Archive for the ‘progress’ Category

Can Small Businesses Find an Affordable Niche in Google’s Paywall Service?

Discussion started over at SEW…

Google always gives prominence first to paying customers (PPC above natural results) and second to what it deems are the most relevant results.

Let’s say that now when we produce valuable content on a client’s website, we have the opportunity to collect a fee. If a customer of Google’s paywall clicks and “accepts the charges”, supposedly we as the publisher of valuable information gain a dominant share of the fee.

This shows a great potential for businesses to invest more greatly in researching and publishing quality content. Of course it could also mean that writing a great headline could earn you the same fees rather than focus on the content behind the paywall…

Let’s look at it another way. I publish great content and offer it via RSS feed to other websites to increase my traffic. Will the paywall only be enacted if the visitor enters by Google referral?

Many questions certainly but I truly hope that Google succeeds in developing a working model for paid content. The dumbing down of literature and culture badly needs a buttress against the hammering of small opinions writ large.

Mohandas Ghandi, in a list of 7 of the Worlds Greatest Blunders he made for his grandson, included among the list the following maxim as one of the great blunders of our world:

Commerce without Morality

Warren Buffet, IMHO, is a living example to the world what it means to exercise morality with commerce:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-16/buffett-says-wildly-capricious-economy-inspires-his-charity.html

-C

1) In addition to tried-and-true reciprocal link building, we are also coupling this with social media promotion(digg, delicious, twitter), article submissions and blog commenting

2) We’ll want to incorporate conversion tracking to measure results

3) By properly identifying your competitive niches by keyword (i.e. town/region or type of job), we can help grow specific aspects of your business.

4) By partnering with 3PRIME, your company greatly extends its control and interest in what your web presence represents for your business. This 24/7 sales presentation can become a much more critical asset to your business.

Stop waiting and start doing, call 203-789-8229, today!

Response to an article from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Inc.

What’s interesting about the use of the “cottage” terminology is it, to me, references “cottage industry” where people work independently to bring their “goods” to market. I suspect that for many people, who are comfortable with their niche in a larger organization, they are likely to feel alienated in a primarily telecommuting environment. However, I believe the author misses a key opportunity.

If employees acclimate themselves to working from home, it seems likely to me that those that are successful at it will expand their productivity to include other processes, new initiatives and new methods.

Perhaps the greatest potential outcome is that these individuals begin to offer their services to other individuals in addition to their employer, or completely evolve and specialize their niche service to offer it entirely as their own product, branded or unbranded. This can then lead to them needing additional persons to meet demand, and their “electronic cottage” becomes a “electronic cottage industry”.

Where can I find statistics on why Web Design and User Experience matters?
- Jed H. 31 / M / Portland, OR

I like this article:

How does user experience affect your company?

Bottom line though is that you already know that useful and pleasing presentation makes 100% of the difference between whether a website visitors stays or goes, whether they call or click, or whether they back out.

Thats true. But good stats to back that up would go a long way in selling design services This is the best site I have seen so far. Thanks
- Jed H. 31 / M / Portland, OR

After a slow beginning of 2010, 3PRIME has signed up 4 new web design clients in the past 10 business days. It’s not the statistics that did it, business owners know what they need. Once they find a reliable, clear-spoken advocate for their business that ALSO helps them transform their vision into a website, they’ll move on it.

Great job 3PRIME team!

Finally purchased some new VPS space for our FormTracks service, and the migration process is well underway!

The new environment is a very robust entity to say the least – memcached, zend optimized, and fully loaded with automation up the ying-yang to make even the seasoned admin say 01000110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01011001 01100101 01100001 01101000 00100001 (gotta copy the text in to translate it…)

anyways, short post today, more tomorrow, so check in then. Tah-tah…s

-C

Made some important programming changes, bug fixes, feature upgrades, etc to our OrderReadyInventory.com web service.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve moved a step closer to realizing our vision for a robust Form Data aggregation and modeling utility service in our FormTracks offering.

FormTracks is exactly what this post title says: a Web Form Conversion Tracking and Analysis Service. Simply put, it offers website owners a means by which to securely stored Web form Data that comes into their domains, analyze conversions, and interpret form fields into cogent data sets to further interpolate and extrapolate what the data means. All of this means better data management for your domains, and a more concise understanding of what all of the data means.

What’s more, it is a developer-centric service. FormTracks Integration is available through the FormTracks Web API platform. It’s early capabilities allow for remote form posting, system querying, report creation, and data exporting. Eventually, through the FormTracks API, we intend on providing white labelling capabilities, so developers can build their apps around the FormTracks Architecture while embedding their own programmatic touch of class! The API system is slow going, so stay tuned for the FormTracks API Documentation.

Take a look at FormTracks for yourselves.

Living in N.E. with the winter not too far away got me thinking about
the ‘awesome’ commutes us New Englanders have to look forward to on
our way to work. Which immediately brought one word to mind:
Telecommuting. Being in the “Web Sphere” as it were, 3Prime has the
luxury of being accessible anywhere – at the office, from home, etc.
b/c we have implemented a telecommuting policy that works for the
company b/c it works for our employees.

But what else dawned on me was how many businesses through New England
(and country wide) DON’T have any intention of implementing a
telecommuting policy anytime in the near future, and how these
businesses are putting themselves at a great disadvantage.

So, I came up with a short list of reasons to implement a
telecommuting policy, and how doing so will put businesses at an
advantage in the short term as well as the long term.

1) Increase Employee Moral
Workers will embrace their employer when telecommuting becomes
available b/c they are being given the opportunity of flexibility,
which is a critical in-road to embracing your staff as a key business
asset. Any attitude an employer takes that conveys the concept that
employees are valuable and not expendable, will generate a reciprocal
feeling of appreciation, which will bolster employee moral, job
satisfaction, and motivation to excel. Which leads to my next point:
Increased Productivity.

2) Increased Productivity
A satisfied worker is a good worker. And a good worker is productive.
Think about that: People LIKE to work. If they didn’t, we’d ALL be
looking for government handouts!! People work to make a living, and
to advance their stance in life. They may not like their JOB, but
they understand the value in working. So make them like their job a
bit more, and they’ll give it back to you. By introducing a means by
which to access their working resources from many locations, you are
increases the means to produce, and that is good in itself for morale,
as well as the employer.

3) Maximize Resource Allocation
Telecommuting policies provide an opportunity to down-scope resources
through data centralization, hardware consolidation, and
virtualization. This in turns drives deployment opportunities for
said-resources regionally, nationally, and globally, and in a global
economy, this is a must. What’s more, the overall overhead of
managing hardware resources is reduced dramatically, so along with
allocation improvement you affect a lower cost of operation. And
through advancements in Cloud Computing, implementing complete
web-based solutions are now possible, which further reduce operating
costs further.

Many businesses that offer a service (b/c, as we know, America is
becoming more and more a Service Economy), have the potential for
having an “always open” persona that makes their services more
accessible, more effective, and ultimately, more marketable if they
would but embrace too philosophies: View your employees as your
greatest assets, and provide them the means to telecommute.

Telecommuting in this day in age, IMHO, represents a major departure
from traditional Business management policies – and also the most
important thing for ownership to implement.

Offering health insurance coverage to our Connecticut-based employees is one of our goals for 2009, at the close of the 3rd quarter, we find ourselves in an unexpected position where due to a lack of certainty about what legislation federal government may churn out in the next 6 months, we are hesitant to make a move only to find that it doesn’t meet requirements or fails to take advantage of greater choice or competition in the healthcare insurance marketplace.

What has been your experience?