Web Sites are Green

by Jimm Fowler
www.mywebsource1.com

Living in the United States today, people are acutely aware of the need to “Go Green” in their everyday lives. We are all trying to shrink our carbon footprint. We’ve heard the news. We need to conserve if we want the planet to be inhabitable for our children. This method of thinking would have been unheard of 40 years ago. Today, it is “trendy”.

One way of going about this is to have a web site and be online. “He’s a web site designer”, you are probably saying to yourself, “of course he feels that way.” But it is true. By going online, you are shrinking your carbon footprint everyday. Technology is helping to forge a better tomorrow. Let me explain:

Paperless Society
F.W. Lancaster, the Informational Scientist who coined the term “paperless society” in 1981. With a paperless society, we would stop using print media and find everything online.

Is it a reality?

Not now, but as more and more web sites become interactive and better allow you to access information online, this thought process helps us to conserve our planet.

Online Literature
In the old days (circa 1989 or even yesterday), you hired a graphic designer to create a brochure and you sent it to a printer who would charge you around $400 per thousand to print and fold your brochure so you could hand it to your customer. The ink they used was then discarded and entered our waterways, harming plants and aquatic life. A simple solution to this is to cut back on printed literature and put it on your web site. Not only does this save you money, but it also helps the environment.

Now, think about the cost savings when you apply this same thought process to your hundred page catalog! You are saving money on printing costs and mailing costs. Your catalog is now in the hands of anyone who would like to view it and what is best, you are cutting back on waste for those who don’t want your services. Add a simple form to access your catalog and now you know exactly who was interested enough to look at your wares!

Conserving Gasoline
By putting your goods online, people can find what they are looking for without having to get into their vehicles and drive to different stores. You can join comparison shopping engines, use pay-per-click ads and organic optimization methods to get people to your site and show them what you have to sell. Less people driving on the roads means less energy wasted which helps in lowering gasoline prices.

Other ways of getting people through your front door is to blog, use social networking tools and sending out online newsletters. Most of these are free to use and won’t waste our natural resources.

Casting Out The Clutter
Everyday we are interrupted in our lives with advertisements. We see them on billboards, on television, in the newspaper and we hear them on the radio. We are so bombarded by these interruptions that we tune them out – unless they are really good or that we’ve heard or seen them so many times we can’t help but notice. In today’s world of marketing do these methods even work like they used to in years past?

Direct marketing works ONE PERCENT of the time – if you are lucky. This means that if you send out 1000 direct marketing pieces to customers, you might get 10 responses. If the item you sell is worth $100, you probably broke even. Most likely, 990 people just added to the excess of trash that we throw away each day. How many of those do you think recycled the paper?

Here are some facts:

• 50% of all junk mail (i.e. your advertisements) is thrown away without being opened.
• Junk mail wastes an average of 8 months of every American life.
• 100 MILLION trees are destroyed each year to produce junk mail.
• 28 BILLION gallons of water are used to produce the paper each year that makes junk mail.
• The yearly creation of junk mail equates out to the emissions of 3.7 million cars.
• An estimated $320 million in local tax dollars are used to dispose of junk mail each year.
• About $550 million dollars is used to transport junk mail to your mail box.

Why would you want to contribute to this?

Instead, try online advertising with either a pay-per-click campaign. This is really an ingenious method of advertising. You set up an ad. You decide which keywords will work best for you. You set a geographical location to place your ads and PEOPLE find you by typing in something related to your keywords. The PEOPLE come to YOU. These are people with an interest in something you are selling. You aren’t interrupting them. You aren’t filling up their mailboxes and lives with a deluge of unsolicited garbage to be tossed aside into our landfills. You are letting them come to you.

I do not pretend to believe that all paper advertising and marketing will stop. I don’t even believe that it will decrease to the point where junk mail is an occasional present in our mailboxes. But, if everyone started to move just 5% of their business away from the old, familiar ways of marketing – ways that don’t work anymore – then maybe we can help to reform our planet into a better place to live.

Go online. Sell online. Become a part of the solution for a better world.

Planning Your Web Site

by James Fowler
www.mywebsource1.com

Proper planning is the key to success for your web site. It may be difficult to overcome the first impression of disorganized information, a terrible user experience, or the drivel of poor content. Will your web site visitors return to you? By planning your web site out, you will have the right elements to keep people coming back to your web site again and again.

There are several things you must prepare if you want to have a successful and timely web site. The following can be used as a check list to help you be on your way.

DOMAIN NAME
This is the first thing you need to start your web site. A domain name is a unique name that identifies your site on the internet. For example, www.mywebsource1.com is a domain name. You typically buy a domain name for one year or more. It is suggested that you buy the domain for a minimum of 3 years, however, because search engine spiders look favorably on web sites that plan to be around longer than a couple of months. By buying ahead, you help yourself with the search engines.

HOSTING
Hosting is the next thing you will need. You have your web site name, now you need a place to “host” the web site. Hosting is basically keeping your web site on an external server that connects itself to the internet. Good hosting companies offer special services like a free blog, an email with your web site name, and enough space to hold all of your information.

THE WEB SITE
Finally! What you have been waiting for! Gathering everything you need to build your web site. It is time to come up with a web site strategy and some objectives. What is your web site going to accomplish? What will bring people to your web site? What will you gain from your web site?

Styles of Web Sites: What is your web site going to do? Is it an informational piece that is just an extension of your business card and literature? Do you want to sell something by using eCommerce? Maybe you want to interact with your customers and collect data so you can better assist them?

All of these are viable web sites. What is most important is to stay focused on what you are trying to do. People do not want to be confused. If you confuse them, they won’t come back to your web site. One thought. One page.

Think about the colors that you want to use on your web site. Does it look good with your logo? Do you have a logo? If not, you should really get one and use it on all of your marketing materials.

Information to Customers: This could be your contact information and store hours. It can be interactive in the way of a form. This way, you can collect information through a database so that you can market information to your customers. Keeping a close contact with your list is essential to ecommerce success.

Pictures and illustrations: A picture says a thousand words, right? This holds true on the internet, as well. People are visual beings and good, eye-pleasing graphics will attract people’s attention. You can take the pictures with a digital camera and upload them to your web designer. Pictures can also be found on the internet, need to be purchased. Just because they are out there, doesn’t mean you have carte blanche to use them. You can obtain them through a variety of web sites that sell images or if you see a picture you like, contact the web site owner and ask them to use the picture. This works particularly well if you are adding product to your web site to sell. Manufacturers want you to use their pictures to sell more product.

Web Site content: What are you going to say? The truth of the matter is that how you say your words are more important than anything else. Search engine spiders (those little programs that find your web site on the internet) love text. They’d love if you wrote a book on the page topic. However, most people don’t want to read volumes of text. Make sure you are concise about what you say and use plenty of keywords so that someone will read it.

Products to sell: Decide what you to sell and how you want to present the items. Typically, you will need a name, a picture, a price, and a unique ID number for the product. Think of things like shipping and handling costs. Know the policy you will follow for international orders (if you plan on shipping out of the country) and the costs associated with this. Think about what you want to use as a merchant account or do you want an online merchant account, such as Paypal?

Marketing your web site: This is the hardest part for most people, but the most vital aspect of your web site. A web site has to be kept up to date and the information has to get out to your potential and current customers. How do you do this? There are plenty of ways including writing a blog, trading links with other businesses, and writing articles. If writing isn’t your thing, try going onto bulletin boards or other places where you can comment something and make sure you add your web site address to your signature.

Another way to market is sending out an email to people who visited your web site. You can find out these names by requesting this information on your web site.

If you want to have a successful web site, you should follow these steps. They are a good basic starting point to complete your goal of a web site and it is something that you should have in place when you meet with your designer. It will make the entire project move along smoothly and you will be happier that you have more control over your web site.

WHO COULD USE SOME MORE MONEY?

COULD YOU USE SOME EXTRA SPENDING CASH?

