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By Gayle Hawks in Featured

spn_exclusiveThere is a link “below the fold” to a YouTube video entitled “Advertiser vs Consumer” – please watch it. It conjures up various feelings in everyone who watches it. However, it also highlights some major flaws in true, reliable, customer service.

As a business owner, are you truly meeting the needs of your customers? There are tons of blog posts and articles on the Internet from business men and women going on and on about nightmare clients and their sometimes ridiculous demands. Many of them are valid rants. However, there are also many that may be the direct result of failures on the part of the business owner. This shouldn’t be a shocking revelation, but business owners and upper management aren’t always innocent.

Failure is a part of every occupation, every business, and every person. To deny it would be ridiculous. Knowledge and implementation of knowledge is what reduces the frequency of those failures. As people who are heavily invested in the success of our own companies, we need to make sure that we are doing all we can to properly meet the needs of clients (our customers).

How is your company using the Internet to its advantage?

“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.” ~Bill Gates

Using Mr. Gates’ quote as a focal point, what part of the ‘village’ are you gearing your products and services to? This is an essential element to consider when creating your marketing and advertising plans. Make sure that your website operates in a way that your customers will “get it” and understand why they should choose to use your services or purchase your products. If customers can interact with your site in a positive way, then your website will be successful.

What’s being said about your business on the Internet? Have you looked at Yelp and other review sites to see how people gauge their interaction with your company, your employees or how they perceive the value of your products/services? If you’re not checking for those “word of mouth” referrals or unfortunate negative reviews, then you’re missing a critical component of being able to provide the “right stuff” to your customers. If you’re not listening to them and are unwilling to take a look at your internal policies/procedures and quality control standards, then you should just stop reading this article right now.

David Ogilvy, who is considered by many to be the father of modern advertising, always stressed the importance of the “BIG IDEA”. He always capitalized those two words in order to make them stand out. Are you doing your best to ensure that your company’s customer service, reputation, and quality standards are an integral part of America’s economic, political, and social life? What is the BIG IDEA that drives your business? By listening to your clients, understanding their wants and needs, and adapting, you are better able to refine your customer service procedures and better produce the products and services your customers desire. In doing this, you’ll be able to convey your company’s BIG IDEA in an easier, more effective way.

This isn’t an easy task. There isn’t one tried and true formula to achieve this – it’s more of a mindset and method of operating. In some ways this might seem a bit obtuse and nebulous. The beauty of it though is that this method of operating is one of the major facets of what you’ll see when you study the successful models of companies such as Amazon, Dropbox, Google, and others who do a great job of listening and interacting with their customers.

Here is the link to the video mentioned in the beginning of this article:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heSudg-tfIk. Hope you enjoy it!

Color Card Administrator is the parent company of PrintBusinessCards.com and several other innovative Real Estate Business Cards websites. We’re eager to share with you what it is we do. Give us a call today at 858-522-9335 or email at Author@CardAdmin.com for Cheap Business Cards. We look forward to discussing your comments, suggestions, or hearing any ideas for future article topics you may be interested in regarding online business cards design or business card management.

By Resource Nation in Featured

webdesign4If your company’s Web site just isn’t cutting it these days, there are ways to improve its look, in turn, hopefully driving more business your way.

Business owners need to remember that their Web site is oftentimes the initial impression that potential customers acquire of the company.

In the event your company site is outdated, stale as it relates content, or difficult to surf, many visitors will leave after just a few seconds. The resulting impact is that you may have and will continue to lose out on revenue.

Upgrading the Company Site

In order to better position your site to attract more business, keep several factors in mind as you and your I.T. team or others look to improve:

1. Give the site a thorough review from top to bottom. Don’t be afraid to voice your opinion or take constructive criticism from others regarding the site. Remember, you and your employees are a team, so make this a group project;
2. Is your site positioned to take advantage of search engine rankings? The easier it is for customers and those interested in your products and services to find you, the better it is.
3. Is the site easy to navigate, with no broken links? Nothing turns off a visitor more than a site that is hard to maneuver on and doesn’t provide them with the details they came for in the first place;
4. Listen to your customers. If they’re providing feedback, take it in stride and see where you can accommodate them. Your customers are your most important item (along with your employees), so don’t turn a blind eye to them.
5. Lastly, in order to stand out from the competition, remember that your site’s appearance needs to be professional from start to finish. If it means spending some more money to upgrade the site, do it.

In the event your site does need some upgrading, it is actually not as costly as you may think. By upgrading your company’s site, you can add to your revenue and put together a steady customer base in a relatively quick manner.

When all is said and done, your site should be the envy of competitors, allowing you to stand out in your respective industry.

If you’re reluctant to upgrade your site, just think about what message that is sending to your customers in this technologically-driven world that we live in.

Perhaps they are not that important to you? Perhaps you’re not a visionary and you’re too reluctant to change with the times? Perhaps you’re not willing to invest the time and money into being a premier player in your industry?

If you can say that any of the above mentioned may describe your business, perhaps you won’t have to worry about being in business too much longer….

Dave Thomas is an expert writer on items like business security systems and is based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on surveillance systems purchasing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

By Gayle Hawks in Featured

employeesIn today’s difficult economy many small businesses are operating on thin to non-existent profit margins. With it being difficult to just stay afloat, it’s important to get creative when it comes to maintaining employee satisfaction. So with that in mind, here are several effective and affordable ways to make your business a place where your employees are dedicated to a common goal and happy to be working with you.

1. Say Thank You

Seriously. Make it a point to single out employees when they do a good job and say thank you. Be genuine and sincere. If you have a client or customer who thanks you for your services, be sure to pass that on to your employees too. Publicly recognize them for their role in satisfying that customer’s needs. If a customer or client singles out a particular employee, send a thank you note to them at their home praising their good work and efforts. Send out a tweet or Facebook post acknowledging that employee’s contributions.

2. Be Accessible

Take breaks with your employees or eat lunch with them. Do more listening than talking. By spending time with your workforce, you will be able to glean more ways to take care of them in practical ways.

3. Use Gift Cards

Employees always welcome gas cards, grocery store cards, big box store cards, coffeehouse gift cards, and even movie tickets. These are nice, relatively inexpensive rewards to use when money is tight, yet you want to say thank you in a tangible way that they’ll appreciate.

4. Support Community Involvement

Provide company time for employees to serve a meal at a local shelter, help out a local food pantry, adopt a family for a holiday, or raise money for a common charity. This not only serves as a great team building opportunity by engaging in something your employees are passionate about, it also creates a positive public image for your business.

5. Free Drinks or Ice Cream

Open up the office soda machine and give out free drinks occasionally. Make arrangements on a hot summer day to have an ice cream truck stop at your business, have your employees choose their favorite item, and you pick up the tab.

6. Free Food

Announce that you’re bringing in coffee and bagels or donuts for your staff the next morning. Find out what bagel or donut is their favorite so you will have it for them. You can do the same with lunch by bringing in pizza or other take out foods.

7. Fun and Games

Put a foosball table, pool table, or air hockey table in the break room. Let people have fun with them during breaks and lunch. Challenge one of your employees once in a while (hopefully you’ll win a few games).

These are a few inexpensive ways to build morale and keep your employees motivated during tough times. It’s important to foster a culture that shows you’re going the extra mile for them. Don’t forget…it’s not the dollar amount that matters, but the thought you put into it that will have the greatest effect on your employees.

Color Card Administrator is the parent company of PrintBusinessCards.com and several other innovative Real Estate Business Cards websites. We’re eager to share with you what it is we do. Give us a call today at 858-522-9335 or email at Author@CardAdmin.com for Online Business Cards. We look forward to discussing your comments, suggestions, or hearing any ideas for future article topics you may be interested in regarding business cards design or business card management. Be part of the professional business cards company.

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

bloggingBeing a subset of journalism, it is no surprise that blogging shares many traits with its parent. In particular, blogging strongly resembles the feature or editorials pages of many newspapers. Not beholden to quite the same rules of timeliness or AP style guidelines as the news sections, these sections focus on matters of personal interest to the writer, or on a specific topic of particular relevance or human interest.

So, given that blogging tends to be derived from these sections, it is reasonable to look into the tactics that bring traditional journalists such success in their writing and to borrow the best ideas from them. In particular, many bloggers have discovered the value of including interviews in their publications.

An interview is fairly straightforward: a conversation between the blogger and another party, generally about a topic of mutual interest to the blogger, the subject and the readers. Some interviews are scripted, some are more extemporaneous, but at their heart they all have the mission of illuminating the thoughts of the interviewee to the audience of the publication in order to shed some extra light on the subject being discussed.

In the world of blogging, there are generally three approaches to integrating an interview into a blog.

