Wednesday, February 2, 2011

personal finance budgets

A new year often means lofty resolutions, especially when it comes to planning and maintaining a travel budget.

Though there are many personal-finance sites and software out there, this year I'm resolving to use Mint.com's free online tool. You can create plans for saving toward retirement and buying a house, but I'll be primarily using the site for its Travel Goals, which help you set -- and stick to -- realistic travel budgets.

And though the tool obviously doesn't do the hardest part (you still have to save the money), it does track how far or close you are to achieving your Travel Goal.

For example, say you want to go to Hawaii for a week this summer. Once you create a budget by filling in the estimates for airfare, hotel, meals, and other expenses, you can then specify how much you will contribute to that Travel Goal each month.

If you underestimate how much you'd need to save per month, the online tool points out: "Oh no! You aren't saving enough each month to reach your goal on time." The tool then offers you two ways to fix your Travel Goal: increase your monthly contribution in order to reach your desired travel date or postpone your planned date to fit your monthly contribution.

If you stay on track with saving the specified amount each month, Mint.com's budgeting tool highlights (and adjusts) the projected date of when you can afford to take the trip. Save more, and you could afford to take your trip a month or two earlier.

But if you slack on your monthly savings, the date will be pushed back -- a reality check and an instant motivator. Once you mentally equate an unnecessary clothing purchase or an impulse buy to the consequence of delaying your trip by a month, saving becomes a little more real.

Granted, most people will buy plane tickets and reserve hotels with a credit card several months before actually taking the trip; the tool helps track if you'll be able to easily pay it all off after your trip. After all, nothing ruins a vacation more than coming home to bills that you're not financially prepared to handle.

To fund my travels this year, I've linked my Mint.com account to an ING Savings Account labeled Travel Fund.

How do you stay on track with saving up for a vacation?

[flickr image via epSoS.de]

Gallery: How to create a realistic travel budget

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Fox News Columnist Seeks Sources to Scoff at Global Warming

Fox News science columnist Gene Koprowski has a long history of standing up against this "global warming" foolishness. Today, he's seeking sources to to explain the "ridiculousness" of the idea of global warming causing snow.

Good News for Katie Holmes! 'The Kennedys' Miniseries Finds a Home ...

Finally some good news for Katie Holmes! Her highly anticipated miniseries 'The Kennedys' might have been dropped by the History Channel, but it's fou.

News.Me: Here's The NY Times' Answer to The Daily

TechCrunch has an exclusive look at News.me, a new social news iPad app that keys you into what your friends are reading/linking to, while allowing you share the news you're reading as well. Will it compete with The Daily?

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Monday, January 24, 2011

The Importnace of online reputation management

When agencies or folks fall prey to unfair competitors, irate ex-employees or disgruntled clients, then a SERM becomes significant while in the financial survival of a organization.

Firms like SERMs are necessary in keeping, and in some instances salvaging and restoring vendors or person's reputation and fantastic identify.

On the net searches are one particular of the initially elements that modern day day consumes do prior to investing dough using a company or individual, and one particular poor click can suggest economic disaster to get a online business, particularly on this ever growing cyber financial state. Popularity for these SERMs are increasing by leaps and bounds using the realization it's not prudent to try to conduct organization in this cyber age and never have a SERM on retainer along with your accountant and your legal professional.

Businesses are also appreciating the collateral benefit of having a Popularity Management firm on-board as an integral a part of their enterprise product, its great promoting! Even though securing a company's excellent popularity and name via the internet, it generates very good press and positive publicity that ultimately adds drastically towards the bottom line of a company's balance sheet, generating the providers to literally pay for alone in many conditions.

This tends to become a really sturdy selling point for vendors at the same time as individuals, to know that they're cleansing and defending their reputations and cyber pictures, whilst concurrently running a very helpful promoting initiative. In some cases companies absolutely disregard their former marketing efforts internet and go for the benefits of On the web Popularity Management.

