Archive for the ‘Marketing’ category

The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business

February 9th, 2010

If you own a business/mailing list, or provide any type of communication to your subscribers, YOU MUST ABIDE all CAN-SPAM laws and regulations. Yes, we all hate spammers. The FTC receive millions and millions of Cyber Crime reports regarding users who violate CAN-SPAM laws and regulations, PLEASE DON’T become one of them.

If you own an internet marketing group, agency, or internet marketing software/mailing list, please abide these rules.

  1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
  2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
  3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
  4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
  5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
  6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
  7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

Source: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm ; Sept 2009

Everthing your business needs to grow. – RatePoint

January 11th, 2010

“The smaller the business, the more room for growth” – That has to be one of my favorite quotes I saw on a bumper sticker. Anyways, so your looking to expand your clientele and brand awareness. Trying to keep your customer testimonials in order, clean, surveys, email marketing, just trying to grow right? Good! You’re on your first step to sucess.

Http://www.ratepoint.com – RatePoint provides all these tools in one. Customer surveys, sevice rating, email blasts (email promotions) and much more. Take a look at the trial, its free, won’t cost you anything .

I promise!

How to install WordPress on a subdomain

December 3rd, 2009

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to install WordPress via Fantastico on a subdomain created from cPanel.

Phase 1 – Creating a subdomain

1) Login to your cpanel (domain.com/cpanel)
2) Enter user and password
3) Locate your subdomain icon, should be a dark folder (click it)

icon subdomain

icon subdomain

4) Enter in the subdomain youd like to use..in my case.. –”marketing.webmasterpunk.com”

subdomain

subdomain

5) Select “Add”
6) Your subdomain has now been setup. Easy right?
You can now go back to your home cPanel page, or close the screen and login again.
Phase 2 – Installing  WordPress on your new subdomain
 
1) Lets go back to your control panel www.domain.com/cpanel (this is only if you have cpanel linux hosting)
2) Locate “Fanstastico De Luxe” (the big blue smiley face, yes hes cute right?)
fantastico

fantastico

3) Click the smiley face :)
4) You should be presented with a list of menu items on the left, look for WordPress.
wordpress

 5) After clicking it, you will be presented with a few options.
6) Select New Installation (its in bold, you cant miss it!)
7) Now you should see a bunch of fields and dropdowns. Follow my screenshot below. 
Note: My screenshot will install WordPress on – Marketing.webmasterpunk.com (which is the root level)install wordpress

8) Notice how I left the install directory blank? Thats because I want -”marketing.webmasterpunk.com” to be the directory of the isntallation, if you enter in /blog or /news – it will install the blog on a directory under your subdomain such as “marketing.webmasterpunk.com/games/” which I dont really advise people to do.
9) Enter in your login information, password, admin nickname, email, site me, and a description of what your blog will be about.
10) Click install WordPress
11) This wil automatically install and update WordPress into your subdomain.
12)  Click Finish installation and you are done.

This is my subdomain blog. : http://marketing.webmasterpunk.com/

To access your subdomain: http://subdomain.domain.com
To access your wordpress admin panel: http://subdomain.domain.com/wp-admin

Note: Do NOT enter http://www (WWW) will not work in most cases.

Enjoy!

Ultimate Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress

November 24th, 2009

I’d like to introduce a great new tool I found today on the WordPress website. It allows you to add Google Analytics within your blog and track it through the Google Analytics website.

Steps:

  1. Download the plugin here
  2. Unzip and upload into your wordpress directory (wp-content/plugins) folder
  3. Activate the plugin – login to your wordpress account (usually site.com/wp-admin/)
  4. Go to Plugins, locate Ultimate Google Analyitcs, select activate
  5. Now click Settings on the left sidebar, you should see Ultimate GA link, click it
  6. You’ll now be presented with a few fields, account ID and 2 check boxes
  7. Be sure to leave the 2 checkboxes checked, do not uncheck or no data will be passed through your account
  8. For the first field, enter in your Google Analytics account #, this can be found going to your site profile at google.com/analytics/

Wait 24 hours to validate your account so data passes through back to Google. You are now setup to receive statistics on your website.

Why isn’t my Google Analytics Tag Not Working?

October 30th, 2009

I’ve heard this story so many times before. There’s a simple fix for this. Most of the times, depending on if your hosted on a linux or windows server, your index page might be index.html, index.php, default.html or default.aspx, or heck, even something unique like web.php.

