Online Business Press Release Writing Tips And Ideas

Press releases are one of the most cost-effective ways to
obtain promotion for your online business. Many entrepreneurs
ignore this type of promotion because they don’t know how
to write a press release. It’s important to promote your online
business with press releases because of the media all over the
internet. The following is a list of some common press
release writing tips:

- your press release should sound like news, not an ad

- you should only send your press release to the media
related to the topic of your press release

- keep your press release one page in length

- your header, contact information, and release date should
be at the top of your press release

- use short sentences and double space in between
sentences

- your header and first few sentences should capture the
reader’s attention

- you should tell a story and briefly mention your business,
product or service in the body of the press release

- proofread your press release many times. Look for
grammar and spelling mistakes.

More tomorrow…

Keep stress out of your life and your business…

Identify your stress triggers - Lansing State Journal
Your genes, personality and life experiences all influence the way you respond to stress. Situations and events that are distressing for most people might not bother you in the least. Or, you may be particularly sensitive to even minor stressors…

If you want your business thrive and grow, you must reward your customers…

Reward Your Customers

The formula for success for any business is to get your
customers to make repeat purchases. There are a number
of factors involved in acquiring repeat customers: pricing,
quality of products and services, excellent customer
service, etc. One of the best ways is to reward your
customers for their repeat purchases. Here are three
effective customer reward programs you could implement:

Number Of Purchases

This method is based on the number of purchases made
by any customer. You could give away a free product or
service to any customer that makes ten or more purchases.
To make the program more effective, you could require a
set time period for ten purchases to be completed.

Dollar Amount

You can require a certain dollar amount be spent before
the customer receives a reward. Tell customers if they
spend over $50 in one month at your web site, they get a
50% discount on their next purchase. You could also just
reward one customer who spends the most every month
with a bigger reward like a vacation.

Points System

Reward customers a point for every dollar they spend.
Let’s say customers can get a free printer for 300 points.
That means customers will spend $300 dollars on your
products and services to get enough points to get the free
printer. To push slower selling products or services, simply
offer more points per dollar spent for those particular items.

The kind of rewards you give should depend on what your
business can afford. Cheaper rewards could be gift
certificates, coupons, clothes, or movie passes. Expensive
rewards could be jewelry, vacations, bed and breakfast
gift certificates, electronics or computer equipment.

You may want to invest in a good database program to
keep track of your rewards program. We also recommend
contacting a legal professional for advice, set-up, and the
structuring of your rewards program.

Remember that customer retention and repeat sales make
the world go ’round!

A holiday weekend and a death in the family can certainly slow down the productive process. I’ll try to be back on track in a day or two…

We’re going to take the Labor Day weekend off, and renew ourselves for the upcoming busy fall season. We hope you can do the same. It’s a great time to enjoy family and friends.

Before we go, however, I wanted to recommend a new software product. We’ve just finished a 14 day evaluation period of VIPRE - the latest anti-malware product from Sunbelt Software.

VIPRE offers protection against viruses (virii), spyware/malware, and root kits. What separates it from the pack, however, is the speed with which it works, and the minimum drain on system resources - even while scanning email as you download it.

VIPRE is also very intuitive and easy to figure out. We’ve used many different products over the years but none that equaled VIPRE for ease of use!

-Walt

Like most of you, I’m darned tired of SPAM. But apparently we’re our own worst enemy. This from today’s PC World’s Privacy & Security newsletter…

“Why do we keep getting e-mails pitching counterfeit luxury items and “male enhancement”? Because nearly 30 percent of people who receive them buy something from the spammers. This might be amusing if it didn’t have a dark side: Cybercriminals use spam to spread destructive Trojan horses and viruses.”

The only thing that will effectively STOP SPAM at the source is quit buying whatever it is they’re trying to cram down our throats. Sheesh. Almost one in three are purchasing products advertised via SPAM! STOP!!!

…Mozilla switches on Firefox 3.0 auto update…

This marks the first time I’ve ever had a hitch when upgrading Firefox. I received the automatic upgrade notice, and allowed it to download and install itself automatically. When Firefox attempted to launch itself, it crashed, sent an error report, and I had no browser. Nothing seemed to revive it!

Ultimately, I uninstalled version 3 via the Control Panel. Then I opened Internet Explorer and downloaded Firefox 3, installed it, and am now living happily ever after! All the settings were still intact in the Mozilla profiles folder.

It’s fast and furious! Go for it!

