by Ronald L. Burgess

“Everybody’s doing it.” Online advertising, that is. With hard times and faltering newspapers, the pyramid schemes and snake oil salesmen have descended on the Internet. Don’t be surprised if you are hit-up to do “Cheap” advertising or linking programs by people you know (even a relative) in the next year.

How do you evaluate the effectiveness of these new services?

First and foremost, deal only with people who have been in the online marketing business for several years. It is way too complex at this time, for those who do not clearly understand the complete subject of Search Engine Optimization(SEO). Many marketers, designers, or ad salesmen have almost no understanding of the technical and performance issues on the subject.

Second, ensure that your site has traffic tracking analytics, and that your webmaster can independently track every click, to your website, before committing to an ad program. You should have statistics available from your website for all inbound visits, or you simply will never know if you are getting scammed.

Online advertising is a great way to extend your advertising dollars from traditional budgets. But, be sure you have professionals assist you with the evaluation before you spend the big bucks online.

Deeping cutbacks are continuing to hit the advertising sectors.  In a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report showed that fourth quarter 2008 ad spending dropped 9.2% from the year before.  The biggest sector to fall back was the auto advertisers, with a 15% decline, totaling 3.2 Billion.

Online Advertising has projected a dropped of 0.4% for the first quarter of 2009, according to a eMarketer study. “eMarketer forecasts that online sales will be virtually flat in 2009,” says Jeffrey Grau.

Sources
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124148609257185819.html
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007068

2008 numbers on the amount of TV ads skipped while using a DVR product reached about 6%.  That means of all commercials, people fast-forwared or jumped over 6% of all ads on TV.  That number is expected to rise to 16% by 2011.  (source DVR Research Institute from the Hollywood Reporter)

For advertisers, what does that mean?  Well it means that there in 2008, there were an estimated $5 Billion  of advertising that went unseen, of the $80 Billion annually.  The number may reach $14 Billion in two years. 

Recently I wrote about the “Death of TV Ads“, which talked about the increasing demand of people wanting to buy there content verses having to see content paid for by ad sales.  The assumption would be that if people are using DVR’s more often, then they will be apart of the trend to get away from paid advertising content.

To purchase your website hosting account with Wild West, first go to the following address:  www.redfusionhosting.com. Next, click on the red “Web Hosting” link in the top navigation. You will see the available Economy, Deluxe and Unlimited hosting plans listed. Choose the hosting plan that is best suited for you website’s needs and click the red “Add” button. You can customize your order on the next few pages, but it is usually okay to skip these steps, as most websites do not require these extra add-ons. On the Secure Checkout page, review your order to make sure everything looks correct, select your payment type, agree to the Terms of Service and click the red “Check Out” button. On the next page you will enter all of your contact information. You will also create a Login ID and Password. It is very important that you remember your Login ID and Password. Make sure that you store them somewhere in your records. You will need these codes to login to your account in the future. Also be sure and enter your correct email address; this is where you will receive all renewal notices and receipts for your hosting account. On the next page, you will enter your billing and credit card information. Once this is complete, click the red “Check Out” now button. This will complete your domain hosting account purchase. On the final page you can print a version of your receipt. You will also be emailed a version at the email address that you listed for your contact information.

Email boxes do fill up.  Servers do not want infinite amounts of mail on their hard drives, so they will lock or stop receiving mail once they hit their quota.

Problems and Solutions.

Virus - Bad Coding - Server issues

It is possible to have virus, bad code, or server issues preventing your email box from receiving mail.  This does not happen often.  You would probably not be able to pull your email down, thus you should notice a failure warning.  Solution: contact your email provider to trouble shoot.

Not Deleting Email from the Server

This is by far the most common problem when we get email bouncing back.  Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express has a setting that allows you to “leave a copy” on the server, after you have pulled it down to your computer.  The parallel to this is, going to your P.O. Box, making a Xerox of your mail, putting the mail back in the P.O. Box and taking the copies home.  Eventually your email box is full.

The solution is simple, don’t turn on the “leave a copy on the server”.

Checking your “Live” email, online.

For the most part, our clients use one of two email services. In both cases, you can go online and check the live email to see if the box is full.

For Everyone.net customers, you should have a link to your online mail, something like

http://companyname.mail.everyone.net. (ask us if you do not know.)

