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A good logo is critical for a successful business-especially in a trade as competitive as landscaping. Here are five ways an outstanding corporate identity will help your company succeed.

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.”

cPanel servers have a good small file named as antivirus.exim. It is a central filter for the exim mail server which lets you setup all kinds of good filters which helps you to stop spam from coming in and going out of your server.

In this article I will provide you my /etc/antivirus.exim config file which will help you to protect your servers from spammers. First off the default /etc/antivirus.exim has a couple different rule sets in it. The main ones are attachment filters to help stop email viruses from your users. They stop things like .src and .com and .exe attachments.This shows you some custom rules to stop spammers from sending out of your server, you can also use it to stop spam from coming in. I don’t really go into a lot of detail for filtering incoming mail since other applications like Spam Assassin handle that better IMO.

You will need root access to your cPanel server.

First off we need to create a special log file for these filters do this:

touch /var/log/filter.log chmod 0644 /var/log/filter.log

Now open up the configuration file vi /etc/antivirus.exim

Simply add this to your existing file, and save the changes and they take effect instantly.

# START # Filters all incoming an outgoing mail

logfile /var/log/filter.log 0644 ## Common Spam if

# Header Spam $header_subject: contains “Pharmaceutical” or $header_subject: contains “Viagra” or $header_subject: contains “Cialis” or $header_subject: is “The Ultimate Online Pharmaceutical” or $header_subject: contains “***SPAM***” or $header_subject: contains “[SPAM]”

# Body Spam or $message_body: contains “Cialis” or $message_body: contains “Viagra” or $message_body: contains “Leavitra” or $message_body: contains “St0ck” or $message_body: contains “Viaagrra” or $message_body: contains “Cia1iis” or $message_body: contains “URGENT BUSINESS PROPOSAL” or $message_body matches “angka[^s]+[net|com|org|biz|info|us|name]+?” or $message_body matches “v(i|1)agra|vag(i|1)n(a|4)|pen( i|1)s|asu|seks|l(o|0)l(i|1)ta|dewacolok”

then # Log Message – SENDS RESPONSE BACK TO SENDER # SUGGESTED TO LEAVE OFF to prevent fail loops # and more work for the mail system #fail text “Message has been rejected because it hasn # triggered our central filter.” logwrite “$tod_log $message_id from $sender_address contained spam keywords”

seen finish endif

# END # Filters all incoming an outgoing mail

# START # All outgoing mail on the server only – what is sent out

#Check forwarders so it doesn’t get blocked #Forwarders still work =)

## FINANCIAL FAKE SENDERS ## Log all outgoing mail from server that matches rules logfile /var/log/filter.log 0644 if ( $received_protocol is “local” or $received_protocol is “esmtpa” ) and ( $header_from contains “@citibank.com” or $header_from contains “@bankofamerica.com” or $header_from contains “@wamu.com” or $header_from contains “@ebay.com” or $header_from contains “@chase.com” or $header_from contains “@paypal.com” or $header_from contains “@wellsfargo.com” or $header_from contains “@bankunited.com” or $header_from contains “@bankerstrust.com” or $header_from contains “@bankfirst.com” or $header_from contains “@capitalone.com” or $header_from contains “@citizensbank.com” or $header_from contains “@jpmorgan.com” or $header_from contains “@wachovia.com” or $header_from contains “@bankone.com” or $header_from contains “@suntrust.com” or $header_from contains “@amazon.com” or $header_from contains “@banksecurity.com” or $header_from contains “@visa.com” or $header_from contains “@mastercard.com” or $header_from contains “@mbna.com” ) then logwrite “$tod_log $message_id from $sender_address is fraud” seen finish endif

## OTHER FAKE SENDERS SPAM ## Enable this to prevent users using @domain from addresses ## Not recommended since users do use from addresses not on the server ## Log all outgoing mail from server that matches rules logfile /var/log/filter.log 0644 if ( $received_protocol is “local” or $received_protocol is “esmtpa” ) and ( $header_from contains “@hotmail.com” or $header_from contains “@yahoo.com” or $header_from contains “@aol.com”

) then logwrite “$tod_log $message_id from $sender_address is forged fake” seen finish endif

## KNOWN FAKE PHISHING ### Log all outgoing mail from server that matches rules logfile /var/log/filter.log 0644 if ( $received_protocol is “local” or $received_protocol is “esmtpa” ) and ( #Paypal $message_body: contains “Dear valued PayPal member” or $message_body: contains “Dear valued PayPal customer” or $message_body: contains “Dear Paypal” or $message_body: contains “The PayPal Team” or $message_body: contains “Dear Paypal Customer” or $message_body: contains “Paypal Account Review Department” or

#Ebay $message_body: contains “Dear eBay member” or $message_body: contains “Dear eBay User” or $message_body: contains “The eBay team” or $message_body: contains “Dear eBay Community Member” or

#Banks $message_body: contains “Dear Charter One Customer” or $message_body: contains “Dear wamu.com customer” or $message_body: contains “Dear valued Citizens Bank member” or $message_body: contains “Dear Visa” or $message_body: contains “Dear Citibank” or $message_body: contains “Citibank Email” or $message_body: contains “Dear customer of Chase Bank” or $message_body: contains “Dear Bank of America customer” or

