By Sean Cohen

Companies eager to save time and money often take automation too far in their customer support. Each customer has a unique question, and deserves a unique answer. Even if you save time by copying and pasting stock replies, change the opening and closing to make the message sound less robotic.

Be Clear, But Sincere

When responding to customers’ e-mail, be sincere and to the point. Before sending a message, try turning the tables. Ask yourself, “Would this answer satisfy me if I were the customer?”

Take that extra moment to give your customer the help he deserves. It might mean the difference between a satisfied customer and a credit card chargeback!

Offer Live Customer Support

E-mail has become an acceptable form of communication. But, live customer support is still necessary. The plethora of information available online can be overwhelming to customers, especially those new to the Internet!

Single your company out from the crowd by providing customers with a real person to talk to. Live phone support is an invaluable way to foster trust. When your customer has reached the end of his Internet rope, and just needs help, your toll free number is the answer he’s looking for.

Make Sure Your Support Reps Have All The Answers

The presence of phone support will do no good if your staff doesn’t know your product! Customer support reps should be warm and friendly, and willing to help with any aspect of your product.

What a good feeling it is to talk to someone who feels confident in his product. It’s even better if he’s knowledgeable enough to solve your problem without transferring you all around the company!

Provide Stand-Out Service; Gain Lifelong Customers

Too many e-businesses skimp on customer service, hiding behind web sites and message boards. Customer support is an integral part of every company, even those operating solely online. Be one of the few to offer stellar service, and gain customers for life!

Tip #1: Don’t Submit your URL manually to search engines

Search engines like Google, Altavista and Yahoo all have options
for you to manually submit your site. Before submitting,
however, it is important to make sure of the following:

1. All pages on your site are complete. Search engine spiders
won’t touch incomplete sites.
2. Your site is not full of spam and/or excessive use of
keywords. Yet again, spiders won’t touch spam sites, which means
your site will be skipped over if it contains lots of spam.

Better then submitting your site is to have the search engine spider find your site. Gain a link from some other indexed site. An easy idea is a forum.

. Submitting multiple times to the same search
engine will get you no where. In fact, they might keep your site
from ever having a chance at being listed on the search engine.

Tip #2: Use keywords to get spiders to come to your site

Search engine spiders absolutely love sites with good,
well-placed and well-used keywords and key phrases. In other
newsletters, we have covered the correct use of  keywords and
key phrases, so you might already be familiar with it. If not,
we’ll briefly touch on it right now.

Keywords are words that are used frequently on a site that
search engines look for. The key to correct usage of keywords is
to make them fit naturally throughout a piece of content and not
look like spam. Before writing your content for your site, take
a second to decide what the content is about. Then make a list
of keywords or key phrases that seem to fit with the topic at
hand. Next, write the content and try to sprinkle in the
keywords or key phrases throughout the content in a natural,
non-distracting way. When you are done writing the content, you
should count the number of keywords or key phrases. Then divide
that by the total number of words in content. If the number you
get is between 1-3%, you’re good to go. If it’s below 1%, try to
naturally add in keywords or key phrases. If it’s above 5%, try
to take out keywords or key phrases. Aim for the perfect balance
of between 1 and 3%.

Tip #3: Use links

Having another site link to you will make spiders that visit the
first site come to your site as a result of the link. Many
owners of sites related to yours are happy to post a link to
your site on their links page. Some might require what is called
“reciprocal linking”. This basically means that if they place a
link to your site on their page, they want you to return the
favor by posting a link to their page on your site. Doing so
helps both sites better gain the attention of search engine
spiders and helps them both to get listed quickly.

Tip #4: Install a blog on your site

Blogs are extremely popular and quickly listed by search
engines. Places like Google are known to index(or list a
site/blog) far faster than they list regular web sites. Blogs
are listed by search engines like Google within days of being
created, whereas it can take weeks and months for search engines
to notice a site.

Installing a blog on your site is really easy. All you have to
do is install a program such as WordPress on your web site and
then use that to make blog postings. If you run a sports site,
for instance, you could try making twice a week posts on the
blog about sports news. Doing so will help your site as a whole
get noticed quicker by search engines.

If you apply just one of the tips above to your web site, you
will get listed quicker than expected.

M Bistro Review

23800 Detroit Avenue
Westlake, Ohio 44145
440-250-5550

It’s a beautiful day in Westlake, Ohio and a Brunch sounds like the perfect way to start things out.  After doing some quick Google searches it’s decided on M Bistro at the corner of Clague and Detroit.  I know I’m in for a treat as I survey the parking lot – Lexus, BMW, Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar – you get the picture.

