Secondary School Opus

Secondary School Learning

Not only does the internet provide research for everyday school work, students can also find useful material to help prepare them for college.

Some sites allow you to look up information for homework and provide help to complete special assignments or projects. Your child will find question and answer sessions and be able to chat with other students online.

There is a site for just about any topic-- History, Current affairs, Health, Math. Is your child a language student? If so, their skills can be honed by reading online foreign language magazines. Your child will find resources that will help them with any area of study.

One of the largest and best search engines online, can be found at: http://www.google.com When you get to the home page, type a keyword or phrase into the search box. You will receive a list of websites that pertain to your search.

A great site to start with is: http://www.education-world.com They offer links for science, history, math and universities, plus other subjects. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there is also a link for Special Education students.

In order to interact with some sites, you will need to download Shockwave. Shockwave is a plug-in that you can download from a site. There will be a link to download it from, if the site requires it.

You will find that some of the sites charge users a fee to access their services and information. One such site is: http://homeworkhelp.com They offer some free study aids, but charges a fee for their full range of lessons and quizzes in core middle school and high school subjects.

At this site, you can buy books and textbooks: http://www.bguide.com

At http://www.howstuffworks.com , you can learn how things work. It covers car engines to tornadoes, and also has an extensive question-and -answer section.

TIP: Be sure to look for free subscriptions to educational newsletters, that can be sent to your email address.

For The Parents: Chatting online can be addictive. You will need to set a time limit for your child to visit the chat rooms, like you do when they talk on the phone. At http://www.akrontech.com/ they have software that offers parental control (what sites your children view) and an internet timer. The internet timer is a great tool. You, the parent sets up individual accounts and determines how much time each user gets to be online. When their time is up, they are automatically logged out and not allowed to go back online. The cost of this software is $34.95 and they even give you a 30day free trial, to see if it's right for you and your family.

Jane Fulton is Owner & Webmistress of http://janes-place.com 'Home For Newbies & Beginning Marketers'. She has been helping them for almost 4yrs now. She publishes a newsletter, Newbie & Affiliate SOS Newsletter. It appears online twice a month.


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Dot Com Road Kill Verse

Don't Become Another .com Road Kill

Remember those Super Bowl and World Cup commercials where you saw talking hand puppets, scantily dressed women, cowboys herding cats and crude lettering on cardboard? Can you actually name one .com company that paid for these millions of dollar/eurodollars for brand awareness ads?

Doesn't this type of marketing remind you of a IPO.com frenzied "drunken sailor school of budgeting" - meaning, spend like a drunken sailor hitting his/her first port of call in years, with no thought other than "brand awareness" coming to mind? Got the picture yet? Want the cliff notes to the rest of my article? Three words repeated from my header - "target customers online."

Some do and don'ts, with the do's first:

1. Think digital marketing - use keywords your customers may punch in to a search engine to find your site throughout your overall online and offline marketing processes. This forces you to stay focused on your customer niche and ensures context relevancy for your web site. The latter is becoming critical to garner high rankings on Alta Vista, Google and Inktomi.

2. Advertise cost-effectively online where your customers go - this doesn't have to be top tier web sites (more expensive typically); but can be second or third tier community sites. Use online media buying to save money; look at One Media Place, formerly Ad Auction for some unsold inventory and bid with the best of them for a deal! http://www.onemediaplace.com

3. Feature opt-in e-mail as a centerpiece of your marketing campaign - now is the time to negotiate a 90-120 day media plan with some of the market leaders. Yes Mail (one of our favorites) is offering a discount of 10-30%. And, use HTML rich media, your ad copy will look much better, in turn driving a better click-through results; but only if you are a B2C if B2B then don't use HTML, just plain text.

4. Immerse your business with the online community - post to Newsgroups announcing a special online contest, promotion or giveaway that builds over a finite period of time. Get those geeks talking in the virtual world - remember the truism of good PR, any PR is better than no PR.

5. Ask your existing customers where they would recommend your advertising to reach them online. Everybody likes to have their opinions valued - so reach out and ask for their input, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

6. Think and act like a guerrilla marketing type -incorporate "guerrilla marketing" techniques to drive your business in unique ways. Go to the source, the guy who coined the term and many of the processes, Jay Conrad Levinson. http://www.gmarketing.com

Ready for some don'ts?

1. Don't use TV, Radio or Billboards unless you have lots of money to spend (read millions typically). Yes, they work to develop brands, but be aware of the disconnect factor when you are trying to reach online customers. When was the last time you jumped up from the TV set to write down a URL you saw splashed across a screen or stopped your car driving down your local boulevard when you saw a billboard that caught your attention? Not very often!

2. Don't pay top dollar for banner advertising - negotiate a good deal for yourself and don't believe the sales rep when they tell you all inventory is sold out! There is lots of unsold inventory out there, just look at the number of "house ads" (done for the company who owns the site and published on their site) being run on many web sites. Do some old-fashioned digital horse-trading and leverage your media buy!

3. Don't base your business on the "high tide raises all boats model" - there is definitely a storm brewing and we don't mean just at your local movie theater with George Clooney starring (sorry ladies). We are telling our clients to batten down the hatches and leverage their marketing dollars as much as possible - the party is over, time to get down to building viable business models based on selling tangible goods and services.

4. Don't use biz speak verbiage in your marketing processes - if I see another site that has "first mover advantage" quoted throughout the site I am going back to the radio for news/information. Be real, tell people what you do, how you do it and what the value is based on - enabling them to quickly (it's the web ...) understand what your business is all about.

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com, a results-driven marketing services company providing proprietary services to clients encompassing startups to public companies.


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