The Silent Avatar Speaks

Imagine you have become the proud owner of a new web site, with a lovely webdesign.

The very next thing to do is to bring in visitors, and social media offers an interesting place to begin.

There are a few social media sites on the net, and their number is growing daily. But the three main ones are Myspace, Twitter and Facebook. If you have our own business, it is critical that you start blogging or submitting entries on a social networking site. In case you need a blog or content management systeem attached to your website, ask your webdesigner for help. This way, you can advertise your business to thousands of folks that are also attached to the social media site. These sites also supply you with instant communication, and these sites are free to join.

The only way to make the maximum of the social media advantage is to line up an account with all three social networking sites, particularly Facebook. Facebook is one of the swiftest growing social networking web sites in the world, so you are going to be able to draw in clients outside your country, which is particularly ideal if you are running an internet business. You may use the ‘notes’ section of Facebook to explain the function and goals of your business. You can include as many folk in the note as you want, so that prospective partners and backers can find out more about your company.

After you create an account with these social media sources, you must start to make chums on each of these sites. You can start by inviting your acquaintances and family to join the site, and then connecting to their common friends. This may help your network to grow, since you will be stunned what quantity of friends you know. If the members that you’ve sent buddy requests to have their own companies as well, it is probable that your request will be accepted quicker.

You may post info about any business-related events that you are going to be having. You can invite friends to visit the event, and can create an RSVP list, so you may know exactly how many are interested to get ready for. Remember to be consistent when you are using social media. You must check back on the site a couple of times a day to update your standing and add more chums, and to keep your network updated about the pro progress you are making. This way you may have a successful web site in a brief period of time. At Silent Avatar Business Solutions you can get more data if making internet sites isn’t your thing.

I’m the silent avatar and I have spoken

Tags: Social Networking by the silent avatar
No Comments »

If anyone mentions the term Internet it’s not surprising that most people immediately start thinking about the proverbial website.

Contrary to popular belief, building a website is not just about uploading a website to your web host.  More important than many people realise is to ensure the information you present on your site is appealing to both real visitors and search engine spiders.

It goes without saying then that you’ll need to educate yourself about the basics of what goes into  e-commerce web design. The most important factor which is bandied about the internet with wild abandon (and rightly so),  is the premise that content is king!

Good Website Content

And “content is king ” means basically just what it says. That you need great web content to be successful with any website.

Fair enough, you might say, but what constitutes good content?

Well, there are a few ideas here that will help you get started off on the right foot.

Firstly – The content on your site actually has two readers, on the one hand you have the search engine spiders who will index the text on your site so they can deliver the most suitable web content for the searchers query. Secondly you have your human visitors and they will need to have a quality and appealing message that draws them into your site rather than frightening them off.

Without fear of contradiction quality content will be one of the cornerstones of success for a long time to come, but there are other factors too.

Secondly – Your site needs to have visual impact that is appealing to your target audience, this is why you need to ensure your web graphics designer has a full understanding of your market niche. You also need to make sure that site navigation is easy to understand and captures key search phrases.

Take Care With Tab And Side Bar Placement

Thirdly – Re-visit your placement of the sites navigation elements (side bars and tabs etc). These are the roadmaps around your site, they need to be clear, so you’ll want to plan these carefully to keep a visitor on your site as long as possible. Also, don’t forget these navigation aids to be readily apparent to site users other wise they could easily lose their way.

And finally never forget that less is often more, and whilst some (but it has to be argued fewer and fewer) market sectors like a very busy in your face web design, most prefer an nice crisp and clean site that is easy to navigate and find what is needed.

For more web design help visit us at  Silent Avatar Business Solutions

Tags: Web Design, Web Development by the silent avatar
No Comments »

Last post I spoke about securing your downloads for your ebooks, audios, or software. You will read in the post that I settled on DLGuard to do the job.

I also said that when I installed DLGuard I would let you know my verdict on how it installs.

Well.. here’s what I found when I installed it….

Its dirt easy!

DLGuard comes with an executable file which guides you through the whole set up process. It’s as easy as following the steps. The only action you take outside of following the steps is:

1. Setting up a mySQL database, and
2. Deleting your “install” folder” when you have finished
3. Creating your autoresponder list
How easy is that?

After installation you simply point your browser to the admin url and login with your username and password.

The interface when you log in is not overly slick, but then sometimes basic is good (it saves confusion).

My task was to secure an 7 audio products and 7 physical products, using PayPal as the payment processor, and integrated with Aweber autoresponder.

So.. how easy was this to do?

Setting up the audio downloads was easy. Again, when you “add a product”, the screen guides you through the process (just fill in the appropriate blanks). Selecting the payment processor was as easy as selecting it from a drop down box.

Working out how to add a “physical” product which requires shipping was a little trickier, and try as I might to search the form I couldn’t see any reference to how this was done, so I contacted DLGuard support and had an answer the same day.

By adding the text ” — This item will be mailed to you” in the download URL field, DLGuard bypasses the need to give a download link and instead prompts for a delivery address. This is done through the “PayPal Advanced Options” – “Extra PayPal Codes”, and inputting the following: “no_shipping=2″

Integrating Aweber was a simple task of logging into the aweber account and creating a new list.  This list name (yourlistname @aweber.com) then is input in the “Aweber Automatic Sign Ups” field.

When someone purchases from you their details are automatically added to your aweber list.

So as far as I am concerned, this little piece of script that works behind the scenes to secure downloads is a real gem. I can set the download time and the number of attempts before those accessing the download link are “locked out”.

The beauty of DLGuard assigning the number of download attempts goes a long way to stopping files being passed on during the access time. DLGuard won’t stop those who pass on the download to their friends, but it does offer a first line of defence against pirated downloads.

I’m giving it two thumbs up!

Check out DLGuard here

I’m the Silent Avatar and I have spoken

Tags: Tools For Your Business, Web Design, Web Development by the silent avatar
2 Comments »

Evening all,

This post I want to bring you up to speed on what you should be doing when your website is finished,

I’ve always said that a website is nothing more than html code stuck in cyberspace unless you dive traffic to your site.

Given that there are over five and a half billion websites on the Internet and growing at an exponential rate, this figure is enough to scare the pants off any would be Internet merchant, or home entrepreneur.

There’s good reason that Alexa does not rank website unless they are in the top 1000,000 as below this you really aren’t getting enough traffic to warrant being part of their statistics. So unless you are considering throwing a LOT of money at advertising and branding, don’t worry about having a high ranking,

Your goal is to drive a steady stream of people to your website to give you an income, or increase your “authority status”, through your blog, articles and  comments posted back to your website.

To produce a website and not consider how it is to be marketed is just plain stupid.

The time money and effort to produce a website is for naught unless you promote your website.

So how do you promote your website?

This will depend on the type of website (which I will discuss later) but at the least all website owners should be doing the following:

1. Using their web address in all of their emails, along with their tag line.  I wrote about it using email signature sometime back. Review the post “Quick Tip – Using Email Signatures“.
2. Using their web address on all stationary – including business cards, letterheads, with compliment slips, invoices, brochures… In fact anywhere you can put your web address – put it! This includes all electronic stationary as well.
3. If you have a motor vehicle have a magnetic sign made to put on the side of your car (or if you’re really committed get the car sign-written with your website details. Driving around as much as we do this is a great way to advertise your website. Just think of how many people can see your mobile advertisement!
4. If you have a shopfront your web address should be clearly visible from the street.
5. If you have a product tag, your website address should be on the tags, labels, stickers (whatever)

It takes time for something new to sink into people’s consciousness. Repetition is the key. Whether you website name is reinforced through a variety of means doesn’t matter.

Let’s now look at specifics…

[Read more →]

Tags: Advertising, Blogging, Business Tips, Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Newsletters, Online Business, Promotion and Marketing, Traffic Generation, Web Development by the silent avatar
No Comments »