Be The Brand!Written by Paula Morrow
Quick - what do you think of when you think of Nike? The swoop symbol, right? Disney: Mickey Mouse, Disney Land/Disney World and Cinderella's Castle. Now, think Corey Rudl...the Internet Marketing Center; Ken Evoy...Make My ___ Sell products; Allan Gardyne... associate programs. These are much more than products... these are brands and brand identities. Have you thought about how you will brand yourself through your business? Now, a lot of experts emphasize importance of your unique selling proposition (USP) in equation. Granted, USP is a key element in building your brand. But it's not total picture. If Nike had concentrated its corporate philosophy on only producing a top-quality running shoe, how different do you think company would be today? As we all are know, Nike is much more than a shoe company. It's a sports brand: a sports promoter, a shoe and clothing company, a retail store. It closely identifies its brand with winners from world of sports (Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, for example). Their goal - for you to feel that by using Nike products you too can succeed. Or at least look like your heroes. The Walt Disney Company is famous (infamous really) for its religious zeal in enforcing it's clean, wholesome, family image. Having grown up outside Disney World in Florida, I saw firsthand steps that Disney took to enforce their strict standards (appearance, customer service, etc.), real-world tests they put their employees through. And payoff? Billions. Everything is planned to protect branding of Walt Disney Company as a fun, safe, family-oriented organization.
| | Protect Your Online AssetsWritten by Michael Martone
Many of us have spent countless hours developing and refining our websites. Also, if you deliver electronic content (ebooks, art work, software) you have spent much time creating these goods as well. Don’t risk losing everything! Make sure you can always get back to where you were by having multiple backup versions. First a couple of basic points: Most hosting providers perform backups on a regular basis (weekly, daily, or on demand); You should always have a local copy on your own home computer or burned to CD. Now with that said, there are still some open issues. What if your hosting provider only provides weekly back-ups and you make a change to your site, publish it with your editor (or FTP it), and then discovered some mistakes that were difficult to roll back from, and now hosting provider has backed up your mistakes? If you don’t change your content much this may not be a problem. Most of us have Zip disks or read/write CD drives at this point, but not everyone. Also, what if your local copies are destroyed say in a home fire, or if your local computer disk drive crashes and you had no copy (come on -- admit it, I know you're out there)? In interest of protecting your online assets, it is important to save your website to an online storage site. Most businesses store their important data files offsite, and here is a way for you to do same--for free. Many web-based storage sites allow plenty of space to store large files, so you can save daily or weekly snapshots of your site as needed. You can also register for more than one of these sites; and good news is that there are still a few that are FREE! I will tell you how to find them shortly. First, here is an example of how you could use these services. If your hosting provider creates weekly backups (say on Sundays), you can make a snapshot of site prior to publishing any changes and save it to online file storage site. This way you can always rollback if there is a problem. (Make sure you zip it before you store it!) Once hosting provider executes its weekly backup, you can decide whether to delete online storage version. Personally, I know that sometimes backups are not checked by hosting providers, and if they are not diligent about verifying saved data or replacing old tapes, you may find that one day you need a file or two restored, that data is corrupted.
|