The Writeup

This is the general, news-story style form of an interview. The blogger contacts the subject, does their interview, then writes a story around the interview using the subject’s quotations as a framework. It tends to look something like:

By UKFast in Featured

business1Businesses are being overwhelmed by the many different methods of gaining customer feedback and are developing weak service strategies as a result.

The growth of the internet has brought with it a wealth of new opportunities for customers to vent their opinions of the firms they deal with. The popularity of social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook, and customer review sites such as TripAdvisor has forced businesses to extend their customer service strategies to cater for the feedback they receive online.

But many are struggling with the transition and are finding it difficult to cater for a more empowered customer.

A panel of experts in customer service gathered at a round table event held by hosting firm UKFast to discuss how companies should manage their customer strategies and strike the right balance between online and offline techniques.

Sam Gregory, director of B2B operations at Tangerine PR, said: “What I think is very interesting is how businesses are coping with the advent of digital. Traditional customer service teams are seeing their role changing a lot. They are having to become communications experts in a way because they are being bombarded with messages coming through from customers that are positive and negative.

I’ve worked with some very big brands in the past to develop digital and social media strategies to help channel negative comments through a particular platform such as Twitter.

In many cases, the customer service teams are really struggling to know how to handle this. It’s a complete step change for them, they are used to a much slower environment.”

Ross Keeping, UKFast’s head of customer service described social media as a “customer service branch that we can’t ignore” but warned companies not to sacrifice traditional methods of gaining customer feedback. He said: “The principals of good, old-fashioned client communication still hold firm. We just have to apply them to more environments – in person, over the phone, through social networks and other sites.”

Asked whether it was more difficult to implement an effective customer service strategy in large organizations, the panelists agreed that the focus on keeping clients happy has to come from the top.

Lynne Mills from the Institute of Customer Service said: “The Institute believes everyone in the organization is responsible for customer service, whether they are serving the customer directly or not. But accountability lies with the CEO of the organization. Customer service is a cultural thing and without that accountability at the top it’s difficult for good customer service to be in the DNA of an organization.”

Luis Franco, director of international business operations at Survey Monkey, offered his advice on how to approach clients for feedback. “Follow three rules,” he advised. “Don’t survey the hell out of people. Keep it simple and short – seven minutes is maximum survey time – and make sure the question has terminology that is understood by everyone, no acronyms and no sector jargon.”

Top tips on delivering outstanding customer service:

- Your employees are your biggest asset, involve them all and get company-wide buy in for your customer service focus.

- Training and development in customer service offers a good return on investment.

- Make your customers aware that you are acting on their responses instead of aimlessly sending out surveys. Customer feedback shouldn’t be an exercise in self congratulation.

- Don’t be scared of receiving feedback through social media. Dealing with complaints in a public arena inspires confidence and trust among your customers.

- Turn complainants into advocates by rectifying any problems they have.

Visit the UKFast website to find out more about our round table events.

UKFast is one of Europe’s fastest-growing technical companies (as ranked by Deloitte) and has been at the heart of the UK internet industry for more than 10 years. In addition to being named as one of The Sunday Times best companies to work for, it won the UK IT Awards Employer of the Year in 2010. Previous accolades include the industry’s Best Customer Service Award in 2009 and being named the ISPA UK’s Best Hosting Provider four years consecutively. UKFast has over 400,000 web domains on its network and over 4,000 clients across all industries. Clients include Virgin, Microsoft and UKTV.

By Brian Stephens in Featured

BlogGood blog writing is an art. It requires attention to detail, good grammar, good punctuation, correct spelling and great content. So what is the single biggest mistake a blogger can make when writing a blog post that is supposed to be optimized for search engines?

Basically, it is to sacrifice any of these requirements in order to use what they think are high paying, low competition and high inquiry keywords or keyword phrases that simply do not fit into the content of their post under the misconception that they believe this is a good website search optimization strategy.

Examples are deliberate misspellings, phrases that are questions and cannot be contextualized as answers, abbreviated phrases and so on.

The flaw in focusing on keywords of this type rather than content is that the search engine operators actually look for and value good content i.e. the content that flows nicely, has correct spelling, good punctuation etc. etc.

They do not value nonsensical paragraphs that are clearly written to attract search engine attention rather than to meet the requirements of visitors to the website that have arrived there for a specific purpose and that is to find great content and information on their topic of choice.

You only have to think about what happens when someone arrives on your website and either cannot make sense of what you have written or, equally as important, cannot find the information they are looking for. They simply leave again and go and look for a different website or blog that does provide the information they want in a format they enjoy and in a place they can find it.

