One word: ABSOLUTELY!

The Internet trend watching site, eMarketer quoted an Ad-ology survey conducted earlier this month that reveals some rather alarming numbers: 46% of small and medium business owners did not have a website in 2009.  Another study conducted by VistaPrint found that only about 50% of small business owners that have a website are actually tracking their online marketing efforts! And the icing on the cake is a study from a Discover Small Business Watch Poll that corroborates Ad-ology’s survey results and goes on to state that a lot of small and medium business owners perceive the need for a website for their business as a “myth”.

This begs the question: As a small or medium business owner, what are you losing out on if you don’t have your own website?

The answer is very clear: Customers!

Come on folks! We are just about ready to start year 2010. People are no longer using the (actual) yellow pages or phone books to look for information. The three major search engines are serving up local search results even when a search does not include a local or geographical qualifier. The bottom line: Small and Medium businesses need web presence that they can directly influence and control.

There are many ways for you to establish web presence. Of course, you can go Yelp or use other social media websites such as Merchant Circle and get a “listing” but always remember, you don’t control any of these. You have zero say on how they will allow you to connect with customers. It is better than nothing… but sadly it is still not enough.

Your very own website gives you the ability to:
-Provide information and details about your products and services to people all over the world
-Set yourself apart from your competition, especially if they don’t have a website
-Become visible to the growing population that rely solely on the internet for information
-Harness the power of social media and social websites, the new word of mouth
-Properly and effectively leverage local search results from search engines
-Establish yourself as an authority with your customers and within your industry
-Build credibility with your customers by sharing information about your company
-Build and create your own community (social network)
-Leverage email marketing by building an email list and using that to market to potential clients

Before you jump on the website bandwagon, take the time to identify why you need a website. Remember, not all small businesses have the same “web presence” goals. Whether you want to simply promote your idea, sell products and services or build an online community, give it serious thought and plan your web presence goals.

So, now that you’ve got your goals planned, how do you go about getting yourself a website?

Website Domain: We recommend that you start by picking your website’s domain (that would be in the form of yourbusiness.com). In most cases, the domain name you end up with will be similar to your company or business name. Make sure that you book/register the domain name and that you retain ownership of the domain. We have come across situations where a website designer or development company booked a domain on behalf of a client and then refused to relinquish control of the domain name when the relationship changed.

Design & Development: Hire a professional company to design and develop your website. Don’t skip this step. We can tell you countless horror stories where people did not hire the right professional. If you want a proper image, look and feel, go to an expert.  The bottom line is that your website needs to look professional. The exact type of website you end up with will depend on several factors: your brand, your industry, your products or services and your business model.

Website Content: Content is KING on the web. Content is what your potential visitors are after. Content will give you a boost in your SEO (Website Search Engine Optimization) efforts. You do not need a website with lots of pages of content – the aim here is to provide potential clients with the right information about your business and what you are all about. We recommend that you have, at minimum, a 5-6 page website: Home Page, About, Contact, Products, Services and Testimonials and maybe even a Portfolio or Projects Page. The Contact page is essential so that you can leverage local business listings on search engines.

Website Hosting: Unless you already have website hosting in place, we recommend that you stick with your website design company (of course, they should offer website hosting as part of their services) even if you end up paying a little extra for website hosting. Whilst there are many affordable website hosting choices, it is best to stick with your design company because chances are that they know their hosting platforms best. An added benefit of getting hosting through your website design company is having a single contact, avoiding confusion about who’s responsibility it is if your website has an issue. Oh, and be sure that you get enough email addresses to cover your needs. Your email address should be you@yourbusiness.com.

Local Search Engine Listings: Make sure you grab your local listings on Google, Yahoo, Bing , Best-of-the-Web and any other third party websites. Go to www.getlisted.org to see if you are listed, and how complete your local listing is.

Internet Marketing: Again, hire a professional Internet marketing company that can assist you to prepare and complete an Internet Marketing Strategy that will include a Social Media plan, an Internet Marketing plan, Search Engine Optimization and Paid Advertising recommendations. The world of Internet Marketing can be daunting and it is best to have professional guidance so that you get the best return on investment (ROI).

On a final note, small and medium business owners are increasingly using the Internet as a marketing channel – this fact is upheld by the 36% increase of SMB owners who have created websites over the past 2 years. This number, no doubt, will increase in 2010 and beyond. Search Engines are putting more and more emphasis on local business listings which in turn makes your website an integral component of your business and marketing.

In short, get a website if you don’t have one!

As defined in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
•    Web 2.0…refers to a perceived second generation of web-based  communities and hosted services  - such as social-networking sites,  wikis and folksonomies  -  which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users .
•    Is not an update to Web technical specifications.  Instead…
“it is a change in how we use the internet”

Web 2.0 is defined as a set of Web-based software services that encourage users to become more involved in the creation and manipulation of data. Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information.
As the name suggests, Web 2.0 represents an important shift in the way digital information is created, shared, stored, distributed, and manipulated. In the years ahead, it will have a significant impact in the way businesses use both the Internet and enterprise-level IT applications.
The phrase “Web 2.0” was first coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999 but came into notice in the year 2004 when O'Reilly Media and MediaLive hosted the first 2.0 web conference.

 
Web 2.0 is simply a marketing strategy using one or many of the social media outlets. Those outlets are broken down into 6 different types:
1. Social Networking - the most popular of these outlets include Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, DirectMatches, Ryze and Orkut in india.
2. Social Bookmarking - well known ones include Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Originally, social bookmarks were places you could store your favorite bookmarks online, so that you could access your bookmarks from anywhere, not just your own computer. Social bookmarking has evolved as people began to share their bookmarks with others.
3. Content Sharing - best known sites for content sharing are Wikipedia, Squidoo, Hubpages, Gather and E-zine Articles. Content sharing sites are great for people who don't have any web skills but want to share content on the internet.
4. Media Sharing - most well known are YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, JamGlue;
5. Blogging – these are online dairies which facilitate the readers to post interactive comments. They are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts. The most popular amongst them are Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, etc.
6. Adapters - Amazon, Google Products, Cafe Press - these are traditional websites that "adapted" their products to the social marketing scene. 

In all, we can say that Web 2.0 is a compact form of technologies, people, and attitude merged together, that has created an important shift in the way we think about and use the Internet. It facilitates a number of ways to benefit business by saving time and money, and offering a new mode of interaction with customers. Though, it has advantages of emerging technologies but must be used keeping the security aspects in mind.

  

Being able to drive traffic to a website, generate sales, create advertising income and also act as an efficient customer service tool, a blog is fast becoming part of the marketing strategy for most companies worldwide. Here are the top 9 reasons why you should blog to improve your website ranking:

1. You become known as an expert in your field
Use a blog to easily share your knowledge and expertise on a specific niche area is a great advantage to business. A Blog gives you a place where you can write in your own voice and establish yourself as a trusted expert.

2. Blogs get you more traffic from search engines
Search engines love blogs and blog directories because of their built-in notification features and also because bloggers continually add fresh content to their blogs. Blogs also get traffic from highly popular social networking search engines like Technocrati, DIGG and Reddit.

3. Podcasts – easily shared
Podcasting refers to a very low cost medium that enables you to share tailored and targeted content with your audience. Another benefit is given by RSS technology that enables your audience to subscribe to your website podcasts and blogs and pull content they I want from you. Podcasts can also be easily downloaded.

4. Interactive FAQ section
Your blog can also have an interactive FAQ section where customers can ask questions and you can interactively answer them. How great would it be to get your questions answered right away!

5. Blogs are free
You can set up a blog in minutes for free using wordpress.com or blogger.com.

6. You can update your blog without a webmaster
Updating your blog with fresh content is easy to do: you won’t need a webmaster to do that for you. You can work at your own pace and you don’t have to spend extra money.  If you post valuable information on a regular basis, it will boost your credibility and establish you as an expert in your field.

