The Wet Sponge

“Global Strategy for American businesses includes America” !

This minute I am watching & listening to the interview between Charlie Rose and Jeffrey Immelt, the Chairman & CEO of GE (General Electric) on my local PBS station.

GE is one of the few big American technology companies that have survived. Mr. Immelt has some very piquant points to make.

He is continually pointing out the importance of keeping the WORKFORCE competitive. To paraphrase, American companies certainly “have” made some mistakes when it comes to outsourcing the wrong things… not supporting the training and education resources American companies need in order to be competitive in the global market… thinking of our American companies as somehow different from those abroad.

GE and similar companies who are primary source providers of aerospace and other high-tech products need to make sure their workforce is well-educated and well-trained. That’s what our competitors are doing – why aren’t we?

Why aren’t we considering our own American people – our parents, husbands and wives, our sons and daughters -  as assets to be treated as such!

We must turn around the attitude of American business owners, boards, investors, and – yes – the employees themselves. We must deal with the fact that to be competitive in a global market – and to keep our successful employers & employees alive – we all need to think and work smarter.

I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Immelt’s comments on how GE has remained not just viable, but successful.  Obviously, don’t let our local, state, and federal governments cut back on funding for technical colleges and universities. For me in the WNC area, that means Asheville-Buncombe Technical CC, Blue Ridge Community College, and the University of NC Asheville. Industrial companies should also invest in in-house employee training programs – for example, such as those provided by Topaz, a professional hi-tech training development company in my area.

It isn’t a nebulous problem, people. Actually measuring the Return On Investment in people and education is a piece of cake compared to most of the metrics I wrangle with on a daily basis as an internet marketer.

But listen up – as employees, we “also” have to invest our time, effort and ambitions in our own education and training. If we want American business to survive, everyone – from top to bottom – has to be invested in the process. Success is success – you win, I win, they win, we all win.

-Sponge

How to optimize a site and do internet marketing for an international audience is a major FAQ in the business these days. This is just a quick post of my first impressions from seeing the Web from another country – for the first time!

I suggest that one of the best ways to study this is to actually BE in other countries, but this is not always an option for site owners. Despite the fact that I’ve built multi-lingual websites over the years, this was my first opportunity to take my own computer along and just see what happens.

I’ve just returned from a three week trip overseas, including stays in the UK and France. This is a quick, first post on what I discovered. Since this was a family trip, not a business trip, I didn’t have as much time to play around online as I would have liked – but I will expand on this subject as soon as I can.

For a first-timer, the first challenge is getting an internet connection. I brought along my laptop (with a universal power converter) and made an effort to go online every day, no matter where I was. My first try was sitting outside Frankfurt airport in between flights. My trusty laptop detected a half-dozen possible networks, but of course I didn’t know if any of them were free & open networks. I picked one that looked OK, but it required a user login. I stopped at that point, not wanting to “experiment” with my computer too much or expose it to unknown risks.

(Note: My laptop, at least, came home virus-free. Wish I could say the same for myself. When it comes to your computer, don’t take chances if you are not sure what is going on!)

The second challenge is e-mail while overseas. You should definitely have a universal email account before you go.

Since I had missed a connecting flight, I HAD to contact my party at the other end to inform them. I discovered that the Frankfurt airport had little internet kiosks here & there. You just prepay for so many minutes with your credit card, then go online. From here you can use a universal email account such as Gmail or Yahoo mail, etc. This was a lifesaver. But I also discovered that keyboards are different in different countries! It took me half my online time just to find the @ sign

Next stop, a private home in France with a home wireless network. Since they had not put in a security lock, I was able to easily connect, surf, and use my Gmail account to stay in touch with ground control back home. In France I got my first real look at Google from within another country. The Google ‘home page’ defaulted to www.google.fr with everything in French, but with a few additional features – there were links for searching for pages only in French (or only in the domain .fr), or alternatively, switching to Google in English. (It was also just as easy to navigate to www.google.com .) Since I was doing my best to learn French, I stuck with Google.fr as much as possible but did not restrict my searches to only French pages. The upshot is that if you search for something, you’ll get search results for domains/pages in France, a page in French from another country, and the usual world-wide results for that matter. The world is your oyster.

Next stop, Scotland, at a nice B&B outside Edinburgh. They also had an open home wireless network available at no extra charge, and not requiring any login. (They were safe enough to do this, being up on the moors of the Pentland hills.) Here it was easy-peasy to do anything I needed – no discernable difference from being in the states at all.

