ATILUS - Web Design | Internet Marketing

Fort Myers, Naples Court Reporting

We are proud to announce our new client Gregory Court Reporting Services. 

After being introduced to Laura Gregory, the owner of Gregory Court Reporting Services, and a few meeting regarding strategy and marketing, we have officially begun work together in order to further market and promote the GregoryCourtReporting.com website. Initially we will be marketing the website via search engine optimization as well as making a few small adjustments. In the near future we hope to totally redesign the website and further market the website using our other tools (including pay per click marketing and social media). I’d like to personally thank Laura for taking the time out of her busy schedule to meet with me and to trust that Atilus will deliver increased visitors, leads and sales through our strategic search engine optimization package. For more information on the firm please continue reading…

About Gregory Court Reporting Services

Are you looking for court reporting in Lee County? How about court reporting in Collier Countyf?

Whether your law firm is located in Southwest Florida or your case brings you here, Gregory Court Reporting Services has 5 locations throughout Southwest Florida to help meet your needs. You can rely on Gregory Court Reporting Services’ years of experience to deliver accurate legal records. No matter what you need, all of our records, transcriptions and other services are fully documented and archived. In addition to conventional fort myers court reporting Gregory Court Reporting Services also offers other transcription services including:

• Medical Examination Transcription
• Expert Witness Testimony
• Depositions
• Corporate Meetings (held in our gorgeous offices throughout Naples, Fort Myers, & Part Charlotte)
• Sworn Statements
• Private Conferencing (via state of the art video and audio conferencing equipment)

Gregory Court Reporting employs the latest technologies to produce prompt, precise transcripts, while ensuring the integrity of the testimony.

For over 20 years Gregory Court Reporting Services has been providing transcription and legal court reporters for thousands of clients throughout Southwest Florida.

LinkedIN Advertising First Impressions

A couple of days ago I received an email from LinkedIN.

Background on my Experience With LinkedIN:

I have been a member of LinkedIN since day 1, but honestly, up until recently I thought it was complete rubbish. It just tries too hard to be everything else, although I’m starting to appreciate some of the directions it’s gone in. What do I mean by “everything else?” Well, it has an update bar - like twitter (and more recently Facebook), it now allows “friends” not just business connections ala Facebook, it has a whole question/answer section (a great idea), but it too closely mirrors Yahoo Answers system. And much more (blogging, pictures, etc.)...

But, amid all of this social media gobalee-gook it does have some awesome features:

• Interactive Resume - Your profile is MUCH more like a resume than other social networks and allows you to always have an updated copy - an do some personal branding should someone Google you.
• Recommendations - This is perhaps the greatest feature. You can quickly solicit others to write a recommendation on you or your company. Anyone on LinkedIN can quickly see how much love you have.
• Business-Centered - Regardless of the features, everything is more “business-centric.” I receive almost no spam, and this is a great place to keep in touch with business contacts. I don’t want to befriend clients on Facebook so they can see my drunken debacles (just kidding - “or is he?”).

So a few days ago I got an email advertising LinkedIN’s own advertising network. Truth be told I had no idea this existed, and expected something akin to Facebook’s own advertising platform. Because the ad featured an enticing coupon, we decided to jump in. Before recommending any products/services to our clients we like to try it out ourselves in order to understand it both technically as well as financially (does it REALLY WORK and will it provide a return?!).

Below is a list of first impressions, good and bad, as well as a quick summary. 

LinkedIN Advertising Pros

• Easy to Setup - Setup took about 2 minutes which involved logging into my existing account, creating 1 small text ad, uploading Atilus’ logo, targeting certain groups/areas, and then inputting credit card and coupon information.
• Targeting - I love this about Facebook and now too, about LinkedIN. You can target people based on their position, demographic, geography, and much more. 

LinkedIN Advertising Cons

• Limited Targeting - You can only target people by a few categories at a time (I believe it was 3) even though they offer the ability to target by much more, they get blurred out once you’ve selected three target groups. What does this mean? Well - our ad will be shown to nearly 3,000,000 people. I don’t want this, it’s far too many. I’d really appreciate the ability to further drill down to the exact people that should be seeing the ad. As it stands I had to make a sacrifice in terms of what department I wanted to show it to in exchange for a geographic location. Additionally, only a few major metropolitan areas are currently target-able (IE, you can’t just select “Florida” but instead must select Miami/Fort Lauderdale or Tampa/St. Pete). 
• Expensive - VERY expensive compared to similar offerings on Facebook and even much larger PPC networks like AdWords. To give you an example LinkedIN suggests a price per click during the setup process and it recommended $6/click. Even with the $250 coupon, that amounts to only about 40 clicks. Similarly, they have a very high daily budget - $10/day or a minimum of $300/month (if you calculate it that way). 
• Reporting - Jury is still out on this one, but the reporting seems pretty rudimentary. How many people saw the ad, and did they click?

LinkedIN Advertising Review Conclusion

At the end of the month I will review everything and do a larger recap/review once we have some actual data to present to you. But, for now, the major advantage, as I see it, that LinkedIN offers is targeting. I always felt that, although performance on networks like Facebook, was always not as good as other advertising solutions like conventional PPC advertising (via Google AdWords) they do answer the question:

“How do I get in front of an audience that usually needs my services or products, but may not be looking for them at this moment?righ”

AdWords, gets you in front of that audience the moment they are searching, but every other opportunity is lost. If they’re not searching, you can’t get to them. With this kind of advertising, where you target them based on their position, employer, etc. NOW YOU CAN. For the future I see this being a tool great for B2B businesses, IE if you sell printers, computers, consulting, and any other products or services to businesses, this could be huge AND you don’t have to deal with (and waste your money on) the riff raff that are on other social networks. 

It still has a ways to go (targeting needs to get better), but it looks like this might be an amazing advertising tool for businesses targeting other businesses down the road. 

As an aside, because of the nature of the site, as well as the advertisers I do think LinkedIN will always be much more expensive than Facebook ads or even pay per click advertising. However, that may be a moot point if the people you target purchase or sign up more. 

We’ll see…

And Then There Was 9…IE9

So recently there has been some buzz about the new Internet Explorer that will be coming out in the near to distant future (no real launch date yet). Yes Internet Explorer might just be catching up with the times. IE9 previews have been opened to the public and things look promising.

Internet Explorer 9 is boasting improved graphic capability, faster load/run times, and next gen HTML 5 competence (of course everything a browser should have).  IE9’s improved graphics range from full (to near full) CSS3 selector/attribute support to added color profiles.  Speed improvements were made to make the user’s hardware work better for them. Faster Javascript run times and accelerated text and video rendering are some of the speed improvements IE has made to their latest installment. HTML 5 support will give developers the tools necessary to help launch design and development into the future.

Of course these are general improvements that Internet Explorer has been given. Plus IE9 is still in a preview/development phase that will still take some time to tweak to a beta release. And we all know how we love to get our hands on a beta release so we can talk smack about what is still wrong with it.

Till that day comes keep up-to-date on the full line of what IE9 has to offer by going to their preview site: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/. Here you can find a list of demos and test ratings that IE9 is currently getting.

The real question is, “Will this finally mean the end of IE6 for good? Will its eternal hold over some designers out there finally end with the birth of IE9?” I would hope so. I’ve long set that ship sailing and you should have too.

Does My Website Hosting Matter?

You damn right it does! (and Google’s here to back me up)

When it comes to hosting we’ve done and seen it all. From both perspectives - your perspective as a client, you want your website to “just work” operate, come up, and your email to work. And as a development company, working with servers, with hosting reseller companies, etc.

A quick back story on Atilus’ hosting:

Initially we started out with the cheapest solution we could find. We could buy a large amount of space at discount host XYZ company and then resell to our clients for hundreds of percent profit! Unfortunately, it came back to blow up in our face - MORE THAN ONCE! Our first server went down - along with around 20 clients (only 20!) and was down for days. ALL of their emails were down - and what business doesn’t collapse now a days with out email? None, every business runs on email. We spent nearly 100 hours on the phone with support over those few days trying to correct the problem. We decided to switch hosts… but again, to a cheap host. And then it happened again! Despite all of these nightmare scenarios, this cloud had/has a silver lining. It was a slap in the face and a wake up call - don’t get greedy, offer a solid service at a competitive AND profitable price. Switching, and changing our prices has allowed our business to scale and our customers to remain blissfully ignorant of the nightmare of NO EMAIL.

Back to you and your question: “Does My Website Hosting Matter?” 

We are often asked about hosting. We talk about hosting at EVERY new meeting with a client and most have purchased, or are planning to purchase hosting, but have questions. Occasionally, we have a client that hasn’t heard about hosting. Hosting is simply where your website sits, the computer that serves it up when you type in your address. Your website has to live somewhere - your hosting is where IT (your website) is stored.

Hosting Matters

Hosting matters for 1 major reason:

1) Crappy Hosting Costs You Money - Subpar hosting will ALWAYS cost infinitely MORE than the price of a premium hosting service. 

Here’s a tiny example, we lost email using a bad host a number of years ago and is reflective of what we experienced:

If you lose email for 4 days

and your company only has 3 people…

and those 3 people (making $10/hr) can’t work because email is down

you will lose roughly $720!

This is a tiny company, with poorly paid employees. For a conventional website and email hosting a whole year will never cost $720. Even if you have hosted exchange (a much more conventionally expensive form of email) for 3 people it won’t cost anywhere near $720!

I’m probably boring you with technical details. But… that’s not all… 

Bonus Reason: Your Hosting Affects Your Marketing

“Say what? How can hosting effect my marketing”, you’re probably asking? Well it’s simple, Google, and other search engines want to provide a quality experience for searchers… so if your website is NOT consistently up, you’re not going to provide that kind of experience. You will be ranked lower. Google has said this before, and Matt Cutts just reiterated it, your hosting affects your search engine results!

