Although many of us are already savvy when it comes to writing, many more people want and need to learn how to write effective emails. This is imperative nowadays due to the ubiquity of the internet in work, school and everything in between.

1. The Basics

Make sure to use proper grammar and sentence structure when writing to anyone, whether it’s your mother or boss. You can always use the practice. Remember that the rules of paper formatting count in email too. Also, be specific. Unstructured phrases that use too many pronouns leave the reader guessing about the subject that you are trying to talk about.

2. Brevity

Don’t overload your co-workers or clients in the number or length of emails you send.  Use concise details for specific operations that you are trying to address. If you need very specific info, it might be better to draft a report or have a meeting with a note-taker. If you are emailing to a group of people, then minimize sharing details with everyone. Instead, write multiple emails and simply copy and paste the main points from one person to another, adding in details as you go.

3. Format

Use proper email format for letter when writing. That way, your recipient can then better understand and utilize the information you’ve provided. So, don’t just write an email like it’s to your spouse. Is it in response to a question? Make this obvious. Are you sending a questionnaire? Make it organized. Lastly, always include information about the addressee (at the beginning) and yourself (at the end).

4.  Decorum

Be appropriate. For some reason, many people think that email is more casual or less formal than other forms of communication. This may have been true 20 years ago, but now, it’s the primary form of communication for many companies. Never be rude, offensive, sexual or otherwise inappropriate. On the one hand, this makes sense because you don’t want to jeopardize any relationships, but you also should look out for your own interests – usually, email is monitored.

5. Organization

Getting the most out of email has to do with more than just the writing part. Be sure to keep track of all your valuable and important communications by incorporating a BCC line back to yourself, your boss or perhaps just generic inbox, so that you can always have a record, and you can also see what it looks like on the receiving end. Also, be organized. Have more folders than just your one inbox (but not too many that it stops being efficient). Also, be sure to always have all of your contacts and their information in one place – don’t hop back and forth between accounts or address books. This way, your emails are working for you!

About the author: Carla Boddecker likes to write about business, finance & saving money at www.healthinsurancequotes.org.

The popularity of social platforms is increasing by leaps and bounds and therefore business owners are turning to these sites in order to promote their products and to attract young consumers. These three powerful marketing tools are popular in their unique ways, as each of them has its own distinct features and benefits, as well as some drawbacks. People these days are trying to use the internet to the best possible way to earn profits and promote their businesses of any kind. There are a lot of websites which promotes and advertise business activities and give useful information to the users.

The top three online marketing tools available for business owners include the social networking sites:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google Plus

The Twitter and Facebook online social networks are in a tough competition to be the most preferred online media marketing tool. Google plus is also fast picking up in the race to acquire a position in the rising social network to enter into the marketing competition.

Facebook as the preferred marketing tool:

Facebook, which started around the year of 2004, is the oldest of the three competing social platforms and is the highest trafficked site on the World Wide Web. With almost eight years of experience in the field of social networking, this site has learned how to grow bigger and bigger with almost a billion users worldwide. With a fast growing number of users and with a high percentage of them being regular and daily users, Facebook marketing is one of the most important aspects in promoting a business today. Facebook offers you a good chance of helping your business grow and promote your business or brand easily and quickly, reaching a wide audience.

A Facebook page is no doubt one of the best options available for promoting anything. It lets people share and get engaged in sharing comments related to the business being promoted thereby making the people aware of it.

Twitter as the second popular online marketing tool:

There is also a large percentage of online users who spend their time sending out tweets all day, and business owners are using tweets and Twitter site to promote their business online as well.

Twitter is not as popular as Facebook in the arena of social networking, however it is still used by many people, and following people on Twitter can really give you great results. You can promote and build a successful brand by tweeting and making people follow your brand for updates and promotions.

Google plus as the fastest growing and promising online marketing tool:

Google plus is a rising social network. It is the social platform that has a lot of potential and reaching a million users in less than a week from its start is in itself a rare feat. Its greatest advantage is that it is created, managed and promoted by Google, which has already got a huge database of online users.

In the beginning people use to consider the launch as unnecessary as everyone already has a Facebook account for the purpose of social networking and didn’t like the idea of switching to a new platform where there will be very few online people to socialize with. But this platform has started to give Facebook and Twitter tough competition and giving them hard time to maintain their successful positions.

Google has started off targeting people who are already their users by using their email id’s to sign up for a Google Plus account. This way they have been quite successful in gathering a large number of users without much effort. Google local will show you the business, location, contact and business existence in the Internet.

As the competition stiffens in the online marketing field via social networking, it remains to be seen who emerges as the winner of online marketing among the social networking sites. It’s also quite possible that a new trend may begin to start for online promotions in other ways instead of the social networking, but until then it’s Facebook as of now.

