The importance of using labels in your blog postings.
When writing your blog, it is nice to be able to segment the postings into a logical manner for future reference. Labels have now been provided in the new Google Blogger software to do just that. Now, online newsletters created using Blogger can be sorted based on these labels. Imagine being able to have a listing of real estate Homes Sales Prices posted monthly along with other information. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to view all the sales stats for all related postings? Or, how about Marketing or Internet information grouped together in one location as though it were one group of postings online.
This can be of a benefit in more ways than one. Users, readers, buyers, and visitors to a website blog can now get to and read related information quickly. This can also be used as a sales tool for the sales and marketing department. If products or services are grouped together in a logic format, then a single hyper-link can be produced in an email to send a potential customer to the information all in one place.
Additionally, postings can have more than one label. Many times a posting will have more than one subject matter. By being able to label postings with more than one label, this provides the information in various layouts to the reader, depending on what they are searching for.
Take the time to add labels to older postings. Your readers will like it. Think of labels as an online filing system. Try to think in a logical manner and create your own categories.
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Need help expanding your business on the Web? Professional Web Services has the Business Solution for you today. Contact Professional Web Services for your Internet marketing solution.
Make a major marketing impact with video on-demand marketing.
Make a marketing impact for your business with a video. If a picture tells a thousand words, then a video is magnitudes greater, if done in a creative and smart marketing way. The business website is a great place to incorporate the essence of your business and share it with the online world. An unveiling of a product, with a video introduction of the actual product in use, is a cool way to spice up a website and provide a reason for customers to come back. As is common in the B2B, Business to business world, the process of making a sale is many times, significantly longer than the B2c (business to consumer) counterpart. Various levels of management typically get involved with large machine purchases or any type of major capital investment. Having a video of the capital equipment in action can help make the sale.
A video can also be used to highlight the importance of your product or services provided. There are many videos online that make a stunning marketing impact to provide the detailed understanding of what your business is all about.
Here are a few websites with videos that I think capture the essence and ideas of what online marketing is all about.
Actually, I am a little biased on some of these websites, because they are related to Professional Web Services, Inc.
First off, the design and customization group, that has taken great designs, and customized them for various customers to promote their brands. Many times simply changing a heading picture on many of the professional open source designs will set the business apart. Take a look at our Professional Web Services designs for a creative marketing video that has been incorporated into the website.
Second, we have our Marketing Forces in force. This particular website has been incorporated with another video that we discovered that is really cool animation. The creator put a lot of time and effort into creating a super quality artistically designed video using another open source program. It is simply amazing at what can be done.
This website incorporates several marketing concepts that provides information in a particular market segment, just by viewing the short video online. The clip is educational about the circuit board industry and how PCB CNC drill machines actually drill holes in the circuit boards. It also provides an inside look to show other related industries of the types of CNC machines and electronic equipment serviced and maintained by Probe Industries.
Consider using video on demand marketing for your company. For more information, contact Professional Web Services today to have powerful marketing strategies make an impact for your business online.
Are potential new customers seeing your website online or finding your global or local business with the search engines? Are you getting sales leads and customers from the Internet? Do you want more customers now?
Learn how Internet marketing and online advertising with Google, Yahoo!, and Bing Search (formerly named Microsoft MSN Search) engines can drive new customers to your online doorstep and even deliver them to the inside of your store, where they can shop and buy the products or services your business provides. Take the next step with Professional Web Services today.
In the competitive business world we live in, a business must be proactive with 20/20 business vision when it comes to marketing their company online. Any business that is selling products or services to other businesses in the case of B2B, or selling to consumers in the case of B2C would not dream of going without hiring some good sales people. Many times these businesses will be paying top dollar to get the best sales person they can. But, some businesses will neglect what I would consider the most important salesman for their company, their corporate website.
Presidents And CEOs
The buck stops here, with the president and CEO of a company. I am going straight to the top on this one. These are the people that are the ultimate decision makers. They provide the guiding force and direction for a company. While a president and CEO does not have to be a marketing genius, they do have to understand the marketing basics, at a fundamental level, for the health and well being of an organization. In essence a good president and CEO knows the importance of hiring the right people for the job. They know that good marketing is key for business success.
Many of the presidents and CEOs know hiring good people is key to corporate growth, but have not really grasped the importance of the Internet search engines, Internet marketing, and online advertising. They themselves use the Internet on a regular basis for searching all sorts of things but there is a disconnect between the searches they personally do and other people searching for what their business does. Small business company owners seem to be especially guilty of this Internet shortsightedness. Simply put, they are not seeing 20/20 business vision, and sadly they don’t even recognize their poor business vision and the need for good business glasses. They have the misplaced idea that a website is just something you are forced to have in business, instead of wrapping their arms around it, promoting it, and realizing that the website is, or should be, one of their most important assets a company can have. This business mentality is not strictly limited to small businesses. Corporate America has a certain segment group that is just as guilty as their small business counterparts. They have gotten fat and happy doing business the old way and have not adapted to the changes taking place online.
