Gawkwire: Web Hosting and Internet News Resource

Prevent Your Customers from Abandoning Hosting

2010-07-08T08:20:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) - As all of us in the industry know, customer churn is the “ENEMY”! It is the killer of profitability and the reason we all keep a bottle of extra strength Tylenol on our desk.

We spend $100s of dollars on customer acquisition, yet what are we really doing to stop churn. Yes we all provide great hosting services, give great support and make sure they stay up BUT is this enough.

Absolutely not! Why? Because we really are not addressing why customers quit hosting. I am not talking about the constant switching hosting companies; I am talking about the No. 1 reason why hosting customers quit hosting.

Failure to successfully market online is the No. 1 reason, hosting customers quit hosting! Absolutely!!

Most hosting customers are hosting their web site online to sell their services and products both online and offline. Their web presence is either directly or indirectly related to their profitability YET we are not doing enough to help them market and succeed. I mean really succeed. In fact, many hosting companies stop right there..just providing hosting services & they wonder why they have high churn???

The first step to succeeding online is not having a pretty website, nor is it even about being ranked No.1 on Google (of course this is a big part of it). No it is just being visible; being found online. If customers cannot find the businesses, they cannot buy their products and services.

So the first step is being highly visible; being listed everywhere they need to be listed, across all major search engines, online yellow pages, 411 directory assistance, social networks, mobile phones, and GPS navigation devices. If their customers are finding them first, then at least they are in the game. If not, then they do not even have a chance to succeed.

Fortunately there is a simple, straight forward solution. UniversalBusinessListing.org (UBL) has come up with some simple, easy to implement and did I mention, very affordable services which make this incredibly easy for their customers.

UBL helps businesses save enormous time, money & effort having to register separately at all these locations. This includes unlimited updates, changes and best of all, distribution to all major search engines as a verified source; all for just very low price. We also have an Audit tool for large organizations to check all their locations and a new claiming service for Google, Bing, Yahoo, DMOZ and FaceBook.

Most of you know that I spent many, many years in the hosting industry, during which I analyzed this problem in great depth; which is why several years ago I became such a strong advocate of hosting companies adding marketing services to their offerings & why I sit on the HostingCon Advisory Board – to help hosting companies understand what they need to do to overcome this issue.

During my 15+ years in the Industry, this is probably the best and easiest service I have come across for any hosting company to implement to help their customers succeed online and help stop churn. To learn more about how you can implement what is the very first step towards helping your customers succeed online, please contact me.

http://www.gawkwire.com/web_hosting/prevent_your_customers_from_abandoning_hosting.html

Forum Trolling Made Easy

2010-05-26T08:23:00-04:00

(Gawkwire.com) - I like browsing forums. I enjoy reading the posts and normally I learn a lot. But sometimes, posting on forums can be hazardous to your well-being, what with the trolling, flaming, and various other forms of non-goodery. Fortunately, there is an answer! Do not stoop to their level. Instead, use this handy dandy form post to do the taking for you. Simply Check All that apply and post!

Dear:
[ ] Moron
[ ] Loser
[ ] Victim of sibling parentage
[ ] 4 Year Old
[ ] Troll
[ ] l337 d00d
[ ] Web Host Fan-boy
[ ] A card carrying member of the Elitist Internet community
[ ] Whiner
[ ] Waste of physical space
[ ] Other:

You are being flamed because:
[ ] You're an idiot.
[ ] Your current mass of cranial tissue is clogged by spider webs, come back when it works
[ ] You don't know which forum to post in.
[ ] You made a ridiculous claim.
[ ] You didn’t take the time to research and build an accurate post.
[ ] Are a Web Host posing as a normal end user.
[ ] You just plain suck.
[ ] Added nothing to the current conversation/debate.
[ ] Using second hand info and claiming that it is a personal experience.
[ ] YOU POSTED A MESSAGE WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS.
[ ] Yuo mispeled evry sengle wurd or typed gibberish.
[ ] Echoing other member’s statements and claiming them as your own.
[ ] Youhavenotlearnedthepointofpuncuationsuchasspacingcommasandperiods
[ ] You are too stupid to argue with.
[ ] Other:

As punishment, you must:
[ ] Never come into these forums again.
[ ] Get a date from a real life human being that you are not related to.
[ ] Go down/upstairs and tell your parents to send you to Military School.
[ ] Stop being a critic and start your own Web Host company.
[ ] Turn off your computer and go outside.
[ ] Get a real job.
[ ] Apologize to everybody on this forum.
[ ] Other:

