Free Blog Statistics - Find Out the Who and What About Your Visitors
If you already have a Yahoo account MyBlogLog you are already signed up. Just enter your Blog information and you’ll get a complete record of the visitors to your Blog and the pages they visit! Great stuff.
Below is a screenshot of the information MyBlogLog provides. This was only minutes after I added the script to my Blog (very easy - they provide the code and you just cut and past it into the Wordpress Theme).
As always its Free - Quick - Easy
Click on an Image to see it more clearly
Frank say’s “Selling Sucks!” Do You Agree?
That said Frank makes a few great points. Technology, especially using the strategies used by “Growing Your Local Business Using the Internet” , brings prospects to you. Modern strategies, such as email, eNewsletters, and great information packed websites, warm prospects up, eliminates cold calling (dialing for dollars), and many of the worn out approaches of traditional selling.
Listen to Frank’s video and let me know what you think.
A Great Webhosting Choice
Therefore one of the first decisions that you’ll have to make is where to put it - that is what company will you pay to provide (HOST) this ‘virtual’ space for you. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of web host providers. Some are great and others are just good, with a few down right horrible. I know, I’ve used many of them. The company I’ve found that has the best value - features and price - is Hostmonster.com.
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Everytime I use my site I am more and more impressed with Hostmonster. So impressed in-fact that I just wrote an article on why. To read more checkout this article: Choosing Your Webhost
A Great FREE HTML Editor
As you know I’m a big fan of Wordpress because you don’t have to be technical or be a programmer to use it. However recently I’ve come across situations where I need to have some information in html (the web language). For example, when publishing articles some sites want the article in html format so that the titles and margins are pre-formated for the web. MS Word doesn’t work because it puts in strange codes and has special characters. Using the Windows Notepad means having to learn html and code every instruction. No way.
Well for such a simple thing I didn’t want to spend a fortune for software. Sure website creation software such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage are great and powerful. However they cost hundreds of dollars and have pretty steep learning curves. Fortunately I just found a Free web page editor and creator and couldn’t wait to share it with you.
KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. It is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.
Oh and did I mention that it’s Free. Try it out here:
Get your Website & RSS feeds promoted for free
Name: Blogarama
URL Address: www.blogarama.com
Description: A small search engine that will give you a directory listing
Add your blog here:http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/
Name: IceRocket
URL Address: http://www.icerocket.com
Description: A quick one-step link for your RSS feed
Add your blog here:http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=ping
Name: RDF Ticker
URL Address: http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/findchannels.php
Description: A link for your RSS feed, news oriented
Add your blog here:http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/addchannel.php
Name: Readablog
URL Address: http://www.readablog.com/
Description: A quick one-step link for your a website blog or RSS feed
Add your blog here:http://www.readablog.com/AddFeed.aspx
Name: Technorati
URL Address: http://www.technorati.com/
Description: Have to register and confirm with an email. However one of the most important sites on the web right now
Add your blog here:http://www.technorati.com/account/signup
231) Best Directory
http://www.directorybest.info/
Best Directory Anyone can use this directory without signing up to any service. Feeds are divided in 14 main categories, which are divided in two sub-categories themselves.
If you want to submit your feed, all you need to do is to pick the appropriate category, select the sub-categories in which your feed will best fit, provide a feed link, name, description and email, and finally the submission method:
- Free: No registration needed, nothing to pay, but your feed won’t be high until it is rated.
- Exchange: You can get a higher place, for free, by placing a link to Best Directory on your page.
- Blog Carnival is the place to come to find carnivals you are interested in, to submit your blog articles to carnivals where they belong, and to organize and maintain carnivals.
- Understanding of the Problem
- What to do to Solve the Problem
- How to Solve the Problem
Submit your feed to Best Directory.
230) Blogged
Blogged is an online blog directory that you can use to discover and promote interesting blogs
Currently featuring 200,000 blogs this is a very popular resource to get listed at. Blogs are reviewed, rated, and categorized by editors, but anyone with an account can review and rate a blog to help it rise in the rankings. You can browse them by topic, rating, or simply searching for any keyword.
If you want to add your blog to the directory, you will just have to sign up to the service for free, and provide the RSS feed of your site.
Sign up and submit your feed to Blogged.
224) Webloogle
Webloogle is a blog directory where anyone can submit his own RSS feed URL and keep an eye on how his blog is going.
Webloogle will offer you a dedicated page on which it’ll show information, ratings, statistics of your site, and also a link that other people can click to write a review about your site. Requires a bit more time than the other links - the site has an approval process and they’ll email you with the results. Worth the investment of time and effort
Feeds can be browsed by category, ordered by ranking, or simply searched through the search form.
Submit your feed to Webloogle.
Online Shopping Is Growing Every Day
When a business owner makes the informed decision to offer products or services online, he is really ‘going global’ with little effort and minimal costs. Even the smallest business with e-commerce abilities has discovered how easy it is to market their product to those a world away.
Online shopping is growing by leaps and bounds. This isn’t surprising consideration the millions of people who regularly use the Internet.
Consumers are more comfortable with online shopping than ever before. This is due, in part, to the advances that have been made with online security over the past several years. Even those individuals who would have never divulged their credit card information in the past are now shopping from home because they feel safe doing so. Why? It’s convenient, it saves gas, it’s less stressful, and shopping online offers a much greater selection of merchandise than what they will find locally.
There will always be consumers who remain adamant about the fact that they will never make an online purchase. However, neighborhood businesses can still benefit from providing e-commerce options, as those same consumers freely admit to using the Internet for extensive price comparisons before actually making a final purchase.
The news gets better. With additional payment options becoming more readily available, even the individuals who currently feel e-commerce is not safe just might end up jumping the fence.
These options include: Bill Me Later (this payment provider sends out a paper bill, and consumers can send payment via check or money order), PayPal, Google Checkout, Verified By Visa and MasterCard Secure Code options.
Cyber Source Corporation, one of the leading electronic payment providers, reported that their 2007 fourth-quarter revenue totaled $45.4 million dollars. That reflects an astounding increase of 117% compared to the same period of the previous year.
Forrester Research predicts that annual e-commerce sales will top $258 billion dollars, this year alone. They estimate the numbers for 2010 will exceed $316 billion dollars in online sales.
Again, there is no better time than the present for business owners to set up shop in cyberspace. With continual improvements, online sales will only continue to increase. Millions of shoppers agree: e-commerce really is the most convenient, hassle free, enjoyable way to shop!
How to Profit on the Internet
There are three interlocking strategies for growing a business using the Internet: improving a business, growing a business, and expanding a business. Done sequentially they build upon one another and increase revenues immediately. 70% of all buyers buy from the web. 36% of all customers use the web to find local businesses. Understanding the specific strategies to profitably use the Internet will help capture that business and become the backbone of a companies marketing program. To read the complete article click below:
Getting the Word Out - Blog Carnivals
Well that is the million dollar question and there are many answers, many ways of generating traffic to your webblog. A great Free - Quick - Easy way is a Blog Carnival. A what? A Blog Carnival - like Blog Carnival.
A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.
There is so much stuff in the blog-o-sphere, just finding interesting stuff is hard. If there is a carnival for a topic you are interested in, following that carnival is a great way to learn what bloggers are saying about that topic. If you are blogging on that topic, the carnival is the place to share your work with like-minded bloggers.
A blog carnival is similar to an online magazine where a group of people with similar interests and topics converge to create, review, and discuss the articles. Blog carnivals are usually established to draw traffic to a blogger?s site and increase topic or product exposure. Not only do they increase traffic, you are able to exchange email addresses with a large community of people who have shared interests and expand your network in the online marketplace.
The carnival is established by an organizer and hosted by a designated blogger, who solicits and collects articles from contributors to the carnival, and organizes them into a single source. This single source is essentially an “online magazine” with links to various blogger sites and articles.
There are many Blog Carnivals on the web. A quick Google search will find those in your niche. Most have multiple topics and searchable categories. A great one is Blog Carnival. Getting listed in these carnivals is another Free - Quick - Easy traffic tool in your tool box.
Here you can find my first effort on creating a Blog Carnival, Click here to check out BusinessWebStep in the Carnival Universe
Lead Generation for the Complex Sale
This book is fantastic for sales leaders, management, and business owners. It points out that the average salesperson (in complex sales, i.e. capital equipment, business sales, etc.) must generate $1,000 in business per working hour to make their quotas. That won’t happen if we spend our time in unproductive, low quality work, regardless of how important such activities may be.
This book contains the strategies and tools for creating an in-house lead generation system that will help salespeople do what they do best: sell qualified prospects. This book will help transform companies into market/sales driven enterprises, critical to success in this age of hyper-competitively. I believe this is simply one of the best books on this subject (another is “The Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales & Marketing”). However many of the suggestions cannot be implemented and may even run counter to the politics and management of the organization you work for. Therefore most of the ideas won’t work for a salesman in the territory pounding away daily to get sales. For example, aligning business systems and the value proposition to optimize lead generation is imperative, however I can’t do that alone, neither can most salespeople.
If you’re an entrepreneur, a sales leader or a manager this book is a must read with sage and up-to-date advice. For the salespeople on-the-ground and in-the-field better book selections for lead generation are “Selling to Big Companies” and “Selling Against the Goal.” However, “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale” does inform every salesperson about the skills needed to be successful regardless of one’s position. Knowing business metrics, how to profile and evaluate prospects, increasing the value of the sales process by being a consultant and not simply a vender with PowerPoint are all critical success factors for modern salespeople. Not only will salespeople be dramatically helped by reading this book, they may be able to create upward pressure for the business and management to improve as well.
Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Boost the Quality and Quantity of Leads to Increase Your ROI
Have you been ripped off Infomarketers?
I’ve read several hundred eBooks now, taken dozens of InfoCourses and well, frankly I feel ripped off. It’s not only the money but the time. Why is it so hard to get good information? Especially when you’ve paid for it?
Recently I listened to a course by Dan Kennedy, the Grand Puba of Marketing and Sales information products, where he said “The pitch page will never be as good as the product itself. How could it?”
Over promise and under deliver. That seems to be the motto of these internet sellers. What off-line business could operate that way? How many customers could we keep if every time they bought something they felt cheated? I suspect not many.
Their formula is simple – an openly taught by them – tell people the problem and even what the solution is – just don’t tell them how to fix it. For that you’ve got to pay the big dollars. Well unfortunately, even the big buck course are pretty light on the “How To” of getting anything accomplished.
For example the subject of how to use the internet. There are tons of websites and courses on this subject. They talk about all the money that is being made and give endless examples and techniques about Internet Marketing. I’ve taken these courses: how to drive traffic, how to optimize your website for search engines and on and on. However I’ve discovered a huge problem.
The problem is that making all of these things work – actually executing and implementing – is harder than they say. Plus they don’t tell you HOW! I know, they’ll argue with that statement and I’ll probably get flamed in comments and email. But its true. How many eBooks have you read that were worthless? How many free offers to you get that actually have any meat in them? Few I suspect. Its gotten to the point I don’t even open these emails anymore – I just ignore all of their nonsense.
I’ve discovered that there are three levels of knowledge needed to really have a working solution:
How often involves tools and the practive of skills learned in the ‘Understanding’ and the ‘What.’ For example to build a house I first have to learn a lot about building, architecture, legal and structural rules, etc. I then have to learn what a house builder does. I have to learn what tools and resources it takes. I have to learn about all of the skills and techniques that will be used when I’m ready to dig the foundation or put up the walls. Before a single nail gets pounded I have to know these fundamentals.
However none of that will do me any good unless I learn the ‘how to.’ What are the steps to putting in a foundation? Actually doing something is always harder and more time consuming than learning about it. Perhaps that is why for hundreds of years people apprenticed under other ‘Masters’ in their trade.
When it comes to Business and the Internet these same principles hold true. I know the understand email for example (the ‘why’ part of the problem). I also understand the ‘what’ of email: get a good email system or an autoresponder. What is lacking is the ‘how to.’ Sure we all know some of the how to: we type letters on a page and hit the send button, we already know programs like Outlook and Yahoo Mail. But…
Do we know how to do it right? And what about using an autoresponder or setting up our websites to accept email addresses so that we can write people? Those are the critical ‘how to’ details left out. If you don’t know how to use something you won’t use it. The same is true if you don’t know how to do something - it just won’t get done.
Ever ask an employee that you thought knew how to do something and then wonder why it didn’t get done. Often its because they really didn’t know how to do it and were simply too embarrassed to let you know. I’ve had this happen countless times (so much for my learning from my mistakes huh). I would ask my service guy for example to look into a problem and a week later find out that they hadn’t even called the customer. When I dug into it I found out that my computer guy didn’t really understand networking (strange I know) and avoided any kind of situation involving networks. But until I asked he was going to pretend he knew and just not fix anything.
The Backend of the Internet: how to get autoresponders working, how to get orders fulfilled, shopping carts, and the various bits and pieces of using the Web for Business can be overwhelming and complex. Unfortuanlity most of the courses don’t get into these nuts and bolts of the HOW.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting on these subjects because I believe the BACKEND is the most important part of taking the Web Step in a Business. We’ve got customer service, product ordering and all of the other business processes nailed down for our off-line businesses. If we can’t figure this stuff out for the internet we’ll be like my hapless computer guy forever not doing.
See you then…Russ
Membership and Contact Information
Every month BusinessWebStep members get a book summary of one of hottest business books being sold. Members also get exclusive articles, audio interviews, and a newsletter. Personal coaching and teleconferences happen every month. For details click here.
For Further Contact
BusinessWebStep coaches people on how to use the web to increase business. For further information or to discuss how BusinessWebStep can assist your company please feel contact us at russ@businesswebstep.com. Or call us at 719-481-0876
Todays Challenge for Small Business
The Internet can be a powerful tool for a local business prospecting, lead generation and relationship building. Using Internet Marketing all types of businesses can use the Web to grow revenues and get more customers.
Did you know that 70% of all buyers buy from the web and 36% of all customers use the web to find local businesses?
There are three interlocking strategies for growing a business using the Internet: improving a business, growing a business, and expanding a business. Read more about them here:
Profit with the Internet
How To Sell More in a Down Economy
How would you like it if your business earned a five-figure income every month-even while the economy is on a downsizing?
Imagine what your life would be like if all your debts were paid and your business operated in the black month after month.
Using the Web To Get More Business
Will show you how to get new customers and do more business with your existing customers, with or without your own website. You'll learn how to use technology to leverage your time and efforts in 30 days or less!