Everyone knows what an insurance agency website is, but more granular insurance agency web marketing terms such as microsites, minisites, landing pages and squeeze pages may be somewhat of a mystery to many agents and brokers. What’s the difference between these, and why are they an important aspect of your insurance agency marketing?

Let’s begin with a brief definition of each:

• Microsite: A microsite, which is also known as a landing page, minisite or weblet, is an Internet web design term usually referring to an individual web page. Examples of this might be a web page dedicated to Auto Insurance, Home Owners Insurance, Condo Insurance or Errors & Omissions.
• Minisite: A minisite is a small and focused website dedicated to a specific topic. Most minisites contain just a few pages, though pragmatically they can have as few as one webpage or as many as 20. They are typically a subset of a larger website. For example, the XYZ Insurance Agency website might have 30 pages of content, and have two minsites, one of these dedicated to Transportation Company Insurance (Trucking Insurance Leads), the other dedicated to Benefits and Compliance (Group Benefits Leads).
• Landing Page: A landing page is a single web page that is rendered when a user clicks on a search result, online advertisement, social media link, etc. The landing page is often lead or sales oriented, displaying content directly related to the advertisement, search result or social media link. An example of a landing page might be Florida Yacht Insurance or Professional Liability Insurance for Engineers.
• Squeeze Page: Squeeze pages are landing pages created and designed to capture leads, to increase subscriptions (to newsletters for example), or registration for an event (webinars/seminars), etc. Examples of a Squeeze Page include: Territory Exclusive Insurance Lead Generation Webinar, or PPACA Compliance Newsletter Subscription.
• Weblet: Weblets, a term credited to NASA origin, is similar to a minisite or microsite, though there are a few key differences. It is often maintained by a single individual. It typically provides content which can be downloaded. Weblets are often created to assist non-technical people to help publish professional looking web content without having to know anything about programming.

All of these terms are applicable to insurance agency websites and insurance agency web marketing. They are specific tools purposed to drive traffic, generate inbound leads, and increase subscription and/or event attendance. They are also used to convey subject matter expertise and credibility. If you are an agent or broker seeking to extend reach and drive more qualified inbound leads, microsites, minisites, landing pages and squeeze pages should become part of your vocabulary.

It’s probably the most sought-after topic in Internet marketing – how to get more traffic to your websites.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling your own products, promoting affiliate offers or looking for AdSense clicks, you’re not going to earn a single cent if there’s no traffic coming to your site.

There’s more to the process than just getting more traffic, however. You not only want traffic, you want targeted traffic – people who are going to be interested in what you have to offer.

In this article we’re going to look at a number of ways – both paid and free – to get more visitors to your website. Some of these methods can generate almost instant traffic while others will take longer to gain momentum.

By diversifying your traffic generation over several methods, you can get fast traffic while gradually ramping it up over a longer period of time.

Let’s jump right in…

Getting The Right Kind Of Traffic

Before we look at any specific methods for generating traffic to your website, we should really discuss what kind of traffic you should be targeting.

Because there is a right and a wrong kind of traffic.

The right kind of traffic is visitors who are not only interested in what you have to offer them, they’re willing and able to take the action that you want them to take. The wrong kind is simply the opposite – visitors who aren’t likely to take your “most wanted action.”

Let’s look at a couple of examples…

First, let’s say you have an affiliate review website. You post reviews and other content on your site, with affiliate links for those products. Whenever someone buys one of the offers, you get paid a commission.

If you generate a ton of traffic, but not very many of those people are either willing or able to spend money, you’re not going to generate much profit from them. A good example would be a market where your visitors are mostly teenagers. While they might be very interested in the subject, and willing to buy what you’re promoting, a large percentage of them won’t be able to buy because they don’t have credit cards and their parents may not let them use theirs.

A market like that might be better suited for a site that displays AdSense ads, which brings us to our second example. Let’s say you have a site that is monetized purely with AdSense. In this case, it doesn’t matter so much if your visitors are able to buy, since you get paid when they click an ad, regardless of what they do once they leave your site.