In closing, I'd like to say:
[ ] Stop peeing in the gene pool.
[ ] Get a life.
[ ] STFU.
[ ] Learn to post.
[ ] It's called a joke. Please remove the 3 foot stick from your posterior.
[ ] No one Cares.
[ ] Other:

Writer’s Bio: David Dunlap has been both a Web host industry analyst and commentator for the past eight years. Prior to his active writing career, David was a network and communications technician for four years. He currently is the Editor-in-Chief for WebHostMagazine.com

http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/forum_trolling_made_easy.html

Ten Things to Look For in Analytical Software

2010-05-20T08:18:00-04:00

(Gawkwire.com) - To start with, no one package will have everything you need to truly unlock your site’s potential. However there are a number of free and purchased sites and software that can give you a look at the bigger picture.

The Top Ten things to look for in analytical software is as follows:

- Referring Links and Keywords
- Keywords You are Missing
- Bounce Rate, Bounce Pages
- Unlimited Lists
- Categorized Error Reports
- Navigation Paths/Funnels
- Customized Reports
- Vendor Support
- Report Generation

Referring Links and Keywords is a basic component to all analytical software. However, your software package should included and unlimited/user defined amount. Top ten refers just won’t do. The top ten will rarely change over the course of your site, but the refers below that will. This will give you an opportunity to network with those referrers who are lower on the list and give you more traffic. Another cool feature to look for would be referrer trends. Did that article you post increase the amount of traffic from a key term? Did that advertising program increase the amount of traffic over the course of 3 months? 6 months? When you combine trends and user defined lists, you can get a lot more quality information.

Keywords you are missing is rarely found in a complete analytics software package. This also includes negative key terms that are impacting your PPC campaigns. If you use Google Adwords you can solve this problem. The reports can give you keyword variations you may not have thought of as well as giving you a complete list of people who clicked on your add from something like hotel host/hostess services.

Bounce rate and the pages people leave your site from is a very telling statistic. In another blog I will talk about how this needs to be researched properly to get the full benefit, but for now your software should be giving you a complete account on where visitors leave from. It might be a good location, ie leaving from a banner click or it good be a bad location, leaving from the product features page. Either way it will help you fine tune the content of your site and find ways of tailoring poor pages to become super pages.

Unlimited listings is a KEY feature. Your software MUST have this. User defined limits is of course preferred. By getting the full information you can see long tail searches, all the search terms people use to navigate your site, the popularity of every page and the list goes on. In short, this is a necessity and if the package you are considering doesn’t have it then reconsider your considering.

Categorized error reports or reports on errors by their error code is a useful tool when dealing with bottlenecks and other problems on a site. With unlimited listings you can see which pages stopped working and what caused the error. In some cases, bad code is to blame in other areas you might find that you need a better hosting package to handle the load on your site. A useful addendum to this would be having error pages categorized by date and time. That way you can see if the problem stems from overloading your server’s resources. These error pages can also tell you if someone is trying to implant a XSS or SQL Injection attack (by giving you the URL). This too is a necessity.

At the base you need navigation paths. At the highest navigation funnels have proven to be more useful. Your reliance on one or the other greatly depends on how many pages you have that channel traffic to certain sales or exit pages, the amount of traffic, and the diversity of traffic. Funnels give you a broad sense of traffic that you might not have thought of when creating navigation paths. If you package doesn’t have funnels, see if an upgrade does or if the customized reports allow you to build a funnel of sections to the pages you want traffic to follow. Having trends for this segment is an added bonus, but if you can generate reports than you can do it by hand if your software does not allow trends.

Customized report can greatly increase the depth of your analytics. Say you wanted to track your RSS feeds or wish to generate data for one key term in your site’s search bar; customized reports will help you do it. If your software doesn’t have side by side comparisons of which paths are working the best, you can create one yourself. Customized reports is not a necessity when you are getting your feet wet. They take time and patience to create and at the outset you might be too busy tackling all this data to even begin thinking about areas of improvement. However, as you become more of an expert on your site, customized reports give you a major tool in digging into the deep data some software just doesn’t cover.

Never underestimate the power of customer support. Quality customer support will aid you in building customized reports, understanding information you have garnered and will keep you appraised of newer versions and even helpful mods (if the software supports modding).

Report generation allows you to generate a report on those things most important to you. In the end, its all about automation. By building daily, weekly, and monthly reports that sent to you via email or placed in a convenient location in your analytic’s control panel you are able to build one stop summaries of your traffic without having to dig around every area of your control panel. This is not a necessity, but the larger your site gets the more work this takes off of your shoulders.

