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Posts Tagged ‘small business’

Probably the most critical part of Internet marketing for your business is organizing your website so it will achieve your overall goals.  However, most business people ignore this critical step, or leave it to their web designer to take care of, which can often be even worse. 

The process of carefully planning the outline of a new website or upgrade to an existing website will secure for you not only a vehicle to show off your business in the best light, but also one that you are able to control the process of updating content, and, most importantly, achieve your business goals.  Here are a number of important steps to take in the website planning process:

1.  List all the information about your product or service that a visitor to your website might be interested in knowing.  If you are planning a website for a school, for example, the visitors would be interested in how man students attend, classroom sizes, staff information and sports offered.  Take the time to brainstorm as many areas related to your product, service or industry that someone might be interested in when visiting the website.

2.  Put yourself into the visitor’s shoes.  Visit some websites and review them as if you are in the market for the services those sites have to offer.  As a visitor, what do you like and dislike about each site?  Are you driven to take action?  Are you able to find what you are looking for quickly and easily? How many different pages do you have to click through to find what you want?  Take notes on all this information with the purpose of making your own website as visitor friendly as possible.

3.  Do keyword research to find out what visitors will be searching for. You don’t need to invest in expensive search tools, Google has a free keyword tool that is adequate for this purpose.  Enter a general phrase related to your product or service, such as “coffee filters” and other related keywords will appear.  These are the topics that people are searching for already.  By arming yourself with this information, you will be able to plan your website to answer their questions right away. 

4.  Plan your new website so that it can expand.  Don’t be lured into a website format that won’t let you expand easily to add new content pages or products.  A website is not static, but rather should change constantly to meet your customer needs. 

5.  Plan a website that you can control, rather than be at the mercy of a web designer to make even small changes to your website.   Old fashioned websites that only a web developer can change do not work in today’s dynamic Internet marketing environment that demands new content added regularly.  It is to your advantage to plan a website platform that will allow you to add content quickly and simply.

Usually, a new website is one of your business’ largest expenses.  It is critical to take the time to plan a new website that is compatible with your business goals. 

Marty Dickinson is the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for over 10 years. His specialty is Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors. Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.

Life is full of unimaginable possibilities. Many assume because they don’t have the right education or the right experience, they have to get a horrible job. This is not at all the case. Most people can find amazing jobs that help them and the overall economy by starting their own businesses. Businesses provide the amount of flexibility people need and you can sell or manage something that you love.

There are many ways you can start your own business. One of the easiest and low costs ways to start one is by trying to make money online. Making money online can be as simple as opening a website and selling stuff.

If you advertise well, you can start to make money really quickly. You can also start off by doing a part time thing, and then once the business starts to take off you can make a larger commitment to it. You can sell scarves, crafts. Whatever you want.

Most people do not want to risk their full time job for a business they aren’t sure will even take off. This is how you can turn your business into a home income opportunity. By working from home you can get rid of buying a specific place to work and you can build confidence in your business and also get a client list.

This way you can start selling things or providing services from your home at your convenience and when you begin to feel confident that your business is successful you can then decide to quit your full time job and do something you have wanted to do!

If you are not into the whole starting your own business to sell stuff, why not make money blogging. A lot of the popular bloggers make good money. The best way to make money is to get tons of hits on the site. This will attract advertisers. Advertising is the main source of revenue for sites like these. If your goal in life is to write, this is the best option for you. This job itself is low key. It does not involve a lot of hours except for writing, but if you want to be good at it you might want to do your homework first. You should figure out which part of the market you want to attract and things of that nature.

Businesses may seem really difficult, but it’s not too big of a mystery how you can be successful at it. If you are committed and passionate about it, the venture will be successful.

Viewing digital data from an historical perspective, the prospect of lost history looms as a very real threat. It may not seem that the deletion or loss of a few personal blogs could have that much of an effect, but the phenomenon is a symptom of something larger. Professionals in data management know too well that as a technology develops through four generations, the data created with the methods of the first generation finally becomes unreadable. This has implications for everything from blogs to photos hosted on websites to other kinds of records.

