How to write a compelling e-mail that will be read for Your Online Business

Today, B2B and online marketers can respond to what is now termed the e-mail marketing challenge by being concise and compelling in their e-mail marketing program. If done correctly, a well-designed email advertising initiative can deliver great results, a powerful message to potentially new clients, improved sales and even boost morale in your sales team.

In this article you will learn a few ways on how this can be achieved, and the right method to use in order to get the maximum results from your marketing efforts.

First, take longer sections of sales copy and hyperlink to them on separate pages. Begin enough of a paragraph to hook your targeted reader and then link to the rest of the story. Some readers will probably be curious and click to read more of your copy. Separating the page visually into sections makes it easier to read as well. Simply try to place yourself in the place of your reader.

Next, design your e-mail message so that the copy is on a single screen, on what is called above the fold. What is meant here is that about 95 percent of people read the first half of a page beginning from the top and lowering their eyes a bit until they can see the center of the page, but without scrolling down! This is called “above the fold”.

Next, have a strong call to action in the e-mail subject line that also shows up in the preview pane. In the content body, also include a hyperlink to the call to action. This last step can be compared to what are called “spur of the moment buying decisions” or what some call “impulse buying”. About 15 to 20 percent of typical people can easily fall into that range.

Finally, include three to five hyperlinks within the body of your e-mail. This will keep the message concise and provides multiple tracking mechanisms to help you determine just how engaged your audience really is.

The key here is a variety to effective hyperlinks. No one wants to see the same message repeatedly, and the same is true for your hyperlinks.

Try linking to different documents, Web sites, social media or other sources. Always work to make the links relevant to the message and make sure they are content-driven to enable qualified leads coming into your site.

The most thoroughly read e-mails are those that are most compelling to your audience. In a perfect world, if your targeted readers read all the e-mail right down to the end, then you can consider yourself a good B2B marketer.

eMarketer predicts that eCommerce sales should return to the double-digit growth rates seen prior to last year. The latest time period where online sales were thriving is 2007.

Growth in online sales will come from eCommerce buyers who shift a greater share of their discretionary spending from physical stores to the Internet.

Especially among affluent online shoppers, pent-up consumer demand should also provide an additional sales impetus among eTailers.

In less than three years from now, it is expected that online sales growth will begin to dwindle, resuming another trend seen prior to last year. This will be due to the inevitable maturation of the online sales channel, as growth in new eCommerce buyers approaches a certain level of saturation.

From 2008 to 2013, retail eCommerce sales are expected to grow at a about a 8.8 percent compound annual growth rate.

After year-over-year growth rates of 13.3 percent in Q1 and 8.7 percent in Q2, sales grew only 4.6 percent in Q3 before plummeting almost 5 percent in the important and very busy Q4 holiday season.

When forecasting online sales, eMarketer always benchmarks against the U.S. Department of Commerce.

It estimates that eCommerce sales rose slighly less than 4.7 percent last year, reaching about $133.6 billion in annual sales.

After you become a seasoned managed hosting customer, you come to know certain key factors and elements that play a big part in whether you stay or go. Choosing a hosting company and staying with them usually means the hosting company is going above and beyond what they are supposed to do, often times with a level of service that is almost impeccable.

Some of the mistakes you don’t want to make in managed hosting can actually improve your profit margin. For example, if you sign up for a hosting account with fewer features than you need, you’ll end up being dissatisfied for the duration of the contract,. If you don’t sign a contract, you could still be wasting money on a less than full featured account. Get what you want out of a hosting account to start with, plan ahead! You can save yourself the trouble of having to back pedal your life into a different hosting account.

Many hosting sites offer discounts, depending on what you purchase. Some offer a percentage off your hosting fees if you sign up on a contract. If your business stays pretty normal, without a lot of fluctuations in the number of customers and hits, signing a contract will be safe. Simply choose the features and options you want and bring on the savings!

