How to use Social Networks to your Advantage

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social mediaIn today’s society, you cannot escape the fact that the internet has become a social hangout for people all over the world. Even if you are the oldest person on the earth and have no clue about websites, you hear the familiar names like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others. Reporters ask you to comment on their pages, and television commercials tell you to follow businesses on their fan pages. But what is social networking and how do you use social networks to your advantage?

Social networks are places on the internet where you interact with others. They have gone beyond the scope of message boards to become instant response centers. Unlike forums where you might wait hours or even days for someone to answer, social networks are much like answering the telephone, or receiving a text message on a cell phone. Individuals have effectively opened up their personal lives providing all kinds of information about themselves, and letting others know anything and everything from what they are wearing to what they are cooking for supper.

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Starting A Web Hosting Company

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Web hosting is an ever growing industry and, each day, numerous companies spring up trying to make it in this competitive field. Of these many attempts, very few last long enough to become profitable due to a variety of reasons such as poor planning, insufficient capital, unexpected circumstances etc. This article should serve as an effective guideline to person seeking to venture into this industry from people who’ve actually done it themselves!

vpsFirstly, you need to know how you will provide the service. Will you run your own servers? Will you lease servers from a larger company? These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself before you begin. Running your own servers is quite expensive and usually only turns out profitable in larger companies. The best bet for a new company, with a small budget, is to purchase a “reseller plan” from the many large companies that offer them.

Reseller plans work like this. You pay a monthly fee (usually) in return for a certain allotted amount of disk space and bandwidth which you can then “resell” in smaller amounts to your own clients. They will provide you with a Control Panel from which you can add accounts for your new clients and adjust their features as necessary. You must plan carefully, beforehand, and ensure that you can make a profit on the resale of the service you lease.

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Taxes: What You Can Expect to Change when Going Professional

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taxesPaying taxes and saving on taxes are both going to change when “going professional”. Once you register a business, you are going to be permitted to take deductions that would not be possible with just a salary or hourly earnings from a job. On the other side of the fence, there are certain taxes that you will be required to collect and remit as part of your new business. Failure to collect those taxes could result in not only fines, but also having to pay the government the amount owed that you neglected to collect. Plus, they will not take an amount that you decide, they calculate the liability based on their estimation of your sales.

Certainly taxes fall into different categories which may include corporate tax, state tax, income tax, sales tax, employer taxes, and city taxes. In addition, depending on your business associates and specific business dealings, you may be forced to adhere to rules regarding the VAT (Value Added Tax in Europe) and GST (Goods and Services Tax in Canada). Understanding your tax responsibilities is going to be important right from the beginning. And remember that you cannot just take the good and forget the bad. Just because your business is a hobby and you want to benefit from the deductions does not mean that you can “lower” your real sales figures to pay less tax while at the same time reporting all the deductions.

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Starting Your Own Web Design Company

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webdesign businessThe lucrative nature of web designing companies might tempt you to switch jobs. If you are planning to start your own web design company, you will have to keep a tab on numerous factors. You might have seen people making handsome figures sitting at the comfort of their homes by designing websites for their clients. You can follow their footsteps or set up a fully-fledged startup business as a web designer! The second option seems more viable because of the greater profits involved. Besides, if you are able to flourish in this business, you can team up with others and set up subsidiary companies.

a) The knowledge of existing web designing practices – This is one of the most important factors, which you must consider as an aspiring web designer. Plenty of freeware and open source CMS platforms are available, which might reduce your workload significantly. The clients might ask you to design the website in compliancy with numerous factors. You must have ample exposure to designing techniques and tools in order to excel in this niche. Even if you do not have any working knowledge about the requirements of the clients, you must hire diligent professionals for your web design company.

