooper in Featured

Website legal contracts, website legal forms, and website documents as positioning statements for marketing purposes? You’ve got to be kidding, right?

That’s the typical reply I get when I advise clients regarding website legal compliance. They’re aware of the critical need to manage their legal exposure, particularly after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Guides went into effect on December 1, 2009.

They’re not aware of how these website documents also make a positioning statement – either favorably or unfavorably – to their potential customers and joint venture partners.

Two Kinds of Websites

In my experience helping webmasters update their websites for website legal compliance, I see two kinds of websites. It’s really easy to spot them and to see the difference between the two kinds of websites.

  • Serious websites – websites whose webmasters intend to operate them as serious ecommerce businesses; their webmasters design and operate these websites consistent with sound SEO, navigation, and marketing principles. They are in it for the long term, and are committed to doing it right.
  • Hobby websites – websites whose webmasters, regardless of intentions, actually operate their websites as a kind of hobby; although these ecommerce sites may make some money, their webmasters either do not have the time or otherwise are not able or willing to commit to incorporating sound SEO, navigation, and marketing principles that are essential for long term success.

Both of these types of websites have the same legal compliance requirements, and both should be updated for legal compliance by their webmasters for purposes of managing their legal exposure.

Webmasters of serious websites, however, have a more strategic reason for maintaining website legal compliance. As many of them are now discovering, maintaining website legal compliance can position their websites favorably to their potential customers and joint venture partners.

Savvy Customers

Customers are more savvy these days. One of the most critical concerns of both individual consumers and businesses that are your potential customers is privacy and the related issue of data security.

Prior to 2004, the typical website privacy policy contained trite statements like “we respect your privacy”, and little else.

Beginning in 2004, website privacy policies began to conform to the standards set by the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003 (OPPA) which became effective on July 1, 2004. These standards require, at a minimum, that your privacy policy describe:

  • how information is collected from website visitors,
  • the categories of information collected,
  • how and for what purposes this information is shared with others, and
  • how personal information may be updated by users.

Since 2004, based in part on lawsuits brought by the FTC and their related settlements, additional issues are now covered in website privacy policies, and they include:

  • the passing of third-party cookies (for example, by Google Analytics),
  • whether the website engages in behavioral advertising (for example, Google’s Adsense),
  • adequate notification and disclosure of online behavioral tracking activities, and
  • disclosure of personal information access by third-party service providers.

An up-to-date privacy policy will exhibit these features, and more. For this reason, it’s relatively easy to distinguish an up-to-date privacy policy from one that doesn’t pass muster.

The take-away: given that savvy potential customers can easily evaluate your privacy policy, and that they prefer doing business with someone they trust, you should not be surprised that an up-to-date privacy policy will position your website as serious website – one to be trusted with sensitive customer information.

Prudent Joint Venture Partners

Similar logic applies to potential joint venture partners.

Successful webmasters and web marketers look for joint venture partners that can make them money. However, they also tend to do business prudently – with serious websites, not hobby websites.

Ecommerce websites that are regarded as serious businesses will have some combination of these legal documents and website legal forms:

  • FTC Guides Disclosure Policy,
  • Legal Page,
  • Terms of Use,
  • DMCA Notice,
  • DMCA Registration Form,
  • Privacy Policy,
  • Service Provider Privacy-Security Agreement,
  • Customer Agreement (click-wrapped SaaS, Membership, Subscription, Account Agreement), and
  • Red Flag Identity Theft Policy.

Most of these website documents and legal forms should be posted on the website, and therefore would be visible to any potential joint venture partner checking out your website.

The take-away: it’s relatively easy for a potential joint venture partner to evaluate the degree to which you qualify as a serious website merely by checking out your website legal documents and legal forms.

Conclusion

Website legal compliance is now a significant factor in evaluating serious websites, both by potential customers and joint venture partners. While legal compliance has always been necessary to manage liability exposure, it should become an important factor in positioning your website for success. Is your website making the right positioning statement?

This article is provided for educational and informative purposes only. This information does not constitute legal advice, and should not be construed as such.

Leading Internet, IP and software lawyer Chip Cooper has automated the process of drafting website legal contracts, website legal forms, and website documents online. Use his free online tool – Website Documents Determinator – to determine which documents your website really needs for website legal compliance. Discover how quick, easy, and cost-effective it is to draft your website contracts at http://www.digicontracts.com/.

