Online Consulting

Erasing Your Identity Before Throwing It Away

Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

This past week I have spent hours erasing data from old computers that are laying around my house. At first I just thought, well, I can just go into the documents/settings files and delete things out and I would be good. But, after a conversation with my brother-in-law I realized that there is much more concern. From our discussions I learned rather quickly that when you get ready to dispose of an old hard drive, simply deleting the content is not really erasing it.

He also shared with me that when you take a computer to an electronics store and they say the hard drive is fried that I should be asking for it back to take with me. You never know where that piece of equipment might end up and you could be in serious trouble if it ends up in the wrong hands. Think about it, how many times have we punched our credit card number into a website to purchase a product, filled out a form with our social security number, saved private personal information onto a computer? I know that nowadays I pay all my bills online. I hate wasting paper, buying stamps and even just the walk to the mailbox. Instead, I enjoy being able to sit down at my computer and within 15 minutes pay all my bills for a month. But each time I make that payment, something is being stored onto my hard drive.

When your machine is now obsolete and longer being used, what do you do to dispose of them? Do you simply take them to the dump and throw them into a bin with the other few hundreds of computers? Do you recycle them? Either way, before taking them in, do you take the necessary steps to remove all your data to protect yourself against identity theft?

Hackers are becoming more intelligent and learning better ways to hack into old computers. They say that until a hard drive is written over multiple times the data can actually be recovered. This is how organizations like the CIA & FBI are able to get data from a computer that seems to have been cleared and solve cases.

How to Protect Yourself

There are several different programs that are around for clearing your hard drive once you are finished with a computer. The first way is to use a giant electromagnet and wipe it clean. There are companies that will do this for you for a few dollars, or you can buy a machine to do it yourself for a few thousand dollars. The second option would be to remove the hard drive and physically destroy it with a sledgehammer, drill, saw, etc. While this option seems like it could be more fun, it is a little bit more dangerous. The third option is to use some simple software to destroy any info on the hard drive.

The program though that I have have found for erasing old PC’s is Darik’s Boot and Nuke. This program will re-write over a hard drive 7 times which leaves things almost impossible for a hacker to find your old data. This way, when you take your computer to the local computer shop for recycling, you do not need to worry about your personal identity and data falling into the wrong hands.

What about other items with Hard Drives? Did you know that machines like a basic copier machine have a hard drive in them? How easy is it for your information to fall into other hands on this type of machine? Well, from the video below, it looks like only about $300 and a free program from the internet. After that they can have any and all information that was ever stored on the hard drive of this machine.

So before you dispose of your next computer or old copier machine, make sure to take a little bit of time and erase your identity before throwing it away in the dumpster.

22 Businesses Called and NONE Answered!

Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training

Yesterday my dad sent me an email and said I needed to watch this video he just saw. I clicked the link and it directed me over to the Think Big Work Small blog which is developed to help real estate agents. The video was discussing the importance of answering the phone. You can watch the video here. They called 23 different real estate agents around Syracuse, NY just to see how many it would take to answer the phone. The one that did answer hung up on them the minute they said hello. If you are like me, you were shocked to see this. Especially after so many sites make these claims of “We’re #1” and “We deliver the best customer service” yada yada…

Before you start branding your business as “We’re #1” or “I’m busy with other clients, but your call is important” you need to first figure out what you want your business model to look like. If you want your clients to talk to you through services like Twitter, Facebook and text messaging, then you need to make that clear on your contact pages. Add statements that say “if you need a quick response or assistance, the best way to contact me is at:” That way clients learn quickly that this is your preferred method. If they do not like using those forms of communication, then they know to move onto another business that will communicate with them in the ways they like.

Will you lose business? Possibly, but you could also pick up some clients that think the same way you do. The one thing you will accomplish is the ability to work with the types of clients you want and have targeted in your business model. For us here at 210 Consulting, we are pretty open to any means. Both Jason & myself are constantly on just about every social media platform there is. Our contact number is listed on the site, and you can email us too if you prefer.

Call me back please!

