When you choose an advertising network, you need to look at a lot more than how much ads cost or how much you will get paid to host ads. You need to make sure that the reach of the ads is appropriate for your target audience.

Advertisers
If you are getting ready to run ads online, make sure that your ads are being seen by the very people you know to be your ideal audience. What good is it going to do to run an ad for new recipe card software if the ads are going to be running on sites for used car parts or dog grooming supplies? You want your ad to be seen by cooks, moms, crafters, or anyone else who might actually click through and make a purchase.

Publishers
If you are going to give up valuable retail space on your website, you want to ensure that your site’s visitors are going to find interest and worth in the ads they see. Otherwise, the only things you are going to get in the end are a bevy of annoyed site visitors and ads that do not generate any income for your site.

Niche Ad Networks
The good news is that there are niche ad networks popping up. I’ll give you an example. One of the more specifically targeted companies is Intergi (www.intergi.com), an advertising company that caters to gamers. They partner with the foremost gaming web publishers to give advertisers the exposure to gamers worldwide. Gamers are a very specific subset when it comes to purchasing trends. They are also super important right now to advertisers targeting the wired generation. Studies have shown that gamers aren’t just kids anymore. Most gamers are older, working adults with a good supply of disposable income. They are an advertiser’s dream.

I think I mentioned before that my ex employer has retained me on a freelance basis to help research and purchase a new phone system for his business. I was always pulled into communications decisions when I was working there, even though I was only the Art Director. I think it was because I understood technology more than most at our company. And, I have a nose for a good deal.

One of our biggest problems in the past was the sheer level of long distance phone charges accrued due to having multiple locations and salespeople working out of home offices. I have no idea why that was such a vexing issue back years ago, but today there are multiple, economic solutions.

Talkswitch, phone system, PBX is just one of the various systems that have gained popularity in the past year or so. TalkSwitch uses VoIP (Voice over IP) technology and works with IP or standard analog telephones. The most useful feature in the case of our particular business is that any phone can be added as a simple extension. Cell phones, home phones, and other office phone systems can become part of your main network. The phones can be located anywhere in the world. It really adds new meaning to the phrase, “it’s a small world.”

Ideally, our packaging company is an international venture and should not have to reply ion being located in Florida. Our salespeople are located all overt the world and are often on the road with their cell phones. Why should a customer have to call the main office and leave a message when they can simply dial an extension from our toll free number and be instantly connected to anyone in the company? The best part is that when I do act on a freelance basis to do design work for a client, they never have to know I’m not actually in the office.

When you are just starting out in business, it might seem like obtaining all of the software and equipment you need in order to become successful is an impossible task. The start up costs can be staggering.

My dentist’s office recently upgraded to an entirely digital system, including how they take and store x-rays. I commented that it must cut costs to store the x-rays digitally, both in terms of physical space needed and materials, not to mention manpower. I was told that although that might look like the case, the software was so expensive to obtain and keep updated so as to be nearly prohibitive.

One solution for business expenses like software, vehicles, and other necessary equipment is using a resource like Crest Capital, which specializes in software leasing. You get the tools you need to make your business succeed, without having to use a line of credit to get them. It’s a viable solution for small and medium sized business, especially those just starting out in the marketplace.

It’s no secret that the general housing market is tanking all over the place. It is especially bad here in the Tampa Bay area. In fact, the sales of new and previously owned home in this particular region have been harder hit than in most other areas. It’s a bad time to have a house on the market and I can say that from experience – unfortunately.

Just because the residential market is so difficult right now does not mean that real estate as an investment is no longer a viable option. You just have to look around for other ways to invest. Going in and buying a slew on pre-construction condos and hoping to flip them is no longer the way to make a quick buck.

TIC, or Tenant In Common, transactions, are where a developers purchase an institutional-grade asset and then offers investors a percentage interest in the property – or, fractional interest. I know this is an over-simplified explanation of the process, but my goal here is not to fully educate you on the ins and outs of a TIC as much as it is to point out that real estate as an investment is still alive and kicking. Unlike flipping a house, partnering in a TIC Investment is a long-term commitment and there are usually income guidelines. Nonetheless, if properly executed, they can provide a positive monthly cash flow.

A lot of my readers are individual business owners, as in they do it all themselves, without a bit of help. That can stretch you to the limits once your business starts expanding. Sometimes it is all you can do to keep up with orders and answer all of the e-mail your business generates. In the midst of all of that you still need a way to connect personally to your customer, both existing and new. People are looking for real people with real voices when they approach a business.