If the market has a lot of “clickers” who don’t turn into buyers, the ads aren’t going to pay very well, but we’ll set that aside for the moment.

From a pure conversion point of view, you’re going to want visitors who are looking for a solution to their problem – and hopefully the ads displayed on your site offer that solution. Again, you want to target the right people to get the maximum number of clicks on those ads.

If you’re generating a lot of traffic looking for free solutions, or just looking for information, you may not get many clicks. So more traffic isn’t necessarily going to be more profitable.

Before you start doing any kind of traffic generation, make sure you’re targeting the right people for your offer. Otherwise you’re going to be spending a lot of time, money or both with little or no return for the efforts.

Free Traffic Methods

Free traffic is certainly the more popular of the two choices (the other being paid traffic). Many Internet marketers just don’t have the capital to start paying for traffic, so free traffic is a better way to go.

Some marketers don’t really understand the economics of paying for traffic either, which is an entirely different problem. If you can make a profit, or just break even on what you pay to get traffic to your website, it’s really not costing you anything. It’s common for marketers to see the cost side of the equation without considering the profit side, but we’ll get into this in a little more detail when we discuss paid traffic sources shortly.

When it comes to getting free traffic, there are two types – short-term and long-term traffic. Some methods can generate visitors to your site in a very short time, almost instantly in some cases. Other methods will take longer to gain momentum, but these tend to keep driving traffic to your site for a longer period of time once they get going.

Short-Term Traffic Generation

We’re going to look at three sources of short-term traffic that can work very well if you implement them properly:

1. Forum marketing

2. Guest blogging

3. Article submissions

Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is one of the easiest ways to get short-term traffic, particularly if you’re already active in any popular forums in your market.

Note: In this report, many of the examples will relate to the Internet marketing niche, since most people reading it will be somewhat familiar with it. All the strategies work equally well in other markets, so don’t let yourself get caught thinking “this only works for Internet marketing websites” – that’s just not true.

Most forums will let you add a “signature” to your profile, which gets added to the end of every post you make. You can include a link to your website in your signature, along with a short call to action to get people to click through to it.

If you’re active on the forum, and provide good value in your posts, people will click on your signature link. Particularly if you offer them something of value that’s related to the market, like a free report, webinar recording or some other type of incentive.

The key here is to be an active part of the community and provide value first. If you just sign up for a forum, add your signature link and starting posting randomly with stuff like “Hey, great post!” then don’t expect much in the way of traffic.

Give value first, and people will respond by checking

out what else you have to offer them.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is another great way to “siphon” traffic from a community of people interested in your market. A blog is a little less interactive than a forum, but it has many similarities.

Find some of the most popular blogs in your market and see if they accept guest bloggers. Some sites are up-front about this, with a page that explains exactly how to become a guest blogger for them. Other sites don’t advertise it, but if you spend a bit of time reading through existing posts, you’ll be able to see if the same person writes them all or if the site has used guest posts in the past.

Generally guest posts will have a resource box or author byline that gives more information about the author, as well as a link back to their website. If you see any of these, it’s a good indication that the site accepts guest posts.

The key to getting your post accepted is to offer a high-quality article that the blog owner would be crazy not to accept. Spend even longer than you usually would researching, outlining and writing these posts. While it means an extra investment in time, you can get a lot of traffic clicking through to your site if your guest post goes live on a high-traffic blog.

And while this click through traffic will slow down once the post has been live for a while, it can continue indefinitely as that post gains traction in the search engines. Plus that resource link pointing back to your site will also help you with SEO in the long term, so this is a powerful strategy.

Article Submissions

Article submissions, or article marketing, can be another powerful traffic strategy that will provide you will both short-term and long-term benefits. Much like guest blogging, the short-term traffic will come from people clicking through on your resource box links to visit your website.

By submitting your articles to high-authority websites, you can leverage their power with the search engines to get your articles ranked quickly and generating traffic. This direct traffic can actually continue for the long term if your article gets some traction with Google and the other search engines, but it also helps your own site rank better so it starts generating search engine traffic of its own.

