NEW YORK – Once in a while I come across a person, customer or prospect that doesn’t understand what website hosting is and why they might have to pay for it. They seem to feel that hosting is some unknown, unexplained add-on which seems confusing at best or a rip-off at worst. The particular people seem to think a website just 'exists' out there on the Inter-webs or are somehow part of the World Wide Web; they have trouble understanding what website hosting is and why … [Read more...]
Today’s ‘Successful’ Business Owners Become Experts at Doing More with Less
NEW YORK, NY – At a time when the economy is said to be continually improving, if you ask around to fellow business owners, most seem to be in a never ending phase of finding ways to efficiently cut costs and reduce expenses. In fact, this is a good practice for any business owner to keep top-of-mind, annually, or even monthly. To do this effectively, you must identify ways to implement change with minimal effect on production, products and service quality. The changes … [Read more...]
Entrepreneurial Inspiration: Jeff Bezos, Amazon and Earth’s “Blue Origin”
NEW YORK, NY - Jeff Bezos, the guy who built and envisioned Amazon, the largest and most successful online only shopping site, isn’t much different than your average entrepreneur. He was raised in Houston Texas, is a child of divorce, was later adopted, worked at McDonald's as a young boy and went on to attend Princeton University where he graduated with a 4.2 grade point average. He is very much human - and - certainly a hard worker. Bezos held several good jobs after … [Read more...]
ICA Lays Ground for Compelling Argument Even the Most Bias of Opinion Cannot Deny
NEW YORK, NY – Two things happened on November 1, 2018, when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced it would renew its Cooperative Agreement with Verisign while removing price caps on fees it charges registries: Verisign’s stock (VRSN) shot up $25 per share in a single day (then levelling off at still a healthy gain), Verisign came out blasting domain industry participants, calling them “Domain Scalpers” near suggesting that … [Read more...]
Domain Name ‘Bill of Rights’ Proposed by Global Domain Name Registrar Uniregistry
NEW YORK, NY – This past week, the man who virtually created the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, spoke about his “Contract for the Web” initiative; something he believes is fundamental to ensure a protected, free and open Internet for all of society. Early backers of the initiative, which can be viewed at ContractForTheWeb.org, include notable support from some of the webs largest innovators such as Google.com, Facebook.com, Craig Newmark (Founder of Craigslist.org), the W3C … [Read more...]
Human Quality Ratings and Guidelines Continue to Become Center of Debate
NEW YORK, NY – It’s nothing short of amazing to see all of the time, money, resources and effort search giant Google engineers are putting towards accessing the trustworthiness of specific web-pages these days. I remember when the entire Google algorithm was simply based on the HTML code which made up a website. However, these days Google uses not only artificial intelligence to rank sites, but they also use 'real people' to give websites something called “QR” ratings … [Read more...]
Alphabet Releases App to Prevent DNS Manipulation, Deter Online Censorship
NEW YORK, - Google’s Alphabet has released a new Android app called “Intra” which prevents “DNS manipulation”, a process used often by ISPs to redirect invalid domain name resolution to their own version of branded search results, usually accompanied by search engine ads – when used nefariously, it is also a tactic of hackers who steal and redirect users to phishing sites or to otherwise dupe them into downloading viruses and spyware. The app is made available by a company … [Read more...]
Google Trends: Past Five Years in Review
NEW YORK, NY - Google Trends is a tool provided by Google which allows you to review what words, phrases and terms are trending and measure their popularity based on what people are searching for on Google.com. Users can sort and review search history based on region, dates and time periods as well as view top lists within certain categories of content types. Below is a list of what keyword and keyword phrases were trending for the past five years from 2017 to 2013. These … [Read more...]
Yellow Pages Goes Green® Offers Annual Scholarship to High School Seniors Pursuing Environmental Careers
EAST NORTHPORT, NEW YORK - YellowPagesGoesGreen.org (“YPGG”), a telephone directory at the forefront of the environmentally-conscious “Green” movement, has announced that beginning in 2019, the company will be offering a $1,500 College scholarship annually to a distinguished graduating high school senior whose career path is slated to take them into any fields related to environmental science or preservation. The goal of this scholarship, which will be awarded to at least … [Read more...]
Ebay.com to Begin Collecting Internet Sales Taxes Regardless of Physical Presence
NEW YORK, NY - Back in June of this year, the US Supreme Court made a ruling on Internet sales tax that overturned the long-standing physical presence requirement which prevented sales tax to be collected from certain online sellers. This change means that regardless of where you’re physically located, if you sell to buyers in certain states, those states may require you to collect applicable taxes on your transactions. For Ebay.com sellers, the service will begin to … [Read more...]
UK Print Yellow Pages to Cease in 2009; Are US Based Yellow Pages Soon To Follow?
NEW YORK, NY – Yell, publisher of the UK’s Yellow Pages, announced that, due to consumer demand and general lack of need or use, they will cease production of their print phone books as of January 2019 after annually releasing them for over 50 years. The shift in business strategy, Yell officials said, is due to a corresponding shift in consumer use of online phone directory options over print, as well as a growing concern among the general populace over the negative … [Read more...]
