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Archive for September, 2007

47 Simple Tips to Build Trust in Your Website or Blog

I came across this really good article from sitepronews for webmasters and wannabe entrepreneurs… Its about how to create trust on your website. Read on

If your website does not create a sense of trust in your visitors, all your efforts will be in vain. Your online business will never succeed. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it is very easy to create and build trust in your online visitors. Below, I have listed all the techniques used by the hundreds of websites I have helped launch. If you have additional techniques, please add them to the list.

As the old saying goes, you have only one chance to make a first impression. Building trust cannot be
achieved by one single action. Trust is achieved by hundreds of little things you do throughout your website that, when taken together, give readers a sense of honesty, legitimacy and stability. The other bit of good news is that few website owners focus on building trust in the minds of their visitors. If you do it well, it can become a real and sustainable competitive advantage. Here are 47 simple actions you can take to get started.

1. Trust is built by lots of small actions on every page of your website.

2. Your website design is the first impression. Make sure it is professional and relevant to the subject matter.

3. Navigation must be intuitive. If visitors can’t find what they are looking for easily, they will question your competence in providing what they want.

4. Make the website personal by giving it its own tone and voice. People buy people.

5. Follow the HEART rule of creating online content. (Reminder: HEART stands for Honest, Exclusive, Accurate, Relevant and Timely.)

6. Use language that is appropriate to the audience. It will build empathy.

7. Regularly add new content to your site. It shows that the business is alive and kicking.

8. Check all links. Doubts will quickly form in your visitors’ minds if links don’t work or, worse still, take them to error pages.

9. Good grammar and spelling matter. Errors give the impression of sloppiness and carelessness.

10. Never make outrageous and unbelievable claims, like “Read this blog and you’ll be a millionaire by the end of the week.” People are used to scams, get-rich-quick schemes and rip-offs.

11. Publish REAL testimonials and third-partyendorsements. Try to always use real names and link to websites where possible. Some sites show images of letters sent by happy customers.

12. Publish case studies about customers you have helped, who use your product, etc.

13. Don’t put down, curse or insult competitors. It’s unprofessional. It is better to offer an objective comparison of competitive services or products.

14. Focus on building your long-term reputation, not on making quick sales.

15. Write articles for humans, not search engines.

16. Make your ‘About Us’ page personal and comprehensive. It plays an important part in making visitors feel comfortable that real people are behind the site.

17. Publish your photo or the photos of the key people involved with the site. Again, this reinforces the fact that there are real people behind the screenshots.

18. Clearly identify who is behind the site. Nothing creates more suspicion than a site that tries to hide the identity of its publishers.

19. On the ‘Contact Us’ page, provide an email form, telephone number, fax and address of the company. In Europe, it is a legal requirement for sites taking money, but even sites driven by advertising will benefit from openness.

20. Provide a telephone number that people can call and talk to a person.

21. Provide Web addresses linked to the website domain, not addresses from free webmail services such as Hotmail and Gmail.

22. Never lie to make money. The most common way is to write a glowing report about a product or service to earn affiliate revenues. It is very short-sighted to lie to visitors to sell them rubbish. They’ll never come back or, worse still, they’ll actively condemn your site on forums and blogs.

23. Think carefully about reciprocal links. If your site is about organic food and you have links to Party Poker, people are going to question your integrity.

24. Think carefully about the adverts you display on your site. Ensure that they are relevant to your subject and audience.

25. Be explicit when you are being paid to endorse a product or service. An advertorial is fine as long as it is transparent. Paid-to-post is corrupting the Web and will experience a user backlash. I never read websites that accept payment for posting.

26. Write and publish your privacy policy. Be clear about what you will and will not do with any personal data you collect. State that you adhere to all data protection laws. Make it easy to read and don’t use legal gobbledygook.

27. Write and publish a security policy. State what measures you take to ensure that all transactions are secure.

28. Ensure that you have a security and privacy policy which is linked from the footer on every page. Make the link more prominent on all the order pages.

29. Clearly publish your guarantee. I would recommend making it a 100% money-back guarantee if possible.

30. Clearly state your refund and returns policy.

31. Piggyback off reputable brands. If you use PayPal, put the PayPal logo on your site. If you have a merchant services account with a major bank like Citibank or HSBC, put its logo on your site.

32. Use Google search on your site for two reasons First, it is a great search solution which will help your visitors find what they are looking for. Second, having the Google name on your site instills trust.

