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I am Constantin "Noro" Ferseta and I'm glad to see you here. We are a small consultancy cabinet, with a huge experience and a strong portfolio. We are located in Romania, but our work is mainly for external clients. What we do? Help our clients to sell more using Internet and mobile technology. Our main service is consultancy, but we provide full e-marketing services: web development, online promo, communities building, social network marketing, e-commerce, mobile campaigns, SEM, SEO, etc. Contact us. |
3 differences between hackers and admins:
1. An admin must think of ALL security gaps to be succesfull. A hacker must find only one.
2. An admin doing his job is not going to get too much credit. And if something’s wrong, it will be crucified.
A hacker will get praised if he get any success, no matter how rare it is.
3. It’s more exotic to be qualified as hacker versus an admin. In games, everybody wants to be the thug, not the policeman.
I always respected the imagination of the malware creators. Latest case: a small application for Yahoo Messenger, that tries to make you click a link.
It innitiate the conversation or it can responde if you started it.
The language is very human
The application gives replies!
Very nice follow-up
It acts when the Yahoo messenger is open
The victim does not get the messages.
Here is my conversation with the robot 
I consider is a huge step forward in terms of creativity, versus the simple links that were passed on YM until now. I strongly believe that the conversion rate is huge
For the past 6 years, I am keep increasingly receiving requests from various companies/persons to help them out in a very sensitive and important problem: they had negative/bad reviews online. And they need to solve them
The problem is that this way they waste a LOT of sales. A nielsen study since april 2009 shows that 70% pf buyers search on the internet for the name of the company. And if they see negative reviews online, in the first results, they are a big chance to let go the purchase.
So, the problems usually are like this. “If you search <my name/my brand name> online, you will see that in the first 10 google organic results they are at least 1 negative review. Can u help?”
The answer is YES, we can help.
There are several ways of doing that:
1. pro-active approach
2. reactive approach
1. influence the site owner to take the bad review out (or to modify it, so a negative review will become a neutral review)
2. fight back, and explain why the negative review is not accurate
3. assure that we have tons of other positive reviews online, that makes the negative reviews some exceptions. And the positive reviews will be brought higher in google, so the negative review will fell on the second-third page, becoming invisible for most of the potential clients.
The trick is that usually people are writting something on internet when they have a negative experience, not on positive. So, even the experience that lead to the negative review was singular in a zillions of positive experience, only the negative ones are getting exposure.
Our job in this case consist in setting the correct percentage between positive reviews and the negative ones, to corespond with the actual situation. This increase in positive reviews can be done in two ways:
- artificial (write positive reviews on command, via specialised team, like www.positivisers.com, with extreme discretion.)
- organic (incentives people to write down the positive experience) – there are a lot of marketing tricks to make people do that. Of course, the organic way is the preffered way, even if it cost more
The discuttion is much bigger and it has a lot of complexity, however, in most of the cases we can succed in achieving what the client wants.
If you too have this problem with negative reviews online, give us a call. We can help.
I’ve made a test, on one of our websites targeted, to US visitors, having before Google adsense and after that adbrite, on the same ad spots.
Conclusion: Google Adsense produce an income 78 (seventyeight) times bigger then AdBrite! WOW.
the quality of the Adbrite’s ads was very low, the contextual targeting did not function, it was clear that they do not have quality ads.
I will test also the rest of competitors, to see how they rank.
Some nice figures on Romanian Social Networks usage.
Looking at godaddy as a hosting provider? Here are 10 reasons why NOT to.
As part of my work I had a lot of experience with tons of hosting providers. From shared hosting to virtual servers and physical hosting. From small sites to huge sites (like Coca-Cola sites, with mobile databases included). From high traffic sites to high process intensive sites.
