by Aaron | Feb 22, 2006 | Web Hosting
I used to hate with a passion the web hosting providers that I used and relied upon (cough, cough) before I started Web Smart Central.
Just the simple task of communicating was a foreign concept.
Other things used to bug me but you could break it down in the end to just plain bad communication.
If you have watched the Seinfeld TV show at any stage, you may have seen the episode where George Costanza being completely inept and hopeless at everything he ever did in life, simply turned himself around 180degrees to lead a charmed life, by doing the exact opposite of what he normally would do.
Well that is the exact philosophy that I chose when starting this hosting firm.
I figured if I do the exact opposite of what the bad hosting firms were doing to me, then I would have a great web hosting company.
I was right! Thank you George Costanza.
My main goal was give my clients as many avenues of communication as possible and to keep them informed when necessary.
To achieve this, I’ve setup… a Postoffice (email lists), Forums, Support System, Phone contact, Emergency Mobile Contact
Since I’m in regular contact with my clients through email, I am building up a relationship with them that other web hosting providers fail or are unwilling to do. Their loss.
As I’ve always said (assuming that your product is good) business is all about relationships.
Aaron
by Aaron | Feb 22, 2006 | Web Hosting
I have been getting a fantastic newsletter from Scott Bywater from copywritingthatsells.com.au
He mentioned finding out from your existing customers their biggest fear they had before they become a customer of yours.
Simple question, but it the answers give you a direct key to knowing what you have to do to alay those fears that are present in your yet-to-be customers.
Invaluable knowledge wouldn’t you say. I asked my client list this very question.
“What was your biggest fear when deciding to sign up for our hosting service?.”
I was blown away by the response of 22% of my clients taking the time to answer my question. Not only answer my question, but give me other fantastic information as well.
It was such a good response that I’ve added some of the responses to my testimonials page and tagged a link to it from my homepage.
Go and check out what they had to say on the testimonials page.
I strongly suggest that you ask your clients what their biggest fear was, and you might be pleasantly surprised. I was.
Aaron
by Aaron | Feb 16, 2006 | General
Doing joint ventures with other internet businesses is a fact of life these days. Bottom line is you can grow your business in leaps and bounds with just one good joint venture.
Affiliates are a form of joint venture, and is a topic that some internet users have an aversion to. Affiliates have their sales tracked by embedding a fairly obvious user ID string onto a link. It’s easy to spot an affiliate link and some people will go out of their way to either strip out the affiliate information relieving you of any commissions you may have been entitled to or in fact hijack the link with their own ID.
It’s just another form of stealing when you get right down to it. I refuse to expose myself to it, so I wrote a script some time ago to stop theifs dead their tracks. I’ve now decided to open it up for everyone else, mainly to get some promotion for my Australian Web Hosting and Development company, and maybe sell some of Jim’s software as well.
Jim Edwards had a program written called Affiliate Link Cloaker that has all the bells and whistles on it, and automates the whole process for you.
But if you want to see what all the hype is about you can test it for yourself, you can use my very own online link cloaker. Nowhere near as good as Jim’s product, but it get’s the job done and it’s awesome for hiding affiliate links
Beware it is manual process and probably not for newbies and also doesn’t have any error checking other than for pain in the ass spammers. Shite In = Shite Out
Enjoy
Aaron
by Aaron | Feb 16, 2006 | General
I’ve been an avid student of Brett McFall and his marketing ways for just over 2 years now, and last year when the World Internet Summit was held on the Gold Coast, I was very I’ll and wasn’t able to attend. It was disappointing for me.
This year as soon as tickets went on sale I jumped at the chance, grabbing one of Brett’s Birthday special price tickets. Only this year, it’s being held in Sydney.
So I’m off on a plane to Sydney for 4 days next month to immerse myself into internet marketing, joint ventures and all things internet. I can’t wait. For me personally since I am not a newbie to the internet (far from it in fact, since 1993), I’ll be using the time to meet like minded people and perhaps gather some Joint Ventures and great contacts.
Here’s the catch cry from Ted Ciuba (one of the 3 amigos) that run the event.
