Dec
28

Latest Virus Alerts - 2008

Microsoft fixes 28 flaws; 6 are critical

Microsoft on Tuesday released its December 2008 security bulletin. The "critical" bulletins affect Windows GDI, Word, Excel, Internet Explorer and Windows Search. The "important" updates affect SharePoint and Windows Media Components. Microsoft is including within each bulletin an "exploitability index" to help system administrators prioritize the patches.
All Microsoft security patches for both Windows and Office software are available via Microsoft Update or via the individual bulletins detailed in our forum, in the following link: http://support.fuchsiasoft.org/microsoft-fixes-28-flaws-6-are-critical-t73.html
To read more about this,please read this from our forum post

Holiday Cyber Scams

As the calendar dates for Christmas and Hanukkah quickly approach, scam artists are looking to take advantage of consumer shopping anxiety to make illicit gains. Your local Better Business Bureau is warning consumers of a new string of phishing e-mails making the rounds this holiday season. Scammers are posing as well-known companies that do a lot of business this time of year, attempting to steal personal information such as Social Security or credit card numbers.
“While most of the country is promoting peace and love this holiday season, criminals are spreading computer viruses and stealing identities,” said Tim Burns, Public Affairs Director of the Better Business Bureau Serving Eastern Michigan. “Hackers pose as trusted businesses to take advantage of the seasonal increase in online shopping and shipping. They utilize holiday themed messages to lure people into online scams and frauds”
The BBB has spotted a recent trend of phishing scams aimed at people celebrating the holiday season. Beware of these phishing scams that are circulating the Internet.
You could read more about it from our forum post in the following link: http://support.fuchsiasoft.org/holiday-cyber-scams-t74.html

Virus in your PDF file attachment - W32/AdobeReader.K

F-Secure has been monitoring a large mailing of malicious PDF files. These PDF files exploit a recent vulnerability. When such PDF files are viewed on vulnerable machines, they get infected. An unknown party has been sending out tens of thousands of mails with Subject-lines like:
Your credit report
Personal Financial Statement
Your Credit File
Balance Report
The mails contain no mail body, only an attachment called "report.pdf". When opened, the PDF file uses the CVE-2007-5020 vulnerability via Acrobat Reader and IE7 and downloads further malware from a server in Malaysia. The target of the malware seems to be to create a botnet of infected machines to be used for further malicious activity.
To know more about this virus, follow it in our forum post in the following link:http://support.fuchsiasoft.org/virus-in-your-pdf-file-attachment-w32-adobereader-k-t55.html

To know more about latest virus and its possible fixes, please check out our forum dedicated for new virus alerts
You could check more topics in the following link:http://support.fuchsiasoft.org/new-virus-alerts.html

This entry was written by Edward Anil Joseph and posted on December 28, 2008 at 1:25 am and filed under General Information, Tips. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.




Nov
15

Reach the Inbox: How to Avoid the SPAM Folder

Hitting the inbox is the holy grail for email marketers and whether you believe it or not non-profits who send email are definitely email marketers. There are a couple of key factors I’d like to discuss that determine whether your email gets into the inbox.

Reputation
In order for an ISP like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL or others to accept your email you must have a good reputation as a sender. Reputation is king - it doesn’t matter how clean the content of your email is if the ISP blocks your email because of a reputation because the content will never be checked.

Your reputation as a sender is based on two things: the From Address of the email and the IP address of the sending email server. The From Address is the one that you specify when you send the mailing and its reputation is largely based on the percentage of complaints, invalid accounts and spam trap hits that emails with the same From Address have generated in the past. (A complaint is what the ISPs call it when someone clicks the "this is spam" button.)

You have complete control over your individual reputation based on the From Address used in your emails and you influence it every time you send an email. You can severely damage your reputation by mailing to an list of questionable quality. Regardless of whether the list is from RE, NetCommunity or is an imported list, if it contains invalid accounts or spam traps it will have a negative effect on your reputation. Or, if the people reading your email consider it to be spam and hit the spam button your reputation will be affected. To avoid these reputation problems, make sure you only send email to people who have asked for it and make sure the content is relevant.

One note, while you might be thinking you can run away from your reputation problems by changing your From Address frequently, this will have a very negative effect on your email campaigns. Different From Addresses will confuse your constituents and negate the positive effect of clients adding your address to their address book which will help get your email into the inbox and cause images to display by default.

