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Posts Tagged ‘advice’

How To Engage All Your Customers

Every 6 months I gage my email subscribers to see what their needs are, what information they are looking for, and how much do they actually know about all my services. The responses to the latter question was somewhat shocking.

For this particular project, I have a website, a Twitter account, and an email list. In the survey I asked the email subscribers do they visit my site more than once a week and do they follow me on Twitter. The responses were 60% don’t visit my website more than once a week and 80% of list doesn’t follow me on Twitter.

What does this mean?

Don’t assume your visitors know about all your services and actively visit the ones they know about.

Promote, promote, promote.

Somebody who signs up for your email list may not know anything about your Twitter account. Somebody who follows you on Twitter may have no idea you have an email list. Make sure you actively engage and notify all mediums of any new content otherwise you might leaving a big bulk of potential customers in the dark.

Learn more about email marketing.

Is Your Flash Site Hindering Your Business?

Being an owner of an online media business, obviously I always need to be on top of what design and marketing practices are being implemented. While things come and go, it still always makes me cringe every time I land on a 100% flash created website.

Whether it looks good or not, coding your site 100% in flash basically does more harm than good.

For those unfamiliar with how web coding and design works, there are basically two form of sites: flash and non-flash. Take the following example to help distinguish the difference:

Compare two identical parks: Park 1 is trapped within a glass box (flash site); Park 2 is not (non-flash site).

Which park do you think people will go to? Obviously the one not in a glass box because people can go into the park and interact with all the amenities it has to offer. Nobody just wants to look at the park just from the outside. This is exactly the effect flash has on a site.

  1. Search engine spiders can’t read it.
  2. Usability for readers is just horrendous.
  3. There are no back buttons and no right click options.

Overall, the functionality and usability of flash sites are completely pointless and not solving our main problems.

Moreover, the overall design appeal of flash sites tend to be annoying to most users as well. In today’s internet world we have trained our head to think flashy, animated objects are spam. If we add all these things in our flash site, then what good does it do?

When flash is good to use. While I never believe flash is good except for some game or unique marketing campaign, there are coding techniques that allow flash to take on characteristics of non-flash sites; however, that requires some deep pockets, which is never really good on our bottom line.

Buying vs. Selling: What to Do?

Forget about just making money online, when you are dealing with anything that has to do with some sort of income we all would like to make money right now; however, the desire to experience satisfaction now might hinder that feeling a couple months down the road.

With any business, revenue is usually generated in an exponential format… meaning your money grows exponentially over time. While you make a couple cents in the first month, the next month could bring a couple dollars, followed by a couple hundred, and so on. The ability to see passed the rough patch and keep you eye on the end goal is what separates successful ventures from fallen one.

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An Unique Business Name. Its About Brand Awareness

Being in my position, I am constantly being pitched new business ideas and concepts. One question I always ask is what will be the name of your business or this particular project? Most of the time I receive some boring same-old name.

Take a second to think about this…

At some point of your business lifespan, you can change everything… except the company name. You can always change the product, logo, rebrand, and so on, but you can never change your company’s name. If anything, you have to create something else under another identity if you want to ditch your name.

For the most part people understand this, but because of that they are scared to be creative when choosing a name, rather they are looking for what I call a descriptive name (i.e. Bob’s Dry Cleaner, The Electronic Shack, etc).

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When To Spend Money On Your Site

With tools like WordPress and extremely cheap hosting, getting your site up and running really requires no money; however, when do you know it is time to spend more money?

The allure of starting something like a blog is enticing to most because they can make money without have to expense really any of their own. While you can relatively build and grow your site without have to spend to much extra, how do you know when and what to spend money on?

We need to first look at the essentials that we have to spend money on: Hosting and domain. These are annual payments and combined can cost you somewhere between $80-$100. Not bad especially when you consider of starting an actual brick-and-mortar store. Check out a bunch of cheap hosting companies that offer free domains with web hosting plans.

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