Are you ready for Cyber Monday 2009?

Consumers spent $733 million on Cyber Monday in 2008, 2009 was a bit slow due to sluggish economy but as the economy is making a round turn Cyber Monday is expected to be bigger this year. According to a survey by online shopping site Shopzilla, nearly 84 percent of online retailers plan to have a Cyber Monday promotion on December 1.

What is Cyber Monday?

Cyber Monday refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Whereas Black Friday is associated with traditional brick-and-mortar stores, "Cyber Monday" symbolizes a busy day for online retailers. The premise was that consumers would return to their offices after the Black Friday weekend, making purchases online that they were not able to make in stores.

Although that idea has not survived the test of time, Cyber Monday has evolved into a significant marketing event.

Tired of the long lineups for holiday shopping?

A lot of people will be getting up early and fighting the crowds at the mall for that special deal on Black Friday. But with everything you know now (Cyber Monday), you can spend Friday at home finishing off the turkey, and do your gadget shopping at work on Cyber Monday morning.

People see items in the shopping malls over the weekend and wait until Monday to buy them online, where they can compare prices, avoid lines and/or take advantage of free shipping or other offers.

Fact Sheet-

Though it sounds like slick marketing, Cyber Monday, it turns out, is a legitimate trend. According to Shop.org, a trade group, 77 percent of online retailers reported a substantial sales increase on the Monday after Thanksgiving last year.

This year, online retailers plan to help drive Cyber Monday shopping with special promotions and discounts, with deals ranging from free shipping to gifts with purchase to percentages off, according to an eHoliday Mood Study.

For retailers, it seems, the Internet is becoming an incredibly powerful way to market and sell their products. Companies have come to understand that, even for those individuals who prefer to purchase their gifts in stores, the Internet can still be a great tool.

Online retailers generally offer a great deal of information along with high-resolution images of their products for Cyber Monday 2009 Online Deals, so that consumers can research them and make purchasing decisions before heading out to shop. While many of the shoppers who browse online shops during Cyber Monday may not purchase their gifts online, the research that they do on this second Christmas kickoff day may lead to in-store purchases a few days later.

Everyone here with CoolWebDeveloper team has also been busy building there list of gadgets they would like to buy this year on Cyber Monday. Happy Holidays!! 

Clear writing checklist for your blog or small business website.

I have always been awed by the power and influence of a well written article. It is quite amazing how a well written article can influence your readers views and can help in increased sales and  a positive return on investment. And not to forget all the back links that you get with people talking about your article all over the Internet.

It really doesn’t matter whether it is print or online media, a well written post has always been able to pull readers and investors, and the most important thing is - people really listen to you if its well written.

Quite recently I got a chance to attend a Clear Writing seminar here in Toronto. I learnt a lot from the seminar and I would like to share a few pointers with our readers.

I know a lot of you are small business owners and Online marketers and I think this article will really help you to take your writing to the next level.

And I am very sure that you (yes, I am talking to you) already are aware of the impact of a clear and well written article and know that it can do wonders for your small business blog or website.

Why is it important to know your audience before you start writing?

Before you start writing, spend some time on knowing your audience. This way you can target your writing more effectively. Writing for low graders is entirely different then writing for a highly educated class of readers. And if you are not sure just stick to the basics and you will do just fine.

Here is a list of very basic and easy to follow clear writing pointers -

1. Font

• use at least 12 point
• use serif font
• use simple fonts rather than fancy ones
• use regular proportion rather than extended or condensed

2. Justification

• left justify your text
• let the right side run ragged
• Do not centre, except for headings

3. Colour

• have a good contrast between background and foreground colour
• use dark print on a light background
• avoid textured backgrounds
• do not put text on top of pictures

4. White Space

• use white space freely
• leave space between headings and text
• try 1 inch margins and 1.5 line spacing
• use block paragraphs rather than indented ones
• wehn using columns, use two rather than three

5. Emphasis

• use bold type to emphasize words or headings
• avoid italics and underlining
• make headings consistent
• use text boxes to separate essential information from the text
• avoid using all capitals

6. Pictures

• use pictures that relate directly to the text
• put pictures to the side rather than behind the text
• use pictures to illustrate difficult words

7. Words and Sentences

• use simple words and short sentences
• replace complicated words with more simple ones
• if you must use a difficult word, define it
• keep sentence length to 15-18 words
• for lower grade level materials, try 12-15 words per sentence

You can always email me or send me your feedback if you have any questions or need help with your blog or small business website. You can email me at - info[at]coolwebdeveloper[dot]com

Featured Articles WordPress Plugin

Today is an exciting day for us. We have kicked off our Featured Articles Wordpress Plugin Marketing Campaign.

