Archive for the ‘Submission Software’ Category
So you have your own website. Congratulations. Now, what exactly are you doing to get people to visit your site? Just like a brick and mortar storefront or an office suite in the commerce park, your website isn’t just going to become a popular hangout spot for clients and prospective customers. You’ve got to tell everyone about it!
When you open a restaurant, you put up signs, you take out a newspaper ad, you buy space in the yellow pages, you turn on the lights, you open the door, you tell everyone you meet about your new business. Your website deserves the same treatment. If you fail to promote your site, you’ve basically just spent a thousand dollars or more on a standard lot in cyberspace with no roads in and no roads out. You need to get the word out on your new company website, and here’s the best part… it doesn’t have to cost anything at all, if you’re willing to take the time and make the effort to do it yourself.
So…how does a small business owner jumpstart his or her website? You may consider hiring a professional to do it for you. Your web design and development firm built your site for visitors, but probably did not include promotion along with it. A good ad agency will raise the topic when quoting on your site. An experienced marketer knows it’s always best to group your promotions and cross-sell at every opportunity and should have suggested handling your web traffic. But in case they missed the boat, you can still contact a full-service ad agency to help. Of course, that’s not the FREE methods mentioned in the title of this piece, so for those who’d like to take a shot at handling it themselves, this article tells you 5 FREE steps to jumpstarting your web traffic:
1. Connect the Cables
2. Start the Engine
3. Get it Running
4. Give it Some Gas
5. Put it in Drive
Everyone who’s ever owned a car long enough to pay off the loan knows that an indispensable part of the trunk contents is a set of jumper cables (the other is a gallon of water). You never know when you’ll be stuck somewhere with a car that just won’t get going. Same with your website. It’s there, but it’s going nowhere unless you first get it connected to something that’s already running or capable of running. Whether you already have established business or not, you’ve got to connect your website to every promotional piece you create. This means adding your web address to:
- company stationery (business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, quote sheets, receipts)
- business signage (windows, counter displays, and company vehicles)
- ads (yellow pages, newspapers, and local magazines)
- everything else (boxes, bags, cartons, promotional pieces and more)
Everything that gets your name and phone number, gets your URL (web address). This shouldn’t cost you anything if you wait until it’s time to reprint. But, if you want to get started today, you’ll need to redesign and reprint new promotional pieces to add your site. Since jumpstarting requires the cables be connected, it’s a great way to get your site visited sooner rather than later.
It’s important not to lose track of one key point, there are 2 sets of clamps on a set of jumper cables. You must make sure your website is sending the right message back to visitors. It must look and feel like your existing promotional pieces. Your brand identity is dependent upon it. And your website must clearly identify who you are, where you are and what you do. Your contact information is as critical online as it is on your business cards. Make sure the electrical current is flowing freely between both vehicles if you’re ever going to get rolling!
Okay. So your cables are connected, and now it’s time to start the other engine. The most important engine on the internet is the search engine. You want to become very friendly with Mr. Search Engine – because he knows lots and lots of people. You want his friends to be your friends. Search engines, and their brothers, Directories are the traffic cops of the internet. They basically tell people where to find the files and pages they’re looking for out of billions of documents on the world wide web. So…you can’t have them over for dinner, but…you can get them to know about you by sending them an invitation to visit your site.
Search engines use robots and spiders to crawl all over the web and take inventory of the files and their content, it’s a computerized process. You can wait weeks to be crawled, or you can help the process along by submitting your URL to the search engines directly. Well over 80% of internet users take their first step via a search engine like Google, AltaVista, or HotBot.
Directories like Yahoo, employ humans to compile lists of websites and web pages from the millions available online at any given time. You can also help the directories find you by submitting your site to the proper subdirectory inside these engines. Directories will “consider” your site on a free submission. If you want a guarantee, you’ll have to pay for it.
So, as soon as your website is complete and live, SUBMIT. List your site on as many FREE (there it is again) engines as you can find. Check out www.directoryguide.com for a list. You should resubmit your site every few months especially if you have had content changes, page additions or other major changes to your website. Make sure you submit to the “local” yellow pages and white pages online too. Most offer free listings for businesses.
If you haven’t already done so, confirm that your web developer added page titles and keywords to your website. If you aren’t using metadata like this, you need to. Search engines utilize the keywords and compare them to your content. They return your title and page descriptions in search results. Don’t expect the best ranking without metadata, so call on a pro to get your pages optimized. Consider your keywords carefully. They will be ones that are basic to your business or industry. Put the most important words and phrases first in the list.
Search engines like the popular sites. So, another way to make your site attractive to the search engines is to have lots of friends. The way to gain popularity is to have lots of good websites linking to your website. When a search engine returns results, they rank the pages based on relevancy and popularity. Your goal is to always be in the top five or ten listings returned on a search. Popularity pays off in ranking your site higher than other less noticeable sites (thousands of them!).
Getting popular doesn’t have to mean spending money. Sure you could spend thousands and thousands on ads to get onto the first page of search results (basically buying your friends), but why? If you can get your site linked up, you’ll get the engines fired up about you. You’ll find more info in steps 4 and 5 below.
Step 3 – Get it Running. Once the engine starts up, you need to let it run for a while to get the power flowing to your site. While it’s idling out in cyberspace, run off with promote your site via email. There are two email tactics you need to think about. The first is your email signature, the second is email marketing.
Your signature is unique, and your unique web address is as important as your name and phone number in the closing of every email you send out (business and personal). You and your employees must include your company’s digital signature. It should include a clickable link to your URL. This form of viral marketing is both FREE, and easy. Your email software will have a place to format your digital signature. Find it and use it.
Email marketing is one of the most effective tools to market your website and to showcase products and services. Permission-based email can be extremely targeted by including only those people who’ve expressed an interest in your business, product or industry. By building and maintaining your own house list, you ensure you’re compliance with anti-spam laws. There are also reputable list brokers who can help you choose a list of email addresses to prospect to with an offer, coupon, or other introductory special. Of course, list rental isn’t free, but you can certainly start building a list of your own with friends, family and current customers. You can ask for email addresses and permission to send on every inquiry your company receives both online and off. Build your list, keep it clean and offer an easy way for people to unsubscribe or opt out. Most important, send relevant and targeted content, a clear call to action, and pay close attention to your subject line. You want your mail to be opened, read, and acted upon. Armed with this info, you can easily create simple text emails for FREE!
Done correctly, email marketing will become an extremely powerful tool for sales and customer service. When you’re ready to make your email campaigns even more diverse, in-depth and creative, call on a professional marketer. But whether you keep it simple by doing it yourself, or hire someone for the task, don’t let this one get by you.
Pushing down the pedal helps boost the power. Step 4 of our FREE Steps to Jumpstarting your Web Traffic involves content. Quality content makes the difference between visited and forgotten. Hopefully, when you created your website, you included the kind of useful information web surfers are looking for. Your content is what makes your website important, it’s what keeps people coming back, and it’s what helps you rank in the search engines. Keep your content relevant, current, and easy to navigate. Some examples of content that you should include on your site, and keep updated, include:
- instructions for assembling and using your products
- technical specifications
- maintenance schedules
- warranty and upgrade information
- frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- articles/information bits on your industry, products, or services
You’re already an expert in your field, so show it off online! Write hints and tips, articles (like this one!) and more. Post this information on your website, but also, submit it to article and press release websites. These types of directories house hundreds of articles on all different topics. If you can’t write, then visit an article site and download some relevant content to use on your website. Here’s the bonus: if you write and submit, your bio and website link go with your article. Anyone who wishes to use your content must keep your bio and links intact. BAM! You just added links throughout the world wide web, back to YOUR site! Watch those FREE rankings go up in the search results! Giving your website some gas by filling it up with quality content is step number four in our 5 FREE Steps to Jumpstarting Your Website.
