Kathryn Lively

These days, it isn’t unusual to hear stories about people who have had their identities stolen, credit ratings trashed, and reputations put at risk. The Internet, unfortunately, provides a forum for making identity theft easier and more expedient. However, there is no need to panic, for one can take measures to decrease the possibility of this happening to you. Common sense and vigilance are the keys to keeping your identity – and consequently your finances and future – safe.

Good Steps to Take to Prevent ID Theft

If you are concerned about private, sensitive information being exposed for thieves to use against you, there are things you can do to maintain your security, especially on the Web. Here are a few suggestions for keeping your ID your own.

Shred Important Documents and Receipts: Once you are finished with invoices, credit card statements and anything else that has personal or financial information, make sure it is shredded thoroughly. But watch for personal shredders, because even the craftiest white collar criminal can piece together strips. Look in your area for community shredding events, where professionals will take your paperwork and shred it with an industrial strength machine.

Be Careful When Shopping Online: Buying products and services via the Internet may be easy, but if you give credit card information over an insecure website you risk exposing that information to hackers. Look for the lock icon on your browser when you shop, and only make purchases from sites you trust. If you receive e-mail newsletters from vendors, be wary of clicking through to websites unless you have opted-in to a specific mailing. Many times scam artists disguise e-mails to look like a legitimate company advertising to you. Sometimes hovering your mouse over the links will reveal a dubious address.

Change Passwords Periodically: If you are the type to use the same password for a multitude of protected websites, consider mixing it up a little, and changing your password from time to time. Do not use a password closely associated with you – children’s names, phone number, etc. – that somebody could figure out.

Give as Little Information on Yourself as Possible: Social media is a popular trend right now, with millions of people using Facebook and Twitter to connect to friends. If you feel the need to be social, don’t give out too much information about yourself. Use an e-mail address with a gender neutral ID and try not to volunteer geographical information if you can.

For more tips on Internet identity safety, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a good source, and the site of the Federal Trade Commission offers good tips for consumers and businesses. The more you know, the better you can protect yourself, and your identity.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on Virginia Beach shredding and Virginia web design.

Perhaps you know the craving. You may be enjoying a healthy-sized plate of hot wings or succulent barbecue ribs, and you suddenly desire a cold beverage to help savor the enjoyment. No fizzy soda or plain glass of ice water will do – you need a beer, frosty and sharp with the right amount of flavor to compliment your meal. Why settle for a standard name brand, though, when you can try the unique taste of a drink brewed regionally? If you live in the Mid-Atlantic area – Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland, you’ll find a host of micro-breweries to try.

So where are the best lagers? Next time you’re browsing a specialty liquor store, or on the road and looking for an interesting attraction to tour, consider making the following stops along the way:

Weeping Radish Brewery – Outer Banks, NC

For over twenty years, the Weeping Radish has been the place to go for beach brewed goodness. Visitors to the Outer Banks can tour this working farm and eco-friendly brewery, where you’ll find delicious pale ales and full-bodied lagers created in the old German style. Grab a case of homemade root beer to go, too, and try a cold wheat beer at the brewery’s restaurant with some authentic Carolina BBQ.

Starr Hill Brewery – Charlottesville, VA

Based near the rolling hills and valleys of Shenandoah, Starr Hill is known for its award-winning tastes and trippy-looking labels. Beer connoisseurs may enjoy the Dark Starr Stout, described by the brewery as a liquid equivalent to “Grandma’s pumpernickel bread,” or the Festie, an Oktoberfest style lager.

Clipper City Brewing Company – Baltimore, MD

Organic beer? You bet! This Maryland brewery offers two varieties of organic beer – a traditional amber ale and a bold raspberry wheat. For others tastes, Clipper City has Holy Sheet, brewed in the manner of the old Belgian Abbey monks, and Peg Leg, a dark chocolate stout, among many others.

If the craving for a unique regional beer hits you, try any of these Mid-Atlantic brands. Just remember to drink responsibly and in moderation.

If you are new to pay per click advertising, chances are you haven’t quite grasped the lingo associated with it. You may be aware that as you bid on keywords relevant to your business, your goal is to spend as little money as possible for the highest visibility for your ads. The better the quality of your ad, the more affordable local PPC becomes for your campaigns. Click-throughs from the ads to your site are recorded to give you an idea of how well the ads perform, but there is another statistic you should study as you spend. This is the conversion rate.

What is a PPC Conversion Rate?

When an Internet user sees your ad and clicks through to your site, you have a visitor. When that same visitor performs a function on your website, such as purchase a product or fill out a form, you have a conversion. A conversion is a goal you set for your website, and as a PPC program like Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing can record visits and money spent, they can be set up to track activity by all users come to visit via the paid ads. A conversion need not be an actual sale, but can record a variety of actions you wish to see accomplished by site visitors:

• Signing up to an opt-in newsletter
• Filling out an online form for information
• Registering online for an event
• Downloading a PDF document or freeware
• Registering to a message board

As each task is completed, the conversion is recorded and your PPC management dashboard will note the conversion rate compared with the actual number of visits to your site from the paid ads. Most PPC programs will allow you to set more than one conversion goal to track for your campaigns, so you can compare which ads are more effective achieving the results you want for your site and business.

What should your conversion goal be? Consider your website and how you want it to function for you. If you sell online, most assuredly actual purchases are one goal to attain. Collecting customer information for future promotions could be another. If you run a non-profit, you may wish to track visitors who leave information or sign an online petition. Only you know for certain what your site should do for you.

As for what is a good conversion rate, this is also dependent on the type of work and the scope of your business. A small company garnering a 1% conversion might not look successful, but if you factor how much is spent and how many ads are distributed, this small percentage could easily compare to a larger site enjoying a 6% rate. In short, as businesses have different models, so will the mark of success differ. Determine what is good for you and work from there. Hiring the expertise of a PPC management firm can help you plan a conversion goal strategy that works for you.

K. Lively

While waiting to speak at a regional science fiction and fantasy convention this past weekend, I sat in on the panel preceding mine. The topic, using social media in promotion, is one that always holds my interest, as social media optimization is more a part of my job than ever before. I took away from the discussion a better sense of using networks like Facebook and Twitter with regards to promoting products and services. What I learned at this panel could be applied to anybody new to SMO who is not sure how to use these networks to their advantage.

Avoiding the Hustle

So let’s say you set up a Twitter account, and slowly but surely people are following what you have to say. That’s great, that’s what you want to happen. Once you establish this captive audience, however, you want to keep them in place and perhaps get them to “re-tweet” your posts and spread the love. It’s important to do this in a way that doesn’t lead followers to think you are constantly trying to sell to them. If every tweet you post implores people to buy this or buy that or hire me, you risk losing followers. The point of social media networks like Twitter and Facebooks is the social aspect of them. To keep people tuned into you, you must engage them directly.

So what does this mean? Well, if you’re an author and readers follow your social profiles, talk to them via the medium. If you receive a note complimenting your work, return with a thank you but don’t feel pressured to deliver a hard sell of your other works. You would be amazed with how your name or brand can stick in someone’s mind just by being yourself. In talking to some authors this past weekend, I discovered how well this tactic could work. One author trading tweets with a reader found that person bought his entire backlist, while another author noted that hits to her website spike when she posts about a new book cover or pictures from a con, not necessarily a new book release. You may think this is not productive, but visitors come to the site. They just might return to buy.

Maybe you operate a business catering to local markets - talk about the weather, what is going on in the city. Reply to a follower’s remarks about favorite television shows and music…let people know there is an actual human being behind the social avatars, lest anyone suspect the profiles are there merely to regurgitate sales copy. If a follower enjoys your content enough to click through to your site, your profile has served its purpose and may just attract new followers through word of mouth.

Give it a try. You just might find you can build trust among your online following…and customers.

The sunny beaches and succulent seafood of St. Augustine, Ponte Vedra, and Vilano Beach are certainly popular draws for visitors to Florida. If one had to pick another reason to spend a lengthy vacation along this stretch of Atlantic shore, the prospect of a great golf game might just be the ticket. It’s no secret that professionals and casual golfers enjoy the lush greens of Northern Florida golf courses, and if you’re the type to plan your trip around eighteen holes St. Augustine is the place for you.

Where are the best courses to play? Here are a few suggestions to “link” you up to a great golfing vacation.

A World of Golf Awaits

Imagine if Disney World had been built specifically to showcase golf…that pretty much describes the World Golf Village in St. Augustine. This is perhaps the largest and most luxurious golf resort in the state, with two par-72 championship courses and an official PGA-recognized golf academy on the premises. When not out on the greens, you can tour the World Golf Hall of Fame or catch a show at the on-site IMAX theater, and for non-golfers on the family there is a full-service spa, swimming pools, and easy access to historic St. Augustine for a day trip.

Play Where the Tiger Prowls

Situated in beautiful Ponte Vedra Beach, just north of Old City, you’ll find one of the best known courses in the south: TPC Sawgrass. These greens are home to the annual Players Championship, and when Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson aren’t battling for top honors, the public is invited to try their hands, and clubs, at the challenging course. In order to play either of Sawgrass’ two courses, you must be a guest of the Sawgrass Golf Resort and Spa or else reserve a tee time two weeks in advance of your visit.

Pack up your clubs and your best golf shoes (no metal spikes for Sawgrass, please), and watch the cool Florida breezes as you prepare to tee off. A golf vacation in St. Augustine and Ponte Vedra Beach is perfect any time of year.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on southern vacation destinations, including St. Augustine and the Outer Banks.

These days a potential client coming to your door wants to know two things: 1) Can you put my website at the top of search for my relevant keywords, and 2) How soon can you make it happen? While we all would like to have the crystal ball that tells us when to expect the fruits of our SEO labors to bloom, answering either of these questions can’t occur without some heavy explanation into how search engine optimization works. As you win the confidence of clients and take on the tasks, you might find utilizing social media is a good way to expedite some goals, but what happens when you take on too much work?

Recently we scored phenomenal success with a client by creating a Facebook page that attracted nearly 2,500 fans in less than a month! That the client practically sells itself - a southern travel destination - helped enormously, but the fixes we made to the site allow us to update with pertinent information without having to log into every single network profile we set up. As you take charge of more accounts, knowing the shortcuts to take when promoting websites can be a boon to your own business.

RSS is Your Friend

The beauty of syndicating content is that once you place it in a primary spot, usually a blog, you can set up a feed practically anywhere else. If you have a client for which heavy article marketing is conducive, you can set up a weblog with RSS capability (Wordpress and Blogger, for two), and use the content to feed an accompanying Twitter account and Facebook page. Squidoo, a growing social network for business users, also accepts multiple feeds into their pages.

Maintaining a blog for a client, too, permits the use of widget to bring in supplemental content that can be helpful for blended search. Feed the blog with RSS or XML links from video sites like YouTube, plant the client’s social bookmarking links from Delicious or pictures from Flickr.

Essentially, one task for an SEO client could look like this:

Article posted to off-site hosted blog > fed to Facebook page, Twitter, Squidoo lens, and RSS widget embedded on main site.

Depending on the business involved, more specialized networks may permit feeds. A good SEO trick for a book author would be to sign up for Amazon.com’s AmazonConnect program and feed a blog into that client’s page.

The only caveat to this approach: it is advise to check up periodically on the social pages and profiles you create. You can’t always rely on e-mail to notify you when a visitor makes a comment or when somebody tries to spam your space. Plan your course, monitor your progress, and you will find you can become quite adept at juggling multiple SEO clients through social media.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on social media optimization and local ppc services.

