How to find out the security and compliance of your website?

How to find out the security and compliance of your website?

In recent years, we have heard all the horror stories about website security and compliance. This is one topic that every company’s CEO agreed that it’s a top priority for their firms. However, when it comes down to it; most of them just talk and take very little action on it. Why? Because it hasn’t happened yet and it costs to much to deal with or worse yet; their IT team said that they are okay.

Before we go into answering the question of “How to find out the security and compliance of your website?”, let us briefly talk about may cause the insecurity of your website? Here are just a few:

1. Coding or Software. Have you or your IT ever looked into how the website was coded? Do they leave any hole that a robot or trojan can crawl and get into?
2. Hardware or Server. Is the server setup with all the security needed to protect your site?
3. Who has access to it? Too often we spend so much time and money defending the attackers from the outside but in reality; it’s most often and the most damages are caused by the insiders.
4. How often it’s being backup? Maybe you as the owner or the CEO of the firm tried to ask your IT team a backup of the website from last week to see if they can deliver it. The reason I brought this up is that too often your IT guys said it’s regularly backup but when it happened; you found out that is not the case.
5. Who and how the website was created? Was it coded from the scratches by your IT team? Was it came from one of those open source Wordpress? Having an answer to this question will help you think of what you have to do when it comes to your website’s security.
6. What about a SSL? Now days almost every site has a security socket layer to protect the website. And it’s one thing almost every webmaster knows. However, it’s also one thing misled to a lot of naive or untrained webmaster thinking that’s all they needed and when the website has this; it’s safe and sound. This is one of the biggest mistakes out there!
7. Is it equipped to stand against a DOS attack? Denial of Service or DOS attack is one hell of an attack and when it came, only a few is equipped to deal with it because it’s so costly. Fortunately, with recent technology service provided by company like Cloudflare; this solution is very affordable and very easy to implement
8. Can it handles a worst case scenario of heavy traffic? Let's say tomorrow your company ran a Superbowl ad and you expect one million visitors within 30 minutes. Can it handle it? Maybe before you spending millions of dollars running the ad, you may want to put it through a bandwidth load impact test? There are third party services that provide this kind of service such as Loadimpact.com where you spent a few hundred dollars to find out first before spending millions and ended up ruining your company’s reputation.

Fortunately, with just a few hundred dollars; our website security team can quickly find out the answer for you and also provide you a step by step detailing how to fix it yourself or we can do it for you.

I hope that this article or video has helped you somewhat in answering the “How to find out the security and compliance of your website? ” If you have any questions, please contact Digital Marketing Solutions’s Website Security Service.

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How to create a successful Google PPC?

How to create a successful Google PPC?

If you have advertised with Google where you “paid to be found”, then you know the process is not that complicated. But let's first define what is Google PPC? It’s an abbreviation from Google “pay per click” or PPC. It simply means that you will be charged each time someone clicked on your ad. How much? Well, it depends on the amount you agreed with Google when you first set up the campaign. Here come the complexities. How much should you pay per click? Determining how much you should pay Google per click required a lot of evaluation and examination of your competitors independently from Google. I am talking about others who paid Google to be found on the same keywords or similar keywords as you are. It’s all come down to who is willing to pay to be on top of the others. So to know who is out there and who paid for what amount is the job that not everyone knows. Yes, within Google’s Adword system, it does give you an “estimate”. Remember, the word “estimate and I have been there and done that. Google will give you an estimate and this estimate is always for Google’s profit margin. You know what I meant and let leave it just that before this article is being banned.

This is when you need a company like Digital Marketing Solutions LLC or any other trusted digital marketing company to help you out. We have the software tools, and strategy to get you the biggest bang for your buck. It’s estimated that billions...with a Big B are being wasted each year by businesses running Google AdWord. Here is a classic example of money being wasted. Let's say you have the software and the services for this software. The software is penny auction and the website that you would like to bring people to is www.pennyauctionsoftware.com. So you decided to use the following keywords such as “penny auction website, free penny auction site, best penny auction site, bidding on penny auction site, etc.” because these were the keywords suggested for you. You ran the ad months after months and it racked up thousands of clicks and you paid an average of $5 per click. You now can see how much you have to pay Google and none of this is Google’s fault because you were the one to set this up and Google engine just followed your setting. Even Though there are 5 thousand clicks on this ad (5k x $5 per click = 25k) but there are only ten people who actually contacted you via your website. So in this case, the cost per conversion is $2,500. 

It cost you $2,500 for each sales lead. This is an enormous amount to pay for ten sales leads. With this kind of money, you can see that you can better spend it elsewhere to get a much better result.

