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I’m writing this post from a veranda with a great view of the north-west Adriatic coast of Croatia, where I’m currently on vacation. This trip is different from our previous vacations in that we’re staying a full 5 weeks, so I needed to bring my laptop to stay in touch with my clients (after I finish this post I need to send an email newsletter for a UK-based client).

Although I did a pretty good job of making sure I have all my passwords with me, I was given a shock by Facebook when I tried logging in for the first time after we landed here. Although I entered my user ID and password Facebook recognised I was trying to log in from a different geographical location and, as a security measure, forced me to confirm my account. At first I thought, great, I like this, but then the trouble started: Facebook used a very unusual method of confirming my account – it asked me to give the names of seven of my Facebook friends! Although I only have a few hundred FB friends, I certainly can’t remember all of their names!

Facebook showed me pictures of no fewer than seven of my friends – but not their default profile photos, but random images from their photo albums, where my friends were sometimes pictured from the side, with other people, or in poor image conditions.

Somehow I managed to confirm my account after two tries, so now I am OK. The moral of this story for you: know thy Facebook friends if you’re planning on traveling abroad.

If you just built a new web site, or if you follow my advice — a business blog — you should announce it to everyone you know to attract them to visit. Although you can and should use opt-in email marketing systems to send an announcement to your contacts, I’d like to propose an “off-line” marketing strategy as well: postcards or greeting cards!

If your budget allows it, I recommend sending postcards to your existing clients asking them to promote your new blog to their contacts. To create personalized postcards, or greeting cards, I use my SendOutCards system which costs me $0.62 + postage for a postcard with a custom design ($0.31 for a stock card).

The design can be an advert for your new blog, and then on the flip side (or inside of a greeting card) you can ask the recipient to give a unique URL to their contacts, e.g. NewBlog.com/Joe, etc. where Joe is the real name of your client.

Using a unique URL will allow you to track new visitors/signups, and then award the one client who sends the most traffic to your new blog. You need to give your clients an incentive to promote your new blog, say a chance to win an iPod or something, or something more expensive, depending on your business model.

Follow this link if you’re interested in the SendOutCards business opportunity. This can become a lucrative second income or a full-blown career, all depends on you.

Q: Adam from Manchester, U.K., sent in this note:

“I am having a hard time figuring out how to deal with a high percentage of people who come to my web site, signup for my e-zine but never confirm their email address. Sometimes this is as high as 60% of total subscribers. Since I am using the recommended double opt-in process, I don’t know what I can do to have most of my subscribers confirm their address.”

A: Actually, Adam is not alone in this. I have received messages from several subscribers that are experiencing the same problem.

Let’s first examine why this is happening. When I visited Adam’s web site, and subscribed to his e-newsletter I noticed that after clicking the submit button, I was taken to a generic web page, provided by his Email Service Provider (ESP). The page simply said “Thank you for subscribing.”

Please read the rest of this article on my email marketing consulting blog, or leave a comment or ask a question here.

On July 1, 2010, VeriSign®, the registry for .COM and .NET, will increase prices – .COM will go up 7%, and .NET by 10%.

The increase will be passed to registrars like GoDaddy, Netfirms, and BeaverWebHosting and then, unfortunately, to consumers and business owners like you.

If you wish to avoid this price increase, you can renew your domain names by June 30 and add another year to your current expiration dates. You have the option to register or renew for multiple years and lock in long-term savings. Of course, should you have any questions, please give BeaverWebHosting a call at 1-480-505-8821.

Twitter has just released a free iPhone application, available from the iTunes Application Store.

What’s new is the ability to use some of Twitter’s features without having a Twitter account, namely, you can use Browsing trends, read Top Tweets, find popular users, and check public tweets geographically nearby you.

Are you still trying to figure out Twitter and how you can use it to promote your business? Try downloading this training session from my Contacts 2 Clients series.

If you have an online presence, most likely a brochure web site, you’re very likely thinking it’s not really bringing you any new business. In most cases it’s “I built it, but they never came.”

Some years ago I was in a similar situation, but I discovered blogs. When I realised how powerful they are in

1. generating more traffic to my site
2. pre-qualifying the visitors
3. giving me points in Google

I just had to re-build my web site using blogging technology.

But then I discovered social media: Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and found a way to connect those external sites to my own blog. Now every time I post on my blog, my Linkedin and Facebook pages are updated, and an automatic “tweet” is sent to my Twitter account.

If you’d like to learn more, please consider joining me for a 3-hour seminar on business blogging, social media and email marketing I am hosting on April 29, in Oakville, at the e-Spot.

Eric Laffoley, a small business owner based in Burlington, is one of my happy clients said about the last session (or play on YouTube):

As if you needed any more reasons to attend one of my highly acclaimed business training seminars, I am adding another one: attend any Contacts2Clients business seminar in April, May or June, and you will be entered into a draw for a chance to win an Apple iPod Nano with video, a value of $190 (with tax included).