If you haven’t already figured it out, business websites always have a “ranking”, so to speak. Whether it be the number of hits they get or customers they pull in, they are charted somewhere. Web hosts use these charts to determine the type of account, bandwidth and amount of data transfer you’ll need. You can usually trust customer service associates from companies which require this kind of data.

You don’t want to spend more than you should, so you should have an idea of what your business needs before you spend. The more popular a managed hosting service is, the better quality you’ll get for your dollar

As far as features go, you’re always going to want a server with the best uptime guarantee. Not only does this ensure your quality of service for your dollar but it also keeps things competitive and moving as they should. You can only offer the best service guarantees if you truly outperform the competition

There are different types of managed hosting you can choose from. Most are all alike, except for a new type of hosting called cloud hosting. Cloud hosting offers the same level of service but through a more reliable configuration structure. You’re safer on a cloud network than a regular one any day.

Managed hosting should be acquired using skill and knowledge. Know how much you are willing to spend on a specific plan and try and stick to that. If you overspend for options you don’t need, it will cut into your profits. You want to run as clean of a ship as possible, with nothing you don’t need. Part of the luxury of owning your own business revolves around you being able to make the right choices.

Automatic scheduling of service renewals is a definite do in managed hosting. It automatically pays your bill from either a credit card or your PayPal account.

If you’re looking to make all the right moves when it comes to your managed hosting efforts, talk to a friend or business associate who has already gone through it. You can learn a lot from someone’s past experiences and even get some help with your own efforts.

Managed hosting is great for keeping your business with a low overhead cost, providing you know how to configure your options. Each option you select, especially in the custom managed hosting market, will cost you an additional amount. Only pay for what you need initially, and then upgrade your account with new features and options. Managed hosting will also allow you to keep your mind on other things, while a portion of your income is set to be made online. This means more time to prepare your business for whatever might happen.

Don’t sign up with the first hosting company that catches your eye. Let them “compete” against each other! Price, performance and reliability are three very important areas you need to be focusing on. If a hosting company lacks these key business ingredients, then move on. More often than not, you will be left with sub-par quality service and less than desirable feature performance. However, if you can match yourself up with a hosting company with everything you need for a great price, what more could you ask for more?

According to reports appearing Thursday, security software firm McAfee (www.mcafee.com) agreed to be acquired by chip-making giant Intel (www.intel.com) for $7.7 billion.

McAfee is well known for its widely used anti-virus, Internet Security and Firewall products, but also produces several enterprise security software products. The company employs more than 6,000 people worldwide.

Both boards unanimously approved the deal, which is expected to close after approval from shareholders, and a few other conditions. According to Intel, McAfee will become a wholly-owned subsidiary, under Renee James, Intel’s senior vice president and general manager of its software and services group.

While there isn’t anything in the announcement to explicitly impact the hosting business, statements from both companies show their excitement about the evolving nature of security solutions, and the role of hardware in security services.

In the press release announcing the deal, Intel says it has internally elevated security as a priority to be on par with energy efficient performance and Internet connectivity.

“Hardware-enhanced security will lead to breakthroughs in effectively countering the increasingly sophisticated threats of today and tomorrow,” said James, quoted in the press release. “This acquisition is consistent with our software and services strategy to deliver an outstanding computing experience in fast-growing business areas, especially around the move to wireless mobility.”

Included with the announcement, Intel posted a YouTube clip that includes commentary from Renee James and McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt.

In a blog post made Thursday, DeWalt calls the deal “incredibly exciting,” and refers, like Intel, to the proliferation of mobile devices and their use as a means of interacting with the Internet as a force for change in the world of cyber security.

He suggests that a major change in the nature of security is coming, and that the partnership is a big step toward that future goal.

“The current cyber security model isn’t extensible across the proliferating spectrum of devices – providing protection to a heterogeneous world of connected devices requires a fundamentally new approach to security,” writes DeWalt. “The industry needed a paradigm shift, incremental improvements can’t bridge the opportunity gap.”