“Give Me A Willing Person…
Loan Me A Laptop Computer
With An Internet Connection …
And Within 72 Hours That Person
Will Have A Product, A Website …
And Money In The Bank – PLUS
A System To Make That Money
Over And Over Again FOR LIFE!”
Now they hold a contest where they pluck someone from the audience and use them as an example of the process to make a product and sell it online. From scratch.
Of course the huge figures that you see on the website are based on selling the product to the speakers (internet marketers) existing lists. Since the guinea pig in the audience didn’t have any contacts yet, this just shows the power of joint ventures. But the principles of the task are the secret sauce that you must know.
If you are thinking about generating an income online then why reinvent the wheel. You’re wasting your time. I’ve wasted about the last 2 years slowly learning about internet marketing when I could have been moving at full steam straight away if I had of been to a seminar like this back then.
Visit the World Internet Summit site here to see what it’s all about.
If you decide it’s what you’ve been waiting for then please contact me as I’d love to know someone ahead of time that’s going to meet up with them at the event.
Aaron
by Aaron | Feb 9, 2006 | General
I am a big fan of search engine optimisation – SEO.
But it can be so frustrating at times.
Let me outline for you the keywords that I’m trying to crack and have been since March 2005.
Brisbane Web Hosting and Australian Web Hosting
These are big players in the keyword marketplace. They fetch a high price on Google Awords and Yahoo Search Marketing (the old Overture)
I have advertising in both and it costs me, but it without it I would have no targeted traffic generation at all. Notice the bolded word targeted. It’s the best kind to push for.
Over the last few months I now have a good ranking i.e position 1 and 2 for Brisbane Web Hosting, and 2 and 11 for Australian Web Hosting, MSN and Yahoo respectively. But I’m still not showing in Google.
Now why is that. The Google web crawler visits my site up to 3 times a day, yet I still don’t show for my main keywords that I’ve optimised for.
I do show for other obscure terms that I never would have guessed people would be entering.
Aparantly Google has a sandbox (a trap they keep you in) for high profile keywords that you can only get out of over time. Supposedly up to 18months. How ridiculous that I have a number 1 postition in Yahoo but don’t even show in Google. My content is fresh, I am a legitimate business, but I’m still shut out.
The worst part is that there are listings in the first 10 pages that are just rubbish. I’m not talking about taking a front page spot here, I just would like to at least be in the first 10 pages and work it up from there, like I did with the other engines.
I have yet to work out what to do about this. I’ve been told by experts that I still need more links to my site. But when I do a check on the competition even on the first page of Google, I actually have better links and more of them than they do.
Will update the blog once I find a solution. If anyone has any ideas for me to try, I’m all ears.
Aaron
by Aaron | Feb 9, 2006 | General
I see it again and again with businesses not taking ownership of their web presence. They are leaving money on the table in the bucket loads.
If you don’t take control then no one else will.
Just talking with people that I come into contact with about their sites, it’s truly amazing to here what they have to say.
Some don’t even know how much their website is costing them in actual dollars per year to run, domain fees, hosting fees, useless editing fees from consulting firms that they pay and no edits ever take place. This astounds me, when they are small businesses that are usually solo operators.
When I talk with them just in general conversation (no sales pitching going on at all) about enhancing their website to generate more business for them, I’m met with blank stares. You can give people all the information in the world, but if they aren’t ready to take it on board, it’s a useless battle.
Does anyone else have this problem? Getting a point of passion across to someone that just isn’t as passionate about it as you are.
That reminds of what a founding hosting customer of mine once said to me. “You care more about my website than I do”. I remember laughing at the time, because it was so very true.
Aaron
by Aaron | Feb 9, 2006 | Web Hosting
Domain sniping (aka fleecing, aka duping) is rampant.
I own several domains, more than I can count on my 2 hands, and yet again another year rolls around and I keep getting these Domain Name Expiration Notices from a company (Domain Registry of America) that has absolutely nothing to do with the company that I get my domain names from.
It’s a very smartly marketed letter sent direct mail and to the uninitiated it looks like a bill that needs to be paid, and I bet many people just pay it like a bill, without understanding what it all means.
The worst part is that their fees are $25 US or $38 AUD for a .com for 1 year. But what is even worse than that is that I know people that have .com domains where they paid and continue to pay $90 AUD for them per year. So to them this appears as a real bargain and they of course jump at the opportunity.
With the likes of godaddy and registerfly, and many others now flogging domains for $6 US, and spending money hand over fist advertising it like crazy on all mediums, you’d wonder why anyone would pay these sly marketers.
There is a lesson here people, that it doesn’t matter what you charge, it’s how you approach the sale. These offline direct marketing techniques for online businesses should be embraced.
I disagree with this particular mail out since it takes advantage of those that don’t know any better, but there is very much a place for offline marketing in online business.
To date my marketing efforts have been exclusively online, but with my current Website Renovation Contest underway, I’m stepping up my offline marketing. Starting with the free publicity generated from the contest.
Aaron
by Aaron | Feb 8, 2006 | Web Development
I’d like to quickly mention that I personally use WordPress and b2evolution for my blogging needs.
In fact I’ll be moving away from b2evolution on my other sites and into WordPress, since I find the SPAM filters in WordPress to be far superior. Blog SPAM is as much of an issue as it is for normal email. So any software that handles it better will put you ahead from the start.
Customising WordPress is straightforward and simple, and the admin area is very easy to use. I can see why after installing and customising a couple of WordPress blogs it has grown so fast among the blogging community.
We have several blogs in our installable scripts area that you can install and try out.
b2
b2evolution
myBloggie
bMachine
Nucleus
pLog
pMachine
Serendipity
WordPress
Aaron
by Aaron | Feb 7, 2006 | General
I need to have a party now. The Web Smart Central Business Blog (or Aaron’s Business Blog) is finally here. The title is not set in stone yet.
I’ve ummed and ahhed about putting the blog live since November 2005, for several reasons.
The main reason is that blogs are personal by their very nature and you can’t escape that, and I had reservations with the fine line between keeping it business and not getting to personal.
We’ll over the last few months my thinking has slowly changed, and over the last 2 weeks, I’ve done a complete backflip on business blogs and for a business throughly recommend them, and I’ll go into why I think so.
I’ve stumbled across (isn’t that always the best way to find something) a great site through another great site. Flying Solo by Robert Gerrish is a site dedicated to the Solo Entrepreneur, which I frequent regularly, and that led me to Entrepreneurs Journey by Yaro Starak dedicated also to you guessed it Entrepreneur content.
I’ve also had the pleasure of following Ed Dale a very successfull internet marketer from Underachieving Mastery for a long time.
Yaro Starak just did a blog post and Ed Dale has just done a blog for a large multinational IPO and has espoused the virtue of blogs for ages, which has combined convinced me that blogging for any business is a good thing.
Let’s face my facts. I own and operate a small business. My target market is other small businesses that are looking to or already have an internet presence.
Why hide it? as many internet businesses do. They think just because the internet is anonymous they can get away without putting contact details and not disclosing who’s involved with the business.
We are in business with each other. People do business and want to do business with people, not faceless websites.
Offering a blog that is business based but also my own is a fantastic way to build rapport with my online family. Both existing and those still deciding.
I’m not alone in my business, I do have helpers that also now how to operate the business, but I do run the show and as such can stand up and say that I am proud to own and operate a small business that I truely get enjoyment out of. Sure it has it moments but what in life doesn’t.
Aaron
by Aaron | Nov 23, 2005 | Web Development
I have just noticed not 1/2 hour ago, that for the last 5 months or so months (I don’t really know how long) our main logo was displaying badly in Internet Explorer.
PNG format with alpha transparency in IE5.5 and up, was rendering with a light blue background. I can’t believe it.
I was positive that I checked IE before going live but it was so long ago that I’ve now forgotten. And no one mentioned it to me.
Talk about egg-on-face.
You always say it can’t happen to you until it does.
There are several fixes for this out there here’s one of them.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/
Oh by the way, I didn’t bother with any fixes, I just changed from PNG to GIF because I could with a standard white background on our pages.
Aaron
