Simplosys Solutions Blog

I love it! Slicker, faster, and more integrated with the rest of Yahoo.

 Now only if Yahoo actually made similar progress on their Calendar tool, I'd be in love with them even more.

 I've always thought that Yahoo kicks google's ass when it comes to mail. Gmail is the most confusing email client I've seen. The only  thing it does better than Yahoo mail is faster results on maibox searches. But yahoo takes just a few fractions of a second longer and I can live with that. Their mail folders, automatically moving emails to folders by clicking numbers on the keyboard, just well organized email lists, easy flagging, unlimited email and RELIABILITY (it's hardly ever down in the 10 years that I've had it) just is awesome. Having maintained exchange servers for clients, I can imagine how hard it must be to pull off an email service like that for 100  million users. Yahoo, your email rocks!

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As I wrote on my previous post - 2009 Internet Sales Trends for Specialty Stores, I've been thinking about ideas on how to source goods and sell them online ourselves. We specialize in figuring out what to sell and to estimate demand for products on the Internet. For any ecommerce business, really, to me, it boils down to -

 - Decide on what to offer (this is the hardest part)

- Establish reliable supply chain

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As a small business that helps companies establish their brand online and drive traffic to their sites, we spend a very large portion of our time analyzing Internet search traffic and sales trends on sales of things that our clients sell.

Over time, we've noticed some very interesting facts. For instance, in the present year 2009 and last year (2008), we've seen a significant increase in the number of people buying things online. OK, that's what everyone says and reports but we've actually seen that in many Ecommerce stores that we promote - so I can say a 10-20% increase in sales on average despite the recession.

In particular, sales of vegan products are on the rise. We can say that based on sales on veggieplaza.com - a store for vegetarian and vegan cookbooks. Sales of clothing stores such as stores selling jeans, Etc. appear to be going down, we will not name the stores to protect our clients' identities. Gay and Lesbian apparel sales online are on the rise as well.

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Yugma online web conferencing tool showed promise. Some of my colleagues have used it with great results and it costs lesser than webex or gotomeeting. It also has a free version if you are not interested in changing presenter or using their online collaboration tools such as whiteboarding, multiple user mouse pointers, Etc. Fair enough. You get what you pay for and just getting basic online screen sharing for free, that too, along with Skype Integration through its Yugma Skype SE is  pretty good deal in itself.

 However, that's only if it works. 

For me, on Vista Ultimate OS, after installing the Yugma application, it simply fails to launch with a "Yugma cannot run without the client.properties file". I went in and looked at Yugma's installation folder at

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I am using Web CEO for the first time to optimize a few sites for one of our clients - they specifically wanted us to use this tool, so we obliged. The very first thing I started on was the keyword research portion. I've used IBP, SEO Elite, Wordtracker, Google KW Tool Etc. in the past so I know a thing or two about keyword research. Web CEO looks up keywords from your page and lists them. You then pick the ones you want and analyze them. It comes back with Keyword results such as "Daily World Searches". That's where the issue is. The Daily World Searches for most keywords that are 2 or more words was less than 10. That's impossible since I was optimizing for highly searched keywords. Other tools come back with numbers in the hundreds or thoudsands for the same phrases. Am I missing something or does Web CEO Keyword Research tool really suck that bad?

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Every company has to invest into capital - human and technology at some point in the hope that it will bring them additional sales and revenue and allow them to grow. Sometimes, that decision can be a difficult one though, especially in an economy like today's. Some clients are closing shops, which means lost business for all their vendors. Some lines of businesses that we are currently staffed for aren't doing as well as other lines of businesses that we want to launch but that would mean new investment into capital without knowing how soon the return will happen.

I am sure every company in the world faces such a predicament, almost all the time. That' where numbers, and that mysterious thing called instinct comes into play. Objective reasioning, combined with instinctive gut are necessary qualities for any entrepreneur. 

Without getting too detailed about the specifics (some of our clients do read this blog ;). we are in that situation now. 2009 is going to be very exciting for us. We have lots of changes and improvements planned. For one, we are going to add more information on this site about the services we offer. We are planning to offer several free resource for visitors for self-study on topics such as backlink building, search engine optimziation, Joomla and Wordpress. You might argue that there is a lot of information on these already,  but really, when it comes to details, there isn't much. Stay tuned.

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There are several options for integrating a discussion forum into your wordpress blog.

bbpress:

Pros: The one to watch out for. Integrates closely with wordpress. Makers of wordpress are closely involved with the development of this software. Actively developed. 

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I've written earlier about how finding and getting a Blog component to work in Joomla hasn't been the smoothest experience . I tried MojoBlog initially, then painfully switched over to MyBlog and spent a considerable amount of time making it work in my currents setup. One of my biggest pain points was that none of the Joomla Sitemap components would work too well with MyBlog - they would just not pick up the URL's. Anyone that knows anything about SEO knows that a sitemap is very important to make sure that Google crawls the right URL's with the right priority. If you have multiple websites in your shared hosting space, then it's even more important to tell the search engines what to crawl.

Xmap comes with extensions (plugins) for several major Joomla components. Make sure you check their list of plugins and make sure it has your major components that are installed or likely to be installed on your site. If not, then do not use Xmaps. It will not pick up your component's URL's which could be a deal breaker. In that case, your only choice is to look for another sitemap compeonent that might work with your specific component OR request that extension from either the maker of Xmap (who is really responsive btw) or your specific component developer. Or, if you are a developer yourself, you could write it and make it available to others in exchange from some bragging rights and free traffic from the Xmaps and related sites.

Here's what I did.

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In my previous post I had explained how selecting an autoresponder is not an easy decision and can often costs hundreds of dollars per month. I had concluded with a statement about Profollow . This post has my chat transcript with the Profollow people. This might be a good solution for those looking for a low cost autoresponder to start with.

Srini: Are you guys an Aweber reseller? How is profollow different than Awerber then? Do I get access to all the tracking and analytics features in aweber or is that different in profollow?

You are now speaking with Erin Carney of Customer Solutions.

Erin Carney: Hi Srini

Srini: Hi Erin

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Selecting your Email Marketing provider is a VERY important decision any website or online business will make. Why? Because once you make your pick, it is VERY difficult to change the provider if you decide to change your mind in the future. I know what you are thinking. You could always export your list to Excel or CSV and import it into another list management product, right? Yes, but there's a catch. Most list management software require your subscribers to opt in again when you import a list. This is to ensure compliance with the Spam act and make sure that all your subcribers have actually expressed interest to be part of your site. Furthermore, it's not just the list. Each product has analytics and tracking info that cannot be transffered from one product to the other easily. In Email marketing, knowing the history of a specific email list is very important in order to be able to segment your list and make a targeted pitch to each segment. So, long story short, once you pick an email marketing solution, you are more or less married to it for life. I know that sounds scary, but it's true.

First off, you need to decide between a Server Software based solution versus Hosted Solution. The difference is that a server-based solution is a software product you buy and install on your server (or even desktop, in the case of certain products). Hosted solutions manage your mailing lists on their servers.

Server Based software:

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