Pros And Cons Of Getting VOIP Right Now

You have a telephone, right? You have a computer, right? You want to save money, right? BAM, you are a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) candidate. It is inevitable that VOIP will replace traditional telephone service at some point. The only question is when should you jump in? VOIP is quickly becoming more reliable and receiving wider acceptance. In fact, phone companies are already taking advantage of the technology to provide cheaper long distance rates. Like any emerging technology, however, there are kinks in the system that are still being worked out. Advantages VOIP has many advantages over regular phone service. One primary advantage is its low cost. If you have a fast Internet connection (DSL or cable), you can make PC-to-PC phone calls anywhere in the world FREE. ...

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7 Warning Signs of an Unprofitable Web Site

7 general mistakes which you should avoid to make your web business successful and not Unprofitable. 1. Selling To Everyone Means You Sell to No One If you do not target your offer, it will confuse your customers. People are not patient. In a recent survey, 73% of people claimed to be "insanely busy". If you do not develop a target customer profile and appeal directly to them, you will lose customers. And they will never come back to your site again. 2. Web Flea Market: Buy a Web Site or Get a Grocery Coupon People are selling Web Sites, classified advertising, pre-paid legal services, long distance phone cards, and reminder services via affiliate programs...All on the same Web Page! Think about that the next time you go to your grocery store. Do they offer to sell you a Web Site...

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The "e" In eBusiness Does Not Mean Exempt

I've gotten quite a few emails recently from ebusiness owners who seem to think that just because their business is conducted online or from the comfort of home that the rules and regulations that govern brick and mortar businesses do not apply to them. The ebusiness questions I get most often do not involve building websites or conducting ecommerce. They are more what I call the "Do I Really Have To" line of questions, such as: "Do I really have to get a business license?" "Do I really have to get a tax ID number?" "Do I really have to pay taxes on income from my website?" Yes, yes, and yes. Do I really have to get a business license? This is one requirement that many ebusiness entrepreneurs think they can skirt because they don't have a brick and mortar establishment. Sorry...

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How To Choose A Good Web Host (When They All Look Alike)

Choosing a web host is never easy. There are just so many unknowns when it comes to finding a host. It's hardly ever possible to walk into a web host's office, look around, meet the owners, and get a feel for whether or not you'd like to do business with these people. It's important, though, that you bend over backwards to establish whether your prospective web host is a credible provider - or a fly by night artist. The webmaster industry is awash with horror stories about signing up with a web hosting company, onlty to find out later that this 'business' is run by a 14 year old who lives at home. For the most part, you'll make your decision using whatever information you can find online. Start out with the website of the web host you are considering. Is it professionally...

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Google Brings the Earth to Your Desktop

Google Inc. has launched a new software package that allows you to see satellite images on your desktop. Google Earth lets you search for locations anywhere on earth and display 3D aerial images of major cities and tourist attractions. Google Earth is in development, but a free beta version is available for home users. Locations can be searched by address, intersections, cities, zip codes or countries and the images can be zoomed in close enough to see streets and buildings. The images generated are 3D – you can rotate the view to see different sides of an object. You can navigate using a mouse or the keyboard, and view selectable layers to display information about local features such as roads, terrain, schools or golf courses. Images of 38 US cities can be viewed from...

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How to Choose the Right Online School

Kids aren’t the only ones getting ready to go back to school. So are some of their parents, and they won’t necessarily be attending classes at a brick and mortar institution. Thousands of adults are now pursuing higher education online. Debbie Alms, 32, a relationship facilitator for Retek, a software company in Minneaopolis, Minn., is among them. She already has a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from the University of North Dakota, but is now pursuing an MBA at Jones International University to enhance her career. “I decided to pursue a degree on line for a number of reasons,” says Alms. “Flexibility is one of them. I can still work and I like not having to report to class at a certain time on a certain day. I do a lot of my course work at night and on weekends, so I didn’t...

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What makes a good Web Hosting Provider!

When building your website and getting it hosted online, you want your site to be up and running on the World Wide Web 24/7 without any hitches so that it is making you money all the time and all you have to worry about then is getting visitors to your site, doing seo, getting repeat visitors, maximizing your sites revenue, etc. You don’t want to have to worry about your web hosting and it’s stability. So, when choosing a web hosting provider to host your website with, you want to try and get the best web hosting provider so that your site is always up and running smoothly on the World Wide Web. So what makes a good Web Hosting Provider? There are many things that make up a good web-hosting provider. Some of these include good support, good uptime, good backup system in place,...

