The once popular Orange County Business Directory

That was offline for a while due to a new ownership is now back in action and better.

With more options like adding videos and custom options to a free and paid business listing you make a near complete website for your business on there.

If business’s in Orange County California want free orange county advertising then check out OC Focus

The owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a full plate. Besides his basketball team, the busy billionaire also owns part of a media company, and serves as chairman of the TV channel HDNet. He recently competed for five weeks on “Dancing With the Stars” on ABC. How on earth does he find time to blog?

Yet his site is one of the top 1,000 Weblogs, according to the search engine Technorati. Thousands read Mr. Cuban’s posts every single day. If he can do it, why can’t you?

“Don’t go into blogging to make a living,” Mr. Cuban warned in an e-mail message. Still, he and other top bloggers with day jobs agree most people could attract a following on the Web. And whether a person blogs to make a little money, to influence opinion or just for sheer ego gratification, amassing a large audience is the goal.

Here’s what a number of successful bloggers with successful nonblogging careers say are the ways to think about getting into the business of blogging.

Don’t expect to get rich. You can easily place automatically served ad banners from Google or AdBrite onto your blog. It is as simple as signing up with an ad service and placing a snippet of HTML code into your blog. Many of the ads will be specific to the topic of your posts and the service will credit your account whenever a reader clicks on one of the ads. You get a check only if the account builds to a set amount, $100 in the case of Google.

But Philip Kaplan, president for products at AdBrite, cautions that only one in six blogs draws even 500 page views a day. At that pace, you would make at most $45 a month, even if the site were decked out with full-page ads. Mr. Kaplan estimates only 3 percent of active sites make more than $1,000 a month from advertising.

“In 3.5 months we made $9.47,” complained one blogger, Ted Dziuba, who yanked the automatic ads off of his site, Uncov.com.

Write about what you want to write about, in your own voice. Mr. Dziuba, a software engineer at Persai, a Web news filtering service, began blogging out of sheer frustration with buggy, overhyped Web 2.0 applications. Uncov.com became a magnet for techies with similar complaints, and unintentionally raised awareness of Persai. Thousands of Uncov readers signed up for a test of Persai’s service. Eventually, even advertisers took notice. “Once I started getting 2,000 to 3,000 page-views per day,” he says, “advertisers started coming to me.” He says advertisers have contacted him directly with offers of $750 for a month of display ads.

Mr. Cuban said: “Blog about your passions. Don’t blog about what you think your audience wants. Post because you have something you are dying to write about.”

Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule. “Deal with the rest of your life first,” advises Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who posts constantly throughout the day on his site, Instapundit.com. The volume and regularity has helped make his political opinion site one of the most popular on the Internet. “The blog is best handled by inserting it into the small bits of free time that rest among the bigger chunks of your work.” Mr. Reynolds slips in posts between classes, as a break from writing law review articles and during slow time at home.

Just post it already! The hurdle that stops many would-be bloggers is fear of clicking the “Publish” button. Xeni Jardin, who juggles blogging at the quirky alternative-news site BoingBoing.net with a career as a freelance journalist for NPR, Wired magazine and others, resists the urge to polish her blog prose the way she would a radio script. “Don’t bottle up your ideas forever believing you have to hit the same kind of mature, complete, perfect point as you would with a magazine or newspaper article,” she says. “Blogs are always in progress.” Boing Boing’s bloggers are known for going back to posts to update them, adding new information and striking out factual errors.

Keep a regular rhythm. Bloggers disagree on how often they should post. Mr. Reynolds and Ms. Jardin post several times a day. Mr. Cuban and Mr. Dziuba will go a week without a post. What matters, they agree, is that you establish a reliable rhythm for readers, so they know they can rely on you to have new material for them every so often.

Likewise, there’s no one right length for blog posts, but the most successful sites seem to have their own reliable formats, just like most professional publications. Mr. Reynolds rarely goes beyond two or three lines per post. Boing Boing entries run one to three paragraphs each, always with a photo. Mr. Cuban’s Blog Maverick entries can take up the entire browser window — when the guy’s on a roll, he’s on a roll.