Featured Articles WordPress Plugin - Campaign Landing Page

BETA version of this Plugin will be available for testing from 15th June onwards. We are calling in all the BLOG owners to volunteer for BETA testing of this Plugin.

We are running a WordPress Plugin contest where 50 BLOG owners from a list of  Subscribers will be chosen randomly and will be provided Featured Articles WordPress Plugin for testing purposes.

And the MOST exciting news is, these 50 BLOG owners will receive a FULL version of Featured Articles Plugin for FREE!! ($20 value) once we launch it on 15th of July 2009.

I invite my fellow bloggers and wordpress users to subscribe to the list here -

 

Join our growing list of Featured Article BETA testers (and receive a FREE Featured Articles Plugin worth $20 once the contest ends)

How thought turned into an idea?

I have always noticed a website visitors lack of attention to existing articles or banners thus loosing a lot of conversion value. It’s called Article / Ad Blindness, and every civilized human in the world has it.

“Ad Blindness is a term used to denote the state of conscious or subconscious ignorance of advertisements placed in a web page by visitors…”

We did check a lot of other Featured Articles Plugins available but none fit our need. They were either hard to install and implement or need code level access to pass the post ID’s as parameters. We wanted to use something that is simple and can be managed entirely by using WordPress Settings Console. We were not able to find a single Plugin that fits our need and thus Featured Articles WordPress Plugin was born.

Here are some COOL features of Featured Articles WordPress Plugin -

• Complete Management of Plugin by using the Settings Console in WordPress.

• Select the Height and Width from within the Management Console.

• Capable of creating Multiple Instances of the rotator, thus providing you the ability to rotate separatearticles on separate pages / templates.

• Ability to rotate BANNERS / ADS from within the same Management Console.

• Proven to increase conversion rates, and reduce Bounce Rates.

• Provides you with a new medium to present anything worthwhile to your visitors.

• Flush all the pending changes with a single click thus removing the margin of error.

As said above we do need a handful of smart BLOG owners for testing our product. And as a bonus reward for helping us we will offer this Plugin for free to those BLOG owners once we launch the FULL version.

If you think you will be able to help, please sign up and we will send you the plugin once the BETA is released. We will be selecting a list of 50 bloggers for testing this amazing product.

How to save your data if world comes to an end in 2012?

Try searching for 2012 on Google and you will get approximately 232,000,000 hits. So what is 2012? and what is all the hype about?

The 2012 Doomsday Prediction is a present-day cultural tradition proposing that cataclysmic and apocalyptic events will occur in the year 2012. You can read more about 2012 Doomsday Prediction on Wikipedia.

Though I don’t really buy the idea. And I am in no way suggesting that world will come to an end in 2012. But I do think world will end some day and this make us wonder -

What will happen with all the earth’s data?? Are we backing up our data somewhere outside earth??

I think we as earth’s intelligent inhibitors should be responsible for saving all the intelligent data (information) that we have collected so far. This will save a lot of work for our future generations to come (i.e. if some of us are lucky enough to survive).

Saving data at a remote location outside earth will be important to make sure that our future generations doesn’t have to start from ground zero.

There is a lot of important data we have collected so far about earth’s evolution, about all the medical advances etc. and this needs to be saved. And don’t forget a lot of this data is analyzed in a number of BLOG posts, written by and ranging from NASA’s scientists, world’s renowned astrologers and doctors etc.

So what really are our options?

Backup data on Moon

Well, there is some good news here. TransOrbital of La Jolla, California is taking this and other proposals for marrying high-tech and the Earth’s only natural satellite seriously. The company is getting ready to send a commercial mission to the moon and intends to send servers, data, handheld computers, and digital cameras along for the ride.

We’re the only company licensed to send a commercial mission right now," says Dennis Laurie, TransOrbital president and CEO. "We’re shooting for the first quarter of 2004." On December 20 of 2002, the company launched a rocket to test telemetry, positioning, and other concerns in preparation for the upcoming mission. TransOrbital had to obtain approval from the US State Department and the military to gain its license, and has also been consulting with officials at NASA. The licensing process took two and a half years, according to Laurie, and involved getting a specific license to take pictures from space.

Read more about TransOrbital.

Backup data on Mars

Though this will be a perfect setup. Unfortunately there is nothing available right now. But I am pretty sure one of the Backup and Recovery companies will read this article and will probably start working towards this … hopefully :)

Backup data on a man made satellite

This is another good option but with a bit of risk involved as the satellite will still be in close proximity to earth. And in the event of some magnetic changes or due to impact, we might lost the satellite or the data or both.

Backup data in the ionosphere above earth

If we are able to save data in electrons this is going to be a good option. Read more about Ionosphere here on Wikipedia.

Though in this day and age we are able to save data in living cells. I will not suggest this as this might be of no use if the cells are destroyed by some catastrophic event either natural or man made. Well, with that comment I will conclude this article. If you think you have a better idea then please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

Are you a small business owner? Simple, Effective and Affordable steps to increase and monetize your web presence.

Are you a small business owner? Do you have a web presence? Is your Website related to the product or services that you sell?

If the answer to any of the above is Yes, then chances are you are missing on a big opportunity to monetize your Website and increase your sales.

Read the full article to learn about Site Monetization and How to increase affiliate conversions and thus increase sales.

As a small business owner, we can categorize Site Monetization into two key areas-

• You can optimize your site to increase sales of your current products and services. And can use your Website to promote your brand and improve relationship with your business clients and customers.
• You can use your Website to promote the products and services that complement the kind of products and services you already sell. This way you can expand your web audience and can also earn affiliate commissions thus monetizing your Website traffic.

Now lets dig down deeper into the first point about optimizing your Website. (Second bullet about promoting products and services that complement your existing services - needs a full article of its own, so I will touch back on that in a separate article within next 3-4 days. So stay tuned to coolwebdeveloper.com and click to Subscribe to my Email Feed, Newsletter or RSS feed).

Optimizing your Website - The first two important steps are:

• Make sure that your site has a Blog
• Make sure your site and blog are Search Engine Friendly.

“For many businesses, a Web site is the first way that your clientele will look at you, even if it’s just to find your address and phone number,” says Rand Fishkin, founder of Seattle-based search engine optimization consulting firm SEOmoz, which aims to increase the odds that search engines will happen upon a given site. “The quality of your site is often a measure of the quality of your business.”

As a small business owner it is costly to maintain and blog and to update and optimize your Website for Search Engines. Well, luckily enough, WordPress comes to the rescue.

What?? Not familiar with WordPress??

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging tools available. But what many people don’t know is that it is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that can be used for more than just blogging. With WordPress you can build a blog, a Website, or both.

Top Five Reasons to Use WordPress for Your Small Business Website -

• SEO - WordPress provides good search engine optimization (SEO) right out of the box. There are many SEO benefits that WordPress provides for free. In fact Google’s own Matt Cutts says WordPress is “made to do SEO well” in this video: Matt Cutts gives tips to small business owners.
• Content - It is super easy to update content on your Website without knowing HTML.  Do you hate the idea of having to learn to use a complex HTML editor tool like Dreamweaver? Do you have to “ask” your webmaster every time you want to make a small change to your Website? Well no longer - once
  WordPress is set up for you, you can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple rich text editor.
• Extensions - There is a thriving ecosystem of developers creating themes and plug-ins - imagine free design themes, or the ability to extend your Website with polls, contact forms, ratings or hundreds of other cool features without having to hire a web developer.
• Support - If you do have problems, or want to add very custom features, it is easy to find support and developers who can help you. There are literally thousands of WordPress developers out there. And there are so many people writing about WordPress that help is only a Google search away!
  One-click-installation - Quick installs are provided by many hosting providers, including Bluehost, 1and1 and Thinkhost.

Thesis WordPress Theme has the following functions automatically built in, so you do not need to use these plugins if you are using this theme. Just as an FYI - This theme is already getting some great reviews around the blogosphere (you can see some testimonials here). You can download Thesis WordPress Theme here.

But if you are using other themes, the following plugins will give you a similar look/effect.

• All in One SEO Pack - This plugin makes it easy for you to optimize your article titles and other meta tags. 
• Google Analytics - This plugin makes it easy for you to insert your Google Analytics code and start tracking your blog visitors.
• WP-Note - This plugin lets you insert notes in your article to make them stand out. Kind of similar to the yellow colored notes I have twice in this article.
• WordPress Gravatars - This plugin lets you display Gravatars of your readers in the comments section and can put your Gravatar on top of your article to show who the article was written by.

Even if you are not using WordPress for your Blog or Website you can still follow these important and useful SEO tips for an enhanced web traffic -

• Start early. It can take up to six months for competitive search terms to see results through Google.
• Content really is king. Make a list of the top 20 search keywords relevant to your business and create content that’s thematically linked with those terms.
• Don’t use the same keywords over and over. Search engines have gotten smart enough to weed that out.
• Focus on Google. The magic formula is relevance and popularity. Having a well-written and well-structured Website is a big part of the battle. Mentions and links from blogger’s and other Websites can be a big boost as well.

If you choose to work with an SEO consultant, find one that specializes in the needs of startups and growing businesses. If he or she tries to guarantee you an instant #1 ranking in Google, run the other way.

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