If you are using our RedFusion Media Hosting, you may have our WildWest email service, you can log in here.

https://email.secureserver.net/login.php?clearcookies=1

If a website was to fall out of an ugly tree, and hit every branch on the way down, you could probably find that website in Geocities.

Geocities was the first “MySpace” or “Facebook”, where anyone could build free website pages. As a professional designer, I know that everyone and their brother wants to be a designer, but not many people even know what good design is.  Well, if there is a hole to which bad marketing aesthetics lands, that hole was Geocities.

“Geocities was created in 1994 as an easy way for people to create a Web presence. Fifteen years later, Yahoo has decided to close the doors on the iconic webpage service. Geocities to close after 15 years of aesthetic “awesomeness”"

In a survey by Accenture, “a growing number of consumers would rather pay for content to avoid ads.” The survey of 14,000 people found that in 2008, 37% of people would prefer to have subscription based TV than to watch ads.  The number has risen to 49% in 2009.  - Source: Newsweek

This trend shows that not only are viewers tired of TV ads, but prefer the models in which you can choose to watch your content, when you want.  With half of viewers interested in paying for ads to be removed, and at the same time TV ad sales falling sharply, we may be at crossroads of the TV advertising model.  Will the TV ad die? Too soon to tell, but I do not think many people will mind if it does.

Over just the past few weeks, we have had a distinct escalation of outbound emails being blocked.  This has happened to a number of clients, using various Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and with large email providers. 

The causes seem to vary, but boil down to two main issues.

1. SPAM is being received by networks, thus the receiving network blocks not only the domains that sent the email, but the IP address, and in somecases ranges of IP addresses, and even whole networks.
2. Filters are become more proactive, scanning for SPAM on the outbound emails, not just the inbound emails.

We recently had an issue where the our email provider for most of our clients, Everyone.net, was blocked by some of the largest email receivers in the world. All caused by a few bad apples.  The blacklist was noticed by a number of clients and took more than 12 hours to fix.

“The blacklist by Hotmail, MSN and Earthlink has been lifted and all issues resolved. Everyone.net cleared and locked all accounts causing the blacklisting this morning by approximately 9:30 am PT. While Everyone.net worked with Microsoft to clear the block, Microsoft temporarily rate limited Everyone.net. All emails sent that did not receive a non-deliverable error message will be delivered.”

What can you do?

Well, don’t SPAM….. most of you do not, and we have found over the last few issues, that a real SPAMMERS have probably caused the problems.  There is nothing we can really do about that, so with most of the problems we have seen, we are at the mercy of the larger networks to fix the problem.

Make sure you have SPAM, VIRUS, FISHING, SPYWEAR, protection on all of your computers.  If you get a virus, they want to multiply, and many time that means they will SPAM out of your email box.

Make sure to have an internal email policy for your staff, so that your company doesn’t accidently get blacklisted. Suggestions for Your Company’s Email Policy

Send out “clean” emails. We have had a few situations where outbound emails were being blocked by filters because their “signature block” had too much custom coding.  Suggestions on formating your Email Signature block.

Wow - I have been following Twitter, but this is an amazing fact.

Twitter’s traffic is shooting through the roof right now — a recent Comscore report finds the site’s U.S. usage more than doubled in March, jumping a full 131 percent from the previous month — and now, the service’s founders seem to have some sort of surprise up their sleeves. So what’s the big secret? http://www.pcworld.com/article/163291/pssttwitter_has_big_news_and_its_topsecret.html

If you would like to add my twitter, click here http://twitter.com/jonburgess.

by, Jon Burgess, M.B.A.

For years, professionals have used a standard “signature” on the bottom of their corporate emails, which has proved to be a useful tool in both building brand and improving overall communication.  Typically, emails contain the “who, what, when, and where” sorts of items, and a link to the company’s website. This is usually been standard practice, but has recently become an issue on a few fronts, especially when images and extra lines of copy like quotes or disclaimers are added.

Email Signature Etiquette 
Some signatures are too long. For some outrageous examples of overdoing email signatures, Google or refer to this link: “Too Much Flair” for some great examples. Most agree that a signature that is too long, too wide or has multiple colors and images, is not usually in your best interest.

Here are a few tips for a short and professional signature: