How to properly use promotional products
Promotional products are something that many businesses use, but few use effectively. I get bags full of pens at conferences, but rarely do these ever incline me to deal with that company ever again. Chances are most promotional product use, ends with similar results.
There are a few key factors in making promotional products work.
- Give people something they want!
- Don’t skimp out!
- Design them properly!
- Quality targeting is more important than quantity!
Oh my stock, photos that suck
Almost every website with any resemblance of professionalism uses stock photography. Although it is usually very high resolution, it is so often very low in realism.
Do people actually respond to fake, photographs? Only your own testing can tell for sure, but one thing’s for certain, if the images on your site are actually unique and speak to your customers, you have an advantage over everyone else.
Here’s my favorite examples of the too-stock photography that we see everywhere!
Starting a new business, 5 reasons to avoid Microsoft now!
If you are a new online business owner, one of the best pieces of advice I can give you is to not become a whore to Microsoft, their high cost, and their ludicrous licensing system.
Since most of us started with Microsoft Windows it’s natural to assume that they are the only viable company that can provide software for our business computers. What you will find especially if you can grow into a medium size business with several employees, is that Microsoft is truly an evil company, and your business is far better off without them. I don’t just mean that your web server should not be running Microsoft, but if you have the capacity to, I recommend not installing a single piece of Microsoft software in your entire business.
There’s millions of people that make the Microsoft sucks claim, but here’s why you should avoid them with your business: Click to continue…
The myth of tax free internet sales
It has been a long held belief by most online shoppers that out of state internet purchases are tax free. I have to admit that I believed this for a long time myself, but unfortunately it’s not the case.
Just to dispel any theory dissolving that old ‘Death and Taxes’ quote, internet purchases are not tax free. That’s right. As the wording goes, most internet companies don’t have to collect out of state sales tax. However, consumers, businesses and any end users still must pay a “Use Tax” on non-taxed purchases that they make through mail-order or online.
Most states currently have Use Tax which specifically requires consumers to pay their state sales tax on purchases they make online that are not taxed by the business. There are some exemptions for certain types of products and for states that do not have any sales tax, but for the most part, taxes on these purchases are required to be paid to your state government. With the exception of very large purchases, use tax is rarely if ever monitored, as it would simply be an impossible feat for any state government to handle. However, we can all be sure that states are losing out on millions if not billions in uncollected taxes, so if you aren’t paying them, enjoy the free ride while it lasts.
Here’s a Use Tax table that I came up with covering which states require it:
(Let me pre-apologize about all of the PDF links here, Government websites are about as bad as they come, and in many cases PDF’s are the only pages available.)
Get an awesome computer for really cheap!
If you are in the market for a new computer, but you don’t want to drop a couple grand, here’s how to get a really good one for under $500.
Go to eBay (of course) and look for a Dell Precision 450, 470, 650, or 670 with dual processors. These computers can run dual hyper-threading Xeon processors and usually come with XP Pro installed. You may need to buy some more RAM but otherwise a Dual 2.8Ghz (HT) computer will run under $500, and if you have time to bid rather than buy you may find one for under $300. Dual Hyper-threading roughly equates into four processors total.
Since these computers are essentially servers with XP on them, they should last a long time. The processor / chipset combination is rock solid, and you will be hard pressed to find a comparable computer for the price.
Spam-proof your dedicated server!
I wrote about a great cpanel firewall add-on that I found a while back.
The same company that designed configserver firewall, has two security packages that are designed to help maintain a cpanel/whm dedicated server.
I recently purchased the “cPanel Service Package + MailScanner” package for one of the servers that I manage.
Here’s what you get for $125:
- iptables SPI firewall (csf)
- Login failure detection (lfd)
- Stop unnecessary processes
- Logcheck
- Logwatch
- WHM configuration check
- OpenSSH configuration check
- Install and configure Rootkit Hunter
- Install and configure Chkrootkit
- install mod_security
- Host spoof protection
- Operating System check
- Name server configuration check
- Disk check
- Kernel check
- Apache tune and check ***
- MySQL tune and check
- Enhanced log rotation
- Day of the week backup rotations
- Secure /tmp /var/tmp /dev/shm
- Install and configure ConfigServer Explorer (cse)
- Install and configure ConfigServer Mail Queues (cmq)
- Install and configure ConfigServer Mail Manage (cmm)
- Perl installation check
- Delete unnecessary OS users
- Disable open DNS recursion
- Enhance path protection
- Remove SUID/GUID from binaries
- PHP hardening
- Exploit check
- Disable vulnerable phpBB installs
- Initial cPanel configuration
- Enhance MailMan performance
- Install MRTG graphs
- MailScanner Server service
- One week of informational tickets
While this is all great, what really caught my attention was the improvement with the email that the server was handling. Click to continue…
Online business will benefit from aggressive retail cross-selling
I am sick of shopping at retail stores (Putting aside mom-and-pop stores). I like going down the street to buy something, but I can’t buy a candy bar anymore without being offered a warranty, two magazine subscriptions, and a credit card. The cross-selling situation is getting to the point where I and others avoid shopping at retail locations. I avoid going into a number of stores simply because I don’t want to deal with being offered a bunch of crap that I don’t need. I have no problem saying no, but i just don’t want to have to. I bought a laptop from Circuit City, a while ago, and I had to literally walk out of the store for the salesman to stop adding the warranty to the bill. I’ve known more than ten people who’ve been talked into several hundred dollar warranties because they were pressured into buying them. They were hardly any improvement on the manufacturer’s warranty. In the past few months I have been observing other people’s reactions to this retail mess, and I’m certainly not the only one who is sick of it.