Which brings us to longer-term traffic strategies…

Long-Term Traffic Generation

We’re going to look at three longer-term strategies for getting traffic to your websites:

1. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization

2. Social Media

3. Relationship Building

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is probably the most common free traffic strategy. There are dozens of techniques for improving your rankings in the search engines, and just as many products that teach you how to implement them. Some of these methods work year after year while others are more short-lived.

You’ll also see a lot of methods that would be considered gray hat or ***** hat meaning they might go against the terms of service of one or more search engines, or even cross legal lines.

You’ll need to decide for yourself exactly what lines you’re willing to cross in the interest of getting traffic to your website, but keep in mind that the stuff that crosses those lines tends to be the techniques that are more short-lived. They may require less work up-front, but in the long run you can wind up spending more time or money to maintain your traffic because things keep changing.

SEO is a huge topic that goes way beyond the scope of this report, but let’s just look at a few of the most important principles.

There are two main factors to SEO – on site and off site optimization. On site optimization is things like using your keywords in strategic places on your pages:

-The TITLE tag

-In the page content itself

-Image ALT tags

-etc.

At one time, repeating your keywords over and over throughout the page (known as keyword stuffing) would improve your results but the search engines have evolved well beyond that. Don’t do this, just use your keywords and other related terms naturally in the content.

Off site optimization really comes down to links pointing to your website. The more links you get, from related sites that also have some power of their own with the search engines, the better your site is going to rank (and the more traffic you’ll get as a result).

This is where the short- and long-term strategies start to overlap a bit. If you’re using any of the short-term traffic strategies we just discussed to get quick traffic to your sites, they will also help you with SEO in the long term.

The links in your forum signatures, guest blog posts and submitted articles will all help push your site up the search engine rankings so while you might get a short-term jump in traffic when they first go live, they will keep working for you for a long time.

This is why it’s a good idea to keep doing those things, even when your site starts to get traction in the search engines. It will continue to drive both instant and longer-term traffic.

Social Media

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are a relatively new way to get traffic, and as a result they tend to be misunderstood. A lot of marketers use them as a kind of “announcement” service, posting links to new offers, affiliate promotions, new blog posts and anything else they want people to visit.

But that’s all they ever post, and then they think social media doesn’t work because nobody ever clicks through on their links.

The fact is, social media is a longer-term traffic strategy. You need to build relationships with the people you follow before you can expect them to click on any of the links you post.

Example: Think of it in “real world” terms. If you went to a party or some kind of meeting, would you just make a sales pitch to everyone you talk to? Or would you have a conversation first, so you could get to know one another and what you could offer?

Treat social media like you would a “real life” meeting – offer value first and build up some trust with your followers before you start hitting them with a bunch of offers.

Relationship Building

Building relationships isn’t really a traffic generation method in and of itself, but it applies to virtually every other strategy to some degree. If you build relationships with the visitors to your website, or to the other places you post your content, you’re going to be a lot more successful in the long run.

When you have strong relationships with your visitors, they’re a lot more likely to return. And return traffic is one of the keys to a really successful website.

Look at it this way. If you get 100 visitors per day and you have no way of getting them to come back to your site after they click an ad or an affiliate link, you have to find 100 new visitors every day to maintain your results.

But if you get 100 visitors every day and get 10 of them into your “relationship funnel” so they return to the site, you’ve increased your future traffic without having to find “new” visitors. It’s over-simplified, but let’s assume that they come back the next day. Now you’ve got 110 visitors, of which 10 will again become return traffic.

Every day that goes by, you’re getting more traffic while you’re still only having to generate 100 new visitors. Over time, your traffic will continue to grow even if you don’t do any more work to find new people than you already are.

One of the best ways to build these relationships and generate return visitors is with our next traffic strategy – list building.

Generating Traffic Through An Email List

One of the biggest advantages of building an email list is that it lets you control your own traffic. If you have a list of people interested in your market, it doesn’t matter if Google, Facebook and every other traffic source shuts off tomorrow – you can still generate traffic just by sending out an email to your list.

And if you have a brand new page or website that you want to direct traffic to, you can do that as well.

You could set up a website in the next half hour, send an email

to your list and see traffic to your site within a few minutes.

