Thursday, December 24, 2009

Merry Christmas And Happy New Year From WorksForWeb!

Best Holiday Cheer to All Our Customers, Present or Future,

Best Holiday Cheer to All Our Customers

We wish you all a joyous holiday celebration. Regardless of the continent you are on at the moment, and no matter in what country, nearby or across the world from us, we hope that you take the best out of those few day of upcoming holidays and weekends.

May the upcoming year bring you millions of opportunities to make your lives and lives of your families, colleagues, friends, and neighbors better, happier, more enjoyable and richer.


Let all your projects hit the jackpot, yet keep you busy just enough to have time for yourselves, to enjoy quality time with the loved ones, to travel and discover.

We promised a New Year present to everybody, and now we deliver the newest and greatest in the classifieds technology, namely new major releases of iAuto, iRealty and iLister! Moreover, we have great discounts for the new customers, and even cooler deal for the existing customers of ours.

In the upcoming year 2010, we promise that we'll bring even more products and features, less bugs (keeping our fingers crossed), cooler designs and yet more reasons for you to be and remain a proud member of the huge WorksForWeb family, the family so diverse and widespread that only the penguins of Antarctica are still resisting the urge to join in.

It has been lots of fun working with all of you over the last year. We hope that with all the new things we tried to bring in to improve the quality of services and products, to make sure you get the best you deserve. We went through 3 or 4 major releases and a bunch of minor releases, got a new website running and improved a lot of internal processes.

We hope to continue working with you on existing and new projects that you will undoubtedly start in the coming 2010, but for the mean time we all wish you a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, a Happy Kwanza and a Happy Hanukah.

Good luck and have fun!!!

Yours truly,

The WorksForWeb Team

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

iAuto 4.7.0 Car Classified Script Released

WorksForWeb hereby announces a new version release for iAuto 4.7 car classified script.

Along with dramatically improved stability, better user friendliness and enhanced customizability you can now enjoy newly added features and enhancements, including:


  • New Credit System to revolutionize internal payment processes

  • Improved membership plan and package functionality, enhanced plan management capabilities

  • Automatic renewal for listings and subscription plans based on credit balance

  • A number of enhancements, improvements to the current functions, bug fixes and more

You can read the detailed description of the features and improvements for the latest classifieds scripts release. iAuto Changelog is also available for your review.

You are welcome to contact, email or chat with our Sales Team. Please send your requests to sales@iautosoftware.com or submit a new ticket. We'll be happy to address your inquiries.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Christmas and New Year Offer by WorksForWeb

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

WorksForWeb offers great discount deals for existing and prospective customers!

Buy any Standard Edition (iRealty Real Estate Script, iAuto Vehicle Classified Software or iLister Classified Ads Script) + Banner Management Addon and get $100 OFF the Christmas bundle!

To claim the discount all you need to do is contact our sales representative via e-mail (sales@iautosoftware, sales@irealtysoft.com or sales@ilistersoft.com). Offer ends 31 December 2009.

You are welcome to get more info about our Christmas and New Year Offer. Don’t forget to share the great news with your friends and partners!

WorksForWeb wishes you and your family a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

WorksForWeb redesigned corporate site released

After several months of development, we are proud to release our long awaited totally redesigned corporate website: http://www.worksforweb.com/. This redesigned website provides more detailed information about our company activity and services, and features in-depth information about our classified products: iRealty, iAuto and iLIster. So why did we decide to make the changes and what did we do to improve the site?We created our classifieds products from scratch. It was a long way from simple PHP script to sophisticated yet easy-to-use classifieds engine capable to run large classifieds portals. Our old product sites grew up with the products step by step, from enhancement to enhancement. And one day we realized that our old product sites cannot serve the needs of our top-notched products and it does not reflect our organisation’s current market position. We know that we have to evolve to ensure we can deliver what customers need today. A web site redesign was a great opportunity to evaluate where we are today and where we want to be in the future.

At the beginning of the redesign we outlined the main purposes of the site as follows:


  • Enhance customer perception of our classifieds products and WorksForWeb services

  • Ensure an online presence in the face of similar moves by competitors

  • Provide customers with the ability to view the product demo on-line

  • Provide an opportunity to inform people about classifieds scripts in which they may be interested, thus enhancing customer service and increasing sales.

Several months of hard work of designers and developers allow us to present you our new redesigned site. So what’s the value?

We tried to make the web site well presented and provide it a professional appearance. Now the site appears to contain most of the information a customer would require. We use the language and visual cues in a manner that is both internally consistent and consistent with general practice, so our customers do not have to learn any new techniques in order to use the site successfully.