#ISPs $message_body: contains “Dear AOL Member” or $message_body: contains “Dear AOL Customer”

) then logwrite “$tod_log $message_id from $sender_address is phishing” seen finish endif

# END # All outgoing mail on the server only – what is sent out

The log file will have the logging format like this: /var/log/filter.log

2006-05-10 12:05:13 1Fds7S-0002Sa-MV from smooth595@gmail.com contained spam keywords 2006-05-10 14:18:47 1FduCn-0006GV-1r from dayton.nowellu7xn@gmail.com contained spam keywords 2006-04-27 15:44:35 1FZDLn-0005Mo-5z from nobody@ocean.wavepointmedia.com is fraud 2006-04-27 16:37:40 1FZEB9-0002KQ-VP from nobody@ocean.wavepointmedia.com is phishing

Date and time, the Exim message ID, the sender and the section of the filter, like phishing, fraud or spam. You can check the mail message by grepping the exim_mainlog for it like this

grep 1FZEB9-0002KQ-VP /var/log/exim_mainlog

CTOEdge has published an interesting article on migrating to cloud computing… it’s written from a business perspective, but it is definitely relative to our industry as well. These are the things you want to be up on when talking to your customers about standard server based hosting vs. cloud hosting. I recommend that all hosts read it…

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

Local search has become an engrained part of website optimisation. The geographic focus of this form of SEO gives any site the ability to target and encourage consumers from their surroundings areas to utilise their services.

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.

Social networking is one of the fastest growing trends in marketing today to generate website traffic. It is the means of creating a network of people interested in what you have to say. Like all forms of attraction marketing, the goal is to help encourage people to trust you so that they are willing to buy from you. Rather than cold calling, you are dealing with a warm market ready to respond to you. Social networking has opened the doors to millions of people not connected with many more around the world.

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

A successful web site or blog is always made meaningful by its domain name. The web address that you choose must suit the theme and tenor of the web site or blog. Make sure that your name matches the subject of the web site or blog. Almost all well-known web portals have a domain name that is short, easy to remember and type into the address window of the browser. You should understand the system by which a domain works and performs. An effective name is always catchy with a definite theme and subject. Your visitors will feel that the domain name of your web site is quite powerful as it can evoke very strong connections with something that is special to the web user.

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.

Lagniappe Internet LLC has a new half-page ad appearing in the Ping! magazine. See the Oct-Nov 2009 issue page 32.  The pup in the photo is one of our own… Doug. We’re pleased to be partnering with Ping! and are looking forward to a long relationship with them. As part of the partnership,  all existing and new U.S. based customers are getter a free subscription to Ping! after they’ve been with us for a month.

Straight from the horse’s mouth…

 

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!

The other day I blogged about tynt.com’s tracer program and how to stop it from annoying you while browsing. The idea behind it makes sense to a lot of web publishers. You don’t want people ripping off your content. But the post the other day pointed out how easy it is to get around these measures.

Google has a feature called Google Alerts, http://www.google.com/alerts, which lets you find content and emails it to you. I strongly recommend that you set up alerts for your domain name, and company name at a minimum, and get them emailed to you as they happen. This lets you keep on top of what people are saying about your company.

It would be trivial to include a fairly unique phrase into pages you are wanting to try to protect. Then setup an alert for that phrase and have Google email you. Sure you may get some false positives, but provided the phrase is unique enough, it should be few and far between. Remember to use double quotes, like “this is my phrase” so that google doesn’t match “this website is not the same as my website, even though it has the same words as my phrase“. See how all the words are there, but it’s not the phrase.  And it could miss a copied page if they did enough editing on the copied content. But since these people are basically lazy, they won’t edit the page much if at all. So it should catch the majority of them.  Catching the others probably won’t happen with the other “solutions” either if they’re modifying the content that much.

One of the best services I’ve found for finding expired domains that are cheap is http://freshdrop.net. This one site lets you search several domain dropping services at the same time and sort them based on all kinds of criteria. The only “issue” with it is that it provides so much information that it can be overwhelming. But there are a couple to pay particular attention to… The PR column is just that, Google’s pagerank. But notice the column next to it, “Fake”. This flags domains that may have suspicious pageranking going on. Realize though that once Google sees the site change, it’s likely to redo the PR anyway.

Next look at the ‘age’. Since you’ll pick up these domains on their way out, the age stays with it. It’s one way to make a site appear older than it really is… but that leads to some ethical questions that this isn’t the place to discuss.

Move on the GR and GRN – these are Google search results for the domain with and without the extension respectively. Related to those is GIDX which is the number pages in Google’s index for the domain. GBL will give you the number of backlinks on other domains pointing to that domain.

Similar to all the Google colums, there are columns for Yahoo, Altavista, Ovation, etc. And over on the right there is a very complete search filter section.  You can filter of TLD (TLD is the top level domain – com, net, org, etc. or a country like .us, .ca, etc.) as well as looking for domains with certain terms in them, or excluding, or with based on any of the columns listed. And you can do compound searches: .COMs containing “host”, excluding “adult”, with 10 to 500 Google backlinks, for example. It’s really quite powerful.

The price you see listed is on top of the regular annual registration fee, but considering they have many that start at $5 it’s quite reasonable compared to some services.