Even when you’re paying for traffic, it’s pretty tough to get visitors within minutes of finishing a new site.

List building as a traffic strategy is a bit of a Catch-22, however. You won’t be able to generate that “on demand” traffic until you’ve built a list, and to build a list you need to get some traffic from other sources first.

That’s why it’s important to use all the strategies we’re discussing, but get those visitors to subscribe to your email list so you can contact them over and over again in the future.

Paid Traffic Methods

A lot of Internet marketers are intimidated by paid traffic. They might have been burned in the past, or they might be afraid of losing a lot of money. This is definitely a concern, so you need to approach paid traffic with a certain amount of caution.

But the fact is, if you do it right, paid traffic doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money to test, and once you figure out how to make it profitable (or just breaking even) it isn’t actually costing you anything- you put X dollars in and get Y dollars in return.

There are lots of different paid traffic sources so we can’t discuss them all in this report, but let’s look at a few of the most popular (and effective).

Pay Per Click

Pay per click, or PPC, advertising includes sources like Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter. You pay a certain amount for every person who clicks on your ad and visits your website. That amount can range from a few cents to several dollars, depending on the market and the keywords that you’re targeting.

If you’re not careful, PPC advertising can chew through a lot of money in a pretty short time so it’s important that you approach it correctly.

Make sure you’re not targeting really broad keywords that are going to get a ton of clicks but poorly targeted visitors.

Example: You probably wouldn’t want to target the keyword “lose weight” because it would cost you a fortune and those visitors could be looking for any number of things when they arrive at your site.

You would be better off targeting the keyword phrase “how to lose 10 pounds in a month” (assuming your website can help solve that problem) because while the amount of traffic wouldn’t be nearly as high, those people are looking for a very specific thing.

You should also set your daily budget to something you’re comfortable with. That way, if your ads just don’t convert for some reason, there’s a limit to how much you can lose.

Once you find a keyword/ad combination that is profitable, you can start to expand on it. Being successful with PPC advertising requires a lot of testing and tracking.

Banner Ads

People have been saying banner ads are dead for over 10 years, but the fact is they still work if you use them properly. If you just blast a bunch of banners with “punch the monkey” kind of stuff to as many websites as possible, chances are it’s not going to be very profitable.

But if you pick the sites where you want to advertise based on how relevant they are to your target market and design your banners effectively, they can still product a lot of traffic for relatively little cost.

Like PPC advertising, start small and track your results. Once you find a banner and/or website that’s working for you, start to expand those successful campaigns to other places.

Paid Ezine Ads

Paid ezine ads are another “old school” traffic generation strategy that can still work very well. Basically, you’re paying for an ad to another marketer’s email list. This could be a small ad placed in a longer newsletter or it could be a “solo” ad that is nothing but your offer.

This is a great way to leverage someone else’s list to get traffic to your own site (and hopefully onto your email list in the process).

The key here is to target your offer to the audience. Make sure you subscribe to that marketer’s list yourself and read several of their emails to see what kind of tone they use, and what sort of offers they promote.

You want to tailor your ad to appeal to the people who receive that person’s emails, so make sure you offer something of value and that what you’re offering is going to be appealing to the people who get the email.

Facebook

Facebook is a fairly new source of paid traffic, and is constantly changing as more and more people start to use it. But with hundreds of millions of users, and the ability to target very specific interests and demographics, you should definitely include it in your paid traffic strategy.

The key to using Facebook effectively is to remember that most people aren’t there to be sold to – they’re there to be social. Most Facebook users aren’t doing business there, even though it might seem that way to us internet marketers, so if you hit them with a high-pressure pitch (paid or not) it’s probably not going to go over so well.

Once again, it comes down to building relationships with people first so they know and trust you. Once you establish that trust, you can start to ease them over to your websites and other offers.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has given you a bit better idea of some of the ways that you can generate traffic to your website, but also what you should be doing with that traffic once it gets there.

New traffic sources constantly come and go, but most of the strategies we’ve discussed here have stood the test of time. While it never hurts to test new strategies and add them to the mix of what you’re doing, don’t let yourself get caught up in the latest “shiny object” that promises unlimited traffic with little or no work.

