Using the Internet to Boost Your Bottom LineWritten by Kate Smalley
The Internet is a powerful resource that, if properly used, can reduce your operating costs, stimulate sales and add to your bottom line. Research shows that Internet is playing a greater role in way small companies operate. It’s also playing an increasing role in driving profitability for smaller businesses.According to a recent study by ACNielsen and eBay, 51 percent of small businesses using Internet believe it has helped them become more profitable. Fifty-eight percent of them report that using Internet has helped their companies grow or expand, and 15 percent feel that using Internet is necessary for survival of their business. Boosting Your Bottom Line With Your Website An effective strategy for using Internet to enhance your company’s bottom line is to maximize your presence on Web. More specifically, turn your Website into a virtual work horse for handling marketing/advertising, sales and customers service functions. Here are key points to keep in mind concerning these areas: •Marketing/Advertising - A Website is like having a business card, brochure and advertisement in one powerful package. It’s ultimate marketing tool because it gives you an affordable, effective way to market your company — worldwide. Having an effective Website is also an easy, beneficial way to advertise your business. The advantage of using a Website as opposed to other methods of advertising is difference between having an active or passive audience. People visiting your Website are an active audience, and are curious about what you’re offering. On other hand, print ads, telemarketers, or mass mailings are geared toward connecting with a passive audience. If your Website effectively provides information about your products, services and company, this can lead to sales.
| | Computer Geeks and Garden GnomesWritten by Birmingham UK Com
First and foremost before I begin my ranting it is worth mentioning that there are many very helpful and considerate people out there in cyber wilderness who devote much of their time to providing open source and free scripts of all variations from PHP, CGI and Java to name but a few. They provide dedicated support, do not insist on payment, and spend much of their free time helping you avoid having to part with your hard earned cash to get free programs and scripts up and running on your websites.Now, that having been said I have just spent an enlightening couple of days installing several PHP and CGI scripts, mainly because whilst I have some experience of installations, only true way to become fast and efficient with all this geeky stuff is to install, de install and test a variety of applications and programs yourself. After two days and over a hundred scripts I am left drained. Half of scripts I just dumped immediately due to poor or non-existent documentation and bad layout of files. It amazes me that some quite intricate scripts are left high and dry without any installation documents at all. In other words, author spent days programming and putting together complicated scripts, to fail miserably on poor or non existent documentation. Aside from this, some sites you visit in order to download this material insist on blitzing you with numerous pop ups – end result of which is neither good for person visiting website or website owner. Both part very quickly. Perhaps I am intolerant but any sign of boxes leaping up in air and blind adverts and I am gone. I know I am not alone. Add to this frustration of taking time to read through endless documents and CGI scripts on websites only to find that when you click on a link for more information or a download you find it is dead, site under maintenance or what was advertised as free is not actually free. Either that or you go to extreme of getting a script working only to find writers advertisement popping up all over place to extent it warrants dumping script. Yes I know you can remove it for a fee but why didn’t you tell me that before I installed it? Even quite clear documentation often omits what is to writer an obvious requirement but not something that he or she chooses to share with their hapless user – classic example might be forgetting to mention that an SQL database is needed. Hardly a minor omission.
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