9 Ways To Make Your Website More Presentable

Keywords: Websites

Your website works as your spokesperson presenting the message you wish to convey. Thinking in terms of this analogy often helps you to look at your website from a different angle and make visitor-friendly changes.

Imagine a situation - you have to make an announcement about an exciting event or an opportunity. You have appointed a spokesperson to make a presentation on your behalf to an audience consisting of invitees, interested persons and on-lookers. How would you like her to perform? Your website should do the job of a real, living spokesperson. Following considerations will make your website more presentable.

1) Main Theme - The presentation in the above example has been organized for a particular occasion. Similarly each webpage should be built around a particular theme. It doesn't help if too much information is given on a webpage on seemingly unrelated issues.

2) Fast Opening - You would certainly not like your spokesperson to be late and make your audience impatient. When a visitor clicks URL of your webpage or is redirected there, the webpage should open real fast. Your webpage gets just a few seconds to engage your visitor's attention. You would like your visitors to spend those few seconds looking at your webpage rather than waiting for the webpage to open.

Orient Your First-time Web Site Visitor

Keywords: Websites

Imagine spinning someone around so profoundly and for so long that when you finally tell them to open their eyes, they ask "Where am I?" not knowing if they are even on the same continent they started from. When someone comes to your web site from a search engine or through a link from another site, it's like that for them. They may have little or no context within which to understand your home page - or another page deep within your site that they've landed on.

By imagining and engineering your site for that profoundly disoriented visitor, you can add subtle clues and explicit messages to your site that orient the person arriving at your site from who knows where. You can do this without "dumbing down" your presentation in any way, turning confused visitors into converted ones.

For instance, while judging sites for the Webby Awards, I've sometimes found myself at a home page about a city that appears justifiably proud of itself for all that it's achieved, yet I haven't a clue what state or province or even what country that city is located in. It's easier to appreciate what you're reading if you know that Kamloops is in British Columbia, Canada and not in Scotland or New Zealand.

Likewise, when people are searching for a service provider and you do what you do only in a specific geographical area, say so right on your home page. For instance, if you provide emergency on-site technical support throughout Southern Vermont, say so. You'll have fewer potential clients clicking away in confusion and have fewer inappropriate phone or email inquiries to deal with.

How to search your PC with Google Desktop

Keywords: Software

In this era of Internet, most people are frequent users of computers. Many of us use computers through out the day, accumulating morasses of information in various formats, which include email, digital photo, word document, spreadsheet, presentation file, ebook, article, other downloaded files, music, visited web pages, and many others. We stuff them in multiple folders in our PC. Before we know it, our hard drives become a storeroom of misplaced items. As a result, finding a needed file of information some times become a daunting task!

The search function integrated to Microsoft Windows is not a big help either. It requires you to know, albeit vaguely, where the file could possibly be located. If your data storage is significant and you made a search on your whole hard disk, it might take ages to get search results and, then again, there is no guarantee that you will find the right file. Frustrating? Thanks to new Google Desktop Search this is about to change!

What is Google Desktop Search?

Google Desktop Search is a free downloadable small program, which will quickly and easily find your files no matter where in your hard disk they are stored. The great thing about this program is by making your computer searchable, this program frees you from having to manually organize and sort your files, emails, and downloads. You no more have to mull over where in your PC the information you are looking for is residing – in your email, files or web pages that you browsed recently.

3 Tips for Improving Your Communications

Keywords: Communication

As a manager, you have so much to do and so little time to do it. You know communicating with your staff is critically important, but how can you make it easier? Here are 3 techniques you can use:

* Because I said so isn’t always enough A leader’s power comes from his/her followers. If your staff rejects your directives, you’re toast. Here’s how you can work out your differences with a staffer who fails to follow your instructions.

- Confront the issue. Meet with the employee to discuss what’s going on. Don’t be afraid to ask for his/her perspective. Example: “Joan, this report isn’t what I asked you to do. Can you tell me what happened?”

- Be quiet. Once you’ve asked the question, resist the urge to put words in her mouth. Remain silent until she answers the question completely.

- Give in for now. If you have the luxury of time, let the employee prove you wrong. Example: “If I let you do it your way and it doesn’t work, will you agree to rerun the numbers?”

- Share power. Encourage the employee to suggest solutions to the impasse. Example: “How are we going to keep this kind of misunderstanding from occurring in the future?”

Does Email Work?

Keywords: Email

Have you noticed how much email marketers are sounding like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz lately: "Filters and spammers and laws, Oh My!"

Pretty much everywhere I go I hear people reading the obituary of email marketing. Everywhere, that is, except the companies that actually measure the effectiveness of real-life email campaigns.

Here are the real-world results Double Click found for the second quarter of 2003:

For every 1,000 emails sent, here are the average results:

919 actually get delivered 366 get opened by the recipient 69 generate a site visit 2.65 people buy $98.48 is the average sale

Does that sound impressive? Let me put it in slightly different terms:

On average-not just in the perfect campaign, this is average-when someone sends out 1 million emails, they generate 2,650 sales for a total dollar volume of (drum roll please.)

Do I Need A Feed?

