In a startling news release on CNET News, it was just reported that Network Solutions and Monster Commerce, who host about 10,000 ecommerce stores, had their credit card data stolen from almost 5,000 ecommerce websites.   This is obviously a nightmare for their customers, and the cardholders that have shopped on Monster Commerce stores.  We can help them!

Delaware.Net offers an alternative to Monster Commerce called Store-Logic

Monster Commerce has been a large ecommerce hosting company that we have looked at for some time for ideas as we built our next-generation ecommerce engine.   Particularly, we liked how Monster Commerce handled category viewing when managing their stores (we had a demo account with them), and we like how they employed a theme engine for their stores.    We took these good ideas into account when building our new ecommerce engine, which was released late in 2008.

Importing Monster Commerce Stores

Monster Commerce customers can call us, and we  will help them export their data from their existing stores into our engine.   We will import their product data, sales data, customer data, and more.

Credit Card Data Storage

While we can import your store data, we won’t import your credit card data.   Modern ecommerce stores should never hold onto credit card data permanently, as the risks are just too great.   It is possible to pass credit card data securely from your online store directly to a payment processor such as Authorize.Net, or PayPal’s PayFlowPro system, or YourPay.  All of these systems are already integrated into Store-Logic so that you can accept credit cards right away.

Ecommerce SEO, Shipping, and More.

Our system includes real-time shipping for UPS, FedEx, USPS, and UPS Freight.  Most other ecommerce engines out there do not include these features alone.   We are a certified UPS Ready Ecommerce Vendor, so our store engine talks directly with UPS’ servers.    Our store engine has the latest search engine optimization features, to help your store come up in search results. For example, as you add products and categories to your store, they are added to a special Google Sitemap file that you can register with Google.

Get a Quote Today to Upgrade Your Ecommerce Store

Let us help you with your ecommerce website. You can get a quote from us online using this form:
http://www.delaware.net/free-web-design-quote/

What is the “The Long Tail”?
The Long Tail has a detailed definition at Wikipedia, which goes into quite a lot of detail that gets a little bit too detailed, but the opening paragraph is useful for this discussion. It goes like this:

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8).

So we know that The Long Tail is a phrase that describes selling a large number of items, in realatively small quantities, that add up to be a large volume. In other words, the web makes it possible to sell a large number of items in small quantities, which when added up exceed the amount of more popular items that are sold. Amazon.com is an excellent representation of a company that sells way more unpopular books than it does popular books. The problem for Amazon, of course, is that it has to keep an incredible inventory of books in its inventory.

The point of the graph is that overall, Amazon.com makes more money (the yellow area) selling unpopular books overall, than it does selling popular books (the green area). This yellow area, is the long tail.

How does this help my website with search engines?
You probably thought I was going off track talking about books and Amazon.com, but I needed to explain that to lead you up to this next point. You and I can’t go out and build a warehouse and stock more books than Amazon.com, but there are things that are in virtually limitless supply that will help you sell online, and these are your keyword phrases and terms that your website contains. In other words, most website owners focus too much on a small number of phrases that they believe customers will enter into Google. The more popular phrases, or the first thing that comes into their mind, and they stop. If more time was spent focusing on a larger number of phrases and terms…. targeted words that coincided with each and every page in the website, they would have much, MUCH more success with less frustration. Lets take this further….

Focusing on Keyword Quality AND Quantity for SEO
Lets say that you are a Realtor. And you live in the state that I live in, Delaware. An you want to come up high in Google under “Delaware Real Estate”. So in your real estate website, you target the phrase “Delaware Real Estate” and you put it everywhere in your website. You might even hire an SEO guy to “optimize” your website to get that term in there everywhere. But nothing happens. You don’t really get a lot of traffic to your site, and when you search for this term in Google, you aren’t on one of the first couple of pages in search results. Something must be wrong with your website! Well, not really. It is more likely that something is wrong with your approach, because unless your website has an extremely high Google PageRank (discussed in a future blog post in detail), you aren’t likely to come up under that search term. So lets analyze why that might happen.

From the detail that Google gives us above, we can see above that 60,500 people searched Google for “Delaware Real Estate” in February 2009. The solid green bar also shows us that more than likely, quite a number of people are bidding on that term in Google’s AdWords system. This means that if you want to pay Google to have an advertisement under that term, you will probably need to budget into the thousands of dollars per month to both rank high in the paid listings, and have enough money to have staying power month to month. But lets face it – an individual Realtor won’t pay that. More people click on the free listings anyway, and since they are free, that is the place where Realtors want to be – at the top of of the organic (free) search results. It could also be argued that this term is too broad, so paying a premium for it or chasing it in your SEO might not be the best use of your time and money, since people that are searching for very broad terms are much less likely to be your ideal customer. This phrase (Delaware Real Estate), because it gets a significant amount of traffic, puts it into the green area of the graph, and it is not part of the long tail. Lets look at another phrase.

Now I did a search for “Dover Delaware Real Estate”. All I did is add the word “Dover” to the search phrase, making it 4 words long. You can see that Google shows “not enough data” for the month of February, but overall, they have statistics showing an average of 2,400 people per month that are searching for this phrase. Obviously this is a lot less people than the number that was searching for “Delaware Real Estate”. You can also see that not as many people are bidding up the value of the phrase, because the vague little green bar isn’t all the way full. If I were a real estate agent in Dover, Delaware, I would be targeting the crap out of this phrase. This phrase does not get a lot of traffic, but it is VERY targeted. There is also less competition for it, which is VERY important. It gets enough traffic to make it relevant to your website, so it should definitely be in there. More importantly than just including it, is WHERE you include it. Instead of being stuffed randomly throughout the website, it would make a lot of sense to make a page designed solely around this one term. The title of the page, the heading tag in the page, the content, the inbound text links, meta tags (not as useful, but not dead), and other attributes of that page should all have that term in it. This is where Delaware.Net shines, because we are very good at this, and we can automate much of it for you.

The Bottom Line
By targeting a larger volume of terms and phrases that are more specific, but less popular, will help you to cast a wider net with Google. Since there is less competition for larger word combinations, it is easier to dominate those phrases and come up number one. Understand that it is still sometimes worth the effort to target a two-word popular phrase, but as the popularity goes up, so does the work required to get noticed by Google for those popular phrases.

Action Plan For Using The Long Tail
Here is a “to do” list of things that you can do to use this technique in your website.

