The Brother QL-570 Label Printer can print up to 50 labels per minute (faster then one per second!).

Did I miss a memo or something??  When did we change the number of seconds per minute to 50?  Maybe it’s one of those European things like the electricity being at 50Hz instead of 60…  Since last I checked, and until someone sends me a copy of the memo, we still have 60 seconds in a minute. So to be “faster than one per second”, it would need to print MORE THAN (not “up to”) 60 per minute. So does the copy writer for Brother’s specs need to go back to grammar school science class, or are they playing fast and lose with the features list?

I hate things like this… I’m sure they know that it’s not faster than 1 per second. They shove this garbage in there expecting up to just read and accept it without thinking. It’s as if they think we’re stupid… maybe we are, we keep letting them get away with it.

Join Jack Norris, VP of Marketing and Business

Development at Parascale, as he presents “Lower Costs and Increase Differentiation with Cloud Storage”. This webinar will provide an overview of how service providers today are using enterprise cloud storage to reduce operational costs. This session will also discuss how cloud storage can serve as a flexible platform for an array of new value-added services for the future.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

Quickly and cost-effectively scale up, without increasing management complexity
Provide a flexible storage platform for internal use, partners and customers
Repurpose fully depreciated hardware into cloud storage nodes
Support a variety of use cases to maximize the value of cloud storage infrastructure
Maintain high availability, replication and security for today’s hosted private clouds
Jack Norris has over 20 years of enterprise software experience with leading virtualization and storage technology companies, both private and public organizations. During this time, he has catapulted start-ups including Rainfinity, the leader in network file virtualization acquired by EMC, to a leader in its respective marketplace and successfully directed the integration of its technology into EMC’s virtualization portfolio.

Most recently, Norris served as vice president of marketing for Wanova, an early-stage desktop virtualization software provider; and previously held senior executive roles with Aster Data, Brio Technology, SQRIBE, and Bain Consulting. Norris holds an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and a BA in economics with honors and distinction from Stanford University.

Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/578972152

1. Great Logos Make Great First Impressions Before your sales person knocks on the door, before your truck pulls up, and even before they call you, potential customers consider your logo when they decide whom to trust.

Wayne Stuetz, founder of The Sodfather Landscaping in White Plains, New York, understands how that first impression gives them an edge. “People are always asking for a t-shirt with my logo on it. My logo is very memorable, and once a person has seen it, it’s hard to forget.”

When people can easily remember your logo, you have a competitive edge.

2. Attract New Customers Your customers see hundreds of logos a day-and they know a good logo when they see one. By sending the right message to potential customers, your logo helps them choose you over the competition.

The Lawn Rangers, in Pearland, Texas, have seen the fruits of a good logo. “When customers initially see the logo on our estimate sheets, trucks and website, they feel good about us,” said co-owner Aaron O’Donley. “And unless there’s something you can show potential customers to convince them their expectations will be met, they will turn to the competition. Our logo helps us persuade them.”

3. Stand Out from Your Competition Flip through the phone book and you’ll quickly see that potential customers have plenty of landscaping company choices. You’ll also notice very few logos stand out from the crowd. Differentiating yourself from your competition is critical in winning the battle for customers.

The Lawn Rangers do that with color. Instead of the usual greens and blues, they use a warmer color combination that stands out. Original uses of colors, words, shapes, and fonts can set your logo apart from the rest.

4. Keep Loyal Customers Good service is the key to keeping your customers. But what happens when a competitor moves in with shiny trucks, clean-cut employees, a professional look and promises to match your service? If your company image isn’t as good, your customers may be tempted to try the competition.

Don’t put your business in that position. “A great logo convinces high-end customers who look for a loyal, long-term relationship to choose you over the next guy, who is probably waiting around the corner,” adds Stuetz.

5. Earn Trust with Professionalism What convinces people to choose an established landscaping business over a couple kids with lawnmowers? Often it’s the professionalism of the business.