Keywords: Feeds

Do I Need an RSS Feed? RSS has been around for more than 10 years but has only recently become popular. RSS provides headlines and summaries of information in a concise and standardized way.

Benefits for Publishers

1.) Avoid Spam Filters Statisticians estimate that 70% of the email transferred each day is spam (unsolicited email). With that statistic, even opt-in users risk losing valuable messages in the cesspool of spam. RSS feeds effectively nullify spam as an issue. Requesting feeds allow users to maintain complete control over the content they view. Users can easily opt-in and out of feeds that provide content of interest or importance.

2.) Expanded Reach RSS allows publishers to reach a number of new and different markets that typically are less crowded with competition. Many small businesses are often slow to adopt or learn new technologies, giving businesses that lead the way a competitive advantage.

Do you want your own fully programmable ERP? - Part 1

Keywords: ERP

We are in a transition phase in the Managerial Administration models of any company or Government, because three factors are summing for that:

1. The new powerful business Information Technologies and its more and more smaller costs, like ERP, CRM, BI, etc.,

3. Several different layers in the companies in what refers to its managerial and administrative automation levels.

This created not very orthodox solutions, and one of them is the installation of a Front-End System above the Transational System already existent in your company that -by any reason - cannot be substituted by a "pure" ERP System.

Inside the existent tools and for reasons that will be exposed, we used the IBM Lotus Notes software for that purpose, briefly Notes as it's widely known.

5 Little Known Ways To Generate Free Traffic

Keywords: Website Traffic

Most people have the notion that generating traffic is a one-off event, and it involves spending huge sums of money on advertising.

Nothing can be further from the truth.

First of all, it's possible to open up streams of autopilot traffic geometrically, surely and steadily over time.

Secondly, it costs next to nothing to do it, if you know how.

Here are 5 instantly implementable methods to open up new traffic streams without needing to spend a dime.

Free Traffic Method #1: Contribute Content

Writing an ebook is a time consuming and arduous task. In comparison, writing a chapter of rock solid content is much easier and more achievable.

I've personally been invited to contribute content to many people's info-products, usually in the form of 'chapters', and this has resulted in a lots of quality traffic that is not only free, but presold.

Web Content Writing: Combining Links and Content

Keywords: Website Content

When you write for a web page there is a great attraction for using hyper-links. Even I cannot resist the temptation of linking different pages to a single paragraph just to encapsulate lots of information in short text.

Although a web page is mostly written in a hyper-text language, it does not mean we use hyper-links at the drop of a hat. They are extremely useful, no denying that, but an over-dosage can end up utterly distracting the reader.

Just as a side note, when I talk of links, I don't mean the navigation links. Whenever I mention hyper-links, they are the links, for instance:

A web page content writer can be searched for either on Yahoo! or on Google but Amrit Hallan has written many articles on copywriting and web content writing.

There are so many links in the above paragraph to take the reader somewhere else. Here, they might be solving some purpose because I want to promote myself, but if I just insert hyper-links to show I have lots of information, it can prove to be really distracting.

10 Secrets To Improving Your Website's Conversion Ratio

Keywords: Websites

Anyone may use this article free of charge, provided the article is not altered and the resource box remains intact.

According to the so-called experts, a decent conversion ratio is right around one percent. In other words, one out of every one hundred visitors to your website converts to a sale.

Personally, I think you should ignore what the experts say, and strive to achieve as high a conversion ratio as possible. You should never be satisfied. You should always be looking for ways to improve your conversion ratio. My website consistently converts anywhere from 3 to 5 percent, and often converts as high as ten percent!

Unless you're selling a big-ticket item and making $100 or more per sale, it's extremely difficult to make any real money with only a one percent conversion ratio.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and if your website is attracting hundreds or even thousands of visitors a day, then obviously you can do quite well with a one percent or lower conversion ratio.

But what if you don't have that kind of traffic--and most websites don't. Then what? What if you're selling a $20 e-book and you're only attracting a hundred visitors a day to your website? With a one percent conversion ratio, that means your website is making a measly $20 a day. And believe me, that's much more common than you realize.

The Internet - a numbers game....

Keywords: Internet

If you take a close look at this 'working online' business, you will see that it is quite simply a numbers game (this is actually the case with most if not all businesses).

At the most basic level, building a successful website is just a matter of getting sufficient visitors to the site and ensuring that some of them purchase something. I am a firm believer that you can sell pretty much anything if the price is right and whilst your products may not appeal to everyone, they will appeal to someone.

So, back to the numbers game. Once you know the percentage of visitors to your site that will actually buy something (the conversion ratio), you can give yourself something to aim for.....

If one out of every 100 visitors buys something then you have a conversion ratio of 1% (which online is actually not that bad). This means that 500 visitors to your site should result in five sales.

To increase the number of sales there are a couple of things you could do. Firstly, you could increase your conversion ratio by improving your sales page or reducing your prices etc. Alternatively, you could work the numbers game and increase your traffic - you already know that 500 visitors will give you five sales so if you can get 1000 visitors to your site, you should generate ten sales (assuming that the quality of the traffic is equal to or better than that which you are already receiving).