Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all my bloggateers!

What you can do to bring in leads

You hear me say I can bring you leads but in truth I should be saying what you should do to bring in your own leads!!! Here is a snippet or two from a leading net source on advertising on-line:

Rather than accumulating debt to spend on marketing try to create something that is free that you can give away. Sell food? Offer free recipes and a free online cookbook. Sell software? Give away a lite version. Looking to build a platform? Offer a strong API. Sell consulting or information? Offer with papers and/or a blog. As you gain exposure you can give away less and spend more time and effort making your customer relationship deeper and more meaningful.

What else can you do? Advertise to your own customers! Sounds funny ha? How simple an idea? Yes capture your own e-mail lists then advertise to them via e-mail newsletters!This strategy works and will bring leads and sales!

Here is a recent example of one of our successful e-news letters we created for a customer:

http://www.rossini.com/layouts/hottest_software/newsletter4.html

This is just a sample not totally done but it gives you an idea that it can work.

Another form of advertising is just plain sending out a simple text message to your clients like we did for www.streakfreemichigan.com. Here is an example and it doubled her sales over night! Simple, to the point and well it worked!

Save time and money with our ultimate cleaning cloth made from patented mirafiber. This cloth uses only water to clean any surface. It is green technology at its best." The Ultimate cloth cleans windows, glass, mirrors, windshields, shower doors, stainless steel, ceramic tile, granite, marble and more. This “green cloth” is washable, bleachable, and is guaranteed for 5 years!
Take a look at our web site www.streakfreemichigan.com and see the many green options that are perfect for a small holiday gift.

Free shipping through the end of the year on all orders big and small!

Please feel free to visit our informational blog on our website at www.streakfreemichigan.com. Thank you for reading this e-mail and I hope to see you as a valued customer soon.

Lorraine
Streak Free Michigan
P.O. Box 115
Bradley, Michigan 49311


This simple blog has worked! By the way, her ultimate cloth is great and I highly recommend it.

From Lorraine see what she says: It looks like the e mails are paying off. Sales are coming from all parts of the country!

Another way to stimulate your own traffic is: Write articles

Writing Articles is an excellent way to promote your website and best of all you can get recognize as an Internet business expert. You can submit your article to ezine or article directory. We at Rossini.com can show you the way! Be an expert in your field!!!

How about doing SEo to get more leads? Here is an opinion from the net that makes sense:

The Outsourcing Option

Full disclosure: I am biased. I run a search engine marketing agency. But I hope you’ll hear me out anyway.
Hiring an SEO agency to either handle the full scope of work or to consult on research and strategy and delegate to your web developer makes sense in many situations. SEO agencies usually spend a great deal of time researching strategies and tactics and compiling resources - all of which can help you hit the ground running with your SEO campaign. But you need to find the right agency.
Let’s be clear: no SEO agency can guarantee you rankings or growth. If they tell you they can, they’re being either dishonest or foolish, or both. The bottom line is that SEO experts don’t control the search engines. Changes to Google’s algorithm can, and usually do, come unannounced. That is out of our hands.
This doesn’t mean, however, that the burden of risk should fall entirely on your shoulders. Failure of a campaign shouldn't’t mean you lost your investment, the agency “did their best” and it just didn’t work out. Smart agencies recognize that the best thing they can do is share the risk with the client. How? Simply: they set specific goals and benchmarks and stick to them. That may mean they continue working at a discounted rate if they don’t reach a goal. On the other hand, they may offer to work on a performance-based contract from the start so their compensation will be linked directly to the return on your investment. The point is, it should be more of a partnership than a client/vendor relationship. That is as important now as it ever has been.
SEO is scalable - you don’t have to throw everything and the kitchen sink into it. Sometimes just taking a few small steps here and there over time adds up to success. Other times you need a one-time overhaul of your site, or maybe a long-term relationship with an expert who can help chart the course. It will depend on the goals you set for your website and how realistic they are given the limits of time and resources. But search engines are going to remain the primary driver of traffic and sales on the web for the foreseeable future. SEO, for that reason, shouldn't’t be an afterthought to your marketing plan, even in tough economic times - indeed, with such a high potential return on your investment, it should be a priority.

Well enough for now, I believe that despite the economy, using my strategies, you can still make sales and be successful!!

I can bring leads!

Bottom line, if you want leads and sales give my company a try! I use my experience, powerful software and a lot of elbo grease to bring results!

Spammer shut down!

Junk e-mail drops after major spammer shut down
Star news services

The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide plummeted Tuesday after a Web hosting firm that engaged in spam activity was taken offline, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

McColo Corp., according to The Post, was a Web hosting business with customers made up of “some of the most disreputable cyber-criminal gangs in business today.”

The San Jose business was reported to be responsible for more than 75 percent of the world’s junk e-mail each day.

According to The Post’s Brian Krebs, two of McColo’s main Internet providers shut it down after his blog “Security Fix” reported the spam activities.

“Security Fix” said it studied the company for four months before making the report.

According to Krebs’ article: “While its gleaming, state-of-the-art, 30-story office tower in downtown San Jose, Calif., hardly looks like the staging ground for what could be called a full-scale cyber-crime offensive, security experts have found that a relatively small firm at that location is home to servers that serve as a gateway for a significant portion of the world’s junk e-mail.

“The servers are operated by McColo Corp., which these experts say has emerged as a major U.S. hosting service for international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via e-mail.

But the company’s Web site was not accessible Wednesday, when two Internet providers cut off MoColo’s connectivity to the Internet, security experts said. Immediately after McColo was unplugged, security companies charted a precipitous drop in spam volumes worldwide.

“E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent as of Tuesday evening.

“Spamcop.net, another spam watchdog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to about 10 per second.

“Officials from McColo did not respond to multiple e-mails, phone calls (or) instant messages. It’s not clear what, if anything, U.S. law enforcement is doing about McColo’s alleged involvement in the delivery of spam.

yahoo chairman steps aside now will Microsoft step up?

A view from a stock market watcher:

“The strategic necessity here is for this company to merge with Microsoft,” Larry Haverty, a fund manager at Gamco Investors Inc. in Rye, New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. Gamco manages about $24 billion, including Yahoo shares. “This is just unmitigated good news for the Yahoo shareholders.”

Microsoft and Yahoo trail Google, which controls more than 60 percent of the Internet-search market in the U.S. Microsoft has said that while it’s open to a search-ad deal with Yahoo, it isn’t interested in buying the company outright. Microsoft bid as much as $33 a share for Yahoo this year, and Yahoo now trades at less than a third of that value. Microsoft may end up paying between $15 and $18 for Yahoo, Haverty said.

A new Google product

This company is the new Microsoft look what they have now:

Days after it was expected to debut, a voice search function has been added to the Google application for the iPhone. The feature allows users to speak a search term, which is then transmitted to Google’s servers, recognized, then entered as a search ...
First Look At Google Mobile App For iPhone: Great But Not Second ... TechCrunch
Google Voice Search could be Iphone killer app Inquirer

This article created by C-net.

What is the worst computer problem?

Take a look at this!!


The Worst Tech Problem? 'The Internet's Down'

11.17.08

discuss Total posts: 1

by Chloe Albanesius

Most of us have been plagued with a blue screen of death, a laptop that refuses to connect to a home wireless network, or a cell phone that just doesn't feel like making calls.

About 48 percent of technology users have encountered such problems with their devices in the last year, according to a Sunday report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. How do they deal with these technological meltdowns? Most turn to customer support or just tinker with the devices themselves.

Of the more than 2,000 people surveyed last year by Pew, about 38 percent of them said they contacted customer support for help with a bad Internet connection, computer, or cell phone, while 28 percent fixed the problem on their own.

About 15 percent asked friends or family for assistance, 2 percent found help online, and another 15 percent could not fix the problem at all.

What caused the most headaches? Internet connections. About 44 percent of home Internet users reported having their Web connection fail in the last year.

"Broadband may be trickier to fix than dial-up without help from customer support," according to the report. About 49 percent of broadband customers had to contact customer support when they had a problem, versus 27 percent of dial-up customers.

Also causing problems were computers, with 28 percent of respondents reporting a malfunction in the last year, followed by 21 percent of cell phone users, 2 percent of people with PDA's like the BlackBerry, and 3 percent of those with MP3 players like the Apple iPod.

People who encountered computer trouble were most likely to fix it themselves, with about 29 percent contacting customer support. Internet and cell phone troubles were not as easy to troubleshoot, with 45 percent and 43 percent of people turning to user support, respectively.

Friends and family were most likely to help with computer and Internet problems, but cell phone problems were not as easily resolved. About 23 percent of people with cell phone issues could not fix the problem at all. About 19 percent of computer issues were unresolved, while only 7 percent of Internet connection issues could not be fixed.

Men were more likely than women to fix their computers themselves, but women were more likely than men to ask friends and family for help, according to Pew.

An interesting way people look at the net

This is a very cool article:

F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content

Summary:
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

F for fast. That's how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school.

In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users' main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

* Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar.
* Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar.
* Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.

Obviously, users' scan patterns are not always comprised of exactly three parts. Sometimes users will read across a third part of the content, making the pattern look more like an E than an F. Other times they'll only read across once, making the pattern look like an inverted L (with the crossbar at the top). Generally, however, reading patterns roughly resemble an F, though the distance between the top and lower bar varies.

Three screenshots from Nielsen Norman Group's recent eyetracking study.
Heatmaps from user eyetracking studies of three websites. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations.

The above heatmaps show how users read three different types of Web pages:

* an article in the "about us" section of a corporate website (far left),
* a product page on an e-commerce site (center), and
* a search engine results page (SERP; far right).

If you squint and focus on the red (most-viewed) areas, all three heatmaps show the expected F pattern. Of course, there are some differences. The F viewing pattern is a rough, general shape rather than a uniform, pixel-perfect behavior.

On the e-commerce page (middle example), the second crossbar of the F is lower than usual because of the intervening product image. Users also allocated significant fixation time to a box in the upper right part of the page where the price and "add to cart" button are found.

On the SERP (right example), the second crossbar of the F is longer than the top crossbar, mainly because the second headline is longer than the first. In this case, both headlines proved equally interesting to users, though users typically read less of the second area they view on a page.
Implications of the F Pattern
The F pattern's implications for Web design are clear and show the importance of following the guidelines for writing for the Web instead of repurposing print content:

* Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won't.
* The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There's some hope that users will actually read this material, though they'll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
* Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

Detailed Scanning Behaviors
It's fascinating to watch the slow-motion replay of users' eye movements as they read and scan across a page. Every page has reading issues beyond the dominant F pattern I'm discussing here. For example, users scan in a different, more directed way when they're looking for prices or other numbers, and an interesting hot-potato behavior determines how users look at a list of search engine ads. We also have many findings on how people look at website images.

Many of the detailed findings are presented in our two days of seminars on Writing for the Web at the User Experience 2008 conference in Chicago and Amsterdam.

The biggest determinant for content usability is how users read online — and because people read differently, you have to write differently.

Net marketing can increase your sales!

Net marketing such as SEO services, Google pay per click, Craigs list, PR releases, blogging all need to be used together in this troubled time to increase leads and bring sales. I use every marketing product I can to assist my customers to get rankings and get leads or sales. Time is what it takes but it will work. Do not try to be a brain surgeon and try to do this yourself. Let a professional company bring you those leads! Call us today or by our SEO 1 month service and see what we can do for you!

Need SEO help or have questions?

We have added a pay per month for help with your search engine marketing questions. You can use me as a consultant and I will help you.

Need good keywords or phrases? I can help
Need help with adding a site map?
How about having me submit you to the search engines!

Follow this link and have up to 2 hours of contract assistance: http://www.rossini.com/submit.html

We can bring you leads and sales!

Its a holiday today and the post office is closed!

First I wish to give thanks and praise to our veterans today. We have benefited so much as a country from their bravery. My prayers go out to them and our fallen heroes today!

As a national holiday even one so special as today, the post office is closed as it should be. One thing to remember is that the net now is a world community and we are more and more intertwined. On a day such as today, you still may have the need to get mail out or send a proposal or a special notice and it is through e-mail that it can be done. You can send an e-mail brochure or an contract or just a special note and you will find that the net is 24/7. I recently heard that the Post Office will again raise rates in May and once again costs will go up for us all. Again you will find that e-mail is a very effective way to send out a message and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

We at Rossini.com offer e-mail service and offer e-mail newsletters should you ever need it!

Have a very good day and do not forget to remember those who have fallen today!

E-mail providers are squeezing you!

Here at Rossini.com we currently do not have any limits on your e-mail but most other companies do. Read this article from Kim Kamando!

E-mail limits can be tough

This will greatly reduce the file size. Your file size should be less than 2 megabytes. Gmail is quite generous with its e-mail size limit. Other providers are often stingier. It isn't uncommon to see 2MB limits on e-mail messages. You have to plan for the worst.

Now, you mentioned PDF-creation software. It certainly is a good idea to send your newsletter in PDF format. And yes, you can put photographs in PDF files.

With PDF files, you don't need to worry if recipients have Word. Most computers have Adobe Reader installed. If a recipient doesn't have it, it can be downloaded for free.

Also, PDFs retain their formatting across operating systems and machines. You don't need to worry that your carefully formatted document will go askew.

Blog writing

Believe it or not blogs do work! If you are looking to do a blog but do not have the time, I offer several ways to have them done for you. Yes it will cost money but less than you think. Call me at 913-533-4098 or e-mail me at jrossini@rossini.com for more information.

New testimonials!

Rossini.com is pleased to post two testimonials we recently received. We are proud to be these people's vendor and it is our honor to have them as customers!

LET'S GO JOE!

Marketing on the internet is a specialized field. It is difficult to find someone with the expertise to get the job done properly.

I was fortunate to find Rossini Management Systems. Joe Rossini has proven to be both knowledgable and conscientious. My sales have more than doubled this past month. If something does not produce the desired results, he moves to something else. This is important since every web site is different and appeals to a different market.

Thanks to Joe, I am looking forward to an expanding business on the internet by capturing more and more of the available market. Let's go Joe! www.rossini.com

Lorraine Koloseik
Streak Free Michigan
www.streakfreemichigan.com


"When I need a hands-on, responsive web designer or host, I know I can
always count on Rossini Management Systems. I have know Joe Rossini for
years and have worked with Joe and Brenda now for nearly a decade. They
know what they are doing, they learn your needs, and they are creative.
There's nothing more reassuring than knowing you can count on a partner
in your activities, and Rossini Management Systems is a partner you can
count on."

Greg L. Musil
Shughart Thomson & Kilroy, P.C.

Rossini.com produces three election night winners!

Rossini.com is proud to say that three of our web sites were winners on election night. Go look at www.patapple.org, http://www.reelectfrankkellysheriff.org/ and www.justicenotforsale.org.

Rossini.com 15 years in the web creation business! Give us a try!

Is Yahoo about to fold?

SYDNEY, Australia - Yahoo Inc. shares dived more than 14 percent after the chief executive of Microsoft Corp. said Friday the software giant is not interested in renewing its bid for the struggling Internet company.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer told a business lunch in Sydney that he had moved on after Yahoo rejected its takeover bid in the spring. He did suggest a partnership in the search engine market is possible.

"We made an offer, we made another offer, and it was clear that Yahoo didn't want to sell the business to us and we moved on," Ballmer said. "We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition. I don't know why they would be either, frankly. They turned us down at $33 a share."

Yahoo shares fell $2.01 to $11.95 in morning trading Friday.

Yahoo's co-founder and chief executive, Jerry Yang, said Wednesday that Microsoft should make another bid for his company, which runs the world's No. 2 search engine. His appeal came after top search engine Google Inc. backed out of an Internet advertising partnership with Yahoo to avoid a challenge from the U.S. Justice Department, which said it would sue to block the deal on antitrust grounds.

Yahoo had been counting on the Google Inc. deal to boost its finances and placate shareholders still incensed by management's decision to reject the $47.5 billion takeover bid from Microsoft six months ago.

"I'm sure there are still some opportunities for some kind of partnership around search, but I think (an) acquisition is a thing of the past," Ballmer said.

He also told the Australian audience that Microsoft saw an opportunity to reinvent the online search process.

"If anybody thinks the future of search is going to look like the present search, that's crazy," Ballmer said. "The user interface on search hasn't changed for six years. You still get the same dull, boring 10 blue links, for God's sake. Can't we do any better than that?"