Website Development, Email Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Tools & Resources

By Masterpece Di Vendita http://www.marketingmasterpiece.com

Marketing is very important to any business or corporation. It is the way that your potential customers get to know about you and your product. Customers are everywhere which is why you will find types of marketing everywhere.

You can not leave your home without seeing the effects of marketing. In fact, it comes into your home through television, radio, internet, direct mail and more. Everywhere you go, people are marketing to you. You see advertisements for goods and services at every corner. When you need to market your business, you can learn a lot from observing all these different types of marketing.

Mass media

Mass media such as television is a very popular marketing choice. However, this comes at a price and many small companies cannot afford to advertise on the more popular channels. Prices of adverts will depend on the time of day that you want to advertise, the length of your advert and the channel you wish to use. Be wary, a top slot may cost you a small fortune. For this reason, many people do not advertise via mass media.

However, even if you don’t advertise on the TV, you can still use it as a resource to learn more about the market. It is a great way to do research on products and on customers. You can see what the competition has to offer and how they are choosing to market it and this can give you ideas for your own.

Billboards and Signs

Another popular way of marketing is to advertise on billboards and signs. People see advertising everywhere they go and billboards and signs have long been a great way to market your product.

You will see signs and billboards on the sides of highways and interstates across the country. Since people can not stop driving their cars to stare at the billboard, things have to be large and the message has to be short and to the point. You have to be very direct in this type of marketing and leave the reader with something that they will remember. They should be thinking about your message after passing your billboard or sign.

One-to-One Marketing

Direct mail marketing is another very effective way of marketing your product or service. This is a great way to tell people about your business and adding coupons or discounts will bring people in. You are also offering them a way to read over your business and what you are offering. It instills faith in your company when you have an address and other information in your mail.

Masterpece Di Vendita is the webmaster and operator of marketing masterpiece inc. which is a premier resource for marketing information. For more information, go to http://www.marketingmasterpiece.com/ for questions or comments about this article, please visit: http://www.marketingmasterpiece.com/

Filed under: Marketing & Publicity on December 26th, 2004 No Comments »

It’s A Wonderful Life - Fox and Friends

Filed under: Propy's Blog on December 24th, 2004 No Comments »

by Jon Ricerca
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com

This is a hotly debated topic. Some SEOs claim that sites with a static IP address rank higher while other SEOs claim that shared hosting is just fine… that it would be stupid for search engines to penalize shared hosting since we are running out of IP addresses and so many sites are currently using name based hosting.

First, let’s define what we are talking about when we say “static IP” vs “name based” hosting. Here are some synonyms:

For “static hosting”, the following all mean the same thing: static IP, dedicated IP, http/1.0, non-shared hosting. For “dynamic hosting”, the following all mean the same thing: dynamic IP, name based hosting, http/1.1.

Let’s take a brief history of the Internet to put things more in focus. Once upon a time, every host on the Internet had a unique IP address. It is usually expressed as 4 numbers from 0-255 separated by dots. An example would be 207.44.161.131. There are billions of such IP addresses possible… however, there is a finite number. An organization called ARIN hands out IP addresses in the western hemisphere while another organization handles Europe and another Asia. Those organizations noticed several years ago that we were going to eventually run out of those IP addresses because of the proliferation of web-sites. At the time, every website had it’s own dedicated IP address that was associated with it’s domain name.

The solution? A new protocol was developed called HTTP 1.1 (to replace HTTP 1.0). The new protocol allowed more than one domain/website to share the same IP address. In fact, hundreds of websites can now share the same IP address. The new type of hosting is called “name based”, “shared IP”, “http 1.1?, etc.

Some SEOs theorize that your choice of dedicated hosting vs. shared hosting might affect your rankings. Some others claim that is ridiculous because all hosting will eventually be shared in order to preserve IP addresses. Which are correct?

I decided to run it through our statistical analysis engine to get the facts. Here is the methodology I used to answer this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then pinged each site to get it’s IP address. I then tried to visit the site using the IP address. With shared hosting, this isn’t possible. You get some kind of generic page instead of the specific site you want. I tallied my results for each of the first eight rankings.

On the Y-axis, you will see the number of sites found that use a static IP (do not use shared/name based hosting). On the X-axis, we have rankings from 1 to 8. Here is the graph showing Yahoo and Google results:

http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/de05.gif

(Note to webmasters: You are welcome to hot link to the above graph or even copy it to your own site. You are also welcome to delete this note.)

First, it is interesting to note that the number of sites using shared vs. dedicated hosting is just about half and half. We expect that as time goes on, more and more sites will be using shared hosting.

The second thing to note is that there is no trend for either Yahoo or Google that would indicate any preference for either type of site. Google might show a slight preference for static IP. Yahoo might show a slight preference for shared hosting. The net effect is null. The correlations for both are very close to zero (on a scale of -100 to +100, Google’s correlation was a +35 and Yahoo’s was a -21). I generally consider anything from -35 to +35 to be statistically insignificant.

Do you use dedicated hosting in order to improve your rankings? Don’t bother. There isn’t any advantage in this factor. Often dedicated hosting is more expensive than static IP hosting… so save your money and invest it in other factors that do affect your ranking!

Notes:

1. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this study.

2. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and three associates during the prior month.

Conclusion:

Sites using static hosting do not rank significantly higher or lower than sites using shared hosting on both Yahoo and Google.

This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied, but the end result is that both of these search engines do, in fact, rank pages with a “window.open” command higher on average.

Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com. For access to the other SERF reports, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.co

Filed under: Optimization on December 23rd, 2004 No Comments »

Stop Stressing When You Discipline! The usual approach to discipline–especially school and classroom discipline–is to teach toward obedience using rewards, punishments, and telling young people what to do. These are all external approaches and are various forms of manipulation, pressure, and coercion.

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Filed under: Education on December 19th, 2004 No Comments »

Sell ‘em Up! Training Systems: In today’s highly competitive business climate, it’s not good enough to rely on a traditional selling approach that focuses on things like: quality products, exclusives, life-time warranties, good service, and competitive pricing. All of these are benefits that today’s buyers expect and do little to differentiate you and your products from the competition!

Filed under: Sales Training on December 18th, 2004 No Comments »

By Masterpece Di Vendita http://www.marketingmasterpiece.com

Whilst there is no doubt that marketing is a vital issue for any business, many companies do not do the amount of research that they need to in order to ensure success. One of the main reasons for this is the high costs that often are involved.

Having a smaller budget does not have to mean fewer results. If you have a lesser budget you may have to spend a little
more time and effort, but the results can be just as effective. In some instances, the methods are not even as time consuming as you might expect.

Some methods may even cost you nothing! By mixing several procedures that are all free, you can draw conclusions without spending a cent.

You can begin by comparing your methods to that of the competitors. Look at how they do things and what they might do differently than you. How can you improve upon your methods as compared to them? This is a great way to learn more about your approach and how you can improve it.

Next, consider your customers carefully. Who do you think currently uses your product, or your competitor’s product? Create a profile of your customer; from this you will be able to ensure that you do not waste time and expense targeting the wrong people!

The internet is another great way to get the research that
you need. You can visit government databases that will give
you a lot of information. You can also use email to send surveys and questionnaires out and you can even research in chat rooms to find out what people are really looking for.

Another great method is to simply watch people using your product. You can even set it up so that you give it to someone for free or as a trial and then they can answer questions regarding your product and you can watch them using the product to see how they respond to it. This is a great ~hands-on~ method for finding out how people feel about your product and how you can market it to its dull potential.

Masterpece Di Vendita is the webmaster and operator of Marketing Masterpiece inc. which is a premier resource for marketing information. For more information, go to marketingmasterpiece.com for questions or comments about this article, please Visit: www.marketingmasterpiece.com

Filed under: Tactics on December 11th, 2004 No Comments »

WorkingPerson - Quality work Shoes, Boots and Clothing: Working Person’s Store is dedicated to the working person by specializing in top brands like Wolverine, Red Wing, Spenco, Carhartt and much more.

www.workingperson.com

Filed under: Resources on December 3rd, 2004 No Comments »

1. You’ll brand your web site, business and yourself by submitting articles to e-zines. You could include your name, business name, your credentials, web site address and e-mail address in your resource box.
2. You will become known as an expert on the topics you write about. This will give you and your business extra credibility which will help you compete against your competition.
3. There is the possibility the e-zine publisher will place your article on their home page. This will provide you with additional exposure if each issue is available on their home page.
4. You might get extra exposure if the e-zine publisher archives their e-zine on their site. People might want to read the back issues before they make the decision to subscribe.
5. You will get free advertising. This will allow you to spend your profits on other forms of advertising. You could buy advertisements in other e-zines that don’t publish your articles.
6. You can gain more earnings from people interested in employing you to provide other writing services such as books, or seminars.
7. You could offer e-zine publishers the opportunity to publish your article submissions within the e-books they offer for free. People tend to share these kinds of books and this could lead to your ads being spread across the web.
8. Submitting your articles to e-zine publishers that maintain a directory of free content on their website will result in your article gaining exposure across the Web. The publishers will give visitors permission to publish the articles again.
9. People will begin to trust you. They are more apt to make a purchase of your products if they enjoy reading your article. You can then earn more profits.
10. You could establish an agreement with an e-zine where they would promise to publish your article. You could offer to place an article of theirs in your e-zine and they could place yours in theirs. Both of you win in this situation.

The author, Scott F. Geld is the Marketing V.P. for Marketing Blaster. Feel free to write him with any questions or comments about this article at: MarketingBlaster.com

Filed under: Tactics, Traffic Generation on December 3rd, 2004 No Comments »