Do This if You Want Your Email Banned May 3, 2009 Seems sort of silly to start an article off this way, but I am amazed by how many people still do not run their computers with adequate anti-virus protection. While Greendays Group hosted Email protects against inbound Email threats it is not intended to be a replacement for running protection at the local computer level. Most folks that don’t run anti-virus protection do this because they don’t want to “slow down” their computers or because they don’t want to pay for the updates. However, this is simply not a good reason.  If a computer is slowed down by the software designed to protect it, it is time to update your computers!  If you haven’t yet invested in protection for your computer, spend the $50 a year and pick up a system like System Mechanic Professional by Iolo.    It is a complete bundle of tools that will keep a Windows based PC running well.  I have found their system easy to use.  Plus, it seems to work well even on older machines.  This tool is more than just anti-virus and gives you the ability to tweak setting to maximize your system performance and security.   The annual fee includes keeping your library of anti-virus definitions up to date. There are plenty of other dedicated anti-virus systems out there.  Another that I’ve had fantastic success with is from Panda Security.  Their system is robust and can protect up to 3 PCs for $50 per year, which is a generous licensing arangement.    Keeping your anti-virus system updated is critical because viruses are always changing.  It doesn’t do any good to run virus protection using definitions that are one to three (or more) years old.  It is just an invitation for a disaster, for example, having your Email account shut down! Here’s what happens: Your computer that’s not protected properly becomes infected. A virus creates privileges for itself to take over your computer when you aren’t using it and turns it into a spam zombie. Your computer becomes a part of an international network of hacked computers sending out spam at an alarming rate using your Email account. Your Email host (including Greendays Group) notices a significant bump in activity coming out of your Email account.  Furthermore, there is a spike of responses saying that you are sending spam. Your Email account is immediately suspended until absolute proof is provided that your computer is no longer a threat. Your account cannot send or receive Email because it is blocked. Once a system is infected, it is a significant (and expensive) undertaking to completely clean it from an infection.  It can take a tech an entire day (or more) to fully clean a system.  (Figure up to 8 hours x $100 /hour = $800!)  Furthermore, if your computer is a part of a network of unprotected systems, there is a high likelihood that other computers may also have become infected.  Your tech will need to scan and potentially repair ALL of the systems in your office.  You can see how this bill can add up quickly. While this may seem like basic information, we run into a handful of customers each year that ignore this threat.  They figure as long as they are running protection, even if it hasn’t been updated in a year or two, they should be safe.  Experience has shown this isn’t the case.  An ounce of prevention is indeed worth a pound of cure! So, if you want to end up with suspended Email accounts, do nothing and run out-dated anti-virus protection or don’t run any protection at all!  But if you take your business seriously, be sure your systems are adequately protected with an anti-spam system that auto-updates itself and keeps your system truly clean. Search Engine Market Share Implications  April 12, 2009 Nielsen Online just released data regarding search engine traffic and the information is quite interesting.  From March 2008 through March 2009 overall search engine traffic is up by nearly 17%.  That’s a big number and ties in with other findings suggesting that search engines are quickly replacing the Yellow Pages when people want to connect with businesses. Both Google and Yahoo saw growth but Google is still the dominant force in search with over 64% of the market share and roughly 28% year-over-year growth.  Yahoo is in second place with almost 16% market share and roughly 2% growth.  In fact, if you add up Google, Yahoo, MSN /Live, AOL, and Ask -these five sites represent about 96% of all search engine traffic.  By comparison, all combined Yellow Pages online search engines (such as DEX) account for just 0.4% of all search requests.  Given this information: Avoid paying extra fees in Yellow Page advertising for insertion into their search engines -as there simply isn’t a significant value in potential results. Avoid using one of the so-called search engine optimization experts that will place you into “thousands” of websites.  These are of little to now value. Be careful about using advertising dollars in search engines that have little to no traffic.  Pay-per-click advertising should be concentrated in Google and then Yahoo. Our conclusion:  A properly constructed search engine strategy will concentrate on the top 5 search engines and that is it. Here are the full year-over-year stats from Nielsen: Provider Searches (000) YOY Growth Share of Searches All Search 9.522,853 16.7% 100.0% Google 6,113,906 27.6% 64.2% Yahoo! 1,505,426 1.7% 15.8% MSN /Windows Live 982,661 0.3% 10.3% AOL 356,569 6.6% 3.7% Ask 197,957 -0.7% 2.1% My Web 59,597 -15.1% 0.6% Comcast 57,605 30.2% 0.6% Yellow Pages (all) 37,295 N/A 0.4% NexTag 22,432 -23.7% 0.2% Dogpile 19,461 0.7% 0.2% Blogging 102 March 5, 2009 Once you’ve decided that a Blog is an important part of your marketing mix and once you’ve made the commitment to make it happen, it is important to take a step back and understand a bit about how the technology works. Blogging isn’t simply the posting of ideas online.  It is about accessibility to information.  It is about facilitating connections with your target audience. One way this happens is via something called RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  It is a defined format that allows frequently updated works such as blogs to be “pushed” to recipients via a feed.  This “web feed” usually includes the title of the blog post and a snippet of summarized text. Using feed readers, subscribers can see all new articles posted to them from whichever blogs they’ve subscribed to.  Here is a fantastic summary on how RSS works: A recently added feature here at Greendays Group allows content to be summarized from any web page and converted into an RSS feed without you having to lift a finger. This nifty feature helps make blogging a reality for our customers without their having to learn any new software.  Our system will compile all of the updates you’ve made in a day and “push” them to any feed subscribers for the next day.  Now that you understand how RSS works and that the Greendays Group system handles this with ease, our next article will deal with how to set up your blogging page. Blogging 101 March 1, 2009 Greendays Group makes it super easy to have your own blog.  Simply dedicate a page within our content management system, and you are half-way there already! In the next series of articles, we will be detailing how to build a Blog using the Greendays Group system and how to manage and maintain the information once you’ve started. Before we dive into the details, let’s discuss the advantage of having a Blog associated with your Site. There are a few key reasons to have a Blog: To demonstrate to your target audience that you are an Authority in your given profession. To create a stream of communication to your target audience that will help educate and thus motivate them to some action. To deploy unique, fresh, changing content that Search Engines appreciate which will in turn help to improve your site’s Search Engine Rankings. Be aware of the commitment required to make a Blog work:  A Blog requires ongoing effort in order to maintain it.   In our own testing, we’ve found that a Blog should be updated at a minimum of twice per month.  The best performing Blogs are actually updated Daily.  Most professional oriented blogs simply won’t have the time to manage content on a daily basis, but this establishes the range of update frequency.  Best performing blogs are updated daily. The minimum updating frequency is every two weeks. If you cannot commit to this level of frequent updating, investing your time in a Blog will not be effective and we would recommend not pursuing it as a concept. The good news is that no one is saying you must have LONG articles in your Blog.  In fact, we encourage you to keep your articles short and perhaps break them apart into a series, much like what we are doing here.  We recommend the 15-minute rule.  Crank out your first draft of your concept in 15 minutes.  Clean it and post it.  By the time you are done, you shouldn’t need to spend more than 45 minutes from initial draft to final draft. We also recommend that you keep things fresh and current by adding your insights to a given issue taking place in your local community that would be of interest to your readers.  Use the news to inspire you and then write your thoughts, your suggestions, etc., regarding that topic. Next time, we’ll dive into more details on using the Greendays Group system to launch your blog… specifically RSS and how it will help you compete in a world of 50,000,000+ blogs. A Warning About Domain Renewal Scams February 1, 2009 At Greendays Group we take a very different approach to Domain Name Registration.  We handle all the work so you don’t have to worry about it at all.  We monitor the domains and we make sure they are paid for on time so you are never at risk of losing your domain. Because we directly manage the domain, including handling payment for renewal, our customers can ignore all the “junk” they receiving warning them they are about to lose their domain. One such scam is a company called Domain Renewal Group.  They send a very official looking expiration notice and tell you that you must renew as soon as possible.  They very cleverly make the notice look like an existing bill you need to pay.  They hope that the bill will go straight to your accountant and that it will be paid without a second thought. This particular company charges $30 per year for each domain.  That’s TWICE what we charge at Greendays Group.  (And remember, you always get a FREE domain by hosting with Greendays Group.) BEWARE the scam.  Instruct your staff NOT to pay such bills.  If you ever have a question about a Greendays Group managed domain, simply Email or call us and we will be happy to help.

Archive: 2008 Articles: Do This if You Want Your Email Banned Search Engine Market Share Implications  Blogging 102 Blogging 101 A Warning About Domain Renewal Scams