You now blamed Google for paying so much without much result. But Google is not the problem. The problem is with your campaign’s settings because most of those five thousand clicks were people who were looking for a penny auction website to bid on. They are the bidders looking for the penny auction site to bid on and not the people who are looking for penny auction software and services. In fact, you wasted these people’s time. They found you under those keywords and then clicked on it thinking that you are a website offering penny auction bidding and not the software and services you are trying to sell to those who wanted to set up a penny auction website. This is just a small example of ad money being wasted. There are tons of others that this brief article is not able to cover all. 

So What included in Digital Marketing Solutions’s Google PPC & Facebook Campaign? Here is just a shortlist:

1. Keywords research and analysis
2. Target market analysis
3. Competitors’ analysis
4. A marketing strategy roadmap
5. Weekly report and campaign adjustment based on competitor analysis
6. Landing page creation

I hope that this article or video has helped you somewhat in answering the question of how to create a successful Google PPC? If you have any questions, please contact the Digital Marketing Solutions’s Email Campaign.

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Social Media Marketing Accelerate Plan

Social Media Marketing Accelerate Plan

Affordable website design for small business. Everything you need will be taken care of by a team of 24 website specialists. DIGITAL MARKETING SOLUTIONS has been in business since 1995 with a A+ rating by the BBB since 2003. You just can’t find a better deal with an experienced team like us.

BUILD PLAN $249 per Month

This package is ideal for start-up and for small businesses that need some help getting started on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and Blog for their business to increase search engines ranking and to build awareness and trust. What you got delivered

1. Strategy Interview
2. A Social Media Marketing Roadmap (Aligning with your business goals)
3. 25 posts per month (Selecting from your social media choices)
4. 3 blog posts per month (Selecting from your social media choices)
5. 20 back links to your website (Improving your website SEO)
6. Monthly Strategy Meeting
7. Monthly Reporting

Social media marketing is very time consuming and required a lot of meticulous work. First, we will work with you to develop a social media marketing strategy both short-term and long-term. Then revisit this plan monthly with the benchmarking result from the report. Sometimes you have to change your strategy because of your competitors have changed theirs. When it comes to social marketing, it’s all about the end users. The post you wrote, the Youtube video you produced or the comments you made; it’s all about getting the end users to pay attention or read or watch your video. The time they spent reading your post or watching your video does make a big difference because it’s all about quality content. Nowadays, social marketing should be a big part of your Internet marketing strategy because the number of hours an average person spent on social media.

I hope that this article or video has helped you somewhat in answering the “What included in Digital Marketing Solutions’s Social Media Marketing Accelerate Plan” question. I will be covering the following questions on my next articles or videos.

1. What should be included in a Social Marketing Analysis Report?
2. How to get your message out to tens of thousands of people at no cost?
3. What social media is best for your business?
4. What tool or tools to use to schedule and manage all of our posts?
5. How to manage your social reputation?

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How to create a successful email campaign?

How to create a successful email campaign?

Before answering this question, let us dive into this service a bit and try to understand what it is and the good, the bad and the ugly sides of the email campaign.

So and so promised you that with just a few hundred dollars, they can send hundreds of thousands of emails for you. This sounds so good isn’t? Worse yet, they try to sell you that million email list for just $99 and you thought it was a great deal! I have so many customers bought into this and have tried it themselves. The reality is that most of these emails will be blocked or filtered as junk by anti spamming network and software. But that is not a big problem. The problem is that your email account may have ended up being listed in the “black list” and unusable. If this email is hosted within your server, the entire server IP address may also be banned. This is a problem that will cost you a lot of time and efforts to untangle or to get out of it. 

So Email Marketing is not what it used to be. This doesn’t mean that Email Campaign is dead or longer a viable solution to your marketing. In fact, if it’s done right; it provides you the biggest bang for your buck. The key here is that it must be done right. So before start sending email out based on the list you just bought...think it twice.

