INTERNET SAFETY AND SUCCESS NEWSLETTER

Greetings from Out of Nowhere.

Below are some of our helpful newsletter articles. Our intention is to give you clear, easy-to-understand information that will keep you safe and profitable on the Internet.

We sincerely hope this information benefits you and your business.

Email Masking.
Have you ever asked yourself, “How did all these people get my email address?” when you see all the spam in your inbox? Maybe you gave your email to someone when you joined a discussion group or registered a new purchase? If you own a website, you are most likely giving out your email to web spammers, unless you have masked your email address.

Web marketers have little programs called “robots” that scour the web for email addresses. When ever they find text that looks like an email address (someone@website.com) it adds it to a database. They sell that database of email addresses to anyone willing to pay. The next thing you know, you are receiving tons of junk email.

Masking your email address is a process of changing the text on your website so the “robots” can’t recognize it. We have many ways to do this and it is a quick change. This has really become a problem within the last year and we are now masking email addresses as a matter of routine. If you aren't sure if your website is protected, we can check for you. Give us a call if you want us to mask your email addresses.

Upgrade or Buy New?
You paid a lot of money, four years ago, for a good computer and it has served you well. It has gotten a little slow and you have depreciated the equipment to zero for tax purposes. Now, you need to upgrade your accounting software and you are concerned about having enough hard drive space or memory to install it. Do you buy a new hard drive or beef up the memory?

I hear this type of question a lot. With computer prices as low as they are, I believe the answer is an easy one, a “no-brainer” as my father-in-law is fond of saying. Go out a buy a basic new computer. You only need to spend around $500 today to get a good, fast machine that will do everything you need. Upgrading an old machine costs at least $150 and you still have an old machine. Do yourself a favor and donate that old computer to the kids or to a school and buy your self a new machine.

Put your web site to work in the same manner. An FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page can provide simple, easy-to-understand answers for all those questions you have answered a hundred times. The FAQ page saves both you and your prospective customer valuable time.

An FAQ page can also be a great marketing tool. It can present the questions you wish more people would ask and give them the answers you want them to know. Inform your prospective clients of the reasons why you are better than your competitors. You can up-sell your clients by explaining the advantage of buying the premium brand.

Put your web site to work for you, don’t forget the FAQ page.

You must use the same common sense shopping on the Internet as you do shopping anywhere. You wouldn't make a purchase of a digital camera from a man standing at a traffic intersection! The same rules apply with the stores on the Internet. Make sure the business has a physical address (not only a P.O. Box) and contact numbers (not just email). Do a search in Google for reviews of the store. For large purchases, check on the store with their local BBB. Whenever possible, shop from an Internet store that also has a physical location locally (Wal-Mart, BestBuy, Home Depot, Lowes, Staples, etc.). Always research their refund policy in the event you don’t get what you wanted or expected.

Use a credit card when making purchases, and before you put in your card number make sure that you are on an encrypted site. You can tell an encrypted page because there is a gold pad-lock in the lower right corner of your browser window. PayPal is also a good idea for making secure transactions.

Now you only have to worry about what you are buying. Make sure you know if the product is new or used and if all the parts are included. Make sure your “bargain” price is still a bargain after the shipping and handling charges.

Now relax and enjoy your shopping trip.

Add Simple Online Sales with PayPal.
Selling your products and services online couldn't be easier. If you want to be able to accept major credit cards (Mastercard, Visa, Discover and American Express) without monstrous monthly charges and contracts, consider using PayPal’s shopping cart and "Buy Now" buttons.

Just by setting up a business account with PayPal (for free), you can accept credit card payments for your online sales for only a small processing fee of 3% and 30 cents/transaction. This is a perfect solution for businesses and organizations that want to offer a small selection of products or that what to accept donations online.

One reason this is such a great tool is that there is no need to purchase a shopping cart program and there is no program setup involved. All you need to do is set up the PayPal account and then we insert some special code into your web site where you want to have the “Add-to-Cart,” “Buy Now” or “Donate Now” buttons. All sales are secured and encrypted so you and your customers don’t need to worry about credit card numbers being stolen.

The drawbacks to this system is that you are limited to the look of PayPal’s payment pages and it’s not a good system for large stores where you want to keep an inventory and have a database of all sales. But, if you just looking for a simple, quick and economical way to do business online, it’s a terrific solution.

Call us today if you would like to add this functionality to your site.

Refer-A-Friend?
When you create a really great website, you hope that visitors will do two things: They should buy from you and then tell their friends about your site. Make it easy for people to tell their friends by adding a refer-a-friend form on your site. This little form is easy to add and reminds your visitor that it is good idea to spread the good news about your web products or services.

Marketing Outside of the Web.
Your website is perfect and you have done everything to bring it to the attention of web browsers and search engines. Don’t stop now! No business should rely solely on web advertising. You need to continue to promote your business in the “old fashioned” marketing way. Make sure you have printed marketing materials for advertisements in business journals, newspapers, mailings and brochures. Through our new co-operative relationship with Creative Madhouse, Out of Nowhere can help you round out all your graphic needs, Logos, labels, catalogs, publications, etc.

Backing Up Your Data.
OK, tell the truth now, when was the last time you backed up your data? This is like exercise, it is something you know you should do, but never take the time to do it. Believe me, this is something you will regret sooner or later if you don’t get on the ball and establish a backup routine. Backing up you data doesn't need to be painful. You only need a couple of things to make it painless.

1. Good backup software. I like SyncBackSE by 2BrightSparks, but there are many good backup software solutions available. Go out to www.downloads.com or www.tucows.com and try out a shareware version before you buy to make sure it works for you. You want to make sure you can backup to whatever media (Floppy, Zip, CD, Tape, etc) you want.

2. Adequate storage. Buy yourself the proper media for the amount of data you need to backup. CD-R writer is perfect for those with less then 700 MB of data. You can buy CDs cheaply and take copies offsite for added protection. Tape drives are great for those with a lot of data, but they are pricey. Consider buying an exterior hard drive and use it as a backup devise.

Once you set up the backup software and media, you should be able to forget it with the exception of switching out CDs or tapes periodically. Everyone will experience a drive failure, the question is will you be prepared when it happens?

Are there spies in your computer?
You are doing everything to maintain your computer. You are periodically running scandisk and defragging your hard drive. You are running an antivirus and keeping the database up to date, but something is wrong. Your computer is getting slower and slower. Well, it could be a badly installed program or failing hardware, but most likely you have accumulated many spyware programs in your computer.

Spyware is not a computer virus. It is a small program installed on your computer without your knowledge. It is a benign program, in that it only reports home to the marketing company who put it on your computer. The program is meant to report your computing behavior so that the marketing company can send you more targeted junk mail.

From where do you get spyware? You can get spyware from a website you just visited or from the last program you downloaded. There is spyware loaded on many of the commercial software products you purchase at the store. I have even found spyware loaded on brand new computers that I have set up for the first time!

Getting rid of spyware:
Many of you have heard of specific spyware called “cookies,” and you have blocked them, thinking that you have handled the problem. Not all cookies are spyware and not all spyware are considered cookies. In fact, many cookies are helpful and are used only to remember you when you revisit a favorite website. For these reasons, blocking cookies is not an effective way of dealing with the problem.

The best way to handle spyware is to download a program that tracks and cleans it out of your computer. Just like an antivirus program, the anti-spyware program has to be kept up-to-date in order to be effective. My favorite Program is:

• Ad-Aware, which can be downloaded from http://www.lavasoftusa.com/. They have a free version that can be used for non-commercial purposes.

Getting in the Search Engines.
Everyone wants to be in the search engines for obvious reasons; To get more traffic to their sites. When talking about having sites in the search engines, there is an important distinction to keep in mind; Inclusion vs. Placement. Inclusion means just being included in the search engines. Placement relates to where your site ranks for a given search term.

• Inclusion: There are still a few search engines or directories in which you can have your site listed for free - Google, The Open Directory and All the Web. Other than that, you will have to pay to be included in the other biggies. For example, it costs $299 per year to be listed in Yahoo! Another way to be included is to bid for placement on sites such as Overture or Looksmart. A small bid will get you listed; a larger bid will get you listed on the front page of the results.
• Placement: How do you get your site ranked highly? There are many, many factors involved. Most important, you must have your site designed properly for the search engines to be able to collect "data" about your site. If your site is primarily in images, there will be little to no data, only image. If you have lots of information in text, then you should make that text "rich" with your search terms by using your search terms over and over in your text. We used this strategy for ourselves. If you go to Google and type in "Fort Worth Website Design" you will see that we are listed on the 1st page out of 291,000 results.

If you are in a competitive industry, you may have to pay for placement in the search engines. This is usually a great way to spend your marketing dollars! The two pay for placement engines we recommend are Google and Overture. With these sites, you pay a certain bid amount (determined by you) each time the link to your site is clicked on. What's great is that the only people you will be paying for are those that obviously want your service; they are searching for you! Where you rank depends on the amount that you bid. On Overture, if you have one of the top three bids, you will be ranked in the front page of results for Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, CNN.com and InfoSpace.

If you're a go-getter, take this information and run with it. If you want our help maximizing your site for the search engines or you want to begin a pay-for-placement campaign, please give us a call and let us help you maximize your success on the Internet.

Reciprocal Links - Improve your ranking in the search engines.
There are many small things to potentially improve your ranking in the search engines, but aside from having rich content, having other people link to you will probably have the greatest effect.

Here are the basic rules:

• Find other sites that are related to (but not in competition with) your business.
• Contact them to see if they will link to you.
• Offer to provide a link to them.
• Who do you ask?

Think of the other businesses related to yours. Let’s say that you have an auto repair facility. You will contact the other businesses that you know, for instance your upholstery people, the car wash down the road, the body repair shop you work with the most, a car rental facility, the towing company that you use, other businesses near you, or your good friends who have other local websites. Get links from them.

Get links from organizations of which you are a member. Get links from the BBB, the Chamber of Commerce. In the example listed above, get links from the AAA for which you are a preferred provider and the Automotive Service Association.

Get links from sites you find online. Go to Google.com and put in your search terms. See if you find any sites that relate to your business and ask them for a link.
Most of the major search engines include the number of links to your site as a factor in determining how to rank your site. If you do a little work getting other sites to link to you, then you can certainly expect to see your site rise in the rankings.

Give us a call if we can help.

Best Wishes and Regards,
Don and Mary Beth Hirsch

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