Jonathan James Aston asked:


Why You Need A Website …

Even the most negative anti-internet people out there even believe that a huge portion of business revenue is be derived from online transactions, or offline transactions as a result of seeing the product or service online beforehand.

Sometimes I wonder why people even hesitate about creating an online presence, why? nowadays the cost of setting up a website from scratch is extremely, and I mean extremely cheap.

Don’t be quick to dismiss your product or service as one that doesn’t lend itself to the online environment, people all over the world are selling all kinds of goods online, the product doesn’t even have to be tangible, it could be selling an e-book on how to make hats!

I know of many local businesses who don’t put all their efforts into selling over the internet but they do have some kind of online presence, whether it’s a small brochure website which simply contains an inviting homepage, about us and contact page, this type of website is great for small local companies who offer a local service, for example a ‘local car valeting service’.

The point here is to have something on the web so you can be found by potential customers or even partners etc; even if your website simply contains your contact detail with a brief description you can still generate leads and business.

Below are a few more reasons why you need a website

1. Build Customer Relationships

A website is a great place to build customer relationships – this can be done extremely effectively using email. Once you have a consumers name and e-mail address they could be a customer for life if they are treated well.

2. Lead Generation

Let’s face it we all want to make money online, and the sole intention of many online organisations is to make money, and turn visitors into customers into loyal customer who use their products or services again and again.

Creating a website, attracting visitors and funnelling this traffic are a great lead generation technique. A local organisation I worked with on a website visitor conversion campaign found they increased lead generation by 800% by effectively utilizing the powers of creating an effective online presence and marketing their website through a variety of channels.

3. To compete against your competitors

Without having an online presence could mean you are missing out on a lot of potential business – meaning your competitors have a distinct advantage just by having an online presence. Effectively leverage the power of the internet and get ahead of competitors by learning by their mistakes and doing what they do better.

4. To provide business information

A huge proportion of internet users use the internet to find local businesses or a product or service in general. Using the web to do this, is a lot cheaper than directory enquiries and a hell of a lot quicker than using a telephone book or directory.

A website containing your business information is available 24 hours a day, this can be printed and can be bookmarked to return to later. Furthermore potential customers can contact you using the desired communication channel you display.

5. Global Reach

Ok, a lot of people use the advantage of having a global reach to say things like “you can sell your products to people overseas” and “people like to buy the latest and best products”, yes of course you can but you already know that. Having a global reach means that people from all over the world can buy your products, however again it doesn’t have to be a tangible product it could be an e-book or a series of videos.

6. Open 24/7 365 days/year

Your shop is always open so to speak. Visitors can enter your shop any time of the day – before 9am and after 5pm – because out of these hours are when people tend to surf the internet, a perfect reason why you should have an online presence

7. Cost Effective Advertising

Offline advertising generally has an extremely low conversion rate. Leaflets and brochures can be quote costly and once these have been printed and distributed and more often that not thrown away this communication channel is dead.

However using a website as a communication will always be online; this cannot be thrown away or discarded. Offline Marketing could be looked upon as a ‘push’ marketing mechanism, however having a website uses a ‘pull’ mechanism, and customers search for your services and find your website.

Think of a website as a full colour interactive brochure which you can add to whenever you like. Reduce advertising costs by using just one effective call to action / message and promoting your website address e.g. learn more about this product on our website, for more information visit http://www.domain-name.co.uk.

And finally on this one alteration to your website can be done quickly and free, this is a completely different story with marketing literature such as posters or flyers.

8. To Project a professional image – not @hotmail.co.uk

Lots of very small business nowadays has some kind of online presence. Nothing looks more unprofessional than when a company refers to one of their points of contact being your-name@hotmail.co.uk or your-name@yahoo.co.uk. This says too many consumers that the business either couldn’t afford or wasn’t bothered about investing in their company brand image, would it to be nicer to use a more user friendly and professional email such as support@your-domain.co.uk or contact@your-domain.co.uk, this gives the consumers the feeling they are dealing with a successful organisation and that their query or contact is being deal with a customer support / care team.

9. Your website can make you money – sell your products and services

Firstly before I go into this one I would like to tell you two things, I recently attended a Search Engine Optimisation seminar in London and In one of the exhibition hall I engaged in a conversation with a middle aged woman from Scotland, after discussing the topic of the seminar we were about to watch she revealed to me that she found her online success selling, get ready for it, selling books on how to make straw hats, she uncovered that she was able to quite her full time job 3 years ago to peruse her online career selling books full time, but without the full time 9 – 5 or later house, she found she could happily sit back and work 1 – 2 hours per day checking email and performing general maintenance on her website.

I think this goes to show that you need to be a retail outlet selling top brand labels in clothing to become and entrepreneur online.