If a new customer finds your site and wants to contact you, they probably have to use an e-mail form or pick up the phone and call. What if you could turn one click into immediate one-on-one communication with that potential customer?

Here is a very handy tool: Ifbyphone – free phone calls from your web site. The system gives you a link that can be placed on a webpage, Powerpoint Document, in an e-mail and even in a Word document. Your customer simply clicks that link and enters their phone number. Then, their phone rings, your phone rings and you are connected in real time! Nothing could be simpler. Plus, there’s absolutely no technical expertise needed.

The best part is that you don’t have to know anything about web design or phone systems or anything technical. It’s a simple system that anyone can use. And, you can sign up for a free account. Check out their site. They have a live demo so you can see how the system works right now.

Here is their press release, in case I left anything out:

Ifbyphone Releases revolutionary Phone-Me-Now: the world’s first Zero Configuration Click to Call With 100 free minutes per month Phone-Me-Now
Promises to be biggest Killer App of 2008

Chicago, IL: December, 2007 – Ifbyphone, a voice infrastructure and applications development company providing enterprise class services to Small and Medium sized Businesses (SMB’s), has just released a solution destined to revolutionize the web to voice space: Phone-Me-Now, a zero configuration click to call application. To introduce Phone-Me-Now to hundreds of thousands of businesses that will be able to use it as a sales tool, Ifbyphone is making it available free of charge for 6 months and providing the first 100 minutes per month of usage for free as well.

This patent pending solution can be integrated in less then 60 seconds into any website, email or hyperlinked document and requires no experience to configure. It’s literally the Internet’s first instant voice mash up tool.

“While many companies provide click to call services we were troubled by how complex they are to use. Users had to cut and paste HTML or javascript, rendering these services outside of the technical reach of thousands of businesses. Once we designed this patent pending solution we configured our existing smart click to call services to work with the Phone-Me-Now interface.” says Irv Shapiro, Founder and CEO of Ifbyphone. The zero configuration Phone-Me-Now service is literally the Holy Grail of web to telephone integration and ease of use.

Using Phone-Me-Now is as simple as typing: www.phone-me-now/your-business-number into any web site, Word Document, Powerpoint Presentation, Spreadsheet, PDF or email. When a reader clicks on the link they are prompted for their telephone number and the Ifbyphone systems call your business, calls the reader and conferences the call. Phone-Me-Now works with any telephone number you register on your Ifbyphone account.

“We wanted to eliminate any barriers to basic click to call, and know that Phone-Me-Now will immediately set an industry standard for rapid deployment. If the Internet is all about speed and response, what could be a more appropriate Killer App for 2008 than Phone-Me-Now, which puts a business owner in instant voice communication with their customers,” adds Shapiro.
Free Phone-Me-Now accounts can be updated to additional Ifbyphone packages that include:
- Click to Call with Custom Dialog Forms
- Integrated Call Routing and Reporting
- Find Me
- Virtual Voice Mail
- Virtual Receptionist
- Outbound Voice Broadcast
- Web Configured Voice Dialogs (Hosted IVR)
- Call Recording
- Backend Database Integration
- A Complete Call Management API

All Ifbyphone solutions work with any telephone system and are fully portable if a company moves from one telephone transport vendor to another.
# # #
About Ifbyphone
Ifbyphone is a hosted voice application and platform company with a simplified approach to the deployment of stand-alone and web-integrated voice services for small and medium sized businesses (SMB). Combining advanced telephony and web services, Ifbyphone’s web-integrated voice applications turn the small business telephone into a powerful tool, increasing lead generation, improving sales conversion and enhancing the customer experience. Ifbyphone makes it easier for customers to connect with you from online and off. All of Ifbyphone’s applications are accessible via a click on a Web site, an inbound call to a toll free number, an outbound call or with the help of a programmable API. Our configuration and deployment tools look and feel just like Web applications, and require no previous knowledge of telephony programming or terminology.

Previously available only to large enterprises, Ifbyphone is delivering these converged voice and web solutions at affordable monthly fees, with no major upfront costs. The company’s services are available online and through a network of SMB value-added resellers.

The internet is a big place. If you want your website to receive as much exposure as possible, it just might be time to set aside an advertising budget. Of course, now that means choosing what kind of advertising to go with and where to advertise.

