Following are some resources that I can personally recommend!

Esther C. Kane
Eckweb Designs, Inc.

One of the BEST ways to market your web site is to show the Internet audience that you KNOW your stuff!

If you would like to write an article about any of the following topics and submit it to our Newsletter, we would love to review it for inclusion in future issues.

Our topics of interest are...

Marketing (General)
Internet Marketing
Small Business Issues
Web Design
Web Hosting
Web site Programming

Contact us today about your article(s) and get yourself promoted!!

Editorial

Hello Everyone!

Hope your holidays went well and I certainly hope they were prosperous.

2008 is here and with it I'm hearing all kinds of dire economical predictions, well, maybe not all kinds but dire ones at least. It doesn't seem to matter if I watch CNN, MSNBC, CNBC Fox, or any other news station, when it comes to the economy they all seem to be talking about a downturn. A recession, inflation, higher prices, lower wages, etc.

As Michigan continues to spiral downwards in their economy, it does seem as if it's only a matter of time that other states will get caught in that downturn.

So, what are you doing to recession proof your business? Here's what I'm doing:

1) I'm not spending as much. I'm saving more. If I absolutely don't have to purchase a software, I won't. If I can go another year without having to purchase a PC, I will. I'm going to save as much as I can in business expenses.

2) I'm raising my hourly fee from $45.00 an hour to $51.00 an hour. This is still far below the average $75.00 an hour and should still be affordable for my small and home based niche.

3) I'm completing my new website (beautifully created by PickMeandMoore) and I'll be targeting a more global market.

4) I'm expanding my online social networking through Linked In, Open Social, etc. and using that as my networking groups. It sure beats getting up at 6 AM for meetings.

5) I'm utilizing free article submission sites more and more. I write and submit as many articles as I can weekly to several of these sites (you'll find many listed below). I still get traffic to my websites from articles I wrote years ago so no one can tell me that article marketing does not work.

6) I'm expanding my Adsense marketing by creating new websites and optimizing them for the search engines.

I hope my tips help you with your plans, or if you don't have any plans, I hope these tips put you in the mindset to begin making plans for 2008. If you've been in business long enough, you've been through this before so learn from the past. You don't want to see all the hard work you've put into your business so far go down the drain just because you didn't set forth a few good plans.


Sincerely,
Esther C. Kane
Eckweb Designs, Inc.
678.765.0120
Search Engine Optimization Services

Cool Tools

I receive so many questions about the types of tools that I use not only for Internet Marketing but also for business that I decided I should add a section to the newsletter about them. So, each month (or so) I'll try to add a new tool to this section. Of course, if you have any tools you would like to recommend, please let me know!

The Changing Future of Social Media Websites- The Global Entrepreneur

Local SEO 2008 Predictions

1. Small Businesses Will Start to Understand the Difference Between SEO & Paid Search Advertising Whenever I speak with anyone in the local search biz and tell them I think the small guys are starting to get SEO, the typical response is that the small biz guy confuses SEO and paid search. All I can tell you is that not a week goes by without a small business contacting me to help them with organic rankings. And every SEO consultant I talk with says the same thing. SEO is pretty much mainstream. SEO is the iPhone of local marketing strategies – once you see the other guy doing it, you want to do it too.
   
   
2. Google Will Become Even More Important To Your Local SEO Strategy On average Google accounts for about 75% of all of my clients’ referral traffic and it looks like it’s heading for the 80% territory this quarter. And let’s face it, most of the yellow pages and other local search websites rely on Google for a good deal of their traffic. As more local search offerings proliferate they will be fighting amongst themselves for their share of Google traffic. And Google is going to keep pushing more of its own “local” results into the Web search results reducing the amount of traffic these sites will get (and watch out for Google Knol local). So if you’re a local search player you’re going to have to figure out more ways to squeeze traffic out of Google and if you’re a local business you are going to have to decide if you are going to try and compete against these big guys or pay them for your inability to do so.
   
   
3. Video Will Start To Become An Important Part of the Local Marketing Equation As we saw with the dentist who gets leads from Youtube, video will become a medium of choice for aggressive local search marketers to distinguish themselves online. Many search marketing companies will start including video as a standard part of their offerings and at least one local biz will produce a video that goes crazily viral and sets a new standard for the industry. In addition small biz videos will start popping up in Google’s Universal local search results which will create a large demand for local/national small biz video production.
   
   
4. The Small Biz Website Will Start To Beat The National/Local Directory At SEO Most of the money terms in organic local search appear to be dominated by national/regional local directories like Yelp, Citysearch, Superpages, etc. I have long held that as small business websites get their act together they should have a natural advantage in outranking these directories in organic results. Per prediction #1 this will start to happen and as a result the big local search players will follow Intuit’s acquisition of Homestead and make aggressive moves to own the small business website by acquiring companies like Market Hardware, Creating Your Space, etc.
   
   
5. Scalable SEO Will Become A Product There are numerous start-ups working on automated SEO solutions and on “scalable” SEO services that can be sold in cookie-cutter fashion to small businesses. While SEO will remain for the most part a highly customized, manual process performed by experienced professionals I do believe we will start to see more low-cost entry-level services that will provide a tangible benefit to those who can’t afford the kitchen sink job. This will lead to even more work for skilled SEOs who will acquire more-educated customers who have had a taste of SEO and are ready for the big time.
   
   
6. Google Webmaster Tools Will Give Away Even More SEO Information It used to be that you needed a SEO to tell you what other websites are linking to what pages on your site. Now thanks to Google Webmaster Tools you can get a pretty good idea yourself. You’ll still need a SEO guy to interpret all of this data but I believe Google is going to counter the growth of automated SEO by providing as much of this data as it can for free. Maybe they’ll even sell you a site audit while they’re at it.
   
   
7. MSN Will Roll Out A Huge Upgrade of Its Webmaster Tools And beat Yahoo to the punch, stimulating even more blog posts about how Microsoft is going to buy Yahoo.
   
   
8. Google Will Make A Major Change To The Link Popularity Algorithm There are just too many ways to game it. I don’t know what it’s going to be - BritneyRank could be a good idea - but it’s going to happen. For more ideas on this check out Patrick Altoft’s post on How Google Will Change SEO in 2008.
   
   
9. Local SEO Will Be One of the Bright Stories in an Economic Downturn At least I hope that’s what will happen. If the economy slows down marketers are going to look even harder for better ROI. When done right it’s hard to beat the ROI of SEO. And then all of those out of work sub-prime mortgage brokers will start selling SEO services.
   
   
10. Anyone got prediction #10?

Not Your Usual Marketing Tips

Visit Joel's new blog!

There, I’ve now claimed the first commercial “ownership” of a Year…

It’s the first month, and that begs the question: have you made your New Year’s resolutions yet? I mean from a marketing, advertising and promoting standpoint. (I could care less if you’ve vowed to lose weight; trust me, it’ll only come back by this time next year anyway…)

Since offering up this specific column thrice before, it’s worn well as universal and timeless commentary. So, as they say, if it ain’t broke…

There’s a great scene in an old “Seinfeld” episode where Jerry has telephoned in reservations for a car rental. Except that when he arrives to pick up the car, he’s told there are none to be had. The girl at the counter explains that, for whatever bureaucratic reason, his rental was released to someone else. In his customary exasperated manner, Jerry then tries to “educate” her -- that although “it’s your business to MAKE the reservation…you also have to be able to HOLD the reservation..!”

It’s January of a New Year. From a marketing standpoint, presuming you’ve MADE your New Year’s resolutions, are you planning to actually HOLD them?

In no particular order, consider these 12 Resolutions for 2008 – one per month – vowing to proactively engage in at least one of them:

Guerilla Marketing: Think outside the box for ways to promote yourself. There are rules…and sometimes there are no rules.

Networking: Do more, by joining more…networks that is (associations, fraternal organizations, fellow hobbyists, etc.)

Publicity: Toot your own horn through such means as press releases; even if you think you’ve got nothing new to say, there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t know what you’re thinking…but would like to, or perhaps more importantly, needs to.

Positioning: All things being equal…what makes you “more” equal than others?

Seminars: Think you know it all? Well, there’s a good chance you do – to targeted markets with whom you wish to do business and promote yourself.

Newsletters: Share your ideas, broaden your constituency; send out industry-relevant information either as hard copy…or electronically (such as what you’re presently reading).

Trade Shows: Go to them, be in them, mingle within them, write a program article for them...

Event Marketing: Sponsor a cause, have an Open House; it’s good PR by “humanizing” your business.

The Newspaper: What a concept! For ideas, for client contact opportunities, for business references, don’t rely on the 11:00 PM TV news alone. Read the newspaper.

Greeting Cards: It doesn’t have to be Christmas to send them. Stay top of mind year-round, with Valentine’s Day, July 4th, Arbor Day – whatever! – as the “excuse.”

