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Friday, March 17, 2006

Truth or Fiction Dot Com

We all get junk sent from friends claiming all kinds of things. Most of the time these emails are sent out from well meaning friends. One out of every 200 or so may be true. Before you forwarded an email you ought to check it against http://www.truthorfiction.com/. Below is my personal checklist regarding emails.

1. If an email claims that it is true, it is not. Just like the person you know who is always swearing something is true. You know they’re lying.
2. God does not believe in “Luck” and neither should you. Forwarding emails to you friends for Luck will just p!$$ them off and result in loss of respect and possibly the friendship.
3. Nobody in “name your country” needs help depositing funds through you.
4. Disney, Microsoft and other companies will never ask you to forward an email or reward you for forwarding emais.
5. Never forward an email that tells you to forward it. If you need to be told to forward a email how legitmate do you think it is?
6. When all else fails there is always a way to block emails from friends that won’t listen to your advice about not forwarding emails ;-)

How long have you guys been around?

Paontheweb.com officially opened on 17 March 2004. The significance of opening on St. Patrick’s Day was due to the proximity of completion to the holiday and the owner’s birthday. Since he is now an old guy he knew he would forget the day it opened. It had to be done on a day that he could remember.

Was the orange color scheme picked for a Protestant Irish reason instead of green? No. It just so happened that the design staff created it in orange. It is only a coincidence that the owner, Mike Kelly, born on St. Patrick’s Day is Protestant and Irish.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Email campaigns as advertising, do's and don'ts

The great thing about the internet and electronic advertising is it has the power to give people a look at your business like no other medium. The bad thing is if it is done wrong it can hurt you more than help you.

Here are some pointers on what not to do. Do not spam people with email. You don’t like it and neither does anyone else. Not only can this ruin your business reputation it can get your email banned from many different spam organizations today. We’ve had several clients that have been “Black Listed” by a number of different services. It can be time consuming and expensive to get yourself removed from the Black Lists. To see if your website email is Black Listed visit http://www.dnsstuff.com. Insert your domain name if you don’t know your I.P. address and scan the results for Red color bars. One may not hurt you. Multiple red bars are cause for concern. However, one red listing from a large spam house can do you great harm.

When you do send out group emails always have a remove feature. Either a link to automatically remove the email from a list or a simple “Reply with Remove in the subject line to be removed from this mailing list” should work. Warning: Many companies like AOL now provide their users with a “Report as SPAM” link in their mail browser. Many people will report you as a spammer instead of using your Remove feature. There is no guarantee that people will not mark you as a spammer when you are innocent of wrong doing.

You can alternately use a Newsletter service. We offer newsletter services that include all the compliant features for SPAM. In addition your personal email will not be affected if someone marks you as a spammer. The cost for these services varies based on the number of emails you want to send, graphic design work for the newsletter and the urgency of your request. The strength of doing things this way is most systems can tell you how many people opened and read your newsletter, if the reader clicked a link and where they went after that. In addition it can tell you if the person forwards it to a friend or opens it later for a second look.

Where should I advertise?

The age old question is where is the best place to advertise? Let’s think about this in modern terms. By all standards Billboards, Radio and T.V. have been around for a very long time. In relative terms the internet is new. This may be the most important article you read on advertising so we suggest reading it all.

TV is good but what do you do when a commercial comes on? You change the channel or use your fast forward if you have some kind of digital video recording device. If you decide to purchase TV commercials try to get what the industry calls Book Ends. These are the first 10 to 15 seconds coming and going between the show and the commercial break time. You’ll optimize your exposure since most people see a few seconds as their favorite program goes to commercial and is always flipping back to see if their show has returned from the break.

Radio is good but what do you do when commercials come on? You change the channel again. Hum a few bars of “let’s go surfin’ now, surfin USA” from the Beach Boys. The best radio ads are the quick ones during Traffic, Weather and News breaks. Most people stay tuned for those features. Of course, as satellite radio takes over there will be less of this.

Billboards are good. They range in price from hundreds to many thousands per month. All of this is based on the amount of travelers that see them. Of all the billboards you see how many do you really remember? Until you get home, to work or wherever you are going you’ve completely forgotten about what you saw. When you drive the same road every day you also develop Billboard Blindness. You don’t even see them anymore. They are good for getting a new company name out there initially but they are not very cost effective.

Magazines, Newspapers and other print media is good. There is a certain group of people you will reach in print advertising. However, the numbers are significantly dwindling. This is mainly due to the internet. With most articles and news online who uses print any more? I’m sure there are some but I don’t know anyone that reads the newspapers that is under 60.

Yellow Pages is Not a good place to advertise. There are two main reasons. First, they are extremely expensive and you’re locked in for a year. Second, who uses the Yellow Pages anymore? The only time I use them is when there is no computer available.

Internet advertising is the hottest thing going. There are many reasons. First your text link or banner ad can be clicked on to take people to your business website. Instead of 60 seconds of air time or a small square in print you get many pages of information across to your potential customer. If your banner ad is developed correctly you get the same branding effect that you do from billboards, print and TV ads with the extra value of the website link. With a website link people can get more company information and your contact information. Try getting your phone number on a billboard, TV or Radio ad to stick in someone’s head. It just isn’t going to happen.

