If you’re struggling to understand how to optimize your website, this article discusses some cool tools (or to use the author’s phrase, ‘tools that don’t suck’) for improving your hits and click through.
Tip of the hat to Elmer Thomas for this great reference.
“When I first heard about Twitter—a tool for instantly broadcasting the minutiae of your day and following the trifles of others—I couldn’t imagine a bigger waste of time.”
If this was your first reaction, check out this article.
A great article about segmenting your friend lists to keep your personal and business life separate.
Testing something new or changing something seemingly small in your email campaigns can definitely tell you something about how your recipients will respond. You’ll either get more open & clicks or you won’t. But you won’t know until you try.
Testing something new can SEEM like a lot of work but it’s really not. If you’re going to create an email marketing campaign anyway, it’s just three more tiny steps.
One: Make a copy of the campaign you’re creating
Two: Change a little part of the campaign (see below)
Three: Test with a small portion of your list or split your list in two
These three simple steps could get you a better response to your next email campaign and it takes just minutes for you to do. Unleash the mad scientist in you with these 5 easy things to test within your next email marketing campaign.
Continue reading “5 Easy Things to Test to Get a Better Response in Your Email Marketing Campaigns | Vertical Response”
Our friend Marty Gronewald just forwarded us Well Fargo’s ARC loan application. He said none of the local branches had a clue about it but he was able to ferret out the information for us.
It is encouraging the have an application, but in the early paragraphs it says that the program is subject to the banks underwriting rules which would mean that they would never actually loan the money.
If you’d like to brave this adventure, click here to view the application. Right click on the ‘click here’ to save it to your computer. It’s a standard package, so you could send it to multiple lenders.
If anyone gets funded with this program, please let us know. We would love to spread the good news!
Enough already with those darn search engines!
by Jim Hague, CEO, CrystalDI Web Design (www.crystaldiwebdesign.com)
So you’re concerned about search engine rankings?
You’ve read books, listened to so-called expert advice, and urged your Webmaster to add the correct Meta tags. You’ve established a monthly budget for a pay-per-click campaign only to realize you could have used those same dollars to pay ‘other’ bills. Some of you paid SEO companies who promised results only to fall short of the glory. End result: Your website’s search engine placement is less than satisfactory.
Enough of those ‘darn’ search engines! Obtaining high a ranking is too competitive to rely on traditional search submissions. Why? Because everyone is doing it!
Continue reading “Enough already with those darn search engines! | Jim Hague”
The parallels between the Great Depression of the 1930s and our current Great Recession have been widely remarked upon. Paul Krugman has compared the fall in US industrial production from its mid-1929 and late-2007 peaks, showing that it has been milder this time. On this basis he refers to the current situation, with characteristic black humour, as only “half a Great Depression.” The “Four Bad Bears” graph comparing the Dow in 1929-30 and S&P 500 in 2008-9 has similarly had wide circulation (Short 2009). It shows the US stock market since late 2007 falling just about as fast as in 1929-30.
This and most other commentary contrasting the two episodes compares America then and now. This, however, is a misleading picture. The Great Depression was a global phenomenon. Even if it originated, in some sense, in the US, it was transmitted internationally by trade flows, capital flows and commodity prices. That said, different countries were affected differently. The US is not representative of their experiences.
Our Great Recession is every bit as global, earlier hopes for decoupling in Asia and Europe notwithstanding. Increasingly there is awareness that events have taken an even uglier turn outside the US, with even larger falls in manufacturing production, exports and equity prices.
In fact, when we look globally, as in Figure 1, the decline in industrial production in the last nine months has been at least as severe as in the nine months following the 1929 peak. (All graphs in this column track behaviour after the peaks in world industrial production, which occurred in June 1929 and April 2008.) Here, then, is a first illustration of how the global picture provides a very different and, indeed, more disturbing perspective than the US case considered by Krugman, which as noted earlier shows a smaller decline in manufacturing production now than then. Read More
The May-June 2009 edition of The Small Business Advocate features the latest Small and Micro Business Lending Study, plus a look at Advocacy’s role in the national strategy to extend broadband access to all Americans. This issue also reports on important regulatory news for small employers.
Read More
Just In Case – A Referral We Hope You Don’t Need
Apparently, Bernie Madoff’s niece contacted this guy to get a quote on how long a conspiracy conviction sentence would be. Interesting story about how the company started.
Keep it on file, just in case.
Through the Looking Glass…Killer SEO Tools
DISCLAIMER: As far as the internet goes, I am a hack. I know very little about what most of the stuff I’m going to share with you.
On the other hand, I think the information provided by these tools does provide insight into how your website is ranked and what you can do about it. At the very least, it provides enough understanding about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that you will have a better shot at knowing what your web consultant is saying.
The sites below provide tools for understanding how your keywords are working, the density of them, how the web crawlers find and rate your content. For example: Content is king, so much so that if you pack your content with keywords you may find your site sliding down the rankings. The search engines are looking for a balance of 3 to 7% of the text being keywords. Anything past that is considered keyword spamming. I didn’t even know there was such a thing.
Continue reading “Through the Looking Glass…Killer SEO Tools”
Dispatches From The Front 