Even though technology continues to change the ways we do business, the telephone is still one of the most effective ways to communicate for our business. Every day I spend at least twice as much time on the phone with clients as I do emailing, or sending direct messages on Twitter & Facebook. Why? Because when on the phone I can answer any & all questions that person might have. When I just reply to an email, that doesn’t always happen. Maybe the reason you despise the phone so much is that you can’t stand dealing with the difficult phone calls. If that’s the case, read 5 tips to handling difficult calls. You might find something valuable in it.

Whatever means of communication you prefer, the same principles hold true. When a consumer contacts you, they expect responses. And they expect them to come quickly. If it is taking more than 24 hours to respond you run a very high risk of losing them. If this is the case, then you need to either hire an assistant to deal with your incoming messages from consumers.

One of the ways we gain new clients several new clients that write rave reviews about us without us even asking, is because we deliver fast and reliable service. Normally when someone emails me, they get a response within 2 hours. On busy days that might go as high as 12. One thing though I rarely do is leave my office at night with stuff sitting in my inbox or phone calls not returned from the day.

So, how many times would I need to call your business before you answered?

Photo Credits:

Open 24 Hours & Phone

Increasing Blog Traffic Through Comments

How To Blog, How to Use Twitter, Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors, WordPress Tutorials

We all know that one great way to increase traffic into your site is to visit other people’s sites and leave valuable comments on specific topics. Leaving those comments shows that you care about whatever the topic might be, or you are able to share your knowledge answering a question that someone posed in a blog post. The other benefit is that some will allow you to get a backlink to your site which can help with the SEO end of things on your site.

So how can you find new blogs that are sharing information that will be helpful to your business or be great to connect with? One way I like is using Google Blog Search. I can quickly type in any subject I care to read about & find some of the most recent posts on that topic. Here is a brief video that will show you just how easy it is to find plenty of great blog content to read as well as some really awesome bloggers to connect with:

So get searching for other blogs and start connecting today. The power of these types of connections can be great for your business while also being a wonderful source of knowledge. The best part of this technique is that it only costs a little bit of time and energy to accomplish which is wonderful if you are optimizing a blog on a budget. I know when I started into social media a few years back I would start each morning by reading anywhere from 1-2 hours other people’s content. I would make a dedicated effort to leave valuable comments that would encourage the writer to want to connect with me.

After doing this for just over 6 months I had over 400 people subscribed into my old blog with great amounts of traffic coming daily from those subscribers. In addition, the posts were averaging around 20-30 comments. These people were not just finding me in the search engines, but they were mainly coming from the comments I left on their site.

Engaging the writer and other commenters

This part can be rather difficult at times. You have to be creative in thinking of ways to get the original writer of the blog as well as those who are commenting on the post to want to first read your comment and then secondly want to either reply to you or visit your site. This is a very delicate line to walk. If you go overboard in your comment, you might offend the originator of the post. One thing I would never do is leave a link in a comment, unless the writer asks specifically for that. If you think you have something that could help, send them a quick email with the link. Adding a link is widely recognized by most bloggers as a non accepted practice as well as highly discouraged. The writer has worked hard to get a reader to their site and they don’t appreciate someone trying to push them away to another site.

You also want to keep from sounding like a giant sales pitch. The minute someone feels that, they will automatically categorize you as a spammer which could result in being banned from a site completely. The final thing you want to skip are canned generic responses like: “Great post I really enjoyed it and look forward to future posts of yours.” This shows lack of interest and that you are only there to hopefully get exposure for you and your blog.

So what should you do? Start by adding value to the conversation. This might mean that you need to spend some time reading through all the comments before posting yours. If you can either answer a question, or supply additional information on a topic the commenters and writer will pay attention to you. The most effective thing you can do when commenting is to leave a genuine caring response that shows a level of interest on the subject. When you read about someone’s question about what is the best Twitter Application for a Blackberry and you can share what app you are using, they are more likely to come over to your blog and read your post on Twitter Applications.

So give Google Blog Search a try and start connecting with great blog posts on just about any subject you wish! And let me know in the comments below what you are searching for!

Are You a Social Media Loser?

