We have more than our fair share of questions from our clients, mostly in response to SPAM promotions about being ranked high in search engines.  It goes something like this:

Guaranteed Organic Top 10 Program Step by Step

I’m not sure you got my message but I noticed your website was listed on the 1st page of Google, but only in the “Sponsored Ad Section” and not in the “Organic Section”. Just so you know, Organic search results are viewed 80% of the time while sponsored ad results are viewed less then 20%.

FACT - YOU CAN NOT BE GUARANTEED TOP LISTINGS!!!

Anyone who claims to be guaranteeing a spot at the top of Google, Yahoo, or MSN, is only guaranteeing that they are going to charge you a bunch of money.  This is SPAM, this is un-true, and it is a SCAM.

“If you believe it, theynI will be happy to sell you a magic carpet.“, said Jon.

Viacom’s ad sales have slowed on all of its TV channels, and their net-income dropped 6% in the second quarter.  The Wall Street Journal reported “Viacom had warned that its domestic advertising growth would slow to 3% to 4%, from an original forecast of 7%” (WSJ 7/30/08).

TV advertising has become increasingly less important as eyes and value has shifted to the internet.  Young people are now online more than they watch TV, with Viacom specifically noting that MTV and VH1 were hardest hit.

Internet advertising is still growing at very healthy rates, and the important thing to note is that any company can jump in and buy ads, it isn’t limited to just fortune 500 companies.  If you would like more information on locally targeting your customers online at Local Target Marketing.

We have announced our seminar dates for our Internet Seminar Series for Business Managers, Owners & Executives.

Seminar 1: Basics of the Internet will be held on August 12th and again on September 9th.

Seminar 2: Online Marketing will be held on August 14th and September 11th.

To reserve your seat and find out more information about the seminars go to http://www.redfusionmedia.com/seminar.htm

Coding your email blasts correctly is a critical part of building successful email campaigns. With SPAM protection continuing to improve, your emails must be built and sent properly coded, or not only will it get blocked, but you may also embarrass your company and good name.

The first rule of coding is that all emails must have images published on your website, and you must hard link (using the full URL) to all of your images from with in the email.

Second, you should never use images only in your email message, because it has a high chance of being blocked and many email programs are defaultly set not to view images.

REAL LIFE EXAMPLE

I have received 3 emails blasts from a reputable public relations company in the Inland Empire in the last month. All three were coded in images and all their links were broken. Knowing that the event is large, and that we have met with the company, I sent them a nice email to tell them that their site was not working. They ignored my email, they didn’t check the problem, and I received a third email, with no change. In my amazement, they still have the same issues, their site was down.

This is a great example of our feed at work. We did not send this to any news outlets, they came to us. I asked Margaret to write a little page on newly completed websites.  We added in four that we recently completed and launched, spending less than an hour writing and posting the release.

We posted an informal press release on RedFusion’s WebMediaWire feed, here http://www.redfusionmedia.com/rss/article.php

We were picked up by a Sun or Daily Bulletin writer, and got two posts, with links to our clients.

6/26/08 - http://www.dailybulletin.com
6/26/08 - http://www.sbsun.com

Not only did our clients get exposure, and received links to their sites, RedFusion received a lead and have set up a sales meeting next week.

Google announced that it has improved its performance of Flash indexing by creating an algorithm that specifically is designed to use Adobe’s Flash Player technology.  It has always been a problem of Flash websites to not be properly indexed into the Google search for the simple fact that Google could not read what content was included in the flash file.  Now Google hopes to improve that issue, and hopes to improve flash websites visibility.   Read the Google Learns to Crawl Flash post on Google official Blog.

Microsoft no longer will distribute Windows XP to large computer makers, like as Dell, Lenovo, or Hewlett-Packard, and large software retailers.

For those of you (like us, RedFusion Media) that have refused to upgrade, you still can get copies of XP from small custom computer makers, and in some cases large companies will allow you to “downgrade” your Vista to XP. You can read more about it at Information Week.

Mozilla has launched its new version of Firefox, Firefox 3. You can down load the new version now which includes a new look, more features, and an alternative from using Microsoft explorer.

Online website volume by networks show that there is a growing trend in media outlets for creating synergy for the overall network by the parts of the more segmented brands.  You will notice that Fox is now number 5 because it has a number of very popular brands in its network including; American Idol, Fox, GameSpot, and MySpace.  Google who used to trail Yahoo, now has Google, YouTube, and Blogger as their backbone, along with there online office services like GMail and Google Docs.

We have been growing our network at RedFusion Media for the same reasons, to create a broad base of niche traffic.  We now have RedFusionMedia.com, InlandEmpire.US, RedlandsWeb.com, RedlandsWeddingGuide.com, LocalTargetMarketing.com, WebMediaWire.com, and soon to launch InlandEmpireWeddingGuide.com, and MyMembersLogin.com.

RedFusion Media’s offices will be closed on Friday the 4th of July.

Since we have been using the Everyone.net email for our clients, we have noticed very little email issues or downtime. This is a good thing. However, we all know how technology can be, so every once in a long while something happens. If you do come across troubles logging in to your web-based mail, or sending and receiving email, you can check the status of the email service online by going to the Everyone.net Service Status page here: http://www.everyone.net/main/scripts/status.cgi.

This is a great tool to see if they are experiencing technical difficulties. Typically, the issues are always temporary and corrected within 5-10 minutes.