• Use Free Keyword Tools - There are a lot of tools online for generating keywords, and for researching keywords. You can get a good start on your own, but these tools sometimes expose ways that people search for your products that you are not aware of.
• Create a Larger List of Keywords – Don’t stop at 20 or even 50 terms. The more keyword research you do, the longer your list should be.
• Don’t Worry - You can always add more and more detailed keywords to your site as you go, but the sooner they get in there the better. Moving up in Google and changing your PageRank value can take months.
• Automate Where Possible - I mentioned in my example above that the Realtor should have a page in their site for ever city in their state. This could be done by manually creating each of those pages, or, it could be done by making a dynamic city page. In other words, one city page whose content changes on the fly, depending on how you link to it. Using this technique, I was able to make a page for every state in the country for a client in minutes. Be smart and plan this out with your web designer.
• Use Long-Tail Terms Everywhere – Google reads only what you give it, so these terms should exist in your links as well as your content. Also consider adding these tags to your image alt tags, and your link title tags.
• Add Pages – If you are able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then keep in mind that beside the cost of your time, those pages are free of charge to you. So the more content that you put into your website the better. This doesn’t mean that you should indiscriminately add pages and pages that have nothing but keywords in them. If you aren’t able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then consider adding a Content Management System (CMS) to your website. Almost every site we build now contains a CMS system so that clients can add and edit content on their own.
• Ecommerce Tricks
  
  • Informational Products- If you have an ecommerce store, then you should be able to add detailed descriptions of products, and also have the ability to add informational pages. In other words, it is possible to add pages into an ecommerce store that behave as articles, even if they are within a product page. In our store engine, we built the ability to hide the checkout and “add to cart” icons on certain pages. We call those pages “informational pages”. This was done so that customers can embed articles into the product catalog.
  • We also created “informational options”, which allows customers to add keyword-laden instructions into the options area of the product pages.
  • Always mix up your keywords in your custom page titles. The page title is the text that appears at the top of your browser window, and this can be edited on each product page. Instead of using the same keywords over and over in your store, add a custom title that reflects the make, model, part number, and keywords that reference each product.
• Blogs – If you are an expert at what you do, then you should add a blog to your site. Most importantly, you should keep it updated. Blogs are an easy and inexpensive way to add supplemental content to your website. I charge only $50 a year to host a blog, and there are free alternatives online as well. Blogs can exist as a site on their own as well, like this one. Adding articles to your blog that have long-tail phrases in them are very helpful.
• Add Product/Services Pages – get into detail about what you do, so that you can have more rich content in your site.
• Use Tagging Features – Blogs, Ecommerce Stores, and our new CMS system contain the ability to add keyword tagging links to each page. Use this feature to mix up how you are describing the content in your site. If you don’t know what this is, please ask me.

Problems with The Long Tail

• More Keyword Research is Required- Leveraging this technique requires more research time to find phrases that work. There are many resources online for generating keywords and phrases. You can’t be effective by only using one tool, so you see why this takes a lot of time. I can steer you in the right direction if you want more information on them.
• More Pages Need to Be Built – You might need a page for every city in your county if you were a Realtor that was following my example above. Also, you would need to know another dozen tricks or so for how to add those words in your site the right way. Many website owners forget that traffic can come from Google to one of your deeper pages (not your home page). So each page should be a little bit different and highly targeted to a small group of phrases, instead of stuffing lots of phrases into one page.
• There are Exceptions – Landing number one on a popular phrase can make you rich. I have seen it happen. But since Google shuffles up the index from time to time, that easy money can quickly vanish. Having a larger catalog of terms in your website that you target is like balancing your stock portfolio.
• It Requires Time – If you aren’t looking at your traffic reports and your inbound link performance from search engines, then you have no basis for measuring your performance. If you want to experiment with strategies like this one, you have to schedule monthly reviews of your traffic, to make sure that it is working for you.
• Fresh, Unique, Targeted Content is Still King – This isn’t what most website owners want to hear, but it is the truth. Search engines like fresh content. Stuffing your website with terms and walking away from it won’t necessarily help you in the long run. You should instead focus on how to adapt the long tail strategy into your overall strategy of adding and updating content in your website in an ongoing way.
• There is More – A solid website that has a solid SEO effort involves work in a lot of areas, so this is in no way a magic bullet.

I hope that this article will help you better optimize your website content better, and help you focus more on what will help you to get noticed. If you have questions about this article, or you have a related question, please reply using the comments under this post. I promise to answer every one.

It took a while, but Realtors are finally coming around to Web 2.0, Web 3.0, social networking, whatever you want to call it. It is becoming clear to Realtors (finally) that building a website and waiting around for Google to find it simply doesn’t work. This is a good thing! It means that they are waking up to the reality that we are LEAVING THE INFORMATION AGE and that we are ENTERING THE PARTICIPATION AGE. While this is a positive step, and Realtors are using more of these social solutions online, many see them just as a tool for profit instead of a tool for SHARING THEIR KNOWLEDGE and building credibility.

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0. What does it all mean?

Web 1.0 was the “information age”. In regards to the web it was from 1995-2001. Building your website, getting a domain name, and having a presence with email were about all a Realtor could do with Web 1.0. Adding meta tags to your website and some other formatting is what web designers did to get you found on search engines. There were a LOT of search engines back then. Today there are just a few. The old meta tag days are gone forever. It will never again be that easy to spoof search engines and become #1 on Google with a meta tag or even a blog post.

Web 2.0 is about shared content, online applications, and syndicating content. It was also about mashups and the new nature of syndicating, cataloging, and making data discoverable by using tagging to create a more democratic search. Mainly, it was about applications and new ways of posting and sharing data. For Realtors it was the MLS systems, blogs, photo sharing sites, and other websites that are now indispensable tools for Realtors.

Web 3.0 (to me) is about relationships. It is the “participation age”. It is about much more than building applications that automate marketing (Web 2.0). It is about knowledge currency. Trust. Honesty. Transparency. Reputation. Networking. But you can’t have any of that if you don’t understand the unwritten rules of being a good net citizen, known as Netiquette.

Yeah, us geeks are full of ourselves, and we talk too much.

Well, hey… there is a lot to know with all this stuff. So in this article, I will answer the fundamental questions that I am getting from Realtors as to how to best use these new methods of networking to grow their real estate sales. How to come up high in Google. How to really use a Blog. And why how you use Facebook matters to your reputation.

Rule #1. There is no simple path to coming up number one in Google.

It can be a little draining explaining to folks how to come up high in Google because most people don’t want to hear the truth. Everyone wants to believe that there is a quick fix or trick to coming up high in Google, but there isn’t.
Some Truths:

• You need a site that has a lots of content.
• You need a site that has an old domain. The older the domain the better.
• You need a site that has well-formatted content.
• You have to have ORIGINAL content. Lots of it.
• You have to have a high Google PageRank, which can take quite a while to develop, and Google doesn’t update it often.
• There ARE formatting things that you can do to your website, like text linking, deep linking, adding a Google Sitemap, better page titling, and MUCH more.
• To get your Pagerank higher, you have to GENERATE A LOT OF INBOUND LINKS to your websites.
• You have to have time to wait – it sometimes takes a generous amount of time, especially to develop your site’s PageRank.
• There is more.

Stop thinking of Google as “something to be done” or handled, and think of it as a report card of your online work. ALL of your online work.