Top 5 Tips for Managing Email

Are you swamped by your email? Do you have tons of messages coming in everyday, so much so that you’re beginning to become overwhelmed? Me too! Or maybe you’re slowly getting more and you’re looking for tips on managing your email better before things get out of control. Regardless of what situation you are in, here are a few tips from me - Zach - an email master, that should help you out!

Give me 2 minutes - read this article - and I promise you will save tens if not HUNDREDS OF HOURS over the next year(s). 

I get around 100 - 200 emails per day, and send around 50 (in addition to any number of meetings and about a dozen phone calls). But managing all of this communication, particularly email is easy if you follow these tips for managing your email more efficiently:

1) Stay Organized

What does your inbox look like… go ahead, take a look, I’ll wait... is it overflowing with thousands of messages? Or is it nice and neat?

If it’s neat, move on, but if your “inbox” is where you keep EVERY message, you ARE going to have a problem. If not now, then pretty soon, your email will overwhelm you.

Start creating folders, sub-folders, or tags for your messages immediately. Go through that large list, create appropriate folders, and start dragging and dropping. I particularly LOVE outlook because folders can be created in seconds, and email can be quickly organized.

2) Use Your Inbox as a To Do List

Again, I love Outlook. Why do I love outlook so much (even MORE than gmail, which has a similar feature)? Well, as you may have noticed you can click on a message to flag it… when something comes into my inbox and I need to take action on it, particularly something important, I flag it, and move on.

I will deal with it later.

Everything in my inbox is an actionable item, everything else (stuff I’ve completed, people I don’t need to get back to, or newsletters) get filed immediately or automatically. The stuff in your inbox should ONLY BE STUFF YOU NEED TO DO WORK ON! And if there is ANYTHING that needs to be done in regards to the email, even a tiny-baby step at the end… it stays in the inbox until it is complete.

3) Automatic Filing

That last tip brings me to my next tip… filing automatically. No matter what software you’re using for your email, it has a feature to AUTOMATICALLY FILE MESSAGES. Here at Atilus, I get about 1000 automatic notifications a month because of some of the software we have (analytics, scheduled invoices, etc.). I don’t need to read them all (although I do need to keep copies), but because of the way the software works I must get them. Instead of manually filing them each month (taking probably about 30 minutes/total), I’ve instead created rules in outlook to automatically file them away. 

For more information on auto-filing emails in outlook check out “creating a rule” in outlook.

4) Say NO to Email

“What, Zach… this article is ABOUT EMAIL… how can I say no to email!?”

Studies have shown that multitasking actually SLOWS YOUR ABILITY TO GET THINGS DONE. You can get much more done if you “chunk” (I know it’s a funny word - it makes me think of a large chipmunk). Joking aside you’re wasting tons of time keeping your outlook open and jumping back and forth between new emails and the actual work that gets interrupted. Sure, your response time might look amazing to your clients or customers, but that is MEANINGLESS if you don’t get stuff done!

So what do you do?! Only read email a few times a day. Outside of that… I turn it off and actually DO work. Spending a lot of time emailing (communicating) actually creates MORE WORK, which is great… but it actually NEEDS TO GET DONE! Writing emails however, although at times necessary, is not the core of what needs to be done. For example, I received a request this morning for a new possible job with information. I need to create a proposal. If I continued to spend all of my time emailing people, that proposal would not get generated. 

What Should Your Email Schedule Look Like?

This works for me: 1st thing in the morning, mid-afternoon (around 1pm - 2pm) and then again in the evenings. 

Other than that… I’m working on the things that need to get done at the company, or work for clients. 

5) Manage Expectations

One of the big things I’ve learned in business, and in life over the last half decade is to manage people’s expectations. Be they friends, lovers, or clients, people have expectations of you - sometimes they are implied and not even directly communicated.

So you need to take control.

I remember reading about email response time expectations a few years ago (not sure where, or if the numbers are even that accurate), but apparently people expect a response to email in less than 15 minutes. That’s right, no matter where you are, what you’re doing, people want to get a response from you in 15 minutes. And is it any wonder? With smart phones and ubiquitous wireless access, you can have access to your email pretty much anywhere, anytime.

Recently I was one of those people that wanted a quick response:  

I emailed one of our software providers a question. It took them 5 days to respond. I was shocked. Although I never expected customer service from this particular vendor (they provide hosted project management solutions) I didn’t expect such a delay. We’ve spent literally tens of thousands of dollars with them over the last 5 years! But, in truth, it WASN’T an important question, and just needed to be answered “whenever.”

Anyway, your customers are thinking the same way. And how do you deal with this? Be upfront about response times, and if you do receive an email, shoot a VERY quick one back letting them know when you’ll be able to answer or address their problem, question, or inquiry. It’s that simple. Hell - you can take a week or even months sometimes to address something, but just letting them know when will keep rapport. 

CAUTION - be sure that you keep the message in your inbox (see tip #2) and DON’T forget what you promised. 

If you follow these 5 tips for managing email, you should be able to save time and do business more efficiently over the coming years. As always, if you have any questions, or tips of your own, feel free to comment below. I’ll be happy to hear from you!