About the author: Brianne is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury. Beside this she is fond of gadgets. Recently an article on Captiva attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on Samsung S3770.

Many inventions come from moments of inspiration. Some new inventions are based totally on a need that the inventor sees and strives to fill, like the invention of the first electric car.

Many inventions are actually variations of something similar that has already been invented like many new apps that are new inventions but in the same genre as other programs.  Many new inventions come from individuals who watch a loved one struggle with a task, for example the maker of the first Band-Aid invented it because he saw that his wife couldn’t wrap her finger with gauze and tape with one hand.

With approximately 8 million patents and millions of patent applications pending, it’s clear that we love inventions.

But do you want to make a major invention to change the world?

Like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did when they introduced the personal computer and the ‘what you is what you get’ type icon-rich interfaces that were navigable by computer mouse?  With thought and creativity you may be able to look back and say my inventions helped people or maybe, my inventions changed the world.

What are the top inventions that changed our lives?

Obviously the harnessing of electricity, the original telephone, the personal computer, and the internet are some of the inventions that immediately come to mind.

What other inventions changed our life? The microwave oven allowed us to think that two minutes is a long time to cook something.  Now no modern kitchen is complete without one.  The refrigerator, invented in 1927, allowed people to buy groceries periodically instead of every day and its ability to keep food cold cut down on disease.

The printing press made literacy a widespread goal and possibility.  The radio, which was invented in 1901, gave us the first non-print way to share ideas and songs.  The iPod changed our culture from carrying huge boom boxes to putting thousands of songs in a machine smaller than a pack of cigarettes.

All of these inventions changed our life for the better.

Plastic, created by Alexander Parkes in 1855, has evolved so that it is in every school, hospital, and household.  It’s now part of our computers, part of medical tubing and syringes, and the main product in most of our food containers.

When Parkes or Jobs or Wozniak started their inventions their dream was to create a specific useful device.  Did they know their inventions would make the world an easier place to live?

Will your inventions help change the world for the better also?

Author Bio: Joel is the Marketing lead at  www.ideadesignstudio.com. Idea Design Studio is a product development firm that specializes in top-of-the-line design work for inventors. If you have any question on how to get invention help just contact Idea Design Studio.

Business Directory Listings are an easy way to add some SEO linkbacks to your website. They are also a great way for people to find you when searching for businesses in specific areas. But there are hundreds of business directories that you can get listed in, and keeping your information up-to-date can be cumbersome.

Out-of-date information can hurt SEO

If you have information out there that is not up-to-date, it can be seen as a dead SEO link. It’s important to do a periodic review of these listings to make sure your address, phone, email and business description are all the same.

We have moved, so nothing has changed

Do not assume that because you haven’t moved that nothing has changed. Some of these sites allow visitors to change listings, and sometimes visitors make mistakes in an attempt to be helpful. It’s still important to check out the information that is published about you.

Aggregate business listing sites often get it wrong

Sites like ZoomInfo or Pipl crawl the internet and compile information about businesses. They often get the information wrong so it is crucial to check these regularly.  A great example is for Landau Design. There is a company overseas with the same name, and ZoomInfo put all our information together into one listing. That means their employees and our employees were both listed, and our offices were shown as two locations for the same business. Some of the most popular aggregate business listing sites:

Services to help keep up-to-date

There are some really helpful services that can help keep you up-to-date. You do have to pay for them, but in exchange they can save you time.

• For as little as $39 Universal Business Listings will manage keeping your listings on track. They will also submit your business information to hundreds of directories that you may not already be a part of.
• Yext allows you to scan listings and it will tell you which ones have erroneous information. You can pay them to fix specific listings or all of them. If you want to save $$$, you can just use their scanning service as a way to point out errors, then you can go to each site and fix the listing yourself.

Twitter is fun, but it is also very easy to get lost in the millions of micro messages that are spit out every day. So how do you distinguish yourself and make sure that your messages are the ones that get noticed?

Dan Zarrella, in conjunction with HubSpot, did specific research to find out which tweets have the highest click through rate (CTR).

Twitter guidelines that will get you more re-tweets:

1. Use more verbs and less nouns to get more attention
2. Tweeting on Friday, Saturday and Sunday significantly increased CTR numbers
3. Tweeting later in the day also had better results
4. Put your links about 25% of the way into your tweet for higher CTR
5. Keep your tweets between 120 and 130 characters
6. Slow down the number of tweets. The more you blitz, the less people pay attention.
7. Tweets with ‘via’, ‘RT’, ‘@’, ‘please’ and ‘check’ had higher CTR numbers.
8. Tweets with ‘AddThis’, ‘marketing’ and ‘GetGlue’ had lower CTR numbers
9. The term ‘daily is out’, used by paper.li, had the highest rate of CTR

Read the specifics of this great research study by visiting Dan Zarrella’s website.

You have signed up for all the social media platforms, but you have not engaged the number of people you were hoping for. Your website can be a significant tool in gaining you some social media connections.

We have tracked down some fabulous articles that will help you do just this. They provide you nearly a dozen ways that you can use your website to grow your social media network.

• 9 Tips for Integrating Social Media on Your Website
• 5 Ways to Include Social Media in Your Website
• Success Practices to Integrate Social Media With the Business Website

Have you found any other ways to integrate social media on your website? Please do share!

Tracking social media success has been an elusive path. There are tools out there that you can pay hundreds of dollars for, but they often require a steep learning curve as well as a monthly financial commitment.

You can actually track social media results using free analysis tools. The key is to know what to look for and how to bring it all together so it can help you make social media decisions.

Salesforce has compiled the Social Media Analytics: The Small Business Guide to Metrics & Tools. They gathered some of the best experts in the industry and asked them how to monitor social media success. Their answers are simple and straightforward. They tell you:

Why measure website traffic alone is not enough.

How to determine engagement of your connections.

How to gauge social media success in major networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Read the guide on the Salesforce website and gain some great tools for keeping your social media on track!

No one is happy when the day begins with a customer calling to say they get an error message when visiting your website.  A visitor may see a message indicating that the website is not found, the domain is available for purchase, a database cannot be accessed or that the website is offline. Here are the most common reasons websites don’t display and how to avoid it.

• The hosting or domain fees have not been paid
  If you catch either of these issues quickly, you may be able to remedy them by simply paying the bill.  Many web hosts and domain registrars set you account to renew automatically.  If that is the case, your credit card information may not up to date.
• The host server is down
  The easy solution is to contact your hosting company or by checking with your IT group for internally hosted sites.  A professionally hosted site should have redundant servers and be able to get your site live quickly.  If you continue to experience downtime and if the downtime is over an hour, look for another hosting solution.  Sometimes shared hosting environment are prone to downtime so consider upgrading your hosting plan to a VPS or dedicated account.  Sometimes a new hosting company is appropriate.  Look at our hosting recommendations  if you need to consider that option.

• Your visitor is inside a restricted network
  It is not unusual for visitors who are inside a firewall to loose access to your site because the security settings or workstation settings have changes.  Sometimes public wifi networks have similar issues.  So ask your visitor if that may be the case.I attempted to access the internet in talking to a potential client from their office and could not access many public websites because of this.  (Needless to say, I didn’t gain that client.  It is hard to tell a client that their IT is poorly configured.)

• Something in the basic website code failed
  This may be because of an incorrect edit to these files.  Occasionally files become corrupted because of many unknown reasons.  These reasons include corruption on the host servers and read/write errors from accessing files.  These types of issues are unpredictable.  If your host does not provide a good backup, plan look for another host.  Regardless of your host, you should have a backup process that stores backups apart from the host server.  Akeeba provides a good backup option within Joomla.  Check with your developer to see what options are available for your site.
• Someone “hacked” or maliciously interrupted your website
  Just as viruses can find their way onto your local computer, websites can be compromised too.  Public and internally websites should be protected in a variety of ways.  If you have a Joomla site, check our recommendation.  Many of the principles also apply to websites overall.

How you recover from a hack or virus depends in part on your host’s security measures.  Some hosts quarantine websites they detect as compromised.  Your first steps are to check the date of your locally stored backup and then seek assistance if you are unsure what to do.

If you don’t sleep late from over-consumption of turkey, you have to check out these incredible Black Friday deals on website hosting! These companies have gone all-out to make you their next new client. So log onto your computer and steal yourself some great deals!

FatCow Holiday Hosting Special!

• Begins: after Thanksgiving
  
• Ends: 11/27/11
  
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Hostgator Black Friday 2011 Deals!

• Begins: 12 am CST on Friday, November 25, 2011
• Ends: 11:59 pm CST on Friday, November, 2011
• Deal: 50% off EVERYTHING the entire day!

This includes ALL accounts. You could get hosting for $.99 per month! We’re very happy with Hostgator for our Joomla accounts, and we’re certain you will be too! Buy hosting with Hostgator >

Interactive Online Black Friday Special!

• Begins: 11/25/11
  
• Ends: 11/27/10
  
• Deals: The promotion is for 1 year of hosting for $9.95 on our Shared Hosting Service.

If you’re wondering which host to choose for Joomla, read our blog post What is the Best Hosting for Joomla to make your choice.