Free Tools For Home Business EntrepreneursWritten by Chris Ellington
When resources are scarce it’s important to maximize results and stretch every dollar. As home business entrepreneurs, we don’t have ad budgets of Coca-Cola and Disney, we can’t afford to throw money away.There are a number of free resources that make building and promoting your website a whole lot easier. Web Site Design - page layout (http://www.steves-templates.com) Steve provides free web page templates which are nice looking, professional and can be used free for personal and business websites. Check out all variations and pick a template for your site. Another way to use this is as a springboard for your own creativity. Perhaps you like an element on template 1 and navigation of template 7. Get some ideas for creating your own site from scratch. There are also designs you can buy for under $100 and you gain access to a number of images, clipart, sounds, fonts etc. Web Site Design - graphics (http://www.cooltext.com) Cool Text is a wonderful tool for creating great looking buttons and logos. It’s free and combinations of shape/color/texture/font are virtually endless. You can create professional buttons and logos with just a few mouse clicks. I use this site any time I want to "freshen up" my site or create buttons/logos for my customers. Web Site Performance - images (http://www.gifworks.com) Nothing slows down your page like heavy graphics. Did you know that you can dramatically reduce file size of your graphics without compromising look and feel of your site? That’s where gifworks.com comes in. Run their free “optimization” tool on your gif images and watch as they get more and more streamlined. Your web pages will load faster. Gifworks has a paid service as well, allowing you to buy images, get custom work, etc. Web Site Performance – code (http://validator.w3.org/) Is your website correctly coded? This free validator from W3 examines your html and reports missing tags, missing attributes and other errors that make your code non-standard and therefore difficult for some web browsers to serve up. With line-by-line validation, you can easily find places in your code that will cause errors. I love this validator, it makes sure my pages work across all browsers and platforms. No more trying pages in every browser/OS configuration. When it validates here, you can be sure that it’s up to W3 standards.
| | Advertising Your Home Business With Pay Per Click Can Be Risky Written by Kirk Bannerman
An unfortunate byproduct of pay per click advertising business is click fraud. Many people with an online business spend large amounts of money on pay per click advertising only to discover that many of people clicking on their ads weren't really interested in their products or services.Bogus "visitors" to a pay per click ad represent click fraud. This is a serious scam that threatens viability of pay per click advertising business which has become enormously profitable for all of major search engine operators, namely Google, Yahoo/Overture, and MSN. Click fraud has different twists, but end result is generally same. Advertisers are billed for fruitless traffic generated by someone who repeatedly clicks on an advertiser's ad without any intention of ever buying anything. The search engine advertising market is currently about $3.8 billion per year and estimates vary widely on how much click fraud is actually going on. Clearly, search engine operators would like to downplay extent of this problem. Some industry experts claim that a little click fraud exists but that it is overblown by advertiser paranoia, while others estimate that ten to twenty percent of all clicks are false (made by someone with no legitimate interest in ad itself). Virtually everyone involved with pay per click advertising sees click fraud and knows it's there, but no one is quite sure what to do about it. Both Google and Yahoo/Overture acknowledge that click fraud problem exists, but claim improved internal controls will prevent problem from escalating. Their stated position seems to be that they are concerned about click fraud, but that it is not a material issue so far. Both of them are touting their increasing internal actions aimed at detecting and combating click fraud. Such reassurances from search engine companies certainly aren't surprising, given how much they stand to lose if advertisers cut back on advertising spending. The stakes are huge and search engine companies are actively involved in public relations campaigns. Industry research firm eMarketer expects $7.4 billion to be spent on search engine advertising by 2008, up from only $108.5 million back in 2000.
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