One of the most important challenges was the necessity to consolidate four sites in one (three products sites and one company site) and retain the navigation through the site clear and user-friendly. We worked hard to design 4-level menu. The 1-st level menu presents our company, products and services, the 2-nd level menu navigates you through the scripts and addons available. The 3-d level menu guides you through the information about each product: iAuto, iRealty and iLister, product features, portfolio, demos, documentation, etc. And finally the 4-th level menu (it’s displayed in the right block of the site unlike the previous three menu levels which are located under the site header) invites you to look deeper into the detailed info about product editions and detailed functionality descriptions. If necessary, a site map is available.

We designed the site with our valued customers in mind so we did our best to provide all necessary means of communication. We encourage you to contact us through the contact forms specially designed for pre-sales questions, submitting testimonials and feature requests and general suggestions, besides you can call us or chat via Skype.

We created the site with love and desire to make your surfing through our site and searching for the information smooth and problemless. Our designers tried to make the site attractive and pleasant to look at. You are our most severe judges and the best usability consultants. We are eager to listen to your opinion about our efforts regarding the site redesign. We would like to offer you to fill in a short survey on the site redesign. Your feedback is highly appreciated!

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

How to write a good success story: CARP - Model

Author: Natalie Kozlova


We live in the world where people are mostly skeptical and need a good reason to listen to you, or choose your product or use your services. Previously we discussed the reasons for writing success stories and today we will learn how to write a success story that makes people believe.


There are a lot of ways to write an interesting and persuasive story and you can easily google them. Today we offer you the CARP-model for wring success stories, the model which is easy to understand and follow and flexible enough to be changed giving you much space for self-expression. Finally it’s quite effective.


The structure consists of four parts:


1. Challenge

2. Action

3. Result

4. Perspective


We call this structure CARP-model. it’s easy to remember even if you are not a fishing lover, isn’t it?

So the CARP-model provides you with the structure for your success story. Let’s dive deeper into the details.


Challenge

The main purpose is to make readers identify with the challenge.


Who had the challenge? Who cares?

What problem, issue or concern needed addressing?

Why was it important?

What was the cost of addressing or not addressing it


Action

The main purpose is to demonstrate how you responded to the challenge and how our product and services can impact the business challenge.


What did you do to address your challenge?

How big was the project? Include inputs (staff, funding, volunteers, research, expertise) and outputs - activities (teaching, facilitation, product development and people (number of people and demographics).

Which product or services by WorksForWeb did you use?

How did our products and services help?

Why do you choose this product?


Result

The main purpose is to show that the benefits are real, quantifiable and compelling


What resulted? Use quantitative and qualitative data to describe important outcomes (changes and benefits) achieved as a result of the actions described earlier.

Who benefited and how? Help the reader understand the meaning behind the change.

Describe the benefits you achieved (including benefits like increased customer satisfaction or reduced stuff turnover) in most-important-to-least-important order.


Perspective

The main purpose is to show that achieved excellent results are the part of continuous growth and you are full of plans and perspectives.


What is the perspective for the future?

Is there a next stage that you now plan to implement?

How do you plan to change your business in future?

What are your goals and intentions?


You just need to follow the CARP-model and it will keep you from becoming confused while writing your success story. Answer all questions and you will get well-structured and clear success story.


And some more tips:


· Don’t forget about the appealing lead to the story

· Use attractive pictures

· Proofread the text

· Use active vs. passive voice

· Read it aloud before submitting somewhere

· If the story seems too long, delete one or more of the least important facts from the story .

· Try to follow the classic structure for writing a success story: Problem and Solution, Before and After, Then and Now.

· Focus on the reader's interest (usually in terms of how clients benefit).


Good fishing!

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Marketing Tips: Providing The Competitive Advantage Through Writing Success Stories


Just imagine that your classifieds site is one of the most successful in the on-line classifieds industry, but no one knows about this fact. The both sides - you and your prospect clients - suffer. You are not properly rewarded for your efforts because nobody knows about your excellence and your clients don’t know what good services are available for them to use and how they can be benefitted.


You should do something to make the public to get to know about your accomplishments. How?

We’ve got the answer! Write a success story! Success story, case study, customer testimonial - whatever you call them they are a valuable sales and marketing tool, as their main goal is to impact public and make them visit your site and use your products or services. Almost everybody loves to read about success stories. They are always about a challenge, new experience and looking for solutions.

What Is a Success Story?

In general, success story is an example of a successful practice when a company has achieved documented successful results. Success stories can be as short as 3-4 paragraphs or as long as 20 pages. It can be distributed in print, as PDFs, in the company newsletter, it also can be posted on the Web site, distributed at conferences, packaged and tailored to particular audiences for customer meetings, and sent in direct mail packages.