There are no free lunches with Google, no quick and easy tricks. But there ARE tricks and techniques. Most small web development shops don’t know all them. The more experienced web developers that understand how Google works charge a fee to work on your website.

Your blog can help you with Google. Your Facebook page can help you with Google. Simply adding tags to your blog posts WON’T MAKE YOU NUMBER ONE ON GOOGLE! But if you do them right, then they can help. I really want all of my clients’ websites to come up #1 in Google. But only 1% of my clients are willing to do the work it takes and wait for it to happen. This creates a natural conflict for us, especially because it is complicated to make happen. This is why there is a strong cottage industry of thieves that will take your money to “get you ranked in the top 10″. I have looked at many of them, and 99% of them are thieves.

I will focus on additional things that you can do to come up higher in Google outside of Blogs and Facebook in a future article.

Rule #2 Your website solution company should be your SEO consultant too, not just your web designer

It is up to YOU to contact your web design company, perhaps every 4-6 months, to give your site a checkup. Going to Google and typing in some words to see your ranking is NOT how you should be testing your site. Did you know that when you are logged into Google they change your search results based on what they know about you? It is true. So typing words into Google is not the way to test your site. There are many tools for testing your site outside of Google.

Rule #3 If you use a template company for your website, your Google Pagerank WILL suffer.

There are a LOT of companies out there offering turn-key Realtor websites with MLS listings in them. For the non-technical Realtor on a budget, these sites are an easy way to get a site live with listings. A Realtor was in my office the other day, and we pulled her site up to look at it. She is a friend, so I wasn’t charging her. I was just taking a look at what she has. Her site is build by a company that does Realtor template sites. So I check her Google PageRank, and her ranking is ZERO out of 10. That’s right – zero. So no matter what this company can offer her, the site won’t come up high in Google. I pointed this out to her, and she quickly back-peddled saying “most of my sales aren’t from my website anyways”. But it is pretty obvious that this is a copout, because why have the site if it isn’t going to generate leads?

So you might be wondering, why do template sites get penalized form Google? Duplicate content. Google is now smart enough to notice when a bunch of websites all look the same, and it hurts your score when your content isn’t unique.

Rule #4. Blogs are great for SEO, but are you using your blog correctly? Probably not.

I recently had a Realtor asking me for tips to make their website come up higher in Google. It happens all the time. Looking at their site, I saw a lot of things right away that could be done to make them come up higher in Google. It would take me….. 5 hours to explain all of it to them. It would take…. 20+ hours of work to implement it all. At $110 per hour, that gets expensive. Would they pay for that? Probably not. But some of my clients do. So, an easy to fill, glaring gap in their online marketing efforts that I saw was to add a blog link to their website. Why a blog? Because a blog makes it easier for the Realtor to add UNIQUE, ORIGINAL CONTENT to their website. Rich, juicy content that Google will respect when it reads it. Is that all there is to do? Fire up a WordPress blog, enter some articles, and sit back and wait for the Google gold rush? Hell Friggin No. There is still lots to be done.

Your blog needs articles that people actually give a shit about. Articles like this one! A rule in the new web world is that you have to stop holding onto your “secrets”. If you are an expert, you have to prove it with valuable information and less hype. The realtors that blog about Obama’s stimulus bill and who post their opinions about politics or their political affiliations on Facebook and their blogs are COMPLETELY MISSING THE POINT OF HOW THEY CAN HELP MAKE NEW RELATIONSHIPS. Why would you alienate 1/2 of all of your prospective customers by being political? Leave your ego and your confrontational political opinions at the door in this new web world. If I am a potential home buyer that wants a Realtor that can be trusted (and some can’t be), then SHOW ME that you are an expert and that you can be trusted. TELL ME WHAT I SHOULD KNOW about what it is like to live in this area. Posting a list of links to area parks and restaurants is a cop out.

OK, so how to choose content for your blogs…. Ask yourself “If I was a home buyer, will this content help me?”. If the answer is “no”, then don’t post it. Also remember that blogs are chronological. They are for telling the story of the moment. The top ten tips of the moment. The top recent problems that you are solving for customers. The top resources for customers, etc. etc. It is OK if these get old over time, because if you are a TRUE PROFESSIONAL, then you will constantly have new subject matter that is unique, easy for you to write, and relevant for your customers. THAT is what blog content should be. Content like link pages, information on neighborhoods, taxes, employers, zoning, entertainment, restaurants, mortgage lenders, all that content that isn’t time sensitive – that content should be on static pages in your website. That content is not time-sensitive. It isn’t storytelling. It is resource stuff, not blog content. Don’t repost listings into your blog – it looks desperate. It looks even more desperate on Facebook.

Rule #5. Blog Content Needs to Be Described AND LINKED to Be Found

So you wrote a great post to help potential home buyers. Terrific! Then you go to Google and you don’t see it. Not even a month later. Something must be wrong, you say! My web designer led me astray with all of this blogging malarky! Those bastard web designers. Well, before you blame the web designer, you have to ask yourself these questions:

1. did I add tags to my blog posts?
2. do I even know what the hell the tags are, how they work, and what they do?
3. does my blog have a decent number of posts in it?
4. am I linking my blog to other blogs?
5. are my tags formatted as complete keyword phrases?
6. am I linking to my blog from lots of other websites?
7. am I emulating this blog content and posting strategy to match the leaders of my industry?
8. have I created adequate categories in my blog so that I get the quality text links in the blog?
9. is my blog IN my company website, or is it linked from my company website? (hint: link it).
10. am I using the right blog software? is it the latest version?
11. am I using link directory websites like Digg.com, delicious.com, Technorati.com, and the other MANY sites?
12. am I tagging and linking words WITHIN my blog posts to other websites? hrm?
13. am I getting press coverage to get inbound traffic and links to this valuable blog content?
14. am I tweaking the permalinks in my blog posts to create adequate search engine safe URLs?
15. am I using Wikipedia to lookup all this crap that John McKown is telling me?
16. if I don’t want to learn all the blog crap, can I honestly blame my web designer for not doing it for me for free?

Digg.com and Delicious.com are nice, solid ways to get your blog content indexed by Google. It isn’t foolproof, and no SEO tip is. They are all part of what is required today.

Rule #6. Facebook is a powerful networking tool. But no one wants to be friends with a jerk Realtor.