33. If there are well-known industry associations for your subject, join up and put their logos on your site.

34. Have a forum on your site and respond quickly to questions. Have the attitude that you are happy to help others without receiving immediate reward. As the old saying goes, ‘Givers always gain.’

35. Allow people to comment on articles. Interactivity and an exchange of views build community and a sense of involvement.

36. If people provide constructive criticism or comments in the forum, don’t delete them, but respond with your point of view.

37. Put photos on the website of the owners, publishers and/or team. Let visitors know there are real people behind the business.

38. Put images of the credit cards you accept on every page of the order process.

39. Use the words ’secure website’ whenever you try to get any information from visitors, including newsletter sign-ups, forum input and payment.

40. On every page, state, “We take your privacy and security very seriously.” Link the statement to the security and privacy policy.

41. Remember, reputations take years to build and seconds to destroy.

42. If you are selling a subscription, offer a low-cost, entry-level option. This could be a one-day taster, ‘a week before billing starts’ or a monthly trial.

43. Use a high level of security when processing credit cards. Make sure you make your clients aware of all the steps you are taking.

44. Never send credit card information or personal details over the Internet unencrypted. Tell your customers that their data will be encrypted.

45. Only ask for information from customers that you really need. For example, for an email newsletter sign-up the only information you REALLY need is an email address, so that is all you should ask for.

46. If you have pricing on your website, make it transparent. I recently went to buy a book which was advertised for $10. When I checked out, they added tax, post and packaging, and the final bill was $19.50. I didn’t buy it as I felt they had deliberately tried to mislead me.

47. Keep your SSL certificate up to date. Let people know you are using SSL encryption and who the provider is.

You can never do too much to build trust. Most of it comes down to common sense and good business practice.
To ensure that you are continually improving your trustworthiness, every time you go to a website, ask yourself
whether you trust it or not. Then ask yourself why you have formed the opinion you have. Continually try to
learn what makes a site trustworthy or untrustworthy and implement the relevant changes to your site.

If people trust you, the money will follow!

The security and safety of your website itself and transfer of data through your website are the most important things which your web developers have to taken care of. They must equip your website with a powerful anti virus software and the most effective tool might be the antivirus firewall software. The web developers may make your website most attractive and beneficial for your site visitors with a simple and powerful anti right click javascript. Among cheap web hosting providers, lunarpages and midphase are not old enough but they have established their web hosting business online. Most PC users prefer norton antivirus software for their home PC but web hosts use other antivirus software also. Any web site can be made more attractive with a great number of remotely hosted options on the front or main page for web traffic or advertisement purpose.

Written by rochit

September 28th, 2007 at 12:45 pm

Posted in Internet

Tagged with tips

Pros and cons of mobile marketing

without comments

Pros and cons of mobile marketing

Pros:

High penetration of devices with twice as many cell phones as PCs.
Web searches on mobile devices will eventually exceed searches on PCs.
Access to many international consumers who can’t afford PCs
Mobile phones can receive input anywhere-anytime, enabling location-specific and behavioral targeting for local businesses.
A
cell phone is a very personal device that people take with them
wherever they go, making it easy for marketers to develop a
relationship with customers through this medium.
Carriers have customer data and location information potentially available for targeting.
Personalization, immediacy, and interactivity of mobile ads encourage response by consumers on the go.
Preliminary data show good response rates for mobile campaigns (5% click rates vs. 1% for conventional web ads).
New tool for brands and advertisers to reach new customers and target specific audiences.
Smartphones and iPhone to enhance mobile surfing, promoting mobile marketing success.
Messages sent to a mobile phone are more likely to be read than email sent to a PC, which can get caught in the spam filter.
Mobile marketing campaigns are highly targeted and are opt-in, making them more effective than other forms of advertising.
Mobile
marketing can help build a customer database. Once customers opt in to
receive an ad, you can use the information for loyalty marketing and
customer retention.
Mobile marketing can help generate buzz about your
products/services because your offers will reach consumers while they
are actively shopping, socializing, and making buying decisions.

Cons:

Current WAP technology inadequate, discouraging web searching and surfing.
General intolerance of advertising messages on a personal device.
Current carrier-imposed “walled garden” approach prevents unfettered mobile web access.
Adaptation of content and messages to the mobile web results in poor user experience.
Scarcity of mobile web sites (only 8% of 1,000 top U.S. brands offer a mobile site).
Current
low usage of WAP-based mobile search doesn’t support investment in
creating mobile sites because traffic volumes are low except on search
portals and other high-volume sites.
Trial and error period required for mobile marketers to
learn how to succeed in mobile marketing, which differs from the
traditional web marketing.
Advertisers are wary of consumer privacy issues.
FCC yet to rule on limiting use and release of customer data, including location information.
In
April, FCC released order requiring mobile marketers to obtain express
consent from customers before carriers can release data and to make it
easy for customers to opt out.
Mobile marketing is fragmented and complex because of many
different handsets and carriers, different types of functionality, and
different preloaded apps (i.e. Google Maps on iPhone).
Currently, reach is low because consumption of mobile
content is small (10% of subscribers), and penetration of 3G devices is
still low in most countries.
Establishment of reliable measurement and metrics for advertisers to measure mobile ad effectiveness is needed.