The other part of your reputation is the IP address of the sending email server (MTA). The shared and Private IP addresses used by Blackbaud’s MTAs are accredited by SuretyMail and whitelisted at AOL, Yahoo and other major US and Canadian ISPs. In addition we are on the feedback loop with all major ISPs that provide one and we carefully monitor the percentage of spam complaints as well as hard bounces for each client. As a result, we rarely experience any IP address reputation issues with major ISPs. In fact, as a result of becoming accredited with SuretyMail we have see a dramatic improvement in email delivery with Yahoo in particular.

However, due to the fact that small ISPs and corporations do not provide feedback loops it is difficult to determine if users at these organizations feel the email our clients send is spam. Consequently, occasionally one client may cause a shared IP to develop a poor reputation at a small ISP or corporation. This can lead to email being sent to the spam folder or even blocked entirely. As soon as we detect or learn of these issues we work with the client and the ISP to resolve them as quickly as possible. While clients who use a shared IP also share a reputation, clients with Private IPs are not affected by these kinds of problems.

Email’s Golden Rule
This is a very short post and the information is incredibly obvious, yet many mailers tend to ignore it.
It all boils down to this: Treat others as you would like to be treated.

  • Treat each of your addresses as if it were a person - not just an email address.
  • Only send email to people who want it. You don’t like it when you receive email you didn’t ask for - right?
  • Encourage people to join your mailing list by offering them something they want – like useful information – then deliver it.
  • Ask people to trust you by adding your email address to their contacts or safe list – but don’t violate their trust.
  • Tell people up front what you will be sending and the frequency – then stick to it.
  • Tell people about things that are interesting to them – don’t waste their time.

Branding Your Subject Lines to Avoid the Junk Folder
Email Filtering has become a standard anti-spam tool in the email administrator inventory. While some filters are better than others, even the best filters can throw a false-positive and trash a legitimate email. If this happens to one of your messages, successfully branding your subject line can give you another chance to reach the recipient.

Most filters are configured to segregate offending messages to a junk folder rather than the inbox, with the intention of letting the user scan for valid emails caught in the crossfire. An email user will probably give their junk folder a quick look-over occasionally for immediately recognized emails, but rarely opens the messages found within. Unfortunately, your snappy subject line will be lost amongst all the crudely spelled vulgarities and spammer lingo meant to mislead. To grab your user’s attention, you need to show him something immediately recognizable.

Here is where subject-line branding comes in. By placing your branding or company name at the very beginning of the subject line, such as our Intevation Report subject line, your message becomes easier to identify even to those who work with ten inch screens and can only see the first 13 characters of the subject.

If your company name is prominently displayed in the subject line, you have a good chance of the user noticing the familiar name and plucking your message from the email junkyard. This also gives the user an easy keyword to add to their filters’ white list, ensuring that your messages are sent to their Inbox.

More Tips:
1. Maintain clean , deliverable lists.
If you start hammering some "20 MILLION EMAILS CD" list you bought from ebay, you will make nothing, you will get RBL’d , you will fail horribly. If you have a site with decent traffic, use that traffic to build an opt-in list . Offer a newsletter that pertains to your site. Don’t spam it! Let it build up, keep the offers relevant to the site. After it’s grown then send out one offer a week or so. If you don’t have a site with decent traffic or a way to grow an optin list , come up with one. Most lists available for purchase are crap, have been spammed to shit and are more than likely full of spamtraps.

2. Remove unsubscribes / bounces.
This is obvious. If you keep mailing bounces, your IPs will be seen as spam sending bullshit and the providers will flag your mail. Not removing people that ask for it will only cause more complaints which will get your message / IP flagged. Especially with yahoo/aol/gmail/hotmail.

3. Valid reverse dns on all ips you mail from
Most major providers will not accept mail from IPs without rdns..

4. DKIM/SPF settings on the mail from domains help delivery with larger providers.
Credibility , shows that the mail is coming from the right server. This helps with larger providers in lowering your ’spammy’ score.

5. Use Spamassassin filter test to check your message’s "Spam score".
While not 100% , it is a good general guide to use. It may raise flags on things you didn’t consider would cause problems.