Reason #1. Your sites will be in a bad neighborhood, especially in shared hosting. After testing with http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/ i found on different IP poluttion with explicit content site
Reason #2. Go daddy does not have a live chat support. You can either call them or by email, where the response can be from 30 minutes to 24h. Other competitors they do
Reason #3. Every modification you do: create a DB, creat a subdomain, create a domain, create an email account, whatever is not instant. Godaddy has to approve it, and it takes ages. There is no such thing on the most of other providers
Reason #4. Godaddy has a lot of errors on wordpress sites. Search on google error 500 godaddy to see what people are saying about that
Reason #5. Godaddy abusevly closed a full account with dozens of sites (!) because it received a complain that a picture could infrindge the trademark of a third party. Also, it took a lot of time to reinstate the full account.
Reason #6. On shared hosting, we bought for some of our sites the ultimate hosting plan, the unlimited one. Because the traffic on one of the sites spiked to 500 visits per day (!) they saw a lot of requests to the pictures from the page and they decided unilateral to move the full account (with more then 40 domains) to a new server. That means a down period to all sites up to 72h!!!! After desperate discutions with their infoline lady, they said that procedure has been started and they cannot do anything. And they said that are sorry for inconvenience!!! This is an abuse. Also, they sent me an email saying that if we don’t decrease the load on their server, they will terminate the contract. And, to be supportive, godaddy suggested to move to a physical dedicated server
Reason #7. The Godaddy hosting platform it’s incredible complicated.
Reason #8. Godaddy hosting is very slow. Both for us customers but even more for the rest of the world.
Reason #9. The email system is very slow and inefficient. Very difficult to set up or to run. They have weird limtiations: 1000 emails sent by day from a dedicated server!?!
Reason #10. Poorly trained support staff, unfortuntelly.
Also, others are saying negative things about Godaddy hosting service. In a top of the hosting services, Godaddy is ranked #63! http://www.myhostingpicks.com/
One of our clients, Eco-Rom Ambalaje (#1 in recycling in Romania), launched this month a campaign, with a strong call2action. Colecteaza Selectiv (http://colecteazaselectiv.ro).
50 bikes as prizes. 3 bikes for the most influencing bloggers + 30 tshirts made from recycled PET. As the campaign ends on October 3rd, we’ll give more nice results after that. Excellent results so far.
This evening I’ve been to a Orange Meetup, organized by Orange Romania. Excellent ROI for me.
The topic was SEM.
The guests were 2 ladies (Amelie and Essuhana) from eSearch Vision, a french SEM agency.
The moderator was Maria H. – a very human presenter:)
Here are some interesting facts:
This week, wordpress banned 2 of my wordpress sites, one with PR 4 and one with PR 3. They banned it automatically after I posted a specific url to a travel dot com site that was ok from reputation point of view (as far as I thought).
I just saw a big red thing saying your site is down for breaing TOS.
The shock was pretty big. The loss was also pretty big.
All the content on those two sites was original and it was giving a lot of benefits to visitors. Also, the sites had like several hundreds visits per day. They were alive.
After talking with wordpress guys, they reinstated both of my sites, but with one condition: to take out the last site introduced in blogroll. Which of course i did.
However, i found it interesting that they ban sites for specific links that appears on their platform. Just like google is doing the same thing – bad neighborhood, but not as strict as wordpress. Interesting.
Here is a good learning worth to be shared.
For small keywords, like “mp3″, “laptop”, “travel”, and so on, adwords keyword tool shows tons of searches. Well, this is not correct.
Here is a test I have done:
I found a term that was searched 110k/month according google adwords keyword tool (simple term).
I found the dot com free – I bought it instantly.
I made a site and brought it to first position in google, in spite of heavy competition.
Now I have less then 100 visitors on that search term per month! I expected at least 1k/day only from that search term only.
Instead I’m getting a lot of traffic for more complex search terms, that includes that domain term. So overall I don’t regret doing it
Using this tool should be consider approximate (I had a similar conclusion some 2 years ago, when I noticed that on some key terms I have generate more traffic than google says is the total).
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