Postcards: Along with greeting cards, postcards are a fast, convenient, economical – and customized – way to let people know about your business (think realtors, financial services professionals, et al…).

Website: If you don’t have a site, get one. If you already have one, concentrate more on the text this time, by focusing on Keywords to help facilitate Search Engine Optimization. (You need to be found…before you’re read.)

That’s enough pontificating for now…

Have a happy, healthy and prosperous 2008. And we’ll see you again the first Tuesday of next month with another edition of Not Your Usual Marketing tips.

Joel Kweskin
JDK Marketing Communications Management
704.846.4835, office
704.575.8850, cell
704.841.2746, fax
www.jdkmarketing.biz

Just when you thought that you had Internet marketing figured out, a new advertising vehicle has emerged. Mobile marketing has already taken root in Asia, mainly in Japan and South Korea, and is soon expected to wash up onshore here.

Market research firm ABI Research expects worldwide mobile marketing to jump from $1.8 billion in 2007 to $24 billion in 2013. Noting the high growth, start up vendors, such as Admob, Enpocket and Millennial Media, have been trying to build viable business in this area. In addition, larger players, such as Google, Yahoo, and Nokia, have made significant investments to try and grab a slice of this emerging and rapidly changing market

Because the market is fledgling, entering it presents some risk. Unlike advertising venues, such as TV or the Internet, mobile marketing is fragmented. Ads have to be designed for specific cell phones and PDAs, and hundreds of different models are now available. Also the mechanisms used to track the effectiveness of mobile advertising are just beginning to emerge, so small and medium businesses may not be certain about the risks/rewards that the market offers.

Despite those issues, the mobile advertising market is poised to take off. While your company may not be ready to jump into it now, you should be monitoring it and trying to gauge its potential impact on your business. You do not want to be caught unaware of its impact when the market blossoms.

Does your company have much interest in mobile marketing? What do you view as its potential benefits? What do you see as the risks involved with it?

Original Article

Expand Your Website Empire

Many business, especially small business, make the mistake of only having ONE website. They put all their eggs in that one basket. And I don't have to tell you about putting all your eggs in one basket, do I?

Search engines LIKE niche websites. So, if you happen to be a "keynote speaker", "business consultant", "author" and "mediator", don't try to cram all that information into one website, instead, make several. Each one dedicated to the individual service you provide.

I know, I know, it's more expensive to have several websites. Yes, that's true. But the price of a website, when compared to the price of an office or a storefront is minimal. If you spend $2000.00 creating a website and then $3000.00 per year hosting, marketing and maintaining that website, that's only $5000.00. Where can you spend $5000.00 for opening an office AND marketing your business? One ad in your local Yellow Pages can cost $5000.00!!

So, if you're truly serious about your business, get some other domains and expand your website empire!!

Basic Seo Tips for Web Designer

After designing a layout for a web site, we obviously start converting it into HTML during this session as a web designer we mainly concentrate on cross browser compatibility but we also need to concentrate on some basic seo things like…

1. Using Correct Doctype
2. Using Meta Content and Meta Keywords.
3. Using Alt tags for Images.
4. Using Valid HTML and CSS code.
5. Make your web site load fast.

1. Why to Use Doctype and what does correct doctype means?

Document type defination(DTD) is also know as Doctype, doctype informs the browser how to interpret the content of the page. If the the doctype is not declared, the browser assumes you don’t know how to code, and goes into quirks mode. If you know what you are doing and include a correct HTML doctype, your page will be rendered in standards mode.

Some Recommended DTDs to use in your Web document.

Use correct doctype, for example your using strict doctype and you use used align in in div tag or in p tag then doctype you used is not correct because align attribute is deprecated in strict doctype.

2. Using Meta Content and Meta Keywords.

Use proper keywords and content relate to your web site, that helps search engine to crawl your web site.

3. Using Alt tags for Images.

Specify alt tag for image and that alt tag should be a keyword related to web site, because images you have placed on site can be seen by visitors but not by search engines, so alt tag help search engines to read, with the help of alt tags search engines display the image results.

4. Using Valid HTML and CSS code.

Validate your html and css code and make your code w3c standard.

validate your html code here

http://validator.w3.org

validate your css code here

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator

5. Make your web site load fast.

Don’t mess up your site with heavy images that makes your site heavy and slow, try to optimize images that reduces weight and helps to load fast.

Online Image Optimizer

Original Article