Exploding Inbox (CNET)

For many business people, their email inbox is a drag on their productivity. Massive amounts of email – and much of it useless – causes many to loathe checking their email, or it causes many others to stay glued to their inbox just to stay on top of it. The CEO of a large European-based tech firm hates email so much that he is attempting to actually ban it for his 74,000 world-wide employees. Blogs (including Forbes last week) are full of ideas on how to manage your inbox, and most of these ideas serve no real purpose other expounding the problem (in this author’s humble opinion.)

I personally get far in excess of a thousand emails sent to me every day, and yet many of my colleagues are surprised to find that my inbox generally doesn’t require scrolling on a MacBook Air. I thought I’d add my voice to the chorus preaching about clean inboxes, and share some of my tips to keep your inbox clean.

Spam Protection
The very first step is to have really, really good spam protection, what we would call enterprise-grade spam protection. It used to be that really good spam protection was quite costly, but that cost has been coming down quickly over the past years, to the point that today you can actually get it for very little or nothing at all with a good hosting package. According to SpamCop.net, on average 14.6 spam messages were sent every second during the last year. According to Symantec, about 73% of all email is spam, and by cutting out that volume, you’ve already saved yourself the vast amount of email coming to your inbox.

Now, you probably already have a spam filter, provided by your current email provider. How good is it? Are you still getting a few dozen spam emails each day? Then it’s time to cut those out. Nerds On Site provides spam filtering by SpamExperts with all of our shared hosting account. SpamExperts is a fantastic enterprise-grade spam filter, which claims 99.98% of spam is stopped by their system with only a 0.0001% false positive rate. By adding such a spam filter to your system, you can cut down on almost all the garbage you get on a daily basis.

OHIO
No, not the state – it’s an acronym, standing for Only Handle It Once. This is a method that I stumbled upon a year ago or so, and it’s a magnificent way to deal with most of the remaining legitimate email that is coming into your inbox. Every day, a large portion of your inbox is filled up with emails that come frequently, repeating themselves nearly every day. It’s time to find a way to stop all of them! Here are a few examples and fixes, and you can apply these to your own particular circumstances.

First up is newsletters. We all seem bombarded with newsletters, whether they are daily, weekly or monthly. Most, if not all of them are newsletters we no longer want, no longer remember signing up for or are borderline spam themselves. Unsubscribe! All legitimate newsletters have a unsubscribe link at the bottom, and if they got past your excellent spam filter, they are almost certainly not a phishing link. In nearly 100% of the cases, once you unsubscribe from a newsletter, the company sending them will immediately honour your request and will stop sending them to you.

Next up is automated reports. Many of us seem to get a constant stream of automated reports from such services as MLS listing services, daily deal services, equipment monitoring alerts, etc. In many cases, you can change this flood of alerts to only alert you when something critical is happening, or to send you a daily summary of these reports instead of each individual report one at a time. For example, I’ve read that Groupon has a setting where you can request to only get one summary email per day instead of an individual email for every deal. One other example is reports that you simply don’t need to action, or that shouldn’t have been sent to you in the first place because you should have taken action. A perfect example of this is a ticketing system or a project management system in which a team is working on the same project or ticket. Every notice how every time an alert goes out to the person who ‘had the ball’ you get copied on it? See my Outlook Rules tip below for ideas on solving that.

My last example ties in closely with the automated reports example, but is slightly different. I’ve dealt with many professionals that have great monitoring services watching everything from the health of a computer to the health of a piece of equipment. Many times when the system alerts them to a problem that isn’t critical, they leave it to deal with it later. The problem is that we are all so busy we put off this ‘non-critical’ tasks, and suddenly we find ourselves with many, many repeats of the same alert. Now multiply this across all the systems you are monitoring, and you can quickly see how hundreds of items in your inbox are just copies of the same ‘non-criticial’ alert. Here’s the fix – start getting into the mindset that every single alert is critical. You need to find a way to NEVER get that alert again. This might mean hiring someone to permanently fix it, or fixing it yourself. Either way – by fixing the ROOT cause of the alert, you’ll ensure that you no longer get that email in your inbox.