Despite the 114MW of wind power capacity that it purchased from an Iowa wind farm for the next 20 years, Google will not be using this renewable energy to power its data centers anytime soon, according to a report by Forrester Research analyst Doug Washburn.

In April, Google revealed it formed its new subsidiary, Google Earth, to purchase and sell power on the wholesale market.

At the time, many industry insiders speculated that Google would use this newfound access to  power its data centers with renewable energy.

However, Google senior vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle told Washburn that Google “cannot use this energy directly,” so it will be “reselling it back to the grid in the regional spot market.”

As Washburn explains, the lack of data centers currently using clean energy can be attributed to issues of uncertainty among data center managers and IT vendors, including uptime and resiliency, return on investment, and priorities such as SLAs.

Fortunately, it looks like things are eventually going to pick up. A recent report published by Pike Research shows that enterprises are starting to invest more in energy efficiency upgrades for their data centers.

The report projects that these investments in upgrading data centers will skyrocket from $7.5 billion this year to $41.4 billion in 2015.

Just Host Introduction

Just Host, has impressively grown into one of the most recognized web hosts in the industry today. They truly are the best when it comes to features as the amount of extras you get with your hosting plan is outstanding. Each plan comes with unlimited disk space and bandwidth (monthly transfer), you can also host unlimited domains on one account. They also offer brilliant extras such as Google and Yahoo advertising credits for your site’s marketing needs. JustHost really focuses on the aspects that count to customers. Their tech support and customer service are great when it comes to knowledgeable technicians as well as response time. The extras such as Fantastico and their easy to use site builder really make them stand out in the crowd. We strongly believe you will be satisfied with them.

Reliability

Just Host’s reliability is very highly rated among hosts, thanks in part to their unique load balancing technology and super fast backbone connections. With load balancing, your site is available from multiple servers, so if one server becomes unavailable, your site will still be live on the other server virtually eliminating site downtime. They also utilize top quality Dell servers, which are industry leading in terms of speed and processing abilities. This enables Just Host to boast a 99.9% infrastructure availability and gives them top ranks in terms of site uptime. When you add to this the state-of-the-art firewalls that they use and the multi-layer security system, you can easily say that JustHost is one of the most reliable web hosting companies that you can ever subscribe to.

Price Value

JustHost offers one of the best hosting plans available in the hosting market today. Whether you are a business customer or a personal website owner, their plan will suit your needs to a tee. When checking out the many options that you have when it comes to the hosting provider, one of the most important factors that you need to consider is the price value. In return for the monthly rate that they charge, what are you getting as a customer? How does the price that they offer measure up against the ones offered by other service providers? To give you an idea as to whether JustHost will give you the best bang for your buck, here is a short list of what their individual packages include: a free domain for life, free setup, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, and a free website builder starting at just $3.45/,month. Further features include an entire script library totally free including WordPress, osCommerce and Joomla. To top it off they offer an industry leading Anytime money back guarantee.

Control Panel

When selecting the web host service provider, one of the most important things that a web administrator should learn how to use is the control panel. JustHost offers the famous CPanel control panel interface, which is a very popular control panel. CPanel operates on an interface with many different functions and is very user-friendly and makes it very easy to manage all aspects of your hosting account. Some of its features are website statistics, search engine submissions, forums/bulletin boards, script implementation, database administration, easy access to email - including creating and managing all e-mail accounts, and file & domain management. Even better is the fact that first-time site builders will have a blast constructing their website from the ground up. From editing you site’s content to customizing your error pages to checking your e-mail through a web browse – the CPanel makes all of these a lot easier.

Customer Support

Did you know that customer service is one of the best ways to measure the reliability of a web hosting service provider? This is because every minute counts – especially if you have a website which relies on the uptime for sales and information provided to customers. If the site is down, you can lose many customers. There’s a good chance that those who are not willing to check back on your site every hour will run out of patience and go with the competitor’s site. Just Host’s customer support is also in a league of its own, with 24/7 toll-free phone support, free e-mail and live chat support to get your answers in a matter of minutes. They also maintain a comprehensive knowledge base, to get answers on common questions quickly and easily. All this and more give Just Host great marks in terms of customer support and satisfaction.

