BHS Web Design – Toronto Web Design Blog

Many website owners are discovering social bookmarking as an effective way to drive traffic to their websites. Social bookmarking websites are basically all about communities and participation. Social bookmarking sites let users interact with each other as well as create their own content. These sites are very different from static sites and blogs.

There are two ways in which social bookmarking sites operate. There are social bookmarking sites that let you bookmark your favorite links in one central place. This is especially handy and convenient for users who get online on different computers. They can always access their favorite sites from one central location.

There are social bookmarking sites that let you create a list of favorite sites public or viewable by other users who are within the social bookmarking site. This is a great way you can generate traffic to your own websites and articles since you can bookmark their URLs and make your bookmarks viewable by others.

And then there are social bookmarking sites wherein you can submit articles that can be voted on by members of the community. The articles that receive the highest votes are the ones that get featured on high-traffic pages. If one of your articles are voted to the top, you can expect to receive a lot of traffic to your site as a result.

When creating some of your articles, keep the social bookmarking sites in mind. Create a few articles on controversial issues or hot topics and then submit them to social bookmarking sites. If one of your articles catch the attention of a lot of readers, it can be voted and your site may may get hundreds, if not thousands, of new visitors.

Here’s a tip: encourage visitors to add your site to their list of favorite sites by including bookmarklets at the end of every web page you create. Bookmarklets are small icons from each social bookmarking site and display to your web pages. Whenever a visitor clicks on a bookmarklet on your site, your page then automatically gets added to their favorite sites list.

There are plenty of social bookmarking sites you can submit, but the more popular ones include Blinklist, Del.icio.us, Digg, Fark, Furl, Netscape, Reddit, Simpy and Stumbleupon. Don’t limit yourself to these social bookmarking sites. Find others that are particularly geared towards your niche or target market.

Here’s another tip: Get yourself rolling in the social bookmarking scene by creating multiple profiles in each social bookmarking site. For instance, if you have 12 accounts in one social bookmarking site, that’s 12 votes already for every page you submit. However, be careful about this method. It’s actually a “black hat” method, and you can get your accounts deleted and your sites permanently banned from the service if you get caught.

First and foremost, what is a blog? A blog is a popular outlet for non-techies to easily maintain their own content based website. It is a pre-packaged program that can be setup on any web server, or there are other free alternatives available such as blogger.com that allow anyone to quickly and easily setup their own blog and begin sharing their thoughts with the world.
The word “blog” comes from the two terms “web” and “log”. The blog contains regular commentaries from the blog owner about interesting or informative information, website links, pictures, videos and more. Blogs can be setup as a stand-alone feature, or easily integrated into an existing website.

Blogging can be a great way to promote your company’s products & services, and also be recognized as an authority on the subject you’re blogging about. You can also gain visibility for your website by commenting on other people’s blogs. It’s smart business to find blogs about your company’s industry and make insightful and helpful comments. These comments will help drive traffic to your website and the readers will recognize you as an expert. Technorati.com is a great resource to find other blogs to comment on.

Blog Writing Tips:

1. Write about something worthwhile.

2. Follow the 5 W’s in the first paragraph – who, what, when, why and where.

3. Follow the KISS rule – Keep It Short and Simple! Most people scan when they’re reading, particularly online. Get to the point immediately.

4. Write attention grabbing headlines.

5. Write like you’re talking to someone – you are.

6. Keep the information clear – you want to gain their trust so they return.

7. Use keywords to try and get search engine traffic.

8. Link to other bloggers, who in return will link to you, and everyone gets more traffic.

9. Make sure your links are highlighted and say where they’re going not just “click here”

10. Time stamp your posts so everyone knows how current they are.

11. Proofread, check grammar and content before posting.

12. Pose a question to your readers to make them want to participate and comment.

These guidelines should be enough to allow anyone to take the leap into the world of blogging and promote your products / services, and most importantly, yourself!

Paypal has established itself as the easiest way to set up payment reception on a Web site and one of the easiest ways for customers to make payments. As an online business owner or manager, you have more than one type of Paypal account you can set up. You also have multiple ways by which you can use Paypal to receive online payments. As such, it is essential that you at least know what Paypal has to offer you and how it works.

1. Setting up Paypal can be as easy as clicking a few buttons on a wizard and generating code to paste into your website to create a payment button.

2. Paypal allows you to accept secure payments, giving your customers a greater sense of security.

3. Paypal allows you not only to accept payments directly from Paypal users, but it also processes credit card and check payments for you.

4. Most of Paypal’s merchant payment processing plans have no fees accept for a small percentage of each transaction. These transaction fees are much less than those charged by the average credit card payment processor.

5. In addition to payment buttons, Paypal offers full shopping cart options for your website. For those with many products on their sites and who aren’t masters of databases and Web scripting, this is a very alluring feature.

6. Paypal does not require that you have buttons on your website to receive payments. In fact, it doesn’t even require that you have a website. Payments can be made to you using your email address as an identifier.

7. Paypal Pro members have a monthly fee they must pay in addition to the standard payment processing individual transaction fees.

8. Paypal’s standard payments, business, and premiere membership levels all allow you to accept payments by phone, fax, and mail. Pro members do not have to pay an additional fee for these options.

9. Pro members have the additional benefit of being able to process payments through interfaces on their own site, rather than redirecting them through Paypal’s site.

10. Paypal members with a standard account can only accept payments from Paypal members who have a cash balance in their Paypal accounts.

In addition to the above notes, further distinction needs to be made between the Paypal business accounts and Paypal premiere accounts in order to avoid confusion. They actually offer pretty similar options, but the premiere account is more for a sole proprietor or independent contractor. The business account is set up more to be in the name of your business. As such, the business account also allows you to add multiple users to your Paypal account. Otherwise, you as the owner of the site would have to do all of the financial work for your business even if you have a full staff of employees.

If you’ve got an online company, any web design expert will tell you that your website is the heart of your operation. This means that your website design is equally important to the success of your company. Because a person cannot be seen physically as a representation of your when you operate online, that image must be transmitted via the internet. It then makes sense to put a lot careful thought and planning into your website design.

Think for a second on what impression you would make on customers in a physical location if when they walked in the door they were greeted by a salesperson dressed in wrinkled pyjamas. Do you think this salesperson would be representing the proper image of your company? Do you think customers would take you or your business seriously? Well, these same rules apply when it comes to putting together your website.

If you have a website that looks like it was made from some common website template or appears thrown together it can, and will, greatly affect sales of your products. The important thing is to make sure your website speaks of quality without you ever having to say word, which is important since you won’t be there to say one.

Conversely, if your website design comes off polished and professional it will go a long way towards winning over prospective customers. By paying close attention to all the details that others won’t, you will be able to give customers that much needed confidence necessary to choose you over another competitor. A top quality Toronto web design company can assist you with making this goal a reality if you are not an expert at website design yourself.

Also keep in mind that you want to have all materials associated with your online company well thought out and designed. Items like brochures, letterhead, and business cards are also important to creating a polished image for your online company. It will be these inches which will cause you to step miles ahead of the competition and represent your company in the best light possible. Now when customers encounter your website they won’t meet the “salesperson” dressed in pyjamas, they will feel as though they got the one dressed in a tailored suit!

Building a blog to receive maximum exposure is indeed a daunting task as there are thousands of blogs being created each day.  To create a popular blog aimed at receiving large readership calls for good quality and wide number of distribution channels. You ask any web designer or blog builder the secret of creating a popular blog and the one standard reply you will receive is “Content is King”. Of course, content is essential as people visit your blog primarily to read the content. The quality of this content will have a significant impact on how your readers perceive or evaluate your blog. The next important factor to make your blog popular is the distributions channels. Many blog builders will tell you that the secret of getting maximum exposure is developing a wide range of distribution channels.  The ultimate aim is to ensure that as many people as possible view, recommend and distribute your content!

It is common knowledge that the success of a blog depends on its audience size. When more and more people read your blog regularly, your content will potentially be circulated more widely. There is certainly some truth when people say that the value of content is subjective and can vary depending on the aptitude and levels of knowledge of the visitor. So the actual impact is created by proper distribution than mere content. If you can meaningfully expand your distribution channels, people will naturally talk about what they see frequently instead of something they see less often.

If you want to build a large readership or be regarded as an authority on any topic, you have to necessarily develop a core group of supporters. This is important because these people allow your content to reach beyond your existing readership. The core group of supporters should be bloggers, each with his or her own audience, and with the ability to send you links and traffic. Whenever you publish an important article, it is your core group of supporters who will disseminate it by sharing it with others. This will fetch more targeted visitors into your site, some of whom may eventually subscribe and follow your blog.

Increasing your distribution channels will certainly call for some active effort on your part. Allowing other websites to syndicate your content is an easy way to get some extra exposure and develop some additional readership.  Translating your content into a few other major languages like Chinese or Japanese will makes your content accessible to a much larger audience.

Another effective method of getting your content across to multiple audiences is to indulge in guest blogging. The true value of guest blogging lies in your ability to build closer relationships with the bloggers you write for. Guest blogging is an assured doorway towards future recommendations and links. It is best to pitch a blogger who has previously published your article on his or her site. If you have an exceptional article that merits being shared with others, you will easily succeed because you’ve already acquired that trust.

The only known secret for a blog to grow fast and gain maximum exposure is to post interesting and valuable content and have it spread through a core audience who have the ability to link or influence links.