It is estimated that the average American office worker uses over a hundred pounds of paper annually for various tasks. When you think about a company of a hundred employees, you realize that’s ten thousand pounds of paper! One can only guess how many Social Security numbers, payroll designations, legal documents, and other important notes are printed and passed around a building in one year.

As companies turn to greener options like increased utilization of e-mail and word processing documents, the need to store excess paper is certain to fade. Yet, to simple dump everything in the trash poses risks to corporate and personal security, so the best option for cleaning house is to start shredding.

Should a company handle document shredding in-house? Believe it or not, there are risks associated with that as well. By hiring a licensed, bonded contractor to shred your business papers, you can save your company money and time and maintain productivity. Here’s how:

Employee production remains on company work. Say you have half a ton of back-logged documents to shred. To take a worker off his current task and move him to something else slow production. Contracting a professional shredding service eliminates the need to restructure.

In-house security leaks are reduced. As an employer, you are certain you have hired trustworthy people to help run your business. Placing one person in charge of shredding private documents, however, grants him access to information that may not be his to know. To prevent possible leaks, hiring an outside company is the better solution.

Safety measures must be recognized. Depending on the type of shredder you plan to use in-house, your company could be held liable if an employee has an accident. Somebody inexperienced in mass shredding could get hurt if clothing gets caught in a machine. A professional shredding service, with workers trained in the field, reduces this risk.

A professional shredder completes the job. Say you have a large amount of paper to shred. Removing employees from their work to take care of it could lead to problems with the actual destruction of the documents. Somebody may thing the job too arduous and boring and might not shred as well as needed, thereby allowing important information to be found and abused. Using a professional shredding service ensures the job is done correctly.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on Norfolk document shredding and local PPC advertising.

If you Twitter, or use some other form of microblogging, you’re aware that URL shorteners are seen sometimes as a blessing. If you need to get out a message and find the URL link is too long to accommodate everything you have to say, the use of a URL shortening service allows you the wiggle room. It’s not uncommon to see the same URL root spread out among dozens of the Twitter accounts you follow - in this respect the shorteners are convenient and quick and, depending on the type of microblogging service you use, automatic.

Users of Twitterfox, a handy Firefox extension that lets you track folks from a pop-up screen on your browser, will note that URLs too long to appear in posts are cut using TinyURL, perhaps the best known of the shortening services. What TinyURL does is take a long URL like this:

http://www.highsearchranking.com/index.php/2009/05/01/are-url-shorte…s-good-for-seoare-url-shorteners-good-for-seo/

and make it shorter through its own root and a random extension, like this:

http://tinyurl.com/djvfvq

Some services, like TinyURL, have recently allowed users to customize the URLs, so the first string above could be also marketed like this:

http://tinyurl.com/urlshortshsr

The downside to this, for one, is that more popular names may be taken. “url-shorteners”, for example, was.

Good to use on the go if you Twitter constantly, but are shortened URLs good for your site’s SEO? In observing recent trends in Twitter, it isn’t difficult to see spam accounts are on the rise, and the inclusion of such a URL, however innocuous the preceding text may appear, could lead to a phishing link. It stands to reason one should look on shortened links carefully, clicking through only if you are certain the source can be trusted. The use of another company’s URL root in your posts, aside from your own domain, might also set back marketing efforts. The more people see your name, the more apt they are to remember your URL. Long strings cut short risk the dilution of your brand as you micro-blog.

This is not to say you should never use a shortening service. One suggestion, if you must promote long URLs for specific pages on your site, would be to use a service that lets you customize their link name. Make a spreadsheet and record all the customizations - using your brand in every way possible - and drawing from that list as you Twitter. With many services the shortened URL is permanent, so you can reuse them as needed.

Another suggestion for marketing via Twitter is to create alternative pages on your site with short file names that best describe the content. This way, you can provide good text before your link and get everything in under the character limit.

URL shortening services are handy in a pinch, but ultimately it is important to promote your own domain in Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks.