In a recent article I read it discussed different types of Brands. This can be found in Pharmaceutical Executive, June 2009. The author is Vince Parry. I thought it interesting in that they were discussing this in the context of pharmaceuticals, but could be applied to online businesses as well. Too many times, we try to copy what is already out there, and the real value is finding that unmet niche. Even better, creating our own niche to attract new customers and expand on a current market trend. For example, developing a website that sells Ringtones. There are 1000′s of sites that are dedicated to this category. So how would you differentiate yourself and rise to the top. IN the next few series of discussions, we will take this business and explore different brand strategies that would be applicable. Stay tuned for part two.
How safe is your Brand?
The internet is great place to do business, and enable your customers easy access 24/7 to your services and products. The movement of information can take place in the blink of an eye. This is why brand reputation management on the web is so crucial. If something is written about you or your company, you need to know quickly and be able to respond to your customers and those who wrote the article. Through a company called MatrixMT, they have the resources and technology to act as your eyes and ears on the internet. They have Blog monitoring capabilities that will detect any sudden spike in negativity and be able to work with you and your PR firm to control the noise.
All companies that have employees are at risk of a disgruntled ex-worker getting on a site and bashing the company. It is even worse if a customer writes a negative article about your company and you only find out after sales start slipping. MatrixMT can also help to rebuild your company reputation in the event of bad press. They have the ability to help market and grow your brand pro- actively through extensive SEO, and Brand Equity management.
MatrixMT has the resources to to deploy on the companies behalf an extensive pro-active campaign to minimize the situation. Through aggressive search engine optimization campaign to take back the top 10 on the major search engines, or compile a list of offensive blogs/sites/ezines to be delivered back to your legal team for appropriate action.an exhaustive compilation of offending blogs/sites/references to be delivered to legal council.
SEO and your successful marketing
If you are looking for creative ways to help drive customers to your site there are several ways that we have tried and have been successful. The first option is the tried and true PPC avenue where you buy certain keywords and the ads are then shown across various sites and people click on those ads to be taken back to your site. The one issue with this is that most people do not spend the time or resources to get this right. A recent survey conducted by simply.com of 25,000 businesses showed that only a small percentage use any type of agency to help in their website advertising efforts. The other creative way that we have found to generate traffic and improve our SEO is by giving away free stuff. Consider offering a free service that is beneficial to the consumer. Offer free update services, a newsletter or an e-zine. If you’re worried that this may be too time consuming, put your fears aside. You can obtain free services that will notify you when someone has signed up for your newsletter and through the use of a distribution list on your e-mail you can easily handle circulation for your newsletter or e-zine. Keep in mind, however; when you are putting together your newsletter or e-zine that the only reason a consumer has for signing up and continuing to subscribe to your publication is for worthy information. Don’t allow your publication to become a forum for advertising. Provide information that is of real benefit to the reader and that convinces them to re-visit your site. In order to really make a quality publication make sure you include a privacy statement and provide a link in the publication for the customer to unsubscribe at any time if they wish.
Online marketing or advertising is a passion of mine and I love the way it is set up. I do have ads on my website but I don’t put them on every one of the websites I control. I have experimented with the Google Advertising tools and found that I just didn’t have the patience or understanding of the reports to capitalize on what I was seeing. The blogs I do choose to put contextual advertising on are still rated high with the Google PR Rankings. These ads may have even help me maintain my high rankings in some cases, because some of my websites that I chose to not install these codes on, did drop in value with Google’s ranking system.
For publishers simply.com also offers online advertising channels that can help you monetize the traffic that you have already. Most people are use to the ads like Ad Sense on websites and they are more acceptable today. For people that are struggling with a unique domain name or their own personal website, when it comes to making money online, could enjoy this type of program for making money at home. Hosting these text ads is a good way to start earning money online and everyone should at least try it, before they come to conclusions about this subject. If you seek more advertising online for a product or service you’re promoting; you can benefit on the other end of the spectrum too, by using this as a marketing tool for your online promotions. There are two ways that text ads can help you gain more money and a leg up on the competition.
Branding your website through your email.
If you are starting your website or blog, why not use your email to help build traffic and brand your website. We use traffexone@comcast.net and rogersemall@comcast.net. We place a signature in that is automatically sent out to all those we communicate with. So whether is is friends, family, or customers they all know what we have to offer. And the best part is when you send along some great news, or the joke of the day, your email is attached and more and more see your sites. See the power. Most email providers allow you to set up a default signature that can be sent with all emails. So check it out and make your email a part of your online branding.