So what Digital Marketing Solutions’s Email Campaign Service do differently? First, we only use quality email list. This means these emails were collected based on permission or subscribed option. Meaning that the end users have given permission to send. Maybe not all of them but as long as you have a delivered rate of about 7% or more, most of the networks are okay with it. Second, in the email there must be an option for the end users to unsubscribe and once this request is made; it will be automatically removed from any future sending. Third, it must come from a trusted network that delivering it. Meaning that the server or network that was used to send these emails is not blacklisted or spam watch rada. Fourth, each email campaign must be monitored and constantly cleaned. Why kept on sending to those who never opened your emails? We have a report of those who opened or not opened as well as one that has been successfully delivered and those that got blocked. So cleaning up and improving the quality of your email list is a major task. Finally, we only charge you for the delivered one and void or no charged for the ones that failed to deliver. Here are a few things that we suggest you do to your email campaign:

1. Scrub and verify your email list regularly. ...
2. Personalize the email to each recipient. ...
3. Use emojis in your subject line. ...
4. Test multiple deployment times. ...
5. Build a double opt-in list. ...
6. Segment your email list. ...
7. Use a custom responsive email template. ...
8. Have one clear call-to-action per email.

I hope that this article or video has helped you somewhat in answering the “How to create a successful email campaign? If you have any questions, please contact Digital Marketing Solutions’s Email Campaign.

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Search Engine Optimization Startup Plan

Search Engine Optimization Startup Plan

Affordable website design for small business. Everything you need will be taken care of by a team of 24 website specialists. DIGITAL MARKETING SOLUTIONS has been in business since 1995 with a A+ rating by the BBB since 2003. You just can’t find a better deal with an experienced team like us.

STARTUP PLAN: $295
Suitable for small businesses or startups

1. Complete Website Audit (SEO, Usability, Performance, Social & Security Reports)
2. Campaign Setup & Optimization
3. Pages Optimized (15 pages)
4. 15 Selected Keywords Targeting
5. Keyword Research
6. Keyword Grouping
7. On-Page Optimization
8. SEO Road Map
9. Blog Creation
10. Title Tag Optimization (15 titles)
11. Meta Description Optimization (15 meta description)
12. Meta Keyword Optimization (15 meta keywords)
13. Domain Redirect Optimization (15 domain redirects)
14. Xml Sitemap Optimization
15. Robots.txt Check
16. URL Rewrites (15 URL rewrites)
17. Broken Link Report
18. Rich Snippet Recommendations
19. Breadcrumbs
20. Initial Off-Page SEO
21. SlideShare
22. Link BuildingDirectory Submission
23. Local Business Listings
24. Social Media Linking

Most SEO agencies charge you regardless of results. With us, if we can’t improve your site, we don’t get paid and we do it ethically because there is no other way. There are so called “SEO experts” and they tried with all sorts of tricks to fool search engines to improve your website’s ranking, and sometimes it works. But this is very dangerous to your long-term ranking strategy. Your website may achieved the result your SEO agency promised you. However, if you ever got caught cheating, search engine like Google will penalize your website’s ranking like nowhere to be found. By then, your SEO vendor has been long gone with your money. So the keyword here is ethical SEO.

I hope that this article or video has helped you somewhat in answering the “What is included in Digital Marketing Solutions’ Search Engine Optimization Startup Plan” question. I will be covering the following questions on my next articles or videos.

• What should be included in a SEO Analysis Report?
• Why the age of your domain affects your Google ranking?
• What caused your website to rank low on Google?
• Why search engines is all about honest and useful contents?
• Why link building is important to your high ranking?
• Why you should be careful with link building services?
• Why mobile unfriendly website can cause low ranking?
• Why slow page load can cause low ranking?

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How to create a successful SMS messaging campaign?

How to create a successful SMS messaging campaign?

There are many ways to deliver your message and got your customers’ attention but none work like a text message. Of course, there are pros and cons to it. But if you have a line to deliver and get our customer’s attention, SMS messaging is certainly second to none. The open rate is extremely high. Some studies show it’s as high as 95% compared to an average of 7% for email campaign. The problem here is that it’s not that easy to have all of your customer’s mobile phone numbers. Everyone can online and create an email account and then give it to you but most people only have one mobile number and it’s very sacred to them. If you are planning on using SMS as a way to reach to your customers, then you have to plan have to plan way ahead of time. 

For an example, if you run a nail salon business and you are planning on sending sms message to your customer on a weekly or monthly basis; then you need to have a way to collect and got their permission to send the sms message to them. Maybe you have a sign up sheet clearly stated that they will get a 5% discount for leaving their mobile phone with you because want to send them the 5% discount coming up next week? If you have a website, maybe it’s time to add another field called “mobile phone” and it’s required? There are many ways to collect them but always respect their permission. If they asked to be removed, then you must have a system where it’s automatically removed. Else, you will forget to remove them and if you have to do it manually; it would cost you so much time and effort. Some carrier services charged their customers for texting so you must be aware of this and let your customers know. Although most mobile phone carriers now days offer unlimited texting.