6. Don’t send spammy subjects like, pills, porn, make money, etc

Also read it from
http://support.fuchsiasoft.org/reach-the-inbox-how-to-avoid-the-spam-folder-t71.html

Original Sources:
Reputation and Avoiding the Junk Folder
Can I get a list of spam words to avoid?
Email’s Golden Rule
Branding Your Subject Lines to Avoid the Junk Folder
How to send bulk email and bypass spam filters

This entry was written by Edward Anil Joseph and posted on November 15, 2008 at 6:30 pm and filed under General Information, Tips. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.




Oct
28

Top 20 Tips for Marketing

Customer discounts/incentives
When people fall upon hard times it is important we justify the cost of any purchase, offering special incentives or discounts can really help customers choose to purchase.
If a customer is undecided between two different products it might just be the discount you give them which could swing them one way or another.
Ensure you use the SG ‘credit crunch’ discount code on your site and look out for the Proactol one coming this week.

Push the price benefits over other options
One of the biggest concerns will be the price of the product, it is important that you show why choosing your recommendation will be a cost effective solution.
Compare against other products in the market place or other options. For example: by taking Proactol you will eat less saving you thousands from your shopping bills.

Increasing perceived value
It is even more important than ever that you push the extra value services; ideally you really want to promoted time based bonuses, order today and get $50 off. You should also really market the bonuses like “free shipping”. These could make a real difference when people come to order.

Selling everyday items
It is very important that your surfers do not look at the item as a luxury, often in difficult times people will stop purchasing more luxury items and stick to the necessities.
It is very important that you pass the message across that this is an everyday item which they cannot do without; this is not the purchase of a lifetime but just something else to add to their basket.

It’s quality and will not need replacing / Will last the test of time
Finally it is important that customers feel they are purchasing something of quality, after all this needs to last longer than before as we all have less disposable income. It is important you portray the message that this product is better value for money as it will last twice as long as other products in the market.

Come in under the radar
Building a brand is a roll-out process, not a drop everywhere in the world at one time.
Do you know what the best selling imported beer is in the United States? It’s Corona. Who would expect a beer from Mexico to be popular? The fact is it’s a terrific beer.
But they didn’t just come to the U.S. and put it everywhere. They went to the cities with a Mexican population — Los Angeles, Chicago, New York — and then they put it in restaurants and stores there. The key to brand-building is to have something good that you roll-out in a very intelligent way. Maybe even invisibly for a while because you want to be under the radar screen of competitors.

Know your customer
There are still too many CEOs who identify marketing with selling and advertising. But marketing has evolved to be not only product centered but customer centered. We are saying you’ve got to understand and choose the customers you want to serve. Don’t just go after everyone. Define the target market carefully through segmentation and then really position yourself as different and as superior to that target market. Don’t go into that target market if you’re not superior.
We are trying to make the case that it’s much more important for a company to be customer-centric than product-centric. The same customer you have for product X, may be available for product Y and Z and so on. And you won’t know that if you have separate product managers, each only concerned with selling his or her product.

Own your branding
We are not in a state of competition anymore; we’re in a state of hyper-competition. So people are desperately looking for handles — functional features, emotional appeals — that will draw people to their product. We should think of owning a word or a phrase that helps to build customer retention and loyalty.
Look at how we buy the Mercedes because it’s the best engineered car. We buy a BMW because it’s the best driving performance. We buy the Volvo because it’s the safest automobile. A lot of these companies lose that edge too, but they don’t lose the impression.

Stay ahead of the competition
The worst thing is that if something works, your competitors are going to clone it and before you know it anything that you had as a differentiator is imitated by the others. So you’re in the business of constant innovation. Constantly asking yourself, ‘Three years from now, what will our differentiator be?’
Markets change, so marketing has to change.

Make it an experience
Once in a while we find someone having a whole new approach to a mature market.
Starbucks is a very good example where coffee is coffee but they decided to sell it differently, put a higher price, make it good-tasting and make it an experience rather than just some coffee. In fact, I’ve heard that if Starbucks closed its shops, a lot of people would go crazy. They are in such a habit of going to the Starbucks before work, taking the coffee, and they’d become desperate otherwise.
There’s a big movement to say, ‘we’re not just adding services to our business and our product, we’re actually trying to design an experience.’
You’ll see that language being used. We’re in the experience design business.

Make your advantages easy to understand
For instance, Computer Resources International AS originally sold consulting, for which they used proprietary software. Only when they started selling the software first, and then customization and consulting as extras did their business take off. Buying software was easier to understand than the more intangible consulting.
LifeUSA insurance, and many other businesses, focus on speed in every aspect of their business. They make fun of the slower industry standards and provide a simple advantage clients understand. Other ways to set yourself apart are through great service or association with worthy causes.

Don’t try to be everything to everyone
Just as customers screen you, you should decide who you want to serve.
Printing Resources originally took any printing business that walked in the door. When they realized which kinds of customers they worked with best, they were able to cut down their marketing costs and make more money.
Some computer consulting firms only work with one customer per industry so they will have no conflicts of interest. You can bet they select customers carefully, and that customers are flattered by the partnership approach.
Consider creating a checklist of who shouldn’t hire you! It will help you focus, and may impress the right customers if you share it with them.

Work for referrals
Word of mouth is the least expensive, most effective way to get new business.
Barry Farber has new customers write on the back of their business cards why they bought. These become mini-testimonials.
Bob Brassard calls at least one client a day just to keep in touch. This builds the relationship by showing he doesn’t just care about them when he wants something, allows him to update files, and generates referrals.
One upscale dentist put up a Web page. He got about six extra referrals a month because his clients thought it was "cool" that their dentist had a Web page.

Use online marketing
You don’t have to have a Web site like Eastern Mortgage Services to do business online.
You can send personalized e-mail like Michael Swartz of DNA Software.
You can pay only for the leads generated for you by advertising on many sites.
You can research potential clients for better presentations.
You can gather customer input inexpensively as Ritchey Design does. Or you can post free ads in discussion groups.

Don’t sell, help people buy
When you truly put the client’s interests above your own, you will become a consultant, a team member, and a partner for your client. When you’ve earned trusted advisor status, doing business is no problem.
For instance, computer consultant, Amadaeus Consulting Group, helps its customers make more money by using computers to help their clients sell more. Of course, the extra business comes around as the client grows.
A small accountant’s client felt they needed a "Big 5" firm to handle their audit because they wanted to go public. Instead of resisting, the accountant helped the client select a Big 5 firm, thus maintaining and extending the relationship with the client.
Conrad International added warehousing services near overseas clients so they could afford to buy in bulk for a lower price.
When you put the customer first, you earn long-term loyalty that is more profitable than a larger quick sale.

Partner with other companies reaching your market
This might be neighborhood merchants cooperating on a sidewalk sale, or Digital Equipment partnering with Infinite Technologies to better serve the Bank of New York. Or it could be you partnering with a charity to create a fund raising event that brings attention to both of you, like Service Merchandise and Goodwill did.

Shift the risk to yourself and you will profit
A believable guarantee makes it safe for prospects to give you a try. Very few people will exploit a generous guarantee compared to the extra business it generates.
YoyoDine is one of many companies that guarantee you results from their online advertising. Even Kaiser, the big HMO, found a money-back guarantee to be successful.

Be personal
To build relationships you have to build a personal connection.
A handwritten invitation pulled great for Frank Candy, president of the American Speakers Bureau and for restaurateur Murray Raphael.
Internet consultant Dan Janal gives clients links from his page.
One nursing home created a waiting list through great referrals by greeting visiting relatives by name and filling them in on their loved ones at the start of each visit.

Create free publicity
Construction Computer Applications Newsletter had a hard time finding reviewers for computer programs of interest to readers. The reviewers not only got publicity from their reviews, but the firm gave them referrals.
A large CPA firm specializes in citrus growers. Every year they do a survey of their clients’ costs of operations. The survey data helps their clients benchmark their operations, positions the CPAs as the experts, and gets the CPA firm publicized in trade articles.
Inquiry Handling Services gets regular publicity from newsletters and articles, as well as a book they wrote for their industry.
And Luxury Limo received major coverage about a special rate created to allow three "regular" women to share the commute in a limo at about the cost of carpooling.

Integrate your marketing
This means that everything you do should convey the same message and represent what you stand for. Putnam Investments manages $150 billion in assets.
All their literature, and even their office, conveys the same message.
Viva Knight, a script consultant, rents mailing lists from the same magazine he advertises in. If he also wrote articles for the same magazine, it would add to the integrated approach.

Original Source:
http://netsell.blogspot.com/2008/10/tips-for-marketing.html

This entry was written by Edward Anil Joseph and posted on October 28, 2008 at 4:36 pm and filed under General Information, Tips. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.




Oct
11

10 Most Useful Free Google Marketing Tools

Google has become the dominant search engine on the Internet. It would be hard to imagine a web without Google. For that matter, it would now be hard to imagine a world without Google. As frightening as that may seem to many people, it is none the less true.

For better or worse, Google has permeated into almost every aspect of our everyday life. Being Googled is now a common expression and an act carried out by millions of users around the world each day. New Google products and services are coming on stream at a staggering pace, further increasing Google’s impact on our lives.

Despite this dominating presence, many people still don’t realize Google offers some excellent free marketing tools for marketers and webmasters. Marketing tools which can prove extremely valuable to any webmaster or marketer trying to promote their sites or products online. Useful tools that will make your promotions easier and much more profitable.

Don’t be fooled by the ‘free’ label, these marketing tools might be free but they are also valuable. One even wonders why Google would be giving away these tools and services for free? It probably makes good business sense in the long run. By providing these free tools Google is fostering a lot of company good-will and building up the Google brand name in the process. Good PR is good business.

Every marketer and webmaster should be taking advantage of Google’s good-will and snapping up these professionally run services and marketing tools. Here’s a quick run-down of the 10 most valuable free Google Internet marketing tools:

1. Google Analytics
Perhaps the premier marketing tool offered by Google. It will prove helpful to both the marketer and the webmaster. Google Analytics gives you a daily snapshot of your web site. Google Analytics analyzes your traffic, where it comes from and what it does once it enters your site. You can monitor up to three sites for free.

Google Analytics is extremely valuable in analyzing your marketing funnel. It tracks all the steps leading up to your sales or checkout page. Vital information for raising your conversion rate and ROI. You may be placed on a waiting list for this highly in demand service from Google.

2. Google Sitemaps
Webmasters can use Google Sitemaps to almost instantly place newly created pages on their site into the Google Search Index. This is a XML file that is uploaded to Google as new pages are added on your site. Needless to say this can be a valuable service for any webmaster or marketer who wants to get their information on the web quickly.

3. Google Alerts
Be notified when someone or another site lists your site or mentions your name. Great way to keep track of all your online activities. Great way to monitor all your online business interests and products.

4. Google Froogle
Froogle is Google’s price directory! It simply lists all the cheapest prices for different products on the web. For marketers and webmasters who are promoting products, it should be studied and analyzed. Optimizing your site’s content for Froogle may prove to be very beneficial.

Follow Froogle or Google directions exactly on how to list or display products on your site. Froogle will spider your site and display your prices and products to thousands of targeted customers. That, as they say, is priceless.

5. Google Checkout
Not exactly free but for those marketers who use AdWords - for every $1 spent on AdWords you can process $10 for free. You can also place the shopping cart logo on your AdWords ad and take advantage of the prestige and trust the Google brand name has built up.
Over time marketers may find this tool to be very effective and valuable.

6. Google eBlogger
Blogging has become vitally important to the health and functioning of your web site. No site should be without at least one blog and RSS feed. Creating a blog (online journal) on the topic of your web site or product will bring in extra traffic and targeted customers. eBlogger is a simple free blogging service that even lets you publish or post your blog files to your web site server. Keep in mind, each blog has that all important Google Blog Search bar.

7. Google Toolbar - Enterprise Version
Try the new enterprise version of the Google Toolbar for your company or business. Integrates countless features with all your employees or corporate network. These could include a common customer database, company calendar, financial news…

Keep in mind, Google also ranks every page it indexes on a scale of 0-10. While it is important to know the Page Rank of your pages, it is even more important to know the PR of your competitor’s pages. You can use the toolbar to get the PR of each page you’re visiting. Extremely helpful information for webmasters and marketers to know when forming online linking or business arrangements.

8. Google Groups
Every marketer knows the important of having a large contact list of people with a similar interest. Social networking will play an ever increasing role in your success on the web. Just look at the growing popularity of sites like MySpace and LiveJournal.

Google Groups is another form of social and business networking that every marketer should be aware of and pursuing.

9. Google Adsense
One simple way to monetize your web content is to use Google Adsense. Just place the Adsense code on your site and receive a check from Google each month. For webmasters who are not really into online marketing (do such creatures exist?) Adsense can be a painless way to earn extra income from your site.

For professional marketers, using the Adsense system can supply a tremendous amount of marketing information on the keywords in their particular niche. It keeps the marketer informed on what keywords are being bid on and how much advertisers are willing to pay.

Adsense also has an excellent real-time tracking system you can use to keep track of all your important web pages.

10. Google Docs
A recent addition to Google’s stable of free products. Google Docs (Writely.com) is a full featured online writing editor with spell-check and great collaborating features. It also lets you publish your content directly to your blogs. One feature that may be of interest to marketers, is that it lets you save files in the popular download format of PDF.

Let’s face it, until video takes over the web in four or five years time - the written word is still king on the net. It is the medium that markets, promotes and sells your content or products. Writely will help you write better.

Google Trends
This Google program will let you search popular trends, important for marketers searching for the latest hot product to promote. You can also break down these trends by different regions.

Please take note that signing up for a Google account will usually help you in obtaining most of these free services or programs. Some of these programs may have to be applied for individually. But be assured, all these free Google marketing tools are well worth your time and effort. They will make your marketing easier and they will help any webmaster or marketer run their online business more efficiently.

About The Author
The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: BizwareMagic.com . If you liked the SEO tips above, why not try this Free 7 Day Traffic Course

This entry was written by Edward Anil Joseph and posted on October 11, 2008 at 2:55 pm and filed under General Information. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.




May
09

Top 10 Reasons A Website Fails To Perform

You’ve taken the time to finally build a website, and now it is online. Months go by. Maybe you get a few visitors now and again. Maybe you land on the search engines. Mostly though, it just sits there. Is the website you paid for pulling its weight?

A website is a tool and can be of significant help to your business. It can cut a lot of time you put into giving information to customers. It can answer questions and perform tasks for you. Find out where websites fail to perform and how you can figure out where to make it better.

1. Undefined Website Objectives
Some sites try to do way too much at once, or worse, they have no definable purpose. Many provide no clear objective. A site can do more than look good and flashy and have your contact information.

Websites can be informational, storing content and articles based on a topic. Sites can run eCommerce solutions that help you with your sales process. It can also generate leads, asking customers to fill out forms with their information and interests. It can also be a hybrid site, with mixed purposes, like offering a free ebook or free access to information (informational) in return for contact information (lead generation).

Defining the purpose of your website gives a clear direction to your customers. Where should customers arrive when they find your website? Where do you want them to end up? Using a clear path and clear objectives, you can lead them through your site, your products, and your information, depending on how you need to sell your products. Not all products or services can be sold directly in an eCommerce situation. Maybe you prefer just getting to know your customer a bit more, and being able to forward marketing materials, so a lead generation type of site might be more suitable.

Assign a secondary objective. Maybe after visitors sign up for free access, or an ebook, they are encourage to ask more by contacting your sales reps, or perhaps they can make a direct purchase online. Use a clearly definable call to action. "Email for more information." "Click here to sign up." Tell visitors where to go.

2. Unidentified Target Audience
Demographics have been used in marketing for generations. Marketers use the information because it works. Knowing who your audience is defines the purpose to your website and calls out those who qualify and would be interested in your products. Marketing is the one area where discrimination is actually a good thing! You don’t want to waste the marketing dollars that draw people to your site who won’t need your products in the first place.

Get to know who your clients are. Are they male or female? How old? Where are they located? What do they do for a living? Habits, income levels, preferences, they can all be discovered with a quick email, phone call or have your current customers take surveys and help you figure out what your clients want.

Read more about Web Tracking and Analysis

3. Building for the Wrong Audience
Your site can have a purpose and a select audience, but if it doesn’t appeal to audiences, they tend to go elsewhere. Finding preferences is only the first step. Once you figure out what your demographic is, it is time to find out what appeals to them, and use that to your advantage. It could be something as simple as site colors and images, to where and how they prefer to use navigation systems and the type of content presented.

Maybe you need simple content, easy to read and understand for younger audiences. Perhaps you need something a bit more technical for professionals. You can even see if you need to add features for those who are visually impaired. Paying attention to your demographic and their preferences can mean building your website around their likes and getting more responses.

4. Oblivious to Web Traffic Sources
A link on a Harry Potter fan club forum to your website can bring in traffic, but does it really bring in the right customers? If you’re not directing traffic from sites relevant to yours or where a matching market exists, you might end up with empty hits to your website. It looks pretty on stat pages but it doesn’t really do anything.

Refocus your efforts on search engine optimization and focus on keywords that do fit, not just what might be popular. You can plan the sort of traffic you want and focus your outreach efforts on that. Planning your search engine campaigns can make them more effective, bringing the right customers to you. You don’t need 1,000 random visitors a day, when 100 qualified visitors will do.

5. Underestimating the Competition
Who says you can’t grab ideas from your competition? Find out what they are lacking and draw customers to your site by adding more features and information. Your target audience is searching the web for your product. Don’t let your competition become more appealing.

Understand your competition by observing their sites. Where are your competitors linking? Where aren’t they? What designs do they use on their site? Does your target audience like that type of design or do they want something better? Figure out how to improve your site and make it better than your competition.

6. Poor Site Communication and Inconsistency
If you’re building a website, is one page orange and another blue? Does one page have your logo and another doesn’t? People love consistency.

Does your content and images display the right message? Your website might have pretty pictures of your children, or a fun story about what happened to you last Christmas, but is it really what your customers want to know?

Skip the personal info, unless it’s relevant and your audience wants to hear about it. You also need to make sure you present your brand in its best light, and consistently give visitors the same presentation every time and on every page. Let your brand stand out.

7. Outdated and Antiquated Site Features
Out with the old. Check your site for old content and images and delete them. Remove old links that go nowhere too. Forget pop ups and old methods of keeping visitors around. Content is great, but if it’s so old that it’s irrelevant, you’ll lose respectability and your expert status.

Stick to new information. Don’t be afraid to get rid of old articles and delete old images. Do an update on your site features, like navigation systems and contact forms.

8. Poor Overall Site Performance
You’ve plastered all there is to know about you on a few pages. Is this the right way to do it? Maybe not. Yes, you’ve given them something to look at, but you have to remember, your time to impress people on the Internet is limited to just a few seconds. Long passages of text, lengthy forms, even poorly constructed or confusing navigation can slow people down, which leads to people leaving.

Making your website flow is all about making your site easy to read, easy to browse and easy to find what you’re looking for. Include a search function, highlight popular pages, and make it simple for people to give you their information. Start with short forms, only the essentials, and a few simple questions. You can get more info later.

9. Lack of Commitment
When was the last time you updated additional information to your website?

Remember those "Website Under Construction" images from the early years of the Internet? Over time, people have learned those images are pointless. Your website is ever evolving, ever needing updating. Your website is isn’t ever finished.

You must make a commitment to update information and to improve interest in your site from visitors. It could be as simple as updating a blog once or twice a week, or updating about sales and special events. Give visitors something to come back to, and let them turn into regular guests.

Read more about How to Keep Your Service Edge

10. Not using an Experienced Web Firm
You do a good job with what you do, and a good business and website owner knows when to call for help. Maybe you’re okay with writing content, but you need help with creating navigation and setting up forms. It’s okay to ask someone else for help, either with a few pages, or for the entire site design, and leave it to a professional.

It also saves money and time getting someone else to do the complicated things for you. Are you spending weeks on figuring out a web page design set up when it takes a professional a few hours to produce? When you’re in business, you consult with professionals who will help you build a better website, develop methods of search engine marketing strategies, and find out how to appeal to your target audience. You save time, money, and plenty of headaches.

Read about finding a good developer in this link:
Do Your Homework Before You Go To A Web Developer
Top 10 Things to Look for When Choosing a Web Developer

About The Author
Gary Klingsheim is the Vice President of Moonrise Design. Moonrise is a San Diego web design company specializing in flash web site design and custom web application development. Visit us online today or call us at 415.887.9240 to discuss how we can help you make the most of your online presence.

This entry was written by Edward Anil Joseph and posted on May 9, 2008 at 7:58 pm and filed under General Information, Tips. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.


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