Image by ozgurmulazimoglu via Flickr
Please check out All About Dragonflies. It’s been fun to develop, I hope you all enjoy learning more about dragonflies. I thought it was especially interesting that the babies bite, but adults don’t. hmmmmmmmm
Our goal with this blog is to share marketing tips with our small business associates and clients. If there's a subject you would like us to cover, please drop us a note!
Image by ozgurmulazimoglu via Flickr
Please check out All About Dragonflies. It’s been fun to develop, I hope you all enjoy learning more about dragonflies. I thought it was especially interesting that the babies bite, but adults don’t. hmmmmmmmm
Be sure to check out our latest efforts at RamonaGolf.com! We will do our best to provide the visitor with all things golf in Ramona, CA including the latest tournaments, course information, local golf links, as well as selected training guides for the golfer out to improve their game.If you know of an upcoming tournament, help us spread the word to improve the attendance of the event. Charity tournaments are our favorites!
Tags: charity, courses, golf, ramona, tournaments
We’re excited to introduce our latest development project - Ohio Sports Teams - a social networking site dedicated to sports in the state of Ohio. If the site goes over well, we will be expanding to add other large states such as Illinois, Texas, California, and New York.
Feel free to drop by, sign up, comment, and become part of the community!
Tags: development, Ohio, Social network service, sports, website
We’d like to share with you our latest client: eDataLockDown.com. We are working with them to optimize their site for search engines as well as for useability.
This company provides managed data backup and storage services. We will soon be partnering with them to offer our clients the same service. Just think, never worry about if your data was backed up, never worry about how to store your backups - your data will always be available to you, wherever you are.
We will let you know more as we implement this service for our valued clients.
Many apologies for our extended down time. We expect to have all services up and running within the next 4 hours.
An explanation of what has happened will be forthcoming at some point today or tomorrow. I’d call it a comedy of errors, except that it’s not very funny, for us, or for our clients.
As most of you know, we migrated to a new server earlier this year. One of the reasons we did that was to bring our operating software (system, web, and email) up to current technology standards. Our plan at that time was to migrate to a new server every two years.
So why so soon?
From the start, we have had problems with the server. Despite literally spending hundreds of hours researching, pouring over logs, and discussing the subject with our upstream provider, we have never been able to resolve the issues.
Additionally, late last week our server was hacked into and used to distribute thousands of illegal spam emails. This, of course, caused many ISPs to block emails coming from our server. Again, despite many hours of effort and discussions with our upstream provider, we have been unable to remedy the problem.
The long and short of it
It is our responsibility to provide our clients with a fast and reliable web and email server. We felt we were not performing this task to our high standards, so we elected to make further technology investments in order to return our service to one of the best.
We thought it might be helpful to briefly discuss what happens when we migrate to a new server. There are many different things that need to happen behind the scenes in order to make the migration a success. So here, in chronological order, are the steps that happen.
There are a few other tasks that need to be performed, but these are the highlights of the process. If you have any questions, please feel free to make a post in the comments section, and we will try to answer them.
Last week we discussed setting a SMART goal for your website. This was a sample goal we created:
I would like to increase traffic to my website by 10% and begin gaining 1 new client each month by the end of December, 2008.
Once we know our goal, we can start to set out some strategies. Marketing strategies are simply high-level thoughts on how to achieve the goal. Here is a possible strategy we might devise in order to reach our goal:
So this week, take 5 minutes to devise a new strategy to help you achieve your goal. Don’t forget to write it down!
We wish you great success.
We will, at some point in the not-so-distant future, get around to discussing the recent restructuring within SmileyRose Web Solutions. One of the things we will be sharing with you is how we found an overwhelming need within our client base to help with your marketing efforts, especially online.
One of the greatest points of discussion from our clients stems from the topic of “too much to do, I have no time to read all the information that’s available”. So we are going to start this series of “Website Marketing 101” articles, with the goal of publishing them weekly, and having them take no more than 5 minutes of your time (to read, anyway).
If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?
Do you have a goal for your website? Does it go beyond “sell more products” or “get more customers”? Goals need to be SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
An example of a SMART goal for a website might be:
I would like to increase traffic to my website by 10% and begin gaining 1 new client each month by the end of December, 2008.
So take another 5 minutes, right now, and think about what a SMART goal for your website (or your business) would be. Write it down or type it in Word or Notepad or scribble it on the back of your hand. Next week we will start working on achieving your goal.
Until then, we wish you all the best.
Related articles:
Image via Wikipedia Full story here
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It’s difficult to understand this judge’s thinking:
The Virginia law “is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Justice G. Steven Agee wrote.
How can SPAM be protected under the first amendment?? Did this judge miss his history class? Does he not understand the reasoning behind the first amendment? It is to allow people to speak their minds and not be persecuted by the government for doing so. How can millions of emails, sent anonymously to people (or “email addresses”, technically) be considered speaking one’s mind? So now it’s ok to harass and annoy millions of people and hide behind freedom of speech?
As many of you know, our outgoing mail service became unusable a few weeks ago. Emails were taking over 24 hours to arrive at their destination. This was not a service outage. This was a brand new server, with plenty of processing power and more memory than it can every use, being brought to its knees by SPAM.
As individual users of the Internet, we can shrug off the problem, increase our SPAM filtering on both the server side and on our computers locally, and pretend the problem doesn’t affect us. The problem is, it has a profound impact on us as small business owners. The costs of fighting SPAM are astronomical. From SmileyRose’s point of view, we spend probably 20 hours a month on SPAM related issues. Of course, the SPAM problem of a few weeks ago escalated that to about 40 hours for the month. But if you look at how much time and money you spend on fighting SPAM, you’ll see that the costs aren’t just relegated to service providers.
We, the people, are going to have to start speaking up loud and clear. We, as business owners, are going to have to start speaking even louder. SPAM directly impacts our bottom line, and these days as we watch our profit margins shrink because of the escalating cost of goods, we can’t allow that to continue.
UPDATE: Here is CNET’S analysis of what happened. Simply put, the law was too loose. That’s a shame.
Tags: CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, First Amendment, First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Freedom of Speech and Expression, G. Steven Agee, United States, Virginia
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