When steps 1-4 are complete, you’re ready to turn the key and shift into drive. You’re marketing your website on all your promotional material (for free), your site is ranking with the search engines (for free), you’re sending regular email messages to customers and growing your list (also for free), and you’re keeping your content relevant to both customers and potential customers (again…for free!). So now it’s time to take off! Once your site is doing things to help grow your business, it’s time to turnover it over with step 5 — new ideas. If you’ve started your website for Ecommerce, it’s time to enhance customer service. If you’ve begun as info only, it’s time to sell or take orders online. If your restaurant started a site just to add its menu, then it’s time to take customers in the kitchen, show them what their meal takes, what it’s made of, what you’re made of. Whatever you do, don’t just jumpstart your traffic, then sit back and watch everyone drive past you.
The final step to jumpstarting traffic is really not the end of the road. The internet is different daily. Search engines change their algorithms, new technology is available almost by the minute, consumer tastes and preferences are in a constant state of flux. In this environment, you need to keep your website and marketing tools up to date if you want to stay competitive. Subscribe to free E-zines, newsletters and other information sources that will keep you current on what’s new and what’s hot. Keep your marketing efforts tuned up and it will always be rush hour on your website.
Linda Lullie
http://www.articlesbase.com/advertising-articles/5-free-ways-to-jumpstart-your-web-traffic-112658.html
Posted in 
Article marketing has become very powerful over the last several years and the popularity is increasing constantly. Due to the success that many have with submitting to article directories, new technologies have been created. These technologies and new tools have been designed to help make it easier for many to transition over into article marketing.
Article directories have started to upgrade their service to include many new tools and some even with brand new technologies that are created to help the authors and marketers take full advantage of article marketing. Many of these tools and new technologies have been created to make article marketing more automotive.
Taking advantage of automation will make your article marketing efforts easier and your life easier. Submitting your recent articles that you have written to thousands of article directories is now easier than ever. Creating interesting content filled articles has now become possible because of new technologies. Short articles can even be submitted to your blogs on pure auto-pilot.
Advancements That Will Change the History of Article Marketing
Article Submission — The popularity of auto submission for articles have been increasing and some developers have taken note of this popularity. There are many submission services online and software that can be run from your desktop. Not all auto submission is created the same though and this is where technology is starting to step in. Many auto submission services use generic categories to submit your articles, for more details visit to www.ezines-success.com which can be more harmful to your marketing efforts. Handfuls of submission services have decided enough was enough and have created powerful auto submission tools that will submit to each article directories exact categories. Think of how much more exposure your article could get by being submitted to the proper category.
Drip-Feed Submission — Blogs have been increasing in popularity and with that increase comes the need for automation of posting to your blog. Many marketers have 20 or more blogs and it is very time consuming trying to keep those blogs updated. Drip-Feed submission will take articles that you have written and post them to your blog on auto-pilot at the times your specify. You could drip-feed your blog with 1 or 2 articles per day or per hour. Only a handful of sites currently offer this technology but those sites are producing more powerful tools to make your life easier.
Content Creator — Until recently only a few article directories have been allowing a limited about of html in articles. There are a handful of sites though that are allowing full html that will actually allow the creation of article sales pages. With this brand new technology writers and authors have the capabilities to insert images, for more details visit to www.newbies-copywriting.com videos, flash, html templates and many other elements into articles. Using proper content creation can transform your article into a true work of art.
Though many of these tools and technologies are only available at a handful of sites currently, technology is increasing everyday and more powerful tools are being created. Think of how much greater of a response you can get from your recent articles that you have written by using these interesting article tools.
ruchika
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/taking-advantage-of-automation-will-make-your-article-marketing-efforts-easier-738913.html
Did you know you can submit classified ads as a way to increase your search engine ranking? Regional classified ads can help you in two ways. For more detail go to: www.offline-promotion.com.First of all, since you’re advertising, you can bring traffic to your site. But secondly, even if no one is clicking on the links, the search engine spiders are still following them. You can increase your search engine ranking with properly placed classified ads.
There are literally hundreds of places to submit classified ads for free on the internet. Some are local community websites, and others are regional and international sites. You can probably search for lists of places to submit your classified ads and then spend hours each day, still never reaching the end of the list (new classified sites are started every day.) You can see why it is more efficient to use a program that does the submitting for you, instead of spending hours and hours each day simply working to generate a few inbound links.
There are a few things to keep in mind when you’re using this approach. First, be sure that your posting isn’t a violation of the site’s terms of service or you could end up having your IP address banned from their sites. For more detail go to: www.the20seotools.com.Also, you could end up being reported as a spammer and end up in costly litigation. Second, placing each individual advertisement can be time consuming. You might want to invest in classified ad Submission Software. Third, your anchor text should be relevant to the key wording on your site in order to maximize the SEO value of every link.
Classified ad Submission Software programs are uniquely programmed to make sure that you gets the most out of every ad you place, and that each one follows the specific guidelines of the classified ad publication that is posting it. Craigslist for example, has specific posting guidelines and procedures, and so does every other regional classified ads site. Using a program that automatically submits for you helps you make sure that you’re meeting the requirements for each listing and that you’re getting the most out of every post.
Be sure that your anchor text is relevant. For example, if I were selling Seaweed hair care products, I’d want to make sure that my posts and links were key worded with terms relevant to seaweed and hair care products. an ad that simply said “Natural beauty” wouldn’t be specific enough to help your search engine ranking. Submission software often allows you to create and track several different classified ad promotions, so you can study to see which ones generate the most clicks.
These programs also keep track of when the ads were placed and when they expire, so you can be sure that you always have current links and don’t over-post, which is often a violation. The Nurture Submission program submits to 500 classified Romanian ads, which will generate so many clicks and incoming links that you’ll be amazed, especially considering how affordable and easy to use it is, even for beginners.
Roos Andy
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/seo-way-to-increase-your-search-engine-ranking-707149.html
INTRODUCTION
Would you rather buy a product from a company with a reputation for having a great Support organization or a great Sales organization?
Join the crowd if you answered Support; survey after survey shows that it is one of the strongest factors influencing sales, and every company has strong self-interest in doing it right.
It’s no secret that software is a necessary component of an efficiently run Support organization. There are dozens of different solutions out there; taking the time to choose one that gives you the flexibility you need and the power to automate business processes will not only save you time and money, but allow you to shift your focus to improving your quality of service.
So why is Support so often perceived as broken?
The answer is that effectively managing a Support organization for even a simple product is difficult, and managing support for a complex product or service is as tough as it gets. This paper discusses the challenges involved in managing a sophisticated support organization and the key strategies for dealing with those challenges.
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1. BE ADAPTABLE
If you are going to win games, you had better be ready to adapt.
- Scotty Bowman, Winningest coach in NHL history
If history has proven anything, it’s that winners are adapters. Evolution itself is rooted in this idea, and companies, like creatures in nature, must adapt to thrive. There are countless success stories of companies bucking expectations and making real profit from adaptation.
The Solution
Over time, your business will grow or shrink, shift focus, adapt new technologies, meet new challenges, and discover new opportunities to reduce costs and improve performance through automation. A system that adapts as you do will save your organization money, time, and a good deal of frustration.
Life would be easier if you knew what changes were coming nine months in advance, but new challenges can surface almost overnight, so you need a system that will adapt quickly, under your control, and at a reasonable cost. The following paragraphs explore this issue in more depth, with an emphasis on support systems.
Configurability
The ideal product starts as a good fit, adapts to your requirements, and gives you freedom to automate new business processes as needed. It doesn’t force you to change your business processes to live inside hard-coded functions.
