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The image accompanying this post will give you a good idea for what to look out for. DO NOT PAY THESE PEOPLE. They do not own your domain nor that of anyone else.

Here is an article about them.

Wylie Galt

Things are constantly changing. With new technologies coming along and old ones getting better every day, standing still will leave you quite a ways back.

Gone are the days of building your website and ticking it off as “done”. Staying near the top of search engine results requires a lot more effort than it used to.

Today websites need to be built using best practices and consistently updated with new information.

Over the past year we’ve converted a number of clients from standard websites to CMS-based sites and the results have been staggering.

Unique visitor figures have increased between 200 and 500 percent.

Benefits of CMS-based sites
✓    Client can update or add pages without knowing HTML
✓    Updates can be syndicated to social networks or subscribers.
✓    Site maps automatically ping search engines to any updates.
✓    Has the ability to allow for interaction with site visitors.
✓    Search Engine Optimization is much easier than with HTML/CSS Sites.
✓    Website maintenance costs are greatly reduced.
✓    An endless number of features can be easily added via free or low cost plugins
✓    Ability for client to load photo galleries or videos to any posting or page
✓    Ability to be seen on all mobile devices
✓    Google analytics integrated into each page
✓    Search window that will allow for easy location of relevant information

If you would like to learn more, and why wouldn’t you, drop a line or give a ring and I’ll be happy to take a look at what you’re doing now and let you know if we can be of assistance.

We can’t help everyone but we might be able to help you.

According to the Entrepreneur article. “77 percent of business-to consumer (B2C) marketers have acquired customers through Facebook, while business-to-business (B2B) marketers have found more success on LinkedIn — finding it a whopping 277% more effective than Facebook or Twitter.”

Why not reach out to your client base to remind them of your services? A newsletter or discount offer can go a long way towards top-of-mind awareness and increased sales.

Email marketing works for a variety of reasons…

• It allows targeting
• It is data driven
• It drives direct sales
• It builds relationships, loyalty and trust
• It supports sales through other channels

Many business owners mistakenly believe that email marketing was killed off by spam. In fact email marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to promote your website and your services (check out the research section below).

For a successful campaign you have to get the basics right. The basics of building a list of people who want to hear from you, crafting a message, and ensuring the emails get through to those on that list.

Getting those emails through to the recipients and not getting trapped by spam filters is paramount to a successful email marketing campaign. Use of a third party is crucial.

Google’s GMail, Hotmail and other mail servers in general recognize Mail Chimp and Constant Contact as “safe sources”. They understand that these services have strict policies about spamming, so they don’t filter email from Mail Chimp or Constant Contact.

We’ve been searching for the best solution for sending email newsletters and promotional offers and have settled on Mail Chimp.

It’s the most economical Mail Chimp offers those with lists up to 2,000 subscribers, to use the service for FREE with the ability to send up to 12,000 emails each month.

And one of the best features is that the level of reporting is truly staggering. Check out the Reporting discussion below.

While the service is terrific, a professional look and approach is essential. A poorly executed newsletter or promotion can do more harm than good. Let us help you do it right.

To get going with a newsletter or promotion campaign of your own, respond here and I’ll get right back to you

REPORTING

The reporting that is available is simply outstanding. Below you’ll discover a few of the things that are available, but there is a lot more.

There’s an Overview that gives the general performance of the campaign and compares the performance of the campaign to the performance of others in the same industry but you can delve in a lot deeper.

The Subscriber Activity report tells you who opened the email and how many of the links in the email they visited and which ones.

Delivery Statistics include any bounced emails and the reason why.

Click Performance reporting gives an analysis of your email showing where people clicked on the email and the percentage that did so.

You can track readership and click-throughs and even run multiple campaigns at once to see which is more effective.

The reports tell you who’s opening, clicking, and coming back for more and Google Analytics integration can give advanced stats on how your campaigns affect traffic to your website.

RESEARCH

According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing was expected to generate an ROI of $44.00 for every dollar spent on it in 2011. e-Mail Marketing, outperforms all the other direct marketing channels examined, such as print catalogs.

A 2011 MerchantCircle survey of over 8,000 local business owners in the US found email marketing cited by 35.8% as a Top 3 most effective marketing or advertising method. Only social network profiles and search engine marketing scored higher.

The ForeSee Results 2010 report on the effectiveness of social media found that promotional emails were the second biggest influence on retail website visits. The biggest influence was familiarity with the brand.

A January 2011 survey by BtoB Magazine found 63% of respondents likely to increase spending on email in 2011 (second only to websites), with 29% keeping spend constant.

Whether you are subscribing to a data backup service like Carbonite, taking advantage of the iCloud, using Photobucket or just active on Social Networks the degree of password security that you implement can mean the difference between keeping your assets and a catastrophic loss.

Recently Wired Magazine’s Mat Honan suffered just such a catastrophe. According to Mat, “In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.” You can read the whole article here.

Pretty horrific stuff but it can be avoided.

There are strategies that you can implement to protect yourself.

To avoid the fate of Mr. Honan you should:

1. Backup everything — in the cloud and on the ground.

2. Use a bunch (maybe hundreds?) of different passwords.

3. Don’t link all of your accounts together.

4. Use two-factor authentication on Google and Facebook.

5. Don’t use ‘Find My Mac’ on Apple computers.

To learn more about these steps, the steps above are covered in greater detail in an article on the CNN site here. 

It is interesting to note that as a result of Mr. Honan’s experience both Amazon and Apple have implemented changes. Amazon has closed a security hole

and Apple has suspended over-the-phone password resets.

The Flash downfall started with Steve Jobs announcing that iPhone and iPad would not support Adobe’s outdated animation software. If you’re interested in the reasons why you should read his article Thoughts on Flash

In support of the steps first taken by Apple there’s now a group called group the Occupy Flash.  Their home page proudly proclaims, “Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It’s buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn’t work on most mobile devices. It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology. Websites that rely on Flash present a completely inconsistent (and often unusable) experience for fast-growing percentage of the users who don’t use a desktop browser. It introduces some scary security and privacy issues by way of Flash cookies.  Flash makes the web less accessible. At this point, it’s holding back the web.”

For all of you still clinging to that old Flash site it’s time to let go and get with the 21st Century. For Search Engine Optimization there really couldn’t be a worse choice than a Flash-based site. None of the text is readable by the search engine bots and thus all the content is not doing you any good at all.

The best solution is to have your site updated with new relevant content on a regular basis and to have both a regular and a mobile version  of your site.

Do yourself a favor and take a moment to read this.