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How To Use The Ebay “Checkout Service”.

Back in the ‘old days’ of eBay, getting payment for the item was entirely left up to sellers: you had to choose your payment service, sign up for it and then send links to your buyers. Now, though, eBay handle most of the complexities of payment for you with their checkout. How Do I Offer the Checkout? The checkout will be offered to your buyers automatically. When they win an item, eBay send them an email with a ‘Pay Now’ button that takes them to the checkout, and they can also access it through their My eBay page. It is in step 4 of the ‘Sell Your Item’ process, the payment and shipping step, that you can choose which kinds of payment you want to accept through the checkout and which you don’t. PayPal: You should be accepting PayPal. You might want to click ‘Edit Preferences’,...

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A new definition of "Buyer Beware".

"Who's Suzie?" My wife Katrina had been acting strangely ever since I had returned home from my Native American cultural class, not to mention the weird phone call I received just before I left, full of little pauses instead of our usual fast-paced communication. Now that I was home she had been pretty much ignoring me completely, then comes this strange question. Katrina was calm but I could tell there was something under her skin as she chopped up the vegetables for the night's dinner. "I don't know anyone named Suzie." I replied. "Well come to think of it, there's my old friend Peter's wife Suzie." My wife remained calm, " Do you want to tell me anything?" she replied. "There is nothing to tell Kat." Katrina was heating up; her trademark rosy cheeks had evolved to boiling teapot....

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How To Report And Handle Ebay Transaction Problems.

Even when there aren’t any disputes, you might run into a few transaction problems on eBay – glitches that aren’t really anyone’s fault, but are just the result of a technical malfunction or another situation beyond the buyer or seller’s control. The number one cause of problems like this is email. Email Problems. If you use the Internet a lot, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the problems eBay can cause, and many buyers and sellers are relying on email to keep them informed about their transactions. Sometimes, you might find that your emails to a seller bounce –you might have the wrong email address, or there could be a problem with their email. This happens especially often when buyers have free webmail accounts at places like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. When this happens, the...

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Tips to Build Your Email Address Database

WHY BUILD YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASE? Gaining your customers' email addresses will: Provide an additional channel for reaching your customers Increase the ROI of your marketing investments Significantly reduce your customer acquisition and marketing costs Allow you to easily measure the impact of your marketing campaigns Increase your customer participation and retention rates With ongoing postal and telemarketing pressures impacting marketing budgets for many organizations this year, email marketing could become the "silver lining " for many marketers.   But how do you create a successful email marketing campaign if you do not have a substantial email database?  That question may be one of the largest Internet...

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5 Linking Strategies that Work

One of the most effective ways to promote your business online, especially if you use search engine optimization to build traffic, is linking. However, as a certified Web CEO professional, and someone who also uses only "white hat" optimization strategies, I see people make a lot of mistakes when using this technique. Below are some of the strategies that I use to make linking more effective, as well as raise my rankings in the search engines. 1. Do your homework first. You're probably wondering what "white hat" techniques are. "White hat" techniques are techniques that will always work with the search engines, like writing articles, blogs, and press releases, and optimizing individual pages for the search engines. These are the primary techniques I use in addition to linking because...

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The Need for Help Desk Tracking Software

Companies that use help desk software note the many benefits of having it. Flexibility in web-based programs and the ability to effectively organize and manage trouble tickets are two of the most prominently praised features. Many businesses are now realizing the importance of help desk tracking software. They’ve learned that effectively managing consumer issues can create a loyal customer base. Help desk tracking software is a vital component in help desk technology. Your competitors know the benefits of help desk programs. In order to stay abreast of current trends and customer expectations, you should too. Help desk tracking software allows your company to deliver effective and timely responses to customer trouble tickets. By using a ticket-tracking program, you can prioritize...

