While no good web site is ever quite finished as we’re always focused on what current and new content is on it, handling what’s NOT on your site is also crucial.
A web site is a fluid medium, which makes it the ideal information bridge between a business and its audience. Content can be changed and updated constantly with new information, and the organization of the information can be restructured easily as things evolve. If you’ve been online for many years, you’ve probably made changes to the organization of your site and possibly even the platform it runs on (and if you haven’t yet, you will eventually). What’s more, there is nothing that search engines love so much as new content, and honestly, constantly creating new content is just the sort of thing that will keep people coming back to your site.
This puts a high premium on what content you have on your web site – possibly to the point that you forget what is NOT, or more accurately, is no longer on, your site. That is, as your site evolves, content and navigation changes, it’s redesigned and possibly even completely reengineered on a new platform, you are inevitably going to leave some folks facing the dreaded 404 Error: Page Not Found experience. There’s no avoiding it really; it’s going to happen.
My last Tech Beat article, “What the Heck is Social Media Marketing,” was an introduction to how businesses can better expose their product and service offerings for free using “Web 2.0” technologies (interactive, social aspects of the Web emerging over the past several years). One premise for that article was that if you have a business in this first decade of the 21st century, you really should have a website for your business. In this article, I’d like to show you how easy it is to add the power of social media sharing to your website. Read the rest of this entry »
Since 2005, Kiva.org has helped Internet users give microloans, or small loans of $25 or more, to business owners in nearly 50 impoverished countries. Now it’s offering similar loans to struggling U.S. entrepreneurs.
For those of you just getting started with Social Medial Marketing, Jeremy Hunt has some excellent advise for you.
“Social media is, at heart, social. It’s meant to connect people. We form and build relationships (whether in person or online) because it brings joy and meaning to our lives, so don’t let the business of doing business via social networking sites rob you of that. Take the time to invest in the lives of others, and the riches that you reap will be far greater than can be measured in balance sheets and ROI calculations.”
NPR’s Scott Simon interviews Gary Vaynerchuk on branding and Social Media Marketing
This is a must listen, even if it does only scrape the tip of the iceburge on using Social Media Marketing to build and promote your brand and then monitize that.
Looking for a way to better expose your product offerings and services in this challenging economy? Use the power of social media marketing – for free!
If you have a business, then you should already know by now that you should at least have a small website for you business. Face it - some demographics don’t even know what a “phone book” is anymore, and others find it easier to Google your business than to thumb though a printed book. If all you have is a website for your business, however, you have not yet fully entered the 21st century. To do that, you need to understand how your business website is or could be networked with folks using the Internet.
If you run a small business with any Internet interaction, I’m sure you have experienced fatigue with too many logins to remember. User name and password combinations abound: a login for your domain registrar, a login for your hosting control panel, another for your online banking. There just seems to be no end of logins to remember.
A couple of months ago, in an article titled “Are social networks worth the effort?”, Chris Crawford raised the question: “Are you bombarded with requests to join Linkedin.com, Facebook.com, MySpace.com, Twitter.com
…? If [not], are you at least curious as to what these things are …?”
Social networks, blogs, and all manner of “Web 2.0” options have rapidly transformed how people interact with each other online.
Chris focused on LinkedIn, a social network that focuses more on business networking. Meanwhile, Daria Topousis has contributed several articles about Twitter. These and all the past Tech Beat articles are archived on the Redwood Technology Consortium website at www.redwoodtech.org. I’d like to now move on to discuss Facebook and MySpace.
Do you accept payment under either the Visa & MasterCard logos? If so, are you certified as PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant?
If you don’t know what PCI DSS is, join the crowd. While we believe Visa & MasterCard really haven’t raised enough attention with this yet, this is changing swiftly. If you are accepting credit or debit cards, then you are required to be PCI DSS compliant once you accept the first transaction; however, you may not have been required to certify that you were compliant.
The Internet has exploded as a medium for organizations and small businesses to find audiences for their services and products in the past several years. Searching the Internet is as likely a way for audience to find you as any other means – IF you have an online presence. Read the rest of this entry »