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Publishers are looking for high quality articles, and violating a publisher’s article submission guidelines for grammar and spelling can result in your article being declined.

Why is grammar so important?

Your articles are being published all over the Internet, and they are a reflection of YOU. People all over the world are looking at your articles, so you want to put your best foot forward. A grammatically correct article is an indication of your article’s quality and is a sign of respect for your readers. Additionally, an article that is free of grammar errors increases the pool of publishers who will find your article attractive.

Here are five popular myths about article quality:

Myth #1 – A grammatically correct article sounds overly formal.

FACT: Writing with correct grammar and spelling does not mean that your article needs to sound like a doctoral thesis. You can still write in your own style and in your own voice, and your article can have a conversational tone to it. Most publishers are on the look out for major grammar issues, such as putting a full stop at the end of each sentence, subject/verb agreement, proper capitalization at the beginning of each sentence, and proper use of words like its, it’s, your and you’re.

From the viewpoint of a publisher and a reader, grammar errors in an article make the article difficult to understand. The idea is not to sound like a college professor and use high and lofty language. Your goal is simply to state your points in everyday language that everyone can understand.

Myth #2 – The English language does not have any definite grammar rules.

FACT: While there are some slight differences between British English and American English, both countries agree on the basics:

The subject of the sentence should agree with the verb. The first letter of the first word of each sentence should be capitalized. Proper nouns should be capitalized. The words ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ have different meanings and are not interchangeable.

Myth #3 – As long as readers can figure out what you’re trying to say, your article does not need to be grammatically correct.

With texting and instant messaging, it is a plus to use abbreviations and to get your point across using as few words as possible. Nowadays there are many forms of communication that do not place a high value on grammar, but article marketing is not one of them.

Readers will make judgments about your business, products and services based on the quality of your article. If your article contains numerous errors and looks thrown together, what does that say about you?

Publishers will make decisions about the quality of your article based on your attention to spelling and grammar, which influences how many websites republish your article.

Myth #4- Article marketing is about building links, so it’s a waste of time to proofread articles.

Building links is one of the main reasons why people submit articles, but in order to earn the link you need to put forth the effort by writing a high quality article.

Myth #5 – You need a degree in English in order to write grammatically correct articles.

If you are a professional person in the working world, most likely you have the necessary language skills to write a grammatically correct article. Every writer should proofread their articles several times and think very hard about what they are writing, but most people are able to write acceptable articles with some effort.

Think about it–if you are applying for your dream job, you will think very carefully about each sentence of your cover letter to be sure that it sends the message that you are the right person for the job. You will likely have a friend with a good eye for grammar read over your resume and cover letter before sending them to your potential employer.

Each article that you submit is like a mini job interview. Potential customers are reading your article! Pay special attention to the grammar and spelling in your article to make the best impression possible.

For more info. on how you can use article marketing to reach thousands of potential prospects for your website, go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report . Steve Shaw is an article marketing expert and founder of the popular article distribution service http://www.submityourarticle.com used by thousands of business owners.

By Suzanne Vara in Featured

website-promotionGoogle recently introduced us to Real Time Search and this has been met with a lot of questions. What Tweets will show up in real time? How will this affect businesses who are, and those who are not, engaging in social media? How will it affect PPC? Where will the searches show up? The biggest question is what impact will this have on small business? Small business owners are met with limited resources and adding any additional hours into their day is nearly impossible. But can a small business ignore real time search?

By John Sylvester in Featured

With the growth of developing economies and the vast amounts of energy needed for cloud computing, publicity-conscious Greenpeace has criticised the ICT industry’s data centers, where utility power comes primarily from coal.
 
By some quirk of fate and timing and imagination, cloud computing, based on an infrastructure whereby data is delivered to devices directly from the internet in real time, has all of a sudden been impacted by the shadowy voice of Greenpeace.

A study, “SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age”, highlights the significant and rapidly-growing footprint of the ICT industry and predicts that, because of the rapid economic expansion in places like India and China, demand for ICT services will quadruple by 2020.

The report finds that by then PC ownership will quadruple to four billion devices – with laptops becoming the main source of global ICT emissions – and that mobile ownership will almost double to nearly five billion over the same period.