There is much more to know about managing mobile marketing campaigns
besides the pros and cons. You’ll want to know what types of campaigns
work best, how to target your audience, and the most important factors
leading to campaign success.

source:searchengineland.com

Written by rochit

September 20th, 2007 at 4:33 am

Posted in Internet

Tagged with marketing, Mobile

Top 30 Social Bookmarking Sites

with 4 comments

I just came across this blog which listed the top 10 social bookmarking sites (wiki definition) in this world.

Its rating is as follows

Here are the top 30 largest social bookmarking sites ranked by a combination of Compete and Quantcast data. Ranked from 10 to 1
1 | digg.com
117,796,083 – Inbound Links | 16,964,445 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 8,700,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 98 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
30 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites | Updated 8/14/2007

Digg is still ruling the roost… But other players are still in the fray to get the spot..
In india still social bookmarking is picking up, but slowly…….. There are a number of sites in India like

indiagram.com
indiamarks.com
Indian Pad
Putvote.com
Humdigg

You can read about it more here at webyantra.com

Written by rochit

September 10th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

Posted in Internet

Tagged with social networking, Top 10

Yahoo Acquires Ad Network BlueLithim

without comments

This afternoon Yahoo announced that it was buying US-based ad network BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. Founded in 2004 the company has 10 offices globally and claims more unique US visitors than Google, MSN, AOL and eBay. It also claims to be the fifth largest US ad network and the second largest in the UK. It’s part of Yahoo’s push to create “the largest and most effective online ad network globally.” That network includes the recently acquired RightMedia Exchange. The company will apparently operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo and will report into Hilary Schneider’s new organization.

Most of what BlueLithium does is behavioral or demographic targeting, which has recently seen a big push by Yahoo via its new SmartAds platform. This acquisition can be seen as partly defensive and partly offensive in an effort to retain brand advertisers that have more choices today and to build out a broad and efficient online ad network that offers huge reach (incl. beyond Yahoo), as well as targeting and search.

Not long ago AOL acquired BT ad network Tacoda.

Source:searchengineland.com

Online learning schools provide you the facility of learning foreign languages. There are software which not only can translate english to spanish but also read, write, speak and spell one language into another for example from english to spanish. Among the best online colleges and universities, Kaplan University is one which was formerly known as American Institute of Commerce. It now offers online degrees in many disciplines and management studies. Online certificate courses of german and english language teach you how to translate german to english. Almost 30 million non-native speakers have learnt german as a second language and speak as fluently as they can speak english. The University of Phoenix is one of best and popular online universities among students as well as professionals.

Written by rochit

September 5th, 2007 at 12:58 pm

Posted in Internet, Search Engines

Tagged with yahoo

Alexa Ranking: Do you need it.

without comments

What is Alexa Ranking and how Important it is?

All Media planners, Internet marketing guys refer to alexa to get a idea about the traffic a site gets…….. but most of them dont know how alexa works… The article below throws some light on it….

Alexa Ranking – A Web Site Monetization Strategy?

All businesses that employ online marketing, strive to improve their conversion rate. Now, there are
different ways of attracting targeted traff?c. Some try to achieve a good ranking in the SERPs, while
others are satisfied with heavier traffic. Either way, everybody has the goal of achieving financial success.

But, while scoring high with Google may seem to certain business people the only way to make themselves
known and thus reach their goal, there are others that think that a good position in the Alexa ranking
system might benefit them just as well.

What is Alexa Ranking?

This is a ranking system set by

alexa.com (a subsidiary of amazon.com )
that basically audits and makes public the frequency of visits to various Web sites. The algorithm by which
Alexa traff?c ranking is calculated, is simple. It is based on the amount of traffic recorded over a period
of three months from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed.

This traff?c is based on such parameters as reach and page views. The reach refers to the number of Alexa
users who visit a particular site in one day. Page view, as the name indicates, is the number of times a
particular page (URL) is viewed by Alexa users. Alexa.com makes it clear though that, if a particular user
visits the same URL multiple times on the same day, all those visits will be counted as one.

