Internet and Businesses Articles

John's online business is expanding. His customers are increasing day by day. However, he feels very frustrated at the moment as he finds his website is 'down' about every 4th day. Whenever he calls up the support team of his web host, he gets the same old answer that his problem will be rectified soon. If the problems do persist it will surely hamper his business. He has been with his present hosting provider for the last year but now he feels he has to find a new web host as soon as possible because his present hosting package is also not able to meet up with his growing demands. This is not a one-off occurrence that has happened only to John, it happens with many people like him. Changing the web host might become a cumbersome task if John and other people like him don't know the correct procedure of doing it. So, let's have a look at the following easy and simple steps:

First of all, it's very important to have a backup of your website and everything related to it, like databases, scripts etc. It will be very helpful in case there is data loss because of any unforseen reason. Save at least 2 copies of everything and store them separately, so that you can work with one and the other one will function as a backup. You can take backup in various ways. One is by using software programs like a FTP program (e.g. Smart FTP http://www.smartftp.com/) for downloading data.

Now, the time is to look for a new web host that meets all your requirements and provides better technical services than your previous host. Since you have already been through the search procedure it won't take you much time to come across a reliable hosting company.

Once you have taken a new web-hosting plan and you are ready to upload your web pages, databases etc., check that you have received an IP number, FTP or FrontPage login, and password from your new hosting company. Now, upload all your files to the new server; you are just repeating the same procedure that you've done in the past when you uploaded your files for the very first time.

Only a few more steps more and you will be completely done. Before transferring your DNS servers over from your previous host to your new one, debug and test the new site from an individual IP number. Check that all the web pages exist, the links point to the right pages and that all your scripts are running. One important point which people always forget is their domain name expiration date. If you plan to move near the expiration date, it could cause you lots of problems. To be on the safe side, make sure that you have at least 3-4 weeks in hand before the domain name expires, or just renew it for another year.

To transfer domain name service to a new host identify registrar using "WHOis" lookup http://domreg-m6.net/domains/WHois.asp, verify registration of your domain name, identify the name server information for the host your are transferring to, and make changes in the DNS information at the registrar. During this DNS transition period new DNS information has to be propagated throughout the world's DNS servers. This propagation might take 2-4 days as an International root name server will firstly have to check all the various Domain registrars for updates, and then every ISP provider will update their DNS setting to show the new changes. Not only this, even Internet, i.e. Internet routers and caching engines have to update/clear its DNS cache as well. During this propagation period, you keep your old site running so that the visitors whose ISP provider haven't updated can still visit your website.

It's advisable that you don't cancel your old hosting service during the transition period, as you will need to check your mail from both the hosting providers, as some will direct e-mail to your old server whereas other Internet regions will send mail to your new server. After one or two weeks you can annul the account with your old host.

On the very first notion it sounds like a painful task to find a new web host and make all the necessary changes, but with the steps known, people like John will not find this procedure problematic. With so many automation software packages available, it has now become easier to switch over your web site from old host to new host. If both hosting providers have the same operation system platform, the procedure will become even simpler. But remember, the most important task in the whole host-changing scenario is to find a host that meets your requirements so that you don't have to go through this entire procedure again in the future.

Priyanka Agarwal
Hosting evangelist

Creatively marketing your corporate site takes time in the set up but you will learn that building your customers isn't about marketing your products but getting your name and reputation into the minds of internet customers.

I have randomly chosen Watkins to design a marketing approach but you will see how to apply this concept to any direct sales company.

Now let's sort through the steps of developing your online marketing plan.

Become an expert.

Be an expert on your products, your corporate website, and your current and potential customers. If you don't see yourself as an expert about your products, your company... that is your first step.

Don't try to market or pay for advertising without knowing your products and the people that would love them!

When you are comfortable with the products you offer on your corporate website begin to brainstorm about how to connect your products to internet customers.

On paper list the different categories of products with a list of potential "markets"
you can target. You are ready to start your marketing plan itself.