How to Use Twitter, Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

I work daily with clients assisting them with using social media for their business successfully. One of the first things I try to do is teach that while it is important to use the mediums properly to reach out, it is even more important to have systems set up in place to monitor your business online.

Monitoring your business online? Yes, you need to know what consumers are saying about you, your company, products, & services. You can really impress your customers when you are paying attention to what they are saying and responding appropriately.

So how do you go about this? Well, there are actually a few very simple ways to accomplish your monitoring. The first, is through Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows you a quick and simple way to set up automatic notifications whenever the search engine picks up that term.

So, you would want to set up alerts for your personal name, your brand name, business name and any other ways that people may refer to those things your either produce or provide. This way you know whenever consumers reference your product or service, you know what is going on.

This is important for a plethora of reasons. First, say a customer writes a blog post about how wonderful your product is. If you took 30 seconds after receiving that blog post to go visit the post and leave a simple comment thanking them, you have instantly taken that person from being a happy client to a fan for life!

Or, on the other hand, you had a client that wasn’t very happy with your product and decided to blast your company publicly in a blog post. When you see the post hit your inbox you can quickly begin the resolution process to correct whatever issue they may have.

A story that recently comes to mind is about a friend of mine who had some issues with a mobile phone company. They were completely untruthful with him and promised things that they would not deliver then. After several calls ending in pure frustrations, he finally turned to his blog and wrote about his experience. Within 48 hours he had people from this company contacting him and working on fixing the issues.

How did this company know about it? I am sure they had some sort of an alert in place to notify them whenever someone wrote about them.

Other than blogging, another way people enjoy voicing their opinions is through Twitter. They will send out tweets that their friends will then see and start discussions about how this company was terrible or really great with helping them with whatever they needed.

As a business, you MUST have someone monitoring Twitter and keeping track of what others are saying. While there several ways to do this, one of the ways I like to do this is to set up certain searches inside my twitter application of choice, Tweetdeck. I used to do community management for a large real estate corporation called ActiveRain. At the time they had well over 150,000 members from around the world. So, one of the things I did daily was monitor what our members were saying on Twitter. You would think the typical term I would put in would be ActiveRain. But, the company had created a feature that thousands of it’s members use to automatically post their content into twitter as soon as they hit publish. I didn’t need to have 2,000+ updates showing up in my stream. SO, what I had to do was be a little more specific with my search setup. The phrase that attached to the auto post was “Just Posted on ActiveRain” so to build a real time search that would monitor the company name without the automated feed, I created a Twitter search that was Activerain -“just posted”. This meant the search would look for ActiveRain but would ignore any that had the term with just posted in the phrase.

By monitoring the term I was able to provide a great level of service for new members who had just signed up and were completely lost. Or just being able to give an added level of support by saying “Hi, I am Jeremy the community builder, let me know if I can help out. These members that just joined and tweeted 2 minutes ago were already receiving customer support from the top level available in the organization and were blown away.

The reason this post today came about due to a recent experience I had with Target. My wife who is now 8+ months pregnant asked on her Facebook profile:

Explain to me this… Our local Target has over 13 handicap parking spaces ( I lost count at 13), and even on the busiest day I have not even seen half of them full. Yet EVERY time I am there there are a ton of pregnant ladies or moms with small babies. So why don’t they make some of the parking spaces close to the doors into “New or Expectant Moms” spaces?!?!?

See, my wife is now 8+ months pregnant and had visited the local Target to make some changes to our baby registry. She had my 2 year old daughter in hand and 107 degree heat index that had to walk from the farthest point of the parking lot over to the entrance. When I saw her post this, I left a comment saying I knew they were on Twitter and would send them something to find the reason why they set things up this way. When I sent my tweet, I watched several of my friends start a conversation around it wondering the same thing. I know there were at least 15-20 tweets all targeted to them all revolving around this subject. 10 days later and still no response from Target.

Granted, maybe the company is huge in size. But there still needs to be some sort of monitoring of this. Corporations like ComCast & Best Buy do this phenomally. When their clients ask a question or place a complaint, their team is quick to respond and assist in any way possible. Normally within a few hours. By doing this, consumer satisfaction goes through the roof, customer support calls go way down and business production increases.