Let me make a case for pay per click (PPC) advertising. It was the hot ticket years ago on the internet, then it saw a fade in popularity, but with the advent of contextual advertising it has seen a resurge in popularity that has lingered for years now. Modern PPC advertising networks have a lot of safety mechanisms in place so that you are not going to pay for click fraud or for non-converting publishers. You pay only for the internet traffic that sees your ad and actually clicks through to your site. You can dynamically change your ad content and what you are willing to pay per click on a daily basis.

Most (not all, but still most) PPC ad networks have made a move to contextual advertising, which means that they keywords you specify will help ensure your ad is displayed on websites with like content. What that means in the people who see your ads will see them because they are already looking for similar topics and information. They are more likely to show an interest in your ad, and therefore your website.

If you believe the hype, you might think the only choices you have are Google and Yahoo when it comes to choosing a PPC contextual network, but that’s not the case. There are actually more economical options with just as many features, safeties and the same access to quality publishers.

One of those options is Adknowledge. They run BidSystem.com, behavioral targeting ad network where you can bid for traffic in display, email and search engines. They are offering new advertisers $50 in Free PPC advertising, so it is the perfect opportunity to try their network, test out some ads, and see if this is the solution that’s right for you.

If you want your own domain or a blog where you have full control or a web presence for your business, you are likely looking for the web hosting services that meet your needs. You can design a website and have it residing on your hard drive, but until you have your site on a server, nobody will be able to access it. So, that is where web hosting comes into play. You pay a monthly or annual fee to a company to host all of your web pages, images, e-mail, etc.

You cannot count on the free hosts. I cannot stress that enough. Your best option is to find a web host that fits into your budget and pay for an account so that you have absolute control over your web content.

Looking around at all the thousands of options for web hosting can be confusing. I spent a good month researching my options before I settled on my current web host. I looked at their customer rating, prices, pre-installed scripts, availability of customer service, uptime, and a handful of other parameters. I feel like I made an educated decision.

When I compared companies, I will tell you that I stuck to the larger, more established web hosting services. I ruled out the small players and new companies. I wanted a company with a good track record and a reputation in the industry that I could see via multiple sources.

One of the companies I researched was Network Solutions, simply because they have been around since the dawn of time – at least in internet years. They are not a fly-by-night operation and their reputation is the most valuable thing they have to offer. Their monthly costs are reasonable and their plans offer adequate space and transfer limits. Plus, they have 24/7 customer support with live people available. That is a whole lot more than the smaller companies will offer you in the way of help and support.

Do your research. That’s my best advice. But, I do suggest you add Network Solutions to your short list of options.

This one is for all of you small business owners who find their way to my blog. I have a mailing list with over 1000 members who are nearly all small online business owners, and I understand the struggle to make a mark online. I see how competitive the market place can be and how important affordable, effective advertising is if you want to rise above the rest.

Google and Yahoo Are Expensive
Are you looking for a way to advertise online in the highly competitive PPP (pay per click) environment? Sometimes it might not seem like it, but there actually is a world outside of Google and Yahoo when it comes to the world of PPC. Adknowledge’s BidSystem can run text ads at up to 30% less than the Google Adwords or Yahoo network prices. Their system has click fraud prevention measures and you do not pay for low converting users, which removes a lot of the risk of PPC advertising.

Why Contextual Advertising?
Contextual advertising is the current online trend and it seems to be the best bet, because you’re ensured that your ad is being displayed to users who are interested in similar content and topics. If a user does a search for Florida beaches and sees ads for a Florida hotel or travel agency on the resulting site, they are more likely to click on the ads since they arrived at the site already interested in the subject matter.

Try This
If you want to see how BidSystm will work for your advertising needs, now is a good time to give them a try. If you sign up now they will give you $50 in FREE PPC Advertising. You can’t lose with a bonus like that.

I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels in my life. I used to travel a LOT for work and now I travel simply because I enjoy getting out and seeing the world around me, or more often the state around me. Last night, my best friend and I were discussing booking one of the theme hotels in Kissimmee for us and the kids so we can take a mini vacation at the parks.

The thing about hotels is that they are either truly pleasant, or a real chore. A pleasant hotel has two things, in my opinion: cleanliness and décor that makes you feel spoiled and surrounded by luxury.

There are companies that specialize in beautifying retail establishments, restaurants, resorts and hotels. When decorators go to work on a hotel, they want it to look nice, but they are often restricted by budget issues. That’s why buyers tend to gravitate to businesses like Tres Amigos, a seller of rustic wholesale furniture, who in their own right have a large buying influence and can obtain décor at much lower prices because of the volume at which they purchase.

Tres Amigos focuses on Spanish Colonial, Tuscan, Rustic and Southwest style. And, although they sell to everyone on a per piece basis, it only takes $1000 to bump up to wholesale status. And because of the sheer volume of their business, they are able to cater to huge projects just as easily as they can to the small ones. A hotel planning a folksy southwest look will find their selection of Mexican wholesale furniture invaluable. While most large-volume sellers are going to only offer the kind of items that are “a dime a dozen” in their lack of uniqueness, Tres Amigos has Spanish Colonial wholesale furniture and accessories (among their other styles) that are made exclusively for them so that their inventory is able to reflect a “one of a kind” flavor. They can even work with you to design items that are unique to you.

Additionally, Tres Amigos has a full container program and can source from Mexico, India, Indonesia and elsewhere.

Individual customers like me are not excluded, because they still make their inventory ultimately affordable. And, I stumbled on their hand crafted jewelry selection, which is absolutely stunning and more affordable than I had even imagined. I grew up in a home where my parents decorated using mostly a Tuscan style, so this furniture feels like home as I browse the selections. I’m currently debating one of the armoires they have on their site right now. It would look VERY good in my bedroom.

When I contact customer support at any given company these days, I skip the 800 number and the mailing address and go straight for e-mail. I like that communicating via e-mail gives me an instant record of all correspondence between myself and anyone at the business. All too often, though, I find that my messages have not been properly tracked on the business end and if several employees are involved, I often have to get on the phone anyway to help untangle the path my inquiry took.

Businesses of any size can afford to use simple customer management systems, like PerlDesk help desk software. This particular program implicitly tracks all incoming e-mails, logs all requests and issues so that any staff member can log in and see the full scope of the situation, and allows a variety of reports for tickets and other pieces of info. When you have a central system like this, anyone can login and have all of the information they need in order to interact with a customer. And, as more and more business applications are now, it is web-based and requires no on-site installation or backup.

Years ago, when I worked at a large non-profit professional association, we had an internal system that did many of the same things PerlDesk does, but it was clunky and complication. Nonetheless, what it did accomplish is that no matter who a member called and spoke with at the association, they always received consistent information since we were able to login and see the absolute most current status of any issues or communication of file about the member.

Even a very small business benefits by having a help desk set up. PerlDesk just happens to be the number one rated system of its kind. It’s worth checking out, since it is the industry standard.

I have mailing list of over 100 people who are all involved in one way or another in the business of hair accessories. There are hobbyists who only sell to friends, small businesses in their local communities, and big online retailers. We all have the same goal and share a lot of information.

One thing the members of the group are great about is helping one in another in brainstorming things like business names and logo ideas. So, I see a lot of those logos bandies about. I have a couple tips that I would like to share, because all too often the logos I see people choosing to use in the end are complicated, multi-colored designs.

1. Make sure your logo is just as attractive and easy to recognize if it is printed in straight black and white – no grey, no half tones, nothing except solid black and white. There will come a time you want a simple version of your logo for invoices or low-cost flyers. When you get into color, costs go up, so you want to always have a b/w option.

2. Use clean lines and simple designs. Think about what your logo might look like if you need to shrink it down to a 1-inch square. What does it look like if you make a copy of a copy of a Xerox machine? Will it become incomprehensible once you make it small? Is there so much detail that it turns into an unattractive blob?

3. Your logo needs to be easy to remember. If a customer sees your logo, will they remember it? This is your brand, your image. Think about how the Nike swoosh is burned into your brain. Ideally, your logo will incorporate something just as unique, simple and memorable.

4. Make sure you keep your logo in a vector-based file format for future use. A jpg might work if you are putting your logo online, but it won’t print well.

One thing I do a lot of as a freelance designer who specializes in corporate and industrial business work is what I call logo repair or logo recovery. Often, a business or individual will have a copy of their logo that someone else designed for them, but not in an appropriate digital format. They will have a printout or a low resolution jpg and when they need to have print jobs done, they no longer have a clean logo in a print quality format. I go back and re-design their logo, often improving it as I go, and give it back tot hem in an appropriate vector file format. If you need a service like this, please drop me a line via my contact form. My prices are super reasonable.