As we enter M Bistro we are promptly greeted and seated at a table with just a short wait.  The layout offers the brunch items in the center of the restaurant with rooms leading off the center.   This helps segregate things and we’re thankful we were not seated in the area designated for crying babies.

Service is king here as Andy get’s the drinks flowing. We choose to start things out with a perfect brunch addition - Bloody Marys for everyone. 

While waiting for the drinks to arrive I scope out the items on the buffet.  It seems like they have everything here.  If you can’t find something you’re just not hungry.  The make to order omelets are calling my name…  western with cheese sounds like the order of the day.  Peruse the buffet and add sausage, bacon, sausage gravy and biscuits to round out a perfect first course.

Time for the second course and I’m off to the cold seafood bar.  I load up with jumbo shrimp and smoked salmon.   If you’re a little obsessive compulsive you’ll appreciate having your very own cream cheese and single serve ketchup bottles.

The Manager stops by just to make sure everything is A OK.  All is well for us.  Just then a table 18 strolls in without a reservation, no problem here, lots of room and they are accommodated by the staff without any fuss.

If you’re looking for a way to avoid cooking and feel like you can go with only one meal for the day, M-Bistro is the perfect place to spend a Sunday afternoon. 

Our check:

3 Sunday Brunch

$20.95 x 3 = $62.85

3 Bloody Marys

$7.00 x 3 = $21.00

Add Ohio Sales Tax and the total comes to $90.35.   While there’s cheaper places: M-Bistro is great when you are looking for something a little special.

But how exactly do these sites help your site and its rankings? By sending huge amounts of traffic and getting you a good ranking on search engines.

There are two types of social sites. One is social networking and the other type is social bookmarking. Social networking sites provide you an easy way to connect with people who share similar interests like you. Sites like MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster are popular among users. These sites have a huge user base and provide an excellent opportunity for advertising your site. There are also specialized social networking sites like 43Things, MomJunction, Mothersclick which cater to specific interests.

Some social networking sites group people with common interests, but some sites are “traditional networking sites” and allow you to search for friends based on your interests. In any case you will always have a larger audience for showcasing your site. Sites like Facebook and MySpace allow you to post your advertisements and promote your products, provided you are not spamming. If you have a really good site, you will surely find a large visitor base just by showcasing your site on your profile.

Social bookmarking sites provide you easy way to store, organize, manage your bookmarks as well as share them with your friends. You can bookmark any URL or page you liked and even mark them for public or private viewing. Social bookmarking sites also provide you with the option of tagging your bookmarks. Some of the bookmarking sites link directly to your URL’s thus helping your site in getting valuable back links and quick indexing. Sites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious are known to send huge traffic to your site. If you manage to get on the front page of these sites, you should be prepared to handle a huge number of visitors to your site.

Search engines spiders love social sites and usually follow links on these sites. This means if you have your site link on social networking and bookmarking sites, your site will be indexed quickly.

If you happen to be using Wordpress for your blog, you should use some good plugins like Socialmarker, Socializer and Addthis. These plugins provide your site visitors a quick option to bookmark your site. Getting bookmarked from different users and different bookmarking sites will definitely help your site rank better on search engines. Some plugins like Onlywire automatically bookmark your post to 20 different bookmarking sites as soon as you publish your post.

It is a known fact that the video and photo sharing sites like Youtube and Flickr are visited by millions of people everyday. If you think out of the box and use your creativity, your published video will get your site the traffic you’ve always wanted. Some video sharing sites like Metacafe also pay you a part of their revenue just for publishing your video.

Like it or not, social sites have become an integral part of the internet. You need to use this opportunity to you advantage before it is too late.

Obviously you do not want to buy an existing web site for your new business as you wish to create a web site that accurately reflects your business vision, but there are a number of advantages to buying an existing domain name and if you do not yet have your heart set on a new domain name you will likely find an existing domain name available at a price not much greater than you will pay for a fresh name and an existing domain name brings a number of advantages.

One of the primary advantages of an existing domain name is that it already has traffic flowing toward it. Obviously the amount of traffic will vary greatly depending on what the current owner has done for promotion but any traffic is more than the zero visitors a fresh name will deliver.

Another advantage is from search engine optimization. Many domainers will have at least put in a small amount of time optimizing their domain name portfolio for search engines. Others put in a great deal of time and effort targeting key words and making sure the domain name is listed. It takes time for various domain names to work their way into search engine listings and if someone has already done that work for you then you are ready to capitalize on their groundwork as soon as you take over the name.

