May 2009

Budget is the main concern of businesses for availing advertisements specially in this global financial crisis we were experiencing right now. But adverting is also very important, specially in a period like this. Why? Branding is of utmost importance so people will still have loyalty to a product despite of a weak economy and will appear that the company or business is doing all right. Mainstream media is the most effective way of advertising but if you are looking for an alternative to lower the cost, then below are some options: (I omitted online advertising because I already made a post for it)

Transit Ads

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After watching the Youtube video on how those prankster contaminated the food being served, it reminded me again of the food our family eats in fast food chains. How safe they are really? how can you be sure if those in the kitchen are not putting anything on the hamburgers or fried chicken you ordered? Worst is if there is a psychopath in the kitchen. This is very alarming if you have a food business and you hired a psychologically unfit person. Yeah, you really need to screen your employees. And not only proper screening, but also proper motivation for your employees. If you treat them right, then most probably you won’t encounter much problem.

Watching the video of those two Domino’s Pizza employees makes me feel disgusted. One employee is picking his nose with a cheese strip then putting it over the pizza dough. I hope there is no booger on it. I’m not interested eating a pizza with booger as toppings. It really destroys a company brand name doing those things. I do hope Jollibee, Chowking and Greenwich Pizza employees won’t follow their example just to be a Youtube sensation.

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Branding is the most important part of a business. And there is no better way of accomplishing it than by free. Yes, you can make our own branding without any advertising cost. Today, or I mean in this later part of the year twitter has became so popular that many people are now having a twitter account. Many internet marketers are making the most of this new fad and the popularity  is now second to Google search. Twitter is the simplest from of blogging that is why it is called “micro-blogging”. Having a twitter account is very easy. Just register and you already have a twitter account. But if your twitter account is for the sake of branding your business, you should give it a different approach. One is by customizing the twitter background.

Twitter Background Size

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Looks like MySpace is following the footstep of Facebook having it’s own pay per click advertising network. I still can’t give a detailed comment on MySpace  MyAds Beta because I have not tried to register as an advertiser. I once tried advertising on Facebook for my social networking site. The conversion of advertising was not very satisfactory if I paid for it. But since it’s free, which I got a $250 worth of advertising using the promo code ($25 per promo code) I don’t mind if the conversion rate is poor.

Maybe the type of website I’m promoting doesn’t fit on Facebook members. Myspace on the other hand have $50 worth of free advertising using this promo code upon check-out: ENTRY2 which expires on May, 31, 2009. Since I haven’t tried MySpace, I can’t tell if you can get more free advertising using other promo code like what I did on Facebook that allows me to accumulate $250 by having ten promo codes. At least it’s worth a try because you can’t find a $50 bill on the sidewalk if it isn’t your lucky day. So if you want to try it, just go here.

When you talk about search engine, nowadays it’s “Google”. Like this: “Search Engine = Google” it’s like they are the same thing. It’s similar to gadgets and appliances we are very familiar with. When you say refrigerator, we Filipinos call it “Frigidaire”. Or if we want to photocopy something, most of the time we call it “Xerox”.  So when it comes to people searching the internet, I heard and read people saying “Google it”. And the statistics don’t lie, the search engine market share of Google is dominating which overpowered Yahoo! that sometime ago was called “The Mother of All Search Engine”.

Aside from that, there are also some observation on what kind of people uses that search engine. I once read a post on Yugatech blog that says users of Google are more financially able than those who use Yahoo! So we can assume now that the money is in Google. The more traffic that comes from that search engine, the more potential buyers your site will have. More potential buyers means good conversion rate for any website that have advertising on it. This is the reason why many webmasters and internet marketers do their best to get as much Google traffic in their blogs or websites. If you happen to have lots of visitors from Google, then you are one of the luckiest guys and gals on this planet. But what if someday you see your traffic coming from Google slowly diminishing? That is a very big problem. I read many webmasters in Webmasters World Forum who are complaining about the sudden loss of their traffic blaming the Google update. It’s easier to blame others than yourself. Why not check first on your blog or website?

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I was unaware of the other damages done by that hacker. The only thing that comes to my mind now is what have I done to deserve this? I was just doing my business here and not hurting anybody, particularly other websites or blogs. Maybe those comments I made to other blogs might be considered spamming or registering to a forum using my signature to promote my other websites. If that is the case then I’m sorry if I’ve done such a sin. But on the contrary, any innocent blogger or website owner can be a victim. I was thinking, maybe those who promote their website hacking other blogs was the effect of the recent policy update of Adsense for publisher sites to refrain linking to lottery and casino sites. But what kept me thinking is why was my hacked site’s pages redirects to an anti-virus site? Maybe it was just a coincidence.

So what I’m pointing out here is doing our data files back-up regularly will save us from a lot of trouble created by incidents like hard drive crash, your hosting provider loss it’s data or hacked by a very devious person (or thing) or your password was phished by a hacker and did some notorious job on your website’s files or database. I was hesitant to make a post regarding technical stuffs on website maintenance because it seems awkward. But come to think of it, we are in the digital/information age and businesses now are migrating to the web. If you are a businessman or entrepreneur reading this post but not really interested on computer technical stuffs, the fact that you are reading this post means you might as well have a website of your own in the future. So this is just a reminder to make a back-up.