We all know the benefits of online advertising. The top ones that come to mind include: It's affordable. Online ads have one of the lowest CPM (cost per thousand reached) rates of any medium. It can be tightly targeted. You can define a very specific market and reach only those people. It's global -- or [...]
Is it possible to avoid spam? Sadly, I don't think so. One of the reasons I had my website redesigned recently was to integrated my blog with my primary site for greater search engine optimization. It worked. More people are finding and visiting my site--and more spammers are leaving comments filled with links on my [...]
How many ways can your customers communicate with you? Recently a friend of mine was evaluating two companies who were vying to provide a service to her church. One had a product with a pricing and service package that was clearly superior. But that salesperson would only communicate by phone -- he didn’t use email [...]
If you’re in business today, you have a website. In fact, there’s an excellent chance you have multiple websites, or at least multiple domain names pointing to your primary website. Choosing those domain names must be done with care. You can use different domain names as tracking devices to test your various advertising and promotion [...]
A judge in a Florida case has ruled that debt collectors may not use social networking sites to contact debtors, their family or their friends. I found this case interesting in part because I used to write a column for Commercial Law Bulletin (published by the Commercial Law League, an organization of collection, creditors’ rights [...]
Is social media—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube—a fad or the wave of the future? From a company policy perspective, the answer to that question doesn’t matter. The fact is that you need a social media policy that clearly defines what your employees may and may not say about your operation on social media sites—and you need [...]
Last week, Charlene Davis (my friend, colleague, and occasional co-author) joined a Yahoo! Group called Clever Homemaker. The group has 6,000+ members and Charlene thought the articles the list owner was posting about business were very well-written. Then she recognized one of the articles — it was actually excerpt from one of my books on [...]
This morning I called Go Daddy tech support and had to wait for a few minutes before someone was available to help me. When the phone system gave me my estimated wait time, it then offered me this option to press 1 if I didn’t want to listen to music while I was on hold. [...]
A substantial portion of my communication is done electronically through e-mail, texts, blogs, Twitter, websites, etc. It’s fast, convenient, efficient—but you know all that. Even so, since I was a small child, I have loved getting real mail: envelopes and packages delivered to me by the USPS. In the last year, the volume of [...]
Like everybody, I hate spam. It annoys me that these low-lifes get to waste my time just because I have an e-mail address. Most of it I can spot and delete without reading, but every so often, I get tricked into opening one of those messages. What tricks me? Usually a good subject line. And [...]