So, take the time and set up ways to monitor your online business. Besides, who wouldn’t want to know what people think of you? 🙂

We’re Not in the Year 2005 Anymore

Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

This post was inspired to day by my journeys into a website and the tweet that followed. I was visiting a link a friend sent about a place he was published on a photographers site. Being the good friend I went by to try and leave a comment of encouragement for the new blogger and for my friend. I was greeted by some obnoxiously loud music that almost made my eardrums bleed. I then tweeted: “I’ll say it once again, please disable auto play songs & videos on your site!”

I am sure you remember back in the day when Conan O’Brien had his infamous standing skit “In the Year 2000.” We would sit and laugh at that show as it poked fun at the future and things we would expect when it got here. Wondering would the internet survive the Y2K bug. Then the year 2000 came and left us quickly without much fanfare. We move forward and in 2003 came along a site called MySpace. We all rushed and created our account & started gathering friends as fast as we could.

We visited a friends site & grew an instant case of envy as we saw how much cooler their MySpace page was than ours. We began searching for free Myspace themes to “Pimp my Profile.” After giving the page a new look, we had to have our favorite song rocking out on home page in order to have a certain level of coolness.

Fast Forward to Today

Unfortunately some got stuck in the mid 2000’s where it was not only acceptable, but was the “in thing” to have music and video players automatically start playing when a page loads. This style of doing online business is becoming more & more an bad practice. Before I continue, please don’t feel bad if you have an auto player running on your site. I am not talking to just you. I’ve seen major businesses like MLB.com use this tactic and it just drives me nuts. Whenever I am in the initial consultation for building a new Custom WordPress Site for a client, I explain the negative effects music and videos that start playing automatically can be. Most never realize it until I mention something. Remember, you only have one chance to wow me, so make it the best! If I get blasted by audio off the bat, I am gone for good.

The reason it bothers me is because I work from home most of the time. So I normally have iTunes jamming you. And all of a sudden in comes this blaring commercial when I just wanted to check on a score of the game. My good friend Ken Cook had a rather embarrassing story the other week that he shared on our weekly social media radio show.

Ken was in his office one day and wanted to check on something so he visited a website. Now unlike me that has the luxury of working from home, Ken is in an office that is filled with other people and is normally on the quiet side. The minute the page loaded it started playing a video commercial. All of his co-workers were instantly greeted by a woman loudly proclaiming: “I sometimes have really bad diarrhea!” His co-workers who were engrossed in their computers and handling loan files stopped and all glared in his direction. How embarrassing.

I shared all this to get to my point behind this blog post:

We are no longer in 2005. Online practices that were acceptable then are not as well accepted now. While you found it a good idea to have auto playing video & songs on your site, the general public has voiced their opinions and begged for you stop. As an owner of a website, you are going to have constant changes needing to take place.

Right now we are in what is called web 2.0. The season of social media is upon us. Learn the correct practices for this season and implement them into your business today to have a successful online presence. Also, learn what things are no longer effective and discontinue them immediately. For some of you, this might mean an complete overhaul of how you have been doing things. This could even mean building a new website to accomodate the trends of today.

Whatever you do, please do us all a favor and disable the auto play for songs & videos!

You Don’t Order Steak at a Seafood Restaurant, So Why Buy a Website From Postcard Companies?

Custom WordPress Sites, Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors

One of the things that we at 210 Consulting love doing is helping new businesses get their online marketing started in the right direction. Unfortunately unless you are always working in the web development, SEO, and online marketing industry, it can be overwhelming to a new company. Also, since you are just starting your new business, money is usually very tight. So, when you go to purchase business cards, accounting software, or a domain name and they offer to get your site up in running in less than 10 minutes for under $100, you are ecstatic to do so because you can now say you are on the internet.

Usually within 10 minutes of a conversation with a new prospective client I can tell if they have one of these types of sites. Why because they have only 5 pages of content, on a standard layout with zero ability of customization, and the adding of plugins or a blog is impossible! When I ask them why they chose this as their website company, the response every time has been this: “Well, I didn’t have a bunch of money to go buy a fancy site and didn’t want to put that much money into something. Once this site makes me some money I will upgrade. Besides my new site looks pretty and will be fine for my online marketing strategy.”