Unfortunately this is an inaccurate list. I was going to name it 11 things, but I wanted to reward those who read the entire length of this blog. The number 1 absolutely critical feature that you need in your analytical software is a user interface YOU are comfortable with. The software could be the greatest package on the face of the planet, but if you can’t find the reports how can you use the software to its fullest?

I am Dave Dunlap and I approve of this message. Until the next time, happy hosting!

http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/3583.html

Website Hosting and Volcanoes

2010-04-28T22:27:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere you probably heard about that volcano in Iceland that has wreaked havoc with air travel across Europe since mid-April when it erupted. It happens to be called the Eyjafjallajokull volcano (please don’t ask me to pronounce that though). If you haven’t seen photos of the eruption, you should definitely check out these photos of the volcano. It seems that the ash can enter the intakes of jet engines and cause them to fail. In checking up with a few hosting companies across the pond I heard from them that the volcano actually had a significant effect on website hosting in Europe as well. Here are the reasons why.

Reason Number 1: People aren’t buying web hosting when they are stuck in an airport in another country or city for a week.

Although you might not think that the number of travelers impacted by the complete shutdown of airline travel across the whole of northern Europe would be include a large subset of hosting buyers, the numbers argue otherwise. According to published reports, a total of more than 100,000 flights were canceled outright and the affected airlines are on track to lose more than $2 billion. So that’s 100,00 flights with a few hundred passengers each – you do the math. Therefore, none of those people were buying web hosting during that period, which generally lowered hosting sales for the time of the flight cancellations.

Reason Number 2: Businesses were scrambling to get their people back in their own city.

Compounding the problem of actual travelers
seeking transportation was the issue that businesses now had key people out of the office for overly-extended and unplanned periods. Those left in the office were also often involved in helping arrange accommodations or alternate travel for the stuck passengers. That means that they too weren’t conducting business as usual. This further reduced the web hosting buyers pool during the airline shutdown.

Reason Number 3: Web hosting companies buy servers, routers and switches that are flown in from other cities.

Web hosting companies were also impacted by the disruption in the supply chain for key equipment needed in fast growing hosting environments. For example, Dell has a large manufacturing facility in Ireland. Those servers are generally flown around the UK and into northern Europe as well. It wasn’t just commercial aircraft that were grounded – cargo planes were also halted. UK website hosting company 34SP.com purchases part of its inventory from the Dell factory. The company had recently stocked up on server inventory, but was monitoring the situation in case a need arose for alternative server supplies. While the flight disruptions didn’t last quite long enough to put the true hurt on hosting operations, or to cause prices to go up for available servers – a few more days or weeks of no inventory would have cost hosting firms real money. The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece about these supply chain disruptions for small businesses as well.

In the end, things returned to normal fairly quickly. This is great news for travelers and also the web hosting companies in Europe. Don’t get complacent though – the Eyjafjallajokull volcano could easily spring back to full eruption at any time. Plus, there are many other volcanoes out there that can produce world changing eruptions at any moment. Here’s a photo summary of a few of these actively erupting or recently erupting volcanoes on our planet. You may want to stock up on a few extra servers if you live near any of these volcanoes – just in case.

http://www.gawkwire.com/web_hosting/website_hosting_and_volcanoes.html

Advertising, as we know it, needs to evolve.

2010-04-26T16:22:00-04:00

(Gawkwire.com) The next evolution of advertising is social network advertising. There are numerous forms of social advertising from targeted banners and deals, to members displaying product recommendations with buy now links, to adding cookies into a user’s system that track their actions across a Web site’s communities listing every subject they are interested in and serving them advertising based on their likes. These can all be considered passive forms of advertising. Active forms include setting up a company account on some place like Facebook or MySpace and actively engaging the community to participate.

In passive advertising, the goal is to get clicks and then get conversions. With active advertising, the goal is to build a relationship with your potential customers and community and get people to advertise your products and services of their own accord.

The core of social advertising depends on building a level of trust between business and the customer. This trust then allows interaction between the two, in one form or another, to build a personal relationship. Once a personal relationship is established, the customer buys the product. If the customer is happy with the product, they then recommend the product within their network and the cycle starts over again with more customers.

The Good
If the product turns out to be everything the company says it is, it will be disseminate throughout the customer’s network rapidly. Many users of social networks also participate on forums, chat rooms, and the like. Gaining a fanatical customer base gives the company product evangelists who descend on these discussion groups amass. What started as a simple ad campaign, can quickly take hold of an active user base thereby making your campaign viral. Those who dare question the product get ridiculed in a way that would make the average user of Digg blush. At least that is what all the reading material says.