Probe the limitations of each potential software solution. Good questions to ask include: Can you define custom fields, tables and table relationships? Can you create custom business rules, workflows, charts and reports? Can you define custom access permissions or are you limited to a set of pre-defined roles? Do custom tables and workflows behave like the native ones? Does the product provide an API for customization and integration with other systems? It’s impossible to predict future requirements, but adaptable software will handle the changes as they come.
Adaptation Time
After choosing an appropriately configurable solution, determine the ease of modification. If it takes assistance from dedicated IT staff to modify the product or you need to depend on the “common sense” of programmers to make your desired changes, you may end up waiting for a long time and paying a lot of money for a disappointing result.
The easiest way to find out how long it takes to adapt software to meet your challenges is by observing it firsthand during the demo – keep some of your requirements in reserve so that you can tell the vendor about them during the demo itself. Ask that they be implemented while you watch and then request access to the resulting system so that you can test the result. A good question to ask is “Could I or my staff have made such changes, or will we be dependent on expensive consultants?”
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2. MAKE IT PERSONAL
People want to feel that suppliers give care and attention to their individual needs. So high-worth individuals are assigned “personal bankers”, doctors at HMO’s are taught “bedside-manner” and marketers at Apple strive to make the entire company seem “personal”. This section describes how you can provide personal service without raising costs.
The Basics
Find out the customer’s name during the first 10 seconds of a call, then use it immediately and thereafter. This technique is obvious and basic, but highly effective. For example a call might start: “Hi, what is your name…”, “John, how can I help you?”
Take responsibility and follow up. Customers care that you care and are much happier if they get a follow up – even if it is just to say “John, I am sorry, but I followed up with Kathy and we just cannot do what you want.” You can automate this by setting a flag such as “Follow-Up Required” that automatically reminds your staff to follow up with the customer and escalates the issue if they fail to do so.
Listen with an open mind. Ask open-ended questions and get the facts before offering a solution. In many cases, the customer needs to vent a bit before they will even be willing to listen to a solution, especially if the problem is their fault.
Remember What You’re Told
Your customer may communicate with multiple individuals from multiple departments through voice, email, chat or online forms. Whatever the format, the information they convey should be captured and available during the next interaction so that they do not have to repeat themselves.
You can achieve this through web-forms tailored for each interaction type, integrated with email and online chat, by capturing these interactions in a central database, with access controlled through precise security permissions.
Acknowledge Immediately
By configuring your system to generate an immediate response to incoming emails, together with a tracking number that can be used in future communications, you are letting the customer know “I hear you”. It costs nothing and improves the efficiency of future communications.
Satisfy SLAs
The only way to ensure that your company keeps its Service Level Agreement promises is by automating the process. The software infrastructure needs to monitor activity, notify the appropriate individuals to ensure that SLA requirements are met and escalate issues before you are out of compliance. Automatically ensuring that promises are kept not only burnishes your reputation, it saves you time and money.
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3. MEASURE THE RIGHT THINGS
“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics”
– Benjamin Disraeli
Statistics that reflect the wrong metrics can drive the very worst decisions. The peril is illustrated by the following real-life example.
Joe was consistently closing 15 issues per day while Mary only managed 7. Who should get promoted?
Happily, Mary got promoted and Joe got fired. Although he was closing over twice as many tickets, he was not actually solving the customer problems and over 80% of them had to submit a new request. This came to light when the helpdesk manager put in place a CRM system that tracked customer satisfaction for each support representative.
Incidentally, it was later estimated that Joe had cost the company $250,000 in lost customers.
It is not enough to measure; you must measure the right things.
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4. HIRE THE RIGHT EMPLOYEES
By far, the most effective way to be a great manager is to hire great employees. Of course, the problem is finding the few great candidates in a sea of resumes, so that is what this section is all about: a process for finding employees that is more effective and takes less time than the traditional process. But first, let’s clear up a couple of myths.
Myth 1: Interviews are effective.
The exact number depends on the interviewer, but researchers have found that typical interview accuracy rates are only 30% better than random selection. Further, there is almost no correlation between how good someone thinks they are at interviewing and how effective they are. If you have never hired a dud employee, congratulations! If you have, read on.
Myth 2: Talking to references and evaluating past experience can ensure you make the right decision.
Not only are many employers too afraid of lawsuits to give bad references, some will even give excellent references to help rid themselves of problem employees. In general the only thing harder than finding a good employee is finding a bad reference.
Prior experience is an excellent indicator of how much money employees will want, but a poor indicator of how well they will actually perform.
Of course, interviews, reference and background checks are an essential part of the hiring process, but they should not be the sole criteria. Here is a more efficient process:
• Create custom web forms for each job opening and set up business rules to prioritize and/or auto-reject candidates based upon information provided in the form. For example, you can ask them to take a quick online test and include the result in their application. Appropriate rules can eliminate 70-90% of the candidates without any effort on your part.
• Conduct a ten minute telephone interview with the remaining candidates and ask them to take an online aptitude test for that specific position. Only consider candidates who score in the top 10-20%, depending on the position.
• By this point, you will have eliminated about 95% of the applicants and can afford to schedule in-person interviews for the remainder with each member of the team.
• Only hire candidates who achieve unanimous buy-in from team members. Immediately make a job offer, contingent upon reference, credit and criminal background checks. Do not keep them waiting or another employer may step in.
A disciplined, automated hiring process can not only free up your time and ensure you find the best possible candidate, it is objective and can be audited to demonstrate an absence of bias.
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5. BE PROACTIVE
To provide proactive support you need to recognize and resolve issues before they become problems. This section describes how you can obtain early warning signs of pending issues and either resolve them in advance or reduce the severity from a disaster to a minor blip.
Answer Before Asked
Once a question has been asked and answered by one customer, why not make it available to all the others?
Provide an FAQ at your website so that customers can get answers to common questions 24/7 without even asking your staff. The FAQ should be tightly integrated with the ticketing system so that you can publish the best answer to a new question with just a mouse click.
Plan for the Unexpected
Even with redundant power supplies, RAID hard drives, and ECC memory, any given server will eventually fail.
If you are hosting your support system, deploy hotswap redundant servers so that service is automatically transferred to the other server. If you are using a SaaS service, check that their SLA guarantees 99.5+% uptime, backed by a money back warranty. An SLA that just provides a pro-rata refund is worthless.
No matter how carefully you test, your own product and infrastructure will have problems.
Set up automatic monitoring and notify your customers of critical problems in other areas of your product infrastructure, before they call. When possible, include the resolution ETA.
Early Alerts of Changes
You need to have the right number of staff to handle an ever changing flow of new issues.
Do not just track the number of open issues, track the rate of new arrivals with a weekly trend chart.
Plan for a flood of new problems when a new product is released.
Handle Issues in Order
Service reps may try to inflate their closure rates by picking the easy issues to work on. This hurts both customers and other staff.
Use round-robin assignment or skill-based assignment of each issue to an individual rather than simply leaving it in a pool.
Make it easy for staff to open and work on the next issue in their queue.
Improve Staff Morale
Customer support is a tough job at the best of times and it is made even more frustrating by having to answer the same questions time and again.
Allow customers to self-register and submit problem reports or requests over the web 24/7, thus freeing your staff from manual data entry.
For customers who do call or submit problems, create a library of standard solutions that your staff can import into the ticket. This not only saves time, it helps prevent mistakes.
Anticipate Staff Changes
Staff vacations, sick-leaves and changes should be transparent to customers.
Make sure that your support system supports the rapid re-assignment of issues and can automatically re-assign issues that have been dormant for too long.
Survey Your Customers
Seek feedback on your support interactions.
Implement surveys that go out to the customers based on “types of issues” to stratify your data. You can find out what about a product the customer doesn’t like, why they cancelled, etc.
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6. BECOME A PROFIT CENTER
The easiest way to justify a bigger budget is to generate more revenue, and Support is superbly positioned to do exactly that – customers call Support far more often than they call Sales. Here are some simple steps you can take to exploit that opportunity.