Am I bashing Realtors? No. I am not bashing Realtors. There are a lot of great Realtors out there, some are my close friends. Some, unfortunately, are jerks. There are also jerk web designers and definitely jerk mortgage brokers. Hang with me here…. I think it is great that Realtors are using Facebook. I have a Delaware real estate license and I pay the National Association of Realtors and KCAR dues. So I AM a Realtor, at least technically. So are you a “Jerk Realtor” you ask? Well, that depends totally on your behavior. If you joined Facebook because some guy in a marketing seminar told you to add everyone in your address book to your Facebook account to make money, then yeah, you might be one. My point is, I will help you. I don’t care if you are a Realtor or not. I help people because, quite frankly, when I do so it ends up helping my business and it makes me feel good to share what I know. My ego likes me being considered an expert. I’d be a jerk web designer if I used my knowledge to exploit people like I see happening EVERY DAY from other companies in my industry. If you are HONESTLY interested in me, my experience, what I have to say, how I can help you, then great. Add me as a Facebook friend and I will accept you. Again, I really don’t care if you are a Realtor or not. If I help you and gain your trust by doing so, then you should return the favor and recommend me as an expert too. But….. if you sponge me for information and then blame me because you didn’t do ALL of the things that Google and Facebook and your website require for online success, then you are a Jerk Realtor. If you use your Facebook account to post all your listings, then you don’t look professional. Why do I want to see all of your listings in my Facebook account? I don’t. And you will be removed from my friends list in a hurry. I bet other people feel the exact same way. Relationships are built on trust, sharing, and listening. Not by adding a hyperlink to someone. Use Facebook, but don’t be a ….. you know.

You are on Facebook. Is your company?

You can create a FREE business page for your real estate company. I added one for Delaware.Net, check it out and become a fan real quick: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dover-DE/DelawareNet-Inc/41553338643?ref=s . This a great way to get traffic, and to mass email your friends list with news from your organization. But BE CAREFUL. Don’t overdo it. Add content that matters, and don’t do it too frequently. Get all your business friends to add themselves to your new business page. There is a link at the bottom of the page when you look at my business page. That is how you can add your business site to Facebook.

Are you syndicating your OWN content?

If you are posting a good article to your blog, you should also use that article for an email newsletter. You don’t have an email newsletter? You should. The content that you mass email people is almost as sensitive as what you blog and post into Facebook. One thing that email newsletters are better at, is letting the visitor choose what content they want to get from you. For example, they could chose to get emails about new properties. So it is totally acceptable to email them property information. It is much different to dump your listings into your Facebook account.

Build a link share network – it is important

Earlier in this article I mentioned getting inbound links to your website to build your Google Pagerank. Google Pagerank can be thought of as a multiplier. Meaning, if your site has lots of jucy articles and keywords, but your Google Pagerank is a 1 (out of 10), then you are going to get beat in the search results every time. So your Google ranking can be thought of as this formula: Google PageRank * Relvance of Content = Ranking. One of the things Google looks at to determine how “important” your site is, is by measuring the number of websites that are linking to yours. It also takes into account RECIPROCAL LINKS. This is critical. So you should link to other large websites that have a good pagerank, and most importantly you should try to get them to link back to you. Start to look for sites that have a high pagerank, and then try to get a reciprocal link between their site and yours. Now repeat this dozens or hundreds of times, and you will start to see your Google Pagerank climb.

I wrote this in one sitting while watching TV. Ask me questions about any of this and I will do my best to answer you and explain further. Use the form below this story to post your questions. Thanks for reading, and I hope it helped.

Cities need to provide real-time bill payment options online

Municipal customers expect to find convenience features in their local municipal website. With the mass adoption of broadband, online banking, ecommerce, and web applications, it is no longer a novelty to add an online bill-pay system to a municipal website. Delaware.Net builds real-time online bill-paying services for small and large towns, as well as corporations and utility companies. When complete, city customers can look up their account online securely, and pay their outstanding balances using a credit card. We can integrate with any popular billing package that runs on an SQL database server, or that has an import/export API (Application Programming Interface). The API serves as a gateway that allows us to look up and insert successful payment information into a municipal billing system.

Who pays for credit card fees?

An important challenge we have seen in working with large municipalities and utility companies is determining who will pay the fees that merchant providers charge. To accept credit cards online, there will be typically two fees involved; the merchant account fee, which is a percentage of each transaction, and the payment gateway service (such as Authorize.net), which makes the transaction real-time in your website. If you simply tack-on these fees to the bill amounts that your customers are paying, then they will generally not use your online bill-pay system. Why? Because postage stamps are always going to cost less than the fees that you add to the transaction if they are percentage-based. Since your customers are able to gain convenience by using the website, and since your city employees won’t need to open paper envelopes and process checks (expensive in labor costs), the online fee amounts are generally a wash if the transaction amounts are under $500 on average. For this reason, you may want to limit the total amount that can be transacted through the website, to minimize fee exposure, or you can calculate your total cost of providing the online bill-pay service and incorporate it into your fee structures across the board.

How NOT to introduce online bill-pay to your customers

I witnessed one utility company that had a successful online bill-pay system, and then outsourced it all to a separate bill-pay company so that they would not have to worry about the fees any longer. The problem was, each bill had $20 tacked on as a service fee. It really looked and felt like a bait-and-switch to the utility company’s customers, because they would start to enter payment information and then get hit with the $20 transaction fee. As you can imagine, customers stopped using the service almost immediately.

How much are the credit card fees?

There are two primary fees involved in accepting credit cards online. The first is the payment gateway service, and the second is the merchant account fee.

The payment gateway service is straightforward and inexpensive. Typically they are $90 – $140 to setup, and then you have a $10 per month fee, and a 15 cent transaction fee. The payment gateway talks to the card issuing bank, the card companies (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover), and your merchant account. The payment gateway service is required for real-time transactions.

Merchant account fees are where things can get expensive. With fees generally between 1% and 3% of the total transaction amount, with the average being about 2.3%. In my opinion, a municipality should never pay more than 2% for merchant account fees. This is because merchant account providers use a risk assessment chart to calculate your fees. I have seen these charts, and you can find them if you do a web search. The lowest credit card fees are 1%, and this is typically the rate for a grocery store – they ALWAYS get the lowest rates. A typical mom-and-pop web business can get about 2.3%. As a municipality, your transactions are much more trustworthy than a typical online retailer. It is important to note that ALL MERCHANT ACCOUNT FEES ARE NEGOTIABLE so you MUST shop around.

Why you shouldn’t just sign-up for a merchant account from your bank:

A common mistake that I see is when an organization goes to their bank for a merchant account. This is because the vast majority of banks simply RESELL merchant accounts from one of the large merchant account providers. You should shop around and get a quote from several companies so that you can get the best rate. Even a fraction of a percent difference in cost can add up to big dollars in savings when you obtain a merchant account. I have dealt with MANY different merchant account providers over the years, and you need to be careful to make sure that they have experience with online transactions. Surprisingly – many do not. We have worked with PNC Bank corporate as a reseller of their merchant account, but we in the end, they too were simply reselling someone else. Today, we have a close relationship with a merchant provider that has superb rates, and they offer great customer service. I can’t post the name here, but contact me directly (888-432-7965 x100) and I can give you their name.

