Creative Online Marketing, Link Building and Ecommerce

Contests make for great SEO! We talked about Hosting Contests to Generate Links earlier and we've seen this work more and more. Here are some ideas to host contests that serve more than one purpose.

 1. Caption contest

Put up a funny picture relevant to your website. Then invite your visitors to log in to your site (there you go, more registered users) and write a caption for that image (more content). Have others vote for the best caption (more user interaction) and then give away something super cool for that audience as prizes (this gets proomted on giveaways sites and usually catches on in twitter, digg, etc. - so more buzz and links!). And the best part? You don't have to offer expensive prizes. Just offer them something that's valuable to them and overstocked with you or a service that's not much of an additional cost to you or your staff.

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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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One of the reasons why Google began to gain so much importance as a search engine in the past couple of years was because it was accurate, superfast, and had plenty of innovative ways in which you could find the right search results. No wonder MSN hit number 3 as a search engine in search engine rankings, because people found the search engine result pages too cluttered and too many mistakes. Yahoo came out as 2nd in the ranking. Now there are some points, which are pretty good in Google, like accurate results, fast loading of pages, and even video results.

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One of the reasons why Google had begun to dominate in the search engine area was because, seriously speaking, MSN was a bit of a dud, when it came to search engines. The results were inaccurate and the search engine loaded up real slow! But that can be considered to be a thing of the past now, what with Bing coming up, in such a manner that you might say Bingo, or Eureka, for every superfast and relevant search result, in the future!

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Now one of the most sensible marketing strategies is to make sure that you have plenty of people coming to browse on your website or blog is to host a contest.

One particularly effective marketing strategy is trying to get people more interested in your product by hosting a competition in such a manner, that they have to answer a couple of questions and if they get the answers right, they get a free sample of any product of their choice available on the online site. This marketing strategy is extremely effective, (because you are going to give away a product as a prize), because word of mouth is going to spread news about your website, products and services faster.

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Now that you have finally unleashed your website upon the Internet, it is necessary to make sure that all the potential customers out there get to know about your website, your products, and every single aspect of what you have to offer to them. That is the reason why your job is to make sure that the client comes to your website, and remains to browse upon it. That can only be done by making sure that the interest of the client is caught and held. If he happens to be the average Internet browser, his interest quotient is going to be just for a couple of seconds before he takes upon the mouse and navigates away from your web page. So here are some handy tips which can make sure that your client comes back to your webpage again and again.

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Simplosys is a virtual company, meaning that we don't really have a real "brick and mortar office space". All of us working here work "virtually" from our homes and interact via online communication tools, Etc. It is quite a thrilling experience if you ask me, though, of course, it has its pros and cons.

Well, as part of a small but growing "virtual company", we are always looking for free or low-cost options to improve the way we work. I found one for Online faxes today!

We've traditionally used a Fedex Kinkos service or just tried to avoid faxes as much as possible. We just use email instead. But some of our clients still prefer to receive faxes and not email. If you are a small business, you perhaps have the same issue.

There are tons of online fax services - some free and some paid. I am not even talking about the paid ones here since I am not interested in them. Here's a QUICK way to get a free INBOUND AND OUTBOUND fax service setup in less than 10 minutes:

1. IN-BOUND FAX: Efax or K7
http://www.efax.com/efax-free offers this service. I was able to get a local fax number and set up my fax service in less than 10 minutes! Download their Efax messenger free software and you are all set. Efax does not advertise this service anymore, so this link is not available from their Home or Products page. They still support the service though, good for us!

There are others like k7.net as well that offer a similar service but I haven't tried it. Efax is the big name and they have it, why try the rest?

2. OUTBOUND FAX: Vonage or FaxZero
If you have a Vonage phone number then http://v-fax.vonage.com/ offers a free Outbound fax service that is very reliable and quick.

Otherwise, you can use http://faxzero.com/ which offers the same functionality apparently but has limitations on the number of pages sent per day.

There you go - unless you use Fax a lot and care about sending and receiving from the same number, cancel your fax number today and start using these services to save a quick buck.

And here's some ideas on where to invest that money -
1. Sign up for an online coupon generation service and promote to your customers with coupons. Yes, they do work online as well!

2. Sign up for an Email marketing service such as http://www.aweber.com and start your email marketing campaign this week!

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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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