“People see our professional logo, and see that we’re here from year to year, and that builds trust,” said Tina Zoltan, owner of Oak Leaf Landscape in Groveland Florida. “If we can send the message of professionalism through our logo, a lot of the work is done for us.”

If you’re struggling in the rankings and are losing business as a result, you may well be tempted over towards the dark side. But be warned, Google won’t often be fooled, so quick fixes to fundamental problems will often only exacerbate the situation. But if you’re not familiar with black hat techniques there’s a chance you could be falling into this trap by accident, so here are a few of the main pitfalls to avoid.

Keyword Stuffing

A cardinal sin for any copywriter or website. Keyword stuffing was all the rage in the not too distant past; in fact even up until a few years ago it was still reasonably common practice, despite search engines clamping down on it severely. Today though it is very much frowned upon. Copy that has been filled with keywords is difficult for visitors to read and more often than not the search engines will punish your site accordingly.

You should be safe with a keyword density of around 5%, but don’t become obsessed by their frequency. As long as they are included in the onsite content and behind the scenes HTML, you should have enough to gain the search engines’ attention.

Hidden Text

If you don’t want to ruin the visible content by filling it with keywords you might be tempted to sneak in some invisible text to fulfil the same person. Don’t! This is sometimes referred to as white text, or hidden text, but essentially it refers to any copy present on a page but can’t be read.

By having the font colour the same as the background, the copy, for all intents and purposes, is invisible. This is a major black hat faux pas and will almost certainly be punished with the sophisticated site crawlers that search engines now employ. Whilst this too was fairly common in the past, don’t be tempted to bring it into the present. It’s not new and it certainly isn’t clever.

Doorway Pages

In an effort to gain additional traffic to your website you might also consider setting up a secondary, often highly simplistic, site with the sole intention of pushing visitors to your primary site. Because this additional platform has no obvious affiliation with your original site, you may choose to optimise it using more risque black hat techniques, targeting certain phrases that will gain traffic.

This is certainly an underhanded way of gaining visitors, one which most people landing on your site may not be too happy about. Additionally if search engines uncover that you’re hosting both, you may well suffer a dip in rankings or expulsion from their listings entirely.

Cloaking

As with doorway pages, cloaking is a way of trying to fool the search engine about some of the content on your website. This is pretty much impossible to do ‘by accident’ so it is often held in very low regard, despite the apparent ingenuity involved. Essentially a cloaking site will be able to identify when a search engine spider is crawling a site and provide an alternative version of the site.

Admittedly this is often done to cover up something illicit, so it is unlikely that you’d ever even consider it. But cloaking can also be used for doorway pages, and is fairly regularly, to ensure that only the content you want to be indexed is ever seen by search engine crawlers. But as this is a clear violation of the rules set out by the leading search engines, the risks far outweigh any potential gains.

Implement Suggested Changes

Finally, if you’ve gained some SEO advice, make sure you implement the changes. It sounds simple, but search engine marketing professionals have experience in helping sites move up the rankings. It can be frustrating when this doesn’t happen immediately, but keep the faith and keep making those changes. If nothing else, it will at least give you reason enough to go and seek other SEO advice or implement changes of your own.

Depending on the current state of your site, SEO can take some time and does require a modicum of patience. Even if you hire a professional SEO agency, they will need to analyse your site, work out where it’s failing, highlight key terms and then go about implementing it all. Search engines won’t index everything immediately and as a result, your rankings may only fractionally fluctuate. But don’t lose patience, get the advice you need and certainly don’t try any of the black hat techniques explained above, it really isn’t worth the risk.

Stephen Logan works as a Copywriter for leading Hampshire-based SEO Agency Impact Media. They offer a full range of search marketing solutions including expert SEO services.

“The Long and Short of Assessing Cloud Computing Providers”
http://www.ctoedge.com/content/long-and-short-assessing-cloud-computing-providers

Unlike the far broader techniques of general search engine optimisation, local search allows you to filter out much of the wider competition and appear for pre-defined areas. I say pre-defined, because it is entirely up to you how you choose to optimise your website and how wide your want the sphere of influence should be.