Those kinds of promises are generally too good to be true, and even if they do work as advertised it’s usually going to be short lived. Once all the people looking for a magic button start abusing the technique, it won’t take long for it to stop working.

If you build your traffic generation strategy on a solid foundation, you’ll be seeing more and more visitors coming to your website for years to come.

Have you ever wondered how important the Internet is for people? There are no hard and fast limits so as to the usage of the Internet. For casual and informal purposes, the Internet ends up being an important means of digital communications. On the other hand, big firms and companies need websites and domains for their promotional and advertisement purposes. So, the various websites and databases are used for different reasons and activities. What would you think if you came to know that websites can also be bought and sold to people? Yeah, that thought is a bit incredulous.

However, it is a solid truth. Websites are much in demand for the different purposes for people. Some need web domains to create and format blogs, portals and other sites. The business enterprises and firms need databases for the promotion of their products and services. So, selling and buying websites would be a rather profitable venture. It helps you to overcome the costs and expenses with bigger proceeds on the sales. The concept is rather simple. You buy websites, when they are at a low price. Then, sell them to other people at a high price. See? It is dead simple.

There are some rules so as to know the exact values of the websites. The thing is that there is a large bulk of websites on the Internet. These are actually defunct and failed websites. You can buy them at much less prices. Then, it is up to you. You have to update the websites into better and more advanced websites. It may be that there may be a great demand for websites for certain purposes. So, you can format your bought websites for that purpose. Then, sell them to the people, who actually need them.

The process of finding sellers and buyers of websites is a rather simple one. You need to know the people, who are offering their disused websites for cheap. These would want to get some money by selling their sites. So, you can agree to buy websites from such people at less prices and costs. Then, you need to look out for the prospective buyers of the websites. These would need some advanced websites for their business purposes. So, they would be willing to buy them at high prices. You may get some good money out of selling your improved websites and databases. Don’t wait, go ahead.

Internet has become one of the largest platforms of communication. It is the most effective technology available today. Building a website for school can prove to be extremely beneficial if it is done in the right way. It maybe time consuming and include a lot of effort to be put in for developing a website for the school, but it is very advantageous for the school community. The school website gives the school’s information and also clear idea about what they are good at. School websites will provide the up to dates, as well as help them to link between schools, their communities and also to the entire world.

Opportunities provided by a school website:

• Parents become more aware about the schools functioning, and also feel involved. Through the websites parents can be easily informed about the upcoming events like activities, exams and also tips that could help children. Thus websites play a vital role in removing the barrier between parents and the school.
• With the help of websites teacher’s can share their views and ideas with the rest of the faculty as well as the parents.
• Te website makes it easier for the parents to give the school and the teachers their valuable feedback.
• Parents get the opportunity to become well versed with the education system of their child.
• The website provides a platform for the school to build contacts and link with business, families as well as other schools. Especially for families who relocate very often, these websites become great sources for them.

Few elements necessary for a school website:

• Background of the school and other information like history and staff.
• Basic contact details should always be mentioned in the website like, address, phone number, etc.
• The website should contain all the day to day information or notice like upcoming inter and intra school events, holidays parent teacher’s meeting, etc.
• School websites should also avail blogs and forums to give an opportunity to have an interaction.
• The necessary teaching aids, teaching materials, journals, lesson plan, and other education resources should be provided.
• Photographs and write-ups about school, classroom, school trips, etc. should be put up. Also suggestions to be given to parents, assisting them to help their children at home.

Creating websites of your own is the same as being a publisher, but a website is always convenient for both students and educators. Here you make your own website without being criticized and it also saves time. Students should be encouraged to make the website for the school as they have more knowledge about technology than adults. Thus it becomes a learning experience for them, making them more versatile in what they do and create.

Many a times people tend to consider the school website to be a substitute for all the face-to-face interactions. It is a very wrong notion that they hold. The website should be perceived as an extra resource benefit provided to the world by the schools.

SEO in simple context is a process that helps from smallest to biggest websites rank higher in the search engines, invites the qualified potential customers to the website to ultimately turn them into the conversions or buyers.