Integration with billing systems

While it may sound impressive to have a real-time synchronization between your billing system and your website, this is typically not how the two systems interact with each other. A batch import/export system that can be automated to run each day (or each hour) is much more reliable than a live data connection between both servers. This is the only way that we build our payment systems. The payment transaction is real-time, but the synchronization with your billing system is not.

Security and Data Storage

Unless requested by our customers, we do not store any credit card data or financial data that comes through the payment systems. We simply pass the transaction information to the payment gateways, and insert the “approved” or “declined” codes into the data tables that we synchronize with your billing system. All of our web accessible payment forms are secured with 128bit SSL security, which is the same as an online banking website.

If you have any additional questions about municipal online bill-pay systems, visit our website at www.delaware.net and shoot me an email.

There ARE cheaper open source solutions out there, and on the low end you have systems like Drupal, PHPNuke, PostNuke, .netNuke, Joomla, and others. These can be made to work if you have the time and patience, but for the most part they are solutions for non-profits and companies that don’t want to spend a lot on their website design work. I would never recommend them for a growing business that really cares about their website. Especially if they don’t have an in-house IT team. These low-end systems are well suited for a website where it is OK to use design templates for someone that wants to get up and running quickly. But there WILL be problems when using these systems, and like everything else – there is a trade-off.

Quality, Speed, and Cost – Choose Two!

If you go with a low-end CMS system, it might be fast to setup, and the price might be right, but your website will be a low-quality website. And if you factor in the time to customize it, that could then get expensive in a hurry.

Care should be taken to avoid a web design firm that charges a premium price for custom website development, then they turn around and install Drupal or some other low-end open system for their CMS solution. This is a way that a web desing firm can cut corners, and it is lying. We would never do this.

Another problem with the low-end open solutions is that they are higher profile targets for hackers. There are many examples of this that you can search for that show Drupal getting hacked, and other systems getting hacked. This is usually quite preventable if the systems are updated in a very regular manner, but the fact of the matter is that web desing companies that outsource their IT and hosting needs are much more likely to NOT update these systems. They build websites using these systems so that they can get them live quickly and turn a profit, but then the site (and the customer) gets neglected. This problem extends beyond CMS systems – it is also true of forum software and blog software.

Am I against open-source software? Heck no. We have our share of open-source software that we use at Delaware.Net, but there IS a trend away from it almost across the board, from operating systems to web development software, to application server software. Open source software is great if it is patched regularly, and if it meets a particular need. But sadly, most companies don’t do a very good job of updating.

Some folks assume that open-source software is somehow better because it is free and open, but this is just not true. To me, it is irresponsible for a web development firm to perpetuate that myth. Open source solutions shouldn’t be viewed as a software religion, they have to make business sense too. And when you actually track the time that it takes to make some open software work correctly, you find that it doesn’t always save you money in the long run. You also might be missing out on integration with your other business systems. Customers looking for a “quick and dirty” way to deploy and manage their websites might do OK with some of these solutions, but “quick and dirty” isn’t what our company is about.

So, you can go cheap with your CMS solution, or you can get one that is more custom to your needs, integrates with a nice custom design, and that doesn’t force you to log into three different interfaces to get your work done. And best of all your site will work better, and it will come up high in search engines.

Another advantage of our systems over other CMS systems is that ours is updated every month, with updates being seamless and free. Try geting your open-source system updated for free indefinitely by your hosting company (it doesn’t happen).

“we are able to stop over 98% of spam before it gets to our customer’s mailboxes “

Why email forwarding is bad
Unfortunately, customers are sometimes blissfully unaware of how they hurt their own email service. Here is how it happens… A new customer calls. Let’s call him “Jim”. Jim purchase a new domain name for his business. Let’s call the domain name “somecompany.com”. Easy enough. Jim can now have an email address that looks like “Jimbo@somecompany.com”. So after we register the domain name for Jim, we also setup a hosting account for Jim’s web site and any email accounts that he wants.

A sample scenario
Jim then asks us “is it possible to have all email that comes into jimbo@somecompany.com to forward to my home email account?”. In the past we would say “sure”, but not any longer. Let’s say that Jim’s home email address is jimbo@comcast.net, or jimbo@verizon.net, or jimbo@att.net, or whatever. After Jim gets his web site live, and his new email address is published online, it will at some point get picked up by a spambot, which puts his email address into a spam directory. Or, an even worse scenario, is if Jim asks “can you have ANY email sent to somecompany.com, and have it forwarded to my home account?”. The second scenario is called a “catch-all”, and is a much worsescenario than simply forwarding a single email address. If a spammer were to use a baby book of names to guess a bunch of addresses, like bob@somecompany.com, carol@somecompany.com, and so on, they could easily send hundreds or thousands of emails to Jim’s new domain name.

Then… other providers block the customer’s server
Let’s assume that Jim uses Comcast for his personal email service. I am not picking on Comcast, this example is true of any large email provider. Comcast wants to block any spam that Jim gets, just like how Delaware.Net wants to fight spam. Since Comcast has a LOT of spam to fight, they have spam-blocking servers that are smart enough to be alerted to large volumes of email that look like spam come from one source. That one source my be your catch-all domain, or that source of spam might be the server that is fowarding your email (and your spam) to your Comcast account. Comcast, Verizon, Yahoo, ATT, AOL, and most large personal email providers have systems like these.

“It’s important to note that ALL hosting companies get their email servers blocked
by other hosting companies from time to time. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens to all of them.”

When these systems see this spam coming in, they try to block it. What do you think they block? They block the IP address of the server that the spam came from – automatically. That means that ALL EMAIL SENT FROM THAT HOSTING SERVER IS NOW BLOCKED BY COMCAST. Including email from other customers on the same server. Not good. Jim’s seemingly simple request to have all of his email forwarded into one account just caused a very serious problem for anyone else that has email accounts on the same server as Jim. Basically, those other customers can’t email anyone that has a Comcast email address. If Comcast blocks an email server, then NO ONE else on that server can send email to Comcast. It’s important to note that ALL hosting companies get their email servers blocked by other hosting companies from time to time. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens to all of them.

Getting blocked for forwarding email is a huge headache for email hosting companies, because they have to (in this example) call Comcast, and ask to be unblocked. This takes time, energy, and money to make happen. It can take 5 minutes, or it could take 2 days. It depends on the systems that the blocking company has in place. Some systems are automated, and some are not.

So what is the answer to this problem? It’s amazingly simple. First, email hosting companies shouldn’t be auto-forwarding at all, since their customers can use one of the many popular email clients (like Outlook), that can check multiple email accounts at once. Outlook can also auto-filter the email to separate folders, giving Jim the separation he needs between his work email and he personal email.

We have finally removed all forwards and catch-alls from all of our email servers, and if someone ever asks to have their email automatically forwarded again, we will just point them to this article.