Summary

So what’s the final verdict about the services offered by JustHost? To sum it all up, JustHost has an industry reputation of being one of the best web hosts. That’s proof enough of their extensive experience in the field in providing excellent web hosting services to their clients. Next, when it comes to the price value – you can rest assured that their package is feature-packed with almost everything that you need to start building your website. Their control panel is easy to use and packed with scripts and bonus features. When it comes to their customer service support – their waiting time is among the lowest in the industry – which just goes to show how committed they are in making sure that the needs of their customers are satisfied to the fullest. When you combine all of these with the 99.9% uptime guarantee and anytime money back guarantee you can safely say that JustHost is one of the best web hosting companies there is today. We strongly believe you will be satisfied with them.

Nowadays, in order to rank highly in the search engine rankings, it is no longer enough just to have any old links coming in to your web pages. Google will now devalue links it no longer considers relevant to the subject matter of that web site and, if you have too many of that type of link, may even ban your web site for link spamming. So, how do you go about getting quality links? Well, here are three simple, free ways to increase links to your web site.

One method is to submit your web site to one of the hundreds of web directories that are available. Many of these are ranked highly by Google, and getting listed in such a directory will enhance your PageRank. The best-known of these is the Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org, but there are many more, both general in nature like the OPP, or specific to a particular subject. Submission to most of these directories is free, though some will require a link back to the directory in return for listing your web site. One word of warning though – submissions to most of these directories are checked by real people, rather than by computer, and it may take many months for your listing to appear.

If you are running a web site, then it’s fairly safe to assume that you have some knowledge about the subject of that web site. Web sites of all types are looking for articles in their field of interest, whether it’s archeology or zoology, bell-ringing or yachting. There are also many web sites that have banks of articles, on all subjects. Why not use your knowledge of the subject to write articles about it, and submit the article to web masters looking for relevant content. Try to make such an article interesting, rather than self-promoting – you are not looking to promote your web site in the actual text of the article. You do this in your signature file, which web masters will include at the end of the article. In the signature file, make sure that you include a link to your web site, plus a few words about it.

The link will help in two ways, not only in PageRank, but also potentially increasing traffic to your site - people that find your article useful may click on your link for more information. Good articles are often picked up for reproduction at other web sites, increasing your exposure. This is allowed, as long as the content is unchanged and, more importantly for you, the signature file is left intact. Write enough articles and, if they are of good quality, you may appear to be an expert in that field and people will start looking for you by name.

This neatly brings me to the third method of adding links to your web site, although it’s not really necessary to be regarded as an expert for this – it just helps give you some credibility. Message boards, or forums, are all over the Internet, dealing with almost every subject under the sun. Become a frequent visitor to some that deal with your field of interest and start to contribute in the discussions there. Again, don’t try to be self-promoting – this will upset people and could even lead to you being banned. This is where that signature file comes in again – as in the section above, this is where you will get exposure, both from the link itself and the increased traffic you may generate. One thing to check though – some forums will not allow the bots from search engines to follow links from forums, which rather defeats the original purpose of posting on that forum.

To Your Online Success

Jeff

PageRank is one of the many methods used by Google to help determine the importance of a web page. Developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, while at Stanford University, PageRank became one of the main tools used by the Google search engine.

Before I go any further I must give you a word of warning here – Google is very protective of exactly what factors are used in its search engine algorithms, and exactly how those factors are determined. What follows here is believed by most industry experts to be correct in essence, though some of the details may not be fully accurate.

In simple terms Google describes PageRank as a method for determining the value of a web page by the value of web pages to which it is linked. In other words, a link from web page A to web page B is considered as a vote by page A for page B. However, Google does not just look at the number of links that a web page receives; it also looks at the PageRank of those pages. A link from a web page with a high PageRank is considered to have more value than a link from a web page with a low PageRank.