Any website cannot afford to be on an island, it needs measures, tactics that can help it row the boat to its potential market – this is what SEO (search engine optimization) helps with.

These are the 5 key reasons explaining why SEO is a must for websites that are looking for generating huge customer base, revenues without investing much.

1. Conversation rates are bound to improve

The websites that operate with the tactics or strategies of SEO loads faster and leverages an easy experience to the users over the website. They make the websites easy to navigate and read which ultimately acts a catalyst to hold the attention of the visitors & then turns them into subscribers, loyal customers or the returning visitors.

2. Brand awareness in increased

SEO helps the business websites rank high on the SERP (Search Engines Result Pages) of either Google, Bing or Yahoo. It helps to evoke the great presence of the brand amongst the list of competitors.

For a digital business, search engines are a great way to help brands emerge as strongest as customers only believe a website that ranks higher and is quite renowned between the peers as well.

3. Eliminates the strict competition

If there are two business of the same type in a similar industry, one’s website is fully optimized as per Google algorithms and other’s one is not, whom do you think will retract the great number of visitors or customers? Of course, the first one.

The strategies hosted by SEO are very clear and to the point and knows the exact way where business need to make way with. This helps each business stand out from its competitors and early time to win as many customers as possible.

4. Direct marketing channel to create a huge customer base

SEO is one of the most affordable marketing strategies that alone can invite the footfalls of the customers. By spending a few bucks, businesses can easily attract the targeted traffic on their website without spending hefty bucks on ancient, old school or costly marketing activities. It is one rooftop that takes cares of all pillars of the website.

5. User-centric websites are guaranteed

Earlier SEO was all about improving the ranking & visibility of website but today it is much more than that. Many progressions in this initiative now allow it to take care of the user experience as well.

It ensures that websites are uncluttered, clean & well-structured and is compelling enough to make the visitor’s stay longer, thereby, decreases the number of bounce rates and adds on to the increased page views as well.

Provides relevant content on and around the website – that is crisp, problem-solving and well-informed to the audience.

These were the few benefits that explain why businesses need to invest in SEO practices straightaway.

The art of aromatherapy has been around for many years, and is becoming increasingly popular with people from all over the world. It is a massive market and thousands are being spent on essential oils and various other products every year. If you practice aromatherapy or even if you are interested in this topic then you might want to think about purchasing an aromatherapy turnkey website to cash in on this trend.

A turnkey website is one that is already set up, and all you need to do is start promoting it. If you are simply interested in aromatherapy for pleasure, then you can use the website to write about the different essential oils, and your experience with them. You can share your passion with other like-minded people online. You will also be able to write reviews about different products such as candles, burners, oils, and diffusers, and add your affiliate link to earn some extra pocket-money.

We could all do with earning some extra money in these tough economic times, so why not monetize your aromatherapy turnkey website in different ways too. You can apply for an AdSense account, and when someone clicks on these ads you will earn some money. AdSense is a great way to earn money with little effort because your website visitors do not even need to purchase anything. When your website becomes popular you can also offer advertising space to other aromatherapy websites and vendors who will happily pay you to promote them.

These kind of turnkey websites are not only beneficial to those that use aromatherapy for pleasure – they can be useful for those in the health and wellness business too. You will be able to use the website to reach out to a wider market online, and to advertize your health and wellness services, as well as your aromatherapy products. Those without a beautiful looking website in this business are losing out to competitors that do.

Those in this business can also benefit from how convenient a turnkey website is. All you need to do is open up your favorite search engine and search for turnkey websites for sale. You will then be able to purchase a website you like, and be up and running in no time. No more paying through the nose for web designers and waiting for your website to be developed. A turnkey aromatherapy website will already be set up and ready for you to take over the online world.

Most public figures have started to tweet and blog in order to keep their fan base or followers up to date with their day to day life and with their beliefs about everyday happenings. But the most important thing that we must note is that public figures, celebrities, actors and other artistes have the least security for their website and social media presence. This means that they are the favorite tool to spread rumors and misinformation through. This article deals with the need for extra security for the website of a public figure, famous personality or celebrity.

