| LED Digest 2509: The Next Level of Business |
|
|
|
================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom www.GetWebContent.com/LED : the LED's Key Sponsor The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. www.SEOToolSet.com/training/ : the LED's Premier Sponsor Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization Training & Certification ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. October 9, 2007 Issue no. 2509 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ==================== --== Taking Business to the Next Level ~ Carol Simicich "I am trying to focus my business on larger, more complex Web development..." <Moderator Comment> ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Hiring a Marketing Manager ==-- ~ Mario Soavi "Bringing a successful company to the next level is [not] an automatic operation..." --== Placing Links on Client Sites ==-- ~ Jeremy Weiss "...to penalize a site based on who links to it would induce a hole..." ~ Peter D'Aprix "...I don't think a hard and fast rule need apply." --== Email Overload ==-- ~ Martyn Gay "Our main reason for moving to Gmail was its fantastic spam filtering." ~ John Barendrecht "The only drawback I see with this scenario is contacts." ~ Veronica Yuill "Coinicidentally, after sending my post, I also came across this exploit..." =========== NEW ================================== From: Carol Simicich Subject: Taking Business to the Next Level I am a long-time reader and have gotten tremendous benefit from LED thanks to all of you insightful folks. So naturally I thought you all would have some good ideas and resources to help my current situation. I have recently begun working with a business coach to help me take my business "to the next level." (I'm a one-person web design / development shop and want to stay solo.) I am trying to focus my business on larger, more complex Web development, therefore would like to do less maintenance and fewer simple Web pages. I often get requests to do work that is not a good fit, as my business coach points out. Many of these requests come from people that I've done work for in the past or are referrals from existing clients, so I want to be sure that are well taken care of. One remedy is to have a list of good web designer / developers to refer these clients to (suggestions welcome!). Ideally, I would love to find a promising start-up designer / developer who needs a few good clients. I am open to any and all suggestions. I am located in Miami, Florida. Many thanks, Carol Simicich Artege.com, Inc. http://www.artege.com <Moderator Comment> Wow, this is a huge opportunity for an up-and-coming designer to build some good business. I've worked with Carol and she is extremely professional and very talented. For anyone interested, please send an email to Carol directly. You can find her email address above the post, under her name. Just click on the Flow-To.com encoded email link. As to the wider issue here -- namely how a design / development shop scales -- I'm very interested discussing that as well. To those who have been there before: how did you grow your business? How does your service model scale? This can apply to other service areas as well, such as search marketing. Thanks for the post, Carol. -Adam ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Mario Soavi Subject: Hiring > ... I need high powered Marketing Manager who could > help bring my company to the next level... but I'm facing > a challenge. How will I be able to evaluate such a person? - Bogdan Fiedur, LED Digest 2506 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1918/190/ Dear Bogdan, IMHO you have to ask for a professional to help. In your position I would act as follows: A. first of all I would do some "home work", trying to understand which kind of professional do work in companies similar to what is your target evolution; B. that could show you eventually: B1. the ability profile of the Marketing Manager you need; B2. the ability deficiencies of your overall structure (the next level could also mean you have to change more than inserting a new professional); C. only after that you could hire a specialized HR consultant (or agency) and make him do the job professionally. A final note. Bringing a successful company to the next level is neither an automatic operation nor the effect of inserting a new ability in the structure. Your organization is successful because it has good business people, a good business model and an harmonious structure. Each of these elements are part of your current success but you must realize that a "next level" success could need more ability from your people, a different model and a stress to your structure. That's the reason of my suggestion of hiring a professional (which could eventually help you in harmonizing your organization to your new goals). Just m2c Mario Soavi http://mario.soavi.com ========= Begin Sponsor Message ========= 2007 Is Aging Fast, So Is Your Content! Remember when search bots visited every four or five months? Now their noses are in your tent constantly. Weekly. Maybe even daily. What's a webmaster to do? Give 'em what they want! Fresh copy. Great copy. Relevant copy. http://www.GetWebContent.com/LED