]]> http://www.johnmckown.com/hosting-companies-must-stop-forwarding-email-or-else/feed/ 0 http://www.johnmckown.com/web-site-mistakes-that-cost-you-money-dns-problems/ http://www.johnmckown.com/web-site-mistakes-that-cost-you-money-dns-problems/#comments Wed, 17 Oct 2007 02:19:42 +0000 john http://www.johnmckown.com/web-site-mistakes-that-cost-you-money-dns-problems/ OK, this is a very basic, but powerful tip that will improve your web site’s performance. It is a problem that I see over and over and over again with web sites that prevents your customers from using your web site. It’s a problem that I have seen on very prominent web sites, and also very basic web sites. It is a very easy problem to fix, and yet many people don’t know that they have this issue.

In a nutshell, here is the problem:

Let’s say for the purpose of this example your domain name is “MyCompany.com“.
A potential customers hears about your company, and decides to check out your web site and learn more about your company.
So the customer goes to their web browser and types in “http://MyCompany.com”, and hits “GO” expecting to see your web site.

Then – Nothing. Your site doesn’t appear.

Realizing their mistake, more savvy web users realize that they forgot to put “www” before your domain name. So if entered correctly, the domain would look like this: http://www.MyCompany.com. But many, many, many people are too lazy to enter the entire domain name into their browser. You may assume that both domains are the same, but in actuality they are not. The “WWW” part of the domain name is called the hostname, or the subdomain. These are setup on the web server, and have to be entered by your hosting company when they setup your web hosting.

All about subdomains

It’s important to note that when you buy a domain name, your are buying the MyCompany.com portion, but you can put WHATEVER YOU WANT as a subdomain in front of the domain. At the very most basic domain name setup, you should have the WWW and empty hostnames setup so that they both reach your web site. But there are other subdomains that you should consider for your web site, as each subdomain can be used for a part of your web site, an application (like a blog), or for separate web sites entirely.

Sample subdomains

• WWW – again, every site has this to reach your home page. Sample: http://www.MyCompany.com
• MAIL or WEBMAIL – this is an easy way to create a link to your webmail program, or your email server. Sample: http://mail.MyCompany.com
• BLOG – obviously enough, you can use a subdomain to point to your blog. Sample: http://blog.MyCompany.com
• HELP – this is an easy way to give your customers a reference site for help in using your site or services. http://help.MyCompany.com
• CLIENTS, MY, or EXTRA – this is an easy way to make a client area where your clients can log into your web site. We use “extra”, which is short for “Extranet”
• INTRA, or STAFF – use these subdomains to create an Intranet site for your staff to access. Call Delaware.Net for information on how to create an Intranet.

Do lots of subdomains help with search engine ranking?

No. Neither does purchasing many domains. I’ve seen companies purchase domain names with the word “delaware” in them hoping this will help them with local search ranking, and it doesn’t. Domains help with memorizing how to get to your company’s web site, and that’s it. Its better to have one good domain name than to have many. I own “delaware.com”, and it is amazing how many people simply type it in to reach it. A big portal is a coming to that site soon.

So don’t forget…

Make sure all of your sites come up without the “WWW” in front of them. It can save a lot of missed web traffic! Good Luck.

Recently, I bumped into a local business web site that is the only web site for the business. It is run on WordPress (the same software running this web site). Blog hosting fees and and the cost to launch a blog using pre-built designs is so low, that it is basically free. We charge $50 per year for a blog, and yes, I consider that to be almost free for a business.
So what is so bad about using a blog for your entire web site? Lots of things.

Reasons for NOT using a blog as your company web site:

1. Blogs contain posts in chronological order
   This makes it hard for you to stick product pages and informational pages into your site to promote your products.
2. Dated sections drop in search engine performance over time
   It is indisputable that blogs help you company show up higher in search engines. But not without quality content that is DATE SPECIFIC. Over time, the older posts in the blog lose some of their search engine power, and they become harder to find in the blog. Will the older pages show up in search engines? Sure. I have seen blog posts from as far back as 2001 in Google results, but you don’t want your products and services hidden from view.
3. Think of a blog as a STREAM of data coming from you
   Blogs are great for sharing things as they happen, and for sharing professional opinions and advice regarding timely issues. This is why a blog is a good supplement to a more standardized company web site.
4. Most blog owners don’t modify their blog code
   Out of the box, blog software is great for posting articles, and getting content online quickly. But to make the blog into a company web site means that you will have to install a lot of third-party plug-ins, and you would still need to get under the hood and get your hands dirty with the code to make your site world-class.
5. There are better solutions for posting certain types of content
   One misuse of blog software that I have seen is using them as an image gallery or portfolio. While this is POSSIBLE, it can be done using much better tools that look 100 times better. For instance, my company has a plug-in for web site that allows the site owner to create a handsome Flash image gallery and project portfolio. And it isn’t limited by the date-sensitive nature of blog posts.

It may sound like I am downplaying blogs and their importance – I am not. Blogs are critical to marketing. But like every good technology and tool, people sometimes overuse them and misuse them. Blogs should be ONE tool in your tool belt, not the ONLY tool that you use.
There are some exceptions. Here are some situations where a blog works great as a primary web site.

1. Professionals working for large companies that already have a web site
2. Freelance reporters and authors
3. For a sharing tips (like this site)
4. A content-specific news web site
5. Political web sites
6. Any site that relies on date-specific content

Why people make this mistake and settle on a blog for their business web site

1. Money - I have a saying that I like to use when presented by strange actions by other businesses: “If the behavior of a professional or business doesn’t make sense, look to the money first”. The majority of times this tends to hold true. Really thrifty companies that don’t want to spend money on their web site might opt for a blog to get started. While this might get them online quickly, they will outgrow the blog quickly if they are the least bit successful.
2. Domain Name Confusion – Amazingly, the choice and use of a domain name is STILL a confusing thing for many new businesses. I bump into folks all the time that don’t realize that they can have a business web site at www.theirbusiness.com, and then a blog at blog.theirbusiness.com. Not sure why they don’t get that, but that is an opportunity for me to help them out.
3. Laziness – Some folks simply don’t have the time or energy to do an all-out web site for their business, or they are satisfied with a simple web brochure. The problem with blogs is that they aren’t even a quality web brochure.

If your business is profitable to begin with, then the money your bad web site DOESN’T make will always much more money than the cost of building a great web site. Bad web sites cost companies a fortune. New business is lost. Brand identity and image are tarnished.

Initial impressions are important. I had a customer last year that only spent serious money on their web site after a potential client called them and said “I am interested in doing business with your company, but your web site is so unprofessional, I am not sure that you are legitimate“. We didn’t build that ugly site, but we hosted it. And I had tried to convince that company to let us upgrade their site for months. Only when they plainly saw that their ugly site was COSTING THEM SALES did they get very serious about their re-design. The new site cost them under $10K, and they landed six-figure projects through the new web site. Now their business is booming, and the web site as part of a new advertising campaign is partially responsible for that.

