Online Small Business Internet Tutorials for Ecommerce Entrepreneurs - Domain Names

WebSite101 Tweets

Mike Valentine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:11:00 +0000

#101 WebSite101 Tweets:
#101 Ten Ways to Use PHP on your Website: Ten Ways to Use PHP on your Website Copy.. http://bit.ly/4rbHGO 07:34:18

WebSite101 Tweets

Mike Valentine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:11:00 +0000

#101 Ten Ways to Use PHP on your Website: Ten Ways to Use PHP on your Website Copyright © 2009 Chuck M.. http://bit.ly/3cyQBl 04:54:32

Compensation for Unbiased Opinion

Mike Valentine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:23:28 +0000

Why Is Paid Blogging So Controversial?

Blogs are widely recognized as a bastion of unadulterated thought and ideas. Readers are loyal largely because they assume the blogger’s ideas have not been compromised by commercial interests. On the surface, a sponsored conversation seems inconsistent with this ideal. Compensating a blogger to write about your company suggests the blogger must forfeit his or her unbiased position. In reality, that is completely untrue.

The problem is that most companies that use a sponsored conversation to gain market exposure execute a poorly-crafted strategy. It is tarnished from the beginning and does more harm than good for their brand.

How To Generate The Best Results From A Sponsored Blog

There are two secrets to leveraging sponsored conversations effectively. You will find both of them to be intuitive, especially when you consider the perspective of a sponsored blog’s readership. First, the connection between your company and the blogger should be transparent. Second, you must allow the blogger to speak authentically.

Transparency is critical because readers will revolt if they feel something is hidden from them due to the blogger being compensated. That creates problems on multiple fronts. Not only will a lack of transparency hurt the blogger’s influence, but it can also create a public relations nightmare for your company. Make sure that each and every sponsored conversation is disclosed as such.

The blogger’s authenticity is also critical. If he or she is unable to speak freely about your company, their credibility will suffer. Even if a post is disclosed as a sponsored conversation, readers will ignore it if they sense the blogger is not being genuine. That does your company little good. Let the blogger write authentically.

A Sponsored Conversation Melds Voice, Authority, And Marketing

The reason a sponsored conversation has such potency is because it lets you access an existing platform of trust and authority. Many bloggers attract thousands of loyal readers. These readers are influenced by the blogger’s posts because of the writer’s authentic voice. That authenticity encourages trust. If the blogger writes about your company and products, readers are likely to trust his or her ideas. They are likely to act on the blogger’s recommendations. As long as the sponsored conversation is disclosed as such, you can benefit from the blogger’s authority and influence while promoting your products through the blogger’s voice.

Measuring The ROI Of A Sponsored Conversation

The compensation you offer to bloggers and the goal of your sponsored conversation will influence how you measure each campaign’s ROI. For example, if you’re using a sponsored blog to drive traffic to your website, you can embed pixels and trackable parameters within the links. That allows you to measure the number of unique visitors and the sales they generate. If you compensate the blogger based on a cost-per-click or cost-per-sale formula, you can easily calculate the ROI of that particular sponsored conversation.

Sponsored Conversations Can Increase Your Exposure And Sales

Marketing costs are rising with no end in sight. At the same time, consumers are gravitating toward blogs that are written with an authentic voice that encourages their loyalty and trust. A sponsored conversation gives you an opportunity to tap into those powerful levers to promote your products and brand. Despite the controversy, this strategy is here to stay. Major brands are already using it to reach niche communities that would be all but impossible to reach through conventional methods. You can launch a sponsored conversation campaign and enjoy the same advantages.

About the Author: With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Reagor Smith is on the cutting edge. Combining Social Media Optimization with more traditional SEO and SEM methods, RRS is a consulting firm specializing in enhancing clients’ online presence and managing their public relations online through traditional and Reverse SEO. http://www.RostinReagorSmith.com

Ten Ways to Use PHP on your Website

Mike Valentine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:10:12 +0000

PHP is an open source programming language

PHP is a programming language that allows your website to go beyond a basic HTML document, and create an interactive experience. Open source means that the source code is available to someone with proper access to the site, so that they can easily make changes. When the Internet was first getting started, most of the pages on websites were basic HTML documents. Meaning that when you visited a page (about.html, for example), you downloaded all of the content of the page into your browser.

How Do I Know if I have a PHP Site?

If you are visiting a site, and you see that the page name ends with .html, this means that the page is most likely a plain old HTML page. If the page name ends in .php, then you the site is a php based site. Other dynamic programming languages include .jsp (Java Server Pages) or .asp (.NET or Active Server Pages). Occasionally you’ll see sites that end in .html that have dynamic code embedded in them, but this requires some tricks to accomplish on the server.