Why to write success stories?

· To give your readers an example of real successful project. Examples will help to understand difficult concepts and complex business issues. And solutions that can solve the issues.

· To generate empathy to enable readers to empathize with the challenge that you faced in the success story, in case your readers face a similar problem. The goal is make readers to closely identify with the author of the relevant success story.

· To add credibility. People believe success stories because such case studies usually relate a factual situations, besides they are full of real facts. A good success story full with facts and figures can also demonstrate ROI (if the documentation of a return on investment is possible).

· To share your ideas and to learn what works and what doesn’t work.

· To let the public know that you do good work that positively impacts the lives of people

Anyway writing a success story about your business can not only provide the competitive advantage that your business need, but give you additional reason to be proud of yourself which is also important for a successful businessman like you.

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

“Classifieds in Your Language” Discount Campaign launched

WorksForWeb, a well-known worldwide provider of efficient online classifieds solutions for small and medium businesses, launches a one-month long “Classifieds in Your Language” discount campaign to support further development of language files for iAuto, iLister and iRealty.

The 'Classifieds in Your Language' campaign launches on 7 September 2009 and will last for one month.

Every participant can get up to $100 of discount off any Standard Edition license in exchange for a new lang file for iAuto, iLIster, or iRealty from the Top Wanted list of languages needed (all other promotions are not applicable as part of this offer).

Participants can also get up to $50 of discount off any Standard Edition license (iAuto, iLister, or iRealty) for updating or improving an existing lang file.

In addition to that, five lucky participants selected randomly will each get a Banner Management Addon (BMA) as an extra bonus.

To take part in the campaign, please WorksForWeb official website to get more info about the campaign terms

Questions? Additional Info? Please send your inquiries to our Sales Dept at sales@iautosoftware.com, sales@irealtysoft.com or sales@ilistersoft.com.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Learning SEO: Social Bookmarking For Your Site. Get Started!

List of Bookmarking Sites

In fact, there are 100’s of sites out there you can bookmark your site at. Please, check out our social bookmarking list and build your own.

Connotea.org PR8
Twitter.com PR8
Digg.com PR7
Propeller.com PR7
Reddit.com PR8
Del.icio.us PR8
Stumbleupon.com PR8
Google.com/Bookmarks PR7
Technorati.com PR8
Slashdot.org PR8
Furl.net PR7
Bibsonomy.org PR7
Blinklist.com PR7
Newsvine.com PR7
Folkd.com PR7
Indianpad.com PR6
Myweb.yahoo.com PR7
Blogger.com PR7
Myspace.com PR8
Dzone.com PR7
Swik.net PR7
Lipstick.com PR7
Squidoo.com PR7
Mister-wong.com PR7
Facebook.com PR8

How to add my site to a social bookmarking site?

As an example, let’s add our site to the bookmarks at Google.com. First of all you need to create an account (if you have no account). Ready? Now you are able to store additional bookmarks, tag your bookmarks, and share with anyone interested in your bookmarks.

Adding a bookmark

1. Go to your iGoogle page
2. Find “Google Bookmarks” module.
3. Enter the URL, Name and Labels for your site. Name should be appealing for other people who may be interested in the bookmark. Include the keyword phrase into your title as well.


4. Click “Add” button and your site is bookmarked!



And remember that now you have one more external link to your site. Congratulations!

If you haven't tried a Bookmarking site, join one, and use it for a few months before you make a judgment on how useful it is. And surely use Share Your Site feature provided with our classifieds software to encourage your visitors to add your site to their bookmarks.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Learning SEO: Social Bookmarking For Your Site



Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. It's a tool for personal knowledge management
(Wikipedia.org).

In other words, social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks (web addresses) to a public Web site so you can access these bookmarks from any computer connected to the web. Having your site bookmarked in a number of popular social bookmarking sites you drive more traffic to the content at your site. So if you create a piece of content and title it with the keyword phrase you need, you will get a free external link with the required anchor text.

If you wish to create your own social bookmarks, you must register with a social bookmarking site. The part that takes the longest is probably setting up an account for each site, which includes email confirmations. But remember, no pain, no gain, right?

What you need to continue:

- keyword-rich content that provides value at the page of your site
- an appealing title with selected keywords within the title
- time to monitor your accounts at social bookmarking sites
- regular analysis of how long each link pops up in search engines. At some point you will reach a place where you are no longer drawing significant traffic from your older bookmarks, but that’s OK.