So treat your web site seriously. Yes you should have a blog. If you are professional working for a large firm, a blog web site is a great way to share your expertise. But if you are a small business that needs a professional presence to show off your products and services, you will need more than a blog.

Folks are now waking up to the power of blogs, and how they can help their company’s image, their search engine optimization (SEO), and how to better communicate with customers. Unfortunately, most people setting up blogs are too lazy to realize their true benefits. And guess what else? Mediocre web design shops profit from this laziness.

People always want a quick fix – like taking a diet pill instead of eating right and actually doing the exercise they need. Hey, that sounds like me! So… when most folks realize the power of blogs, they say “I need a blog”, and there are many hosting companies that are more than happy to set one up for them, just like me (I sell blogs like this one for $50 per year, which includes a domain name). But here is the bad news. A good, useful blog isn’t just software. A good, useful blog is one that has information in it that clients actually seek out because it is useful to them.

Web 2.0 web technology, such as blogs, is changing the way information is being distributed around the net, as search engines now process this content differently than regular web sites. In fact, entirely new search engines are emerging that threaten Google and Yahoo because they work differently, put the collaborative search power into the hands of the people, and they are VERY effective. While I can tell you all about these engines and how they work in another blog post, this whole new genre of search and marketing power is called social networking and social bookmarking.

Do hosting companies and little one-man web shops take advantage of all of these features for their clients? Of course not. They just say – “we can give you a blog, it will help your SEO”, and most people unfortunately take the bait and set it up without any additional help or consulting. What happens next is an inevitable one-way ticket to an empty blog web site. Gartner recently did a study where they announced that 200 million blogs are abandoned, and while the number sounds high to me, I can easily see why so many blogs are abandonded.
Some examples of how NOT to deploy your blog

This week, I checked out the web site of a company located near me, whose name I prefer not to mention. Their web site was recently redesigned by a graphic designer that doesn’t really understand SEO, social bookmarking, or Web2.0 programming. How do I know this? Easy – from my years of taking drab web sites and making them work better. What this company’s new web site became, unfortunately, is nothing but an online print brochure, with some free blog software and photographs thrown into it. They probably think it is great. But 4-5 years from now, if they are lucky, they will realize that they missed an opportunity to have a site that could have added a lot more value to their company.

This company’s web site has a blog in it that says it is a knowledge base for answering customer questions. But it is empty! All this does, is send web site visitors to a dead-end, and it shows the world that this company is not really serious about their web site. Lesson: An empty blog or forum is worse than no blog or forum at all.

The Realtor Blog

Then there is a Realtor that has a “blog” in his/her web site. This Realtor has an under-performing web site, complete with an annoying Flash intro movie. If you really want to self-destruct your web site, put a flash into in front of it. The Flash intro fad disappeared (thank goodness) almost as soon as it started, waaay back in 1999. After you suffer through the flash intro, you are greeted with a very basic web site that has a “blog” in it. It can barely be considered a real blog, because it doesn’t take advantage of any of the latest Web2.0 features that blogs need to work well, like tagging.
Why is this blog useless?

• It has only three posts in it.
• Someone along the way told this Realtor that a blog is a diary (that is how blogs originated), so he/she uses it as a personal political soapbox. It is OK to have some of this kind of content in your blog, but it shouldn’t be the only content in the blog.
• Instead of educating folks about real estate, the area, schools, financing, or home improvement, the blog has three negative posts that complain about how the media affects the real estate market.
• All three posts say “I am selling more homes now than ever, even though the media says things are so bad”. That may be true, but it smacks of desperation.
• As I mentioned above, it doesn’t have social bookmarking or social networking technologies in it. This means that no one will find the site from alternative search engines.
• There is no SEO technology in the blog, so traditional search engines such as Google won’t index it well.
• No customer-focused content

Everyone has heard of the old famous saying in real estate – “The three things that matter most in real estate are; LOCATION, LOCATION, and LOCATION”. Well, in the world of blogs and Web2.0, the saying goes like something like this: “The three things that matter most with blogs are; CONTENT, CONTENT, and CONTENT”.

Before you start writing content like crazy for your blog, remember – it takes the right combination of design, technologies, content, time, and persistence to get the most out of your blog. Don’t just blog because you feel that it is something you HAVE to do to market yourself online. That isn’t true. If you write your blog content with customers in mind, they will repay you with their business. If you would like for me to help you with your web site, give me a call.

The written content that is necessary to build the web site can come from a lot of areas, including brochures, interviews, videos, history, testimonials, product information, and more. When none of this information is available for the web site, then it might be time to employ a copy writer that can help you to write this content. Typically a professional copy writer will charge about $1,500 or more to help write the copy for a small web site. We know of several copy writers that we can contact if a client wants to go in that direction, but most of the time we end up helping the client to organize this content in one respect or another.

When planning your new web site, you should begin to gather and organize all of this content for your web developer, and it should all be provided in digital format (such as Microsoft Word).

I used to believe that, but what I found is that they really don’t work all that well.

I am CONSTANTLY called (weekly, and sometimes almost daily) to sponsor a golf tournament, a luncheon, a baseball team, and on and on. If I did ALL of them I would probably go broke. I’ve done those long enough that now I can honestly say that they rarely (if ever) turn into tangible sales. They do help our local image, and it does get our name recognition out there, but that again is hard to quantify into actual sales.

Do I sponsor events knowing that I will never get a return? Absolutely. Especially when the person or organization asking me for a sponsorship handout is one of my better customers. To this day we still donate over $50,000 per year in services to many organizations. Even when a service is given away for free, there are still phone calls for support, guidance, etc. So that number may actually even be higher.
But there are MANY easy things that you can do to market locally inexpensively, even if you are not an Internet company.
With that in mind, I started to draft a response to the email list so that I could provide some alternative methods for marketing locally that REALLY add value directly to the bottom line.

Here are some that are off the top of my head. I could probably come up with 50 easy.

1. Offer free trials for services/applications

2. Make it easier to switch to you, or sign up with you

3. Offer service bundles that tie in trials on more expensive services

4. Try BNI (www.bni.com) or other marketing lunch groups

5. Create a NO-RISK, time limited offer (ie “no setup until August 1st”)

6. Attend chamber of commerce mixers (we are doing two of them tonight, actually)

7. Make generic business cards for your company that don’t have a person’s name on them. Put those at car washes and bulletin boards at the Gym and the YMCA.

8. Create another business card that has a cash value towards your services. Hand it to a prospect you meet that is sitting on the fence.

9. Create a blog and have your staff post helpful articles to it (we are only just now getting around to doing one company-wide – http://blog.delaware.net/)

10. Market to your own customer databases with email newsletters

11. Use analytics to find golden pages in your sites.

12. Cross-market services from within your applications and pages.

13. Embrace HTML email instead of fighting it – make nice email signatures for your staff that have links and graphics in them.