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How To Request A Reciprocal Link

On the Internet, various webmasters exchange their links for free to generate link popularity as well as targeted traffic on their sites. This exchange of links is called reciprocal linking and it an important tool for webmasters to gain the targeted traffic on their websites. If you are also serious to build up a strong Internet presence, start making requests for reciprocal links. But if you think you don’t know much about reciprocal linking and want to learn how to request a reciprocal link, read this article. First of all you must understand that you can attain much-desired link popularity with the help of quality reciprocal links. In fact for a long-term Internet presence, a strong reciprocal linking is needed to be built by you. Building reciprocal links is a strategy to...

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7 Ways Email Can End Your Business Relationships Before They Start

Too often, people forget they're anonymous in the internet world. Your friends and colleagues might know you as being a tireless worker, a great friend and loving parent, but I don't know that. To me, you're just a font. You're a font in an email, or in a forum post. If you give me access to your website, then you're whatever impression the website creates. But largely, you're anonymous. So if you want to establish trust in your internet business dealings, make it your goal to paint a professional image via email. I'm a copywriter, so I'm constantly combing the web for possible clients and cohorts. Recently I've encountered some internet personalities who have left me scratching my head in puzzlement. Might we have had a fruitful business relationship? I'll never know, because...

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The Importance Of Email Backup

Viruses, software failures, power failures, human errors, hard drive failures are only a few examples of what could destroy the data on a hard drive, including all documents, pictures, emails and other files! Most home computer users don't need an expensive backup solution; as they only need to burn the folders with important documents and pictures to a CD-RW from time to time; this ensuring that in case of a disaster they can easily get them back. Togeder with documents and pictures, it's a critical operation to save the emails, attachments, address book and other important data from within the email client; otherwise in case of a computer problem the user will find himself in the impossibility to get them back, and this can be a really unwanted situation especially for webmasters...

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How to Put Colors in Your Photograph

Wouldn’t it be nice to see your black and white photos in full color? Learning to create and edit old photos is fairly easy and very worthwhile. Digitally restored photos can be used to make digital scrapbooks, posted to Web sites, shared through email, and printed for gift-giving or display. To achieve this effect, we will need to colorize using Paint Shop Pro. According to Bill Brewer, “colorizing is a feature built into PSP that keeps the luminance values (the bright and dark parts that make up the recognizable image) and colors the image with one color. The image to be colorized needs to have a color depth of 16.7 million colors, and it can be in full color to start with (reduction to grayscale is not required before colorizing). Using that command brings up a dialog box where...

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Cyber Crooks Go "Phishing"

"Phishing," the latest craze among online evil-doers, has nothing to do with sitting at the end of a dock on a sunny afternoon dangling a worm to entice hungry catfish. But, if you take their bait, this new breed of online con artist will hook you, reel you in, and take you for every dollar you have... or worse. "Phishing" describes a combination of techniques used by cyber crooks to bait people into giving up sensitive personal data such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, bank account numbers, dates of birth and more. Their techniques work so well that, according to FraudWatchInternational.com, "phishing" rates as the fastest growing scam on the Internet. Here's the basic pattern for a "phishing" scam... You receive a very official email that appears to originate from...

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Real Estate Website Scams

Many still say the Internet is like the Wild West. When it comes to the proliferation of scams, this is certainly true! As webmaster for over two dozen legal, real estate, and other business oriented websites, we receive a lot of email and phone solicitations. Often our clients ask our opinion on an Internet service or software product. We have researched and found the majority of offers directed toward real estate firms are what I call the half-truth variety. It is interesting that these offers directed at small to mid-size firms are like live Internet viruses, they seem to mutate over time. The core remains, but, the exterior packaging (a.k.a. sales pitch) appears totally different. One of the most enduring of such Internet scams is the offer to list your real estate site...

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You Won That Ebay Auction! Now What Do You Do?

It’s a heady feeling when you win your first eBay auction: a mixture of happiness and perhaps just a little fear. After all, there seems to be so much to do before you can actually get your item. What do you do next? The simple answer is: you send payment to the seller, as quickly as possible. The quicker you pay, the more your seller will like you, and the sooner your item will arrive. But how you go about it? That all depends on how you plan to pay. PayPal. PayPal is one of the most popular options for paying on eBay, to the point where eBay decided to buy the company. It allows instant electronic payment across the Internet. Money goes instantly from your credit or debit card to the seller’s PayPal account, where they can either use it for Internet purchases or transfer it...

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