website – Keep Up With The Web

Is Your Email Address Part of Your Brand?

When you send emails for your business, do you use an email address that includes your domain name? If not, you’re missing a branding opportunity.

Have you ever received an email from a business and noticed that it came from a personal email account? You know the ones that I’m talking about. Maybe it’s your local handyman or your nail salon. You’re expecting to see their business name but if they’re using a Gmail or an AOL account, what are they branding? Themselves? Google? AOL? Recently, I received an email from a new restaurant. I had subscribed to a newsletter that they had posted on their website – which means they have a website. So why was their email from an AOL account?

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Want Ideas to Promote a Niche Ecommerce Site With A Blog?

This week someone left a comment about wanting to add a blog to an ecommerce site. He recognized that it would be a great way to help drive traffic to his website but he didn’t know what to blog about. His perception was that “it is so hard to build a blog for niche ecommerce sites.”

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Differentiate your Website From Your Competitors with Live Help

How can an entrepreneur or small business owner differentiate their product/service from everyone else’s? After you define your niche target customer and identify your marketing message, what else can you do to stand out from the thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of websites that are offering a similar product or service? We all know that you should offer your potential customers and clients multiple ways to contact you. You can provide a contact form, an 800# and your basic contact info for customers who want to call, email, fax or even send you snail mail.. What if you could easily offer your customers a way to chat with you online? Online-help may be the perfect customer service tool to help you keep your customers and clients on your website long enough to answer your call to action. Why not try it? It’s free (or $20 to have the software professionally installed).

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Are You Asking Your Website Visitors Dumb Questions?

I was commenting on an interesting blog article the other day and I clicked off the little box to be notified by email if someone replies to my comment or if someone adds a new comment. Should be simple right? (I mean I just gave them my name and email address in order to leave the comment in the first place.) So, I should be able to just click and go on my merry-way. Right? If the author replies to my comment (showing how much they care and that they value what I have to say), I’ll be notified. If someone else cares enough to comment, I’ll get to know what they’ve added to the conversation. I’m clicking to be notified because I truly found the article interesting and I want to follow it. So why, did I wish I hadn’t started the whole thing?

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Bored? Want a Hobby? Need extra Cash? Is Blogging for You?

Seems these days, everyone knows someone who’s blogging. Whether it’s for fun or for profit, people are blogging. In my previous post, “To Blog or NOT to Blog. That is the Question”, I geared the discussion towards people who want to make money either directly with a blog or by driving traffic to an existing website (presumably where you’re trying to make money promoting a product or service).

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Afraid to Move Your Website but Know You Should?

Are you experiencing slow response times? Is your website sometimes unavailable? Are you frustrated by incompetent tech support? Is it time to choose a new website hosting company?

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Oops! Did I Choose the Wrong Domain Name?

Well, I don’t know whether I chose the right domain name or the wrong one. (Is there such a thing as a right or wrong name? Maybe “better” would be a more appropriate term.) I like the domain name that I registered for this website. It’s easy to spell and it reflects the content I write about. It’s a name that I believe I can build a brand around. So why was I having second thoughts about it? Continue reading “Oops! Did I Choose the Wrong Domain Name?”

Choosing a Domain Name Driving You Crazy?

What TLD (top-level-domain) should you choose for your website? Should you use .COM, .BIZ, .US, .ORG, .NET?

If you’ve built a brand and people already know who you are, your most obvious choice for your domain name would be to register your brand name. Chances are high that name will not be available but if it is, you’re good to go. If you’re doing business in the USA, it’s pretty much expected for you to have a “.COM” top-level-domain. If someone has already registered the .COM version, I strongly suggest that you find another domain name and not settle for something like a .ORG or .BIZ. If you do that, visitors looking for you will most likely land on the website for your competition.

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