Join the community, such as it is. There’s an unwritten rule — actually, it’s written about a lot on blogs — that you should always link back to bloggers whose ideas you repeat, or from whom you get a cool link to another site. Don’t use other bloggers’ photos or excerpt their writing without a prominent link back to the original. When in doubt, give credit.

More to the point, linking to other bloggers is the best way to get them to link to you. Links from other bloggers increase your readership two ways: they send readers directly from other sites, and they raise your ranking in search engine results. A blogger who posts about a hot topic like Eliot Spitzer’s secret life, but has no inbound links, will lose out to one who already has dozens of inbound links from other sites.

Plug yourself. That’s what all the name-brand bloggers do. It’s not bad form to send a short note to a prominent blogger drawing his or her attention to a really good blog you wrote. Some bloggers place links to their sites in comments they write on more established blogs. (And some bloggers are on to the trick and refuse to allow it.)

A more direct way to draw a crowd is to submit your blog posts to news aggregation sites like Digg, Fark and Boing Boing. Readers vote on how much they like the posts and new readers are drawn to the list of most popular posts. Granted, it helps if your blog post includes a home video of someone being attacked by a cat or really arrogant e-mail messages from a hedge-fund manager. Those get passed around virally in an instant.

Allowing readers to post comments on your blog not only increases readership, it provides a sense of live interaction with the rest of the world. But beware: the insulting comment is an Internet art form. “There’s a big difference between being flamed on someone else’s blog, and having them come do it in your own home,” Ms. Jardin said.

In the end, the biggest threat isn’t that you’ll fail to learn to blog. It’s that if you blog regularly for long enough, and begin to get comments and links from other bloggers, you’ll have trouble doing your day job.

“I can’t stop reloading,” confessed a colleague over IM after a post of hers began to attract dozens of comments. “I should be working, I know,” she added a few seconds later. “I have an unhealthy obsession.” Isn’t that the whole idea?

Some Blogs to check out

charlesyarbrough.com

blogmaverick.com

lifehack.org

Besides the obvious, you should do another blog. Two blogs will get substantially more activity then a single blog. You can play off of each other and do separate links to each. This will help the cross links you add to each blog have more weight. So now that your business has a blog, next is to CREATE a personal blog. You can do a slew of new articles and original content easily since there is no direct theme you are limited to.

For example Marketing Spot is DWHS Web Hosting‘s Marketing Blog, they also have a Download Blog at Downloadspot.com But the personal blog of DWHS’s President Charles Yarbrough is a essential key tool in the blog marketing and fun plan. I’m not saying to create hundreds of blogs but several with unique original content will help the overall success of each blog more then itself.

http://marketingspotcom.wordpress.com/

http://www.squidoo.com/marketingspot

http://www.myspace.com/webhosting

Here are some examples of free web pages that can be used for Link Trading and getting new traffic

Here are some more:

http://digg.com/users/dwhs

http://dwhswebhosting.blogspot.com/

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/dwhs/

http://groups.google.com/group/dwhs-web-hosting

http://www.indeed.com/forum/profile/dwhs

http://yarbrough.charles.name/

If you’re thinking of starting a business—or already have one—Internet direct marketing can play an important role in making it grow. Whether your business is brick and mortar, click and mortar or pure e-commerce, you increasingly will be expected to build customer relationships by understanding, engaging and providing individualized service to every customer. And a powerful way for developing these relationships is personalized Internet direct marketing.

Whether it’s a timely email reminder, a suggestion for a bottle of wine for a special occasion or a prompt update of a crucial software program, customers value personalized service because it can simplify their lives, save them time and acknowledge them as individuals. For your company, a communications program that engages your customers’ interest can help to differentiate your business from your competition so you can build long-term, profitable relationships.

Six Tips for Effective Email Marketing
While delivering customized messages to each individual customer was once too expensive to be practical, the Internet has rendered the incremental cost of contact insignificant. On the Internet, contacting 20,000 people costs no more than contacting 10,000 people. And each “contact” can be personalized.