As the world’s demand for content is delivered in real time, this growth comes with an increasing demand for energy, with virtual mountains needing to house this swelling data deluge.

Alarming and environmentally damaging according to Greenpeace, individual contributions including five-second snatchments of the banal, need not only to be available for instantaneous access by others and will need infinite data dumps to do so – the home of the data center.

Greenpeace says that data center builders must become “part of the solution to the climate change challenge, rather than part of the problem” and urge operators to “power their data centers using renewable energy”. They are also pressing US Congress to make “renewable energy more readily available”.

The recent salvos should perhaps be put into context because In its new report, “Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change”, shows that data centers and telecommunication networks “will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatts hours of electricity in 2020, more than triple their current consumption and over half the current electricity consumption of the United States — or more than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil — combined.”

But Greenpeace has been accused of blatant hypocrisy through its glaringly obvious publicity campaign. Digitaltrends reports: “You have to break some eggs to make an omelette, and apparently, you have to burn a couple watts to keep the world tapped into an always-on, instantly available ecosystem of content, ideas and information.”

The article goes on to complain that while “forward-thinking companies like Google and Facebook continue to wring every bit of utility possible from the energy they use, and help their users reduce CO2 footprints in the process, Greenpeace has nothing to do but heckle from the sidelines…”

Greenpeace is said to be targeting data center operators to meet standards it doesn’t itself meet, as some of its servers are  also powered by coal and nuclear. Let’s not forget, headline-catching topics like cloud computing attract publcity to the “good cause”.

Hypocrisy aside, Greenpeace strode on with: “We are calling on IT industry giants to put their might behind government policies that give priority grid access for renewable sources like wind and solar energy…IT companies should also support economy-wide climate and energy policies around the world that peak climate emissions by 2015…The great innovators of the digital age can and should be leaders in promoting an energy revolution.”

It is a bit strange that by announcing what I’ve had for lunch contributes to climate change and even though some may think they are on sturdy ground to dismiss Greepeace for duplicity and manipulating the media, the issue of cloud computing and its environmental impact cannot now remain unaddressed.

This is a new angle for the ICT industry to come to terms with at a time when the long-forgotten Copenhagen climate summit fiasco has been almost universally neglected.

Remember the row over whether to ditch the Kyoto protocol and its legal distinction between developed and developing countries, in which developing nations saw the so-called developed world try and wriggle out of its commitments to climate change?

Many observers at the time blamed the US for arriving at the talks with a paltry offer of emissions cuts on 1990 levels at just 4%. The final text of this farcical agreement made no further obligations on developing countries to make cuts.

Does anyone recall at the end of the summit John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, saying: “The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport”?

Now, perhaps, the ICT industry’s business leaders can lead the way and positively react to concerns about the sustainability of its data centers. If it fails to do so, its shareholders just might.

——————-

V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.

By Anton Pearce in Featured

When you are launching an email marketing campaign, your goal is to become a familiar piece of your subscriber’s world. As you become familiar, your readership will begin to feel like they know you, and in time, they will come to trust you as well.

If you want readers to welcome your emails, build them so that your distribution list will be happy to receive your emails, and they may even come to look forward to your emails. Pay close attention to your content, and then pay close attention to the look and feel of your email.

7 Tips for Email Marketing

Remember that your email reflects on your company, so develop your brand, and be consistent with how it looks and what it says. If you do not want tot be perceived as a spammer, then do not act like one. Here are some helpful tips that will show you how to develop trust through your emails by paying attention to how they look and how they make you look.

1. Use a consistent sender name

When a recipient gets your email, they should be able to immediately recognize who you are. So make sure that your sender information is filled in correctly. Choose a name and stick to it. It can be your company name, your product name, or your online name, but for your readers to know you it must consistently be the same name.

2. Create eye catching preview pane

Most people are inundated with email, so make sure that when they receive your email they see something that will spark their curiosity in the preview pane. Give them just enough information to let them know that want to read more. By not properly formatting your email to make full use of the preview pane, you run the risk of having your email deleted even before it has been read.

3. Ask for feedback

Never send out an email that cannot receive a reply. If you have a prospect that wants to contact you the last thing that you want to do is make it hard. So, when you are creating your email find ways to engage your prospects with questions or a forum for a comment. Ask for suggestions, and encourage questions. Even if you get negative feedback, your prospect has done you the favor of offering you a way to improve your email marketing campaign. One of the easiest ways to find out what people are thinking is simply to ask.