Embracing Internet Marketing
Grasping the potential the Internet has for your business is absolutely paramount to focusing a fair amount of your marketing and advertising dollars online. A salesman can not be available 24×7 but the website can operate round-the-clock, and be accessible to customers that are looking for those frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the products or services your company provides. In addition, detailed information can be available to your customers at their browsing finger tips. Information such as application notes, drawings, manuals, material properties, and type specifications can be made available to customers.
The website is so powerful that it can do most of the work of all your sales force combined. This allows your sales force more time to concentrate on closing sales and building better customer relations. The fact of the matter is the website can help support the structure of the company and provide excellent tools for the sales department to use. Simply having the information at both the customer’s and your sales department’s fingertips will make everyone’s job much easier and will result in more sales. Email’s written can then be linked back to the specific information being requested. Customers will come to rely on your company’s website as being a good source of information. This helps promote your brand and keeps the customer’s focus on you, instead of the competition.
B2B, Business-to-business customers are becoming much more demanding in what they want from a source provider. They demand the information now. If you don’t provide that information, it is just a matter of time before they go somewhere else. Maybe you have worked hard to build up customer relationships in your business. But in today’s business climate, where the weather changes quickly, and customers are likely to get blown off course quickly by the competition, it is imperative to set aside a marketing and advertising budget and focus this toward providing a solid online presence.
Forget the smoke and mirrors approach with the website design. You must have substance, and that substance involves work, time, effort, and a fair amount of financial investment. To be sure, the website is really only the starting point from an Internet marketing perspective. The website must be promoted in the form of quality link building, continued website development in the form of new content and regular site maintenance updates, along with regular detailed evaluations and analysis. With billions of pages online, not to mention the online directories with sometimes hundreds of competitors lined up and down the pages there has to be marketing focus with ongoing keyword development and targeting of new market segments to really standout online.
The businesses that standout on the Internet, and standout first online with the search engines for their specific industries’ keywords, will be in a position to capture those early sales leads and new customers.
As the owner, president, or CEO of your organization, you can do only so much yourself. Start today, set aside an Internet marketing and online advertising budget to promote your business on the Internet.
RESTON, Va., February 21, 2007 – comScore Networks today released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In January 2007, Google Sites captured 47.5 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.2 share points from the previous month. Yahoo! Sites maintained its second place ranking with 28.1 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.6 percent), Ask Network (5.2 percent) and Time Warner Network (5.0 percent).
Share of Online Searches by Engine
December 2006 – January 2007
Total U.S. Home, Work and University Internet Users
Source: comScore qSearch
Dec-06
Jan-07
Pt Chg vs. Previous Month
Total Internet Population
100%
100%
N/A
Google Sites
47.3
47.5
0.2
Yahoo! Sites
28.5
28.1
-0.4
Microsoft Sites
10.5
10.6
0.1
Ask Network
5.4
5.2
-0.2
Time Warner Network
4.9
5.0
0.1
•Americans conducted 6.9 billion searches online in January, up 2 percent versus December. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 26-percent increase since the same month a year ago.
•Google Sites led the pack with 3.3 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (733 million), Ask Network (361 million), and Time Warner Network (342 million).
Website designs, blog designs, website marketing, and blog marketing are making headlines these days. Why do I mention websites and blogs in the same sentence? The reason is because of the power that is in both. Just sit back for a moment and bear with me on my little story.
Both of the following statements are true. There is no difference between a blog and a website. There are major differences between blogs and websites. In fact, we have a convergence going on online today between website marketing and blog marketing. Management at the highest level needs to throw out their misconceptions for understanding about blogs vs websites. Blogs are powerful websites. Blogs may be one of the most simple and most powerful B2B and B2C website solutions on the Internet today. With RSS feeds and world wide subscriber-ships, a business can stay in contact with their customer base.
Well, Google came out with a cool new powerful marketing and branding solution for any B2C or B2B business or C2C person on the planet. Free of charge blogging services have been around since the early days of blogs, using the Blogger driven software engine by Google. Google has provided anyone the ability to create good website addresses and then if they want point it to another domain file name with FTP publishing. Now there is an additional power feature that was launched this year by Google. Bring your own domain name (BYOD) to your free online blog and Google software will host your blog for free with all the links and published articles functioning as though they were published from day one as your own website without the blogspot.com domain suffix. See Blogger Custom Domains
Here is an example. I created a free blog website by the name of mondayswebsite.blogspot.com. I then published several articles on this site. I had a parked domain name by the name of Mondays.ws and decided to turn it on. So, following Google’s instructions for custom domain name publishing, I pointed my GoDaddy registered domain name Mondays.ws to Google Hosting Services. Then I went into the blog control panel and turned on Custom Domain name and set it to Mondays.ws. Low and behold, when this was finished, now Mondays.ws is displayed instead of MondaysWebsite.blogspot.com. If someone tries to go to MondaysWebsite.blogspot.com they were redirected to Mondays.ws. Try it. Click on the links. By the way, as of (4/19/2011) I now have Mondays Website as a place holder for feeling down with the blues. And then you can take a look at: http://ww2.mondays.ws/2007/02/thumbs-up-for-we-design-it.html
I am testing a few other items related to subdomains. More to come in the future.