Four Stages in the Dialogue
The process of building successful customer relationships falls into four stages, which I call:

• the awareness stage — getting a prospective customer’s attention.
• the permission stage — asking for their permission to stay in touch.
• the involvement stage — when the customer demonstrates involvement with you, normally by making a purchase.
• the loyalty stage — with repeat customers who tell their friends about you.

If you’re just getting started and don’t have any customers yet, you’ll want to focus most of your efforts on creating awareness. If you already have a customer base, you’ll need to balance all four stages.

“Young companies are wise to put time and energy into gathering customer data very early on in their development,” especially customers’ email addresses, says Adrienne Down-Coulson, senior director of client services at Netcentives Inc., a San Francisco-based loyalty and direct-marketing solutions company. “Without email addresses, they’re powerless to retain those customers they’ve spent so much money to acquire in the first place.”

Ms. Down-Coulson says her firm often encounters companies that have collected huge databases of customer information, “but then are forced to spend more marketing dollars trying to acquire their email addresses—and with that incremental spend, they generally won’t get as high a response as they might have liked. People will see better results by collecting email addresses at the beginning, even if they need to provide an incentive at the time.”

Make it easy for customers to interact with your site on their first visit. Once you’ve gotten their awareness, ask for their permission to send them an occasional email. And let them know why you want to send them emails and what you’ll be sending. Finally, make it equally simple for your customers to unsubscribe from your programs. Counterintuitive? Not really. Customers are much more inclined to give you permission and start becoming involved with you if they know that it’s going to be easy to disengage if you don’t “deliver on your promises.”

A Retailer Asks for Permission
eBags, a Denver-based online luggage and apparel retailer, works hard to ensure that its customers are engaged in a relationship and aren’t just targets in a marketing campaign. As a consequence, eBags is a believer in the importance of permission-based email. “We make it clear to consumers that they have the right to grant and take away email messages at any time,” says Jon Nordmark, the company’s chief executive officer and co-founder.

eBags began developing a comprehensive, personalized e-mail marketing program early on. The company’s launch was accompanied by a program to build its customer and prospect databases and then implement an effective strategy to contact the people whose names and e-mail addresses it had collected.

For eBags, building relationships with customers via the Internet is much more cost-effective, efficient and measurable than conventional direct marketing. Andrea Butter, former vice president of marketing at Palm Inc., a Santa Clara, CA-based hand-held computer company, was the initial force behind Palm’s successful Insync Online email marketing program. In the Dark Ages—the early 1990s—of online marketing, she, too, realized the power of asking customers what they want.

“Back then—this was before the Palm Pilot came out—Palm sold add-on software packages for handheld computers like the Newton and the Zoomer,” says Ms. Butter. “Sales were so slow that I was actually able to read every single product registration card. And I was completely surprised how many customers took the time to write personal comments—about how much they liked our software, a problem they had getting hold of it or suggestions for improvements.

“It was just a treasure trove of input,” she adds. “Here were customers who actively communicated with our company, and it was just killing me that I wasn’t able to tap into that and turn it into a dialogue that would keep the customer’s positive feelings about his purchase alive.”

Today, the Internet makes such a dialogue financially feasible, even for small companies. The more customer information they have, the better. What’s important is its relevancy. Target Your Approach

A highly targeted approach brings response rates that far exceed those achieved by using “mass mailing” email messages. “We’ve seen response rates go from an average of 3 percent to 15 percent when the communication is highly relevant to individual customers,” says Ms. Down-Coulson.

Used properly, the Internet is a direct marketer’s dream come true, transforming both prospects and casual buyers into long-term, loyal customers. Yet, online marketing differs radically from conventional direct marketing. It’s no longer about the old model of “telling and selling.” If you simply think of the Internet as a better, faster cheaper way to do traditional direct marketing, you’re walking in a minefield. Privacy violations and spam accusations are a sure part of your future.

To communicate with your customers effectively, you must think service. Mr. Nordmark says that if you ask what customers want, they’ll tell you. Listen to what they tell you and use it to deliver value and convenience and you’ve begun to build a solid foundation for lasting customer relationships.

