Increase Your Sales… September 11, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Digital Coaching, Fun Stuff, Interent Marketing, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Productivity Coaching, Virtual Services, Web Marketing, entrepreneur, small business, solo professional, solopreneur.Tags: customer thinking, customer thoughts, customers, free report, henry pellerin, increase sales, Marketing, sales, sales success, selling, success, vantaedge
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In the Mind of the Customer
Have you ever wished you could understand how your customers think? After all, how much easier would it be to generate business and how much more value could you provide to your customers?
Henry Pellerin, has graciously provided some great, eye-opening information about learning how to understand your customers and build effective long-term relationships with your customers.
In case you don’t know Henry, he is the President of VantaEDGETM where he helps companies dramatically improve their sales. What is interesting about Henry is that he is not some sales guru that is untouchable. In fact, quite the opposite, he actually gets out in the trenches. He feels that is the best way to truly be able to understand and develop programs that help people.
When you visit this website you will see a f*ree video that describes some statistics on what customers, business owners, and buyers are saying about you.
There is also a free report that provides a few valuable tips to help you understand your customers and build long-term relationships so you can:
- be more effective at sales and business development – more sales with less effort.
- understand customers better – to have customer relationships that pay and last a life-time
- see the importance of selling value instead of competing on price – understanding how to effectively communicate value
I think you will find this information very valuable.
Oh and I almost forgot to mention that Henry also put together some case studies of sales professionals, business owners, and coaches that explain the details on how they have used this information to increase their business.
Reducing Website Load Time Through Image Optimization August 2, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Interent Marketing, Marketing, Virtual Services, Web Marketing, small business, solo professional, solopreneur, web design.Tags: graphics, images, media, web design, website
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Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web’s population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.
Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.
You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.
If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.
On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!
Google Learns to Crawl Flash Sites!!!!! July 2, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Interent Marketing, Internet Marketing, Web 3.0, web design.Tags: adobe flash, crawling sites, flash, flash graphics, google, Google crawlers, search engines
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I am soo excited about this news! If you have any sort of flash on your site you will be excited too! Check out the post I read…
We’ve received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we’ve greatly improved our ability to index Flash.
Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.
Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.
Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.
Q: How does Google “see” the contents of a Flash file?
We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.
Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).
That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.
Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google’s ability to index Flash?
There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:
1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.
We’re already making progress on these issues, so stay tuned!