The value of a web page can be between 0, the lowest value, and 10. However, this is not a simple linear progression, but rather some form of logarithmic progression – it takes more links, or links of a higher quality, to move from PageRank 6 to 7, than it does to move from 1 to 2. Google don’t state exactly how their scale works, but let’s assume that is actually logarithmic. If so, then for example if it takes 10 links to move from PageRank 0 to 1, it would take 100 links to move from 1 to 2, and 1000 links to move from 2 to 3. This assumes of course that all links are of equal value.

Now, so far we have been talking solely about PageRank in terms of individual web pages. However, a web site also has a PageRank. This can be determined by adding up the PageRanks of the individual web pages. The total PageRank for the whole web site can never be higher than the total number of pages on that web site. In other words, a web site that consists of just five pages will have a maximum potential PageRank of 5. Note the word potential there – that site may never reach that particular PageRank – but without adding more pages there is no way that the site will ever reach a higher PageRank than 5. Note that not all web pages within a site will have an identical PageRank – the web pages with more incoming links will have a higher PageRank than those with fewer links.

I mentioned above the importance of the value of the links to a web page. I don’t want to get into the math too much here – there are many examples of this to be found on the Internet – but I will try to explain this in simple terms. The value of a link is determined by the PageRank of the page from which the link comes. However, the value of that link is divided up between all of the links from that page. So, for example, a link from a web page with a PageRank of 6 and only three outgoing links is worth more than a link from a similarly-ranked page with twenty outgoing links. This holds true for web pages with similar rankings, but, due to the nature of the PageRank scale, becomes less of a factor as the difference between PageRanks increases. The amount by which that factor decreases is open to argument, since Google won’t reveal all of the factors that go into determining PageRank, but it is safe to assume that if the PageRank is significantly higher then it doesn’t matter how many links are on that web page.

So, in conclusion, what does all of this mean? As I mentioned at the start, PageRank is just one of the many factors used by Google when deciding how a web page should be ranked within its search results. The exact importance of PageRank within those factors is something that Google alone knows – everything else is pure speculation. There is some talk that PageRank has been devalued of late, with less weighting given to it than previously was the case. However, PageRank is still something that a web site owner or administrator should take into consideration when designing a web site. Links do still matter in search engine optimization and the higher-quality links matter more.

To Your Online Success

Jeff

After stagnating for the first part of the the year, the volume of spam rose by 10 percent from May to July, according to the latest email security report from German email security specialist eleven (www.eleven.de).

According to the report released Thursday, the increase can be traced mainly to casino spam, which more than doubled its share of total spam in July, rising from 7.2 percent to 16.2 percent. As recently as May, casino spam had accounted for only three percent of the total volume.

In June, eleven first encountered JavaScript spam, which uses code obfuscating to make the destination of links difficult to understand, redirecting the user to the spammer’s target page. This trick can also fool spam filters that check email contents for links to known spam pages.

The volume of malware sent via email also continued to rise. Only accounting for 0.1 percent of the total email volume in May, it rose to 0.4 percent in July. Most of this increase can be traced to the Sasfis Trojan, which spread mostly via email masquerading as messages from package delivery and courier services. Sasfis variants, after all, accounted for 71.8 percent of the total malware volume in July.

Phishing attacks have increasingly been directed at online payment services, with PayPal being the prime target. In June 2010, 96.1 percent of phishing emails identified by eleven were PayPal-related.

With a share of 96.4 percent of the total email volume, however, spam remains at record levels. The top spam originators in July 2010 were the US, followed by Brazil and India. Germany dropped to seventh place.

Last month, eleven reported that a German email recipient falls victim to a phishing attack approximately every 20 seconds. The report was based on data collected via eleven’s eXpurgate managed security service, which also found that the favorite tactic of phishers is to spoof online payment services, followed by social networks.