Beware of spamming these sites and making your list of bookmarks appear unattractive or an obvious marketing ploy which will net you very little. The biggest problem with this method is time and the relative effectiveness of the links. You have to make sure the content is good and the title passes spam detection else it will simply be deleted. Don’t abuse this by submitting every page of your site, try to be judicious and think about what pages of your site may be helpful and of interest to other web surfers.

There is an opinion that social bookmarking has limited appeal for a SEO professional. The reason is that you cannot count on it to increase site rankings directly, but indirectly it can increase awareness which may eventually provide additional natural linking. Besides many social bookmarking sites do not allow crawlers to follow links, thus the links do not help the page rank. However social bookmarking is still one of the cheapest and the most effective ways to get sites deep crawled and indexed and attract more visitors.

Even if you are not going to base the SEO campaign for your site on this technique it should be in your SEO toolbox of tasks anyway. And don’t’ forget that having great page content accurate meta tags with a solid web design combined with quality links from other pages of similar content contribute best to the end users experience.

Friday, June 12, 2009

WorksForWeb Launches a New Release of iAuto, iLIster and iRealty to Enhance Income Generation from Classifieds Websites

WorksForWeb is proud to come up with a new version of its classifieds software: iAuto 4.6.0 http://www.worksforweb.com/classifieds-software/iAuto/. As of this version, we're offering ability to display video from YouTube, brand new search among users, ability to include a slideshow to listings. You will now have a wonderful opportunity to use WYSIWYG editor in text-fields and make the listings highlighted. Several bug fixes and existing features enhancements have been also added. Along with amazing performance, customizability and speed you can now enjoy the expanded functionality aimed at the providing you as a classifieds site owner with new reliable revenue streams to earn more and more money offering your visitors and clients new options to make their listings stay out of the crowd.

Now users can easily add a vivid and informative slideshow to their listings. Users simply pay for this option to be enabled by the administrator and get access to the opportunity to create an attractive slide show. The slide show includes all necessary elements for comfortable viewing of the slides uploaded for the listing (start/stop/pause buttons, customizing slide changing intervals, etc.)

Another great feature - displaying video from YouTube in listings - will allow you to add a block displaying videos directly from YouTube and similar video sites. This option can be provided by the administrator for any listing on paid basis. The administrator can turn on this function for all listings making this option absolutely free to use for all registered users or this function can be enabled for only several user groups and few listings paid by your clients. Sometimes a short video clip can say much more than words or even a number of pictures, so it’s a good reason for your users to pay for the video in listing and a great chance for them to present the listing in the best way.

iAuto Vehicle Classifieds Software Demo WebsiteThe administrator can now create a page with the ability to perform search among the registered users of the site. Users will be able to specify search criteria and view the results which will include the list of the users from the selected group. So you can now enjoy the search among the registered users having all the search opportunities you are used to have with previous versions of iLister, iRealty and iAuto classifieds software. Besides the search results are generated and displayed as a separate page with specific URL where user information is presented (including logo, contacts, links to full user profile and all listings by this user). This feature is a great chance for those dealers who has no their own web-site. The generated web-page can be presented by the dealer to clients and provide on-line presence at minimum costs.

The new version of the classifieds software also offers powerful formatting capabilities for text-fields in listings with WYSIWYG editor to visually improve content and make it more attractive and readable.

New version of iLister, iRealty and iAuto classifieds software provides the ability to highlight the selected listings. It will surely play its positive role in attracting attention of the prospective clients. The administrator of the classifieds site can enable highlight feature and set the price for using the feature. Listing owner can activate highlighting simply by pressing on "Make Highlighted" button and enjoy this additional opportunity to make listings visibly outstanding.

You are welcome to find more information on the changes and improvements implemented to iAuto, iRealty, and iLister on the official WFW website at www.worksforweb.com. Alternatively, you can contact, email or chat with our Sales Team. Please send your requests to sales@iautosoftware.com, sales@irealtysoft.com and sales@ilistersoft.com and we'll be happy to address your inquiries.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

New iAuto, iRealty & iLister Release by WorksForWeb

WorksForWeb (WFW), a software development team specialized in the classifieds solutions announces a new release of iAuto http://www.worksforweb.com/classifieds-software/iAuto/.

WFW introduces a number of new features to enhance the overall user experience with the classifieds scripts. In response to customer demand and recently collected feature requests, iAuto, iRealty and iLister now include a host of serious improvements in usability, functionality and performance dictated by the advanced industry standards and requirements.