4. Include contact information

Make sure that your email includes you company’s complete contact information so that your readers see you as a tangible company. Give your company a physical place, so that people can picture where you are. They will feel more comfortable about you if you have a real presence rather then just floating around in cyberspace. Always publish your contact information in the same place. So if you have a logo for a header and it includes your contact information, always send your emails with your logo header. By seeing your information over and over, prospects will begin to consider you someone that they know and feel comfortable with. So always print your contact information in the same location in your email.

5. Always include complete contact information in the footer

By always including your company’s contact information in the footer of the email, if your prospect becomes frustrated looking for an address or phone number, they will know that they can always find it in the footer of your email. When someone is trying to get in touch with you, it should be effortless for them to locate your contact information.

6. Always keep the same look and feel

People are comfortable with familiar things, and they do business with comfortable companies. By being aware of your brand and always having the same look and feel to you emails, you will become familiar to your prospects. Use your logo, colors and tagline to burn your identity into your prospect’s mind, and they will soon come to view you as an old friend.

7. Use a reliable design

Do not waste a lot of time designing your email. You need them to look professional and have good content, but they do not need a lot of bells and whistles. Keep your format simple, and keep your content rich, and in time you will garner the respect and trust of your readers.

For any marketing campaign to be successful, your prospects have to trust you. You have to make sure that your message works for the demographic that you are trying to reach. Keep your formats simple, so that your emails will look professional for all of your recipients. Pay attention to your format to make sure that you message appears correctly for your subscribers.

While content is important in email marketing, appearance is equally important. Remember these suggestions as you create your email marketing campaign, and it should be very successful for you.

For a free, no-obligation consultation, contact Anton Pearce via www.antonpearce.com. Set aside just 30 minutes and discover how you can use online marketing to get all the clients you need to fill your practice. Anton is an online marketing consultant who specializes in helping health and wellness professionals to market their services online.

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

BREAKING: So apparently Google have rolled out a new home page to some regional datacenters today, with significant changes to both the search function and Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Search Engine College tutor Micky Stuivenberg (@contentwriteroz) alerted me to the changes via Twitter – which she had been observing on Google Australia since midday today. Micky says she is seeing the following:

1) The radio button options that used to appear under the search box at Google.com.au to Search: *the web* or *pages from Australia* have disappeared.

2) A searcher’s default location now appears under the search box on the SERPs (Micky’s says Sydney although she is located on the NSW mid North coast). See this demonstrated in image 2 below.

3) On SERPs, the main search options that used to appear at the top of the page and are now also listed in a left hand navigation column:

  • Everything (default)
  • News
  • Images
  • Videos
  • Maps
  • Blogs
  • Shopping
  • Books
  • More

3) Underneath that it has the option to search only pages from your region (a long way from the search box!)

4) Then there are 3 options to search results for

  • Any time (default)
  • Latest
  • past 2 days

5) Then the standard view (default) with Wonder wheel.

6) At the bottom of the redesigned SERPs is a button for *More search tools*.

Here’s a couple of screen grabs of the changes:

A major difference is that all the above options are now displayed permanently on the SERPs, whereas before you had to click *show options* to see all of them. The changes can only be viewed on selected data-centers right now – I’m not seeing them yet so am grateful to Micky for the scoop!

I haven’t seen any posts about it on official Google blogs, although it may be related to the local search changes they announced recently.

I’ve only seen one other blog discussing the revisions so far, so I think it’s fair to call BREAKING on this one.

* images courtesy of @contentwriteroz and Softpedia

By Tim Meadows-Smith in Featured

SE-TacticsOne piece of ‘new media jargon’ that has got the vast majority of business leaders confused is SEO (search engine optimization). Too many people have been charged too much for either inappropriate or ineffective SEO services, often because the supplier does not really understand it either. This two part article is for people who are not experienced or very knowledgeable when it comes to SEO – defining what it is and what it can do.

The introduction and first five steps to SEO heaven discussed how to get a website ready for an SEO campaign. In part two (steps 6 to 11), we’ll explore the continuous and competitive process of earning a high search engine ranking for a SEO prepared website.

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