I would suggest you try the service out with one of your parked domains. If your business is like most businesses, that have extra domain names, with variations of a business name or even using the .net, .org, .info, .us, or others to test the service out. Domain names are so inexpensive today that it is wise to sign up for another domain name related to what your business does instead of only concentrating on the company name.
Get started today. Need help along the way? Professional Web Services can provide you with professional Internet marketing services and Blog marketing services. Contact us for a free Internet marketing evaluation.
Jim Warholic, President of Professional Web Services, Inc.
The prerequisite for any B2C or B2B business website is to use the keywords of the business in the site body text.
Such a simple statement but I would have to say is very often overlooked by the business owner or president of the organization. Unless your business is a Sears, Best Buy, Walmart, or other well known brands, many business owners assume that someone arriving to the website will already know what their business is about before they get there. That is simply not the case on the Internet. In fact, it is a challenge for any businesses to have their website show up in the search engine results pages for the products and services provided. This goes both for the well known corporate brands and the unknown small business company names.
When writing online, the subject matter should be laid out using keywords that customers would use to find a company via the search engines. Both B2C and B2B websites have some very unique challenges facing them. Understanding the target audience are of a prime importance in establishing what keywords are to be placed into the website. Search engines place a priority on the words within the website itself when the search robots crawl or spider the page. Some folks think that the keywords meta tag is enough to get a web page found online. This is the furthest thing from the truth. The keywords meta tag isn’t even used by most of the well known search engines. Unless the copy is written in the pages of the website, and has the words that customers would use for any searches online, the odds are extremely poor that the website would show up in the search engine results pages.
Many folks think that all they have to do is post some pictures and a little bit of text online, as though it were an advertising placard. The bottom line is a website needs to be thought of as a sales and marketing tool, and not just an online advertising billboard for a company’s name. This requires developing keywords, writing copy for information related to your particular industry, service, or market sector, promoting the website through all online marketing channels, and time and effort to do it right.
There are no shortcuts here to developing keywords for your business to be found online. Think about all the millions or billions of web pages that have the same words within their website. Think about how all of those compete with your business online. Even without Google, Bing, or Yahoo! Search updating their search algorithms from time to time, it is an ongoing task that requires an analytical mindset to set your business apart.
Google Co-op Provides a Great Way to Custom Build Your Own Search Engine When You Want To Find The Web Pages Important To Your B2C And B2B Business
http://pwebs.net/flash-marketing.swf
Now you can customize your own search engine dedicated to your own needs, or better still, build a search engine for your own B2c or B2b business privately or broadcast it publicly for customers to be able to find the information they need.
With the ability to allow for both results from the World Wide Web, and/or a select group of websites, you can customize it to your tastes.
If you are a non-profit, university, or a government agency you can select the option for ads free display for the search results pages. If you want a totally ads free enterprise system from Google, for users to search your website, they offer their enterprise solutions, Google Mini and Google Search Appliance.
While Google Mini and Google Search Appliance are not free as an enterprise solution, I am sure the two solutions are very robust and built with the Google Search technology to provide very good results for both your website Internet search results and your business’s intranet search solution.
The Google Mini delivers cost-effective, high-quality search for your public website, intranet, and file servers – and you can be up and running in less than an hour. Supports from 50,000 to 300,000 documents. Learn more.
The Google Search Appliance provides robust, scalable and secure search across virtually all the information in your company. Starts at $30,000 for search across 500,000 documents. Learn more.
Depending on your company’s search needs will depend on the type of search product required. If you are a small company with very little information on the web, then you probably do not need to have a search engine and can very easily provide a menu system for navigation for website visitors. However, with very large websites, some form a search engine software or hardware is helpful to the end users. You want your customers to be able to find the information, products, or services offered by your B2C or B2B business. Likewise, internal searches on the intranet are very beneficial to the company at large. Sales, marketing, advertising, engineering, customer service, management, and HR can all benefit by making the documents available through the intranet.
