Read this great interview of Supper Solutions’ President Leanne Deister, by Mom Entrepreneur.  Supper Solutions utilizes our Live-Kitchen.com Meal Assembly Software Application to reduce operating expenses, organize client orders, manage inventory, and take payments.

Visit Supper Solutions now.

So, here’s a tip that’s so simple, many of us have forgotten it – I figured most people had already taken this precaution…but I found that not to be the case.

It is SO Simple, yet it may save you a lot of grief and lost sales. Ready?

• Create a 400 Error Redirect (through Apache or whatever web server you are using) if traffic doesn’t reach you in the manner you were expecting it to arrive.

It’s literally a precaution, in case things don’t turn out how you expected them to.  As I was researching a few blogs I clicked on an advertisement, not sure why – I was curious as to what they were selling I guess.

Here is the Ad I clicked on:

After clicking on this Ad that this company is paying for…guess what comes next?

A brilliant Sales page?

A phenomenally written blog post?

A corporate website with logos of their fancy clientelle?

NO! Here’s what I end up with

Not Found

The requested URL /jvsrc=BtoBlonline_Banners was not found on this server.

You’ve got to be kidding me….

You worked SO hard to put together your Internet Marketing campaign, you’ve got Ads rolling, you’ve got landing pages created, and in case someone ends up at a place you didn’t expect – you are going to lose that visitor because the URL got jacked up or a page was moved.

The fix is easy…so easy.  In your Apache settings or whatever Web Server you are using, you can setup a .htaccess redirect – if your web host supports it.

You can just put in a simple line like this into your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

and create a notfound.html page for users to see instead of the 404 Not Found message.  At least then you haven’t lost them and you’ve gotten a 2nd chance.  Sometimes a 2nd chance is all you need to capture a lead.

Consider it…prepare for the unknown!  I’d love to hear from others on simple ways to dodge Murphy and make the most of your Web site or blog.

Comments?

Alright, this may be a stretch in some regard but it was quite apparent and clear to me.

We are putting together our Serious Internet Marketing Dashboard and through a lot of research I’m finding that there are a lot of Internet Marketing Consultants out there. They charge anywhere from $75 – $1,000 an hour.  Seriously, $1,000 an hour.  Why would anyone pay this?

I’ll tell you why someone would pay $1,000 an hour. Because it’s an investment.  Warren Buffet did an interview last month with Charlie Rose and talked about our current economic “issues” and why they’ve occurred.  He talks about the stock market, un-real valuations, and why people still bought.

Why do people spend THOUSANDS of dollars on coaching and e-books to help them market on the Internet?  Because it’s easier than marketing in the real world, and there’s the potential for great RETURN on your investment.

But, you have to do it right…for long term growth.  Slow and steady. It’s not about a big bang to profit, it’s about growth, reputation, and building.

Buffet talks about his $3 Billion dollar investment in GE…Cash is King, but only if you use it…but before you use it, you have to earn it!

In essence this video is about not following and charting your own course…with low start up funds and almost no free time, Internet Marketing is yoru best bet to creating new revenue sources.  Think like an Investor, not like an Imitator, or an Idiot!

Social media provides new tools for business to interact directly with their customer base.  This may be a good thing or a bad thing – that depends on your business and how good your product is.

The fear from businesses may be that they receive some bad reviews on their product or services.  This is a fear of all businesses. In most cases you are trying to provide the best product or service possible and even though you care what your customers think, you don’t want your potential customers to view any negative feedback.

This poses a dilema, to have the best product you must solicite feedback.  You can do this privately through e-Survey software such as ratepoint.com. Social Media now provides a tool and people will use it whether or not you decide to listen.  With blogs, Facebook, and other mediums to rate your product or just chat about your product, some may already be providing useful nuggets of information; yet you aren’t listening.

I encourage you to take heed of these networks and watch your brand and your customer base, they are out there and they can provide you with valuable feedback.  Feedback that will ultimately increase the quality of your product, if you choose to listen.

Social Media allows you to interact with your customers as well.  If someone posts a negative comment, use that same medium to post any changes or updates that others reading the post may be interested in.

