I have been doing loads recently; I have sold a ton of crap on ebay, bought two new books on making cash on the internet (I will review in a few weeks) and bought some sites. I have also been migrating all my sites from one server to another, that’s took a lot of time.I have also been trying to sell a site of mine www.fcforums.com and also a domain name www.themetree.com, if you want to buy them email me at adam@goaheadweb.co.uk .Â
I have bought two sites although I am waiting for the transactions to go through before I will talk about them. I have bought a few more domain names for future projects. I will be starting work on a new project soon, I will keep you updated.
July 26th, 2006
I have decided to close my hosting account with 34sp as I was paying out quite a bit per month £20-30($40-$60) and there hidden charges (such as £1 per month for smtp support per account) were horrible. For the last few month I have been running both accounts and slowly transfering my sites over.
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I use hostgator for my sites and I think they are great, I have the baby croc package ($9.95 or £5 per month) which means that I can host unlimited sites with good space and transfer limits (5gb space and 75gb transfer), I haven’t been hit with any hidden charges and the sites haven’t been down, there tech support is quite good. Too improve I think the live help people could do more complex server tasks.
If you do decide to sign up, please use my link/banner(below) as this pays me a commission and enter the coupon code â€Jury†to get the first months hosting for 1 cent.
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July 26th, 2006
We live in the high technology era and most businesses need a website to market their product and services. The days when a web page was just simple “brochure-ware†are long gone. Today a web site means more than just informing people what your services are and their prices. It reflects the image of your company, it speaks to its visitors about the company goals and achievements, it can play animation demonstrations about how products are made or how should they be used, offers general information and can do much more.Â
The first step to be done in making your web site a successful one is to brand it. If you look in a marketing book for the definition of “brand†you’ll see that it means a mixture of information about a service /a product/a company and it has to include a name, a logo and visual elements such as images or symbols in order to make it distinctive from the others on the market. So when branding your web site you have to be aware of the following:
- Choose a quality name for your site so that people can easily remember from the memory;
- Your logo should be very suggestive and no longer than a sentence (think of the famous “Just do it†form Nike or “Always Coca Colaâ€)’;
- Pay attention when choosing a visual imagine or a symbol for your site; it has to be connected somehow with your area of products/services or be very suggestive (a hawk for example);
- Each page of your site has to have its name, the logo and the symbol/image;
- Put your web site name everywhere where it can attract attention: (business cards, envelops, electronic signature, letter heads, statements, job cars);
- Allow the visitors of your site to share their opinion about it, to ask question that concern them about your services/products; create forums on topics of interest if the field of your activity is compatible with the idea;
- If you have forums, create a “thank you†page to thank the visitors for using your forum;
- Add newsletters (you can send information, weather reports, horoscope, latest news etc);
- Exchange banners and links with other websites form an auxiliary field of activity with you;Â
If you think, create and brand your website carefully, the results of your efforts may appear sooner than you’ve expect them.
July 19th, 2006
Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo are no longer just simple names, they are valuable brands known by anybody who’s ever worked on a computer.Â
What made these businesses the huge successes they are today? First of all timing! They appeared on the market when needed. For example Amazon had been launched in 1995 when people where curious and anxious to have a virtual bookstore, available from their own homes anytime.
Then they have successfully branded their websites using different techniques. Back in 1995 eBay started its activity with the sale of a broken laser pointer. Today it’s the most well known online auction and shopping website. It has revolutionized the collectibles market because it brings together buyers and sellers from around the world. It is not only private individuals using eBay, due to the reputation of this brand, well known companies such as Apple sell their newest products (see Ipod) and offer services on eBay.
Yahoo, the most visited website on the Internet today with more than 400 million unique users, has become the success that it is because they understood and fulfilled client’s needs. They branded their site by applying different strategies (auto response messages, information in different areas, latest news, horoscopes) they have offered people with same interest the possibility of joining together to talk (Yahoo Groups). As James Bilefield, business development director at Yahoo UK once said, yahoo is “first and foremost a media company, selling audiences”.Â
Youtube.com for example has chosen a suggestive logo (“Broadcast yourselfâ€) along with an expressive image (a red tv). So when visitors of the site think of it, they have the image of a tv in mind.To successfully brand its web side Google has found another strategy: AdWords Select (an optimization strategy to bring web sites more visitors as potential clients). According to Business Week, March 2006, “Google didn’t make money until it started auctioning ads that appear alongside the search results. Advertising today accounts for 99% of the revenue of a company whose market capitalization now tops $100 billion”.Â
From every successful story of a company activating on Internet there are lessons to be learned and applied to your own website. Â
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July 9th, 2006