Soft Target

Celebrity websites are a soft target for hackers and publicity seeking geeks. The celebrity has a ready fan base who will immediately be tapped for the attention. The ultimate aim for hackers and script kiddies is to become infamous through negative publicity. The simplest way to do that is to attack websites with the least security and which have been made in a haphazard manner. Compared to the website of a Government or Military, a celebrity, singer, artiste, sculptor, writer will have a less sophisticated website. They will definitely not have as many checks and balances to ensure security and integrity of the data on the website. A simple breach can lead to a huge amount of misinformation or negative publicity being floated around.

Exclusive Announcements

The back-end of a celebrity website is usually buzzing with new announcements of the personal or professional life of the celebrity. This means that sensitive information like the announcement of a new product launch or new movie launch or even personally sensitive or private information like the birth of a child or marriage or a relationship is ripe material for paparazzi and snooping fans who want the latest inside information of a celebrities life.

Personal Information

Recently, actor Charlie Sheen made an announcement on live TV that he was HIV positive. The lives of public figures are becoming more transparent and even more open, with the advent of technology and the internet. This means that there are lesser secrets that a public figure can keep and even more information that they must share with their fan base. Any information or misrepresentation on their website can lead to panic and even chaos amongst their fans and followers. Religious leaders and ideologues require to be more careful and correct with the information they publishinate through online channels, since their online advice is as good as black and white and can be used by future generations to come.

Confidential Business

Many celebrities and public figures who endorse brands and products may need to be extra careful when dealing with website security. This is mainly because whatever adverse publicity they get will also affect the brands that they endorse and support. Website defacement and information leak can severely impact celebrities and their business dealings with corporates and clients.

Social Impact

The public perception and social reach of a celeb website can also do damage to their ultimate brand value and equity if there is a compromise or defacement of their website. People want to see their idols and father figures as being blemishless and spotless but there is no fool proof way of ensuring integrity without upgrading security. Although security and convenience is inversely related, there is no shortcut to peace of mind.

Teaching can be intimidating. If you have taken on the task of homeschooling, it can be especially intimidating. How do you cover all the necessary subject matter and create the links for higher level thinking, which is the ultimate goal of education.

Technology has increased a number of great opportunities that any teacher can reference. Authority sites, museum sites, curriculum sites all offer ideas and opportunities.

Most of these sites also encourage project based learning and have ideas or interactive opportunities that community members can participate in. Take a look at your local libraries and museums to see what programs may be available in your area.

Some education websites also offer project ideas that meet new Core Standards for education. How do you pick a project?

1) Pick a core area and look at what the “meatier” end result should be. At the end of a particular unit or year, students should minimally be able to do what? (Remember that Core Standards were devised as minimum requirements for higher education and employment skills.) These “meatier” content and skill requirements are a great place to aim for deeper learning. Because projects take time, and have lots of “moving” parts, they make it easier to use integrated learning and teach to more than one modality in the same project.

2. Develop projects that target multiple standards. Use project based learning to “spiral” in standards you may have already targeted for continued practice and assessment. If you are a homeschooling parent, you will be more acutely aware of what areas your child is mastering and what areas need further understanding. Target those areas that need greater understanding and create ways to tie those skills to another project. When students see the links between ideas, they will more quickly develop the necessary literacy.

3. Project based learning encourages a higher level of critical thinking. If we want the knowledge to “stick,” then we must help students think critically. When designing or using lesson plans from project based learning curricula make sure that it targets your end result needs. Always keep you end result, or the driving questions, in mind. Design and implement with critical thinking in mind, and make sure the project based learning lesson demands it.

There are of course other reasons why project based learning works, especially for kinesthetic learners, and there is so much research to support it. I think we need to stop being afraid to try new ideas and to teach in new ways. We need to embrace education websites that support integrated learning and project based lessons and stop worrying that change will ensue. Change will ensue, and it is often a good thing — if not a great thing!

Let’s do what’s best for our students, our children, and our community and focus on project based learning and units that focus on deeper learning of the content, where students integrate the material, learn to think critically, and apply their knowledge in new contexts.