Outlook Rules
Now this tip might take an IT’s help to accomplish (did I mention we can help?), but it’s extremely powerful. Microsoft’s Outlook application is very popular for business email use (and is this author’s personal recommendation for an email program over anything else) and it contains a very powerful email rule system. I won’t go into any depth on specific rules, but consider the remaining email in your inbox. Is any of it legitimate email that actually requires you to take no action at all? Consider writing a rule to automatically delete it before you even see it. You can also write rules to automatically move certain emails into a subfolder, or flag certain emails as important. For example, you may want to flag all emails from your company’s CEO as important so that your eye is immediately drawn to it when you look at your inbox. However, I find the most powerful use of this tool is to automatically delete duplicate copies of email. Many of us find ourselves on multiple company mailling lists, and frequently the same email is sent to all of these mailling lists. You can write an intelligent Outlook rule to automatically delete all but one of these duplicate emails.

No one rule will solve YOUR email woes, but our team can certainly help you find the perfect combination for your business. Nerds On Site works hard every day to increase your Productivity, Profitability and Pleasure through technology. Get in touch today and learn how we can make inbox frustration a thing of the past!

Every company should have a blog. Consumers have come to expect it from you as a demonstration of the pulse of your business. Without a blog, or with an infrequently used blog, your customers can write you off as out of business and move on to one of your competitors.

Engaging your customers with a blog can increase repeat visits to your site as well as bring in new traffic as your content works its way through search engines. Here are simple tips for starting a blog and populating it with content your customers will value and come back for.

Jump Right In
There are a number of shortcuts that even somebody with very little online experience can use to get started fast. Services like WordPress or Blogger are tailored toward people new to blogging. These sites offer a number of attractive layouts you can use for free and have easy-to-use word processing interfaces for writing posts.

If you are more experienced online or have a computer savvy family member, you can setup a hosting account and install blogging software there. Your blog will be hosted on your own website and you will have more control over its appearance and behavior.

There are pros and cons to each, but either way you will now have a direct line of communication to your customers.

Provide Content
The first thing you will realize about your blog is that it is a great place to post news about your sales and latest products. While you definitely want to do that, people will not come back if that’s all they will find. Customers need your blog to provide value that keeps them coming back.

Write articles about the latest developments in your industry. Give your customers hints and tips on how to use your products. Answer questions, post photos, and engage your visitors with polls.

Providing content that educates will show your expertise and help build a reputation with your customers where you are seen as an authority and resource. A side benefit is the more content you have the more visible your site will become in search engines.

Update Regularly
As someone operating a small business, it may be tempting to forget about your blog and concentrate on higher priority items. To many customers your blog is your pulse. If it is neglected your customers might think you are not present. Avoid this by posting regularly.

If you know you will be too busy to update in the future, write your posts beforehand and schedule them to go out later.

Finally, Provide Links
There is no point in having a blog if people can’t get to it. It also isn’t as effective if there is no way to get from your blog to your site. Make sure to link in both directions; from your site to your blog and vice versa.

That way people that find you in web searches can find your business and products, and people on your site can consume the content in your blog.

To get started on your company blog, check out our Web Hosting and Web Site Creator services!

Quickly and easily drive traffic to your website with our Business Listing service!

Business Listing is a way for you to get found online by 1.6 million daily searchers! Most online directories charge customers $75/month or more for similar solutions. With Business Listing, you have a cost-effective marketing solution to help boost your online visibility and drive traffic to your website.

Business Listing allows you to customize and advertise your site through your Whois listing – the required domain name registration information. Customize your featured listing with your company profile, latest news, promotions, products, keywords, or anything that would help you promote your business to new visitors.

Benefits of Business Listing:

• Drive traffic to your website
• Indexed by major search engines
• Includes your business listing within the Whois Business Listings directory
• Select from 4 customizable templates or build your own
• Display your customized business information

What does Business Listing show that is different from the regular Whois?
Business Listing allows you to write whatever is important about your domain name, website, blog or business that viewers don’t find in the Whois. For instance, you could let people know that a domain is for sale, post business hours or list multiple domain names that your company uses. The regular Whois only shows the contact information of the domain name managers, e.g. registrant contact, administrative contact.