Next stop, England, staying at a chain hotel. Here I discovered that they charge through the nose for an internet connection from your room – no thanks! They did have 2 computers in the lobby for public use. You prepay for so many minutes at the front desk,, they give you an access code, and you’re quickly online. But it ain’t exactly cheap.

Final stop, a hotel at the Nice airport. Here too, they charge a lot for in-room internet access. But since I was only there overnight (actually, half a night – had to get up at 4 AM for the flight home!) I did not spin the wheel and try my luck with their internet service. This hotel did not have any public computers available.

I will write more about how to build and optimize sites and pages for international exposure, how character sets fit in, and other topics, as soon as possible.

Part of this trip involved a major family reunion – I now have relatives in several continents and countries, including Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, all the UK, France, and I think Italy too. As time and politeness allows I will ask friends and family what their online experience is like from their location, and pass on whatever I learn.

Meanwhile I am catching up on my “real” work back here at home

Sponge

What Would Alexander The Great Do?

I try to keep politics out of my public presence, but I just have to comment on the imprisonment in Iran of journalist Roxana Saberi.

All the pundits and experts I’ve listened to have explained the imprisonment as a inflammatory instigation by hard-right partisans in Iran, who just want to push our buttons and derail any hope for detente.

I doubt it.

This is certainly a TEST of how the Obama administration will react to, and deal with, a disagreement with the Iranian government.

Some History.

According to Mary Renault ( a well-respected historical conjecture author who based her work on ancient and eyewitness acccounts), in her book The Persian Boy, Roxana is a “close approximation” in Western language of the name of Alexander the Great’s Bactrian second wife, translating from Persian to Greek to English. Supposedly meaning “little star”, Roxana is more properly pronounced with the accent of the first syllable – WROX-ann-ah.

Back to Alexander.

At the time he took Roxana as his second wife (around 330 B.C.), he was almost literally king of the world. The only rival at the time was the Persian Empire, which held massive sway over the Middle East and Central Asia. Alexander had temporarily subdued the Persians – even razed the beautiful city of Persepolis to the ground.

Now – what would Alexander do if his wife had been abducted by the ancient Persian empire?

Most likely he’d have turned his army around, pursued and waged war with no quarter until he had her back and had reduced the Persians to total subservience. No doubt with disastrous results. Alexander was Great, but his empire did not hold for long following his death.

But this never happened. It’s just a “what if.”

Are we going to mimic Alexander? Or are we going to model ourselves after the Roman Empire instead?  The Romans -  despite disagreements, political intrigue and skirmishes – managed to keep peace with the Middle Eastern and Central Asian powers from Armenia to India for hundreds of years. (Except for the Levant and Palestine – I am definitely not counting those areas at the moment.)

I repeat – in my opinion this is a test in the time-honored tradition of Persia going back several thousand years. Of course they know the charges are groundless! It is our RESPONSE they want to see.

A new malware attack has been making the rounds recently, infecting a number of web servers and sites. If you suddenly find that your website is triggering your anti-virus software and flagging it as a “dangerous site”, the culprit may be the iframe injection hack.

If your site becomes infected, contact both your webmaster and your hosting company immediately.

I’ve been working on fixing this problem for one of my clients, and had to do some digging to find useful information on the cause, what it’s doing, and the solution. I am not a server admin or IT expert, but I hope the following information will help.

The symptom:

You, or anybody else, visits the home page of your site – only to find anti-virus software kicking in and bells going off. You may even find your site flagged in Google results as a “site that may harm your computer”.

Note – this infection can occur no matter who your hosting company is. I have heard from a colleague who encountered this problem that they were hosting with Yahoo, but I’m NOT suggesting Yahoo is particularly vulnerable – just pointing out that if Yahoo servers can get infected, any server can.

What’s going on under the hood:

If you look at the source code of the infected page, you will see that a script has been inserted into the page at the bottom, usually just before the /body tag. The infection usually hits the following page names:

index
default
home
main
config
web

There are a few variations of the script. Examples (in a graphic) :

examples of iframe injection scripts

What they do:

They create a hidden iframe (inline frame) that contains the malicious code. What happens after that I am not sure – I have not experimented with the infection. I assume that if a PC is infected (i.e. it gets past your anti-virus software), it will execute a malicious code originating from another site/server and dump some malware on your PC.

How it spreads:

From what I read, here’s how I understand it. Somebody with an infected PC accesses their website via either their hosting control panel, or by FTP. The script/virus then activates and scans your site for certain page names (index, etc.) and inserts itself into your page.

