Jan
06
2009

What is an Internet Strategy?

strategycompujerameyYou may have heard the term Internet Strategy thrown around recently. With the rise in popularity of the Internet, businesses have felt the need to get on the Web bandwagon.  Most businesses have a website, but many are feeling the need for a more thorough look at how to use the Internet effectively.  So, what exactly is an Internet Strategy?

Like any good strategy, an Internet strategy is a process of deciding upon a goal and then figuring out how to work towards that goal.  An Internet strategy should be intimately tied to your business strategy.  If you don’t have a business strategy, start there and incorporate the Internet into your planning. The goal should be a business goal, not just an Internet business goal.  The Internet has matured enough to be able to assist in reaching most business goals.

Once you have your business goal, an Internet strategy is the process of figuring out how the Internet can help you reach that goal.  Think about your business website.  What functionality and information should be available to your customers to help you reach your goal?  What other Internet technologies can help?  It helps to think broadly – email, internet advertising, twitter, social networking, blogs – can all help you reach business goals.

To differentiate yourself from your competitors, think about what makes your business different.  What are you good at?  What is your core competency?  How can you apply that to your Internet strategy?

Your customers are the reason why you’re in business.  Don’t forget about them.  What benefits will you offer them through your products and services?  How can you leverage these benefits on the Internet?  How can your customers help you reach your goals?

(photo by compujeramey @ Flickr CC)

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Jan
05
2009

Moving to WordPress.com – What to Consider

wordpressOver the break we moved Sazbean.com and some of our other blogs over to WordPress.com from self-hosting WordPress on our own server.  Most of the process was relatively easy and overall we’re pleased with the results.  We made the decision to move for a few reasons: saving time and effort from updates and support, saving hosting costs (much cheaper), and additional syndication across WordPress’ network.

If you’re thinking of moving to WordPress.com or using them as your blogging platform, here’s what you should consider:

Advantages

  • WordPress.com takes care of all the updates and support
  • Cheap – you can have a blog hosted for free, but their low cost upgrades for control over CSS and domain name are worth it
  • Additional syndication of your content throughout the WordPress network – we’ve already seen a jump in traffic from this effect
  • Good selection of widgets to add functionality to your site – no need to worry about getting them working properly
  • Integrated dashboard – makes it easy to work with multiple blogs and the interface is very easy to use

Disadvantages

  • Limited control over the design and functionality of your blog (you have full CSS control with a paid upgrade)
  • No javascript allowed – which limits your ability to use custom widgets and other services that require a script tag
  • No outside site analytics – WordPress.com provides integrated statistics, but you won’t be able to use any outside analytics services since you cannot add any script tags to your blog
  • Limited control over your domain name – unless you have control over your name server, you have to point your blog domain to wordpress.com so you’ll lose the ability to add any subdomains.  They have allowed some ability to host your own email or use Gmail. Hosting multiple blogs from the same domain is also limited.
  • Limited control over files you can add to your blog (only images unless you purchase an upgrade – and then only movie files) – not too much of a problem with the various types of web services available to link to

Summary

After we moved to WordPress.com there have been some things that we could no longer do on our blog (in design and some in functionality).  But, overall, the tradeoff in terms of cost and time savings as well as additional exposure has already been worth it.  We’ll update you on our thoughts again after we’ve been here for awhile.

We want to hear from you – Do you use WordPress.com?  What are your thoughts?  If you have a self-hosted blog, why did you make that decision?

Jan
02
2009

Goals for 2009

sunmountainmbonocoreNow that 2008 has come to a close and we’re looking at 2009, it’s a good time to do a little thinking on what we’d like our business to do in the new year.  While we launched Sazbean.com in September of 2007, we didn’t really start working on it full time until August of 2008.  For 2009, we’d like to continue to increase our growth, by becoming more customer-centric and providing more information and resources to help our customers.

We’ve already done some planning for this, and here’s what we hope to add in 2009:

  • Ask Sazbean – a discussion and place to ask us any questions you have regarding the Internet and your business.   Any questions that can be answered from our general knowledge without specific research will be provided free of charge, publicly, as a resource for all.
  • Resources – an encyclopedia of sorts to provide information by topic, both from our content and from elsewhere.
  • Media – audio, video, pictures – regular podcasts, etc. to provide more information about reaching your business goals online.
  • Additional Authors – We’d like to provide more viewpoints and expertise with additional authors.  (If you’re interested, please email me).  We have a couple lined up already, so look for them in the coming weeks.
  • Training – There is a lot of information to try to digest and implement into your business strategies.  We’re planning on providing some training sessions – locally, at first, but we’d expect to provide them online as well.

What are your goals for 2009?  If you have ideas for us, we’d love to hear them too.

(photo by mbonocore @ FlickrCC)

Jan
01
2009

Happy New Year!

celebratesmoothie2007

Aaron and I would like to wish you all the best for a peaceful and happy 2009!  2008 has been a bit strange, so we’re looking forward to 2009 with anticipation.  We also hope you’ve had a nice winter holiday.  We’ll be starting up 2009 with some posts that dig a bit deeper into how to improve your business website to be more customer centric.  We’re also working on a few new features for the site – keep an eye out for more updates on that soon.

(photo by smoothie2007)