The technical term for what I am discussing is the bounce rate, the time a visitor spends on your website and how many pages they visit. If they only look at the first page or leave almost as soon as they arrive then you will register a high bounce rate. 100% basically says that they have not found what they came for and left immediately. A more acceptable level is 50%, but should be lower if possible, and that should be the minimum target any webmaster or blogger aspires to achieve.

Writing your blogs or websites with the objective of providing useful information that is well written and with appropriate keywords that describe the actual content of your site will result in far better search engine optimization than selecting keywords that are inappropriate or cannot be converted into sensible paragraphs of written text that can be understood and enjoyed by your visitors.

If you do your keyword research thoroughly and with this view in mind, there is a high probability that you will find keywords that are high paying, low competition, with sufficient numbers of inquiries and that do fit with your content in a sensible and coherent fashion. The extra effort required to do this will ultimately reward you with the associated benefit of attracting more people who in turn will become loyal visitors that come back to revisit your site and who are likely to recommend it to others.

Remember it can take a very long time to build a loyal fan base for a blog but all the work put into achieving that can be lost in moments by placing rubbish in your blog posts. You need to consider both the human elements and the search engine algorithm elements.

Building an Online Business offers information and advice on how to create and promote a small business on the Internet.

This includes an online projects job board, for home based jobs.

By Gayle Hawks in Featured

spn_exclusiveRecently I read an article about the rise and success of link rich home pages over the past several years. After reading through it and processing the information, I thought it would be a good idea to highlight some of the ideas that were brought forth from that article. It’s especially useful for business owners since we rely heavily on our websites’ ranking and position in order to generate consistent traffic.

“Nobody starts their design with the objective, “We need our home page to be as complex as we can possibly make it.” On the contrary, everybody wants to build simple designs. Yet, somewhere along the line, simplicity translated into “Provide as few links on the home page as possible.”" – Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering

This quote sums things up well. It also targets exactly what we need to do to make a site successful for end users. This is one of those cases where we need to ensure that our focus is on what is best for the site users. It’s a complex negotiation between what you envision as the optimal website while at the same time ensuring that the end user has a website that will work well for them too.

Is your own home page link rich? Are you providing your site users with relevant, beneficial links that will potentially take them deeper into your site and further showcase your company’s products and services? These are important questions to mull over when thinking about the function, style, and format of your website’s home page.

News websites have long understood the need to provide multiple links on their home pages. The majority of news sites are loaded with links designed to deliver in-depth information to users. CNN, Fox, the Drudge Report, and many major newspaper sites have hundreds of links displayed on their home page. How many is too many? Take a look at the sites listed below and check out their standings.

Website Google Page Rank Alexa Ranking

Yahoo.com 9 4
CNN.com 10 52
NYTimes.com 9 86
LATimes.com 8 321
FoxNews.com 8 171
BBC.co.uk 9 42
Bls.gov * 7 5697
Craigslist.org 6 34

*The Bureau of Labor and Statistics website isn’t a news site. However, it is a good example of a home page that is comprised almost entirely of links. While this site is very narrow in its appeal, it is heavily used as you can see from its rankings. The same holds true for Craigslist – its homepage is comprised completely of links.

Judging from the rankings shown above for these link rich sites, it’s a good choice to include many links on your homepage. However, my advice would be to take a look at the manner in which links are displayed on these sites. With the exception of the BLS site and Craigslist, most of these sites display links in a tasteful, organized manner. So essentially what I’m saying is that you can still maintain the simplistic design approach while at the same time creating a ‘link rich environment’ which will perform well for the end users of the website.

This is also good reference material for you to use when discussing site creation with your web designer. Please feel free to use the information in this article to point out the need to create a great looking, link rich home page on your website. Hopefully this information will help them understand just how important it is for them to allow you to create a home page that will grab a user’s attention and provide them with a wealth of information in an easy to use, easy to navigate format that is beneficial for your company.

Color Card Administrator is the parent company of PrintBusinessCards.com and several other innovative Real Estate Business Cards website, we’re eager to share with you what it is we do. Give us a call today at 858-522-9335 or email at Author@CardAdmin.com for Print Business
Cards. We look forward to discussing your comments, suggestions, or hearing any ideas for future article topics you may be interested in regarding online business cards design or business card management.