7. Start a series of How-To articles
You can put up articles and explain various concerns in your industry. This will save your readers time spent looking it up and give proof that your company knows what they’re doing, creating a greater chance for sales.

8. Easily connect with your visitors
Your blog can be a great means of communication between your customers who want to share their comments, feedback, ideas and concerns with you.

9. Blog content density is better than your website’s
As mentioned earlier, search engines give blogs a higher rank and active blogs are indexed on a more regular basis than websites because of continuously available new content.

Every time you are surfing the net you encounter something known as TLDs. After all what is it and how is it used?  TLDs are the Top Level Domains and they are the last part of an Internet domain name. Let’s take an example, in the domain name Arnima.com, the top-level domain is the three letters “com”. Look it’s not any more complicated than that!

The top-level domains (TLDs) are the highest level of domain names of the Internet.  The Domain Name System was created in the 1980s, and then the domain name space was divided into two main groups of domains. The country code top-level domains (ccTLD) were primarily based on the  territory codes of ISO-3166 country abbreviations. On the other hand, a group of seven generic top-level domains (gTLD) was implemented which represented a set of categories of names and multi-organizations.


gTLDs - Generic domains
 
A gTLD, is a top-level domain and is used in particular by a specific type of organization. These generic TLDs are three or more letters long, and they're named to be a good fit to the organization.
When top-level domains were first implemented, in January 1985, there were seven gTLDs:
•    ARPA --  Advanced Research Projects Agency
•    COM -- commercial
•    EDU -- educational establishments (primarily U.S.)
•    GOV -- U.S. government
•    NET -- network infrastructure
•    ORG -- non-profit organizations
•    MIL -- U.S. military


You must have come across with the most popular domain extensions on the web -  .BIZ, .NAME, .MOBI, etc. They are all known as generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and are open for registration to all users worldwide, regardless of their citizenship, residence or age.
 
•    unsponsored top-level domains: domains operating directly under policies established by ICANN processes for the global Internet community.
•    sponsored top-level domains (sTLD): The private organizations proposed  and sponsored these domains Use is based on community theme concepts.
•    infrastructure top-level domain: It's a group that consists of one domain, the Address and Routing Parameter Area (ARPA). It is managed by IANA.


ccTLD - Country Code Top-Level Domain

ccTLD is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country or a dependent territory.
Each country has a unique two-character abbreviation which is added at the end of the domain name (e.g. .us for US, .de for Germany, .uk for United Kingdom, .in for India, etc). Some countries have sold the rights to their ccTLDs (e.g. Tuvalu and .tv).
 
A new add-on to this is a group of internationalized domain name (IDN) top-level domains that has been installed under test for testing purposes. The countries and territories may apply for IDN ccTLDs from November 2009.
You may refer to the following links for the authoritative list of currently existing TLDs in the root zone:-
 http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/ and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

Landing Pages vs Mircosites

While they are different from one another, microsites and landing pages are both used in conjunction with search engine optimization, search engine marketing and online advertising for more targeted content.

Landing Pages
Landing pages are usually one-page creations that focus on a particular offer and specifically on leading the visitor to take certain action. Landing pages are used for direct marketing campaigns and are considered to be essential to the success of these campaigns. All savvy marketers use and test hundreds of different landing pages in order to optimize conversion rates.

Microsites
Microsites are one or more Web pages used for a number of purposes:

-Consumer goods companies may market a new product, because the main website may leave the product underexposed; a microsite will focus on that particular product or service and provide extensive details and information.

-A magazine may want cover a time-sensitive and popular event, such as the upcoming presidential election or some world championship and may leverage a microsite.

-A software company may offer its clients more information on a product, which cannot be posted on a simple landing page and adding several pages to its main website would mean burying the information and relying on visitors to feel their way through to the specific information.

In most cases microsites and landing pages are created to convert visitors into leads. Microsite also result in increased SEO opportunities.  Microsites are typically hosted on a different domain than the primary website and contain sometimes multiple pages of topic-related content for high organic search rankings. Most savvy marketers tend to use both microsites and landing pages somewhere along the way. And if microsites are hosting on multiple- C IPs (SEO-hosting), the results can be even more considerable.

Article syndication is the process of distributing articles for simultaneous publication on a number of web sites and article directories.

Articles provide a chance to share information and establish yourself as an expert and create opportunities for you to direct new traffic to your website, establish new links into your website, and provide fresh and relevant content for both your visitors and search engines, which results in higher ranking.

How does Article Syndication work?

-you write an interesting and valuable article
-you then find a service that will provide article syndication
-find sources where you can market the articles yourself
-post your article on your site and wait a few days to make sure the web spiders index your page
-create accounts at the article sources you found and start submitting your articles
-follow syndication guidelines (if they allow HTML editing, require unique content that hasn’t been published before, require the articles to be on your own page, allow multiple submissions per month etc.)

Benefits of Article Syndication:

Brand awareness
Publishing articles to multiple article directories boosts your online visibility. You have your own name/company name in the anchor text, which makes you more popular to the audience

Obtain Higher rankings
Keyword-rich articles are a sure way to improve your incoming links and improve your search engine rankings.

Longer life span
Articles posted in directories are rarely removed. The fact that articles written have a much longer life span shows just how important this marketing tool can be.

Direct traffic
The articles posted on article directories are a great way to get direct traffic to your website. Plus, the readers click through to your website, bringing you getting valuable targeted traffic to your website.

Many businesses think that once they have built their opt-in lists, all they have to do is wait for customers to literally break their doors down for their product or service. Well, that’s not quite the case. In order to really acquire loyal customers, you need to communicate with them on a constant basis and offer them something of value. Remember the old adage, what’s in it for me? As long as you have your customers best interest in mind, you can win your their loyalty for your business.

Here’s how:

1. Offer valuable, rich content.
Don't just throw subscribers a couple of bones, but give them solid information that they can actually use that would want them to read next month's issue.

2. Create a theme and a name.
Create a newsletter that is meaningful and positions your company as a trusted source of information. Instead of cluttering your newsletter with everything you’ve done the past few month, choose a theme and a name that frames your information and grabs attention.

3. Keep it simple.
Keep your newsletter brief, but offer solid, valuable content. If you make it too long or stuffed with too much information, chances are that clients won’t read it all. Go for a readable length of around 1 to 3 pages, including a response area.  You can even use a dedicated blog to house your newsletters.

4. Call to action.
Always place a call to action, be it a request for more details, the option to place an order, a survey, etc. If you ask something from your clients, they are more likely to respond. This works in most industries as long as you offer a product or service that your customers would want.

5. Be Viral.
Use e-mail forwarding. Encourage your customers to share your newsletter with others who may be interested in what you're offering. Make it easy for new visitors to subscribe through a link in each issue of your newsletter

Starting a business without a proper business plan is generally considered a recipe for failure. Similarly, a solid web marketing strategy is a critical part of your online success.

A solid web marketing strategy should cover the following aspects:

1. Help you understand your niche market. This way, after you take the "pulse" of your audience, you can easily create and sell your product or service, in a way that would grab attention and produce visible results.

2. To sell massively, you must ensure you attract potential customers and increase traffic to your website. You can do this by implementing SEO and PPC.

3. Once you have consistent traffic, you have to do everything you can to turn your visitors into buyers. It’s best if you can provide a wide range of products and services at different prices and also offer your prospective clients all the information they need.

4. Maintaining an open channel of communication with your visitors is essential. Allows your visitors to directly approach you and solve their queries so they can easily make a purchasing decision.

To conclude, your web marketing strategy supports your business objective and defines how you will achieve your goals.

Who can use Twitter beneficially?

1. Online businesses
Once you have created a loyal community of followers on Twitter, you will want to start leveraging them. You can start tweeting about your blog, company or anything you are involved in. Your followers will then start re-tweeting your tweets, bringing more traffic to your website! For example, Dell has successfully leverages twitter to drive sales to its outlet website.

2. Journalists
Twitter is a great way to spread breaking news very quickly and easily. CNN’s Breaking News is already posted on Twitter. It’s all part of the wider move of journalism to becoming more connected with readers.

3. Teachers/Educators
Teachers and educators can access a stream of links, ideas, opinion and resources within seconds from a selection of global professionals. It’s now possible to actively compare what is happening in schools in your county with others on different continents. Twitter is a great medium for sharing ideas and getting instant feedback.

4. Artists/Creative People
Create a dialogue with your audience. Twitter works very well for the creative community including artists. You can use Twitter to help encourage people to visit your blog or your website, promote your work and your activity.

5. Politicians
Use Twitter as a political tool to communicate with people.

6. Sports organizations
Sports organizations can ask questions, get instant feedback from fans, plus save money on focus groups. It’s easy to spread the news and extend sponsor promotions.

In short, Twitter can be used by anyone who wishes to:
-    Keep track of breaking news
-    Monitor their reputation
-    Get quick answers
-    Stay in touch
-    Meet new people
-    “Be” in several places at once
-    Build their authority as an expert
-    Share their knowledge

Learn more about Twitter at www.twitter.com

Visitor tracking allows you to learn about visitor activity and trends on your website. It also provides a mechanism for you to check the results of your marketing campaigns, blogging, SEO and your other marketing and website optimization activities. In short, it provides you with intelligence as to how well your website is serving its purpose and what patterns/paths your visitors are following on your website and how long they “stay” on your website.

Visitor tracking also tells you where your visitors are coming from, what pages they visit, how they navigate through you website and what topics they find of interest. The intention is to find out what interests your visitors so you can fine-tune the content of your website to provide a more targeted source of information and to better serve your visitors and customers.

Furthermore, visitor tracking also captures search engine activity and provides a thorough analysis of which keywords are driving the most of traffic to your website.  Visitor tracking can also tell you how much of your traffic is direct, how much is coming from search engines and how much from referring websites. Advanced visitor tracking also lets you see the traffic originating from organic or natural search engine optimization and allows you compare that with any paid marketing campaigns. This way, you can fine-tune your content and marketing strategies to gain an better understanding of how to increase your online visibility and ultimately, result in more traffic.

Here are 3 popular visitor tracking systems:

StatCounter (www.statcounter.com) provides both free and paid services. You can choose to implement Statcounter in invisible mode meaning that there are no obvious links or counters on your web pages.

Clicky (www.getclicky.com) has picked up a significant amount of traffic over the last few months and provides a very comprehensive statistics.

Finally, you can always opt for Google Analytics, which is also free and also gives you great statistics and ties in beautifully with Google Paid Advertising (PPC).

Think of an e-commerce website as a storefront for products and/or services that you want to sell online. Your job is to convert your website visitor into actual buyers. You need to have plenty of appealing content and products on your site to attract search engines as well as to inform prospective clients.

Here are the main parts of an e-commerce site:

The online product catalog is the main place to store and manage the information about products or collections of products.

The shopping cart is a familiar interface buyers use to select products they want to buy. The shopping cart just holds information about the products that your customer is about to purchase and assists them with the checkout process.

The checkout system collects necessary payment information from the buyer, including shipping & billing addresses and credit card information or details of other payment mechanisms. It may also be configured to present shipping rates, taxes, coupons, or calculate other changes to arrive at the final price.

The payment gateway is a secure service that transfers payment and credit card information from your website to a merchant account provided by a bank or financial institution that handles online transactions. The gateway mechanism also handles any feedback from the bank, such as when a buyer has insufficient funds or is using an invalid credit card. The payment gateway is also tasked with validating that the credit card actually belongs to the user.

The merchant account is a special bank account that allows your website to accept online payments by debit or credit cards. Merchant account banks charge variable fees per transaction and transaction types, partially based on the bank’s assumption of risk to collect money on your behalf.

Finally, fulfillment is when the order is processed through the e-commerce website and results in a completed order that is shipped out.

I came across a very interesting graphical representation of distribution of internet users across the major countries for the year 2008, type of traffic and how internet has grown over the years. 

Few interesting facts:
In terms of Number of Users, top 5 countries are:
1 China
2 USA
3 Japan
4 Brazil
5 India

210 billion emails were sent daily in 2008, 78% of which was spam

In 2008, e-commerce spending was $6.8 trillion (wow!)

Streaming media acounted for 8% of total internet traffic

74% population of Japan uses Internet compared to 4% of India

Check out the graphical representation at http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/2988/27062201.jpg

If you are planning to get started on a new website project, the following is a list of pitfalls to avoid to ensure the  successful completion of your website project:

1. Most beautiful website in the world - This is the most common pitfall. People spend countless hours creating a “beautiful’ website without considering what is needed for optimal performance.

If you have a business where beauty and creativity of the website is the most important thing and you have a development company that can support you in creating that piece-of-art, then perhaps the time, money and effort is worth it. Better, though, to create a professional, tidy site that works according to your needs, than to spend time on creating a piece of art.

It takes great effort to generate business from your website. Place your time and effort in marketing and keeping your website updated.

2. Most feature rich website in the world - Do not try to add all the possible features in one effort. Website development is an evolutionary process. Start with a minimum, required feature set, then plan to add features as your needs grow.

3. Website with richest content - Again, it is not possible to add every single bit of appropriate content at the onset of your project, or to have the best content in one step. Plan to have the basic content required to make your website functional first. Once your website is launched, you should work on constantly updating and adding content.

4.  Website with great animation and flash effects - Flash and animation effects looks cool, agreed. But do not overdo it. Flash and other animation effects make websites heavy and it takes longer to load the website. Normal users do not like waiting for websites to load. Even search engines don’t like slow websites. Flash and animation also add costs to development. I suggest keeping the effects to a minimum.

5. Totally bug-free website at launch - No matter how much you test a website, issues will come up on the website when you are ready to launch it. It is better to launch a website when you have covered the majority of issues and there are no major functional problems on the website. If you are expecting heavy traffic on the website immediately after the launch, plan your website launch so that traffic builds up slowly and you can work on fixing residual issues or bugs while the initial set of users are on the website. Consider planning a Beta launch with a restricted set of users who know that they might encounter some issues on the website. Keep reviewing the website after the launch and get the updates done to fix any issues.

6.  Getting the website completed in shortest span of time - Do not expect or plan to get your website done overnight. Website development is an involved and iterative process. From conceptualization to final launch, it takes a good amount of time for each step.

You can minimize the time by working with a project plan, tight set of requirements, and engaging aggressively with the development team. If you attempt to compress the time it takes for each step, you will end up stressed out and with a poor quality site on top of it.

The development and launch of your website is only a small part of a successful web presence. The post- launch process is actually much more critical, and time consuming as well.

 

Have you ever wondered about the "share" of various Search Engines on Internet? Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Live(Bing)? ComScore, an Internet research company, released  its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace on 17-June-2009. Google ranked on top (no surprises there) with 65% share of total searches conducted in the US. Here are the details:

 

You can read the complete article at the following location:

http://tinyurl.com/mbnd3m

 

Lets face it, the Internet has forever changed the way we live and it has become an integral part of our lives. Instant Messaging, Voice over IP and Portals have become critical to life & business – a whole lot of us would have a hard time surviving without the Internet and a whole more could not imagine life without online social networking.

Today’s society is abound with phrases such as “Hey, check out my Facebook”, or, “Connect with me on LinkedIn” or “I will tweet you”. I can understand Facebook, Linkedin and the others, but I must admit that I am intrigued by “Tweet” and “Twitter”.

Online social networking is based on the use of specialized websites, aptly called social networking websites that allow you to directly or indirectly connect with individuals of your choice for various purposes. The purpose is to build online communities of people that share common interests or activities, or people that are interested in learning about the interests and activities of others.

The sheer beauty of online social networking is that it allows you to keep in touch with your contacts across the entire world – there are no limits to the number of friends you can have and they can be located anywhere as long as they have access to the Internet.

The concept is simple. You are either are invited to join a social network website or you join it on your own and you then search for your contacts and then invite them to become part of your network or you get invited to join your contacts' networks. You interact with your contacts and continually grow your network by adding more and more contacts. The main purpose is to share all sorts of information within the network and keep each other informed about your activities, events and in general, life. You can share photos and videos, messages, updates, events and scores of other things.

One word of advice - be careful of who you connect with and how much information you share with them - protect your identity at all times and be sensible about your activity.

Google is set to launch another ground breaking service towards the end of year 2009, called Google Wave. It is supposed to be a new tool for Communication and Collaboration on web, combination of Email, Whiteboard, Chat , Blog, etc, etc. I saw the preview video of Wave at Google I/O pre launch seminar and it looks exciting. Hope the final product lives up to the hype. Officially, here is what Wave is all about:

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-tim

 Watch the video of its developer preview on youtube:

DK

A landing page is the entry page your visitors arrive at after they have clicked on a link when searching for your website, or your service. Landing pages are an essential element in the sales process and excel at providing a customized sales pitch for your visitors. The best way to do this is to determine where your visitors have come from and who they are. By matching the results with top notch sales copy, your chances of engaging your visitors go up, as should your conversion rate. Landing pages are a giant step is the selling process, so the call to action must be as powerful and easy to follow as possible. Landing pages must be created to reinforce the reason your visitors landed on your website. When you get visitors through your pay-per-click or email campaign, these people have a higher degree of interest, because they were already looking for your product or service. So it is best to make sure that your landing page is relevant to the initial offer they clicked on, and not redirecting them to your home page. You should create targeted landing pages anytime you can control where people will be coming from, and your goal is a specific transaction such as sales, registrations, sign-ups, etc. This is particularly true if you are paying for the traffic, with banner ads, sponsored links, or pay-per-click.

Scope creep (also called focus creep, requirement creep, feature creep, and sometimes kitchen sink syndrome) in project management refers to uncontrolled changes in a project's scope. This phenomenon can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled. It is generally considered a negative occurrence that is to be avoided.

Typically, the scope increase consists of either new products or new features of already approved product designs, without corresponding increases in resources, schedule, or budget. As the scope of a project grows, more tasks must be completed within the budget and schedule originally designed for a smaller set of tasks. Thus, scope creep can result in a project team overrunning its original budget and schedule.

If the budget and schedule are increased along with the scope, the change is usually considered an acceptable addition to the project, and the term “scope creep” is not used.

Scope creep can be a result of:
    * Disingenuous customer with a determined value for free policy
    * Poor change control
    * Lack of proper initial identification of what is required to bring about the project objectives
    * Weak project manager or executive sponsor
    * Poor communication between parties
    * Agile software development based on subjective quantifications.

Scope creep is a risk in a lot of projects. Scope creep often results in cost overrun. A value for free strategy is difficult to counteract and remains a difficult challenge for even the most experienced project managers.

However, scope creep can be avoided by. Here are a few examples:
*Proper change control
*Detailed specification and requirements
*Effective communication between the parties involved
*Tight project management

(Some of the information that appears in this post was obtained from Wikipedia)

Read more about Cloud Computing on Rajeev Ratra's Blog.

How? Your website can hep you:

Save mone by lowering your marketing costs

Retain existing customers

Attract new customers

Increase the life time value of a customer

Sell additional services or products

Understand what your customers want

Understand the Internet to help you future-proof your business

and your website will be your loyal workhorse 24x7 day-in, day-out!