DeSignByRandy

Survey Exchange (OTX)

This is a warning that has been floating around the survey world for years. Never do any OTX surveys through any company and do not join their parent company. Most of their surveys have glitches and errors and it’s rare that you will fully qualify or get paid. I do not recommend them at all! Now watch out for Opinion Outpost. They are are using Survey Exchange for surveys that will waste your time and take your information for who knows what. Nail these bas***** to a web coffin.

The answer, surprisingly, is that many companies do not know. You could be seriously underestimating its value to the business. Or you might be failing to make the best use of your website, or worse still, actually damaging your company’s business and brand. It might look slick, but without measuring website performance, you’ll never know what is going on under the hood.

A majority of companies still do not carry out any web analytics at all. We’ve seen any number of companies over the years spend tens of thousands of dollars on a costly re-design because of a vague feeling their website doesn’t work – and then repeat the same mistakes because they don’t carry out analytics first to find out what the problems are. Some of the companies that do limited analytics do not fully understand what they are looking at. Many people still talk about the numbers of hits their website receives mistakenly believing that these are the same as either page impressions, or worse, website visitors. Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Carrying out proper web analytics is vital to determining the true value of your website to your business. There are many aspects to analytics in assessing website performance, such as using Key Performance Indicators. The bottom line though is to try and calculate its value to the business as a whole – the website Return On Investment (ROI).

Calculating website return on investment

For an e-commerce website, this might look fairly straightforward. Determining revenue through direct sales and the lifetime value of repeat customers gives the income stream. While your website might not generate income directly, tracking the conversion rate of enquiries made by email or telephone calls to sales (and the average sale value) will give you a cash value for those enquiries.

Similarly, while some websites are technically information-only, they play a part in the sales process by referring leads to partner websites that handle sales. Tracking those leads by using redirect pages and then working with your partners to determine leads to sales conversion rates and average sales value also provides a monetary value attributable to your website.

Revealing the hidden benefits of a website

Cost avoidance is another area where your website could be helping your business without you realising it. If your website can reduce the number of enquiries made to a call center it could save you a fortune. IBM claim to save $2 billion a year in call centre costs with their online support website. Even for a small business, with limited human resources, key personnel could by using their time more profitably than answering questions that could be answered, for example, in a Frequently Asked Questions section of the website. Calculating average costs for a phone call, email and a help page request – which will vary from company to company – should enable you to calculate savings. A word of warning though – because a customer reads a help page, doesn’t mean an issue is resolved to their satisfaction. Making help resources available that are both effective and cheaper is an art form.

For e-commerce and information-only websites alike, there are also more imaginative ways of determining website ROI. Take, for example making white papers, annual reports or product catalogues available to download. The baseline cost of printing and posting an annual report might be $8. The cost of downloading the same document will be far less, say $40. to reformat the document and server costs. 500 downloads a month would equal an annual saving of $28,500.

So if you are still thinking in terms of the number of hits your website attracts, then you are missing out on the information that will help you calculate the true value of your website to the business. But it is never too late to start; your competitors probably don’t know the value of their website either, so you can still gain a competitive advantage by beginning a program of web analytics.

Better website ROI

Calculating Return on Investment is the starting point, not the final goal. Once you know what you have an initial figure, you want to look at ways to better website ROI.

Web analytics can help you to identify any weak points in your website offering that undermines your conversion rates. Are people abandoning shopping carts? Are visitors emailing you in appropriate numbers? Are visitors abandoning the website at specific pages? Once you have that information you can address the problems, and start to improve website ROI.

First published in ‘Total Business’ magazine, November 2005.

I want to ask each of you to consider doing the following when you are talking on the phone to any US customer service representative that is based in a foreign country (like India ). I have done this twice and it works! Any time you call an 800 number (for a credit card, banking, charter communications, health insurance, insurance, you name it) and you are transferred to a representative (like in India), please consider doing the following:

After you connect and you realize that the customer service representative is not from the USA (you can always ask if you are not sure about the accent), please very politely (very politely – this is not about trashing other cultures) say, “I’d like to speak to a customer service representative in the United States of America .” The rep might suggest talking to his/her manager, but, again, politely say, “Thank you, but I’d like to speak to a customer service representative in the USA .” YOU WILL BE IMMEDIATELY CONNECTED to a rep in the USA. It only takes less than one minute to have your call re- directed to the USA. Tonight when I got redirected to a USA rep, I asked again to make sure – and yes, she was from Fort Lauderdale.

Imagine if tomorrow, every US citizen who has to make such a call and then requests a US rep, imagine how that would ultimately impact the number of US jobs that would need to be created ASAP. Imagine what would happen if every US citizen insisted on talking to only US phone reps from this day on.

If I tell 10 people to consider this and you tell 10 people to consider doing this – see what I mean…it becomes an exercise in viral marketing 101.

Remember – the goal here is to restore jobs back here at home – not to be abrupt or rude to a foreign phone rep. If you agree, please tell 10 people you know and tell them to tell 10 people they know….etc…etc…

The ongoing fight against piracy by the entertainment industry has taken a new turn. The LA Times reported that the federal government has closed down a number of movie websites that has content available to download and stream. Piracy is a big problem on the net thanks to high speed broadband connections and search engines which make finding a movie simply a couple of mouse clicks away.

Last week the new Obama administration launched n initiative to stamp out piracy. This looks to be a first step with the feds shutting down nine websites responsible for streaming pirated movies to the world.

ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) chief John Morton trumpeted the bust as the beginning of a “long-term effort to turn the tables on these thieves.”

Movie streaming sites beware

Federal authorities announced that they had seized domain names from nine websites engaged in the “criminal theft of American movies and television.” The websites include TVShack.net, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org and Ninjavideo.net. Combined, the sites drew 6.7 million visitors a month, authorities said.

Officials also seized assets from 15 bank, investment and advertising accounts and executed residential search warrants in North Carolina, New York, New Jersey and Washington, according to a statement from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which coordinated its investigation with the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.

The crackdown, which involved 100 agents working in 11 states and the Netherlands, was part of a renewed campaign dubbed Operation in Our Sites by federal authorities to curb Internet counterfeiting and piracy. The announcement comes a week after the Obama administration unveiled a detailed plan on how to tackle global piracy, including targeting illegal websites.

The difference between this bust and previous ones is that the websites in question did not actually offer the movies for download, but instead streamed the movies and TV shows. Previously, movie crackdowns had concentrated on sites that distributed movie files.

So could this be the end of illegal movie and tv streams? Well, this is a drop in the ocean of sites that provide this kind of content, and with new ones appearing every day plus most of the streaming coming from China who are no assistance to the US authorities. Dont bet on a pirate free web anytime soon.

Article source:http://www.worldtvpc.com/blog/federal-government-shuts-movie-streaming-websites/

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