Top Five Qualities of Good Webhosting Company

What do you look for in a Good Webhost provider? A question was asked in a popular webhosting forum sometime back. As a small business owner, you may already own your business website or may be looking out for setting up first internet website. Here's a free 7-page report (10 minutes reading time) that concisely describes 5 essential qualities you must look into good webhost company.

Read- 5 Essential Qualities of Good Webhosting Company. (e-Library.net)

Finding Contacts of Almost Anything

Recently I wanted to find phone number of someone who has given his phone number before, but has since switched to another mobile number. I only knew his name and designation, but never seen him. Fortunately, the person worked in the same company as mine. But the problem was there were quite a few number of people with the same name! and I didn't know any other details, designation unfortunately wasn't revealed in the company telephone directory. That's were I realised it can be so difficult to get someone's phone number despite hearing umpteen times Internet has brought the world closer. Frustrated, I just searched for LinkedIn.com and wow, I found that exact person's public profile with his designation and picture!

Similarly you must be desperately trying to find contact address of some company or person, may be you want to apply for job position that's not advertised, or you are business owner wanting to contact prospects, or whatever reason it is to find addresses. Here's a list of tools and techniques which you can consider to find addresses, telephone number or email address:

Social Media Sites

Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut, MySpace- these are just examples of few social networking websites that I bet most of professionals and individuals alike have started using. Often, you can find at least some basic details like picture, name of the person if you know their name. Just search for " Facebook" and you will find link to profiles. 

LinkedIn attracts many professionals interested in networking. So if you are recruiter trying to do a background check on person, Linked In can reveal host of past job details, network, qualifications in Interviewee own words.

Search Engines

If you know just the name of the person, you can start with it, put that in search box and see what it throws up to you. Depending on a name's popularity you may get multiple people and may have to spend some time checking each person.

Trying to reach someone within a company XYZ?
- Search for "Joined XYZ"
- Search by their designation "CEO XYZ"
- Search like (Firstname OR Lastname) AND "gmail.com". Search engines also index email ids, so this little trick can get you personal email ids.


Forums

There are hundreds of forums on any conceivable topic. You can become a member of those forums and find quite many things you need. Suppose you want to contact someone within a company. Join some popular forum that has discussion on the industry the target company works in. Then you can post message asking for reviews about the company or directly, if someone works in that company.

Just a slight spin on above, if you know or have an idea of where normally a company's people hangout, you can also be at same place and strike conversation.

Ask Friends/ Colleagues

Sometimes, we under estimate what our friends or colleagues can reveal about a company or get you some contacts. Why not start with just asking them whether they know anything about Company XYZ or any contacts within that company?

Softwares

Reverse Phone Detective: Find out the owner of any phone number or unlisted number.
Search Public Records: just enter name, and get access to many public records- Marriage, Death, Birth, Criminal records, etc

Do you have better way to find phone number, email or address of a person? I will be glad to read your comments.

Disclaimer

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed on this blog are my own. This blog is intended to be a wide base of good quality articles about Internet/ Affiliate Marketing for Small Business Owners intending to make an online presence. I moderate comments to ensure that this happy place status remains in-tact. You are welcome to ask tough questions, challenge and disagree with me and others here. However, I won't tolerate foul language (as judged by me), discriminatory language (as judged by me), hostility (as judged by me), advertisements and personal attacks. This list is not all inclusive and because you have entered a comment does not imply that I will publish it. I rarely have to remove comments but will do it when I feel that I need to. It's at my discretion because this is my blog.

Ingredients of Every Successfull Online Business

It's said that 95% of every Business (Internet or Offline) fail within 5 years of their operation. While it may sound tough and I don't mean to discourage you from fulfilling your dream or need to start a new business, but I just want to make you aware of challenges you will face and certain qualities that you must imbibe in order to succeed in this online world.

Creating a successfull business can be incredibly satisfying in itself even though lots of hard work goes into it, but it also involves:
1. Patience
2. Passion
3. Focus
4. Guidance in right direction
5. Smart work.

Let's look each in some more detail:

Patience- You need to have Patience as you won't get success overnight. Everybody is different and has unique skills and some may have more time to give to their business. If you are like most people, you inspire to start your own business while still trying to meet ends with job. Don't leave that Job just yet, keep patience and put daily consistent effort to business. Remember! Rome was not built in a day!

Passion- this is the single most important reason why businesses fail. You always need to have that fire within you to be part of successful business. Many times, people just ‘lose it’ when they see nothing come their way soon.

Focus- Internet is filled with scum- alluring offers, too easy to fall prey to, popup here & there promising that long dreamed vacation at Hawaii, or 'secret' to earn loads of money just by dreaming about it. Set aside time to pursue this interest; say 1 hour a day of concentrated effort towards making things work. Read less, do more work.