copy. ========== End Sponsor Message ========== -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Jeremy Weiss Subject: Placing links No offense intended Grant, but from your emails it seems we are to believe that you're an expert in many different fields. And in most of them, such as art and usability I can't argue as I claim no expertise. But I have to rebut some of your SEO related comments. > WE GET ADDED PAGERANK FROM IT, RIGHT? > Wrong. Really? And your proof is... where? > It's a big misconception that backlinks on any websites > home page will increase your pagerank in Google, or > ranking in the search engines. If the site bears no relevance > to your own website and what you offer, it is treated as > irrelevant by the search engines Really? Google says ----------------------- "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance." Source: http://www.google.com/technology/ ----------------------- Let's see, there's mention of links being interpreted as votes, the weight of the vote based on the importance of the page casting them, but not a mention of links being ignored due to relevance. Now, I'll grant you that some links don't help, but to make a blanket statement that all links from irrelevant sites are useless is incorrect. > and at worst they will hurt your search visibility. Of all your comments this one really just gets to me. Admittedly because it's a pet peeve of my own, but it still gets to me none the less. Google and all the other search engines know that you can not control who links to you 100% of the time so to penalize a site based on who links to it would induce a hole where rankings could be manipulated. If links from other sites to your site could hurt your ranking in the SERPs then a large portion of the SEO firms out there would be submitting links to competitor sites to ever FFA and link directory they could find. It doesn't work that way. > (Note: designers who use the term "Pagerank" as an argument > shows their lack of knowledge about how Google really works. > Pagerank is just one factor, as there are so many more things > that are weighed by Google in following links to a site.) And Google says, "The heart of our software is PageRank... PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools." So while you play down PR, Google calls it the "heart" of their software which plays a "central role." Again, I'll admit that there's more to life than PR. But to imply that anyone who uses the term "Pagerank" lacks knowledge is yet another blanket statement that will be wrong just as much as, if not more than, it is right. > I recently interviewed Dr. Susan Weinschenk, Chief of > Technical Staff and Director of Training for Human Factors > International... that also provides Usability training and > certification for 25 years, including for website design > and development. You know, I think this was a great idea. However, I can't help but feel that if Ms. Weinschenk was called as a professional witness in a court of law, and the two of you played out your conversation from that perspective, that there would be a lawyer on the other side of the room objecting on the grounds of you leading the witness. I would like to see a non-biased interview done with a usability expert in a Q and A format where we can all see what questions were asked in addition to the answers given. My $.02 worth, Jeremy Weiss Internet Consultant | Blue Phoenix Consulting, LLC Small Business Consulting and Internet Services http://www.BluePhoenixConsulting.com -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Peter D'Aprix Subject: Usability While I don't disagree with Grant, neither do I fully agree with him. Historically, graphic designers have put their company name on certain types of print work albeit in very small type. Photographers have for a long time been give credit for images published, especially in magazine work even though they have been paid for the work. So I think this sort of thing should be at the discretion of the designer and client and handled in a very discrete manner on a case by case basis. Like many things in this business, I don't think a hard and fast rule need apply. Peter D'Aprix - Visual Communications http://peterdaprix.com -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Martyn Gay Subject: Email > I know Google "doesn't do evil" but how do you > know that will always be the case? What security > and privacy guarantees do they offer? - Veronica Yuill, LED Digest 2506 Veronica, We've been using Gmail to handle our corporate mail for around 3 months now - We've had no regrets whatsoever. Our main reason for moving to Gmail was its fantastic spam filtering. We've been through half a dozen solutions and nothing had been reliable and accurate enough for us. Since most of us had used Gmail for our personal email and found the spam filters very effective, we decided to try it out for our corporate mail (using "Gmail for Organisations"). You can still use POP / SMTP so you don't need to switch over to a web based interface - you can use your existing email software. And in addition you have Gmail's web interface too for when you are away from the office. You keep your existing email address so no one needs to know that you are using