We have several sites that use static HTML pages and have great results. There are some pages that have dynamic content, but most of the pages are built in straight HTML. It’s great for search engine optimization, as some of those pages have been active for years. However, as the number of pages grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to update menu or navigation items, because it means you have to open each page, one at a time, and modify the contents.

Advantages of using PHP

PHP works a little differently. Instead of downloading the entire page (with the navigation, content and everything in one file), php allows you to embed programming code that isn’t displayed to the end user. This programming code allows you to tell the page, “Insert the top navigation here.” Or, “put the content for the page over there.”

PHP allows you to personalize a page, for example, or automatically detect that a user is coming into the site from a mobile device and display a different version of the site that is optimized for their Blackberry or iPhone. PHP keeps most of the code for the site “behind the scenes” so that the page that is displayed to the end user loads quickly and doesn’t require the browser to do processing work — the work is handled instead by the server.

PHP Is Ideal For Working With Databases

One of the biggest advantages of a programming language like PHP is that it allows you to easily interact with a database. If you’re unfamiliar with databases, think of a database as a souped-up form of an Excel spreadsheet. You have columns (i.e. page name, content, title) and rows. Rows typically would hold information that is organized by column headings.

PHP makes it easy to read information from a database, and then display information onto a web page. So, if you’ve ever used a site where you type in your zip code to find a store location near you, the system likely is taking your zip code, performing a database query (i.e. find all stores within 10 miles of the 80303 zip code) and display the results so that you can find your way. In order to do this, we have a geolocation database that allows us to tell the approximate distance between two zip codes.

You could do the same thing by building out a series of web pages that has each location. And while this is fine for three or four locations, as the number of locations increases, PHP allows you to automate the process.

Keep Content Organized

One of the ways we’ve been able to streamline the process of building websites is that we’ve standardized our process using our PageDirector content management system. There are many, many ways to build websites. Each designer seems to have a slightly different way of putting a site together. We are frequently asked to work on sites that other people have created, and in order to make simple changes to the content or navigation, we often have to dig around in the code to find where things are located. This takes time and isn’t very efficient. The PageDirector system, however, keeps all of the content for the site neatly organized in a database table. So that anyone can easily find the content and make changes quickly and easily. One of our clients said to me in an email to me yesterday, “It’s really efficient and a simple tool to use PageDirector. It makes my life easier being able to update the website fast.”

How Does It Work?

When someone clicks on a link to go to a page, the system pulls the right content from the database, grabs the menu items from another location, and on-the-fly creates the page for a person.

Summary

PHP is a server-based programming language that allows you to create an interactive experience for your site visitors, and keep content and other information organized within a database.

About the Author: PHP is a programming language that allows your website to go beyond a basic HTML document, and create an interactive experience. PHP allows you to create an interactive experience for your site visitors, and keep content and other information organized within a database. This article explores some of interactive applications that can be developed using PHP. http://www.customerparadigm.com/index/21/Articles_Media.php

WebSite101 Tweets

Mike Valentine — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:11:00 +0000

#101 How to Market with Social Media: Online Marketing & Social Media as Business Tools What Is Online.. http://bit.ly/UxeNj 13:47:26

How to Market with Social Media

Mike Valentine — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:25:11 +0000

Online Marketing & Social Media as Business Tools

What Is Online Marketing?

Online Marketing is the interactive process of selling your company, goods or services over the internet. A good online marketing strategy will create a synergy between your company’s business model and sales goals and your overall website appearance and function. Some of the most commonly used online marketing strategies include internet advertising (hyper links and ad banners), the management of a customer data base and email strategies. Using a broad mix of components (see “Social Media”) the purpose of online marketing is to increase brand awareness and generate revenue through sales.

How Is Online Marketing Used?

Online Marketing should be a part of your overall marketing strategy. Although many companies still utilize more traditional methods of marketing, not having a strategy for online marketing means you are not reaching an incredibly large sector of the market. Online marketing should showcase eye-catching web design, develop and enhance your brand, utilize online advertising and ultimately, increase your sales. In addition to promoting and advertising your business, an online marketing strategy will allow you to conduct research revealing the preferences, needs and demographics of your customers. You can also post press releases and articles.

Why Is Online Marketing Important To My Business?

Online Marketing is important for the same reason a more traditional marketing plan is. How are you going to generate revenue without selling anything? Online marketing combines creative and technical elements so that you have a specific look and feel to your company while maximizing the broad marketing opportunities web technology provides. One of the most exciting things about online marketing is that you can reach your customers anywhere at anytime! Probably the most important reason to engage in online marketing is that almost everyone else does. If you don’t, all of your competitors will attract and keep your customers!

What Is Social Media?

