Tuesday, 27 September 2011

The Future of networking

I have always been a big fan of networking, this why I spent over 18 years on the field of networking, because when there is a problem, your mind will be challenged like never before. Even the tiniest of problem can bring a challenge on the table which will make all of you think like never before. With years I found Spanning tree issues are some of the trickiest to detect because they send you off course. You will be looking at other problems but the real issue just lie with Spanning Tree and even distributed sniffer will not help when you have complicated issues around Spanning Tree.

In 1993 when Cisco was not the king of network yet, I applied for a job in their company, because I just had a hunch that networking is what will make businesses succeed or fail.But this is a fact most C-Level executives ignore. I have had a privilege of serving many organisations and worked with some of the best Networking people in this field. When there is a networking problem, everything stop working, and the business stopped functioning properly at this point the focus was on Network experts to resolve this problem as soon as possible. However when everything is working, nobody gave credit to Network boffins. I am guessing it is the same with everything important in life, when the Sun is up and shining we do not feel it is a real privilege to have the Sun, until the day we will not have the Sun. again I am not saying that network has the same importance as the Sun.

It our core belief here at iToTalMarketing that the future of network is all wireless, although you have the ability at the moment to have wired network running at 10Gig and 1Gig is becoming the norm for the access layer, and fastest wireless technology most widely available is still 108Mb. It seems that wired technology is winning all the time, but this is about to change.We are sure that soon we will have over 1Gb wireless technology and this will be a game changer. We know there are security concerns, interference issues, signal issues and backward compatibility problems. Once this milestone is reached, wireless will be the technology that everybody will be using everywhere. I do not believe we are very close to get transcontinental wireless links yet, this technology is still far off but who knows?


It is well known that Online games have played a big part in the development cycle of new very powerful computers that allow, the top game players to be very quick online. It is very obvious apart from geek who have structure CAT6 cables in their house, very few people love the clutter created by numerous cables and the salvation is on the way in a form of Gig wireless. Like every technology at the beginning it will not be affordable, because of the potential of the Gig wireless technology, ISP must start investing in their Access, Distribution and Core Layer in the next 18 months before they are overwhelmed by new traffic which they did not predict. Who knew that Clear Channel Selectors that was formerly available only in very pricey wireless hubs for companies will be now available to home router at no premium?

For those who are not real believer of wireless technology, because it has not followed Moore's law be ready to be dazzled, because it maturity time has come and will be everywhere whether you like it or not. For more information visit us at iTotalMarketing.

Tuesday, 20 September 2011

My business does not need a website

Most of businesses in Europe do not know the reason why they have websites, big businesses understand the importance of having a website, while medium businesses know that they must have one  and ask developers to create one, but they fail to look after these websites. While small businesses  know that this is the key to their success, but they do not know what they need to do to optimise this asset. Meanwhile sole traders do not care to have one or not, forgetting that when they are sleeping or trading, their potential customers are looking for them and could not find them because they do not have a website.

So what is really a website?
it is our view it is your online office and should reflect the image of your company and embody your company core values just like your employees. This is hard,  doesn't it?

Your website is really the headquarter of your business online, therefore like you just invest in look and feel  of your headquarter, you should do the same for your website. Now if you are scared that this is not using your business investment capital wisely we have more than 100 strategies that can help you get your money back from this investment. However this topic is beyond the scope of this article.


The key to a good website is a very good design, which has in mind the type of users that will interact with your website. By following the best practice for good design, it is certain that your website will attract many visitors, therefore this asset will had a real value to your business and will be a good return of your investment.

Most common problems we have seen are around are: the navigability of websites and the fact that lots of them are very flashy with gadgets that really annoy users who wants to use those websites. The navigation menu ought to be uncluttered and concise to ensure that site visitors understand how to navigate around your site without confusion.

Reduce the amount of images in your website. They make your website very heavy and your website load time will gradually suffer and most of them are very unnecessary, do not forget that search engine take into account the load factor in their algorithm.We do not believe in flash introduction for companies websites unless your intention is to annoy your users. If you feel any image is important in your site, make certain you optimise them using image editing programs to ensure that the resolution of your images are not too high.

Keep the text sentences length very reasonable. If your paragraph may be too long, just split it into seperate sentences to ensure that the written text blocks won't be too large. Our experience has taught us that big block text intimidate users therefore deter them from visiting your website, even though your website articles may be of benefit to them. This is unfortunately the really of our world we live in.