Gmail. The system works better than we ever could have imagined. Virtually no spam makes it through, and very little if any real mail gets blocked (and in most cases the legitimate mail that does get blocked is auto marketing mails - Gmail soon learns they are legit when I instruct it that they aren't spam). It has some added benefits over other simpler web based mail systems we've used in the past... when using Outlook (or another email client) you not only pickup mail through Gmail servers (via POP) but you send out via Gmail's SMTP servers. This means that even when you send mail from Outlook, a copy of that message appears in your sent folder on Gmail itself. And likewise when you send out mail via Gmail's web interface, it sends you a copy to your POP box so that next time you load up Outlook you have a copy of that sent mail too (I just set up an Outlook rule so that any mail I receive that was sent by me gets moved to my sent folder). So you end up with a full copy of all emails sent and received in both Gmail and your local mail client - very useful! I appreciate your privacy concerns about Google, but similar concerns apply to any ISP that handles your mail. If your mail isn't encrypted, anyone along the route might be able to read it.... unlikely, but possible. Moving on to the risk of all the mail disappearing - if you have a setup such as I've described above you'll have your mail archived locally on your network as well as on Gmail's servers. So long as you backup properly locally, in the event of a catastrophe at Gmail you'd only lose new mail that arrived since you last logged in. Gmail has had some recent security issues, but these are patched in hours... if you are using Outlook or similar software patches it can take days or weeks. Failures can happen with any ISP you trust to handle your email. We saw an old ISP of ours collapse under a denial of service attack once. Google is a big company, well resourced and employing the brightest in the world - if I trust anyone to look after my mail that company would be Google. And whats more - if you only need 2gb mail boxes and don't mind the adverts on the web interface - its free!!! Martyn Gay ASP Ecommerce Software www.cactushop.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: John Barendrecht Subject: Managing Tons of Email [Responding to Adam Boettiger's article on managing email using Gmail: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1917/190/ ] The only drawback I see with this scenario is contacts. Will you remember to add that new contact to Gmail? Personally I use Icewarp mail server and they have a small plug in for Outlook that syncs your total Outlook -- inbox, outbox, calendar, contacts, notes, etc. It will do this to server, from server or both every 5 minutes. Online you can use web mail or wap. It is considerably more expensive than a few Gmail accounts but no matter where you go, you have everything you need. Nothing worse than trying to remember an email address or appointment when you're away from your desk. With over 10 years of emails in 19 accounts, Outlook file is only 1.5 Gigs and very responsive. Outlook will automatically archive to an archive folder. As the server is backed up to tape, you have complete peace of mind. Your chances of your computer, your server and the tape backup crashing at the same time are minimal. Best regards, John Barendrecht http://www.centralhome.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Veronica Yuill Subject: Email Heck, Adam B, you seem to have read more paranoia into my post than I intended :-) I wasn't really trying to imply that I am *that* suspicious of Google, it's just a concern that many people have raised in the past, and I was interested to hear your take on it, so thanks for responding in such detail, it's very helpful. Coinicidentally, after sending my post, I also came across this exploit: http://www.news.com/Gmail-cookie-vulnerability-exposes... Of course, this type of exploit isn't unique to Google, and they have probably already fixed this particular hole, but it is a weakness of storing all your email online and accessing it via a browser. I totally agree with you that unencrypted email can never be 100% secure, far from it, and that's what I've always told my clients. Yes, anyone can read your individual emails as they pass across the net or while they are stored on your ISP's server. But that's a different matter from your entire email archive being stored long-term on a third-party's servers and accessible via a web browser, IMHO. Of course I keep an offsite backup of my local email archive, along with all other business-critical data, which is backed up daily -- I just don't use Google to do it :-) I certainly don't keep the only copy of any mission-critical data on my laptop. I prefer to be in charge of my own backups, so perhaps I am paranoid after all! I agree with you that everyone has to balance up the risks and rewards for their particular situation. Best regards Veronica Yuill http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/ (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "O that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth! Then with passion would I shake the world..." - Shakespeare |