Also see What kinds of internet advertising area available

So now you’ve had an E Seizure, what do you do about it?

Please refer to Entrepreneurial Seizure Examples
If you are the person who had the E Seizure and you realize it you are tempted to avoid the person or organization that made the offer. This only compounds your problem. Yes, you’re embarrassed to admit your mistake. However, most companies run into this over and over. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last.

For example, our company understands and will think more highly of you if you contact us after you realized you made a mistake. We don’t hold grudges. By admitting to yourself and others that you messed up you can begin the healing process that will grow your company. Do you want to grow your business or watch it fail? It’s all up to you. 

Entrepreneurial Seizure Examples

Please refer to What is an Entrepreneurial Seizure?
1. A used car lot owner told us he did not want a website because he already had too much business. There were tons of unsold cars on his lot. Hmmm.
2. A wholesale distributor told us our website service had to have something wrong with it. He received two previous bids. One was for $18,000 and the other was $14,000. Our price was only $2,500 for the same thing. Therefore, our website system had something wrong with it. Hmmm
3. An auto repair shop told us they didn’t need an advertising website. The owner added that he did not do any advertising. Being new we asked him to tell us more about his business so we could understand his industry needs better. If we weren’t going to sell him we would get information to help us sell the next guy. The owner proceeded to tell us about his business and later showed us all the brochures Yellow Pages ads and mailings he was doing to advertise his business. $14,000 a year was his budget. Remember this guy told us he doesn’t advertise. Hmmm
4. A large regional chamber of commerce was sending out a weekly newsletter that reached 5,000 businesses. The newsletter had three empty “advertise here” links on the page. This went on for weeks. We showed them a Google Answers article. It pointed out they were double industry standard on pricing. They did not lower their price. The reason? “The board of directors made this decision and they put a lot of work into it.” Hmmm
5. More on the chamber. After a couple weeks I made them an offer. We said we would give them a 5 to one swap for banner advertising. Since they reached 5,000 businesses I would give them 25,000 customer exposures through our directory. After a week the Vice President of the chamber said no. It is like a guy that owns a Yugo that refused to trade you for a Cadillac.

We’d like to hear your examples of E Seizures.

Entrepreneurial Seizure, what is it?

I like to define an “Entrepreneurial Seizure” as an event when a decision maker without good decision making skills blows an oppurtunity. Examples of this run rampant in our business. What is our business? We created the state of Pennsylvania’s first and only website directory for small and medium sized business.

Do you own your own business? Do you manage or “gate keep” for a business? If the answer is yes then you need to understand a few things about the “E Seizure” we talk about in this Blog. Please read through the quick examples of E Seizures so it doesn’t happen to you. Then read “So now you’ve had an E Seizure, what do you do about it”?

Sunday, March 12, 2006

What is a CMS?

CMS stands for Content Management System. There are many on the market with names like Mambo, GeekLog, Drupal and others. We were never satisfied with any of these systems so we built our own. The average user gets confused by too many options. Our CMS is less complex but just as powerful. We can customize it to the advanced user or narrow it down to a simple text editor. It also comes with the strength of changing the entire design of the website while leaving images, navigation and text in place. There is no need to start your website over again. You can switch the look in less than 5 seconds to a seasonal theme or whatever other design you ask us to create. Call us for a live demonstration 866.316.6913. As always, if we’re busy we’ll call you back rather than sending you through long wait times or annoying cues. 

What Services do you offer?

PAontheweb offers many services. Everthing from logo design and identity packages, website design, hosting, advertising and programming. We also offer unique Content Management System (CMS) that is fast and easy to use. See “What is CMS” as a seperate FAQ.

Many businesses ask us for more things every day. We are hoping to soon bring business owners Retirement and Financial Planning services, Staffing solutions and an employee databse to help people find jobs. We are also adding Bloggers to help people find things like information on Hunting, Fishing, Marketing and more.

What new things are in store?

We’ll soon be adding a feature called “Live Search” which will make your searches quicker. Live Search pulls information directly from a database as you are typing. You will be able to search town names, zip codes and subjects at much faster speeds. You won’t find that in use on a large scale any time soon by anyone else. We will also be adding icons next to all paid listings. These icons will allow site visitors to know certain things about your business. For example, if you are a restaurant do you allow smoking? If you are a seasonal business do you have certain months you’re open? Does the business offer coupons or discounts for Military or Senior Citizens? Icons will also include direct map links to your business using Google Maps. For all you programming Geeks out there we’ll also be writing the new site in Ruby on Rails! We may even be offering Ruby on Rails website hosting to programmers that are jumping on the band wagon.

Where did Email notifications go?

Due to recent problems with recipents listing us as spammers instead of Unsubscribing or writing to us we have stopped the automatic email notifications. A second issue was noticed when a spammer launched a robot to our site that ended up sending over 100,000 emails to one recipient. In the future we intend to have a members login area where you can check your results.