• web access will not be a luxury any more
• the majority of web users will live in emerging markets (within four years, China is expected to be home to 800 million people using the internet; that is more than the United States, India, France, Germany and the UK taken together)
• about 80% of all internet users will access the web from a mobile
• the internet will go social, and allow customers and companies to engage with each other

Online is also reaching into the offline world. The BCG researchers say that every household already researches about $3,000 worth of goods online before buying them in traditional stores. Digital, the researchers say, cannot be an add-on. Businesses have to adapt their people, processes and structures for the digital economy.

Paul Zwillenberg of BCG says that entrepreneurs building a digital business are outperforming rivals who do not embrace the web economy.  BBC technolgy.

If you are a business owner and you do not have a web presence the chances are that you are losing out on business. Even if you do not sell products or service online and are only a brick and mortar business you will have to future proof your business. Technology giant IBM estimates that by 2015, one trillion devices will be internet-connected. This is a mind boggling number!

“Every household already researches about $3,000 worth of goods online before buying them in traditional stores” – the business with an effective web presence will win in this instance. The younger generation even now research online before they purchase a product or research to use a service. The brick and mortar only shop and service providers lose out big time without an online presence.

The bottom line is all businesses need a web presence these days. Gone are the days when you had a choice of trading without a website. Lack of a website will impact your profit immensley. And the more you engage with your prospects and customers with blog posts, social media and newsletters the better for your business.

Over at Microsoft headquarters, the mood was more upbeat. “Time to pop open the champagne because based on the latest data from Net Applications, IE6 usages in the US has now officially dropped below 1%,” blogged Roger Capriotti, Microsoft’s director of Internet Explorer marketing. “We hope this means more developers and IT pros can consider IE6 a ‘low priority’ at this point and stop spending their time having to support such an outdated browser,” he added.

“I think it was rated one of the worst software products of all time by one tech magazine at the time of its release,” he said. The browser was plagued by security issues which has its own knock-on effect, he thinks. Industry watchers have predicted that despite Google’s current marketing woes, Chrome could overtake IE as the leading global browser in 2012.

If you are using Internet Explorer in your laptop or PC please upgrade to the latest version. The older versions had so many security issues. Better still switch to Chrome. It is faster and you can type your Google query in the browser window itself instead of going to Google and typing the keywords. Makes life a bit easier.

A very merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to all of you!

Keep this in mind when you are getting a new website for your business. it is all the more important to think ahead about having a blog and schedule for writing posts. Make this a priority for your business growth. If you write about the benefits of your products often or keep updating the blog with new products, seasonal sale etc your google ranking does not get affected. If you update your website only once in three years ( I have seen older content in business sites) you are bound to lose your ranking and the traffic will drop.

So get smart and install a blog on your business site. Write posts regularly – allocate writing posts to a staff member. Or write posts well ahead and schedule them at intervals.

Whichever is easier for you. Just make time to write your posts and publish regularly without fail. Your business will reap the benefits with more traffic and higher sales. WordPress websites come with blogs installed. This makes it much easier to start writing posts immediately. Contact us for your WordPress business website and blog.

His quotes were so poignant. I love this the best “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Over six months they grabbed 20GB of data made up of 120,000 wrongly sent messages. Some of the intercepted correspondence contained user names, passwords, and details of corporate networks.

The problem arises because of the way organisations set up their email systems. While most have a single domain for their website, many use sub-domains for individual business units, regional offices or foreign subsidiaries. Dots or full stops are used to separate the words in that sub domain. For example a large American financial group may take bank.com as its corporate home but internally use us.bank.com for staff email. Usually, if an address is typed with one of the dots missing, ie usbank.com, then the message is returned to its sender.

But by setting up similar doppelganger domains, the researchers were able to receive messages that would otherwise be bounced back.  BBC news – tech section.

If your brand is your name I would encourage you to purchase misspellings. I have customers who have 3-4 misspelt domains. They do receive the occasional email on those spellings. I do realise you cannot cover all the typos – but you can cover the most important ones.

Bottom like never send important login passwords like bank account logins or other important passwords over emails full stop. It is very easy for hackers to get hold of these logins.

Also never use the same password for all your accounts. It is safer to have different passwords and also change your password once in two months or so.

It changed my life forever. So many little things happened that made it impossible for us to live in California. We decided to pack our bags in December and return to New Zealand. Looking back that was the best decision we took.

No regrets at for coming back to a very peaceful environment and lifestyle. I do feel for all those families who lost a loved one. It the ones who are left behind re live the trauma everyday. My heart goes out to them.

I am doing some exciting marketing campaigns in the next few weeks. Will post all specials here

Step one

Identify 5-6 keywords that are relevant to your business. e.g. Wellington plumber, Tawa plumber, reliable plumber, 24 – 7 plumber virtual plumbing etc.  Try to avoid generic terms like plumbing . The competitions will be stiff and will be hard to rank for those kind of keywords. The type of keywords I mentioned earlier are know as long tail keywords.

Now that you’ve chosen your keywords, you can increase your website’s chances of ranking for those keywords. Search engine optimization (SEO) is about doing just that. In order to get found, you should aim to be on the first page or in the first few search engine results pages for your keywords. Google suggests that you design your website for visitors, and not for search engines. While you should keep this principle in mind, it is worthwhile to learn a bit more about SEO in order to better optimize your site.

On-page SEO refers to how well your website’s content is presented to search engines. This can often be improved immediately. Off-page SEO refers to your site?s overall “authority” on the web, which is determined by what other websites say about your site. This can take time to improve.

Step Two

Put keywords in Page Title. The Page Title is one of the most important things that Google and other search engines evaluate to determine what is on a web page.  Put your keyword or phrase in the title, keep it short.

Step Three

Put keywords in Page URL.  Google and other search engines also use the text of the URL of the page to determine the content of the web page.  You should use your keyword or phrase in the URL of the web page – e.g. Pixels webdesign – small business websites -website packages. ( All my websites come with this feature – it is automatically generated)

Step Four

Put keywords in Meta Data.  While the page metadata (Page Description and Keywords) are not nearly as important as they used to be, they still count.  Take advantage of them by putting your keyword or phrase there.  The description should be readable by a person and make sense and the keyword metadata should focus on your keyword or phrase – do not make it long, less is more.

Step Five

Put keywords in your H1 text.  The H1 text is usually the title of an article or some larger bold text at the top of your page.  Google and the smaller search engines can see this and they put extra importance on the words in the H1 text.  Make sure your keyword or phrase is there.

Step Six

Use keywords in the page content.  Putting the keyword in your page content also signals to search engines that the page is actually about the keyword and should show up in search results.  I have heard from “experts” that you should use your keyword anywhere from 4-6 times to 10-12 times.  My advice is to just write naturally.

Give some time for your website to rank. there are so many other factors to rank high in search engines. But these are the basic steps you must do  to make your website work for your business. Keep tweaking your website with new content – keyword rich words.