For example:

If someone posts a message stating that your Support department is taking too long to respond back to email, even though in your auto-responder you qualify that they will hear back within 24 hours (for example).  You could first contact that client and make sure their needs are taken care of – win them back.  And then post a message stating that you have changed the email auto-responder to give a more accurate response time (or you removed the time altogether).  In addition, you have implemented a Forum that will allow customers to post their questions, your support team to respond to their questions, and everything is archived for future users who may have the same answer.

Here is an article in regards to replacing that un-godly plastic clam-shell packaging that is almost impossible to open without scissors, and then once you have it open the edges become fatal weapons.

Listen to your customers, they are talking about your product.  Don’t fear feedback, embrace it and use the Internet to communicate with your clients.

A piece of interesting data so you can see how Search Engines interact with one another.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of gaining higher ranking in the result set of a Search Engine search.  Now for that to make sense, let’s do some defining of terms and processes.

Here’s the quick and dirty…

A Web site is born
You’ve just started a business and need to put your web site up.  Well, the first thing you will do is figure out your focus.  This usually comes from the products or services you sell, or the demographic of the clients you are servicing.

These are your keywords. Keywords define your site.  Now, sometimes keywords are setup in the META tags of a site, but sometimes the keywords are just generated from the content you’ve created.  Mostly likely, it’s the content that defines your site more so than the keywords.  Although, keywords are very important, so don’t neglect them.

A Search Engine finds out you exist
One way or another, A Search Engine will figure out you exist. You either submitted your site directly to an engine or you posted a comment in a blog with your URL…either way, the engine will see that there’s fresh meat out there and they will send their bots and spiders.

Bots and Spiders – no, that’s not my Halloween costume
Bots and Spiders are what Search Engines send through the Internet to scavenge your site.  These “Spiders” will “crawl the net” and index your content, and various other pieces of data.  They are the ones that check to see if content has been updated or not and will check your relevancy, etc.

Weights and Value
Each time a spider indexes your pages, they will rank you and provide a weight as to the value of your content.  This is the secret sauce for most Search Engines.  If you were to figure out what algorithms they use to figure out weights and value, you could trick them into putting you up top on any keyword you wanted.  It’s assumed that no one person at any company (Google, Yahoo, MSN), has that information; different departments share pieces of the algorithm so that it can’t be stolen.  In some cases, the Search Engine will also change this weighting system which may been after a change, that your site will jump up or drop down in rank just based on how they are looking at your site now.

A user is on the prowl
Now, we have a user on a Search Engine who puts in a keyword they are wanting to find a relevant site for. They type in their keywords and hit search, the Search Engine now goes through it’s database of indexed content and displays results for what they think is the most relevant web site to satisfy the users query.

This is based on data and content saved by the Spiders when they visited your site.

Now, the difference between SEO and SEM:

1. SEO is the process of making changes to your site so that the Spiders will give you a better weight and value based on what you’ve done internally. This means you’ll organically move up the Search Engine Results list.  When you think SEO, think slow, steady, and long-term.

2. SEM can sometimes include SEO, but mainly it’s the process of paying for clicks or “Pay Per Click (PPC)”, paid inclusion, or paid placement, where you are buying clicks. If you pay G
oogle, Yahoo, or MSN for a sponsored link…you’ll show up at the top or the right side but you’ll pay each time someone clicks on your link.

In some people’s definition, SEM can also mean Search Engine Marketer, which is a person or group that provides Search Engine Optimization (Organic), Pay Per Click Management, Social Media Optimization, and other Internet Marketing Techniques.

Hopefully you learned something…we’d love to get your comments!

Cheers,

Arif Gangji
Neon Rain Interactive
www.neonrain.com
Web Design – Application Development – SEO SMO SEM – Email Marketing

If you aren’t familiar with Inbound marketing, it’s the notion that instead of going out and trying to grab potential clients, you just make sure you have good exposure, and when that potential client is ready they will come to you.

Well, it works…but why?

The client has already chosen to contact you, they’ve made a determination in their minds stating that you are already one of the candidates even if they haven’t spoken to you yet.