Obtaining a SERM firm on your aspect is without a doubt the way to go on this cyber age. For extra knowledge on online reputation management and corporate reputation management, Please visit us at http://removeripoffreports.net/

web site promotion internet marketing

When I went into marketing/communications in the 80’s, things were simpler. I spoke 5 languages, which pushed me into this field. What else could I do, be a translator? Not on your life. Not when I could be creative, come up with quantitative studies and research why / how people buy.

It seemed simple, right? You have a product and you have to figure out a way to sell said product. You had magazine ad space, TV commercials, newspapers… every day, everywhere you looked, you’d see some form of advertisement. Eventually, we became desensitized to print and TV marketing – the traditional ways.

The Internet wasn’t used as it is today (although it still had some traction). The World Wide Web was the Wild Wild West. It was a “small” little marketplace, with a minor audience for client product promotion.

And Then Internet Entered the Scene… Fast Forward in Time

Advertising is more sophisticated now… but then, so are consumers. Way back when, we could survey the consumer, create charts, crunch numbers… it was all about data. Anymore, however, you have to understand consumer psychology.

Marketing has gone holistic. Yes, quantitative and qualitative data is still important, but we’re not looking at real numbers anymore. We’re looking at the consumers themselves.

What makes buyers buy? Is it the way a site looks? Does having the sidebar on the left gain a greater response than having the sidebar on the right? Are blue links more “clickable” then, say, green ones? Is “buy” more active than “act”?

What Are the Click Triggers?

With all the Google changes lately, you really have to pay more attention to your site. Of course, if you’re a regular reader, you know I push site attention anyway, no matter what Google’s doing. However, with all the vertical marketing possibilities, you want to make sure you get all the bang for your buck you can from any top listing you get.

So you study the click triggers – those beautiful little differences that cause people to click through: through to your website, through to your buy page, through to your “thank you”. It’s a step-by-step process, and you have to guide them every step of the way.

Ask yourself:

Is my content sticky? Does it have good information worth reading?

Are my headlines well written? Do they grab readers’ attentions?

Do I let others (those who will tell me the truth) read my content before I put it up? Do they like it? Do I listen when they offer suggestions?

Is it easy to navigate through my site? Does my site create a pleasant user experience?

Are You Ignoring the Individual?

This is the most serious question, and you need to really give it some thought. If your content completely targets consumers (i.e. all product/service focused) rather than having helpful bits of information, you could be losing out.

You can’t appeal to everyone; not everyone is your target market. You don’t want to get so busy trying to reach everyone that you miss those who might convert. Build your site, images, writing, etc within the context of your specific target, and then experiment.

Experiment….?

Yes, experiment. Human behavior and relevance is a beautiful thing. Being able to associate one with the other will have half your online battle won. However, you can’t just pull knowledge out of the air. You have to be willing to experiment – to test. Plenty of tools are readily available for just this purpose, such as…

Google Website Optimizer

A/B testing is in; guessing is out. If you think you might know why a page isn’t converting, that’s all well and good. However, there’s a difference between thinking you know, and really knowing. With a little A/B testing, you can find out what areas really are the problem and fix them.

Usabilla

Take a screen shot of your page and put it up on Usabilla. Let people know what questions you want them to answer and then send out the link. This little goodie can give you some very valuable insights in terms of layout and design.

4QSurvey

Very nice, very short survey. You can find out why people came to your site, whether they found what they wanted (giving you visitor satisfaction ratings) and get suggestions from them, all in the same program. Again, this is a very useful goodie.

The three above are just a few. There are, literally, tons of usability testing tools out there. Many are free; some cost, but are worth it.

You’re not going to get through today’s marketing world by guessing. You’re not going to make it with traditional marketing tools. You have to be willing to use everything at your disposal; you have to be willing to expand.

What changes have you made to keep up with online marketing and technology?

Post image via BDoughertyAmSchool

SEO in the niche of web hosting and domain name registration

In this article we`ll try to generalize our practices in promotion of companies that provide web hosting and domain registration services.