A website can be a great tool in not only promoting your products but selling them to, your shop cannot be available 24 hours a day but your website can, and its probably worth mentioning again that people do tend to surf the internet most when they return from work, so why not reinforce your brand online as well as offline.

Having a website is a great way of automating your business, whilst you are having an evening off or even sleeping you website can be generating brand awareness, generating leads but more importantly generating sales and revenue for your company.

10. Word of mouth advertising

With the growing online community and social networking going on nowadays it has never been easier to like minded people to communicated, but more importantly communicate your website address or even drop it into an email. Its very common nowadays that a website address could be posted up onto a website discussion forum by a happy customer and you could expect to receive hundreds even thousand of visitors to your website from that one forum post or conversation about your company and the products and services you offer.

11. Effectively reach new markets

An overwhelming amount of people now have access to the internet whether it is through their mobile phone, pc, laptop or game console. You really can’t afford to miss out on all these potential customers. It may be that someone didn’t mean or intend to land on your website but people surf the internet in many different ways, more often than not people often refine their searches on search engine again and again until they get to the website they want, they may begin searching for “car wax” and throughout their journey they may find that they done actually want “car wax” anymore what they want now is a “car valeting service”, this is common with website users in that they do end up on a website looking at products or services they didn’t intend to look at in the first place.

12. Test the market

Many organisations at some point would like to know how their target marketing are going to react to their new product or service but are afraid of investing large amount of money into creating the product and then be disappointed by the lack of interest or enthusiasm for it. A great way to “test the market” is to expose this new product or service on your website. A typical idea of this would be if a training consultancy wished to offer a new training programme, by adding a small paragraph on the homepage of your website detailing a brief introduction into the course followed by a “click here for more information” or “contact us to register your interest”, by tracking the number of click through or page views or even email enquiries can tell you how your market has reacted to your new offering, this can then determine whether the launch of this new product is feasible. You can even go a step further and test your new found marketing on piloting product prices etc.

13. Customer Support

Provide a support area or knowledge based for your customers. This can become a hub for all your customers’ queries and questions, assistance on products, provide a variety of ways to be contacted, alternatively use a frequently asked questions to answer the most popular questions or queries – all of this can be done without using staff time, employing new resources or without even answering a phone.

14. Advertising Seasonal Offers / Special Offers

A website and having the right data capture in place is a great way to tunnel traffic into an email list. Effectively collecting customers email addresses gives you the power to contact them when you want to tell them something. You may have a seasonal offer that you wish to communicate, effective email marketing is a great way to build relationships, generate leads (by offering a free report or discount voucher in exchange for their email address, and more importantly convert leads into customers through the use tailored email that meet the demands of your customers.

Building up an intelligent database can have a massive impact on consumer retention and loyalty, knowing that Mrs Smith loves to buy books by a certain author gives you an opportunity to up sell and cross sell other books by that author / similar authors and also attempt to sell items that other people have purchased – hence giving the consumer exactly what they want, when they want it a step on from this is to build an incentivised loyalty program e.g. buy this book and get another book for half price, all of this is possible.

Every one of your customers can be alerted about this special offer at the click of a button, and compared to the cost of offline marketing this is extremely low cost with a higher conversion rate and an even higher return on investment.



hotmail.com

Ed Opperman asked:


There are more than two hundred million web mail users that name Hotmail as their web mail server of choice. To be sure, Hotmail is one of the top three cost-free web-based e-mail providers on the World Wide Web. This free, web based e-mail is offered to users by Microsoft and it allows users up to two hundred and fifty megabytes of space to store e-mails and files.

There are a lot of people who love Hotmail because it makes for an easy place to store their junk mail and this makes it easy for spam artists or other people to hack into the hotmail account and then send e-mail to others with it. Have you recently been on the receiving end of unwanted e-mail from a hotmail e-mail address? If so, have you thought about doing a reverse e-mail search?

A reverse e-mail search is easiest when you use the service that provides the e-mail address that sends you the unwanted e-mail. Luckily the Hotmail reverse e-mail search is free for internet users and it is very easy to use. The easiest way to locate a Hotmail reverse e-mail search, all that you need to do is type in the phrase “hotmail reverse e-mail search” into any of the major search engines. The site that does the searches will be listed in your search engine results.

Keep the e-mail address that has been sending you the unwanted e-mails near by because you will need this to complete the search. This might seem obvious, but you would be surprised to find out just how many people forget to write down the e-mail address that they want to look up! It is important also, to remember that you might not always be able to find the information you have been seeking. While it is possible that a real person has been sending you that unwanted e-mail, it is also equally possible that the e-mail address has been hijacked by a spam bot and you might not ever know who has been flooding your inbox.