It is possible it also spreads directly from server to server, or servers are deliberately infected by a hacker.

It is also apparent that the virus, once it gains entry into a web server, can infect ALL websites hosted on that server.

Vulnerabilities:

It appears that this is a Windows Server security vulnerability, and “possibly” more likely to happen to Cold Fusion sites. If your site is using shared hosting, then your site is vulnerable to attack from other infected sites on the same server.

What To Do:

1. Make sure to notify your web host that your site has been infected with the iframe injection.
2. Do a virus scan of all PCs with control panel and FTP access to your site and make sure they are clean.
3. Change your hosting admin, control panel, FTP and database passwords.
4. Check the file permissions on your server – most likely the infected files have incorrect security settings (writeable when they shouldn’t be.) Contact your hosting company if you need help with this.
5. Delete or rename the infected file (to something like index041109.html.bak)
6. Re-upload a clean version of your page.
7. Keep checking. I have seen this infection happen to the same site a second time, after the first time I cleaned it up. If your PC is clean, you just keep renaming the bad file and re-uploading a clean file until the hosting company closes the security gap. (Complain loudly if this doesn’t happen within a couple of weeks.)

If you discover your site flagged as possibly dangerous in Google results, clean the site. If you already have Google Webmaster Tools set up for your site, log in and from there you can request a review of your site.

If you do not have Webmaster Tools set up, use your browser to go to:

http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=YourSiteHere.com/
(Inserting your site name of course). The resulting page will give you further information and help for getting your site reviewed and SE results corrected.

From there you can also follow a direct link to Webmaster Tools. If you have not set it up for your site, you really, really should. Get your site cleaned, then get a Google Login, then follow the link after you run the Google diagnostic above. It’s free, very useful, and you won’t get any spam as a result. Note: the Webmaster Tools setup requires that you insert a verification html file into your site – so don’t do the setup until you have cleaned up your site and you’ve got “safe” access to your site via control panel or FTP.

Following are a couple of explanations by others that I found to be particularly helpful:

http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/thread.cfm/threadid:59164

http://www.diovo.com/2009/03/hidden-iframe-injection-attacks/

I certainly hope you don’t encounter this problem. But if you do, I hope my information will help you!

On April 6, 2009 I will be presenting a workshop covering Internet Marketing for Accommodations and the Hospitality industry as part of the Blue Ridge Community College Small Business Center, “Prospering in 2009 Conference.”

Travel and Accommodations couldn’t possibly be a tougher subject in today’s economy. I have years of experience working with clients in this business – and there is no doubt everyone is hurtin’. They need all the help they can get.

So I combined everything I knew from past experience with fresh research. The resulting paper is available here as a PDF download.

Internet Marketing for Accommodations 2009

Much of the information applies to the region of Asheville NC and the broader area of the Blue Ridge Mountains – but even if you have a B&B, Inn, Vacation Rental or Hotel somewhere else, I hope you will find the resources I put together helpful and inspirational for your own situation.

This document is Copyright Fiona Dudley 2009, all rights reserved. (B&B and Inn owners, hotel owners/managers, and vacation rental owners are welcome to download it and share it with their community, friends, and network connections. Publication or reprinting for any other purpose requires permission.)

Actually, I prefer to say Artisans, Artists and Craftspeople. Here in the Asheville area of the Southern Appalachian Blue Ridge, there are more talented Artisans than there are churches on the country roads – and that’s saying a lot!

On February 23rd I was honored to present a brief seminar on Internet Marketing for Arts and Crafts at the Blue Ridge Community College Small Business Center, “Prospering in 2009 Conference.”

This is a tough subject. I spent many, many hours combining what I knew about the arts and crafts community in our region with a whooole lot of online research to prepare for this.

The difficulty for people who produce fine arts, traditional/heritage crafts, and modern interpretations of traditional arts, is online competition. There are so may huge sites out there that deal in “arts” and “crafts” it’s almost impossible to separate the disposable junk from the truly beautiful items that will become family heirlooms. In my area I’m within hollerin’ distance of fine jewelers, weavers and textile artists, basket makers, potters and ceramic artists, doll makers, metalwork artists, glass blowers, sculptors, quilters – you name it.

I already knew before going in that having a website displaying your wares will not get you much in the way of direct online sales. But a website is certainly a must – it acts as your online brochure and gallery, and there are ways to make that site work for you when you can tie it in to some other internet and media outlets.

The time allotted for my presentation was short – I knew we would not be able to discuss everything possible.