Google Analytics will usually search for the most common default web strings such as index.html.  It sometimes will not recognize any other pages. To fix this issue, follow my simple steps below.

  1. Login to your Google Analytics Account.
  2. Locate your website profiles (ie., www.domain.com) on the top right of your dashboard.
  3. After your dashboard loads with your profile, click edit on the right side.
  4. You page should refresh with some new information, again, top right, click edit.
  5. Now you will notice a few fields to enter, which some people forget.
  6. For the 3rd field area, where it says “Default Page?” enter in your homepage, index or default with your extension.
  7. Click save changes, your done.
  8. Go back and select check status to verify your website is transmitting traffic details back to Google Analytics.

Easy right? Goodluck and happy Analytics!

Website Optimization- Free website speed test!

October 18th, 2009

Let’s face it. If your website is over-taken by images, tons of HTML, inline CSS and a stack of JavaScript files..You’re in for trouble. The average image on a website should be compressed and optimized under 30KB. Yes, ideal range would be 1-2KB but it’s a bit difficult to reach that. Aim for 5KB, 10KB, anyhting under what you currently have.

The average website should take less than 60 seconds to load for Dialup users (56K, AOL, NetZero, Juno..etc). Yes, there still are the oldies who run 56K Modems and still use AOL. (see my upcoming post about DSL and speed issues to find your carrier)

http://websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Web Page Analyzer is FREE. Type in the URL to your website, hit analyze. It’ll give you an output of every image on your website, comemnts about the HTML, filesize and much more.

Once you have received your report about your website, start optimizing it! Don’t wait. You want to make navigation to your site as smooth as possbile for your end-users.

Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies

October 13th, 2009

Internet marketing can attract new business, renewals, potential customers and much more. If you are just starting your empire online, here are 10 quick tips to keep you on-top of your strategies.

  1. Start with a web promotion plan and an effective web design/platform.
  2. Get ranked at the top in major search engines, and practice good Search Optimization Techniques.
  3. Learn to use Email Marketing Effectively.
  4. Dominate your marketing niche with affiliate, reseller, and associate programs.
  5. Contract an expert to analyze your website.
  6. Build a newsletter/signup opt-in-list .
  7. Publish articles or get listed in news stories.
  8. Write and publish online press releases on free websites and paid.
  9. Run contests and gain new visitors.
  10. Blog and interact with your visitors.

If you follow these simple steps, you’ll be working your way to the top in a matter of months.

FREE WordPress Themes

October 1st, 2009

Default WordPress themes are boring and not unique. Need a change? Looking for FREE WordPress templates? Bingo!

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ - Over 1,000 FREE WordPress Themes.

It’s easy, download and upload to your WordPress themes/templates directory in your root folder of your WordPress install. Then, go to your widgets and active the theme. Enjoy!

Free Press Release Secrets

September 25th, 2009

You’ve got a website, good product, and now you want some inbound links to your website, right? Easy. Check out this cool neat tool that I’ve been using for years.

http://www.free-press-release.com/ ==> Free Online Press Release Distribution Service

OK, lamens terms, write a press release or article, signup  (ITS FREE), submit your press release, select your cateogories and your done! This coulnd’t be any easier right?

In a few days; when Google Bot or any other search engines comes back to index your site, you’ll notice a spike in traffic; new links coming from blogs, news worthy websites, and other misc websites.

How do I check if this actually works?

Do quick Google keyword check – Type in “Title of article here” in Google and hit search. You should see all the websites that took your press release or articles in a matter of days after submission. It’s a great way to release your product or any news-worthy events to thousands and if not millions of websites on the internet.

Check it out, join the community and see what Free Press Release has to offer you!

BROWSERCAM – Cross Browser Compatibility Testing Tools

September 22nd, 2009

So you have a website and your curious what it look’s like in other browsers but dont have more than 2 browsers to view it..right? 3 years ago I found this neat little tool called BrowserCAM- BrowserCAM allows you to screen-capture your website or any URL you might present to the system and view compatibility.

For example, you can define that you want the following criteria:

  • Internet Explorer 6
  • Windows Vista Home
  • 800 by 600 resolution

Within a few minutes, their script will run a virutal machine that goes to the website you provided with the specs you also provided. It will take a screen-shot of your website and post it back on your dashboard. Cool tool eh? All your trouble with cross-browser compatibility can be fixed with this neat little tool. They offer a free-trial before you buy, I’m signed up, so should you!