This is when I finally ask the client, Would you order a steak if you were eating at a superior seafood restaurant? No! Because they aren’t known for their great steaks. They are known for serving some of the best fish on the planet. This same principle holds true when you purchase a website from an online postcard company or an accounting software company.

These types of websites are designed to be simple, easy to set up, quick to activate and are inexpensive. But the limitations they possess are huge. My sister-in-law set up a website the other day for her new business and was very excited when she emailed me a link to look at the site. I pulled it up and called her within 2 minutes to tell her to stop wasting her time and that we needed to do something different. We then made a call to one of my connections that was able to create a WordPress Blogsite for her in just under a weeks time, she hired me to do some graphic design work and for under $1,000 we had her an awesome and amazing new site up and running.

So what made her new site that much better & worth the expense? Here are just some of the big differences:

Unlimited Pages of Content versus only 5- The original page had a total of 5 pages of content available. She had maximized that in her first 10 minutes of setup. She could add more, but there was a fee each time she went to add more pages. On her new WordPress.org blogsite, she can now add unlimited number of pages with pictures, videos, links and more. The reason the number of pages is so important is that it is a big factor in how search engines rank your content. More pages make you look more like an authority on a subject and thus the page goes up in the searches.
Power of Plugins- Plugins and widgets are awesome additions to any site. Unfortunately her template 5 page site did not offer any of this. She could not add simple things like a Facebook share button, or a ReTweet button. With a blogsite like WordPress she has the ability to do all these things and much more that not only make it easier for people to share her site with others, but some that also help her with her Search Engine Optimization.
Online Ordering- The template 5 page site also prohibited the addition of any types of online shopping carts or purchase online buttons. Which as her business continues to grow she wants to start offering these features to her clients so that they can purchase her items online and ship them around the world.
True Ownership of Her Content Forever- Unlike the other company, the information is now on her own site. She owns it and nobody else. She does not need to worry about if they decide to raise the price up. Or if they go out of business, or if they move servers and crash things for weeks at a time. The other nice thing is that she has a home base to direct customers to that only her content & products. The customers will not be finding her competition there. While online forums are great sources of online business, you do run the risk of your customer that found you there clicking a link to your competitor that is on the same platform and losing the business to someone else. The same holds true for those those that “have their website on their company site” which is nothing more than just a profile there that drives traffic to your organization and not you. All it takes is one accidental click on a company site and once again your co-worker is getting the sale instead of you.

These are just four of the many reasons why I said she needed to change her site before even really starting. Luckily, she listened to me & took my advice. We worked together with a web developer and built her an awesome looking & highly search engine optimized blogsite. She then did a few training sessions with me to develop her targeted audience and keywords to write about. Since then she has written a few blog posts, added some great content to her site & seen an explosion of traffic. Without this, she would not have known the first thing about what to write about or what types of things people are searching for. Remember, she wants to bake cakes, not become a online marketing expert.

So what are the results?

Well, take a look for yourself. This was an email conversation I had with her today:

Hey Jeremy,

Just got 3 cake orders today for a word of mouth referral! So far since the website has been up I have actually collected about 450.00! Its quite a bit for cakes and chocolate covered yummies….

My response:

Awesome! So how many cakes have you sold in the first 2 weeks now? 5? 6?

Her Response:

8 actually

a gift basket

and 50 chocolate covered pretzels!

As you can see, she is well on her way to regaining the money she spent on building her website and the beauty is that she will continue to profit from the site for a long time thereafter too! So before you sign up for a website through one of these other companies, stop and ask yourself, Would you order steak at a seafood restaurant? Then why am I buying a website through a postcard company?

If your small business needs assistance getting started with your online marketing plan and would like to see this type of results, feel free to contact me to develop your online marketing gameplan. Also, if the picture above has you interested in some delicious chocolate covered pretzels, make sure you visit Vie Bakery. Lastly, if you are wondering what we suggest for a website, we believe you should go with a custom WordPress Site.