How we do it? Our system store these numbers in a database and once we created a message; we can schedule it to deliver them. Just one click for the entire database. If you wish to send it yourself one by one, then it’s okay but think of the time it would take you and how are you going to keep track of who got it? Who requested to be opted out? Etc.

The biggest down fall of sms messaging is their ability to send out a long message. This is where email campaign has the advantage edge over sms messaging. A few things to keep in mind when you wanted to create a successful SMS messaging campaign:

1. Get Permission & Make Opt-out Clear.
2. Know the Rules. ...
3. Less is More. ...
4. Timing Matters. ...
5. Keep it Fun! ...
6. Segment. ...
7. Instill Urgency …

To take your text marketing campaign a step further, there are a tactic to keep in mind when you can undertake a SMS messaging campaign. These include:

• Adhere to customer expectations.
• Tempt and motivate.
• Choose the right words.
• Remain relevant.
• Write concise messages.
• Add short links.
• Engage to build a relationship.
• Consider triggered messages.

I hope that this article or video has helped you somewhat in answering the “How to create a successful SMS messaging campaign? If you have any questions, please contact Digital Marketing Solutions’s SMS Campaign.

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Small Business Website Basic Design Package

Small Business Website Basic Design Package

SMALL BUSINESS WEBSITE BASIC PACKAGE - Limited Offer

• $348 one time plus 94 cents per day for web hosting and support.
• For just less than $1.00 per day. We take care of everything.
• Ability for customer to pay online via PayPal - add $95

Location map - a Google map based on your postal address location for your customer to easily find you and for improving your search engine ranking.

Link social media buttons - link to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc, to build a social online present and to improve your Internet marketing capacity.

SEO target - built in targeted keywords so that people can you your services or products when they searched.

1 review & training - a free consultation and training on how to operate your website is included.

Domain setup - we will help you search, purchase and setup the domain ready to point to your website.

Full ownership rights - you forever own it 100%.

Anti spamming & security - your will be built with anti spamming and Google security.

One Set of Changes - you will be allowed to make one set of change to your website.

Custom design solutions - we offer custom design solution for just $25 per hour.

Online contact form - your website will be built with a secure online contact form.

Google analytic - integrate with your Gmail’s Google analytic to track your website’s traffic.

Social Media & Blog Connections - connect to your blog if you have one.

Up to 5 FREE quality stock photos - up to 5 quality stock photos.

Total Web Pages 3 to 5 - your website will have up to 5 pages such as Home, Service, Product, FAQs, Contact Us.

I hope that this article or video has helped you somewhat in answering the “What included in Digital Marketing Solutions’ Small Business Website Package for Small Business Basic package?” question. I will be covering the following questions on my next articles or videos.

1. What a small or start up business website should include?
2. How to create a website for your small or just started-up business DIYS?
3. Why choosing the right domain name is very critical to your SEO success?
4. Good design vs. Good SEO - which one is more important?
5. What Google used to rank your website?
6. Promising your client on a certain search engine ranking is a straight out lie! Why?

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How to prepare for building a small business website?

How to prepare for building a small business website?

There are a few critical things that you should be prepared before building a website. It doesn’t matter if you are going to do it yourself or you will have someone do it for you. Don’t expect that every website developer or designer knows what he or she should know. Sometimes they know it but they won’t do it because they know that you don’t know it. Furthermore, when it comes to website development, there are a whole lot more than just knowing how to create a website technically. I will cover more on the topic of “what a web design service firm should know” later on..on another article or video.

Get a website address or domain name. The best place that I know of is Godaddy.com. The cost is around $10 per year. Now the domain name is very important. It gotta be short, easy to remember, friendly to search engine keyword(s), etc. I will talk more about this in the next article on the topic of choosing the right domain name for your business. If it’s possible, it has some service keyword(s) to what you are doing. For example, if you are providing digital marketing services or solutions, then having a domain name like www.digitalmarketingsolutions.com would be great. If it’s possible, it reflects your business name like Microsoft is www.microsoft.com. The chance is that the domain you wanted is most likely has been purchased by someone or some firm. You will have to settle for the best that is available to you.

Develop a strategy to be found when people searched for your product(s) or service(s). This is one area that most people didn’t think much because they didn’t know much about it. Well, they will when they found out that their websites are just “dead fishes in the water”. For most businesses, the reason to have a website in the first place is to promote their business. And the biggest place to promote your business is through search engines such as Google, Bing or others. This means that if you operate a dog training service and people went on Google and searched for “dog training service near me” as an example and they didn’t find you. You failed. I will talk more about how you can optimize your website to be found on search engines in the next article. Please keep in mind that each article I wrote, it has to be kept under 700 words if possible because each of these articles will be made into a video and the video has to be less than 5 minutes. 

Create a content development strategy for your website. Meaning, if you are offering “dog training service”, then you want a website to talk about it. Talk about it here means that the keywords “dog training service” have to be weaved into the contents of your website both on texts and photos. So make sure that these keywords not only showed up on the title of the page but also through the pages. It sounds easy but when it comes to doing it; it’s not as easy as it sounds. Most people developed the contents first and then worry about the ability to be found later. This is putting the cart before the horse. 

Define long-term and short-term goals for your site. Do you have a plan to add more products or services to it later on? Will the current design accommodate future expansion? The list can do on and on. 

Define the functionalities of your website? What can people do when they get to your site? What type of users and what role they play? For example, if you are planning on creating a real estate listing website. There could be the site owner, the listing agents, the preferred lenders, the agent that represented the buyer and the agent that represented the seller. What can each of these people do when they get to your website? You have clearly defined the role of each, what each can see and what each can not see, what each can do and each can not do when they do it, how the do it. Man! The list can go on and on. But you can’t design the website and expect it to function as you wanted until you have all of these well defined. 

Set your budget and timeline. It’s best to be upfront with your web design vendor about your budget and timeline. Most good web design firms or vendors will tell you whether or not they can take on your project based on your time and money. If you don’t, they will assume that they can ask for more later on. And if you don’t open your wallet for what they are asking, then either they will do a sloppy job on it or worse; they walked away. You called your attorney and he said it’s not worth it because his legal fee is much more than what you will be able to cover. 

I hope that this article or video has helped you somewhat in answering the “How to get prepared for building a small business website?” question. I will be covering the following questions on my next articles or videos.

1. What a small or start-up business website should include?
2. How to create a website for your small or just started-up business DIYS?
3. Why choosing the right domain name is very critical to your SEO success?
4. Good design vs. Good SEO - which one is more important?
5. What Google used to rank your website?
6. Promising your client on a certain search engine ranking is a straight out lie! Why?

This article is contributed by Phillip Nguyen, the president and founder of Digital Marketing Solutions LLC based in Michigan U.S.A.

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How to setup penny auction Server and Security

1. How to setup penny auction Server and Security Unlike hosting most of other “typical” websites, a penny auction website requires a much more resources and capacities server. Meaning a much bigger budget server built with all the securities both in software and hardware. Before we talk about how to securely set up a penny auction server, let us dive into what are some of the security risks that a penny auction site typically has to deal with. Human. This is the biggest threat. Because of the nature of how penny auction works, it facilitates frauds and other unethical acts. One of the most frequently used acts, is jamming the site with excessive bidding in the last few seconds. This either caused the site to freeze-up or slow to respond to other bidders. Meaning, you can set up a bunch of bidding accounts and waited for the last few seconds to attack / submit bidding all at once. The server is so busy in responding to all the requests, it couldn’t process other bidders and the timer is out or expired. This means that one of the fraud bidder’s account is the last bidder and the winner of the auction. There are other means to carry out this sort of attack but I am not going to publicly discuss it here because the last thing for this article to do is to show these scum on how to scam penny auction sites. There are many ways to counter this sort of attack. One thing that you can do for your site is to pick a penny auction software that has an anti jamming solution based on a unique IP address. If you have a bunch of bidders made the same request from the same IP address within seconds, this means that you have what I called a gang-up attack. If this happened, the system is smart enough to block all bidders coming from that IP address. Block IP based on location. Most of the auction sites are local. Meaning that you don’t need customers from overseas since the cost of shipping the item may not be possible. This means that the penny auction software you purchased should have the options for you to add geo location IP address and stop these bidders from entering your site. Hardware. Get a real server and has it managed by firm like IBM. These guys have tools to detect and defend you from these attacks. If budget allows, you should have a network of servers each doing its own job instead of having one does it all. For an example, one server to handle database, one to handle the web traffic, one to do the load balancing, one for the data, etc. However, the reality is that most penny auction site owners can’t afford to have a network of servers like I just talked about. There are a lot more to talk about server security for penny auction website but the limited length of this video does not allow me to do so. So I will talk more on this in the next video. For more info, please visit https://pennyauctionsoftware.com or send us an email to info@pennyauctionsoftware.com Good luck! Make sure you subscribe to this channel so that more of this topic can coming your way. Once again, if you need a company that has the experience to do this kind of task, check out cybermerce.com that is “C Y B E R M E R C E. COM”.

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