Guidance in right direction, this one is important, but hey I am here to provide you with that. I have been successfully making money online, and I am here to share this knowledge. It's easy to get lost in the sea of knowldege floating everywhere around you. Starting a business, a successful online one, need not be very complex, but it takes some consistent effort to be spend in right direction to make everything work together. You can subscribe to my newsletter and I promise you will keeping receiving only good quality articles.

Smart work- Geez, nobody talks about hard work these days. Because, you can spend months and year trying to make a dime and you may be successful on some level, but only right guidance and smart work can bring you riches in shortest possible time.

Sorry if you have heard these zillion times, but I just need to reinforce 'The Secrets' of any successful business. Frankly you can find million articles on how to do about just anything on internet. But without following above success 'mantra', you will never achieve ever lasting success.

Five Web Analytics Tools To Make a Start

Hi guys, hopefully you would have read a background of this article series on Web Analytics. If not, you can read the first article @ Intro to Web analytics. Let me define Analytics: The Branch of logic dealing with Analysis. source: thefreedictionary.com


Through this series on web analytics, my intention is to write simple easy-to-digest articles on web analytics space, trends and top most tools/ softwares that can help any small business owner to make use of available tools to discover interesting things about their customers (visitors), that they can use to tweak and optimize websites and ultimately increase revenue.

Okay, let's look at some prominent Web analytic softwares available in market today:

Google Analytics (free)



Google has always been forefront of launching easy-to-use, powerful features, industry leading products like  Adwords, Adsense, Webmaster tools, that helped people meet specific needs. Analytics ties all of bits and pieces together to give a full view of your marketing campaign. With a simple piece of tracking code injected in your website, you instantly start getting insights to your website's audience. A simple dashboard presents different statistics- Demographics, Bounce rate, Avg time spent, Referrals, etc which is simply powerful way to monitor your marketing efforts get fructified. Besides, it's free- all you need a google email address!

Talking dis-advantages, the updates are not real time, it could take few hours for google to update latest visitor activity. This delay may not bother startups, but most probably not acceptable to major eCommerce websites.

Yahoo! Web Analytics (free)

In its own words, Yahoo! Web Analytics is a highly customizable, enterprise-level website analytics system designed to help website businesses increase sales and visitor satisfaction, reduce marketing costs and gain new insight on online customers. By storing data in raw, non-aggregated form, Yahoo! Web Analytics is more than simply a reporting tool. It is a powerful, and highly flexible, data analysis tool. Both near real-time AND historical data can be segmented instantly and even visualized with advanced graphs to help marketers and site designers answer specific business questions and find new insights to improve their business.

Omniture Discover (paid)

Omniture Discover® provides Web analysts and online marketers with the deepest insights and most concise segmentation as revealed by unlimited real-time visitor information. Discover delivers a comprehensive, multi-dimensional view of customers that enables marketers with accurate, timely and insightful decisions—improving the performance of their business. Discover is part of the Omniture Online Business Optimization Suite.

This is pretty advanced stuff and I wouldn't recommend this to a budding internet business. I don't have a line beyond which you may want to have a look at, but essentially its more geared towards small to medium and even large corporate businesses. Interested, view product tour (requires free registration)

Woopra (free/paid)

Woopra is a popular desktop based web analytic tools. The main advantage is intuitive interface and real time updates (unlike Google Analytics). Besides, Woopra also claims that its javascript injection (that is primarily used to track visitor activities) doesn't slow down your website.

GoingUp (free)

With an AJAX-rich interface, GoingUp! combines powerful web analytics with top notch SEO tools.

Which one to use? 
It depends! If you are a business trying to work out from home and just nearly started, I would assume you wouldn't really have much to invest at this point. Good thing is not all professional grade softwares has to have a price tag, sometimes, things are just free (yippie). My recommendation is to start with free tools, when you are starting you don't want to invest heavily now and not when you don't have any traffic :) because without any traffic all above tools doesn't help much. Once your business starts getting visitors, then you can use web analytic softwares to understand visitor profile and behaviour, may be some sequence of actions on your website triggers them to make a buy decision. The real benefit of web analytic softwares is to decode this sequence and tweak your business so that maximum number of visitors experience the same triggering sequence of actions.

I actively use web analytic softwares to understand visitor behaviour for this blog and couple of other websites and I am amazed to see some interesting observations. I will keep updating this post and write some more too actually a video that has step by step on how to use such web analytic softwares. You are welcome to join my newsletters to receive such updates as well as other useful articles dealing with aspects of Internet Marketing. Thanks.

*** Does your company offer a web analytic software? I and my readers will be interested to know about your analytic software. If you want, you can send a brief writeup on your web analytic software to internetmarketinghoopla "At" gmail.com . Please stress more on any unique features in your product.