The Bad
Unfortunately, social network advertising is a double-edged sword. If the customer hates the product and believes that the company hoodwinked them, then all hell will break loose. Pretty much take what was said under The Good and throw it in reverse. Instead of recommendations the purveyor of social greatness tells their friends to shun the company and to tell everyone they know about how evil, manipulative, and horrid that company is. Those who speak up about how much they like a product get pummeled with accusations of being an affiliate of said company in disguise. The money spent on the ads not only yields very few customers, but launching a Web driven smear campaign.

The Ugly
eMarketer (www.eMarketer.com an e-business and online marketing research firm) released a study on the potential advertising dollars that will be spent on social networks. It estimated that worldwide spending could reach $2.5 billion by 2010 and $1.8 billion in the US alone. That is a ton of potential competition. As mentioned earlier, social network ads range from simple flyers currently being sold on Facebook to more intrusive ad banners that are set to a Web surfer’s tastes. The former is targeted based on what categories a user joined while the latter goes through a user’s personal profile and scans for the user’s interests. Some social network sites are also looking at ways of searching a user’s browser history and using the sites they previously visited as a means of finding out what the user is looking for.
What many privacy groups consider a gross breach of privacy and net etiquette could be the new rule. The major question many are pondering now is what rights does the user have when it comes to their personal information. While some are now offering opt out clauses, others, like MySpace, are holding their users’ information hostage for the ability to make more ad dollars.

Social Advertising and You
Marketing with social networks is nothing new. The principles that make social advertising work are the same principles used to perpetuate a pro-active sales campaign:

1. You must be truthful in all things. Social networks are, well… social. With multiple people talking to each other, analyzing what you say and what you do, lies can be found quite easily and will come back to haunt you.

2. If you don’t have what the customer is looking for, introduce them to another company who can make it happen. This will be explained later, but for now think of it as a little advertising for the competition will net you some influence when the user tells their friends about their wonderful experience with your company.

3. Building a rapport with the potential customer is better than making the sale. Social advertising is hard work. It takes a lot to be active on numerous social networks and to gain a reputation there for being not only an expert, but also as a trusted source of services and products. If all you are interested in is a sale or the bottom line then you will have your eye on the wrong goal and may rush a sale before it is time.

4. Never disparage your competition. It shows a lack of professionalism. By slandering your competition to a customer, you signal to them that your service isn’t good enough to go toe to toe.

5. Avoid sales jargon and be direct in your communication. Sales pitches are becoming more and more worthless as time goes on. The human mind can only store so much and when it is inundated with tons of useless sales information it will tune it all out. Instead of using catch phrases and witticisms, use common language that establishes why your service or product will fulfill a need of the customer.

6. Make the customer feel good about themselves and their decision whether it is to buy from you or not. Just because you did not make the sales this time around does not mean the customer will have no future need for you. Building client customer relationships through social networks is a long process. No sense in wasting all that time by ending things if they decide not to buy.

7. Never put yourself in a position to take away from your customers. A good sale is mutually beneficial to both parties. An agreement will only last as long as both sides are happy. You may say, Dave how is this possible in Web Hosting? It is true computers and networks fail, downtime can never truly be eradicated, however if you have an outage you are taking away from your customer, so give them something to fill in the gap. Common knowledge is giving them money back in some form. I have never been a fan of common knowledge. Give them peace of mind as well as money. Let them know what you are doing to resolve the problem, how you will prevent it in the future, and keep them updated at all times.

8. Finally, respect your customer and they will respect you. This is a catch in all things you plan on doing with your ad campaign. If your target audience doesn’t like spam, then don’t send any. If your audience doesn’t like being inundated with ads that embed sounds or music, then don’t use it. When talking with a customer do not be quick to assume you know all of the answers. Listen to them and their needs. If they have a problem with your service do not be quick to defend your service, instead ask them why and if there is a way that it can be fixed. Social networks cannot only be used to sell, but can be used as a free means of understanding what the customers want and how they want services to be delivered.

More than in any other form of advertising a social network campaign MUST be truthful. If you are not truthful you will get a mob of angry people attacking your headquarters with pitchforks and torches annihilating any chance you have of becoming truly successful. The Internet has a long memory and just about everything is preserved for posterity. Customers that complained years ago will come back to haunt you again and again. If you want practical examples of this, spend a few hours on WebHostingTalk and you will see what I mean.