How to brand your Business card
Everyone who owns a business, either brick and mortar or online, has a business card. So why then do we hand these out with the same bland titles. Business cards, should say something about your business and be memorable. This day and age with al the PDA’s the Rolodex of business cards are going by the way side. So then how do you create a leave behind that will get you remembered. You can search the internet for Free Business cards, and get back a ton of results. Free Business cards can be found everywhere on the internet, so why www.business-cards-free.com. As we researched this vendor they have the capabilities to create a CD business card. While a paper business card may not get you noticed, I know that one in the Shape and texture of a CD would. you can see their offers here at free business cards
Help your website make headlines
An SEO (search engine optimization) company can fix your website up so that you will get more visitors than your competitors and increase web traffic. If they have the chance to see your products or services first, then they might not ever know that your competitors even exist. There are so many ways that you can make your website “search engine friendly” and many of the SEO companies know how to do this.
The trick to the whole process is to get your website to appear on as many search results as possible and choosing the right key words, implementing meta tags, and submitting your website to the right places, can get your website to appear in more search engine results.
ThinkBIGsites is a place you can go for search engine placement. These guys can do a check on your website and find the best ways to optimize it for the search engines. Now a lot of companies promise that they can get you into hundreds of different search engines. Don’t concern yourself with hundreds, when some say that there really isn’t no where near that many, when you can focus on the main ones. The big search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN and now Bing; are the big boys and if you can get noticed by them, then your on your way to more traffic! So try to focus on these search engines first, before you try to get on other search engines.
As soon as you get your website optimization plan going, you will see a big difference on the search results for your website.
Once you start to see that the search engines are picking up your website, then your goal is to move to the first page on search results. Most people never look at the 2nd page of search results from a search engine. So being on the first page is crucial to getting more people to your website. Keeping your website up-to-date and adding fresh and relative content to it, will maximize your efforts and help you to climb to higher positions on the search engine results. There is a lot of information that you can find out about getting better search engine results. Take the time to learn some of the tricks to getting your website in more search engine results and find a company like thinkbigsites.com.com to help fine tune your website. So be like the grocery store that has the big sign and all the advertisements and get an SEO company on your side today!
Parking your domain for Free and making money
Using Domain parking services
We have recently tried a new service called Domain Parking through a vendor called Gold Key. The results so far have been very impressive. See the details, and if you wish to try them out they are free. Unlike some services, they do not charge to park your domainn, and they even provide loads of templates to use for sites.
Click here to sign up:
Goldkey.com is the industry standard for domain name monetization services. We offer a wide variety of tools and services to help you achieve domain name success! Goldkey.com’s reporting, custom templates, and higher payouts will enable you to earn more from your domain name portfolio! Join our team of professionals today @ GoldKey.com!
GoldKey.com’s Domain Parking service enables you earn money from your domain names without the need to develop your own website. Goldkey.com offers better branding of your names, real-time statistics, higher click thru rates, and a wide range of customization features to help you maximize your Portfolio!
VOIP Calling your parents
One of the newer and growing VOIP companies is called Packet 8. VOIP (Voice over IP) using your existing High Speed Internet connection. We recommend a Broadband connection, as sometimes you will notice some noise on a DSL line, especially if your are downloading any large files over the internet while talking on the phone. Most providers you will be able to use your existing phones, but some are will not. We have found the Packet 8 to be very reliable and have recently made the switch. You can see there information here Packet 8
A great technology resource to help compare and get questions answered is :
Packet8 is an affordable and easy-to-use broadband telephone and videophone service. Designed with both residential and business customers in mind, Packet8 allows anyone with broadband (high-speed) Internet access to use their regular phone to make UNLIMITED calls to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada for as little as $19.99 per month. Packet8 subscribers with videophones can make video calls for as little as $19.99 per month. All Packet8 subscribers get world wide UNLIMITED calling to other Packet8 subscribers at no extra charge.
Comparison shop for HealthCare
Vimovo is a new consumer health care site that allows you to search and locate health care providers and insurance in your local area. their belief is that the consumer should be more empowered to choose their providers and insurers that will benefit them and their families. Vimo will help to make buynig buying health care and insurance more transparent and more cost effective. Consumers can get objective and comprehensive shopping information for insurance, Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), medical procedures, doctors and dentists.
They have made a very user friendly site to be able to search by Zip code for your healthcare provider. You can also compare Health Care Savings Accounts (HSA) in your area to help in your decisions. They also provide a great tool to research and review various Health Care Providers (HCPs) in your area. The Vimo database contains over 650,000 Dr.’s and over 13,000 disciplinary actions. Each report on the HCP will contain, among other things, Board certifications, hospital affiliations, and any disciplinary actions.