The first step of the ranking process is calculating the reach and number of page views for all the sites
on the Web on a daily basis. Alexa ranking is obtained by performing the geometric mean of reach and page
views, averaged over a predefined period of time (three months).

How Alexa Ranking Works

It’s quite easy to get started. All you have to do is visit the

alexa.com site and download (and install)
the Alexa toolbar. This toolbar offers a search function, but it mainly displays the rank (at a global level)
of the visited site, as well as the sites that have been visited by Web surfers that are linked in some way
to the site being visited.

The Alexa toolbar not only displays information, but it also sends data to the central server. Thus, each
time you visit a Web page via a Web browser (be it Internet Explorer or Firefox) that has the toolbar
installed, information is sent to the server indicating your IP and the page you are visiting. Such data
is gathered from all the Web users who have the Alexa toolbar.

With Alexa, the smaller the numerical ranking, the better. Most people say that if you manage to make it
in the top 100,000, it is a sign that your site enjoys quite heavy traff?c.

Is Alexa Ranking Worth Anything?

Benefits

Alexa Traffic can be used as acompetitive
intelligence tool, but you should take into consideration the fact that the audience sample size is fairly
small. Just enter your competitor’s site in the “Compare Sites” section and measure the results of your web marketing
efforts in comparison with your competitors’.

As opposed to Google’s PageRank, the lower your ranking number, the better.

It helps Webmasters and advertisers see the real marketing potential of your Web site. The better your
Alexa rank, the higher they may be willing to bid to buy advertising space on your Web site.

Personal pages or blogs are also ranked in the same way as ordinary Web sites. They will even get a
distinctive mark (*)

Because Alexa ranking helps you with information about your Web site, it is a good instrument for
search engine optimization.

Disadvantages

Not everybody has the Alexa toolbar installed, so there might be mill?ons of Web sites that, even if
they have a lot of traff?c, will not be ranked (or not high enough) by Alexa. It is rather relative.

Many people say that it is inaccurate and that Alexa traff?c can be greatly influenced (or “gamed”,
as some prefer to call it).

Subdomains are not ranked separately, and neither are subpages within a domain. The overall
traffic is calculated for the top-level domain only.

Ways to Improve Your Alexa Ranking

If you want to boost your Alexa traff?c ranking, you just have to follow some quite simple rules, such as:

Download and install the Alexa toolbar and then surf your own site.

Place the Alexa widget on your Web site. It will entice visitors to use it and, you know,
each click counts.

Write useful, quality content, mostly webmaster-related. Promote it on webmaster forums and on
social networking sites. The idea is to get as many computer and Internet savvy people as possible
to visit your site, since the probability that they will have the Alexa toolbar installed is high.

Write blogs and articles about Alexa. You will get links to your pages that will help improve
your ranking.

Try to get your articles on such blog sites as digg.com, del.icio.us, or www.stumbleupon.com

Optimize your site (or relevant pages of it) for Alexa related keywords.

Tell your friends about the Alexa toolbar, have them download and install it on their computers,
and then tell them to visit your site.

Use an Alexa redirect. This means placing http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? in front of your Web
site’s URL. Alexa will then take into consideration clicks on redirected links even if the visitor does
not have the Alexa toolbar.

Apparently, Asian people are huge fans of Alexa. Therefore, many people suggest posting in Asian
social networking forums.

Whenever you post on webmaster forums, include your site’s URL in your signature. It is very likely
that most webmasters have the toolbar installed, and there’s a great probability that they’ll visit your site.

Conclusion

As we have seen, there are pros and cons to Alexa ranking. The bottom line is that most people consider
it valuable only for direct advertising. Given the fact that Alexa ranking for a site is calculated on
the basis of how many visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed have visited that particular site, the
results can be inaccurate.

Nevertheless, it may prove useful for sites with very good traff?c that attract highly target?d leads,
since Alexa focuses more on the traffic that Web sites receive rather than on links to it. As a Web
site monetization strategy, we can safely say that Alexa ranking might be the right solution.

Written by rochit

September 1st, 2007 at 4:30 am

Posted in Internet

Tagged with Alexa, Internet Ranking

Mykarma.in

Archive for September, 2007

47 Simple Tips to Build Trust in Your Website or Blog

Pros and cons of mobile marketing

Top 30 Social Bookmarking Sites

Yahoo Acquires Ad Network BlueLithim

Alexa Ranking: Do you need it.

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