We will talk about such questions:

Analysis of hosting / domain name registration market and finding potentially advantageous promotion directions;

Features of keywords selection in the conditions of SEO-pressure

Definition of promotion strategy

Methods of getting links

Features of different queries groups conversion depending on geography

Typical problems that interfere sites conversion and ways of their solution

Market analysis and competitive researches. Finding potentially advantageous promotion directions

First of all, it is necessary to note that a large traffic in the niche of web hosting is deceptive. If you look at Google AdWords Keyword Tool data you will find out the following picture:

In fact, there are about 400-500 visits from the 8th– 9th place for a query “hosting” per month. It`s necessary to consider this and other points while planning hosting project promotion, because information about a large amount of queries in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool is “stuffed” with endless positions checks. As the market of hosting projects and domain name registrars is extremely competitive, you have a great chance to invest money, work and time in promotion of such queries that are stuffed and do not bring traffic and sales, and after all you can incur losses and even remain disappointed in the search promotion at all. The same can be said about domain name registration.

In fact, there are about 500-600 visits from the 5th – 6th place for a query “domain” per month.

That`s why, in our opinion, it`s better to begin promotion of hosting project or domain name registrar with finding active competitors in the search marketing niche and define their strategies. For this purpose we can recommend a wonderful tool – SemRush.

So, we need to find competitor sites in our niche, which are actively engaged in the Internet marketing. We just type highly competitive query corresponding to the topic in SemRush and find sites that are ranked well for it:

Now we need to make cleaning, i.e., remove irrelevant sites from the list. In this case, obviously, Wikipedia must be removed from the list. After checking a few queries important for you in the same way, we will receive a “crossed” list of sites. Sites from this list have good rankings for many queries in this subject, so they should be examined primarily.

Lets take a site hostgator.com as an example:

The example shows that, firstly, the number of search queries for which the site “hostgator” is shown has an explicit trend to growth. It reflects the efforts made by the owners of this project to increase its visibility in search engines.

After selection of queries that bring maximum traffic to the project according to SemRush, we get an approximate keywords list which can be used to start promotion.

Making the list of necessary keywords, let’s see whether it is a good idea for us to «meddle into a fight» for these keywords. You should consider such factor, as SEO-pressure, for this purpose.

Features of keywords selection in the conditions of SEO-pressure

You can use different tools to estimate a competition for the selected query. A plug-in for FireFox called SeoQuake is one of convenient free instruments.

Let’s type a relevant query interesting for us, e.g., business hosting:

You can see that some strong sites are present in SERP, and some of them have got from several hundreds thousand to millions of backlinks and even more. The competition in SERPs is about to be really strong, so I would like to repeat: you should select a semantic core very carefully. Moreover, there are sometimes artifacts in SERPs, and learning them is possible only from experience. Let’s take the query “ecommerce hosting”. This query is high frequency in subtopic «hosting for ecommerce sites», it has about 12 thousand searches per month in exact match worldwide:

We can see that the trends of search don’t show any sudden jumps or drops.

The target audience for these queries is in the U.S. and UK – the most creditworthy regions in general. However, traffic for such query from the American Google Top5 – Top6 is about 1-3 persons a day, with natural drops on weekends; it gives us about 40 people a month. A conversion rate for these queries is extremely low. Of course, promotion for this queries is acceptable only with the purposes of improving positioning and brand awareness, but as for sales it isn`t effective.

Let`s take a query “reseller web hosting” which has next data from Google KeyWord Tool worldwide, for comparison:

The query brings twice more traffic from the 4th-5th places having twice smaller amount of searches in exact match according to Google KeyWord Tool! Conversion rate of this query is also quite high. At that, Google Insights give the following data:

At the same time the great part of traffic and transactions comes from the U.S. and UK users despite of the fact that the site holds comparable positions also in Google.co.in.

All of these patterns are also true for domain name registrars.

It’s impossible to know this information without experience in promoting a site for such queries or without trying PPC advertising in exact match. There are a lot of keywords like these, so you should constantly monitor all queries in the aggregate estimating of the effectiveness of each one.