The situation with digital data parallels earlier changes in music technology. Think of the progression from cylinders to flat vinyl albums to cassette and 8-track tapes to CDs, not to mention mp3s. Who can play those music cylinders now? Similarly, a person’s digital diary on a 5 ¼” floppy disk would now be almost unreadable, as technology has progressed through 3 1/2″ disks to CD-ROM to flash drives. All that music and all that data is simple gone. If a person writes data about their whole life on blog entries, and the hosting company goes out of business, then where are that person’s thoughts and reflections?

Ironically, ancient records in archaic formats may be longer-lasting than digital data that can easily be lost. Historians can reconstruct Babylonian history from cuneiform tablets, and Egyptian history from hieroglyphs on monuments. Even America’s early history will remain known because it was written on paper, in letters, personal accounts and other documents. But if the software for blogging changes drastically in the next few decades, millions of blogs containing accounts and analysis of today’s history could become unreadable. Blogs are less easily preserved than a clay tablet or even a paper book.

On a smaller scale, blogs themselves are constantly vanishing, as people move them to new servers, start new ones, or simply stop updating altogether. Members of a blogging community, having no other way of knowing the person, lose touch and may never discover what happened to their friend. The blog posts sit there until the host site archives them or deletes them for inactivity, and the person is gone from online history.

As record-keeping continues switch to digital formats and away from paper that might still have been readable a century or two from now, the question of lost records grows in importance. The expense alone of continually upgrading records to new, technological formats is very high, so as people rush headlong into those technologies, they simply resign themselves to losing older data. With the disappearance of the weblogs of ordinary people, as well as those making history, and even people’s simple deletion of their own email, data is vanishing that might leave huge gaps in the future understanding of current world events.

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With the current popularity of blogging and with thousands of new blogs springing up every day, it’s not surprising that one of the biggest segments of growth is the celebrity blog. This doesn’t just refer to blogs written by celebrities themselves (or, in some cases, their publicity people). In fact, the famous people’s sites are probably in the minority, compared to the thousands of news blogs written about them, both by fans and professional star-watchers.

It’s likely that these news blogs, perhaps better described as gossip blogs, came first, and that part of the reason celebrity blogs began to appear was in response to these, so the stars could take back some control of their image. But for a few years, blogs that gossiped about celebrities reigned supreme. This was no surprise, of course, since wildly popular newspaper tabloids like the National Enquirer and magazines like People had been serving a similar purpose for decades. The public has always had a high interest in juicy tidbits about the rich and famous.

But the interest in the stars, thanks to blogs that gossip about them, has attained a level that goes well beyond anything previously seen. A celebrity used to need to avoid the prying eyes of newspaper reporters and television camera crews, but even tabloids and gossip magazines have reason to be envious of the publicity achieved by the new blogs. Even fans are now suspect, posting public photos that might make the stars cringe.

Sports figures, of course, are not immune either, with sports blogs following the gossip trend, running items about players’ love lives or speculation about drugs or illegal activity. And politicians are now major targets as well, having achieved a greater level of celebrity than ever before. However squeaky clean they might portray themselves, if they’ve got a skeleton in their closet, or even just an old finger bone, then someone is going to find them out and make a blog post about it.

It’s no surprise, then, that stars also began their own weblogs, maybe to counteract the rising cacophony of unrelenting gossip. The phenomenon of blogging has been a boon to both sides of the relationship, in fact, since famous people can also get their preferred message out to millions of people. While you have gossip blogs like www.perezhilton.com or www.tmz.com on one side, on the other you have famous bloggers like Bruce Willis, Barbra Streisand, the very popular and prolific comedian Margaret Cho, soccer star David Beckham, famous chef Jamie Oliver, home style diva Martha Stewart, writer Neil Gaiman, and on and on. The blogosphere is crowded with celebrities of every description.

Bloggers who gossip about the stars may in fact have altered the public news landscape, and not for the good. Noting the obvious popularity of celebrity blogs, even more traditional news organizations have begun including this sort of gossip in their own publications or broadcasts. If responsible, well-researched journalism is fading and the prying gossip of millions of peeping toms is what “journalism” has become, then this could perhaps sound the death knell for reliable news.

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