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Whether your site is a content site, an e-commerce portal, a museum site, or something else completely, you’ll likely have fans. Fans come in two types: sneezers and non-sneezers. The word “sneezer” comes from Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. A sneezer is someone who wants to tell others about your site or product. Usually because there is something remarkable to talk about.
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You may not be aware that placing your email address on your “contact us” page is a sure-fire way to get yourself truckloads of spam. As we speak, there are bots traversing the web, looking for email addresses that have been published publicly on web pages. These email addresses (and items that resemble email addresses) are stored and sold to spammers.
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In this day and age, faxes are still surprisingly widely used. Should you have a fax machine to run your business? Not necessarily. I’ve got the solution to all your faxing needs and it’s not expensive.
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Don’t use photos of people pointing at computers
You’ve come up with a brilliant startup idea, and perhaps have even completed the site, but at this point it’s just working wireframes. It’s ugly. It’s time to employ your design skills to make it appeal to people. But if you’re like me, your design skills are not up to the task? So what do you do? Hire a design firm at thousands of dollars? That could work but it kind of goes against the cheapskate theme I have going here. What you need are some attractive, ready-made site designs!
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My last post covered getting your email campaigns out on your own. Today will cover all-in-one email services. These services will handle subscribes/unsubscribes, email composition, CAN-SPAM compliance, will keep your email looking consistent across many email clients, send email for you, and keep analytics on opens, bounces, and clicks.
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Whether you have a good-sized customer base and email list or you’ve got a nice blog following going, at some point you’re going to want to blast out an email campaign to everyone. It’s not as easy as writing out a nicely formatted email in Outlook and sending out a big BCC to everyone. Don’t do that. Seriously, don’t.
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Not too long ago, I wrote a lengthy post called “I’m Your BlackBerry” where I explained how great my BlackBerry is for getting business done. I was at that point shopping for a new BlackBerry to replace my aging one.
Then a little over a week ago a buddy of mine was showing me his new Droid Incredible. It was mighty impressive. It was fast, beautiful, had a polished user interface, and did everything my phone did (camera, wi-fi, web browsing, multiple email accounts, etc) but better.
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When you’re working on a website design or testing a layout, testing it in the one browser you normally use is a recipe for surprises down the road. Your layout could be broken in Internet Explorer 7, or the JavaScript function you’re using breaks in Opera 9. Checking your website in multiple browsers on different platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) will help keep people on your site instead of giving them a bad first impression.
So how do you go about checking what your site looks like in IE7 when you already have IE8? Or how do you check it on Firefox under Windows if you’re on a Mac? Let’s dive in.
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In the last article on advertising, I introduced you to the complexity of Adwords and the promise of Trada. In this article I’ll go over a few more services to help get your startup marketed, this time covering display ads.
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Google Adwords is a force to be reckoned with in the online advertising space. According to IAB Internet Advertising Report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the year 2009, search advertising is 47% of all online advertising efforts, and of this Google has the lion’s share. So when it comes to advertising your startup by being in front of the most people, many agree that Google is your best bet.