• Review tickets and consider which of them might be addressed by other goods and services that your company offers.
• Gather information in ticket submission forms that will indicate which customers are good prospects for other products.
• Train your staff on how to up-sell customers and incentivize them to do so, just like salespeople.
• Coordinate with Sales. You want their active assistance, not a turf war.
• Directly measure the monetary value of Support staff up-sells and assign value to new leads and other intangibles. Use these numbers to make a stronger case for the Support organization.
• Don’t let Support staff forget the bottom line! First priority should be to respond promptly and thoroughly to customer concerns before thinking about sales.
• Use live chat for quick turn-around of common billing issues, such as credit card updates, address changes, and shipping questions. Live chat can decrease checkout abandonment and up-sell other products.
• Use specific hyperlinks or any distinct identification in your communications with customers to identify when Support staff generate an up-sale.
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7. UTILIZE THE WISDOM OF YOUR USERS
Facilitating communication between your users can significantly offset the burden placed on first responders.
An effective Support organization utilizes all resources at its disposal and seeks to balance the support load as efficiently as possible. To most organizations this means appropriately assigning tasks to staff, but many forget to use the enormous pool of knowledge and labor that exists in the user base.
• Provide a centrally located, public, and prominently featured forum for discussion and communication between users. Integrate it as much as possible with your existing infrastructure to streamline the user experience.
• Encourage users to refer to the forums as an additional line of support. Users can post issues and collaborate online 24/7, even outside of business hours.
• Have your staff scan the forums regularly to get an idea of common problems, post quick solutions, and see what workarounds customers devise.
Utilizing the wisdom of your users reinforces the core message of the Seven Secrets, urging you to make the most of what you have. Each secret you employ provides real benefits: Be Adaptable, Make it Personal to increase customer satisfaction, Measure the Right Things to accurately reflect how well your organization is doing, save time by automating and monitoring the process of Hiring the Right Employees, Be Proactive to stay one step ahead of surprises, Become a Profit Center to increase resources, and tap the mental energy of the crowds when you Utilize the Wisdom of Your Users.
Have your own ideas for how to better manage a support organization? Let us know at the EnterpriseWizard forums!
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Complete product information, as well as demos and free CRM software trial downloads, are available at http://www.enterprisewizard.com.
White papers on customer relationship management software are available at http://www.enterprisewizard.com/white.htm.
Please peruse our case studies at http://www.enterprisewizard.com/success.htm to read about our customers’ success with customer relationship management software.
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ABOUT ENTERPISEWIZARD INC.:
With headquarters in Silicon Valley and resellers worldwide, EnterpriseWizard, Inc. is the leading provider of powerful, affordable, and easily deployed 100% web-based business process automation (BPA) solutions for organizations of all sizes.
Our company has attracted customers from industries with vastly different needs, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies such as Chevron, Merrill Lynch, and NEC since we were founded in 1991.
Based on its award-winning predecessor product SupportWizard, EnterpriseWizard CRM is a top-rated, out-of-the-box J2EE solution for issue tracking, helpdesk, customer support, sales, email, and marketing automation. Organizations can get up and running quickly with its default templates, and easily enhance and extend the application through an intuitive browser-based interface. Clients have adapted the system for Sarbanes-Oxley and Government Regulation, Project and Time Management, Change Management, and other specialized applications.
Adam Smith
http://www.articlesbase.com/technology-articles/white-paper-secrets-for-effectively-managing-a-support-operation-669464.html
INTRODUCTION
Would you rather buy a product from a company with a reputation for having a great Support organization or a great Sales organization?
Join the crowd if you answered Support; survey after survey shows that it is one of the strongest factors influencing sales, and every company has strong self-interest in doing it right.
It’s no secret that software is a necessary component of an efficiently run Support organization. There are dozens of different solutions out there; taking the time to choose one that gives you the flexibility you need and the power to automate business processes will not only save you time and money, but allow you to shift your focus to improving your quality of service.
So why is Support so often perceived as broken?
The answer is that effectively managing a Support organization for even a simple product is difficult, and managing support for a complex product or service is as tough as it gets. This paper discusses the challenges involved in managing a sophisticated support organization and the key strategies for dealing with those challenges.
____________________________________________________________________________
1. BE ADAPTABLE
If you are going to win games, you had better be ready to adapt.
– Scotty Bowman, Winningest coach in NHL history
If history has proven anything, it’s that winners are adapters. Evolution itself is rooted in this idea, and companies, like creatures in nature, must adapt to thrive. There are countless success stories of companies bucking expectations and making real profit from adaptation.
The Solution
Over time, your business will grow or shrink, shift focus, adapt new technologies, meet new challenges, and discover new opportunities to reduce costs and improve performance through automation. A system that adapts as you do will save your organization money, time, and a good deal of frustration.
Life would be easier if you knew what changes were coming nine months in advance, but new challenges can surface almost overnight, so you need a system that will adapt quickly, under your control, and at a reasonable cost. The following paragraphs explore this issue in more depth, with an emphasis on support systems.
Configurability
The ideal product starts as a good fit, adapts to your requirements, and gives you freedom to automate new business processes as needed. It doesn’t force you to change your business processes to live inside hard-coded functions.
Probe the limitations of each potential software solution. Good questions to ask include: Can you define custom fields, tables and table relationships? Can you create custom business rules, workflows, charts and reports? Can you define custom access permissions or are you limited to a set of pre-defined roles? Do custom tables and workflows behave like the native ones? Does the product provide an API for customization and integration with other systems? It’s impossible to predict future requirements, but adaptable software will handle the changes as they come.
Adaptation Time
After choosing an appropriately configurable solution, determine the ease of modification. If it takes assistance from dedicated IT staff to modify the product or you need to depend on the “common sense” of programmers to make your desired changes, you may end up waiting for a long time and paying a lot of money for a disappointing result.
The easiest way to find out how long it takes to adapt software to meet your challenges is by observing it firsthand during the demo – keep some of your requirements in reserve so that you can tell the vendor about them during the demo itself. Ask that they be implemented while you watch and then request access to the resulting system so that you can test the result. A good question to ask is “Could I or my staff have made such changes, or will we be dependent on expensive consultants?”
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2. MAKE IT PERSONAL
People want to feel that suppliers give care and attention to their individual needs. So high-worth individuals are assigned “personal bankers”, doctors at HMO’s are taught “bedside-manner” and marketers at Apple strive to make the entire company seem “personal”. This section describes how you can provide personal service without raising costs.
The Basics
Find out the customer’s name during the first 10 seconds of a call, then use it immediately and thereafter. This technique is obvious and basic, but highly effective. For example a call might start: “Hi, what is your name…”, “John, how can I help you?”
Take responsibility and follow up. Customers care that you care and are much happier if they get a follow up – even if it is just to say “John, I am sorry, but I followed up with Kathy and we just cannot do what you want.” You can automate this by setting a flag such as “Follow-Up Required” that automatically reminds your staff to follow up with the customer and escalates the issue if they fail to do so.
Listen with an open mind. Ask open-ended questions and get the facts before offering a solution. In many cases, the customer needs to vent a bit before they will even be willing to listen to a solution, especially if the problem is their fault.
Remember What You’re Told
Your customer may communicate with multiple individuals from multiple departments through voice, email, chat or online forms. Whatever the format, the information they convey should be captured and available during the next interaction so that they do not have to repeat themselves.
You can achieve this through web-forms tailored for each interaction type, integrated with email and online chat, by capturing these interactions in a central database, with access controlled through precise security permissions.
Acknowledge Immediately
By configuring your system to generate an immediate response to incoming emails, together with a tracking number that can be used in future communications, you are letting the customer know “I hear you”. It costs nothing and improves the efficiency of future communications.
Satisfy SLAs
The only way to ensure that your company keeps its Service Level Agreement promises is by automating the process. The software infrastructure needs to monitor activity, notify the appropriate individuals to ensure that SLA requirements are met and escalate issues before you are out of compliance. Automatically ensuring that promises are kept not only burnishes your reputation, it saves you time and money.
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3. MEASURE THE RIGHT THINGS
“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics”
– Benjamin Disraeli
Statistics that reflect the wrong metrics can drive the very worst decisions. The peril is illustrated by the following real-life example.
Joe was consistently closing 15 issues per day while Mary only managed 7. Who should get promoted?
Happily, Mary got promoted and Joe got fired. Although he was closing over twice as many tickets, he was not actually solving the customer problems and over 80% of them had to submit a new request. This came to light when the helpdesk manager put in place a CRM system that tracked customer satisfaction for each support representative.
Incidentally, it was later estimated that Joe had cost the company $250,000 in lost customers.
It is not enough to measure; you must measure the right things.
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4. HIRE THE RIGHT EMPLOYEES
By far, the most effective way to be a great manager is to hire great employees. Of course, the problem is finding the few great candidates in a sea of resumes, so that is what this section is all about: a process for finding employees that is more effective and takes less time than the traditional process. But first, let’s clear up a couple of myths.
Myth 1: Interviews are effective.
The exact number depends on the interviewer, but researchers have found that typical interview accuracy rates are only 30% better than random selection. Further, there is almost no correlation between how good someone thinks they are at interviewing and how effective they are. If you have never hired a dud employee, congratulations! If you have, read on.
Myth 2: Talking to references and evaluating past experience can ensure you make the right decision.
Not only are many employers too afraid of lawsuits to give bad references, some will even give excellent references to help rid themselves of problem employees. In general the only thing harder than finding a good employee is finding a bad reference.
Prior experience is an excellent indicator of how much money employees will want, but a poor indicator of how well they will actually perform.
Of course, interviews, reference and background checks are an essential part of the hiring process, but they should not be the sole criteria. Here is a more efficient process:
• Create custom web forms for each job opening and set up business rules to prioritize and/or auto-reject candidates based upon information provided in the form. For example, you can ask them to take a quick online test and include the result in their application. Appropriate rules can eliminate 70-90% of the candidates without any effort on your part.
• Conduct a ten minute telephone interview with the remaining candidates and ask them to take an online aptitude test for that specific position. Only consider candidates who score in the top 10-20%, depending on the position.
• By this point, you will have eliminated about 95% of the applicants and can afford to schedule in-person interviews for the remainder with each member of the team.
• Only hire candidates who achieve unanimous buy-in from team members. Immediately make a job offer, contingent upon reference, credit and criminal background checks. Do not keep them waiting or another employer may step in.
A disciplined, automated hiring process can not only free up your time and ensure you find the best possible candidate, it is objective and can be audited to demonstrate an absence of bias.
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5. BE PROACTIVE
To provide proactive support you need to recognize and resolve issues before they become problems. This section describes how you can obtain early warning signs of pending issues and either resolve them in advance or reduce the severity from a disaster to a minor blip.
Answer Before Asked
Once a question has been asked and answered by one customer, why not make it available to all the others?
Provide an FAQ at your website so that customers can get answers to common questions 24/7 without even asking your staff. The FAQ should be tightly integrated with the ticketing system so that you can publish the best answer to a new question with just a mouse click.
Plan for the Unexpected
Even with redundant power supplies, RAID hard drives, and ECC memory, any given server will eventually fail.
If you are hosting your support system, deploy hotswap redundant servers so that service is automatically transferred to the other server. If you are using a SaaS service, check that their SLA guarantees 99.5+% uptime, backed by a money back warranty. An SLA that just provides a pro-rata refund is worthless.
No matter how carefully you test, your own product and infrastructure will have problems.
Set up automatic monitoring and notify your customers of critical problems in other areas of your product infrastructure, before they call. When possible, include the resolution ETA.
Early Alerts of Changes
You need to have the right number of staff to handle an ever changing flow of new issues.
Do not just track the number of open issues, track the rate of new arrivals with a weekly trend chart.
Plan for a flood of new problems when a new product is released.
Handle Issues in Order
Service reps may try to inflate their closure rates by picking the easy issues to work on. This hurts both customers and other staff.
Use round-robin assignment or skill-based assignment of each issue to an individual rather than simply leaving it in a pool.
Make it easy for staff to open and work on the next issue in their queue.
Improve Staff Morale
Customer support is a tough job at the best of times and it is made even more frustrating by having to answer the same questions time and again.
Allow customers to self-register and submit problem reports or requests over the web 24/7, thus freeing your staff from manual data entry.
For customers who do call or submit problems, create a library of standard solutions that your staff can import into the ticket. This not only saves time, it helps prevent mistakes.
Anticipate Staff Changes
Staff vacations, sick-leaves and changes should be transparent to customers.
Make sure that your support system supports the rapid re-assignment of issues and can automatically re-assign issues that have been dormant for too long.
Survey Your Customers
Seek feedback on your support interactions.
Implement surveys that go out to the customers based on “types of issues” to stratify your data. You can find out what about a product the customer doesn’t like, why they cancelled, etc.
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6. BECOME A PROFIT CENTER
The easiest way to justify a bigger budget is to generate more revenue, and Support is superbly positioned to do exactly that – customers call Support far more often than they call Sales. Here are some simple steps you can take to exploit that opportunity.
• Review tickets and consider which of them might be addressed by other goods and services that your company offers.
• Gather information in ticket submission forms that will indicate which customers are good prospects for other products.
• Train your staff on how to up-sell customers and incentivize them to do so, just like salespeople.
• Coordinate with Sales. You want their active assistance, not a turf war.
• Directly measure the monetary value of Support staff up-sells and assign value to new leads and other intangibles. Use these numbers to make a stronger case for the Support organization.
• Don’t let Support staff forget the bottom line! First priority should be to respond promptly and thoroughly to customer concerns before thinking about sales.
• Use live chat for quick turn-around of common billing issues, such as credit card updates, address changes, and shipping questions. Live chat can decrease checkout abandonment and up-sell other products.
• Use specific hyperlinks or any distinct identification in your communications with customers to identify when Support staff generate an up-sale.
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7. UTILIZE THE WISDOM OF YOUR USERS
Facilitating communication between your users can significantly offset the burden placed on first responders.
An effective Support organization utilizes all resources at its disposal and seeks to balance the support load as efficiently as possible. To most organizations this means appropriately assigning tasks to staff, but many forget to use the enormous pool of knowledge and labor that exists in the user base.
• Provide a centrally located, public, and prominently featured forum for discussion and communication between users. Integrate it as much as possible with your existing infrastructure to streamline the user experience.
• Encourage users to refer to the forums as an additional line of support. Users can post issues and collaborate online 24/7, even outside of business hours.
• Have your staff scan the forums regularly to get an idea of common problems, post quick solutions, and see what workarounds customers devise.
Utilizing the wisdom of your users reinforces the core message of the Seven Secrets, urging you to make the most of what you have. Each secret you employ provides real benefits: Be Adaptable, Make it Personal to increase customer satisfaction, Measure the Right Things to accurately reflect how well your organization is doing, save time by automating and monitoring the process of Hiring the Right Employees, Be Proactive to stay one step ahead of surprises, Become a Profit Center to increase resources, and tap the mental energy of the crowds when you Utilize the Wisdom of Your Users.
Have your own ideas for how to better manage a support organization? Let us know at the EnterpriseWizard forums!
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Complete product information, as well as demos and free CRM software trial downloads, are available at http://www.enterprisewizard.com.