The Slow Yet Sure Death of LinkedIn: LinkedIn Lead Generation Programs
NEW YORK, NY - A few weeks ago I elaborated on what I believe will lead to the demise of LinkedIn.com as a business related service and as a social network. Today, as well as over the last few days, I received several reminders about this coming collapse; one of which I will detail and share with you below. See Related: Writing on the Wall: LinkedIn to Become Haven for Spam, Scams and Solicitations It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where all of this is … [Read more...]
27 Ways to Increase Website Traffic in 2018
NEW YORK, NY - I remember when Internet marketing was easy. Back then, it did not take 27 things, it took more like three. For me, it was all about: Knowing who I was trying to reach by doing some initial keyword research, then Optimize my web site for particular keywords and phrases my research showed traffic for, and Find links to point to my site including related keywords and keyword phrases in the anchor text of the links. Basically, I could do those three … [Read more...]
LSIGraph: A Free, Yet Limited “Latent Semantic Indexing” Word Research Tool
NEW YORK, NY – You might be familiar with my list of online tools to run, market and manage your Internet business; or you might have just seen it for the first time today. I’m adding something new to the list. It’s called the LSIGraph, and it’s free for a limited number of searches. I’ll give you an example of how it works and how it might help your web pages rank better for online searches. For a quick visual on Latent Semantic Indexing, see this very old post. Note: … [Read more...]
Supreme Court Win for Online Publishers
NEW YORK, NY - California’s Supreme Court has ruled that online review website Yelp can not be legally forced to take down libellous reviews, signalling a clear win for online publishers who allow user feedback, comments and reviews of businesses on their platforms. The ruling was related to a case on the books known as Hassell v. Bird, where Judge Donald Sullivan ordered Yelp to remove a users review of a law firm from the Yelp website. Yelp appealed to the Supreme … [Read more...]
Backlink Scandal for Major Web Publishers Puts Contributor Content in Crosshairs
NEW YORK, NY – Online content will likely become more expensive for several major media companies as a new scandal has to come to light which involves highly influential marketers planting articles and mentions within stories appearing on major publications, such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, Time, TechCrunch, and even sites such as the Wall Street Journal. This is how critical back-links have become over the last few years; that an actual “scandal” can be created by … [Read more...]
Writing on the Wall: LinkedIn to Become Haven for Spam, Scams and Solicitations
NEW YORK, NY – As the title suggests, the writing is on the wall for the demise of LinkedIn, a service Microsoft purchased in 2016 for more than $26 billion. According to the services “About page”, the social network boosts over 562 million registered users; that’s about 100 million more than it had when Microsoft acquired it, so on the surface, the site appears to be growing. But what will happen when the service is completely overridden with Spam, Scams, and Solicitations, … [Read more...]
Internet Sales Tax Law Could Change This June; Decision on South Dakota v. Wayfair
NEW YORK - The U.S. Supreme Court will make a critical decision in the coming weeks that could give states the right to tax small businesses on the Internet. What is being decided is whether or not a decision from 1992 should be upheld in a new case, which prevents States form being able to tax, audit or regulate businesses and individuals that do not reside in their state (Ex: online businesses, who are located elsewhere but do transact business in a state). If the … [Read more...]
The Birth of ICANN: “The Green Paper”
NEW YORK - In 1997, the United States government under then President Clinton began processes to remove its control over the Domain Name System by creating research and dialog on how control of domain names and IP addresses should be handled in the future - by a non-profit organization in the private sector. This resulted in a document which has become known as "The Green Paper" originally named "A Proposal to Improve the Technical Management of Internet Names and … [Read more...]
The Politics of Facebook: Zuckerberg to Testify Before Congressional Lawmakers
NEW YORK – You have to admit that it an amazing time in history when a computer programming entrepreneur must face the United States Government due to his innovative social network becoming one of the most powerful influencer tools in the World. Beginning tomorrow, Tuesday April 10, 2018, Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Marc Zuckerberg will testify before lawmakers in what is expected to be a two-day heavy-hitter grilling on the very serious privacy and … [Read more...]
Publication with Intent to Deceive; Where Does the Wild Wild West Draw the Line?
NEW YORK, NY - First of all, I am the last one that wants to create more rules and regulations for the Internet. As a publisher of both print and digital assets, I value greatly the right to free speech and the freedom of expression, but a problem is brewing out there and it is brewing right before us. It's a pretty serious problem and one that reveals itself as a combination of fake news and what I would consider publication with intent to deceive. Let me explain... We … [Read more...]
Google’s Got Something Facebook Doesn’t; Weather-based Campaign Management
NEW YORK, NY – The war is on as Google and Facebook aggressively fight for businesses ad dollars, yet for the first time in a while, Google’s got something Facebook probably has not even thought about (yet) and that’s Weather-based Campaign Management. Facebook likely has better targeting with people’s true interests due to the ridiculous of amount of data people share with Facebook, but this weather based targeting sounds pretty interesting. Now you can increase or … [Read more...]