The Hotmail reverse e-mail search is a trustworthy method of searching for the information associated with any hotmail e-mail address. If it is possible to find out the information you want to know, the Hotmail reverse e-mail search should be able to turn it up. Of course, you might need to try several different reverse e-mail searches before you get the results you have been looking for.

Keep in mind that not everyone wants to be found. People who do not wish to be found will often take extra steps to protect their true identities and contact information. If you cannot find the information you are looking for via a reverse e-mail search on your own, you might want to hire a professional to do the searching for you. There are many reliable professional services available to choose from when you want to find out who has been sending you this unwanted e-mail.

It is important to remember to report any unwanted e-mails that show up in your Hotmail account to your Hotmail provider!



AUSTIN

Rob Emmerson asked:


If you want to make your articles go viral the first step is to write a good headline. Headlines can make the difference, both in print and online. In some ways the headline of an online article is more important than that of a print headline.

With todays fast pace, writers have only a few seconds to get the readers attention. Many times the decision to read an article is based solely on a very small link from the headline. Many old publishing tricks like huge screaming headlines are not available on the Internet.

So the headline is the first step in making your articles go viral. An excellent place to start is by researching other articles that have gone viral. Headlines that are benefit-laden or that offer solutions to problems are generally successful.

Using humor is a great way to make your material viral. This is probably the most difficult since it is much harder to convey humor with just the written word. But if you can achieve it the benefits could last for years. How ofter do you get the same jokes, sometimes years apart, in an email from a friend? These stories usually stay alive and continue to be passed around long after they first appear.

Even if you don’t have a funny bone in your body is perfectly acceptable to interpret and adapt materially would find on the Internet for your purposes. Not by plagiarizing up by adopting viral methods such as the one detailed below by hotmail.

Bribery is another method and can make all the difference in making your article go viral. There have been many articles that have gone viral just by offering a small incentive for the reader to pass the article on. Some others offer free reports for referring others, if your offer is good, and the perceived value is high your results will be good.

Viral marketing on the Internet is a natural because the very nature of the Internet is viral. The Internet has attained its huge size and continues to grow because of viral marketing.

Probably the most famous viral marketing system is that of hotmail. Hotmail automatically inserts a signature into sent mail that offers a free account. Every email sent was and is an advertisement for hotmail. Google sets the standard for what viral marketing is capable of doing. Google hasn’t spent a dime and advertising. Google’s popularity increased solely by providing a great product and the word of mouth it created.

Every promotional article you write and submit has the potential to go viral. If you’re successful in writing an article that goes viral the traffic to your site will explode. To be successful, you must become an expert at using viral techniques in your writing.



ARCHIE

andy tao asked:


Electronic mail is the full form of email. This is a very simple and quick way of communicating with the world. With the use of this form of communication, we have saved so much money. The world has also become smaller. With the advent of high speed Internet, the email has become much faster as well. Within a matter of a few seconds, we can reach the person we want to.

All you need to do is sign up with some service provider for free, and using your account you can compose messages and send them to the desired email. You will only need a user name and password. Though the concept of mail has been floating around for so many years, it only became very popular about ten years back all over the world. Today unfortunately, there are still some under developed countries who cannot use this form of communication.

This form of communication has made the world smaller, and has also revolutionized the way we communicate. There is no need to spend thousands of dollars on overseas calls. Besides saving money, you can write unlimited number of pages. Yahoo was the first service provider to take the Internet by storm. This was followed by Hotmail and various others.

Though these are free service providers, they are worth millions of dollars, which they capture through advertising. The advantage of using the email is that you can create multiple accounts. You can use each mail for different purposes, and there will be no need to mingle personal and professional lives. Today most individuals prefer to create mails on their own web sites, even though they need to maintain it a lot.

The use of the email is extremely simple, and will allow anyone to learn how to use it within a matter of a few minutes.



DAN

Ed Opperman asked:


Have you ever found yourself wondering who is the responsible party behind an email address?

With over 200 million webmail users Hotmail is one of the three largest free web based email providers online today. Yahoo , AOL and Gmail are also very popular. Hotmail is a A free internet-based email service provided by Microsoft that allows users up to 250MB of storage space

Because it is free many people will use it as a junk email account. This can lead to you getting unwanted email from a hotmail email account. Do you need to find information about someone using a reverse email search?

Hotmail is also a favorite anonymous account used by cyber stalkers to harass and defame their online victims. They foolish;y think they cannot be identified by an experienced investigator, simply because they entered bogus information when they created the account.

If you do than you will want to use the Hotmail reverse email search. It is free to use and it is very easy to use also.

To use the Hotmail reverse search all you need to do is go to any search engine and type that phrase in. This will bring you to the site where you can search easily. Another useful search term is “reverse email trace” to find a reputable compnay to trace your email.