A third advantage is that the wild frontier of short, targeted, key word domain names is over. It is not impossible but very difficult to find an unregistered domain name in a short, catchy phrase and even more so if you have a specific key word in mind. However, many of the domainers who registered these domain names did so as an investment rather than a long-term project of their own and so are willing to sell. The only way to acquire many of these great domain names is by purchasing an existing domain name. You will not be able to find one to register fresh.

Choosing the right domain name for your internet business enterprise can be an exciting and challenging time but if you take the time to learn more about the available domain names you can buy then you just might find the bargain of a lifetime and start off your business with a bang.

Here are some colors along with the emotions and symbols they stimulate:

1) WHITE- purity, innocence, peace, perfection, chastity, sterility, cleanliness. In general, white creates a cool and refreshing feeling.

2) BLACK- night, space, authority, sturdiness, reliability, power, constancy, prudence, wisdom, classy, elegance, submission, mourning, demons, witches. Black is a controversial color as it can symbolize both good and evil.

3) RED- love, excitement, warmth, heat, fire, blood, passion, power, aggression, action. Use red as an attention grabber. It works better as an accent color rather than a background one.

4) PINK- romantic, affection, sensuality, tenderness, calm, soft hearted, softness, femininity. Pink tends to reduce aggression.

5) BLUE- sky, ocean, water, temperature, ice, coolness, mist, shadow, travel, freedom, truth, solitude, wisdom, trust, loyalty, peaceful, calmness, intelligence, dedication, masculinity. Different shades of blue convey opposite meanings. Light blue is peaceful while dark blue is depressing.

6) PURPLE- royalty, dignity, luxury, wealth, sophistication, feminine, passion, romance, sensitivity, coolness, mist, shadows, mysterious, mystic.

7) GREEN- money, calm, envy, greed, nature, life, youth, renewal, hope, vigor, fertility, rebirth, freedom, guilt. Different shades of green have different meanings. Dark green-cool. masculine, conservative, wealth. Emerald green- immortality. Olive green- peace. Green is the easiest color on the eye.

Yellow- light, purity, understanding, brightness, warmth, playfulness, creativity. Lemon yellow is the most eye fatiguing color. Yellow can increase irritability so yellow should not be used as a main color, only as an accent. Yellow enhances concentration.

9) ORANGE- autumn, youthful, fire, warmth, contentment, fruitfulness, wholesomeness, strong, generous, endurance, strength, ambition. Orange is the color most associated with appetite so it would be a good color choice for a website selling food products. Orange also makes a product seem more suitable for everyone and more affordable.

10) BROWN- wood, comfort, strength, earth, solid, reliable, credible, maturity, humility, conservancy. Light brown conveys genuineness.

11) GRAY- exclusivity. Enhances the psychological response of other colors.

In general, red, orange, and yellow are exciting colors while purple, blue and green are calming ones.

Use the color that symbolizes the emotion you want to convey as the primary color on your website. Add 1-2 other colors to reinforce this emotion. The colors used for your background, header, graphics, text, highlighting, headlines, etc. will all contribute to your website’s influence on your visitors.

Here’s why.

Blogging is really just basic communication. All it takes is a computer and an internet connection and you can set up a free blog on one of the many blogging services.

Its flexibility is also one of its outstanding features. There are numerous platforms to blog from, from Wordpress to Joomla to Drupal, and dozens more in between. And even if you don’t want to host your blog, you can set one up at one of the many free blog services like Blogger or Wordpress.com. And even if you use the free services, you can always take your blog to your own server at a later date.

Many people also feel that blogs create an intimate atmosphere for learning and research. A blog can create a simple credibility that can help sell your products because it helps create an “Everyman” aura, that is, a stripped down, hype-free way to talk about products.

If your opinions get read and respected, you might find that your credibility will begin to increase around a particular subject. People will begin to look to you to offer your opinions on forthcoming issues. And once you are established and considered an expert in a niche, your ability to sell from your blog will increase dramatically.

Once you are established, don’t be afraid to ask people to sign up to your list. This will be a list where you can reach your readers at a moment’s notice. A great way to utilize this list is to send a message to it when you have made a new post to your blog, and encourage your readers to not only read your new article but comment on it.

By using your list in this manner, your subscribers won’t feel that you are using your list merely to sell to them. Of course, you can sell to them from your blog, and if your readers begin to comment on your posts, you are helping to enhance your blog’s stickiness.

Blogging is a terrific tool for any Internet marketing business. Done in the correct manner (meaning that if you intend to build your credibility, you should blog in the most personal manner possible), you’ll be blogging your way to success in no time.