Always be certain that your site complies to web standards and the best place to start this journey is by visiting http://www.w3.org and another aspect you  or your developer needs to keep in mind that we live in an area where people use different browsers, therefore your design needs  to take into account all these browsers. it would not make sense that your website looks very nice on IE but when people using mozilla or Opera visit your website the look  is shocking these could be potential customers or business partners.

Stay away from scripting languages in your site unless of course it's essential. Use scripting languages to deal with or manipulate data, to not create visual effects in your website. Heavy scripts will decelerate the loading duration of your website as well as crash some browsers. Also, scripts aren't supported across all browsers, so some site visitors might miss information due to that.

Use CSS to create your page content simply because they save a lot of work by styling all elements in your website all at once. And our last advice make sure that the content of your website page is relevant to your product and services.

Website needs

Wednesday, 14 September 2011

What to think about when selecting an auto-responder?

What to think about when selecting an auto-responder?

One of the method to make an effective use Email Marketing is to implement an automation strategy which involve an auto-responder service. But the key thing you need to remember with Email Marketing it is not cool to spam your customers or potential customers. I am in the distribution list of almost all Internet Marketing experts and many of them send you very valuabale information but some of them just spam you with emails using an auto-responder system and guess what I just delete their emails.

You will find many auto-responders systems available online, even though they are split into three primary types - Managed hosted systems, desktop systems and local hosted systems. For a lot of Internet entrepreneurs, desktop hosted and local hosted systems are far preferred over Managed hosted systems because of the level of flexibility and control they will enjoy with these solutions. Although Managed hosted auto-responders systems are very good and their results are often outstanding than autoresponder systems that are under your control.

Most of hosting company provides auto responder systems with their packages but do not confuse them to the managed hosted auto-resonponder systems. Because these systems will not achieve the same results, as the Managed hosted auto-responder systems. You can use them for small campains but not for very large Email Marketing campaign. With local hosted systems for those who have a website hosting company that offer this facility, it is a good strategy to make sure that the auto-responder systems you use matches your domain name. If you use a managed hosted auto responder systems, you will not have the ability to make use of your domain name, using the auto responder system for Email Marketing. Rather, you’ll get an address which from the Managed hosted company who provides the auto-responder systems using their domain name. This is often ideal for some people, although a lot of prefer to obtain their own domains indexed for the
auto-responder system.

There few benefits of using a local hosted auto-responder systems, not only you can use your domaine name but you can also conceal the fact that you are using an auto-responder systems to automate some of your communications to your customers. If you are doing Email Marketing auto-responder systems are great because they same you lots of time and aggravation. Whenever you send emails making use of the email autoresponder systems, it'll display your domain name, in the email address, therefore makes it very difficult to identify the fact that this email was generated by an autoresponder system. Let's say you have 10,000 emails to send because you are launching a new product, you cannot get a better fantastic tool than the auto-responder systems to achieve this goal, sending them manually is not only very painful but there is a real chance you will miss people in your list.

However if you are using a managed hosted autoresponder platform, the people you communicate to will know that you are using an auto-responder system simply because most of the best auto-responder services, people know the name of domains of these services. Although I love the managed hosted platform because they can deliver up to 99.5% of your Email Marketing. But they can also remove the real bond you have with your customers, it is our view the diminished the level connection you would establish if you were just using your own domain name, people like to interact with people not machines or programs. People always respond better to an email Marketing that is coming from a domain that they know than from the email that is coming from a Managed hosted platform, because there is a felling that this email is addressed to you, therefore you may need to respond to this email.

If you're just beginning to use these sysetms to automate your communication with your customers and have limited funds, managed hosted auto-responder systems are better solutions to your business. Unfortunately for local hosted systems there is a initial investment that needs to made before you start seeing the ROI for this expenditure. There are other aspects you need to think about, managed hosted auto-responder solutions are well advanced and very sophisticated and if you try to replicate the technology used by these companies you will need a big initial investment. There is no doubt to start to automate your communications with your customers in a very short term, the managed hosted autoresponder solutions are the best, no doubt, they will give you just a code that you need to add onto your website et voila.

There are many managed hosted autoresponder providers on the net just using Google or Bing you will be able to find them. However the scope of the subject on how you can select a good managed hosted auto-responder provider is beyond the scope of this article. Among the best on the internet which we have used for our customers are Aweber and getresponse, again this is just our experience and what we have recommended to customer, it does not mean that this is good for your business.

Although most of people prefer the usage of local hosted platform, it has a massive disaventaged over managed hosted auto-responder solutions, there is a limit to the number of domain names that you can use, moreover you will need to address the following technical and security concerns: you need to have an expert who can install this solution, you need to learn how to use this new solution and you need to find hardware resources that will allow you to install this solution. You may need to open up some firewall ports in order for this solution to work best.If the scripts used in this solution fail to work properly you need to find an expert with this knowledge who can come and help you fix this issue. The language used in this solution may be a bespoke language therefore may not have in house skills to manage this solution. For example if you are a Windows house and this solution is on a Linux platform you need to have smoneone who is adaptable. You need also to think about your Internet Bandwidth.

Desktop hosted auto-responders are also great for small businesses however they have aslo their disavantages: you are limited on a number of copies you can install, there this solution will most likely be a single point of failure. Most likely if you use this solution for a Large Email Marketing campaign your success rate will be less than 50%. You will still have the above challenges of having in house expertise to manage this autoresponder solution. You will need to make sure that you have enough Internet bandwidth if you are planning to use this in house auto-responder solution.

Although you will find 3 primary kinds of auto responder systems, the kind you select should be compatible to objectives and your business needs. Therefore you can not think because Aweber worked for our customer, it will specifically work for you, your objectives most likely are different from ours. The best way to choose is to think what is your main objective and who do you want to interact with and if the people you wnats to inteact with are not fussed with the origine of the emails. in this article we have just touched on few challenges which you may have when selling this type of solutions for your Email Marketing.

Email Marketing - Auto-responder Service

Friday, 9 September 2011

PC Protection

At the moment there are lots of Malware around that can turn off the User Account Control (UAC) in windows, what is UAC: User Account Control is program in Windows that prompts you to approve certain actions, like the installation of the new application, so why these malicious programs are doing so. It is simple because they want to disguised their presence on a computers that is infected. This article will explain the difference between various harmful programs that are around that can be very damaging to you and your business. Because of the misconception around we need to clear few things 1st.

 What is the main difference between Malware, spyware and Trojan and virus? Malware, Spyware Trojan and Virus, share some commonalities, one of these is the fact that the 3 are major nuisances for computer customers. Let us differentiate the 3. Spyware is a piece of software that doesn't deliberately harm your PC. what it is does is a creation of access paths in which another person besides the computer owner can contact the PC. Normally spywares record the various internet sites you visit that are later utilized by web marketers to enable them to create some undesirable emails and sometimes some annoying pop-ups. For this reason spyware are often frowned upon and greatly prevented. The reason why people do not like them much, because they're more intrusive than malware. Spyware get their own separate executable programs which permit them to record your key strokes, scan files in your hard drives and check out other programs that you employ including although not restricted to chat, programs, social network interaction and Internet browser configurations. The spyware then will be sending the data it had collected towards the spyware author. This agent will make use of this information for marketing and advertising purposes. They can sell the data to marketers along with other parties who have vested interest in knowing the new trends of users experience. 

Malware, however, tends to be more legitimate type of free software. Much like spy ware, adwares are advertising materials that are packed right into a software or program and therefore are installed instantly once that one program or software programs are added in to the computer. Some types of malware, however, download advertising contents like a particular free application that I installed inadvertently without completely reading the term and conditions associated to this program. It is extremely unfortunate that the majority of the malware programs take the same behaviour as spywares that's they track and report user information to program authors. Some signs and symptoms of spyware infections include pop-up advertisements that appear to become not associated with the website you're viewing. Generally, spyware pop-ups are ads about adult contents. Also if you see your PC slowing down and performing less than usual, there is a large chance that spywares and other undesirable programs have infected your machine. Once in the Home windows desktop you will also notice that it takes a longer period for your machine to load, its better to scan your PC for possible spyware infections.

 Meanwhile, Trojans and virus are destructive type of software. These were purely designed and produced for just one purpose alone: to wreck havoc for your computer. They destroy whatever they are available in contact to and can initiate self replication and infect as numerous aspects of the device's operating-system or network as you possibly can. In our experience we have seen some sophisticated program that open firewall doors from inside and give control of your machine to a 3rd party hackers who will use is to initiate a denial of service attack on someone's network, using your resources Luckily nowadays we have lots of solutions around, but I need to warn you they do not stop or block 100% of the malicious programs. Lots of anti-virus software also provides spyware and malware checking and removal utilities. Some programs, however, are centered on situated and removing or destroying spyware and malware programs. Whether is definitely an anti-virus software or perhaps a anti-spyware devoted scanner, both of them search your PC and identify any spyware, Trojans and virus placed by a 3rd party who wants to take control of your machine.

 Most of the time when these programs installed themselves in Windows (because most of machines out there are windows), they modify a key part of a computer called registry, which the vats majority of should not touch unless you really know what you are doing. Therefore, it is, very helpful to regularly update your virus or spyware scanner to make sure that your pc remains safe and secure, because we have also seen lots of websites that are infected, automatically download these malicious programs in your machine without your knowledge. When downloading free software do not be misled from advertisements claiming their items only contain malware.If this the case we advise you to find another program rather than using the one with malware. These malware sometimes are just spyware in disguised and therefore are just waiting to become activated to allow them to gather your data, which you will not share otherwise.

Another advice we give is to have a Host intrusion detection firewall system on your machine and very good firewall will protect you with their default settings. these host firewall will try to block pop-up and protect you against intrusion from 3rd party, therefore will add more safety to your computer, infected computers are the most annoying part of computer user experience. iTotalMarketing/IT Service Solutions

Monday, 5 September 2011

Your customer is doing your Local Internet Marketing for you

Here at iTotalMarketing we believe in customer services, we think the secret of  success lies  in a wonderful customer services. I have been in IT industry for 17 years and have 3 years on  Internet Marketing, I can say without fail that  a fantastic Customer Services  goes a long way to create loyalty and faithful followers. But how do you achieve this level of service?

  • We pay real attention to the customers feedback
  • We meet with them monthly to listen to their views about our service
  • Every new products we give them to the customers to trial it for free for us
  • We complete every two month feedback report (which is a survey but that goes deep into how the customer use our products)
Everybody loves getting something free, when you take a new customer we provide them with a free SEO Report of their website that make us very lovable. The use of free SEO reports creates a real bond  between us and our customers, this allows our customers to do lots of publicity for us because that report is very expensive to produce, however we bear the cost for our customers,  this reports also show them the areas that we need work hard in order for them to rank very well. This has also enable us to get new clients from our existing customers who refer them to us because they feel they can trust us with their business. We would love to give them also a free Marketing article that will promote their business, but at moment we are working on the best strategy to achieve this.

Our goal is to gather the maximum available online  information and create a SEO free reports that shows the areas that we can focus to improve your online presence. We have had an instance where the customer took this report to our competition and ask them to fix the issues that we found, but after running our tools three months later we found, that they were able to fix two issues out of five issues that our Free SEO report pointed out. As a result the customer website was still ranking poorly.

Google the keywords  tool is a very powerful tool that help us put together a very comprehensive  SEO free report a for the customers. We make sure that in this report we explain technical terms in a very basic language that is not technical. These SEO reports use facts and figures to convey information that you need to make your website a  real online portal for your business.  We also spent 1 hour explaining this SEO report so they know that this is not a scam.

As a result of these extra services given to the customers, we are gaining lots of repeat business from existing customers who will happy recommend your services to a friend, vendor and distributor.

For more about our strategies visit us at iTotalMarketing

Tips of Securing your IT Infrastructure

In Most small businesses we interact with,   80% of the Mobile devices used by staff are not secured and IT is not even aware of them. In our experience we believe that  businesses need to acquire these devices and secure them in the way that protect the business It infrastructure. We are not saying that you need to lock people off the network but you need to strike a balance that is very important for the business. This balance is between the mobile functionality, usability and security.

We use a Seven Strategies for Acquiring Mobile Employees that is supposed to offer practical assistance with dealing and among the quickest growing risks towards the security of sensitive and private information. It's the growing sophistication and ease of such mobile products as laptops, iPhone, Androids, iPads and USB stays that lead to both their recognition within the place of work as well as their risk for an organisation’s systems, data and status.

The amount of Mobile devices that staff use grow on the daily basis and most IT Services do not have any strategy to protect their network against any malicious code , that hidden in the Mobile device and that can easily be transferred on to the network infrastructure. Our IT Security portfolio we have tools that  will defend your network against malicious use of  Mobile device to gain illegal access to your network. If you need to find out more you can get in touch with us at iTotalMarketing