So I prepared a written handout for the participants. This 15-page Guide to Internet Marketing for Arts and Crafts (updated March 29, 2009) is available here, as a free PDF download.

Internet Marketing for Arts and Crafts 2009

This document is Copyright Fiona Dudley 2009, all rights reserved. (Artists are welcome to download it and share it with their community, friends, and network connections. Publication or reprinting for any other purpose requires permission.)

I encourage all my clients to use a blog these days, as a way of participating in social networking. It’s also a great way for site owners to be able to add new content to their site by themselves.

But 90% won’t do it, or don’t keep up with it.

The most common complaints are that it takes too much time out of their working day, and that they can’t think of anything to write about.

Let me dispell the first complaint. First, if you are a business owner, think of this as part of your overall marketing and advertising to generate customer loyalty and acquire new customers! Blogging is sooo easy these days – I promise. Plus it can be fun!!

Now – what to write about?

If you are stuck for things to write about, here are my suggestions:

1. Think about the questions your customers ask you. Chances are, if they have a question about your service or products, so do other people. Particularly potential customers.

2. Think about what friends and family ask you about your business at social occasions. When Mrs. Grundy asks “what do you do?” well, what do you tell her?

3. Write about anything you want! Don’t feel constrained to write about one specific subject.

4. Write about what interests you.

5. Don’t feel intimidated. You are not expected to be writing term papers Blog posts can be as short or as long as you like.

6. If an idea suddenly pops into your head but you don’t have the time this minute, jot it down on a little pocket notepad just for blogging ideas. Then get back to it later.

7. Take some time to surf the ‘net for fun. Participate in finding interesting sites, news, and use social networking/media. These can be great sources of inspiration for writing about your own thoughts and experiences.

8. Check out sites like www.askoxford.com which is a site all about words and word games, quotes and sayings, crosswords, etc. Just browse around  – something is bound to trigger a thought connection in your head.

Finally, if my own ideas haven’t helped yet – check out this article, Triggers for Story Ideas by Asheville Writer and Editor Susan Snowden. Susan has won many awards for her writing, and is one of the best professional editors I know. Her site contains many, many resources for writers of all kinds – including inspiration!

First you need a list of sites you want to link to – and request links from. See my previous post, Link Research Tools & Tips.

Now that you know who you’d like to get links from, what’s the best way to go about it?

Let me give you a real case study with my client, Cormark International – an exotic wood supplier for woodworking and woodturning.

Though the company has been in business for over 27 years, their site is relatively new, and they have only recently added a shopping cart for retail woodworking supplies.

They didn’t have many inbound links going for them – so here is what I’ve done:

1. I started by making sure their site and business are listed in all the “big” Local searches. I also did a few quality directory submissions, just to get the ball rolling. Plus I linked to them from my business site under Clients.

2. I researched competitor links and did online searches. I followed the breadcrumb trails. I manually visited and scoped out as many related woodworking sites I could find. Then I whittled down my list. Remember – quality is more important than quantity. In the process, I also uncovered some really great sites that were not linking to any competitors.

3. I built a Resources page for Cormark, and populated it with a couple dozen outbound links to sites that we all agreed were quality resources for Cormark’s site visitors, whether they link back to us or not. For example, I looked for sites that offered guidance, tips, tools, and free woodworking plans. I also looked for woodworkers’ sites offering items for sale that do not compete with Cormark.

4. I checked each desired site for specific information on exchanging links. Some have emails and forms available for that, and I used them. The key point here is – check out who owns the site, and whether they have any specific information regarding requesting links.

One site I found, www.kevinsbrady.net  contains a page amounting to a manifesto on how to request a link the right way – and it is a beautiful example of how link requests should be approached! Please read his page – he explains quite clearly as a site owner how to get through to him, or how to end up in his trash bin

5. The most important way to ensure you actually get some quality links is to do your homework right, find out as much as you can about the other site and the owner, and contact them directly – by name – with a personal letter or email.

6. I am continuing with the link request process, contacting a few sites at a time. There is some “suspicion” that if you suddenly load up your site with 100 inbound links, you’ve taken a frowned-upon shortcut rather than acquire decent, quality inbound links the “natural” way.

Link Campaigning is not the time to take shortcuts! Do it right and you will build up good links to your site. And don’t forget, as a site owner, part of your responsibility is to provide good links of your own to your visitors!

Give them a reason to come back.

Give other sites a good reason to link to you.

Even though the yardstick for web site popularity undergoes constant metamorphosis, your site still needs links – both inbound and outbound.

I have always recommended to my clients that they provide outbound links. It is a way of giving your visitors added value for visiting your site.