Please peruse our case studies at http://www.enterprisewizard.com/success.htm to read about our customers’ success with customer relationship management software.
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ABOUT ENTERPRISEWIZARD INC.:
With headquarters in Silicon Valley and resellers worldwide, EnterpriseWizard, Inc. is the leading provider of powerful, affordable, and easily deployed 100% web-based business process automation (BPA) solutions for organizations of all sizes.
Our company has attracted customers from industries with vastly different needs, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies such as Chevron, Merrill Lynch, and NEC since we were founded in 1991.
Based on its award-winning predecessor product SupportWizard, EnterpriseWizard CRM is a top-rated, out-of-the-box J2EE solution for issue tracking, helpdesk, customer support, sales, email, and marketing automation. Organizations can get up and running quickly with its default templates, and easily enhance and extend the application through an intuitive browser-based interface. Clients have adapted the system for Sarbanes-Oxley and Government Regulation, Project and Time Management, Change Management, and other specialized applications.
Adam Smith
http://www.articlesbase.com/management-articles/white-paper-seven-secrets-for-effectively-managing-a-support-operation-672485.html
Title : How to Promote your small business web site without costing you a nickel.
Desc : Organizing a Cost Effective Small Business Web Site Promotion And how to promote your website!
How to: Promote your small business web site without costing you a nickel.
Small Business Web Site Promotion
The most important thing to remember when you want to encourage visitors to visit your web site is to make sure they will want to return again. ‘Visitors’ means not just human web surfers, but also the search engines and directories. Small business website promotion, no matter how much you promote your site, will be the look of the site that will keep visitors there and hopefully buy your products or services.
Optimize your Site for Search Engines; Check your links
Small business website promotion starts with a search engine spider indexing or cataloging your site by following the links from one page to another. Just as human visitors dislike a broken link, so do the spiders. If a link doesn’t work they’ll simply move onto the next page. No matter how sophisticated the search engine software is, it can’t index what it can’t find. Also remember that a spider will not be able to follow a link that requires a form submission or Java Script so small business website promotion is very important.
While considering the subject of links, if you are using HTML and CSS on your site, make sure that both work properly. A certain minimum level of requirements must be met so that your pages will display correctly. It is only if these are met that a spider can do its work. There are free facilities online that can check both of these for you.
* Make sure your links work.
* Do not use forms or Javascript if you want a search engine spider to find your pages
* Check that HTML and CSS work properly.
Do not make your Pages too big!
Most of us have heard the expression ‘size isn’t everything’. While this may not be true of many things, it does matter when it comes to web pages. People do not like having to wait an eternity for a web page to load. Search engine spiders may not fully index a page bigger than 150k in size. Remember that the size of a page does not simply depend on the actual HTML file itself, but includes everything on the page such as images, banners etc.
If you have a lot of images on your pages, then either reduce the number of them, or use a program such as Macromedia Fireworks to optimize them for the web. If the page has a big file size because there is a massive amount of text in it, then you should consider splitting the text into smaller, more manageable pieces and putting them on several pages and linking one to another. SEO Chat has a tool called “Page Size Lookup” which can tell you the size of your web page; you can check it out at
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/page-size/
* Keep the file size to below 150k
* Optimize images for the web
* Use a free page size checker to find out the actual size of the page.
Search Engines and Directories; What is the difference between a search engine and a directory?
People frequently use the term ‘search engine’ as a catch-all expression for anything they use to search the Web. They are different things though, and an understanding of the differences will enable you get use both effectively to promote your site more successfully.
How does a search engine work?
Search engines use highly sophisticated software to search the web for new pages. It then automatically creates and updates their indexes. Whenever they find an active hyperlink, they will follow it and add that to the index and so on. These ‘crawling’ programs are generally referred to as ‘spiders’.
Normally, all this is totally automatic, but sometimes human intervention is involved. The spider will return periodically to the pages and check for updated content. Often there will be a delay between you uploading your page, and the spider finding it, unless you submit your URL directly to the search engine itself. You can submit a web URL to Google ™ free of charge.
* Search engines are usually automatic
* They will revisit your pages.
* Spiders will find all the pages on your site as long as there are active hyperlinks for them to follow.
* You can submit a site to most search engines free of charge.
How Directories Work.
The primary difference between a search engine and a search directory is that a directory is compiled by a real person. Frequently the site owner will submit a short description of the site together with its URL to the directory compiler to be considered for inclusion. Directories are arranged into categories to make it easier to find what you are looking for.
When you submit your site to a directory, you choose the category you want your site to be featured in. A reviewer then checks to ensure that your site is in the most suitable category.
Another difference between a search engine and a directory is that whereas a search engine could list every individual page in your web site, a directory will generally only contain a single entry covering your entire site.
* Directories are compiled by real people.
* They are categorized.
* A reviewer checks to ensure your site is in the best category.
* A directory will usually only contain one entry for your entire site.
Shared Indexes and Hybrids
Things are never so straightforward though. Some search portals are a hybrid, combing a search engine and a directory. The search engine part returns automated results, while the directory gives human found results.
Normally, a hybrid will supply hits from the directory as the primary source, with the search engine results of individual pages as the secondary source.
Getting your Site Ready
It cannot be stressed too strongly that search engines and/or directories are by far the most important way of getting your site noticed. To do this, you have to properly prepare the site and submit your URL to them.
Keywords are important: Choose the right keywords
Think what your web site is all about. If you had to describe your site in one word, then that word is your first keyword. Then think about other words to describe your site. Make a list of them, with the most important at the top of the list and so on. You want a list of between ten and fifteen words. Since these keywords will be used in a variety of ways, it is important that you take some time selecting them.
Keywords are important because they are possibly the most important thing that a search engine uses to determine whether a page is included in the search results. Even although different search engines use keywords in different ways, most experts agree that the frequency and position of your keywords is an important factor.
* Select keywords to describe your site.
* Choose 10 – 15 keywords.
* Take your time picking keywords – they are extremely important.
Pick a Good Title for your Web Page
When you write a web page, there is always a tag. This goes into the section of your web page. The tag is what is shown at the top of your web page when it is displayed in a web browser. Search engines, however, often use the tag as the title of the listing in the results.
The tag looks like this
The name of my Web Page
Not only is it good practice to make your tag have a good description of the content of the page, but if you can manage to work into it some of your keywords, so much the better.
Why you should use Meta Tags?
What are meta tags?
Meta tags are a special type of HTML code that goes into the section of a web page. Site visitors do not normally see them, but search engine spiders do. Just as some HTML tags have an attribute with a value, so too do meta tags.
As far as optimizing your web page for search engines is concerned, the most important meta tags are keywords and description. The syntax for the keyword tag is as follows:
The description tag is as follows:
Unlike some HTML tags, it is not strictly necessary to have the meta tag closed, but if you want to have valid XHTML, then you do need to close all your tags.
Consider your URL
Since we are discussing matters that will influence how a page appears, it is worth considering the actual URL of the page itself. Since the URL that appears in your browser reflects the file path for the page, it makes good sense to have the file name reflect the navigation of the site.
You can see at a glance that this page refers to the Lower Square, which is part of the Castle, which in turn is part of Stirling. Not only does this meaningful URL impart information to the visitor, but for the web designer it makes sense to have the separate files arranged in a logical manner. This will only apply to pages that have not been dynamically created by a database program, of course.
* Choose a meaningful title for your page.
* Put your keywords into the /www.dmoz.org/). This is the largest human-maintained directory of the Web. Because it allows virtually anyone to access its resources, many search portals such as AOL, Netscape and HotBot take advantage of this and include their data into their own systems. This means that once you are included on the ODP database, you are also included in many others.
* There are places you can submit your site free of charge
* Google is probably the most important place to submit to.
* Yahoo is a good second choice if you don’t mind registering with them.
* Do not forget the Open Directory Project.