If you want an excellent example on how to run your would-be social networking campaign, then take a page from the Progressive Auto Insurance playbook. Progressive found a way to make even loosing battles win the war. Whether a customer buys from Progressive or buys from a competitor they will all be equally happy that Progressive looked out for their best interests. They will tell their friends that if they are looking for a car insurance provider they should just go to Progressive. Progressive gets an influx of visitors who use their tools. They will either buy from Progressive or not. Either way they will tell their friends about Progressive. Don’t take my word for it though, check the numbers. The online comparison rate campaign started in 1996. Between the years of 1996 and 2005, Progressive grew by an average of 17 percent each year. In more sizeable numbers, Progressive made $3.4 billion in 1996 and $14 billion in 2005. Honesty and truth are valuable commodities.

Avenues of Approach or How to Make it Work
For brevity’s sake, I am going to assume that most of you already understand banner campaigns and so forth. I will be dealing mostly with getting your message out through active marketing, mainly because there is a lot less information out there on it. Do note that a successful ad campaign uses multiple venues to maximize your target audience, provides banners with a message that is targeted at the site’s audience, is in the active voice to cause action in the audience, and above all, is not annoying. If I see another Swat the Mosquito banner I am going to cry.

Actively participating in a social network is normally free. However, like most free advertising it requires time. Each social network be it Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, WikiHow, or Yahoo! Answers, all have different ways of grabbing the attention of the users. I am going to do a quick rundown of the most popular sites and the fastest way to develop a marketing campaign that will showcase how best to use each.

Facebook
Like nearly every social site now, Facebook’s links all have the no-follow tag (search engines spiders will not follow the link) so don’t be surprised that this site will not increase your search engine statistics. Facebook is also a closed, “gated” community, so any flyers you use or advertising or conversations done will not be searchable via Google or Yahoo.

Spend some time building your company profile. You are going to want to keep this handy because you will be adding it to a lot of sites. The company profile is the basest of activities and will be used when users check out your posts or groups you have sponsored and want to know more about you.
With Facebook you are going to want to get active in sponsoring groups on say Web Hosting or Development. Spend some time building up your micro community and it can pay off. After you have a good crowd of people who are interested in what you do sponsor events such as classes on Web Development or making mini-conferences on what the users want in a Host. It will give you good public relations as well as some good demographic information and it’s free. If you have forums on your own site promote your events and your Facebook group to them to get additional members.

MySpace
MySpace is a challenge to get working well. In fact, MySpace’s audience is such that it might be best just to stay away for now. Niche markets might be fruitful here though. Those who can offer things such as Game Hosting, Game Guild Hosting, Templates for MySpace accounts, and graphics for MySpace accounts will do well. The demographic is mostly young teens so plan accordingly. If you are an E-Commerce Web Host you will find the crowd won’t bite, so better off wasting your time elsewhere. This same principle can be applied to MySpace’s newly formed and not yet finished social networking ads spots. Of all the communities on the Net, MySpace is one of the few who have not added an opt out clause and therefore ads will be more aggressive and might turn users against your company.

If however you feel you need a presence here, create a profile for your company and use the advanced html editing features to brand your profile like your site (same color scheme, make the layout similar etc.) Use the blog section to talk a little about the goings on and let your customers know you have a profile. If everything works well (which will be few and far between) you will have a professional looking profile page, plenty of linked friends who will sing your praises and you may even get a hit or two. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

LinkedIn
Unlike MySpace with its tons of spammers and teens looking for a quick fix of cute women, LinkedIn is a community site filled with professionals (roughly 7 million). LinkedIn is not a place to find customers. It is however a place to find business who may compliment your own and is a decent place for hiring employees and finding other businesses who can help yours. Again build a company and personal profile and talk to other professionals about getting recommendations. The more recommendations you have, the better you will look. Out of all the popular community sites, this one is one of the quickest and easiest to use. In a weekend, you will be up and running and maybe even have a recommendation or two. You won’t get a lot of traffic from here, but for the time invested you might as well use it.

Flickr
The last place I am going to talk about is Flickr because its practicality might be overlooked when compared to other social sites. With other sites you basically build a profile, get people to link within you and sponsor community discussion. With Flickr you are not going to do any of that. Flickr is a community of photos and artwork.

The best use for Flickr is to post pictures on events, your data center, the internal workings of your company, etc. Say you sponsored an SEO Conference. Build a profile for that conference name and add pictures of what you did while there, the audience, etc. Make sure the pictures showcase people learning, having fun, and doing things together then post a link to your site or if the conference had its own site like say HostingCon, post a link to that. Not only will you be able to host the pictures for your own customers to see (and you can even have some great fun doing this), but those who are looking for Web Hosts will see a softer, more personable side of your business.