My 3-hour seminar will give you tools and knowledge to use the internet to generate leads, build relationships and close more deals using simple online marketing strategies: business blogging, social media networking and opt-in email marketing.

Click here to learn more about the seminar, see testimonials and to register

Contest rules are simple: attend one of my paid training seminars and each time you attend you will be entered to win the grand prize. The grand prize is one Apple iPod Nano in orange. Only one grand prize will be awarded at the final seminar in June when all attendees’ names will be entered into the draw. Your chances of winning the grand prize will depend on: how many times you attend a Contacts2Clients seminar, and on the total number of attendees. The prize will be drawn by computer at Random.org

Over the last few weeks I’ve met several small business owners who share the same problem: they don’t have full control and access to their business Internet domain registration.

In one case my client is the person who registered his domain name, but when he moved, failed to update his postal and email addresses listed under his account. Because it was a city-to-city move, he also changed Internet service providers, so his old email address expired. An email is the 1st choice for communication for any registration-related issues, so keep that current at all times, perhaps even use a Gmail or Yahoo! account for that.

Another client I’m helping had a different situation: he originally hired someone else to build his web site, and although the web designer registered the domain in my client’s name, it was done within the designer’s web hosting account, so my client didn’t have full access to his domain.

Here are the 5 tips on dealing with web developers:

1. Check your developer’s online “rating” by using this independent web site grading tool. You’re looking at a number that’s higher than 80, but above 90 would be better.
2. Visit Alexa.com and install their FireFox Extension (you’re not using Internet Explorer I hope :-) this tool will give you an idea how much traffic your web developer’s site is getting. Serious web sites have a rating of less than 1,000,000. If a site has an Alexa rating of 1,000,000 this means there are 1 million other web sites that have more traffic, so this is a relative number — and the lower the better.
3. Finally, check the site for Google Page Rank. You can to that easily by installing the Google Toolbar. PR goes from 0 to 10, the higher the better. Small business sites will typically have a rank of 0-2, so you’re looking for 3 and higher. (just in case you’re wondering, this blog site has PR2 which is pretty good for a site that was launched barely 2 months ago)
4. Next, you can check your small web developer on Linkedin. This professional social networking community has high standards for endorsements and recommendations, so you should check the person’s Linkedin profile, specifically the number of recommendations received, but also the type of recommendations, as the work performed may not align with your own needs.
5. Finally, pick a solid domain registrar and hosting company. I like to recommend BeaverWebHosting.com, which is a GoDaddy reseller, so you get the same world-class products and services, but you can also get personalized advice (for advice, simply call me :-) Once piece od advice, never call the hosting company directly as they’ll try to sell you services and products you may think you need and may sound tempting, but are largely unnecessary.

Click here to learn what makes a good web site, what additional tools you need to make an online presence an effective marketing tool, please come to one of my monthly seminars. Ask me how you can save 20% on tuition.

A few years ago I redesigned my email marketing consulting web site into a blog. Very soon after the rebuild, I started noticing:

1. more traffic to my site
2. the visitors were more interested in what I do
3. higher Google page ranking

If you type in the words “email marketing consultant” into Google, my blog comes up on page one of search results, and it’s been coming up on page one since November of 2008, when I first tested it.

Today, as soon as I publish on this blog or any of my other blogs, I can be sure that Google will index my new page within half an hour. This kind of response from search engines cannot be expected with a regular, “static” or brochure-type web site.

If you’d like to learn more, please consider joining me for a 3-hour seminar on business blogging, social media and email marketing I am hosting on April 29, in Oakville, at the e-Spot.

See and hear what one of my happy clients said about the last session (or play on YouTube):

If you’re new to social media, you’ve probably been wondering how you can make money using Twitter, but if you consider yourself an experienced user of social media sites such as Linkedin and Facebook, you may have been wondering how Twitter is (going to be) making money! The service itself is free, and we can’t see any ads when we log in to our Twitter accounts, so how is this company going to monetize the service?

They have made some deals already, with search companies such as Google and Yahoo!, but nothing significant enough to pay for all the development and infrastructure that’s been poured into Twitter.

Well, the cat seems to be out of the bag: we’ll soon start seeing promoted tweets. According to this Twitter blog post, advertisers are going to be able to purchase keywords for Twitter searches, and the service would insert these sponsored tweets at the top of search results pages. There’s an important difference in how Promoted Tweets differ from “traditional” search engine ads: the tweets will be already part of each advertiser’s regular Twitter stream, in other words, Promoted Tweets will not be “ads” that only appear in search results.

We’ll all watch closely how Twitter users react to this new “feature,” but hopefully Promoted Tweets will prove to be a welcome addition, rather than an nuisance.

In case you’re interested in jump starting your own Twitter activities, consider my self-study program “Contacts 2 Clients: Using Twitter to Boost Your Business.”