Category: Digital

Technology evolves quickly. Within six or nine months of a project delivery, the market may produce entirely new platforms radically altering your build-vs.-buy decisions. Delivering solutions in 30 to 90 day cycles enables regular reassessment of business assumptions.

Projects spanning nine months or more tend to be inflexible. Most project managers are not interested in reworking the base assumptions of an elaborately crafted massive project plan. By contrast, web solutions that are delivered in 30 to 90 day life cycles allow a business to quickly change course and take advantage of newly released technology solutions.

Remain competitive by delivering with web speed in an ever-changing market.

IBackup is an application that can perform interactive and scheduled backups of your critical files to an online backup account. I particularly like it in that it has Windows, Mac, and Linux versions, making it one of the few such solutions on the market. It has easy to use native graphical user interface which allows you to transfer your files. The interface supports drag and drop to retrieve or backup your files.

First time users can use an automatic selection, restore and scheduler wizard to easily manage their file backups.

There is an option to receive email notification for your scheduled backups.

Read more about IBackup - Online Backup and Storage

Here is a dump of my current FireFox add-ons.

Some of them are particularly relevant to SEO/SEM:

• Diigo -- Great when you have a group that wants to annotate web pages to share notes on SEO mods you want to do for a page.
• Live PageRank -- Get the PR for a page.
• Send Tab URLs -- A quick and dirty way to get a dump of page URLs and descriptions by opening up the pages you are interested in Tabs, then selecting this option in the File menu.

iContact is an affordable (prices that start at $9.95 per month) solution for anyone who wants to send out email newsletters. They sport an extremely easy to use interface, numerous templates, with surveying, autoresponder, and blogging capability.

They take care of managing bounces and unsubscribes for you (this is a big perk if you have ever tried to manage this yourself like I have). They also take care of the backend technical details like making sure your message gets to the inbox of your recipients through their ISP relations, feedback loops, and whitelist status, etc.

The company has over 15,000 customers and 100,000 users. The product is used primarily by small businesses but also has a number of Fortune 500 companies like Bank of America, Ford, Nissan, Super 8 Motel, and International Paper, and political campaigns like Barack Obama '08.

You can download their free Best Practice Whitepaper on email marketing to get a better feel for the benefits of their tool. You can also view a video overview to learn more about their iContact Email Newsletter Tool.

Looking for the right SEO provider to grow a business?

SEOP is a search engine optimization with a staff of 33 full time computer scientists and 3 cryptologists; their web site is http://www.seop.com.
SEOPerformance was co-founded by former, respected top search engine experts from Google and Yahoo. They teamed with top online marketing minds from Proctor & Gamble, Gillette and Coca Cola and now boast over 400 current clients from Fortune 1000 clients to small startup ventures.

SEOP also focuses on expert SEO results and maximum revenue. With them you can manage your paid search with Google to maximize returns and overall ROI.

Learn more about Search engine optimization using SEOP.

In the late 1980s the advent of Client/Server technology as a new technology platform caused new methods of software delivery to be created. Host-based systems relied on mainframe technologies and centralized systems centered around ‘waterfall’ methodologies. Project implementation often took nine to eighteen months or more.
Client/Server Methodologies

Client/Server technologies focused on creating decentralized PC-centric systems. Client/Server systems emerged to facilitate building RAD (rapid application development) methodologies. Most of these development methods focused on an iterative, staged-delivery approach.

The Client/Server project was broken into multiple phases each containing a complete iteration. Prototyping, coding, quality assurance, and end user evaluation took place within each iteration. Since software was being rolled out in phases, each stage could be evaluated and major system flaws detected early in the life cycle.

Agile Methodologies have replaced these legacy methodologies and allow us the web testing flexibility to be competitive.

When doing SEO optimization, be careful of the personalized feature Google offers:

Google on Friday moved to combine two of its separate personalization features in order to make searching a bit more friendly for its users. When signed into the site, Google will automatically custom tailor search results based on search history and preferences selected for the personalized homepage.

"Keep in mind that personalization is subtle—at first you may not notice any difference," says Google engineer Sep Kamvar. Those who don't want Google to track what they're doing can simply sign out of the site and personalization features will be disabled. "After all, the goal is to give you what you want when you want it," added Kamvar. Source

You may rank well on your personalized search, but not well in the search results others are seeing. Make sure you turn off personalized search if you're evaluating your SERPs position!

Looking for sales advice to give you the edge to succeed? This valuable information that can motivate you to exceed in a competitive marketplace.

Author Bill Todd is a high energy, humorous, professional speaker and trainer with over a quarter century of front line sales, marketing, customer service and advertising experience. His Free E-Book that speaks about time-tested, proven and highly creative strategies for sales, marketing and advertising success.

The author delves into what differentiates the average sales person or manager from high achievers who consistently out-perform their peers. The e-Book outlines five success strategies that can have an immediate, positive impact on your business and personal success.

Business changes quickly. Today’s business cycles are compressed—companies demand solutions requiring delivery in record time.

In order to meet changing business needs, project management must be be flexible, adaptable, and above all quick! Break web projects into a series of iterations delivered in less than three month cycles. This enables you (at reduced cost and risk!) to deliver business solutions that address quickly evolving business needs.

Project management must balance the triangle of cost, quality and time. With web systems, project managers find themselves scrambling to deliver innovative solutions while still controlling costs.

The rapid pace of change and innovation on the web has caused a new catch phrase to be coined—‘Internet-time.’ Doing things in Internet-time means getting things done faster than in the old economy. The rapid rate of e-business change makes quickly delivering web solutions imperative.

Anyone building a business web site benefits from using an agile methodology: decision makers, business managers, web project managers, technical team leaders, consultants, digital media directors, and most of all, the web developers who are often left to improvise and manage projects with little direction from their management.

Last time I had voice recordings transcribe it ran $120/hr for the audio transcription. This new service has the following rates -- making it less than $26/hr for podcast transcriptions!

• URL Podcast transcription is 42 cents a minute. Podcasts are made searchable.
• Uploaded file transcription is 75 cents a minute. Transcripts are not searchable.

The transcribing is done by people, not machines. Read more about CastingWords web service.

On the other hand, if you want to transcribe your recordings yourself, here are some nice free software tools to help you with the job: http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/