When you use the Hotmail reverse search you will need to have the email address handy. You need to remember that you may not find the information you are looking for. It is very possible to find out who sent you an email but there is that small chance that you may not.

These days not everyone wants to be found so they take extra steps not to be. Use the Hotmail reverse email search to see if you can find someone. They make it very simple for anyone to use and if the information is available they will let you know.

The Hotmail reverse email search is a trusted way of doing a reverse email search for any email. If at all possible they will help you find what you want to know. This is one reason that they are so popular.

You can always turn to a professional to do it for you if for some reason you can not access the information you are looking for. There are many services available today that will do a reverse email search for you. They can try and do one on a hotmail email as well.

Some private investigators specialize in reverse email tracing and you may be shocked to find how incredibly affordable they can be.

If you want to report unwanted junk mail to your Hotmail account you can do that as well. They offer simple instructions to follow in your members area.

Definitely use the Hotmail tool if you need to do a reverse email search. You may be able to find the information you need if you just take the time to do the search.



CHARLEY

Tim Trice asked:


Ever wonder why you get so much spam? Where did all of this junk come from? Surely, it had to be that catalog you signed up for online. They sold you out!

Well, perhaps. I’ve used three different free mailing systems over the years, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail. Here’s what I’ve noticed and picked up along the ways.

Hotmail:

Spam to hotmail accounts rarely includes your exact email address. It’s mostly something similar and sometimes not even close. I reactivated my account recently and examined the spam. Here are some samples (a good majority of these were found in the inbox):

1) Lose 30 pounds a day – To: soohtsayer@hotmail.com. First off, my email is my first and last name. So, how in the world I got an email that wasn’t even close to my actual address, I’ll have no idea. Second, what is a soohtsayer?

2) Authentic Viagra and Cialis – To: sandioz@hotmail.com. Just one question: Wouldn’t the viagra help me lose weight as well?

3) Up to 3 inches – To: timothytreesh669@hotmail.com. Wow, Hotmail is really terrible at this.

Mind you, I am not an expert on sending out mass emails nor the protocols used to send them. But, how in the world I get all of this, I’ll never know. Perhaps my actual email address is buried in some BCC field. Whatever!

Yahoo:

For whatever reason, all of these spam emails have my email address on them. Fine. Every now and then, one slips from the spam box into my inbox and thus, gets downloaded onto my computer every time I start Outlook. Looking through the spam box has become a boring every day ritual. I have to make sure REAL email doesn’t get into the spam box. (And, lo and behold, there is my monthly car statement. This is the 3rd time I’ve had to tag it as Not Spam).

Google

First off, I do not work for Google, own Google stock, nor have any benefit from them whatsoever. But Google does a tremendous job of keeping spam away. In fact, I can only recall once time I’ve had to delete a spam message. And, appropriately, it was in the spam box. When I check Google, I know the email I have there is legit (perhaps I should have my car payment sent there).

So what is the difference? Mostly, it all comes down to a cookie. No, not the ones you dip in milk. The other kind. The one web sites put onto your computer so they can remember your information. Did you allow Internet Explorer or Firefox to store your personal information so you won’t have to fill out all of those form fields a second time? That’s stored in a cookie. Most programmers, myself included, use them to store login information such as your screen name/user name. But, that’s only if you choose to (did you check the “Remember Me?” box?). Other than that, I and many others have no interest in storing your personal information. It’s more code for us to write!

But how does that relate to spam emails? Well, when you visit a site, they also can read the cookies. Typically, reliable sites will decode your information to help security. But, if they plan on decoding it, that means others will probably know how to decode it as well. So, it really doesn’t matter. When you allow a website to “remember you”, it remembers your email, and perhaps your password by writing a cookie that it will access the next time you visit the site. In the meantime, if another site you visit knows where that information is stored, it can read it as well! By choosing Hotmail or Yahoo to remember you, you’ve essentially created a path for other less reliable web sites to get your information.

It doesn’t just work for spam emails, either. Have you ever noticed sometimes when you visit a site they might have advertisings specifically for your location? Somewhere along the line, you allowed another website to store your zip code. The advertising website knows where that cookie is; they access it and deliver advertising from your local businesses. The best example I’ve seen from this is on a social networking site where some person is holding a sign that reads “Houston Rocks!”. How in the hell??? What’s funnier is that, even though I work less than a mile away, in a different zip code, if I access the same site, the picture will say “San Antonio Rocks!”. Whatever!

If all of this has made you paranoid in any way, you shouldn’t be. You should never be storing passwords or other information on websites, anyway. If you would like to start from scratch, however, you can start by clearing out your cookies. How depends on your browser, but you can find them in the “Options” menu. And the next time a site asks if you want them to “remember you”, just make sure it’s unchecked! It’s a start!



ALLAN