Check out the tools and resources that the education websites have to offer and join the growing number of home school parents, public and private schools and after school programs that are successfully using integrated learning and project based lessons to redefine education standards in a positive way.

Starting out designing your new website is an exciting time, but also one that can be a bit scary. If you have looked up SEO at all you will be greeted with tons of interesting and lively names for things that you likely haven't even thought of before. What's a bot? What is keyword stuffing? What's a doorway? What's a hub? Luckily once you get going, these things make more and more sense and you'll be on your way to including the good things while excluding the bad.

SEO or search engine optimization is something that you need to get really good at if you want your site to rank well with search engines. The better and more trustworthy the information is on your site, the better it will rank once someone starts a search. The better it ranks the better your site traffic and the better the site traffic, the better your site will become, especially if you are selling items. After all, you want people to shop at your site, not the one next in the search line.

We have all found ourselves on websites that are less than user friendly. You know the ones, they have a bad navigation, they don't lead you to what you are looking for, the font is too large or too small and nothing is organized well. These pages usually don't rank well, if at all, with search engines. They are annoying to be on, are useless and a waste of time.

Ideally then, what you want your site to be is the complete opposite of those. You want it to look nice, to look fresh, to be welcoming, to be full of information and to be easy to navigate. The last thing you want is a design that looks like a 4 year old did it as that is off putting, even for a site that sells toys. You want it clean, sharp and interesting for the consumer. After all, they can just click out of there if it's not appealing and then where would you be?

Articles that pertain to what your site is about, using proper keywords and being informative and interesting will keep the guest's attention. They will want to read more about their query. They will want to navigate around to find out more and they will likely come back again and again. Traffic equals success in websites.

As a start-up consultant I often find myself putting in a little extra effort when it comes to getting the ball rolling. Why, you ask? It’s simple, start-ups only succeed when everyone gives 110% and sometimes even that isn’t enough.

Anyway, let me tell you of a rather enlightening experience I recently had when helping a new company with their grass-roots marketing campaign. First we sat the team down and explained how we were going to do some cold-calling; phone, person-to-person meetings. Really getting out there and going for it, leaving no stone unturned.

The startup company I am helping with is a B2B company, so we started gathering lists of businesses of certain types. We went to the local chambers of commerce and grabbed their printed directories, we used the old phone books, and googled the crap out of all possible categories within our target market. We went to online directory websites 300 Google pages deep, and since we were after easy low-hanging fruit, we even went to Google maps to find home-based businesses in our specified target business categories.

What we found was quite alarming, although not all too surprising in hindsight.

When it came to the websites listed on Google which were more or less directory type websites, it became obvious that the information was next to worthless – even those on the first few pages of a search. Most all phone numbers were disconnected, out of service, or now belonged to someone else who had no idea what on Earth we were talking about and never heard of the company we asked for – I am talking nearly 75%.

When we went to the actual addresses of businesses listed on Google Maps in various cities we found apartment buildings with new tenants, we found unoccupied homes for sale, and we found some addresses to not even exist. When we did find someone, they often said they didn’t do that anymore, or a renter they had did, but moved. Sometimes it was a former spouse, now divorced who had moved out.

How were the local Chamber of Commerce printed directories? Well, a little better actually, but not anything close to reliable, at least a quarter of the companies no longer existed and remember this is within one-year, as the directories are generally printed annually at Chambers of Commerce. How was the phone book? Well, the phone books were about the same, only a little worse than the Chambers’ publications – and I guess that makes sense? What a waste of money for those companies that advertised?

Moral of the Story?

You cannot trust the data online, you cannot trust the printed data, and you sure as hell can’t trust online directory websites which are produced for the best SEO results, but never monitored, pruned or updated.

So what’s my advice? Don’t waste your time running around, mailing out brochures, or paying a team of sales people to knock on doors unless you know for a fact that your information is updated and accurate. I advise to buy lists; contact names, email addresses, phone numbers from competent data vendors who are constantly updating their lists. My advice to Google is simple, ‘get your shet together Google’ and stop promoting bogus websites to first few pages. To all of you startups doing business out there – think on this.