Blog Entries

Joomla upgrade - not as easy as most people would think..

srini@simplosys.com — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Joomla upgrade from 1.0 to 1.5 can be an ordeal. There are tons of sites that provide info on how to do this but very few seem to really nail down the BIG TICKET items - the stuff that is almost guaranteed to give you problems. At least I didn't find any. So here you go. There are still plenty of of 1.0 sites out there so hopefully this will help some:

o. Joomla upgrade from 1.0 to 1.5 is NOT straightforward and something that you can follow a script and complete. I wou [...]

Isn't this interesting?

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:00:00 +0100

According to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the research and support of entrepreneurship, in the past decade the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to those between 55 and 64 years old. According to the study, "The 20 to 34 age bracket...which we usually identify with risk-taking youth (think Facebook and Google(GOOG Quote)), has the lowest rate."

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10669129/1/retire-or-start- [...]

Is your business collecting the right sales tax?

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:00:00 +0100

http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/resources/article.php/3656806

This is an EXCELLENT piece - precise and informative on when, why and how to go about collecting sales tax on your ecommerce sales. If you have a website and are selling anything "tangible" on it then most likely you need to pay sales tax in one more more jurisidictions. Even if you sell something intangible such as digital products - ebooks or software, you still need to pay sales taxes in some states.

& [...]

Call-Me-800 International Call Forwarding Review

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:00:00 +0100

I've been dabbling with the idea of setting up several 1-800 numbers for customer support for my Ecommerce sites. I am based out of San Diego CA but my staff is all over the world. So that makes that whole process a bit more complicated - at least that's what I used to think.

First thought was to do that with Vonage or other VoIP service. But given the poor Internet bandwidth that my Indian and Phillipine office gets, that was out of the question almost right away. Not worth the [...]

Offer based link building

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:00:00 +0100

Five-six years ago, people hadn't still figured out the Google formula as clearly. Good ol' dark ages when SEO was a term not many even knew about. Times when you could rank high with just a few links from random sites via link exchanges. Times that have changed for the better now.

Now, link exchanges are almost a thing of the past. They still work and are beneficial to get direct traffic but getting links from links pages with tons of other links are not really that helpf [...]

Simple website contest ideas

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

I love the new yahoo mail - September 18, 2009

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0100

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 longe [...]

Tradekey.com - what a concept - but wait..

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0100

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

- Market the product online and drive traffic to the sit [...]

2009 Internet Sales Trends for specialty online stores

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:00:00 +0100

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 bu [...]

Microsoft Yahoo Partnership - What It Means For You And I ?

srini@simplosys.com — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:42:23 +0100

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 a [...]

When It Comes To Search - Binger The Better!

srini@simplosys.com — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:30:04 +0100

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!

Live.com was made the default search engine platfo [...]

Hosting Contests to Generate Links

srini@simplosys.com — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:23:22 +0100

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 st [...]

Top 10 Tips to Make Your Website Interactive

srini@simplosys.com — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:58:07 +0100

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 browse [...]

FREE Inbound and Outbound Fax online

srini@simplosys.com — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:00:00 +0100

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 fo [...]

Yugma sucks! - client.properties error message

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:00:00 +0100

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 pr [...]

Web CEO Keyword Research Tool SUCKS

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:00:00 +0100

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 Worl [...]

Invest first or sell first?

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Wordpress discussion forum options really limited

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:00:00 +0100

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.

Cons:

1. The stable version does not integrate with wordpress 2.6 or higher. Generally speaking, the stable version seems to lag behind wordpress stable version by at least a few months. So, if you have [...]

Worked!!! Xmap extension for Joomla MyBlog Component

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Chat Transcript with ProFollow.com - Aweber Reseller

venkat.srini@gmail.com — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:00:00 +0100

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 f [...]