Banner ads will always be banner ads no matter if they are targeted by Website or targeted by a social network that zeroes in on what their users need or want. Greater advertising opportunities can be found by actively seeking ties with the community and embedding your brand name within the users’ collective consciousness.

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/advertising_as_we_know_it_needs_to_evolve.html

iPad: The Almost Business Game Changer

2010-04-14T08:35:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) I have a deep respect for Apple products in that their ease of use and design is exceptional. When I look at the iPad I see an idea, not yet fully formed, but it is that idea that will become a game changing device for business. The most exciting software programs these days are mainly cloud applications, hosted applications, remote applications, etc. in short, vendors are pushing mobile.

The other day I talked about how mobile devices have not forced a change in business culture. This I think is where the iPad comes in. I saw this change happen a long time ago with CD-Roms and a game called Myst. CD-Roms required a vehicle to become accepted by the computer using crowd and they found it in games like Myst and 7th Guest. What’s funny to me is that it not the iPad per se that is catalyst.

Like the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe centuries ago, the problem was not the rats. The rats were merely the carriers of the fleas. What makes the iPad viral (see what I did there… yeah ok it was a bad segue) is not the iPad, but the fact that it carries the Apps Store. It is the Apps Store that will show mobile PC users exactly what they can do with their devices. For instance, PocketCloud. The ability for a person to access their computer from their iPad (or iPhone, if you have masochistic tendencies as far as operating a huge virtual desktop using a tiny little monitor) is incredible.

When you factor in some of the changes iPhone OS 4 will bring to the table, the impact iPad will have on the market will increase. Now I don’t think iPad will create a market as vast and powerful as the iPhone or the iPod have. I do however strongly believe that the iPad will showcase why we have mobile computers and what sort of applications were meant to run on them. And this is why iPad is a game changer. Not because of its feature list (or depending on who you talk to the lack thereof), but on its ability to define a market, which will only get more and more pronounced as the weeks go by.

http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/ipad_the_almost_business_game_changer.html

Why Go Mobile?

2010-04-09T08:44:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) I realize that there is a growing trend for mobilizing the work force, but no one has told me why this has become an all encompassing necessity for business. We have PDAs, smartphones, cellphones, UMPCs, Tablet PCs, laptops, netbooks, portable media players, PNDs, readers, and I imagine the iPad will open a new category of hybrids, looking at Microsoft’s Courier, this is already coming to pass. We have a huge amount of devices to service how much of the workforce? Where are the killer business apps that are mobile only? Which employees really need to be mobile?

First let’s get rid of the obvious, if your job means you are away from any sort of office type location (be it a corporate building or your own home office), then mobile of course is right for you. However, of those types of jobs that do require travel, how much travel has been reduced by things such as video conferencing, online collaboration software, and the like? Those who do face to face sales, how many require instant access to real time inventory data at the moment of sale as opposed to going into the meeting already knowing the information you need?

Customer support? No, customer support is best served at ground zero. No need for mobile tech there (unless of course you do onsite support). Engineers, technicians, mechanics? Maybe, but most engineers I’ve known will write out ideas on anything they can get their hands on or use the audio message recorder most cells have. Techs and mechanics, like customer support, do a better job with all their tools in front of them and the device that needs to be worked on is physically at hand.

I have been reading statistics on why every business needs to go mobile and the bulk of them center on the premise that the mobile market is huge, selling hundreds of thousands of units each month, which means your competitors are buying. And if they are buying you need to buy too or get left behind! Oh really? I have some six or seven mobile devices I use (what can I say I love technology), but for day-to-day use I use only one of them. In fact, for the most part, even with all the travel I do, the amount of use I get out of the mobile devices is probably about 20 work days per year. This is of course where I absolutely need them and can’t use my desktop computer or my office computer. Now if I didn’t travel a lot, if I didn’t need to go to conferences and the like I wouldn’t need any mobile device to do my job. Sure, they are nice I could go outside and write if I liked (which I do on occasion), but I don’t need to go mobile.

The one area where I can see mobile devices consistently increasing productivity is by replacing the clipboard. In fact, any instance that requires a clipboard (inventory tallies for instance… which I seriously hope people are not still using paper for this but I know that hope is in vain) could do better with a mobile device.

A few weeks ago when I was making changes to this blog, I had to use my cell phone to do it. I did everything I would normally do from my desktop using my cell. It took a while since I can’t just type at super speed on the phone, but I was thankful for the device. That is when it hit me. Businesses like mobile cause it means they can make their salaried employees work during their off time. A while back, when you left the office, that was it, work was done. Even if you took some work home with you, you can work on it at a leisurely pace. Now with all the devices we have, we pretty much take the full offices with us. I was having lunch with a friend of mine and he got a call saying the servers are down, fix it. Although he was not working, he immediately used his cell to check the server and reboot it. Heck who needs to hire more employees when you can have all your current staff on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week? Just pay them an annual salary and you have an offices of slaves at your beck and call.

Will this stop me from buying mobile devices? Course not. But let’s be real here, the uses for mobile devices is far less than the hype. In order for a device to truly change the workplace two things must happen: 1) that device must have something nothing else has, it must have a killer app 2) that device must be able to force change on business culture. Mobile devices do neither of these.

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/why_go_mobile.html

Best Practices: Social Network Advertising

2010-03-29T08:24:00-04:00

(Gawkwire.com) Advertising, as we know it, needs to evolve. The next generation of Web surfers deploy popup blockers, banner blockers, and seem to have a complete disconnect when it comes to traditional forms of advertising.

The next evolution of advertising is social network advertising. There are numerous forms of social advertising from targeted banners and deals, to members displaying product recommendations with buy now links, to adding cookies into a user’s system that track their actions across a Web site’s communities listing every subject they are interested in and serving them advertising based on their likes. These can all be considered passive forms of advertising. Active forms include setting up a company account on some place like Facebook or MySpace and actively engaging the community to participate.

Social Advertising and You
Marketing with social networks is nothing new. The principles that make social advertising work are the same principles used to perpetuate a pro-active sales campaign:

4. Never disparage your competition. It shows a lack of professionalism. By slandering your competition to a customer, you signal to them that your service isn’t good enough to go toe to toe.

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/best_practices_social_network_advertising.html

Content: You Are the Rule Not the Exception!

2010-03-15T06:25:00-04:00

(Web Host Blog) There is a line from the movie He’s Just Not That Into You (don’t ask, I was forced to watch it against my will, I felt so dirty that I had to watch the Dirty Dozen and 300 afterwards), that goes something like this; “You are the rule, not the exception.”

When it comes to content, unless you already have healthy traffic, if you write it, people won’t come out of thin air. The content you write must be accessible. It must be available through search engines, it must be a part of the community, and it needs to be in areas where it must be found. When it comes to your content, you need to plan as if you are the rule (cause you are) not the exception.

The worst thing you can do is to rely on the fact that if you write it, people will all of a sudden flock to you. So how do you go about getting the word out?

Become a part of your community: This is a lot of work. In fact, it is very time consuming. The good part is it should be fun. If you like what you are doing, becoming part of the community should be a piece of cake. For more information on this I have a quick example at Niche Markets: Not Just About Products and Features that discusses an example of both a real (Laughing Squid) and a fictional web host built around a community. Pretty much the same principles apply to any market or industry so whether you are a web host or not, you should still check it out.

Blow your own horn: This is probably going to put me in Exile Island, never to be heard from again, but please, market yourself. Go on forums and say look at what I wrote (only in far better verbiage then what I have done). Advance your articles, advance your writing, if you don’t want to do it why should anyone else? Some may see this as becoming a part of community, and that’s true, but this is also the next step in that. Now that you are a part of it, do things like answer questions with summations of articles you have written. Say things like, “if you want more details or a step-by-step approach to how this is done then go here.” If you have been working on your content and it’s good, then you owe it to yourself and to those you can potentially help by putting it out there.

RSS Feed or Feeds: Just having an RSS feed won’t cut it though. You need to get that feed into various feed directories. You have to promote your feed. You must offer readers a reason to subscribe. To help you in this venture I have found some good resources on the subject: 35 Guaranteed Ways To Increase Your RSS Subscribers, 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers, and 50 Simple Ways to Gain RSS Subscribers.

Make your site accessible: Now that you have people coming to the site, they need to find what they want. For instance, say you have 30 articles on game design. One of those articles was really popular and is being passed around forums and such and you have received a traffic spike from its success. That same article should also have a way for readers to navigate to like articles, it needs a way to search the site, and maybe you should even have links to other articles embedded in it so as a reader is reading it they can open in tab other similar articles. So instead of one article read by a thousand people, you have several articles read by a thousand people. The difference between the one article and the several articles is the difference between someone who just comes to browse one article and someone who favorites the web site.

