I was work­ing on a few things on my site tonight and typed in a file name that didn’t work. The page redi­rected to a 404 page at my host­ing com­pany. I’m sure you have seen that hap­pen on sites you have been on — doesn’t look very pro­fes­sional does it.

I changed the appear­ance of my site a few months ago and elim­i­nated some pages and — oops — for­got to upload my cus­tom 404 page. This made me real­ize it would be a good ‘tid-bit’ to pass on to you. Here is what you do.

Check the con­trol panel of your host­ing com­pany to see what they say the cus­tom 404 page is named. With mine it gave me the abil­ity to do a very gen­eral text mes­sage, but I knew if I named the page what it was going to name it I could make my own page. In this case it is:

404.shtml

So this is how my 404 page looks (this page does not exist):

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/error.html

Try your url with error.html and see what comes up. Do you need a cus­tom 404?

Stay tuned for more ‘good­ies’ and be sure to check out our arti­cles page here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html

Jan

Bring­ing your com­pany into Sec­ond Life is a new way to give and share infor­ma­tion. Yes there are a num­ber of major com­pa­nies in Sec­ond Life, such as, Dell, Nis­san, Adi­das, IBM, Reuters, Sony BMG, but there are also more not so well known names that offer art, graph­ics, design, products.

I real­ized, once I got past the part of cre­at­ing my ‘image’ and pick­ing up some fee­bies here and there, that I had to find some land to build on.

Find­ing land cer­tainly has not been easy. How does one fig­ure out where you should buy or not? Should you be in “PG” land, should you be in “Mature land”, and even then, try­ing to find at least a rea­son­able cost.

Read more here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Find

Want to join Sec­ond Life? Click here and do look me up when you get there!

Jan

When you build a blog you are on the right road to pro­mot­ing you, your web site, your ser­vices, your prod­ucts, etc. But just cre­at­ing a blog is not enough.

First Step
It is becom­ing increas­ingly more impor­tant that your blog is cus­tomized, not just a tem­plate that you can use, but cus­tomized to show you and your mes­sage. See some exam­ples here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/portfolio.html#Blog

Sec­ond Step
Post often! Your post doesn’t have to be long, in fact you can, and should, send your read­ers back to your site to read more on the topic. Not only that but your site will have more var­ied and use­ful infor­ma­tion that will ben­e­fit your readers.

Third Step
Reg­is­ter your blog with as many blog direc­to­ries as pos­si­ble. Most of your read­ers will come through these direc­to­ries (though they will come through search engines as well).

Fourth Step
Ping every­time you have updated a post. One of the ser­vices I use is: www.pingomatic.com

Happy Blog­ging!

Jan

In my busi­ness I talk to many clients about dif­fer­ent aspects of mar­ket­ing. They also ask me about all sorts of dif­fer­ent mar­ket­ing strate­gies they have read about, heard about, or been advised to do, in one form or another.

We all know the say­ing “All is fair in love and war”, well that seems to be true in mar­ket­ing as well. It seems to me the more I hear the more I real­ize that ‘many’ mar­keters actu­ally don’t care too much about the client nor do they care about the client’s cus­tomers. They are only try­ing to mar­ket their ‘line’.

Exam­ples:

* Font type (Ariel ver­sus Ver­dana) can make or break a sale

* Price (9.99 ver­sus 9.97) can make or break a sale

* Bold the first sen­tence of every para­graph or bold the first sen­tence of every other para­graph (which one can make or break a sale)

Read more of this arti­cle here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Fair

Jan

Mar­ket­ing In Sec­ond Life — Yes It Is Hap­pen­ing And We Are There!

Sec­ond Life is grow­ing as a very unique area for not only meet­ing peo­ple but also for mar­ket­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices. There are stores, malls, bill­boards mar­ket­ing prod­ucts, such as cloth­ing, with com­pany logos and infor­ma­tion that can given away or sold as pro­mo­tional material.

Who will be involved in mar­ket­ing pro­mo­tions? Of course cloth­ing man­u­fac­tures, but also artists (visual and musi­cal) as well as com­pa­nies and schools from all sorts of dif­fer­ent areas of online companies.

We have started our Sec­ond Life mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Come see our visual exam­ples here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/marketing.html#Second

Want to join Sec­ond Life? Click here and do look me up when you get there!