I talked about several topics involved in getting your online presence up and running when you are a small business owner. I’ve gone over choosing a host, designing a logo, choosing a name for your business and ways to make sure you stay ahead of your competitors in the search engines.

So, how about taking a look at who is visiting your site, how much traffic you are generating and where that traffic is finding you? That is all as simple as making sure you have a good stats program installed on your site and then learning how to make the most of the data it gives you.

GoStats offers both free and paid professional stats for your site. Best of all, they are simple to install and even easier to interpret. I suggest at least signing up for the free stats and seeing how comfortable you are with the data presentation. You can always upgrade to a more advanced account.

The free account does give you access to information about when and where your visitors are coming. I find this to be the most useful part of my stats, because it tells me if advertising is driving traffic, if links from other businesses are successful, or if a particular search engine is returning results for me. It also tells me which days of the week are best for my target demographic and what time throughout the day those people are online and looking for the particular information my website offers.

If you know which pages on your site are most popular, you can gauge where you need to focus future efforts. If I see that a majority of my traffic is coming in to look at a particular product, I will add new products along the same lines.

If you already have stats, learn how to use them. If you don’t have them yet, sign on at GoStats and start learning more about your site’s traffic.

I have a website where I offer free hair bow instructions. Connected to that site is a mailing list of over 1000 people, most of who are small business owners. I get asked a lot of questions about starting a small business and most often what people ask is, “how do I choose a web host?”

I wish I had one answer for everyone, but I don’t. There are so many factors involved: scope of your business, online tools you will use, presence of ecommerce, reach of customer base, your budget, and so forth.

It’s often good to find an online tool that helps you explore a variety of web hosting companies at a glance. There is a site called Web Hosting Choice that has a good selection of tools you can use to filter through hosting companies, their various hosting packages and parameters such as options, bandwidth, cost and extras. You can look at several option, choose a few companies that look like they may work for you, and do some follow up on your finalists,. In the end, you will come out with an educated selection that has been made on your own terms.

You can browse through the webhosting listings in a simple directory format. There is a directory that list my host and another that lists by plan. Or, you can use the advanced search if you have particular aspects that are important to you in choosing a host. Maybe you want to find a package that has a monthly cost of less than $10, or maybe you need to make sure your plan will include a shopping cart system, pre-installed scripts, or that is allow FrontPage extensions. There are over 40 parameters on the webhostingchoice.com search you can specify when using the advanced search.

Don’t just use the hosting company that your friend uses or that someone e-mailed you a coupon for. Do your research and pick the host that will give you the plan that is perfect for your needs.

Due to my Girly Things website and affiliated mailing list, I get a lot of e-mail asking about how to set up a website for selling crafts and handmade products. I always take the time to highlight the options available, depending upon the site owner’s experience with website software. One thing that I always tell people is that you need to have reliable and fully customizable shopping cart software for your site. You want to have full control over how the cart works and the ability to tweak it if you want to make global changes to pricing or policy.

Ashop Commerce is one of the top shopping cart solutions available. Unlike some of the free programs you can install on your server, Ashop Commerce has a tech support team that will walk you through everything. You can test the system free for 10 days and see how easy it is to set up and how dedicated the support folks are about helping you find the right ecommerce solution.

Instead of installing software and attempting to make it work on your own, Ashop is hosted on their site. They provide the secure servers, the fraud alerts, design help, and even web promotion services.

They are a viable solution for small businesses. The costs are low and the learning curve is small.

I love being able to recommend Florida businesses on Suncoast Scribe. I’m especially thrilled to be able to present you with a company who has their headquarters in Gainesville, Florida – which is where I used to live before I moved back here to the Tampa Bay area.

More significantly, telling you about the 352 Media Group feels like a good fit for my blog, because I have so many people who come here looking of information on starting their small crafting businesses. I get multiple e-mails each day asking me for input about starting a business website. When I find out that the business owner has no experience in web design or site promotion, I always recommend that they hire professionals to help them.

That’s where 352 Media Group comes into the picture. They are a Florida web development company with offices nationwide –Atlanta, Gainesville, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Jacksonville, FL. They specialize in custom web design, web application development, CD/DVD production, web marketing, e-commerce solutions, and more. Plus, they won 14 Addy Awards in 2006 alone.

Give them a look and see if they might be the right fit for your business needs. . Don’t forget to check out their blog. It’s amusing.