You know the Joneses, right? They’re the socialite/neighbor/competitor who always seems to have the newest version of everything. The newest car, the hottest handheld technology, even the most current version of WordPress.

Our culture constantly pushes us to keep up; to buy, newer, better, and faster whenever possible. This can place a great drain on our attention and resources. Eventually it becomes necessary to ask, “just how important is this latest update?”

This is especially true of software.  Programs like WordPress, can come out with updates as frequently as once a fortnight. Recently, one of our longtime clients …

This week’s vein of Online Ore can be found at www.surveymonkey.com

If you want a custom survey on short notice and do not have the expertise to add one to your own website, Survey Monkey is an excellent solution.  The questionnaire generator has easily adjustable prebuilt templates for marketing, customer service, client satisfaction, and much more.  Depending on your needs you can change how questions are worded, set available answers, insert a logo, or change the color scheme.  Then when you’re done, you’ll get a link that you can share over e-mail, through Facebook, in your blog, …

“Stop selling your professional services, you are killing your sales.”  That was the message from Jim Horan (known for The One Page Business Plan) in a teleseminar of the same name.

Why Selling Hurts Sales

It’s not selling …

As I mentioned last time, I’m updating my web site. And, as I mentioned last time, it’s slow going.

For those of us with existing web sites, it can be tough to find time to update it. It’s there; it exists. With other demands on our time and energy, we put effort into things that are urgent. That’s perhaps not a wise …

Flash, well known for its elegant moving images and animations, is the application of choice for creating beautiful websites. But many web developers have scrapped the idea of using Flash for business websites because text that is created in Flash is not always easy to recognize by search engines like Google. Search engine optimization has been, and continues to be, a priority for many businesses. So many web developers have gotten into the habit of settling for two alternatives: the less elegant look of a completely HTML site or a hybrid in which only some of the site elements, …

This week I continue my series on e-mail deliverability inspired by the Lyris Inc panel featuring Michael Kelly of Click Mail Marketing, Craig Spiezie of the Online Trust Alliance, and David Fowler of Lyris Technologies.

A Quick Recap

Last week we discussed the importance of letting members of your mailing list chose to opt out, and also to periodically ask them to opt back in so that your least engaged readers will weed themselves out before they’re tempted to hit the dreaded SPAM button.

What E-Mail Monitoring …

Given the choice between having a human visit your website and having a machine visit your website, you would probably prefer the human.

Humans are more likely to be responsible for purchasing choices, humans are more capable of understanding what you write and coming up with reasoned replies, and humans are more likely to generate original content of their own.

Unfortunately, since computers are themselves a form of machine, you can’t just forbid all contact from other machines or you would never have anyone visit your site.

The Turing Test

Before the first computers were ever built, Alan Turing theorized that it would eventually …

Backing up our data, we all know we should do it but it somehow always ends up at the bottom of that never ending To Do list. I’m really late, I’ll do it tomorrow, this proposal has to go out today, the system has never had any problems, the reasons it didn’t get done are endless. The time to learn that a backup is important is not when the system won’t start so you can’t check your appointments for the day or see if that prospective client has responded to the proposal you emailed them. It’s not when that project …

Unfortunately it’s very common to hear from a website owner that his website is not bringing in business only to find out that the site’s traffic and performance is not even being tracked.

How do you know how your website is doing if you don’t put the right tracking mechanisms in place?

Many people know about tracking traffic by using Google Analytics. It is a free service and easy to install. Google analytics does tell you a lot about your visitors, traffic sources, and content… but there’s more than you can do.

For example, have a unique email address on your website that …

We do a lot of maintenance work for our clients at MB/I. Maintenance is key in keeping a site fresh and up-to-date. Depending on the site and the client, maintenance costs can become substantial. Here are a few tips for keeping these costs down:

• Group your requests so you’re not sending several separate emails during the same day or even week. Each time your web developer gets one email from you, he has to locate your project, open the right file, make the edits, upload the revised file to the server, test his work, and move on to his next task. …
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