Find your niche market.

In our example of Watkins, there is a potential market with women that are homemakers, enjoy cooking, love to entertain or create family memories with cooking traditions but remember men love to cook too.

There is a very wide range of the ages, the groups within that cook and entertain. By studying your potential customers, a theme will emerge.

Let's look at "cooking from scratch."

To know your customers, do this exercise:

Think cooking. Think old fashioned values. Think food and family traditions.

Where would they go on the internet for ideas, menus, recipes and more? Use search engines for your initial search to find a few solid popular websites. As most well built website have links within their categories, visit their links or resources to find other similar sites.

Look for homemaking, cooking, familiy focused and entertaining sites with message boards, newsletters and articles.

You are finally nudging closer to your niche market, your potential customers.

Once you have found a few websites that cater to your market, stop and study the sites. Read the articles and visit the message boards. Message boards often have posts asking for advice or recipes. Articles may have ratings by visitors which tell you more about what readers want to see. learn what kind of information your potential customers may be looking for, what they want to learn and do.

Sign up for the site's newsletter. You will learn a great deal from the newsletter. Read the articles, hints and ads in the newsletter.

Start writing.

Submit your articles, recipes and kitchen hints both to site owners that accept submissions but you can also contact the publisher of the newsletters too.

It's very important to remember not to write about your products Write about anything connected to the homemaking, cooking, entertaining site....keep your written article focused along the theme of the website you have found.

Your articles should reflect your knowledge, your passion whether it be crafts for kids or organizing a closet.

Sell outside the article.

You do not need to sell within the article or post. On the power of your words, your writing, they will learn about you, your business in your "resource box." When a reader enjoys your article, connects with your writing, they will feel compelled to click on your link.

You have made your first contact with your market through creative marketing.

This is your best marketing strategy for your corporate website. Continue to post ads on message boards that allow you to but often that serves you best with recruiting for your direct sale team.

Your products, whether it is Discovery Toys or Tupperware, are best presented online in your resource box as you build your reputation as fun, knowledgeable and credible. Over time and repeated exposure online, your name will become synonymous with your product and your company.

That once limiting corporate website will be the link between you and your customer. Your success with your business and corporate site will be based on creating a market for You.

Tammy Ames
Owner of Wahm Connections http://www.wahmconnections.com - Publisher of Wahm Connections Weekly Online. Send a blank email to wahmconnections-subscribe@topica.com to subscribe to her dynamic weekly ezine available in both email text or html online. Free weekly subscriber ads available.

In today's world, a web site is virtually mandatory for any successful business. But there are web sites that will win you customers, and there are web sites that will lose you customers. Good design has a lot to do with which category your web site will fall into. But what is it that makes good or bad web site design? In my personal opinion, a good web site is one that's simple, informative and gives me a reason to come back frequently. That's what you should get from a good web designer/writer team. Bad sites, on the other hand, are complicated to use, slow loading, confusing or just plain annoying. Here's a list of my personal top 7 turn-offs as far as web site design is concerned:

1. Slow loading pages

Studies have shown that you have less than ten seconds to grab a visitor's attention. If your web page hasn't finished loading within that (very short) amount of time, you might as well forget about it. The main culprit I've found here are huge, slow-loading graphics, especially when they are embedded in tables. If large images are absolutely vital to presenting your business, compromise by adding thumbnails to the main page and allow the visitor to click on them to access the main image. Nobody minds a longer loading time, as long as it's them who can make that choice.

2. No contact information

As I've already mentioned in my article "Do's and don'ts of web site copy", one of my pet peeves is a web site that has no contact information accessible form the main page. If I can't get in touch with a company quickly and easily, chances are that I'll go to the competition. My advice is to have a whole page dedicated to contact information - address, phone, fax, email, and preferably a map of where you can be found (remember item #1, though - no huge graphics!) And please, don't use a graphic to display that information in a particularly clever way. I like to copy and paste that information directly from the web page to my contact management program. If I can't do that, you'll likely never hear form me - and all other customers who do the same!