Do your SEO homework: This topic alone could take up pages and pages of writing and in fact has a whole industry built around it with various top notch information sites already there. To work the entire subject in a nutshell, optimize your pages and get them ranked on Google (if you try for Google, you will get ranked in the other engines as well so don’t sweat it). You will not get traffic from search engines if your pages are on the 12th page. Chances are high your brand new articles will not hit the first page for new and exciting keywords if search engines don’t know you exist or do not think your site has the proper “authority.”

There are millions of web sites on the Net. Chances are high that yours will not all of a sudden reach #1 on Digg and become a success, without an active audience. Chances are high that someone is not going to type in a search term, go to your site, and make it an instant celebrity without proper search engine techniques.

Content is king, there is no doubt about it, but if you cannot find that content, it might as well be king of nothing. Therefore it is imperative that you spend as much time on availability as you do on content. Remember, you are the rule not the exception.

About David Dunlap
Over the past ten years David has been a prolific author of hundreds of blogs, commentaries and reviews found here on WebHostBlog.com, as well as WebHostMagazine.com and other sites around the Internet. David manages the daily operations at both WebHostBlog and Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide, and as the head editor, David uses his unique analytical skills to ensure that both sites maintain their integrity and tough, but fair minded, reputations. Prior to his active career analyzing the Web Host industry, David specialized in networking and communications for the U.S. government. David's expertise in traditional and search engine marketing has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.

http://www.gawkwire.com/web_design/content_you_are_the_rule_not_the_exception.html

Optimism, Positive Thinking, and Job Retention

2010-02-23T07:16:00-05:00

(WebHost Blog) Let’s face it, it is easy to fire someone who is a total menace. When it comes to someone you despise, vengeance can come quickly and mercilessly, severing the former employee from the company in a master stroke. And to be honest, you probably feel good about it too. But what about firing someone who is upbeat, well-liked, and a genuinely good human being?

I was reading an article over at Datamation by Eric Spiegel entitled Dealing with Unaccountable Developers. He discussed having to fire a developer who was decent at their job but always late in turning in assignments. He confessed that if the developer was a jerk it would have been no problem, but since he was a well liked guy it was very difficult.

Now imagine a new scenario. You work in a decent sized company (not too large that everything is impersonal, but not so small that everyone can go to lunch at the same restaurant, at the same time) and unfortunately a round of layoffs is about to happen. Let’s now take you and a duplicate of you. Both does the same good job at work, one though is upbeat and helpful the other is well a jerk.

It’s not just the fact that positive people are pleasant and the working environment is such a nice place with that sort of work conditions (ok well that is a really big reason), but optimistic, positive people are, as they said in the Army, a force multiplier. Positive people make me work harder because work becomes fun. It also makes it so I don’t dread getting up in the morning.

Which one do you think will keep their job? I know what you are saying, "Dave, it’s not even a contest me and myself obviously have the same skills and between the two of us of course they are going to keep the person who isn’t a hellion."

True enough. So how about this, you have a team of say ten employees. Out of the ten, your brightest star is a real ass. The type of guy that put everyone in a foul mood. Unfortunately the guy is absolutely brilliant, a fact he knows all too well and reminds everyone of it every day. The other 9 employees aren’t great, but they are bad. They get the job done for the most. You need to cut one person from the team for budget concerns. Who would you cut?

Difficult. See the easy route would be to fire one of the under performers. However, the question is, why are they underperforming? Just as the positive people make work less of a problem and may even make it fun and a joy to do, the negative people produce a hostile working environment. Instead of focusing on work, the nine people could be starring at the clock waiting for the work day to end so they can get the hell out of Dodge. I was talking to Ron about this the other day and he had actual experience with this a while back.

He had a star employee, one who performed far better than anyone, however he was difficult to be around let alone work with. The rest of the team wasn’t bad, they were, well average. Ron had to fire one of them, but the choice was difficult. In the end, he fired the "talent." He was just too high maintenance and was not a team player in the truest sense of the word. What was interesting was the change to the team that took place after the jerk was fired. In a few days, the office environment was jovial and warm. The team ended up producing a lot more. In fact, they produced more than enough to make up for the loss. It was a gamble in some respects, obviously the jerk was the best employee and if all things remained as is, firing him would have crippled the team. Often times however, an individual’s performance doesn’t just hinge on themselves but on other varying factors within the office.

So in summary, optimism and positive thinking, doesn’t just help you be content, it helps those around you and it may even save your job.

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/optimism_positive_thinking_and_job_retention.html