Geo tagging is one of the newest and most innovative ways for modern websites to optimise for localised search. Rather than leaving a visible imprint on the site itself, geo tagging allows you to implement global positioning coordinates within your HTML code. So when a search engine spider crawls your pages, it will know exactly where it is that you’re based and will help you rank higher in searches specific to your area.

Better still you can actually adjust these coordinates across the various pages of your website. Therefore if you’ve got offices at different locations throughout the country, you can adapt the pages that are specific to them to reflect this. Simple, but extremely clever.

To get started though, you might just want to tweak the content on your website. This is easy enough to do, simply add phrases like ‘London-based’ or ‘located in Central London’, will give your pages a clear locality and will influence search engines to feature your business for searches in that area. Don’t interrupt the flow of your copy though, only integrate terms where it will either blend in or compliment existing text.

A simple way of getting your location found by the search engine spiders is simply by including your address on each page. Contact details help customers find you quickly and easily, so will be a major benefit to the usability of your site, as well as optimising for local search.

Going down a slightly more traditional route, one that has been used for offline businesses for years, you could sign yourself up to Internet directories. This will help you gain additional keyword strength, provide a vital link back to the site and, yes, show search engines where you’re located.

So if you’ve invested time in optimising your site for local search, just what are the benefits? Well, first and foremost it could well provide you with a new stream of traffic to the site. But more importantly than this, the visitors will be looking for the services you provide in your area, therefore if you are ranking well for the associated key term, you could well find yourself improving your customer conversion rate.

With the Internet being such a competitive marketplace it is essential that any online business performs exhaustive SEO; local search is one element of this. Whilst SEO will help you rank for certain key words or phrases, local search will narrow this down further, integrating the SEO keyword work but for a specific location.

By narrowing your focus, you also eliminate much of the competition. Whilst you may have dozens, even hundreds of direct competitors, you can bi-pass most of these for those searching in your location. With consumers looking for local services more and more, you could be well placed to capitalise on this trend by optimising for local search.

Stephen Logan works as a Copywriter for leading Hampshire-based SEO Agency Impact Media. They offer a full range of search marketing solutions including expert Local Search services.

How Social Networking Works

Social networking is the means of using one or more online websites or services to find other people to chat with and to get to know. At the same time, you are creating a group of people who are interested in working with you and who respect you enough to buy from you. You are virtually creating a list of exclusive leads.

For example, perhaps you have a blog that promotes an eco friendly solution to cleaning. You are promoting a product specifically but rather than creating a blog that is just about that product, you are designing your website to offer great information, insider tips, perhaps even discounts on eco friendly products. You write a great blog post about how to get started with eco friendly cleaning. Using the link to that blog post, you can use your social network to attract more visitors to your blog.

There are several ways you can make this happen.

1. You can sign up for Twitter and send out a Tweet to all of your followers about the post you wrote. Anyone following you or looking for eco friendly information can easily visit your blog post.

2. You submit your blog post to http://Digg.com where people can rate it and further submit it. This helps more people who are not yet in your network to find you.

3. You can use Facebook to let all of those followers know what you are posting at your blog. They too can follow you over there.

It may seem like a lot of work and at first, the sign up process is a bit time consuming. You will need to work on building up a following on each of these websites. Yet, when you do this, you create a very powerful tool. You see, the people following you are people that either already know and respect you or will find your blog post and learn from you. They know you are not overselling to them, but rather educating them. This creates leads for your business that are highly effective when it comes time to buy from you.

After a few useful blog posts, or messages, your social network trusts you. Therefore, when you mention the product you are promoting, they are more likely to purchase from you. They may even do so just by visiting your blog and finding the link to do so there. Many people love to be social. Social networking has helped to create business for any type of online business out there.

Michael E Friedman has over 30 years sales and marketing experience in a business to business environment. He has rapidly become an expert in internet marketing. His personal directive is to study, practice and teach others to become successful internet marketers. For more information click here to visit http://financialfreedomleaders.com/?t=isnare3c

As far as possible, use main keywords that connect to the theme and topic of your web portal. You may wish to avoid hyphens and underscores as they can confuse and mislead your site visitors. Complicated web domains are those that are very difficult to type and remember. Extra symbols and strange characters can put off web users.