3. Difficult to navigate

Don't try to be clever with navigational features. Simple text links or, if you prefer, quick-loading graphics are perfectly good means of allowing a visitor to navigate your site. Anything that requires interactive navigation, like menus that expand into sub-menus, sub-sub-menus and so on, is more an indication of a wrong information architecture than of a true need for complicated navigational features.

4. Non-HTML features

Don't get me started on this one. I've got a firewall on my computer, and my browser is set to block all those little nasty things that can mess with my PC. As a result I come across many a site that won't display or function properly, because it relies on features like JavaScript, Cookies, Interactive Headers or Java Applets. None of these are necessary to build a good web site, and unless you want your web site to lose you potential customers, you shouldn't use them. Or, if you absolutely have to, make sure that they are not integral parts of the web site!

5. Huge splash page

Another pet peeve of mine. As mentioned earlier, you have less than ten seconds to get your message across. Now guess how many visitors are going to wait longer than that just to watch a fancy animation? 'Nuff said.

6. Pop-up ads

A huge turn-off as far as I'm concerned. As a matter of fact, I've got a pop-up blocker installed on my PC, so if your web site tried to tell me something important via a pop-up window, I'd never even see it. If you feel that you have to use pop-ups, consider going for the less intrusive (and annoying) pop-under windows instead.

7. Sideways scrolling

Not everybody has a monitor with the same screen resolution as you, so make sure that your web site displays on monitors with a lower resolution without forcing your visitor to scroll sideways. It's a singularly annoying thing, and chances are that you'll lose those visitors very quickly. Or, if you have information in a column on the right side of your web site, it may simply never appear on the screen.

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Need online copy that gets results? Frauke Nonnenmacher is a copywriter who specialises in clear, informative and persuasive web copy. For more information, please visit her web site at http://creativecats.sectorlink.org/tracking.pl?article3
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A favicon is a custom icon that sits next to your web site title in a persons favourite's menu when they have bookmarked your site, it is an easy way to create an 'eye drawing image' to ensure that people always see you link in their favourite's and should hopefully encourgae them to check out that 'great site that they haven't visited yet today!'

This is a quick guide that will provide instructions on how to create one for your site, it really is very easy and will help to create a extra tool to maintain your site in the customers mind.

All it takes is four easy steps...

1) Choose an image that you would like to use to represent your web site. Most people use a small version of their logo but you can use any image that you want. I would advise however that you choose an image that is reflective of your web sites theme and an image that will still remain recognisable when the size is dropped to 16 x 16 pixels.

2) Take your chosen image, which should be as high a quality as you can get, in .JPG or .GIF format and convert your image to the 256 color Web Safe Palette or the Windows 16 color format. This can very easily be done in most graphics packages and as a guideline I would say that the less colours you use the better so as to maintain image clarity and professionalism.

3) Using your graphics package, reduce the image down to 16 x 16 pixels, at this point you need to ensure that you preserve the image resolution. This is a key factor as a larger image that has been reduced can loose all clarity and just become a tacky blob, is this how you want your web site remembered? The key here is to keep perservering until you are happy with the finished icon and it is a great advertisement for the professionalism, and the theme, of your web site.

4) Once you are happy with your completed icon you need to save it as "Favicon.ico". This is the default name that web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, look for. This file then needs to be copied to the root directory of your web site and then whenever a customer bookmarks your site your image is cached and will display when they use their favourites menu.

This can very easily be tested by clearing your cache and re-bookmarking your site and 'hey presto' your new shiny, professional and eye drawing favicon will appear next to your site title and will also appear in the address bar of your browser.

This is just another simple trick that aims to get you 'thinking outside the box' when it comes to developing your website presence and reminding your customers to come and re-visit your web site.