Submitting a website to Yahoo! is not that difficult if you already have an email and a Yahoo! ID account with them. However, if you do not want an email account with Yahoo, submitting your website to Yahoo! is quite difficult. “Note: Submitting a URL requires signing in with a Yahoo! ID.” They make you get an email address that is difficult to remember. I tried about ten times before I could create one that would be accepted. Their suggestions for email addresses were not even logical. I tried placing numbers inside of the various combinations of letters and still the sign-up process would not go through. Yahoo! seems to do something very strange with their cookies also. I haven’t been able to figure it out, but with an older version of Mozilla I was not able to start the process. Even if I turned cookies fully on, the system would not accept the information into the system.
So, I had to start the whole process over with Firefox browser that I also have installed on the computer. That seemed to function for registration and login. Once logged in I was then able to submit the websites for the search engine spider to crawl in the future.
Now, Yahoo! is not endearing many folks with such a difficult sign-up process. I forgot to tell everyone that their email has flashing ads on the right side and are very annoying to say the least. If I am trying to read an email, all I see is this flashing graphic image and can’t get rid of it at all.
Yahoo!, if you want to give me ads, please don’t annoy me. Yahoo!, have you considered how this plays out with your users and the competition? I am not one to tell you how to run your business, but how much sense does it make for the long haul, to annoy your valuable users of your services and visitors to your website?
The other two search engines (Google and Bing) make it easy to submit a website for the spiders to crawl it. I don’t have to register for an email address, nor do I have to go through the difficult sign-up process with either of the other two search giants.
Understanding The Search Spiders
If your website is a new website, it can take awhile for the spiders or robots to naturally find it on the World Wide Web through links to it from other places. There are a few things besides submitting to the search engines that a person can do to help get a website in the crawl cue. Google has an excellent set of webmaster tools that can be helpful for building a detailed sitemap that can be submitted, in which every page of a website can be uploaded for the Google spiders to crawl. That way, you are sure to have all your pages included into the search population.
PS Don’t fall for promises of daily submission to the search engines by some of the Internet marketing companies online. This at best, is a waste of time and money, and at worst, could be considered spam by the search engines.
The DMOZ or ODP, Open Directory Project Took An AOL Dump
AOL had the main server that stored the data and ran the ODP operation go down with no backups.
This is strange in more ways than one. Not having backups of the data or the system seems very strange for a company the size of AOL Time Warner. Granted, AOL has had some major layoffs in recent times but not to have a backup, what’s up with this?
Anyways, many have stated that the ODP was dead a long time ago before this major outage occurred.
Apparently the machine holding dmoz in AOL ops crashed. Standard backups had been discontinued for some reason; during unsuccessful attempts to restore some of the lost data, ops blew away the rest of the existing data on the system.
There are various reports surfacing on the web that DMOZ has been experiencing unspecified hardware problems for more than a week, with editors unable to log in, and no eta of a fix. Has the old dinosaur gone belly up?
With the information I have today I predict that 2007 will be the year DMOZ becomes independent and goes 2.0 or it will be the year DMOZ dies for real. If AOL decides to kill the project I am certain that there will be several web 2.0 forks of the project.
The DMOZ Report has some Google insider information on what Google engineers were doing earlier this year with their algorithm ranking of the ODP pages. For those of you that are curious about what the editor application process was like for the ODP and the history of the ODP read more:
Maybe this latest ODP outage will cause enough of a shakeup in the online world and someone will come up with a better system. The ODP became a system of the haves and have nots in recent times. If you could get your website listed in the directory then this was extremely helpful for your Google rankings in the past. But, if you were new, and in a highly competitive field, your listing in the ODP project may never get reviewed or be placed into the directory. This became a directory of first come first serve and many of those that were/are editors simply decided what sites would be allowed based not on content of the website, but rather on “what could you do for me” attitudes by the editors and the select rejections of the competition websites.
B2C And B2B Are Both Facing Some Unique Challenges On The Internet
First and foremost, customers, whether on the side of Business-to-business or Business-to-consumer, (B2B or B2C) are getting much more search savvy. They are spending much more time on the Internet searching out everything. B2B buyers are using the Internet to track down specialty items that would have been typically researched through Thomas Register just a few short years ago. In fact, the Internet, and specifically search engines have had a very positive affect for B2B buyers, and consumers, while at the same time have had a negative affect on old type of Manufacturing Directories and Encyclopedia book sales. Many of these Directory publishers have migrated to the Internet. However, they are actually behind in their conversion because of the abundance of online information that is published on the Web. Both buyers and consumers know how to type keywords into a search engine and get a wealth of information specific to their needs.
Consumers are doing their research into big ticket items before purchases are made. They are searching for and selling items on Craigslist and eBay, and other online classified areas, to the detriment of the local newspapers. Coverage is local, national, or International in scope. The benefits for the consumer are expanding on a daily basis as new types of solutions for buying and selling items are being developed.
From the standpoint of any business, both on the B2B and B2C side of the equation, developing a strong online presence is not an option any more. Every business that wishes to expand, either vertically or horizontally will need to come up with a strategic Internet marketing and online advertising plan.