b) The layout of the website – Look and ponder over the works of professional web design companies. They will strive hard to create simplistic websites. The widespread availability of various kinds of web technologies will tempt the designers to experiment with unknown arenas. It can lead to overall failure of the design. Certain plug-ins and widgets might also induce additional vulnerabilities into the website. Follow the age-old tradition “keep it simple”. Enhanced levels of eye-candy might incorporate additional expenditure of precious bandwidth. The clients could even reject the work – this could turn out to be highly disadvantageous to your business.

c) Make the website search engine friendly – The best web designing companies will also design the website so that the search engine bots can index it properly, and do the needed on-site Search Engine Optimization. The layout of the website along with the content included in every page plays a pivotal role in determining the search engine ranking of a website. The clients might realize this simple factor and could award you with more work. It is a win-win situation. News can pass around and within months, your web design company will get the attention it was lacking.

Designing and implementing a website might seem like an easy method to make extra dough. However, appearances can be deceptive, and it takes a lot of hard work to rise to a dominating posture in this industry. Perhaps you can concentrate on specific paradigms such as e-commerce web design. That would help you to maintain a distinct position in the niche. Furthermore, outsourcing of web designing works is also on the rise these days. Creative web designers reside in some of the third world countries – they take regular work from trusted clients. Maybe you could try setting up an online business venture to utilize their services.

How to Choose a Link Building Company

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If you are going to get visitors to your website you are going to have to optimize for the search engines. In order to do that you will need to get links to your site, lots of them. This is an incredibly boring and tedious job so a lot of people choose to outsource it. The problem is that if you outsource it to the wrong person you will end up with a bunch of worthless links. You need to know how to choose a link building company if you are going to outsource the job.

link buildingThe main thing that you are going to want to look at when you are choosing a link building company is how they are going to build the links. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it and if they do it the wrong way the links will not only be useless but they may actually hurt your site. Unfortunately the easy way to build links is also the wrong way which is what a lot of link building companies do. The main thing that you need to avoid is reciprocal links. It is very easy to go out and trade links with hundreds of other sites, these links are basically worthless.

You are going to need know what constitutes a good link before you start looking for a link building company. This will allow you to assess the kind of job that they have done. Also, make sure to look for the company on Facebook and Linkedin, and see if their employees have the right background. Degrees like Online Marketing Degrees or SEO backgrounds are very valuable!

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How to ensure safe e-Commerce by getting High End Web Hosting

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E-commerce is a growing industry. It has made new businesses possible and made shopping easier and faster. Unfortunately, every advancement in modern technology brings new, unpleasant, possibilities. Aside from hardware, and software, problems, the major concern is security of payments.

With identity theft on the rise, as more unscrupulous individuals engage in such illicit activities, there is an ever growing need for improvement in the security of online transactions. Measures such as encryption of sensitive information, once only necessary for high-risk transactions, of great value, are now required for the simplest of transactions (even the purchase of a toy) due to the great possibility of significant financial loss. Such an event can result from an unauthorized individual gaining access to someone’s credit card information and using it to purchase several expensive items, or perhaps wire money, in the person’s name. This can, and has repeatedly, ruined numerous lives and buried good people in debt.

E-Commerce

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The Importance of a Sitemap

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Web marketing professionals always look out for additional strategies to optimize the page rankings of their websites. These days, they spend considerable time trying to find out tips to tweak the website’s sitemap. The grandness of a portal’s sitemap along with fresh advice on how to optimize a website to make it search engine friendly will be discussed in the following sections. SEO or search engine optimization of a website is all about experimentation. Experts spend hours trying out various newer strategies because of the volatility of the market. Hence, it is mandatory that you must have a good understanding about the sitemap of a website.

SitemapWebmasters place the sitemap on the homepage of the website. There is a specific reason for doing so. A search engine gives priority to rate the homepage instead of the auxiliary pages. By placing the sitemap on the homepage, you are literally inviting the search engine bots to look into the other sub-sections of the website. In order to display your website in the search results, the web search engines will analyze your web page using specialized bots. In the absence of sitemap, the search engine bots will index the homepage only.