Mike - Forum Webmaster at

Online Auction Trader - a community forum dedicated to developing you a sustainable, profitable and long term online income.
http://www.onlineauctiontrader.com/phpBB/index.php

Video communication is an efficient means of reaching prospective customers, of promoting the presentation of your products or services. The use of videos on the Internet brings numerous advantages. It is a great solution with great impact on the visitor. It combines the advantages of "classic" TV advertising with the Internet's most important characteristic, interactivity.

The ad becomes thus more attractive to the Web surfer, who becomes more receptive to what you have to offer. Online marketing is therefore more cost effective than regular TV ads, simply because, on the one hand, it's less expensive to produce and disseminate, and on the other hand, it makes customer targeting a lot easier too.

A Definition

If we were to define the online video marketing concept, it would be as a marketing strategy used by companies in order to promote products and services, by making use of short, catchy, informative videos, with the purpose of inducing awareness to the prospective customers about the promoted products/services and enticing them into purchasing the above-mentioned products/services.

Characteristics of Online Video Marketing

It is common knowledge that nowadays people enjoy more to watch a screen (be it a TV's or a PC's) than reading. Information is delivered at a higher rate via images than through text.

The main advantage that Internet marketing videos have over the traditional, text format approach is that videos can get to the point much faster and waste less of the precious time of prospective customers. Instead of having the Web users go over some pages of text, trying to figure out the message that you're actually trying to convey, you can deliver the same message in a small percentage of that time in a more attractive and inciting manner.

When to Use Video

Marketing videos can be used when a company decides to promote, a bit more aggressively (in the good way), one or more of its products/services. They can help reach the prospects better, on a well-trodden path, that of visual advertising, laid before them by television. Given that more and more people nowadays turn to Internet in search of information, served hot and fast, Internet marketing videos come naturally to supplement the Web user's need for new, for useful, for sensational.

Advantages of Video Advertising

If you decide to use video in your marketing campaigns, it's a very good option. It is catchier than other types of advertising. It captures the Web user's attention easier and transports your message to prospects much faster than simple text.

A video ad can contain a demonstration of a product's use and usability. Add to that a human face and a very pleasant voice (or even a well harmonized combination of a woman's voice with a man's), and you can have your prospects wrapper around your finger. By using these techniques, the prospective customer can relate more to your company and to what you're promoting.

A Few Tips

It is important not just to take the video you made and put it in a video directory and just sit back and wait for it to bring you loads of prospects. The road to a nice result is similar to the regular Search Engine Optimization way. Bear in mind that videos are a gourmet dish for search engines, so it's best that you take some time and prepare it accordingly. Use the right ingredients, so to speak.

Today's technology offers you many opportunities to track traffic and analyze results. Take your time and make an effort (which will be rewarded in the end) to measure the impact that your videos have had on the prospects and to measure their performance. Search for tools that can tell you how much of your video was played before the visitor closed it, how many prospects actually decided to pay your site a visit after watching your video add on a different website, how many of these visits converted into sales, and so on.

Just because you have invested some time and effort in one or several videos, it doesn't mean that you should leave out content. It's still an important part of your business. Offer your visitors enough information on the site. Remember that marketing videos are meant to promote your business, to inspire Web surfers to visit your site and, luckily, convert into sales.

Many experts advise to use the videos on the first page. It's like handing out your business card. The first page recommends you, and we all know that first impression counts. Don't tuck your marketing video away, on some page that a visitor might not even get to. Make it visible. Anyway, give your site visitors the opportunity to skip your video. Maybe they're not in the mood for watching it, and the last thing you want is an annoyed visitor.

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Copyright © 2007, http://www.avangate.com all rights reserved. This article was written by Adriana Iordan, WebMarketing Manager at Avangate. Avangate is a complete ecommerce provider for shareware sales incorporating an easy to use and secure online payment system plus additional software marketing services and sales tools.

This article may be reproduced in a website, e-zine, CD-ROM, book, magazine, etc. so long as the above information is included in full, including the link back to this website