Social Media is an internet based means of communication allowing you to interact with other people. There are various forms of social media. You may recognize the names Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Digg for example. These sites allow users to create a presence on the internet as well as post and exchange written content, pictures, video and audio messages, emails, blogs and podcasts. Social media is inexpensive and wide reaching, allowing you to connect with literally millions of people both nationally and internationally. Social media gets your message, business or products known in a web based interactive way.

How Is Social Media Used?

Social Media is used to create an online community, develop a following, exchange ideas and information and build relationships. It is also a great way to generate “traffic” to your website which is another way of saying that people are able to find you online and then go directly to your website. There are also many ways that Social Media can be effective for specific business purposes. A business can “gather links” which means you can provide a link to someone else’s website where they then promote you. You can also post other business links on your website. This encourages cross promotion and is a great way to attract more internet attention. Businesses also use Social Media to test a market or product, generate feedback, provide customer service, hold webinars, blast emails and post announcements or useful company information.

Why Is Social Media Important To My Business?

Social Media is an incredibly fast way to develop or increase brand awareness, improve your reputation or position yourself as an expert in a certain field. Social Media can also keep you up to date on industry news, provide you with an education that can be applied to your business model, and have related industry recommendations. It is also an excellent path for personal development. Finally, Social Media can build strong and numerous relationships, enable you to network with an international community, post testimonials about your products or services, advertise or promote and in general, build your business bigger, stronger, faster.

About the Author: Wolf Krammel is an Online Social Media Marketing Expert, building customized Organic Social Media System that help small business owners present themselves as the expert in their industry! Learn more at: http://www.PumpUpYourWebsite.com

Tracking: What is Google Analytics?

Mike Valentine — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:44:36 +0000

Tracking: What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a popular free service among webmasters. It can help them learn how to gain more visitors to their web sites and turn more of that traffic into sales and registrations. So exactly what is Google Analytics?

The Google Analytics service provides free information about how visitors locate and view a web site. It also provides advertisement tracking, which makes it easier to determine the effectiveness of banners, e-mail ads, and other types of promotion. For webmasters who use Google Adsense or Adwords to market their sites, Google Analytics integrates with these services and supplies a wide range of statistics on each campaign.

Google will provide both graphical as well as text-based representations of the data collected by the system. This then allows the webmasters to evaluate the information at a glance or in much more specific detail. Much of the data appears in multi-column tables, rectangular line graphs, and “motion charts”. Because of Google’s tracking technique, keep in mind that the information best reflects site visitors who have browsers with Javascript and “cookies” enabled.

The installation process involves creating an account, setting configuration options, placing the code on every page that requires tracking, and (optionally) putting tracking “tags” at the end of online advertising URLs. Third party services are available to help with the installation of Google Analytics for webmasters who have limited time or are not able to do this. The tracking code adds about 400 bytes to each page.

Stats generated by this system may be converted Excel spreadsheets or XLS, Comma Separated Values or CSV, and other formats available for offline viewing (or showing the data to someone else). Webmasters can determine exactly what information they want to appear in reports created by the system. This will enhance their ability to analyze the data and then determine what specific changes need to be made to improve web sites and online marketing strategies.

A wide variety of web sites utilize Google Analytics for user tracking, including state and local governments, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Boston Globe, Paramount Pictures, the University of San Diego, iOffer.com (individual stores), and many others. Some of the sites that use Google Analytics for tracking often mention and describe its function in their privacy policies.

Google is not the only company to offer a service of this type. Others include Yahoo! Web Analytics, Webtrends Analytics 9, Omniture Web Analytics, and Piwik, which is installed as a stand-alone system on each individual web site.

About the Author:

Chuck Aikens has been in Internet Marketing for over 10 years and is currently the President of Market Vertical Partners. http://www.MarketVerticalPartners.com is a Denver SEO & search marketing firm. Check out http://www.marketverticalpartners.com/marketing-services/link-building for information on Paid Search Management, Search Engine Optimization, and Link Building Services.

Fox News Austin Talks to a Filmmaker about Work with Demand Studios

Mike Valentine — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:11:11 +0000

My company is hiring freelance filmmakers and was profiled in a local Fox News Austin segment today.

How to Find Freelance Work Easily

WebSite101 Tweets

Mike Valentine — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:11:00 +0000

#101 Tracking: What is Google Analytics?: Tracking: What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a popular.. http://bit.ly/2yC2fz 21:33:26

WebSite101 Tweets

Mike Valentine — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:11:00 +0000

#101 WebSite101 Tweets:
#101 Top 10 Twitter Tips for Beginners: Top 10 Twitter Tips for Beginners Choosing.. http://bit.ly/4mbLVI 08:57:34