What is the difference between ID Protect and Business Listing?
ID Protect keeps domain owner information private to protect from spammers and other unwanted viewers. Business Listing allows you to have info about your business or domain that is not normally available in the Whois.

Can I have ID Protect and Business Listing at the same time?
Yes! Business Listing allows you to put information about your business, domain, blog or website that is not available in the Whois required by ICANN. ID Protect ensures the domain owner and manager’s contact information is hidden from spammers.

What is the Business Listing directory?
All domain names that have a Business Listing will automatically be placed in the Business Listing directory at www.whoisbusinesslistings.com It is a directory web site that is designed to help increase visibility to your Business Listing. When internet surfers use the search engines to look up information related to your business, the search results will return your Business Listing. It also works as a directory for searchers to access your Business Listing directly.

How does having Business Listing in the Whois help?
Millions of Whois checks are done every day on any domain at any registrar or other domain management company. We will return your information that other companies display in their Whois results.

Do search engines access this information in the Whois?
Yes. Search engines often “crawl” a Whois database for as much information as they can find about a domain. Business Listing may show the information you’ve posted in your Business Listing along with your domains. The Whois results will help improve the relevancy of the information about your business along with the domain name.

Which domain extensions are available for Business Listing?
Business Listing is available for .COM, .NET and .TV

When choosing a new hosting company for your corporate website, knowing your needs is crucial. So say all the blogs that attempt to help you find the perfect web host. But, what if you don’t know your hosting needs precisely? What happens if you don’t KNOW what your hosting needs will be next month, next quarter, next year? What happens if your business explodes? Will you have time to understand your new needs, and find a new hosting provider to meet those needs? What happens if you just don’t understand hosting, and just want to get back to running your own business?

Nerds On Site has a solution: Unlimited Hosting. Unlimited hosting is much simpler than it seems – in fact, it simply means that you no longer have to worry about overage charges, upgrading plans, or switching providers because you outgrew your current provide. Unlimited Hosting means you’re with a company that is ready for your growth spurt, that understands that getting listed on Digg shouldn’t mean your site goes down for the rest of the month, that wants to help you grow your website traffic but doesn’t want to charge you more when you are successfull.

Contact our team to learn how we can take web hosting off of your ‘worry list’. http://www.nerdsisp.com/contact-us.html

Over the past 7 days, we’ve tried to explain some of the features of our NerdCare Assurance packages. We’ve talked about our monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, hack detection, preventative maintenance and content updates, and these are just the major points in our Assurance packages.

Our packages are designed to increase your Productivity, Pleasureability and Profitability, and in addition to our pre-packaged Bronze and Silver solutions we offer customized packages for your unique needs. All of our packages include guaranteed response times and flat rates to allow your business easily budget. Since downtime and recovery due to hacking can cost thousands of dollars per incident, our Assurance packages give you peace of mind with flat rate costs.

If the information we’ve shared over the past few days hasn’t already clearly showed the lengths we are willing to go for our clients, consider this. All clients covered by our Silver package will be contacted by a member of our team at least once a month to ensure that we are doing all we can for your website and your business. Imagine your current hosting provider initiating contact once a month to make sure that all your needs are being met!

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

In our continuing series on Hosting NerdCare Assurance, we want to mention an incredible feature of our Silver package. Monthly content updates allow your business to simply shift the responsibility and burden of updating your website to our team, freeing up you and your staff to work on other aspects of the business.

A regularly updated website receives a higher ranking with the search engines, and naturally attracts more traffic. Clients will only visit websites that present them with fresh information on a regular basis. While the responsibility for creating that content remains yours, our NerdCare package will mean that you no longer have to perform the work required to upload it to your website.