Paid Listings
Although Google and Yahoo do not charge you anything for submitting your site to them, they do not guarantee where or when your site will appear in their listings. However, they do have sponsored links that appear either above or beside the listing of search engine hits. These are useful for promoting your small business web site since they are targeted links. If, for instance, someone searches for “bagpipes”, then not only will they get a list of bagpipe related sites returned, but they will also see the ‘sponsored links”.
Free Promotional Techniques
Ad Swapping
This is one of the easier ways of getting your web site promoted. What it involves basically is that you display an advertising banner, button or text link on your web site, and other sites do the same for your ads.
The simplest way of swapping banner ads is to join an existing banner swapping network:
Banner Advertising
Banner networks work because you are provided with a few lines of HTML code to include on your web pages, usually near the top. The HTML creates banners from other sites on your pages. When a visitor clicks on them, they are re-directed to their web site. At the same time, you provide the network organizer with your own banner to display elsewhere.
There are many banner ad networks available, so choose with caution. Try to find one that will direct traffic to your site, by displaying your ad on related sites. In order for the network to make money, they will perhaps ask you to display 2 banners in return for displaying yours once.
No network will promise a 1:1 ratio, so avoid those that do. Do not consider paying for extra banners until you have proved to yourself that the free ad is generating enough visitors to your site. Although most networks will promise not to display ads for pornographic or other unsuitable sites, in reality you have no control over them.
* Banner ads are free
* Try to choose a network that is related in some way to your business.
* Avoid those that make extravagant claims about the ratio of ads.
* Be aware that you have virtually no control over what ads appear on your site.
* You might get buttons or text links instead of banners.
Peer to Peer Swaps
Although banner swapping can yield increased exposure of your site, sometimes a more targeted approach is required. The object of the exercise is to get your ad seen by as many possible visitors as possible, therefore if you can arrange a deal with the webmaster of a busier site than yours it could be advantageous.
You may have to compromise. In return for prominently displaying an advertisement for a busier or better known web site than yours, you might have to agree to less prominence on the other site.
Web Rings
These are networks of similarly themed sites which creates links from one to another to form a chain. You will display a web link icon and a list of at least some of the other sites in the ring. If you are just launching your web site it is probably best to try to join an established ring.
There are possible flaws in joining a web ring. You will need to allow space on your pages to display the ring logo. Visitors might think that you are part of an organization, and if some of the sites are badly built, you might be associated with the rest of them. You will have no control over which sites join the ring, and link to you and vice versa.
* Web rings are free.
* They are normally similar web sites to your own.
* You have no control over the quality of the other sites in the ring.
Article Submission Sites : What is an Article Submission site?
An article submission site, and there are roughly 250 of them, are an effective way of promoting your own goods and services as well as generating traffic to your web site. Their purpose is to provide webmasters, e-book editors and e-zine publishers with free content for their own publications. The articles are usually arranged into different categories, and the site is normally searchable.
How they work
You write an article or series of articles about what you have to offer on your web site. The purpose of the article is not to directly sell your goods. Let us suppose that your web site sells a wide range of possible gifts for all members of the family. Your article might be about, for example, birthday gift ideas for teenage boys.
The purpose is to make your article interesting enough and informative enough for it to be used somewhere else. Since you have included some biographical details about yourself, including your own URL, and your article is published exactly as it appears on the article site, your URL appears in the end-user’s web site. Thus you are getting free publicity, and the publisher is getting free content.
* Article submission sites get you free publicity.
* Publishers get free page content.
* Your URL appears wherever your article is used, and so generates traffic to your site.
Paid or free submissions
All article submission sites will allow you to submit your article for nothing. You register with the site, and you can select what category you want your article to appear in. When you write your article you will include the same keywords as you did when you wrote the HTML for your web site. Thus a search engine will find your site, as well as the article you wrote about it.
Some article sites will allow you to bid for better placement within their pages. Basically, the more you bid, the higher prominence you will get on the article site’s home page. Thus you are the first thing a publisher notices. Even if you are outbid for top spot, chances are you will still be on the home page. Since a lot of the sites also have separate front pages for each of the categories, even if you don’t achieve prime position on the site’s home page, you likely will in the category pages.
* Use the same keywords you used on your web pages.
* You can bid for increased placement on the article site’s pages.
Summary
As you can see, there are many ways that you can promote your small business web site. By far the simplest way is to ensure that your web site has carefully chosen key words for search engines to find. You can also submit your web site to search engines, ad exchange networks, web rings and article submission sites free.
About the Author:
Rajesh V. Tavakari, Senior SEO of http://www.website-promotion-ranking-services.com/. Offering affordable website promotion and natural optimization services since 1998. Website : http://www.website-promotion-ranking-services.com/ . You may freely reprint this article on your website or in your newsletter provided this courtesy notice, author name and URL remain intact.
Rajesh Tavakari
http://www.articlesbase.com/small-business-articles/how-to-promote-your-small-business-web-site-without-costing-you-a-nickel-129732.html
Article submission software has added a new meaning to article marketing. Webmasters have a love-hate relationship with article submission. Some dread article submission because of the lengthy process of submitting manually to hundreds of article submission directories, others simply don’t have a flair for writing. But in both cases, webmasters still force themselves to do so because article marketing is effective in driving targeted traffic to their websites. This article would share some tips on article marketing and article submissions software to avoid the pains and grouses about in article submission.
Article marketing is a powerful marketing tool if done correctly. Let’s look at some tips on what goes into an article that entices visitors to come to your website and how article marketing can be painless and enjoyable experience using article submission software.
1. Catchy Title
Spend some time to create a catchy title. Try to be funny and entertaining, yet not sound flippant or flamboyant. Compare “Article Submission Software Helps You Submit Articles” to “Killer Article Submission Software Makes Article Submission Easy as ABC”. Which one is better? The answer is obvious. A catchy title grabs the attention of the reader. Marketing research reveals that you only have a few seconds to entice your audience to read your article before he/she decides to move on to something else.
2. Informative and Non-Exaggerative Content
Write informative content to establish trust between yourself and your reader. Investing in good content is wise. Once you manage to get your audience glued to your content, for more details visit to www.newbies-copywriting.com you are one step closer to establishing yourself as an expert in the topic. The probability of your reader visiting your website dramatically increases. But please do not over-exaggerate. Be truthful.
3. Arouse Curiosity
Never reveal everything in your article. TV shows often end each episode with an incomplete scenario. This is how they hook you up to follow through every episode. Learn from them. Give enough “appetizer” to your readers and invite them at the end of your article to have a “full course” at your website.
4. Research For Facts
Stick with good factual content. People are always looking for specific answers and these answers are sometimes found in statistics and figures. There are a few places that are ideal for doing research for article marketing. Wikipedia, for more details visit to www.perfect-ghostwriter.com How Stuff Works and Fact Monster are great sources of research material.
5. Hire A Ghost Writer
If you don’t like to write, hire a ghost writer to do so. Typically, a good article should cost you at least $5 and above. Though $5 articles are rare these days, there are some new authors who are eager to take on your article writing assignment to build up their reputation and credibility as writers. Elance and Scriptlance are excellent places to start your search for a writer.
6. Article Submission Software
Article submission software are tools you should include in your buying list. These tools take the monotony out of article marketing so that you can focus on writing articles of excellent quality. Nowadays there are many article submission software that can submit to article directories automatically. All you need to do is copy and paste your article into the software and send it off with a single mouse click.
These article marketing tips have helped many webmasters earn a fantastic income from home. With the help of the latest article Submission Software, they are able to make significant improvements in their earnings. Visit my blog now and find out which are the article submission software they are using to boost their income.
This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author’s name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.
chameli.jan2009
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/how-article-marketing-can-be-painless-and-enjoyable-experience-725527.html
An all solutions web Expert!