Colors can trigger the right emotions…

Redecorate Your Web Site To Increase Sales

The proper use of colors on your web site can increase your sales. When people see certain colors, their emotions change or they can symbolize things related to the colors. Here is a list of colors with the emotions and symbolizations commonly attached to them:

Red - love, excitement, warmth

Pink - romantic, affection, sensuality

White - purity, peace, perfection

Blue - sky, water, travel, freedom, truth

Purple - royalty, dignity

Black - space, night, authority

Green - money, calm, envy, greed

Yellow - light, purity, understanding

Orange - autumn, youthfulness, fire

Brown - wood, comfort, strength

It’s very important to know which emotions or symbolizations will trigger your target audience to buy your product or service. If you’re marketing a money-making product, you should employ green colors to represent money or bring out the emotion of greed. People also associate comfort and travel with money, so perhaps you’ll want to mix in some brown and blue colors on your website.

The same principle can be applied to images or pictures of your product on your website. Package your products with colors that will trigger your audience to buy. If you’re selling a book about how to be more romantic, use red and pink colors on the cover. We hope these simple website color techniques will increase your business’ sales.

Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela top in Latin America for mobile Web usage - HULIQ.com
Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela lead Latin America in adoption of the mobile Web according to the newest “State of the Mobile Web” report issued by Opera Software today. The report also specifies the Top 10 most popular sites ranked according to unique visitors in each of the top countries for mobile Web usage in Latin America. Google, of course, leads the way…

Apple Faces Suit Over iPhone 3G Glitches

Apple is being sued by an Alabama woman because of problems with its new iPhone. She complains that the 3G speed is not as fast as Apple claims. She’s seeking class action status for the suit.

A third of Vista PCs downgraded to XP | The Register

For the record, we’re neither Microsoft fans nor bashers. We recently purchased our first PC with Vista installed. It’s a nice, fast, powerful Toshiba notebook. With three GIGs of RAM, Vista can’t even make it blink.

The Vista learning curve has been relatively easy after years of using XP Pro. Frankly, there has been no Vista downside for us. The only thing we’ve had to do was move an old scanner to one of our XP equipped machines. Even all our old software runs fine under Vista!

Now, we’re not about to recommend that anyone move from XP to Vista on an old machine. But there really doesn’t seem to be much reason not to move to Vista on a new one (unless you are running software that just won’t handle Vista, of course)… -Walt

Computer Bytes No. 27

Ever wonder about those letters that come right after the ‘dot’ at the end of a file name. These two, three and four letter extensions define the type of file. The File Name can be anything you or the person that created the file chooses, usually a name that will remind you of the contents. However, the assigned file extension tells the computer what type of file it is and which program to use to open it. Most files fall into basic categories such as execution-application, text or word document, graphic, spreadsheet, web files and zip.

The following are some of the more common file extensions. EXE is an executable or application file and is executable or self-extracting by double clicking. If you receive an EXE file as an attachment to an email, open with caution as this is a favorite method for sending viruses. Word processing and text programs such as Word Pad have extensions such as DOC or TXT. Word pad documents will not run in a word processing program and word processing documents will not run in word pad, and trying to do so may cause you to compromise the format and content of the document.

Graphic programs offer a variety of extensions that may show the number of colors, format and how the file is managed through the graphics program. The more recognizable file extensions for graphics are GIF (Graphic Interface Format), JPG (Joint Photographers Group), TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) and BMP (Bit-mapped Graphic Photo).

Spreadsheet files may end in XLS which is the extension used by Excel. Other spreadsheet programs may have their own unique extensions. There are many file extensions for the pages uploaded to the Internet. These extensions let you know what type of page you are viewing be it text, audio, video or something else. An HTML extension (Hyper Text Markup Language) is typical of most text pages. Pages that have a PHP extension (originally Personal Home Page) is a page containing a server-side script that performs a function. There are other embedded program extensions in web pages that will allow them to perform a wide assortment of functions from Email Forms (CGI), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Java (JS) and Perl (PL).

An extension you probably have seen if you have viewed an on line manual is PDF (Portable Document Format). You must have a special program - Adobe Acrobat Reader - installed in your computer to view PDF files. These files may include text, fonts, images and graphics which make it perfect for on line manuals and instructions. If you want to send a large file quickly use WinZip or PKZip to compress the file. This will result in a ZIP extension.

If you are unsure of a file’s extension and the correct program to use to open it, you can enable the viewing of File Extensions on your computer. Doing this will allow you to view the file extension making it easier to select the correct program for use. There are many more file extensions and should you care to look further into this topic perform a search on Google or Yahoo for ‘common file extensions’.

This article prepared courtesy of MoncriefWebDesign.com…