Choosing a very meaningful and practical domain name is actually very simple and straightforward. You need to sit down and think over all possible combinations of good keywords and their phrases. If you want to choose a good name, you can start with a comprehensive list of prospective names and shortlist the best ones among them. When you create a list of good names, the next step is to check whether they are available for registration. To conduct this important search, you will need to use an online tool that tells you about the availability of names.

Domain ownership identification tool is a very simple utility where you will find out who is the owner of the domain is and whether the name of your choice is available or not. This tool provides you the complete details of domain ownership including the date of expiry. Choosing a domain name is a trial and error exercise most of the good domains are already in use and you may need to work hard to create a good name. Domain name tools provide you a number of alternatives when the name of your choice is not available. You can pick the one from the list that best represents your theme and business idea.

If there is a domain name available for purchase, you can pounce on it and buy before someone does it. Domain name industry is a highly competitive industry and you never know when someone is going to buy your domain name ideas. While searching for a domain name think of all possible keyword phrases and wordings because most web users have their way of choosing products or services. Keywords play an important role while searching for domains by using domain name ownership online tool. If you do not find the domain name of your choice, you can always sift through the alternative list to choose the best one. Most of the online tools are efficient in providing a listing of most probable choices that eventually allow you to find a domain name that best represents your business theme, topic, style and tenor. Another emerging trend is to buy expired domain names from registrars. You will need to be very careful while buying an expired domain because the name that you wish to buy may have a shady past. However, expired domain market is a very good place to find those domain names that are not available in the fresh domain name market.

The general rule of thumb is to buy a domain name immediately when it is available in a domain ownership tool. It is always better to buy the domain name of your choice even if you are not creating your web site right now. Never ever, allow someone to buy your domain name. You may regret your decision of not buying your domain name when it was available.

John Khu is an author and also a seasoned professional with vast experience in expired domain name business. He is also the owner of the path breaking web site called www.expireddomaingain.com which provides complete and up-to-date information on expired domains and their eternal secrets.

 

What: V7Network RoundTable
Where: http://www.v7n.com/chat/
When: Wednesday Oct 7 at 1:00 pm and an encore session at 7:00PM CDT
Discussion: How to identify problem areas on your web site.
Cost: FREE to all V7N members.

Win A Free Listing In The V7N Directory For Attending Our First RoundTable Live Chat!
 

 

 
“If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0″
 
As many of you already know, our first attempt with this service crashed down around our feet when we experienced unforeseen technical difficulties. Those issues (knock on wood) have now been corrected and we are ready to get to hit the ground running offering V7Network RoundTable live training chats to the community. To thank you for your patience, we’ll be giving every person that attends a discount coupon for the V7N Directory! And two lucky winners will get free directory listings!
 
These will be structured interactive text chats covering a wide range of topics for webmasters and small business owners, focused 100% on helping our members build a highly successful online presence. At this time, our plan is to offer this training 2-4 times a month based on the response from the community.
 
The next live training chat is scheduled for October 7, 2009 at 1:00 pm CDT. We will be discussing ways to evaluate your site (and the tools that I personally use) to determine what types of changes you may need to consider making in terms of SEO and marketing techniques. Afterward, we will be opening things up for questions and answers. We will repeat the session that night at 7:00 pm CDT.
 
If what you are currently doing is working, please do not consider changing a single thing. In fact, you probably don’t need this type of training. If however you find yourself not getting the results that you have hoped for, then perhaps it is time to think about sitting down and spending some time with us at the V7Network RoundTable and see if maybe we can brainstorm through some ideas for you!
 
We will open the chat area approximately 30 minutes prior to the start of the training session. If you are not already logged in, you will need to log in using your V7N user name and password. I expect the training session to last 1-2 hours, based on the number of member questions.
 
 
 Please let us know if you will be able to attend!