14. Put an article on your web site explaining how to move a site to you (http://www.delaware.net/support/gettingstarted.cfm)

15. Integrate asking for referrals from your customers into your process somehow (lots of gold here)

16. Use press release web site and local newspaper forums for press releases

17. Randomly follow-up with existing customers for feedback (asking for feedback usually exposes other problems that your customer has that you can help them solve.

18. Write articles for local newspapers

Have more local marketing ideas? Reply to this post and I will publish them!

]]> http://www.johnmckown.com/local-marketing-for-internet-companies-should-you-help-non-profits/feed/ 1 http://www.johnmckown.com/why-you-need-a-blog/ http://www.johnmckown.com/why-you-need-a-blog/#comments Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:13:43 +0000 john http://www.johnmckown.com/2007/06/29/why-you-need-a-blog/ Blogs. Certainly you have heard of a blog, but many people still don’t know what they are and why they are useful. In this article, I am going to explain what a blog is, why you need one, and how they can make you and your company a lot more money. Almost for free.

Wikipedia gives this definition:

A Blog (web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

Like all online tools and applications, blogs started out as a tool and a toy for geeks. If you look at email, forums, html, and now blogs, they were all used by geeks for some time before businesses found a way to monetize them. Blogs have fairly recently become the next online tool to become indispensable to businesses.

Blogs started as VERY simple online applications for posting online diaries. Those diaries were used as personal diaries, political activists, amateur news reporters, and for anyone that needed a soapbox. Today, that has all changed, and with this article I’ll show you some of the reasons why blogs need to be a necessary part of your online marketing.

Blogs are different from forums
A blog is not a forum. This is a bit of a pet peve of mine, because I constantly hear people calling forums “blogs” all the time. When you post on a forum, you are not necessarily a “blogger” either. Forums are discussion web sites for discussing topics with a group of people. Forums are better than email listserves because the discussions are searchable, and they persist much longer than discussions in an email list. The main difference between a blog and a forum is that the main content in a blogs is written by an individual, small group, or company, and in the case of a forum, content is written from visitors to the forum. Since posts to a blog generally start from the inside of the group, the content is always relevant to the subject matter of the blog web site. Forums, on the other hand, allow posting from generally anyone that signs up and participates. This makes forums a real challenge to moderate and maintain, because people can discuss anything they want to. When you are trying to create a massive community around a demographic, then you want a forum. When you want to market the expertise of your company or small group, then you want a blog.
Benefits of a Blog

• Increased sales
• You become known as an expert in your field
• They get more traffic from search engines
• They get traffic from next-generation social networking search engines (like technorati.com)
• News agencies are more likely to do a story on your business
• Real-life stories and tips warm up your web presence
• Educating customers on how to be a better customer helps your business run better
• You can update your blog on your own without your webmaster’s help
• Helps build communication between departments that are posting to the blog

Blogs are rewarded handsomely by search engines

Search engines recognize blogs in several ways. At the most basic level, they naturally crawl them like any other web site, indexing the content n them. In this way, a blog provides your company with a second web site, which can cross-link to your main web site. If your company has only one web site, this can help. But blog software tends to be very optimized for search engines out of the box. As long as you are entering meaningful articles that contain your keywords, text links, and categories, then you should get most of these benefits automatically. Blog software typically generates nice page titles, text link titles, and search engine safe URLs. All of these Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks make your blog get noticed by search engines.

Blogs are Free

You can create a blog in minutes online for free using sites like Blogger.com. This has eliminated all barriers to creating blogs online. As you can see, this blog you are reading is not a blog on Blogger.com I don’t choose to use Blogger because It is a hosted application, and I can’t extend it like I can WordPress. WordPress is also free, but you will need a host for your blog. Naturally, Delaware.Net hosts blogs, so you can contact us about that. But the point of this article is not to sell you blog hosting. The purpose is to educate you so that you can realize the benefits of blogging for your business.
Blog content density is better than your web site’s
Since blogs are typically written by real people sharing tips, they are full of content that search engines can consume. In contrast, a corporate site might have lots of forms and other necessary pages that tend to water-down the overall content value of your site. Having a bloated site makes it harder for your web pages to come up in search engines without creating specific content that exists just for search engines, like putting big paragraphs of keywords on your site. People tend to get turned off when they see that garbage content, and they don’t trust the sites that have it in them. Blogs don’t need to resort to this, as long as they have enough articles in them.

Web standards help blogs
There is a lot of talk about using web standards in the web design industry, and blog software today uses many of these standards. For example, blogs can be skinned with new graphics very easily because they use CSS heavily.
Sample uses for your company’s blog

* Create a how-to section – these tend to get attention from search engines
* As a replacement for a static news article on your company home page
* Warn customers of possible problems that they could have with products/services in your industry
* Use the blog as an ask the expert section of your web site
* Tell customers about new products and services
* Link to related articles and web content from your blog

Who SHOULD have a a blog

* Anyone that is a trusted advisor to their clients
* Anyone that has written articles or tips that are designed to educate their clients
* Anyone that gets privileged access to services or products
* A person that is in support, or who fixes problems for a living
* Employees that believe in (and are allowed to) be open about their methods
* Any professional that has extensive training and/or experience on a subject
* Companies that need a way to share their victories and tell stories about their projects
* A senior professional that is willing to share lessons that they have learned

Who SHOULD NOT have a blog

* Unenthusiastic employees
* A CEO that does not wish to share
* A worker that punches the clock and who doesn’t care about community
* Someone that has terrible grammar and can’t write
* Someone that sees blogging as a chore

Blogs represent a part of the next-generation of search engines because they are a part of the user-driven, user cataloged part of the Internet known commonly as Web 2.0

Folksonomy – its probably not a word that you have heard before, but this simple concept helps to unlock the theories of social networking, social bookmarking, and it also explains how blogs are changing the way people search the Internet for content. If a taxonomy is the formal process of categorizing and naming things, a folksonomy is the democratic categorizing and naming of Internet content that is done by people when they categorize photos in Flickr, and when they categorize their blog posts, and when the describe links that they post onto Digg.com, etc. This social behavior change in how people categorize and rank internet content is essentially building a NEW SEARCH ENGINE that adds a piece to the puzzle that Google really doesn’t provide.

Folksonomies help drive Web 2.0
Every time someone posts a video to YouTube, others can comment on it. They can rank it. They can help make it more popular because the number of times a video is watched is also tracked. Below is a great video that explains how this is affecting the way people use the Internet to get and publish data, and how that interaction is being harnessed to allow people to collaborate.

Blogs can also be modified to take advantage of social bookmarking. By implementing plugins that take advantage of social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Del.icio.us, furl, reddit, and other sites, it is possible to spread the word about our new blog posts quickly, but you have to start the ball rolling on you own. This can make things a little more time consuming, but it is worth it.