A sitemap can be beneficial to the website’s visitors also. By accessing this section, they will get a preview of the links present in the website. Instead of spending extra time and bandwidth seeking for specific information, they just need to access the sitemap and click on the right links. The search engine companies are working on newer algorithms that simplify the entire website indexing process. They are incorporating supplementary features, which helps in rating a website according to its “human friendly” nature. SEO professionals are already aware of these changes. They are including suitable modifications to the sitemap of the website to make it friendly to search engines and cyber citizens.

Various search engines reckon the sitemap of a website in diverse manners. For instance, when Yahoo still follows the conventional HTML formats, Google employs a modified sitemap structure (which is in XML format). I could go on and on depicting the importance of sitemaps. The bottom line remains the same, though. If you wish to increase the page rankings of a website while embracing an organized outlook then you must begin to consider sitemaps with reverence. When the famous Las Vegas SEO Experts give on-site SEO tips, a sitemap is often their first pointer!

Creating sitemap for a website is easy thanks to the presence of automated software solutions. One can easily create a Google sitemap online within minutes. HTML and XML sitemap generators are also available for the respective search engines. Cyber citizens are becoming tech savvy – they wish to learn in depth about your website swiftly. In other terms, by optimizing the sitemap, you are merely augmenting the ability to communicate easily with the visitors. They need to know the theme or motif of the website. Only a sitemap can help in conveying the same to them. An organized sitemap will find favor in the eyes of search engines too. Please keep us posted with your findings!

What can Stumbleupon, Digg or del.icio.us do for your business

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In addition to using social networks to grow your business and find loyal followers, it is important to also understand the significance and power of social bookmarking sites. Whereas social networks are a type of community where like-people congregate, social bookmarking is a way to make public your favorite sites and web pages. Instead of bookmarking a site on your hard drive for your own pleasure, you let others know about it so they can bookmark the site as well. Examples of social bookmarking sites are Reddit, Technorati, Slashdot, Propeller, StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us (now called Delicious).

thumbs upIn the early days of Slashdot, if someone let others know about your site, you could potentially receive thousands of visitors, and many websites crashed due to the unexpected volume. So, if you think these sites are a waste of time where your business website is concerned, you must rethink your strategy! To be able to get your content or news story on the “buzz” page of Stumbleupon, the “front” page of Digg or the “popular” page of Delicious is an incredible feat and definitely a boost to any website.

Stumbleupon can be be quite useful for your business as a way to attract quality traffic. Although the site will ban accounts that display outward instances of spam and self-promotion, it will send visitors to your site with just a few “thumbs-up” to your page that was stumbled. Thumbs-up is the way in which other users vote for your page. The site also allows you to make a profile page which is advantageous.

Delicious is much less restrictive because the other users do not have to vote for your page or content. You can basically bookmark every page within your website. In addition to potential traffic, the backlinks will help your search engine rankings. We are not saying, however, that you need hundreds of inbound links from the same site. Many people also express the loyalty of Delicious users, the fact that they come back regularly looking for content in their areas of interest. As a way to organize your bookmarks, you can give them “tags” which is similar to categories.

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The Biggest Link Building Mistakes

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link buildingIf you are searching for effective website marketing strategies, you must be aware of the importance of link building by now. What exactly is link building? It is the art of placing your website’s link on another high traffic website. A portion of the latter’s web-traffic might flow into your website – thus increasing the search engine relevance and popularity of your website among the cyber citizens.

Yes, the administrators operating either websites will concur to display inbound / outbound links. The simplified nature of the ordeal paves the way for some of the biggest blunders. The errors that creep into the scenario will nullify the very grandness of link building paradigm.

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How to correctly embed a YouTube video in your site

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This is a pretty good resource by tipswithpunch. He runs you through the details of embedding a YouTube video in your HTML in the right way. It’s easy, simple – but mainly; it’s important you do it correctly to make it display in a good way on your site for all your visitors; whether they are using a browser or a mobile phone!