You also want to have other quality sites linking to yours. Despite social media and personalized search, inbound links still count for a lot with the search engines.

So how do you go about linking up and forming a good “community” of links for your site?

First of all, YOU need to have a way to link out to other sites. It can be a separate page (a Links or Resources page – name it what you will) or you can use text-based links placed directly in your site’s copy in appropriate places. These outbound links need to be easy to find – not a hidden or buried page.

How do you find quality sites?

No question this is going to take some time, but there are some tools available to help shorten the process.

1. Start with your customers, business associates,  or sites that you have found valuable!

2. Know who is already linking to you. You can usually discover who is already linking to you by investigating your site statistics provided for free by virtually all site hosting companies these days. Check out their sites, and if you think they would be helpful to your site visitors, then by all means link back to them.

3. Find out who is linking to your competitors. If a site links to your competitor, they might also be willing to link to you. Discovering this is tougher. You will probably need some software help. I use WebCEO for many purposes, and discovering links to competitors is one of the available tools. But it’s professional, expensive software. If you’re a sole operator in charge of your site, there are a couple of other options:

www.LinkDiagnosis.comis a free tool you can use. It derives its information from the Yahoo database. It also works better with FireFox and they provide a FireFox Plugin for getting the most out of their tools.

www.Link-Assistant.com : Not free (as of this writing, $147 but that’s very reasonable in this biz.) Their software bundles a lot of great tools for tracking links all over the place, as well as some very useful tools for weeding out the clunkers and determining if a prospective site is using naughty SEO tactics. I have not purchased and tried this software yet, but it’s on my list! This program was recommended to me by Ty, my good buddy and Internet Marketing Pro par excellence over at www.redvwbus.com .

4. This is the most time consuming method but tried and true. Follow the breadcrumb trails manually. If you discover a good site that links to you, check out all their other links. Then keep following. It sounds simple – and it is. And it works. It just takes time.

5. You can do a search on any search engine using terms directly related to your business, see what results come up, and check out the sites. This is a bit more hit-and-miss, but one thing it is good for is locating large directory or specialty sites where you can get free or reasonably-priced listings and links.

6. Don’t neglect to get your business listed in Google Local, Yahoo Local, and any authoritative, well-established local websites for your area. For example, www.Asheville.com is a case in point (by no means the only one) for my own local area.

7. Participate online! Use user groups and social media (such as Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Facebook, just a few examples) to communicate with other people in your business or related businesses. You can find some great sites to link to – and find folks who will happily link to you – with social media/networking. The key word here is participate. Don’t go for hard sell, it won’t work. Be a helpful, contributing community member and the links will follow.

YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE!

I have a client, let’s call them the Friendly Brothers. They provide a specific service in my geographic region. They have only one big competitor – let’s call them the Gorillas.

In all my years I’ve never seen anything as down and dirty – and stupid – as what the Gorillas have been up to.

The Friendly Brothers and I caught them running PPC ads using the Friendly Brothers’ trademarked business name. We caught them in the act, and used our handy-dandy “Print Screen” button. We now have permanent proof of it.

For that particular problem, a Cease and Desist appears to have made the ads go away – so far.

Then, I discovered that when you do a search for the Friendly Brothers dot.com, some very suspicious-looking results pages were coming up in the Top 10 listings. The listed pages contained my Friendly Brothers’ business name, but the URLS were definitely not related to our site or any SEO work we’d done.

Like a hound who’s just been shown a pile of Gorilla poop, I was on the trail.

Turns out these Top 10 listings were originating from a Classifieds website in Canada. There were a dozen or so ads on this site, advertising the same service, using my client’s business name, and a telephone number that “just happened to” be exactly the same as my client’s, except for the area code. And this info was showing up in the search engine results.

We decided to call the number. What we got was a residence, and the mumbled explanation was that the husband “used to be” in this business but wasn’t anymore – we could call again after he got home from work and talk to him.

Now, it is possible that it is a coincidence. I guess. But I’m not falling for it.

Fortunately the classifieds site has links for reporting spam and illegal/infringing ads. So far, we haven’t been able to backtrack the actual Gorilla that placed the ads – and they could have used a mule anyway.

The Friendly Brothers and I are still on the trail, and it’s a hot one.

The moral of the story is that if you try any of these stupid tricks, you can be easily found out AND find some letters from lawyers in your mailbox.

In this day and age, establishing your Brand and Credibility is critical on the web. Protect those assets. Be vigilant! It’s a jungle out there