Lets compare up-selling online and in retail.
Get Adobe Acrobat Pro (non-academic) legally for under $250
Here’s a good way to get a full and legal copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 for just over $200. This is not the academic version, which is only licensed for non-commercial usage.
Adobe Acrobat is a ridiculously expensive piece of software, and unfortunately many businesses truly need it to survive. I’ve tried a lot of the cheap and free PDF software, but nothing that I’ve found compares to Acrobat Pro, especially when you need to make electronic forms, and other more advanced PDF tasks.
Luckily, Adobe substantially reduces their price for an Upgrade product over the full retail version of the software. What this means is that if you own Acrobat 5, 6, or 7 Standard, you can purchase the Pro upgrade for about 1/3 of the retail price of Acrobat.
Get on eBay and search for ‘Adobe Acrobat 5′, or ‘Adobe Acrobat 6′, and look for a legal copy of the standard edition of either one of these. A Buy it Now version should cost around $60, and you may be able to get it on an auction for under $50. Once you get the software install it on your computer, and activate it. You don’t need to register it, but normally you will need to activate it.
Next you will need to purchase an upgrade copy of Acrobat Acrobat 8 Pro, which you will install over Acrobat 5 or 6. The upgrade version is readily available for $150.
Now you have a perfectly legal, full version of Acrobat 8 Pro, and it cost just over $200. Still ridiculously expensive, but you saved over 50% of the retail version.
Enjoy…
Quick Note: The upgrade is available in 4 versions. Mac Standard to Pro, Mac Pro to Pro, Windows Standard to Pro, and Windows Pro to Pro. Make sure you get the correct upgrade version or the upgrade will not work. If you have Acrobat 5, 6 or 7 Pro, you need the Pro to Pro upgrade, and 5, 6, 7, and 8 Standard need the Standard to Pro upgrade.
What domains to block in your Yahoo search marketing account
Yahoo recently added the ability for advertisers to block domains in their search marketing accounts. At first I wasn’t sure how to use this feature, but after some investigation and a cross reference with my analytics, I think that it will be a very effective tool to help eliminate bad traffic, if it’s related to a specific domain.
First thing you need to do to make sure you are using yahoo’s built-in analytics or configure your own analytics to report on all traffic from your yahoo campaigns and run a report by the domain that the traffic is coming from. You want to sort that report by the overall clicks from a particular domain.
Here’s an example of the report that you need (signifigantly reduced for readability).
Now if you look under the conversion column in this report, you will see that a few of these sites have provided no conversions.
These are the sites that you want to block from your PPC campaign. In this case the wealthygeek.com (3/1039 = .29%) is a conversion rate that I am not willing to pay for, so I’ll block it and others with poor converting traffic.
I would make sure that you have at least one month of traffic and PPC statistics, three months or more if you don’t get a lot of PPC traffic. Remove domains that tend to provide a lot of traffic but no conversions. If a site can’t provide a 1% conversion rate, it’s probably not worth keeping. Depending on your past history you may want to set your threshold above 1%.
Just remember that even if your PPC traffic goes down a bit, your overall cost is going to go down with it, and your overall conversion rate is going to go up.
Warning: If your ads attract poor visitors, it wont matter what website they’re on, so don’t use this method to optimize your account if you aren’t getting sales. This tool is useful only to remove sites that just send bad traffic. You should always be testing new key phrases, and new ads, and eliminating the ones that can’t provide cost effective traffic.
Yahoo also has a Q&A post as there have been a ton of question since this feature was launched.
Showing passion in your product descriptions
One of the most effective conversion boosters is writing personal (but professional) product descriptions for the items that you offer. Manufacturer descriptions are often so chocked with technical terminology, and gaudy self-promotion, that buyers simply ignore them. People want to know that real people are on the other end of a website, and writing unique product descriptions is one of the best ways to show that you are real, and that you care.
Keys to a personal (and professional) description:
- Describe the basic features that people are interested in.
- Explain what you like about the product.
- Explain why the product is better than others.
- Explain how the buyer can benefit from the product ***IMPORTANT***
- Give appropriate alternatives to the product.