Sharpecopy.com defines a qualified lead as someone who meets the following criteria:

• Need: They need your product or service
• Authority: They have the authority to buy
• Budget: They have the budget to buy
• Readiness: They are ready to buy now

Now lets look at a ‘typical’ direct mail campgaign…again the numbers are from sharpecopy.com:

Here’s how you calculate your Cost Per Qualified Lead.

Number of pieces mailed (for example): 10,000
Response rate: 1%
Number of inquiries: 100
Number that you manage to reach by phone to qualify: 70
Cost of qualifying by phone, per inquiry: $30
Number who turn out to be qualified leads (20%): 14
Total cost of qualifying ($30 X 70): $2,100
Campaign cost of $10,000 + phone qualifying cost = $12,200
Total cost of $12,200 divided by 14 qualified leads = $871.42

In other words, you must spend $871.42 to attract each lead who needs your product or service, can afford it, has authority to buy, and is ready to buy now.

Staggering to say the least…especially if you are just starting out.  And if your product doesn’t sell for $871 or more, you actually lost money.

Now, with Inbound marketing, you are only focusing on the leads that are already fairly qualified, now you are just developing a lead.

Imagine shifting the focus online…integrating online marketing, Internet marketing, INBOUND MARKETING with your other efforts.

You are now building an online reputation – this is killer for those possibly interested in your product, let reviews, posts, and blogs online pre-sell your service or product for you.

You are also catching the lead when they are looking, instead of bugging them 7 times with a postcard to hopefully stick in their minds, they find you when they need you.

Mediapost.com states the following:

Not all leads are created equal.  To illustrate this point, which lead generation program is more appealing? Would you prefer 1,000 anonymous email addresses where you eventually determine only ten to be good prospects? Or would you like one that delivers 100 leads, each of whom is an ideal prospect?

The answer is obvious, but the trick is how to find those 100 prospects without wasting time sorting through thousands of anonymous and irrelevant respondents.

Are you starting to get the point?

Inbound Marketing through Internet Marketing brings customers to you…

Now get out there and build your online presence

Most of us know about Google Analytics, it’s a piece of code you put into your site and then you can use Google’s free tool to track visitors, time on site, where the visitors are coming from, e-commerce funnels, etc.

It’s a great tool, it’s free, and it’s widely used.

Well, it seems like Yahoo! is putting together an offering as well…it’s a rebrand of IndexTools.

Here are a few screenshots, since it’s not publicly available yet:

Seriously, who actually buys products from an anonymous spam email?

Authorities Shut Down Spam Ring

The Federal Trade Commission won a preliminary legal victory against what it called one of the largest spam gangs on the Internet, persuading a federal court in Chicago on Tuesday to freeze the group’s assets and order the spam network to shut down.

The group, which used several names but was known among spam-fighting organizations as HerbalKing, sent billions of unsolicited messages to Internet users over the last 20 months, promoting replica watches and a variety of pharmaceuticals, including weight-loss drugs and herbal pills that supposedly enhanced the male anatomy, according to the commission.

“This is pretty major. At one point these guys delivered up to one-third of all spam,” said Richard Cox, chief information officer at SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group.

The investigation provides a clear window into the business of modern spam, which by some estimates accounts for 90 percent of all e-mail sent over the Internet.

To pepper Internet users with its solicitations, the HerbalKing group used a botnet, a global network of computers infected with malicious software, often without the knowledge of their owners.

The security firm Marshal Software, which assisted the F.T.C. with the investigation, estimated in court documents that the group’s Mega-D botnet — named after one of its pill products — was made up of 35,000 computers and could send 10 billion e-mail messages a day. In January, the botnet was the leading source of spam on the Internet, the firm estimated.

F.T.C. investigators also said they monitored the group’s finances closely and that it cleared $400,000 in Visa charges in one month alone.

The commission has brought more than 100 cases against spammers and spyware vendors over the past decade. But officials and investigators said this spam operation was perhaps the most extensive they had ever encountered, with ties to Australia, New Zealand, India, China and the United States.

