Keep your site fresh

January 24th, 2008

intro

Happy New Year! It's that time again, where everyone gets excited about all the great things coming in the new year.

To that end, we have a few announcements to kick off our new year. e-Tech Solutions, Inc. is building a new brand! We are excited to introduce PepperStation.com.

PepperStation.com will focus on our products including: Spirit, Recordit, email marketing and Hosting.

Check out our new site, PepperStation.com and let us know what you think! We hope you like the new name...it's catchy and easy to remember.

Also new to 2008, our newsletter. Every month our newsletter will explore topics that help grow your online business and will provide tips on subjects like:

• Recordit - learn how to get the most out of your website's forms and put the valuable information you have collected to work.
  
  
• Spirit - Tips on building web pages that work and best practices in managing your site and storefront.
  
  
• email marketing - every month, learn ways to help increase your open rates, grow your list size and create effective campaigns.
  
  
• blogging - Learn how blogging can drive traffic to your site and receive tips on maintaining an effective blog.
  
  
• site promotion - we will explore various ways to increase your site's search engine ranking and how to drive more traffic to your site.

How often is it sent?
Monthly. Look for our newsletter around the first Tuesday of each month.

In this newsletter we highlight what's new at PepperStation.com and provide a few 'good to know' search engine optimization and Internet related tips.

Enjoy!

what's new

Spirit

2007 was a busy year for Spirit development. Lots of new features and improvements to check out in Spirit3x. To highlight a few:

• Add new/rename existing customer checkout fields
• Customize email headers and footers
• Introducing a Rich Text Editor

Check out the details on our blog.

Introducing Recordit 2.0

We are happy to introduce our newest service, Recordit. Think of Recordit as a catcher's mitt that captures all the form data and files submitted from your website and organizes it into a database. You can then view, search, analyze and download your data and files securely with a simple web-based administrator.

Recordit can also automatically add your visitor's email to a Constant Contact marketing list, making it the perfect companion for Constant Contact users! Learn more.

Get started with email marketing

Email marketing is an effective and affordable way to get your message out, and build strong and successful relationships.

“54% of small businesses surveyed rated e-mail as the top online promotion to drive site visitors and customers to their web sites and storefronts.” - DMA Interactive

Now is a great time to get started. Learn more.

Check out our blog

A spiffy new site needs a new blog. So, we created one. Check out our blog at blog.pepperstation.com to view service announcements, learn about product updates and get the latest scoop on PepperStation.com.

2007 Server Migration

We have been very happy with our migration over to Amazon EC2 and S3, completed in April 2007. Our network has met all of our expectations and has proven to be very reliable. You can feel secure knowing that all of your data is backed up every three minutes.

good to know

In every issue, we'll post guidelines and emerging trends you should know when it comes to your website. Today I'll briefly touch on search engine performance.

Keep your site fresh and search engine friendly

1. Search engines love content. Add pages for news, press releases, blogs and articles. These not only inform customers of current events, products, endorsements, and other company happenings, the search engines really love this stuff.
   
   
2. Make your site a resource. Maintain your pages with fresh, reader-friendly content so your target traffic is more likely to return.
   
   
3. Communicate new happenings with a newsletter containing links to relevant areas on your site. Be sure to include a 'forward email' link on your emails to make it easy for your recipients to share with others.
   
   
4. Links from other sites to your site improve your ranking. Build valuable links to your site by participating on related blogs. Be sure to include your URL link in your signature so you can be found by potential customers and search engines. (but keep it to one link per post as many blogs will deny postings filled with URLs)