You can also “pull out” perspective keywords making the analysis of the backlinks text anchor to sites of competitors who are actively engaged in search marketing. You can use special tools, for example, CS Yazzle or SEO SpyGlass by LinkAssistant, either manually using Yahoo! Site Explorer.

To estimate a real traffic on a query you may also try PPC in exact match.

The following method can be used to estimate keywords efficiency. The initial necessary data is:

Position for a keyword;

Traffic on it;

Estimated number of searches from Google Keyword Tool in the exact and phrase match for the world and top regions;

Quantity of page views;

Time spent on a site;

Bounce rate;

Conversion rate.

Microsoft Excel counts a parity of all these factors with the help of formulas and allows realizing efficiency/inefficiency of each keyword visually.

Perspective traffic, quantity of searches per month (data of Google AdwordsKeywordTool) and conversion data for each query are marked with green color. Indicators exceeded the average indicators for the site to the worse are marked with red (bounce rate, number of pages reviews).The percent of conversion which vastly differs to better from the average indicator for the site is marked with yellow color in the last column (Conversion rate).

Using this technique allows tracking the most convertible requests and receiving greater outcome from a client’s site.

Selection of promotion strategy

Based on our experience in promotion of projects in the niche of hosting and domain names registration we can say that the most high-frequency, convertible and competitive queries are in these topics exactly.

Shared vs VPS vs Dedicated

If to compare an earning power of dedicated servers sale (VPS) and earning power of shared hosting sale you will come to the conclusion that in general virtual (Shared) hosting sale is more profitable: one dedicated server sale brings around 200$ of income, at the same time sale of the same server “cutted” on virtual (Shared) hosting allows to earn much more (~100×5$), even with the consideration of the increasing load on a support.

However, traffic in Shared hosting subtopic is much less than in dedicated server subtopic. People interested in such things, according to our observations, come by queries like “cheap hosting”, “cheap web hosting”, and the quantity of such searches is very small because Godaddy and Hostgator take away the lion’s share of these customers, mainly due to type-in traffic.

In this case, it seems to be a good decision to perform promotion in the VPS and Dedicated sector.

Many companies, apparently, have come to the same conclusion: promotion for queries of “shared” group is much easier, than for queries related to dedicated servers.

Specialized kinds of hosting

As we have noted above, low-frequency traffic brings rather small part in general traffic and conversion; therefore, in our opinion, it`s better to begin promotion for high-frequency keywords with addition low – and mid-frequency keywords, which give a great bulk of sales and target traffic on a site. However, if your hosting site sells “exotic ” types of hosting, such as hosting with support of Zen Cart or Django, then such low-frequency, long-tail keywords can justify themself at the initial stages of promotion.

A cost of their promotion to the Top-10 is small, and similar “exotic hosting” is usually searched by people who understand the subject well and thus type long queries in search bars.

Eventually, when the site starts to rank well for competitive queries, it makes sense to “collect” low-frequency “long tail” of queries in subjects, not to miss this small piece of the market.

Also I would like to notice that promotion for keywords like “hosting” and “web hosting” is extremely difficult process due to high competition (though these keywords begin to “sell” beginning from top-20!)

Methods of getting links

The basis of search optimization are at the moment:

keyword research;

texts and meta tags optimization according to the keywords;

adding backlinks with correct “anchors” (with right reference texts).

As we have already noted, hosting sites have a large number of backlinks. How do they receive so many backlinks? This is obvious, that reviews and comments at forums will never help to collect tens thousands of links. Four main methods used in this theme should be picked out. Some of them are typical for other niches and some of them have unusual “boom” exactly in hosting and domain subjects.

Link exchange (the proper way)

Links buying (the smart way)

Getting links through its own affiliate program.

Conversion of search traffic

Let’s look at the comparative analysis of search traffic conversion in various regions (sample of more than 90.000 sales for “domain names” and more than 2000 sales for the “hosting” market):

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