(formerly known as Healia)is in the news and here is what some of those reports had to say:
Vimo (which thankfully just changed its name from Healthia) is a search tool aiming at allowing consumers to access doctors and insurers, and eventually medical products and services. CEO Chini Krishnan says Vimo is “a comparison shopping site like Lending Tree.” Health IT.com Octrober 9,2006
Can any Blog Make Money?
The answer is Any Kind! So, the right question should be “what blog can make more money?”
The answer is Well Prepared Blog! 
What to prepare? Why not just posting? If you want to just blog and you don’t care things to prepare, maybe you’re not serious about making money from your blog. Otherwise, please read on.
First, I want to say this, “DON’T BLOG unless you know what you’re going to blog!”
By this, I don’t mean only conclusion of you blog. Before you blog, sit back from your keyboard and take a time to answer following 3 questions:
1. About what topic am I going to write? Are many people want to know about that topic?
2. With that topic, what product or link am I gonna introduce?
3. And how am I gonna do that?
Check out our resource for Adsense Alternatives: Click Here
InBlog Ads a new way to monetize your blog
Attention all WordPress bloggers: InBlogAds has recenetly launched allowing you to sell the ad space on your blogs. They offer benefits for both advertisers and publishers. If you are an advertiser you get direct html links, which can help drive targeted traffic,while increasing your link. With the context links, they are typically included within the blog, which search engines love and appreciate. You can have your site reviewed by the community of bloggers, and the posts will be up for a minimum of 30 days
For Publishers, the current technology works with WordPress and is currently being tested for free blog sites such as Blogger.com, and WordPress.com. You can control the types of ads and posts that are on your blog, as you approve or deny them to fit your blog content. Each publisher can earn as much as 60% of the ad revenue sold through their blog. Since these are ads are not contextually served, similar to Googles Adsense, the content can be run along side other ads.
Phishing Alert part 2
Well I guess you need to be careful what you write about. Just after I wrote about the Phishing vs Vishing, I received an email from the Ebay Account abuse team??? They wanted to inform that my account had been compromised, and unusual activity had been reported by bank. They instructed me to click on the link to verify my account within 48 hours, or my account would be closed. And they would have to close any PayPal accounts linked to my eBay account. It was even signed by the VP of eBay abuse report dept. WOW! Of course I did nothing, forwarded to the eBay fraud email address. I did click on the view source for the email, and you could see where the links led to and they were not ebay. Also, the email was cloaked under a gmail.com account. So I sent that over to Google.
Microsoft Access Training benefits
In the world of creating and using databases using Microsoft Access is one that is rather simple to learn, but provides some great tools and data manipulation for most users. If you need of brushing up on your knowledge or learning some new skills then getting Microsoft Access training online should be a top priority. At BestTraining they offer over 85 courses on Microsoft Access Training. These are MS Access certified trainers, so you can be assured that you are getting genuine advice and learnings. We use Access in some of our daily database management tools to create and maintain some of CRM data. I originally taught my self on MS Access about two years ago, reading through the larger books and picking out different scripting language to build and customize some of our databases. I started off using some of the basic tables, and forms fields to create and manage customer interactions. We also piped in Excel spreadsheets for orders and service requests. These all rolled into weekly and monthly reports that we used to help identify certain hot topics and problems across our services.
After taking some of the actual onsite courses, I was amazed at just how much more I could do without having to rely on outside programmers. there is no substitute for live training where you can interact with others to answer questions and provide real life scenarios. The instructors we had were great in their ability to make the content real life and not as technical. This was helpful, when idea to capture certain data, or have a certain report run, I no longer had to wait on others to get the proper coding done. I was even able through some of the advanced online learning’s, get a handle and successfully implement SQL queries and improve on our relational databases.
Access makes it very easy for those that do not wish to creat SQL language, by allowing simple to follow features, such as the table look up feature. We found this helpful when joining several tables that actually had to look up themselves to relate the data for different subsets.It is very important to name the tables with the extension such as “tblcustomers”, “frmscustomers”, as a good naming technique. We found this out early on a certainly saves a lot of time when cross referincing tables to forms, so we knew which were which.
Another key learining we got through our Microsoft Access training was that when using Access online we needed to make sure that we regularly optimized our databases to reduce the load on the server, and make sure there was minimal lag time in processing the customers request. Some of our earlier attempts created too many links and refernces so the table and lookups were not very efficient causing some serious lag time for our customers. So choosing function over fashion was definitely a lesson well learned. Here are some the pointers that have helped us streamline our tables:
1)Try and use several long tables rather than one wide (many fields) table.
2) Try to avoid AutoNumber fields when creating Primary Keys for a table. But rather use one or more data fields for this purpose.
3) Use Lookup lists with a link to lookup table linked to the main table for text fields.
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