Email is so 20th Century

Younger people – those under 40 – don’t rely on email. They may use it, but rarely check their inbox. Conversely, the over-40s love email so much, they feel their life would not be complete without it. If you run an online business these differences are important to notice. If …

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Gatekeepers will become your search gurus

Internet users are suffering increasing problems finding what they want. Often you will find that whatever you are searching for advertisers, or “aggregation” software brings to the top of the search engine listing material that’s not directly relevant. Clearly, the search engines attempt to bring you the most relevant results. …

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Internet shopping needs reliable checkout

Shoppers at supermarkets have witnessed a silent revolution in shopping in the past few years. Supermarket giants like Wal-Mart, Tesco and so on have all installed new checkouts that are rapid and reliable. One of the bottlenecks in the whole supermarket “shopping experience” was the checkout. You would happily (perhaps) …

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Social networking power not yet established

Business owners have still to capitalise on the power that social networking provides. At the moment companies and Internet marketers are largely using social networking sites to advertise their products and services. Some businesses are using social networks to help communicate with customers and colleagues, but that’s about all. However, …

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People expect you to go green

Environmentalists are enjoying success at the moment. After several decades of campaigning, environmental issues are now mainstream and at the top of the agenda for many politicians and business people. Indeed, only yesterday Google announced it was “going green”. Human beings have a tendency to get “swept along”; we have …

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Internet marketers lose revenue by ignoring emails

Internet marketers are losing money by ignoring emails they are sent from customers and potential clients. According to experts in running call centres, eGain, 44% of firms completely ignore emails they are sent by visitors to their web sites. Some sectors are worse than others it seems. The telecomms industry …

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How to use blogs as content management tools

Bloggers are only using half the power of blogging software – if that. The vast majority of people writing blogs are simply typing up their latest musings and adding them to a blog that is not even part of their main web site. Indeed, the vast majority of blogs do …

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Local business will be more profitable

Business owners appear to have become enthralled by the concept of “globalisation”. The Internet means your customers can come from anywhere in the world and several companies have used the web to expand their reach. However, the struggle against the global competition is huge and it is taking many business …

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Internet future will see us untied from its shackles

Futurists have been telling us for ages that we are going to live in an increasingly connected world. Only last week Marks and Spencer launched the iPod suit, where the jacket comes pre-wired with all the connections you need for your iPod. We’ve been hearing about computerised clothing and the …

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Shoppers pay more for privacy

Shoppers on the Internet are prepared to pay more for what they buy from you if your site has a clear privacy policy. According to research from Carnegie Mellon University, shoppers want to see your privacy policy plus they will pay more for goods and services from sites where such …

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Manage projects using social networking sites

Business professionals are increasingly using social networking sites to connect with their existing colleagues, rather than find new opportunities. That’s one of the conclusions you can draw from the latest survey on social networking by the Institute for Corporate Productivity. The study showed that over half of all businesses who …

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Starbucks psychological tactics are effective online

Internet marketers could learn a thing or two from Starbucks. Instead of setting up “just another” coffee shop, Starbucks decided to be different. Rather than do what everyone else was doing it opted for a psychological approach. What they wanted was to make people addicted to Starbucks, not necessarily to …

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Web sites don’t matter if you are trying to sell

Internet marketers are keen on establishing online brands. Some of them spend a great deal of time, money and effort in building their “mission control” web sites which are central to their brand. However, results from a survey of 115,000 people (an impressive number) suggests that this strategy could be …

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How not to get readers for your blog

Readers of Business Week magazine have been told this week that blogging is dead. And who told them that? An executive from Google – and not just any executive either. According to the product manager for Blogger, Eric Case, blogging is vanishing. Now hang on a minute…what did he say…blogging …

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Online success denied to modern firms

Business executives speak a different language to the rest of the world. Indeed, in recent years there has been a whole new development of words that sound highly impressive but actually say nothing. You can be in an business meeting these days where heads nod sagely as people talk about …

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