What in the world are you searching for when you have the best SEO team here!
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For your above requirement, you need an SEO team which understands that your business is beyond the basic parameters of SEO and it needs to be maximized by increasing sales. The target should be to increase website traffic, web promotion and effective sales which is the basic aim for us doing SEO.
We make your business flourish!
SEOXperts India is the only firm you shall find which understands SEO as just a tool to increase sales. Nothing can work alone. You need a bunch of services, among which Search Engine Optimization is one. Why do you want to just stick to one category of SEO and then leave the rest to algorithms even if no website traffic comes to you?
You need to get your website optimization done from a SEO professional and get some great utilities like Link building, article submission and PPC done which increases your website traffic and in return your sales.
Did you know all the above?
We are not surprised to hear that you would have not heard this before! Most SEO teams will not tell you this because they are good just at SEO and nothing else. They do not understand what a combination of all services can do to the web promotion of a SEO website. This only experienced and proficient people like SEOXperts India can explain.
Need more reasons…….. Read on……………..
Have you even seen a website with huge SEO done, good listings and still not selling products?
We have!
The reason is mainly because the website was optimized but the content written was poor. There is no use if the content written does not convey the exact idea of the product and is not capable to modulate the feelings of the reader to buy your product.
We integrate SEO, Content writing and other tools to make such a website which will sell rather than just be listed and waiting for readers to come, read and move on. We make the difference. We first bring the reader to your website through proper SEO and then make the reader stay there to be convinced and take up the sale. This is our main focus. Not just SEO or just Content Writing. This is why we ask you to come to us and forget all your previous teams which have promised, and were not able to perform.
SEOXperts India is not any other SEO firm which promises you top ranking with just one service. We do not make false commitments.
We can just assure you that your sales and ranking will rise considerably and you shall get the best out of your SEO venture.
One very important point to note is that why SEO or web promotion fails even when you have paid good money. The answer is the team is not capable enough. They just say that they can do it and you believe it.
Why have such people work on your business websites who can not eve understand your basic aim. We do understand and our writers work with your business manager to understand your specific areas of business dominance. Capturing the right customer is important. There is no need to do loads of advertising if you do not find the right customer.
We work only to understand your aim and make every endeavor for aiming higher.
Come to us and see the difference.
VISIT : http://seoxpertsindia.com
ananya
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/xigmapro-software-has-launched-seoxpertsindia-736034.html
In this installment of medical billing and the DME software setup, we’re going to briefly cover what is involved with the setup that is specifically designated for the people who do the actual billing of claims. This is a very complex process that involves a number of items that all have to work together.
In order to bill an insurance carrier for a claim, there are a number of items that the bilker needs access to. This includes the patient personal information, the item being billed, the carrier the bill is sent to and the method by which the bill will be sent. In order for this to happen, these things have to be setup in the system for the bilker.
The first order of business is that the bilker needs to have patient access. For more detail go to: www.viral-toolbar-builder.com.When the bill comes in, the patient number is usually on the first page of the bill. This number should have then been entered into the system along with the patient information. The bilker will then have access to this information through what is called a patient lookup feature. These features usually have several fields by which the bilker cans lookup the patient, such as by last name, ID number, etc.
After the patient is found, the next thing the bilker needs to know is what the item is being billed. These items all have to be setup in inventory, which is usually done by the inventory manager. For more help visit to: www.scripts-to-sell.com. Another lookup function is then provided to the bilker for looking up inventory items. This is usually done by item name or ski number. Once the item is found in inventory, the item is then added to the billing sheet.
The next thing that the bilker needs is the carrier that is going to be billed and the method by which the bill will be sent. The carrier is usually attached to the patient when the patient file is setup. But in some cases, the insurance carrier is not known at the time and the bilker has to add it at the time of billing. For this, another lookup table is provided with all the insurance carriers that the system supports. These are usually updated on a regular basis. The way the bilker knows which carrier to pull is by looking at the billing sheet that came in. The carrier is listed there.
The method by which the bill itself will be sent is usually determined by the billing agency itself. Not all agencies have electronic billing capabilities. In the cases where such capability doesn’t exist, the default billing method will be via paper claims and the bilker won’t have to do anything. The claim will automatically go to the print queue upon submission.
Naturally, the above process is greatly simplified, but for the most part, that is all that is involved with sending a bill for a medical claim. The truth is, if medical billing was this easy, there wouldn’t be so many claims that get denied each day. The problem is that bilkers are not properly trained and the medical billing software itself can only do so much.
jaswinder singh MANN
http://www.articlesbase.com/software-articles/medical-billing-and-dme-software-bilker-setup-735806.html
As in past years the IRS issued a 2009 tax guide for employers. Below is a summary of the new changes for the new year.
1. Social security and Medicare taxes (rate and cutoff)
Employers must stop withholding social security tax after an employee reaches $106,800 in social security wages in 2009. The maximum social security withholding amount in 2008 was $102,000. This change will require employers to update their accounting or payroll software, either by downloading a new version from the software vendor or by updating the tax tables in their existing payroll system. There is no limit on the amount of wages subject to Medicare tax. Medicare taxes also apply to the wages of household workers an employer pays $1,700 or more in cash. Social security and Medicare taxes apply to election workers who are paid $1,500 or more. The change in the social security withholding cutoff mainly affects employers who have high income employees, making more than 106,800 dollars each year.
2. New employment tax adjustment and claim for refund process
The IRS is introducing two new forms for the 2009 tax year: Form 941-X, Adjusted Employer’s QUARTERLY Federal Tax Return or Claim for Refund, and Form 944-X, Adjusted Employer’s ANNUAL Federal Tax Return or Claim for Refund.
To correct employment tax errors discovered on or after January 1st 2009, employers should use the new corresponding “X” forms to correct employment tax errors as soon as they are discovered. For example, employers should use the new Form 941-X, Adjusted Employer’s QUARTERLY Federal Tax Return or Claim for Refund, to correct errors on a previously filed Form 941.
For overpayments: Employers can choose to make an adjustment or claim a refund on the corresponding “X” form.
For underpayments: Employers correcting an underpayment must use the corresponding “X” form. Amounts owed must be paid by the receipt of the return. Payments can be made using EFTPS, by sending a check, or by credit card.
3. Credit card payments
Employers can pay the balance due on Form 943 (Employer’s Annual Federal Tax Return for Agricultural Employees) and Form 945 (Annual Return of Withheld Federal Income Tax) by credit card. Employers can’t use a credit card to make federal tax deposits.
4. Social Security Administration and magnetic media
Employers requesting verification of names and social security numbers between 51 and 250,000 employees can no longer use magnetic media to submit their requests to the Social Security Administration. Employers can upload a file through the Social Security Number Verification System (SSNVS). The Social Security will review usage of SSNVS to ensure that employers are using it for the proper purposes. It is not proper to use SSNVS for non-wage reporting purposes, such as identity, credit checks, mortgage applications, etc. The employer can verify up to 250,000 names/SSNs with a correctly formatted SSNVS file. Social Security will not be able to process a file that is not in the correct format. To create the file you will need one column that is at least 130 characters long. This column will hold all data for each record. To get specifications for the record layout, select “Submission File Format” from the SSNVS Handbook from the Social Security website.
5. Paid preparers must sign Form 941 and Form 944
The paid preparer’s section is no longer optional and is included in Part 5 of Form 941(Employer’s QUARTERLY Federal Tax Return) and Form 944 (Employer’s QUARTERLY Federal Tax Return).
Employers using an up to date 2009 Payroll Software to do payroll and calculate withholding, shouldn’t have a problem dealing with any of these changes for tax year 2009.
Lisa Heather
http://www.articlesbase.com/accounting-articles/payroll-software-whats-new-for-2009-wage-withholding-697361.html