By William Galkin in Featured

business1It’s no secret that piracy of music and movies over the Internet is rampant and costs the entertainment industry billions of dollars annually. Most people involved in this activity are not hardened criminals, and if asked, will probably admit that it is a technical violation of the law, but that it’s not really that illegal. You might even hear an argument that since the media industry is resigned to the fact that nothing can be done about it, it’s basically permissible. Legal solutions alone clearly have not worked. Most acknowledge that the only solution is an innovative combination of advanced detection technology and enforcement of applicable intellectual property and Internet laws. Well, perhaps a first step in this direction has now occurred.

Enter the Copyright Alert System

On July 7th major Internet service providers (ISPs), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), after beginning negotiations in 2008, announced the establishment of the Copyright Alert System (CAS). The CAS has been designed to ferret out people using peer-to-peer filing sharing applications to transfer copyrighted music and movies. The ISPs that have agreed to implement the CAS include biggies such as Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, Cablevision and Verizon.

This alliance of ISPs and media companies breaks new ground. In the past, ISPs were accused by media companies of ignoring massive infringing activities. Why join forces now? According to one commentator, the large amount of bandwidth required for these infringing activities has incentivized the ISPs to assist in reducing such sharing, thereby reducing bandwidth usage. The CAS is expected to be implemented later this year.

What to Expect

Monitoring software will be utilized to spy on file-sharing services like BitTorrent. When a media company identifies activity suspected to include the unlawful sharing of copyrighted materials, then the media company will notify the suspect’s ISP. The notice to the ISP will include the suspect’s IP address and the time that the infringing sharing occurred. That information will be enough for the ISP to specifically identify the suspect.

What follows is a series of email notices sent to the suspect. The first level notice informs the suspect that illicit activity has been associated with their computer or device. If the suspect continues the infringing sharing activities, then a series of messages will be sent seeking acknowledgement that the messages have been received. The purpose of this second level of messages in a bit unclear. However, seeking acknowledgement probably will have the effect of suggesting to the suspect that some future threatening response might be in the offing. It is doubtful that anyone will acknowledge receipt of this second level of notices. This second level of message would make any defense of innocent infringement unavailable. If these second level messages have not caused the suspect to cease the activities, then the ISP may implement a consequence or “mitigation measure” as it is called in the CAS.

Mitigation measures could include a reduction of Internet speeds, causing the user to be automatically directed to an educational landing page with information on the topic of copyright infringement, or even suspension of service. These mitigation measures are not obligatory on the ISPs. While, on the one hand, ISPs have a disincentive to terminate service (i.e., they will lose customers), on the other hand, the music and movie industries will likely keep increasing the pressure on the ISPs to impose some “mitigation measures.” The CAS does have an appeal process which costs $35 to initiate.

While all this might sound fairly threatening, under the CAS, the ISPs will not provide any personally identifying information about the suspected infringers to the copyright holders without a subpoena or court order.

How Effective Will It Be?

It is important to recognize that the CAS does not result in any new laws or regulations. Under current law, ISPs are required to terminate repeat infringers in order to maintain protection of the safe harbor under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Also, copyright owners can always sue copyright infringers, and send take down notices under the DMCA.

The RIAA has indicated that they are not expecting to influence the hardcore infringers. Therefore, after a certain number of CAS warning notices have failed to cause a change in behavior, the notices will cease. The RIAA expects that the notices will cause most infringers to stop even before any mitigation measures are implemented.

What would happen if the alleged infringers still don’t comply? Well, the RIAA sued 35,000 alleged infringers between 2003 and 2008, and it has not denied that it may attempt this strategy in conjunction with the implementation of the CAS. However, how they will actually respond is anybody’s guess.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and others have expressed concern that the CAS could result in people being denied access to the Internet without any due process. Our justice system considers people innocent until proven guilty. However, the CAS would operate in an opposite manner, by putting the burden of proving innocence on the accused.

The CAS is being billed as an educational program to alert people when their accounts are being used to share infringing materials. The press release announcing the CAS stresses that parents have a right to know if their Internet connection is being used for illicit activities. The expectation, as stated in the fact sheet put out by the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), which was established as part of the CAS, is that once people are aware that their accounts are being used for illicit purposes they will voluntarily comply. The CCI claims that 70% of users will take action if they know that their accounts are being used for infringing activities and that such activities could subject them to legal liability and consequences for violating their ISPs terms of use or acceptable use policy. Stay tuned.

William Galkin, Esq. is an Internet lawyer who has dedicated his legal practice to representing Internet, website, e-commerce, computer technology and new media businesses in the U.S. and around the world. To learn more about agreements needed by Internet businesses and websites go to http://www.galkinlaw.com/services.

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