“They were sending extraordinary amounts of spam,” said Jon Leibowitz, an F.T.C. commissioner. “We are hoping at some level that this will help make a small dent in the amount of spam coming into consumers’ in-boxes.”

The commission asked the federal district court in Chicago to freeze the gang’s finances, arguing that its members were using unfair and deceptive advertising practices and violating the Can-Spam Act of 2003. That federal law provides civil and criminal penalties for spammers who falsify information in e-mail messages and fail to offer ways for consumers to refuse further messages.

The government is also pursuing criminal charges against the group. F.B.I. investigators in Chicago and St. Louis have executed search warrants against members of the spam gang, the commission said.

Jody Michael Smith, 29, of McKinney, Tex., was involved in the group’s finances, according to the F.T.C. Reached at his home, Mr. Smith said: “I don’t even know who these people are who I have been tied to,” and referred all inquiries to his Dallas lawyer, John R. Teakell. Mr. Teakell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

United States officials are also working with New Zealand authorities in the case against Lance Thomas Atkinson, 26, a native of New Zealand who now resides in Australia. Mr. Atkinson has a history in the spam business. In 2005, the F.T.C. obtained a $2.2 million judgment against him and a business partner for running a similar operation selling herbal pills online.

In conjunction with the investigation in the United States, the Department of Internal Affairs in New Zealand asked a court on Tuesday to impose a fine of 200,000 New Zealand dollars, or $121,000, on Mr. Atkinson, his brother Shane Atkinson and a business partner for violating the country’s own spam laws.

The activities of the HerbalKing group, like those of other criminal groups online, were remarkably international in scope. The group was shipping drugs like Propecia, Lipitor, Celebrex and Zoloft out of India. The F.T.C. also said the group based its Web sites in China, processed credit cards from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and Cyprus, and transferred funds among members using ePassporte, an electronic money network.

As part of its investigation, the commission purchased the “herbal” pills from the group and asked the Food and Drug Administration to test them. That agency found that the pills contained sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, which can be risky for some people with heart conditions.

Antispam researchers lauded the crackdown and said it would send a strong message to other spammers. But they were not confident that spam volumes would decrease.

“This will send some real shock waves through the spamming industry, but even if these guys were running a substantial botnet of compromised computers, there are always spammers looking to take their place,” said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, a spam-fighting security firm. “It wouldn’t be a surprise if people don’t notice any difference in their in-box tomorrow morning.”

So, We have been working on a new product over the last 8 months and it’s going to launch on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 12 noon (MST)!

Here’s the skinny, since someone already leaked info anyway, we have been doing a lot of Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Optimization, and plain Internet Marketing and we’ve been seeing some FANTASTIC success.

The problem is that we end up gaining a lot of clients that have already been through the wringer and truthfully “screwed” by other SEMs (not all SEMs use black hat techniques, just some – shame on them).

We decided that yes, we can grow our SEO/SMO Marketshare but we would have to grow our core group to handle the additional load – that’s fine but it doesn’t fit our business model, so instead we decided to create an Education Course called “Serious Internet Marketing.”  In this course we are actually using the same tools that we use to train in-house and selling licenses to other Web Developers, SEMs (Search Engine Marketers), Business owners, Marketers, etc. so that they can do the following:

1. Educate themselves so they do not fall into the lure of evil SEMs

2. Know what to look for in a Good SEM so that they can distinguish the reputable SEMs out there.

3. Increase their knowledge of verbiage, tactics, what’s good, what’s bad, etc.

4. Even start doing Internet Marketing themselves.  There are a lot of startups that can use this information but can’t afford to hire someone to do it.  Our course will go step by step (including videos).

Our only hesitancy is that we did not want to upset Development companies with these insider secrets being available to the public, so we are limiting the number of licenses to this course by State.  This way, the market will not be saturated but we can still help educate and give a small number of businesses and edge in the Internet Marketing game.

300 licenses per State…that’s it, 300 in each State and that State gets cut off from anyone else purchasing the course.

Serious Internet Marketing – A Web Development Insider Shares their Internet Marketing tactics – 300 licenses per State, opening on 10/28/2008 at 12 noon MST.

Stay tuned…