Our team can take your new information, such as new products, photos, contact details, team members, blog entries and much more, and upload it to your website on your behalf. Having a team perform this service for you results in you having more time to devote to the other aspects of your business. Now, when you create a new newspaper advertisement, you just have to provide it to our team, and it will be copied on your website as well.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

In our continuing series on Nerds On Site’s Hosting NerdCare Assurance, I would like to talk about our preventative maintenance provisions in our Silver NerdCare package. As a Pembrokeshire proverb says, “Eat an apple on going to bed, And you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.”

CMS-based websites, such as Joomla, Drupal and WordPress have become very popular. Due to their popularity, however, they have become a prime target for hackers. Generally speaking, if a hacker can determine a vulnerability in one of these technologies, they can write a worm that automatically search for and hacks all other websites built on the same CMS.

The developers behind all the popular Content Management Systems work hard at releasing updates to their product to combat this hacking activity. However, this becomes an extreme inconvenience to many clients, both because you just want to focus on running your business, and also because some of these patches can take advanced technical knowledge to deploy. Our Silver NerdCare package covers all these updates, and our team will patch your website as they are released. This procedure allows us to close all known vulnerabilities in your website before hackers can take advantage of them.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

While all the pieces and tools in our Hosting NerdCare package work together and are equally vital to your piece of mind, our hack detection system does stand out in the industry for its uniqueness. At the time of this blog, we are not aware of another company offering a product even close to ours, and the benefit to you over your competition is really quite amazing.

Clients protected by our Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have their website scanned every hour of every day. In a nutshell, our system will take cryptographic signatures of every single file in your website, and compare them on an hourly basis. If a hacker manages to change even one bit in one of your files, our team will be immediately notified of the change, and we can swing into action. The vast majority of business owners only find out that their site was compromised once Google or Badaware.org block their site, and once that happens, it can literally take weeks to reverse the damage and have the site back up and running.

Nerds On Site’s Assurance packages allows for our team to know the moment a breach is made, and equally as important, we are notified as to which exact file was compromised. This level of detail allows us to repair the damage before anyone knows about it, ensuring that your site isn’t blacklisted.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

Yesterday, in our continuing series on NerdCare Assurance, we wrote about the depth and breadth of our backup procedures for our NerdCare clients. Today we want to talk for moment about why we want those backups.

Every day, over 3500 business websites are hacked. With the sheer number of servers world-wide hosting websites, inevitably one is crashing at any given moment. While Nerds On Site takes every precaution to protect against every conceivable threat and risk for our hosting clients, it is still best to plan for the worst.

As part of our Assurance packages, Nerds On Site will restore any damage to your site by utilizing our backup system. Since data restores on our system are generally measured in seconds, it’s usually the quickest way to recover from a disaster, no matter how large or small.

Consider the following scenario – one of your employees is logged into your website, making some minor changes. Suddenly, and quite by accident, this employee deletes a file, or perhaps a folder. Now your website is possibly inactive, or missing crucial information your clients need. With another provider you would then have to go through the old procedure of calling them up, waiting on hold, and hoping that they have a backup of the data. Inevitably, if you find that they do have a backup, it will cost you money to restore the data, and perhaps take upwards of 24 hours while they look through their tapes for the information. At Nerds On Site, a quick phone call to your dedicated Nerd, or a quick email to our dedicated team, and the damage is restored free of charge.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

Today, in our continuing series on our NerdCare Assurance packages, I would like to talk about backing up a website. Most businesses would be amazed to learn that their hosting provider does not backup their website, as there seems to be a prevailing belief that all hosting providers backup everything. Your hosting provider may even explicitly claim that they backup your website, but have you inquired as to what exactly they are backing up?

As part of all our Hosting NerdCare Assurance packages, Nerds On Site will backup everything related to your website, including all databases, email and web files. However, we go much further than this, and actually take a bare-metal backup of the server that you are hosted on. When a server goes down, due to hardware failure, hacking or any other reason, it can take days to rebuild and re-configure them. This is downtime that is extremely costly to your business. Our bare-metal backups allow us to simply replace and restore the server, while skipping all the other time-consuming steps others have to perform.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!