We live in troubled times where gasoline is over four dollars a gallon, grocery prices are going up. People need a little extra cash. There is little altruism left in this world, but I would like to change that. If you think you could help me, I’d like to help you.

How would you like me to give you ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS?

That’s right. I want to give you a hundred dollars for helping me out. All you have to do is introduce me to someone who would be interested in building a web site. If they decide to have my company build them a web site AND they tell me that you were the one who suggested it, I WILL GIVE YOU ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

There are no strings attached. You don’t have to sell the web site. You don’t have to do ANYTHING else after I sell a web site to your friend except collect ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

1. Introduce me to a person/company/business in need of a web site.
   
2. Have them tell me that you told them about myWebSource1.com when they buy a web site from me.
   
3. I’ll give you ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS upon receipt of their paid web site through my company, myWebSource1.
   

I am only offering this to you because you know me in some way. It is either through being a friend, a reader of my blog, or a member of one of my social networking web sites.

This offer is valid for only one person, per web site. The money will be given to the person whom the web site owner states that gave me their name. No one else will get the money.

If you know someone who is interested, pass their name along to me via my email address at info@mywebsource1.com.

So let me give you ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS. Send me a name of a company that needs a web site along with the person in charge and I will contact them. Everybody knows someone who owns a business or company. Why not make this work for you!

James Fowler
www.myWebSource1.com
info@mywebsource1.com

Confessions of a Search Engine Marketing Professional

by James Fowler
www.mywebsource1.com

A year ago, on July 1st, I started my business, www.myWebSource1.com. I had been doing search engine marketing (SEM) work for some time, but I thought it was finally time to make it official and start doing this for local businesses and non-profit organizations.

My first thought process was to design web sites for people and do them in a way where they had a good start with search engine optimization. Some of the web sites I saw out there were horribly optimized and relying solely on pay-per-click marketing (PPC) –or nothing at all!

After some time of this, however, I realized that many people already had a web site built for them by a nephew or cousin and they weren’t happy with the results. Some asked for a re-design, but others wanted to know how to fix what they already had. People understood a tangible web site, but finding out the non-tangible – what we do – was difficult for them to grasp. The needed a something to show them a way to make their web site matter. And thus, my SEO report was created.

This was something I was able to grasp!
I had a service to sell!

The SEO report is a search engine optimization paper, consisting of about 40 methods and suggestions for local businesses and non-profit organizations to examine their web pages, find the broken links, the misspelled words, the non-indexed pages and other problems that show poor presentation of a web site. It isn’t necessarily the aesthetic feel of your web site that is the problem, it could just be the way it is presented to the world.

Some things I tell every one of my customers is that to succeed on the internet, you need to do certain things for the search engines to find you. These can be done by yourself, if you have the time, or by a search engine professional. Here is a list of ten things you can do:

1 Have a Site Map – not just the Extended Markup Hyperlink (xml) that Google asks for, but an HTML one, too. This is especially helpful with search engines like Yahoo!

2 Use keyword metatags – these are words that describe to search engines what is on your web page.

3 Make sure that every page has a title. Nothing is more disgusting than finding out your web page is called “HOME”.

4 Create a blog. Most people think a blog is a kid’s thing or something done by musicians. There is nothing further from the truth. A blog can build your business on the web very quickly. More on this at another time.

5 Take those keywords I told you to use in Tip #2 and use them as hyperlinks in your blogs. This entire blog post is a good example.

6 Write articles and press releases. Submit them to web sites that will distribute them for you. Make sure to include plenty of links.

7 Submit your site to search engines. Make sure that each of your web pages is indexed by at least the top three search engines. (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN).

8 Join bulletin boards and online groups associated with your business or service. Post to these. Make sure to include a link back to your web site when you write in them.

9 Ask companies that are associated with your business to include your link on their web site. They may ask for you to do the same. If they do, make sure you add their link to your site.

10 Finally, don’t quit adding new content to your web site. The search engines love this and they will scan your site more often.

I hope you find these ten points useful. If you have any questions or would like to use my services, please contact me at www.myWebSource1.com or by email info@mywebsource1.com .