The listing comparison mechanism is introduced in the latest software release. It provides advanced field-by-field comparison algorithms for multiple listings. Unlike some of the industry's market leader portals, all WFW product-based websites now offer unlimited listing comparison capability. Users browsing listings in one category can simply click the “Compare Ad” button and all pre-selected listings will be displayed in the Comparison Results table. Users can also remove some listings from the table to focus closer on the ones that best match the request. Now the eternal problem of choosing among similar products is elegantly resolved in a couple of mouse clicks.

Among the newly added features there is one that performs import and export of user data in both CSV and XLS formats. Those formats are the most typical and widely-used user account formats. This feature is instrumental for backing up and sharing of the customer account base with third party applications (internal corporate db, newsletter scripts, billing software) fast, easily and conveniently.

The latest release also features CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) protection added to block form submissions from spam bots and prevent abuse. Ad ranking system, a great social networking tool, is a great tool to encourage customer participation and sharing of experience.
Now images uploaded to listings on websites powered by WorksForWeb classifieds software can be copyright protected with watermarks. As a site administrator, you can easily add a custom watermark (image or text) to be automatically merged with all images uploaded by your users. As TechFAQ.com points out, using watermarks for copyright protection and security reasons is equally beneficial to the Web site owners as using watermarks as a marketing/branding tool for additional exposure.

In addition to the above features, the new release of iAuto, iRealty and iLister classifieds solutions includes a number of enhancements such as indicators of the max number of symbols allowed for text input fields, and a new and greatly improved availability calendar interface.
You are welcome to find more information on the changes and improvements implemented to iAuto, iRealty, and iLIster on the official WFW website at www.worksforweb.com. Alternatively, you can contact, email or chat with our Sales Team. Please send your requests to sales@iautosoftware.com , sales@irealtysoft.com and sales@ilistersoft.com and we'll be happy to address your inquiries.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

New Awesome Features: Do We Actually Need Them?

Over the last few years we've come across thousands of requests for new features, new capabilities, and functions that make the buzz of the industry. Let's take a look at whether you actually need features you may be asking for.

Export of your listings to Autotrader.com, Google Base, etc.

Cool, you've decided that the awesome marketing offer you can lure new customers in is the ability for one low fee to post customers' cool rides not only to your iAuto-based website, but also to Google Base, Cars.com and Autotrader.com. Sure, it'd be nice to expand your customer's capabilities of selling his/her car.

However, let's look at it from a different perspective. In the real life, you can hardly imagine referring your favorite customer to a competitor much stronger than yourself. Next thing you know it is you don't have a business anymore.

However, agreeing to cross-post your listings to Google Base or Cars.com, all you're doing is helping one of your great, strong competitors become even greater and stronger. Next time visitors will go directly to Gbase and post their ads for free. After all, why pay money to Joe the Car Dealer if you can submit it to a directory that is frequented by lots of people, with listings being displayed all over.

Downloading and displaying third party listings.

Every other car dealer who's ever inquired about our listing import feature actually was looking for pumping a million or so listings for starters from Autotrader, Cars.com or similar into his/her iAuto-based website.

Hey, after all it's an awesome deal - you got yourself a car classifieds portal for $219, you pumped 1 million listings from Autotrader, those nice guys that are stupid enough to give away their precious listings, and you're all set to start charging megabucks from ad revenues. If there's a millon listings, then there surely are a couple of millions of visitors, right? One attracts another, correct?

No, not really. A person who's searched for cars in his local area on a few nationwide websites came to realization that there's a certain percentage of listings that repeat themselves from website to website. Then, looking for something unique and authentic, they turn over to you and all they see are all those all-too-familiars posts.

You'd probably think that you've gotten a one-million-worth-of-ads-website for nothing, but all you have is a website featuring a million of somebody else's listings. You are selling your toughest competitors' cars and pretending you're happy about it. Are there lots of real customers with real ads on your website who bring real money, or it's just full of semi-fake ads Autotrader gets huge PageRank, sales, and exhuberant banner ad prices?

It's cool if you have a real website full of real listings from your next door dealers that you have rightfully secured and are getting paid for. It's not so cool, however, if all you're selling is your competitors' cars and not even getting much money out of that.

An awesome website is not a website bulging with fake listings, but a website that is part of the business of finding customers, appealing to their senses with an original idea and a good reason to post their listing, and making sure they renew or sell their vehicle.

Here's a good business idea for a website with just a handful of listings. Secure a deal with US Army and buy a bunch of retired tanks or whatever and post them on your website. Or find an aftermarket dealer selling old tanks and have him advertise on your website for $500 per listing per month.

A handful of such dealers, and you'll be making a ton of money since promoting a similar website on Google is going to be dirt cheap because keywords cost a lot less than the ones like "used car website", and there's virtually no competition.

I have a feeling we'll get back to that discussion later.