“There’s a saying that happy customers are your best sales people, and it’s true. And the best time to begin communicating with them is in the honeymoon period right after the purchase” says Ms. Butter. “My advice to entrepreneurs would be to start communicating with customers the very moment they have a customer.”

Direct customer communication and marketing should be a part of any company’s plans. Apply the same old “broadcast” tactics of yesteryear and you’ll be unpopular with your customers at best, and violating your customers’ privacy and compromising the future of your business at worst. Internalize the new rules of Internet direct marketing and you’ll be building the foundation for a thriving business.

1.

Be consistent in your ad message and style including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, signs and banners.
2.

Newspapers, radio and TV stations are helpful in producing the advertising that you will be running with them.
3.

While word-of-mouth advertising has been around a long time, it usually falls short of being able to attract the number of customers needed to be successful in business.
4.

Promote benefits rather than features. A benefit is the emotional satisfaction your product or service provides, or a tangible performance characteristic.
5.

Know your competitors. Knowing everything about your competitors is just as important as knowing everything about your own business.

Home-based businesses are fast becoming a popular way to operate your small company, while reducing expensive start-up costs such as leasing space, lease hold improvements, utility and phone deposits and major office equipment. Thousands of people across the country are finding that working from home provides them with the advantages of earning an income with the flexibility to work when it is best for them and take care of family and other responsibilities that often arise throughout the work day. However, before starting your home-based business, consider the following advice:

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Determine local and state requirements for licensing and zoning regulations. Be sure to check with your local zoning office to find out how the zoning regulations in your area may affect your business plans. Determine if your business requires any licenses and file the necessary forms.
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Rent a post office box and use that address on your promotional mail and stationery, doing this will make it less obvious that you are working from home. The professional image you portray is very important to your clientele.
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Install a phone line in your home dedicated to your business.
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Use an answering machine for incoming business calls.
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Organize your work space with great care. Make sure that you have sufficient space to meet your needs.
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When scheduling appointments with clients, consider meeting at your client’s office or renting a conference room to maintain a professional image.
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Establish contacts with your competitors and join associations pertinent to your business. Have your clients suggest possible new clients and ask if they will recommend you.
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Keep excellent records of entertainment and travel expenses. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tends to audit home-based businesses more frequently—especially when they are writing off a variety of expenses, including the percentage of the mortgage or rent for your office space. There are several good record keepers such as Day Timer®, Franklin Quest® and Day Planner that will help you keep track of your expenses. Your accountant, a CPA is recommended, can advise you on deductions you can take and records you must keep for the IRS.
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And above all, put some of your earnings into a savings account for those times when your business is in a slump . . . and it will happen.
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Discipline yourself. You must be a self-starter and follow a routine, just as if you were working for any other business. In many cases, you are the only person you can rely on to get the job done. Unless it’s an emergency, do not baby-sit or chat with your neighbors.

Since we where breaking some of our own rules by using a black background we decided to show a better example. The theme is simpler and shows the links, categories, ect all on the main page. It also has a clean logo and graphic for a easy on the eyes effect.

Hope you like it.

Charles Yarbrough

SEATTLE (AP) — Starbucks Corp. has announced it’s closing 600 underperforming stores in the United States.

The Seattle-based premium coffee company also announced Tuesday it expects to open fewer than 200 new company-operated stores in the United States in fiscal 2009.

The company says it will try to place workers from closed stores in remaining Starbucks.

In the past year 8.4 million Americans where victims of identity left. Identity is the number one crime in America and it’s spreading world wide. In addition to lost money you might get bad credit from a issue. Email is the main way identity theft is done. By sending a fake email (spoof) so the email looks like it’s from your bank or credit card or service. But really these emails are being used to steal your identity and use your credit cards. The main target now is college kids, a new country wide program to educate kids about bad credit and identity theft.

Do not ever click a email link that asks for your information. Go directly to the website if you need change or update your information.

Also check your credit at least once a year to make sure there is no surprises when it’s time to use the credit card.

I also recomend using a password program like roboform so you do not have type in your passwords each time you login.