1. enetez.com
2. Yahoo Local
3. Local Businesses on Local.com
4. YellowPages.com
5. WhitePages.com Business Search
6. New Hampshire Business Review
7. NH.com (Business and Consumer Info Search)
8. Manta.com
9. Business.com
10. Hoovers.com

Google Local is another great site but users are initially greeted with a map which may be confusing to many people (they may believe they landed on Google Maps instead).

If you’re looking for customer service numbers fast, ContactHelp.com is an excellent directory.

Since this printer is discontinued and a formal official driver has not been created by HP yet, you’ll want to download the latest printing solution for Windows XP.  From there, you’ll want to download the “HP LaserJet 1000 Printing Software Solution” item (when you click the download button, the filename of the download should be lj1488en.exe.

Once you download this file, you’ll want to extract the files from the archive (the file you download is an archive file).  Afterwards, find the files you extracted (i.e. c:/lj1488/) and right click on the setup.exe file, selecting “Properties”.  From there, click on the Compatibility tab, check the “Run this program in compatibility mode for” checkbox and select “Windows XP (Service Pack 3).  Click OK and run that file.  You may get a few error box windows and you may have to click on the “Skip” button when it asks you to power your printer or connect the USB cord but it should install the driver and the printer solution software.

Its that easy — the trick is to run the setup file in compatibility mode.  The same trick works for installing on Windows Vista.

Overall, I felt this was a great event. The speakers were primarily from the ‘techie’ side of the Drupal spectrum so it was a bit difficult to follow theming/design advice being more of a web marketing and design type and not presently having a solid understanding of Drupal’s terminology, but they provided an excellent overview/foundation for me and others like myself to grow upon.

I learned designing for Drupal can become easier by utilizing grid design tools and other utilities such as Blueprint CSS, NineSixty, Skinr, Studio, Yahoo CSS etc. Using a grid system/CSS framework can significantly reduce development time, address browser compatibility issues via built-in functions/code and allow you to be on the ’same page’ as other developers in creating web sites and thus set yourself up to get more support by utilizing well-known development tools.

At the end of the second day I sat in on Maureen Lyons’ presentation entitled “Theming from a CSS Framework” which was very valuable as it was presented using a ‘from a designer to a designer’ approach. One can generate Blueprint CSS code via an online generator to help simplify the designing by grid process.

Drupal is an excellent CMS and development framework that offers excellent scalability if a site you build should ever require more features in the future. You may want a brochure web site initially but may want additional elements such as blogs, photo albums, e-commerce functionality, etc. and Drupal has a module (or core functionality already built-in) for virtually anything you can think of. However, with that said, if your project requires a simple solution, you may want to reconsider utilizing Drupal as you may not need such a robust solution and you may very well find Drupal difficult to theme if you are a ‘noob’. Various other open source programs exist for specialized functionality such as Elgg for social networking web sites, WordPress for blogs, Gallery for photo galleries, etc.

More information on the event is available here:

• “Design 4 Drupal: a movement takes off” (via Drupal.org)
• “Drupal Design Camp Boston on June 13-14, 2009″ (via Drupal.org)
• Design 4 Drupal Boston (event web site)

Of all the services, you’ll have the most luck with one allowing you to optimize the content/ads displayed on your domains.  Traditionally, the most successful domains are B2B related so you’ll want to concentrate on these ones as they will pay out better — in most cases, again, with my own experience and reading feedback from others on domain parking.  Some of the best domain parking services are GoDaddy’s domain parking service, RevenueDirect.com, Google’s new domain parking service (through AdSense), Sedo.com and SEOparking.com.  The later is setup in an interesting format — it takes more time to setup the domains but the end result allows you to display blog entries of your choosing on your web site on a WordPress blog.  Clever format but as a rule of thumb, I always like to have original content on my web site.  WordPress blogs do have excellent SEO capabilities however, as long as you don’t abuse SEO principles, etc.

If you want to consider running your own domain parking service you might want to take a look at a program called Domain Trader.  Looks like a great program but you’ll want to take a good look at this before moving ahead and purchasing.  I haven’t used it because I’m not sure if the $$ income benefits would be worth the investment based on my experience in this area.  Some of the sites the software developer mentions no longer appear to be active as well, for what it’s worth.  You might be able to find a few other ‘out of the box’ programs available on the web and another option might be to develop your own system, perhaps just to serve your own domains on your server or virtual host account.

NamePros.com is an excellent resource where people who are in the business of domain name parking share ideas and feedback.  If you are new to this area, you may find posting forum inquiries on the site beneficial.  The Lazy Domainer is another good resource but is setup in ‘infomercial’ format — does have some nice information however.

Pending review/approval from your legal department (or sole legal advisor), if you do not use your domain names presently, I strongly suggest you consider domain parking options.  If you don’t your domain registrar tends to collect 100% from ads displayed on your temporary parked page by default (if applicable, but usually the case with GoDaddy for instance, at the time of this writing).  You may or may not collect big $$ from this, but it will at least help you gauge which domains might be worth developing first based on pageviews, ad clicks, etc. your domain parking service you partner with may report.

I personally park my domains with RevenueDirect.com not necessarily because of the payouts (it is about the same as others*) but because of the vast amount of reporting available.  My thought process is in the time being, rather than have my domains not pull in any $$ at all, I’d at least be making some money — as Ben Franklin once said “a penny saved is a penny earned” can be applied to some extent here.  My second motive is having a gauge to help me prioritize plans on developing the domains on my own — perhaps a simple web site at first displaying Google AdSense ads.

*Interestingly, in my review of various domain parking services, I noticed the ads displayed tend to always be the same.  My thought is the services must be utilizing Google’s AdSense API for customizing the look and feel of the contextual ads displayed on parked pages.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to share a lesser-known web marketing tactic revolving around using RSS to automatically dump content into e-mails.  This is particularly useful if your business operation has limited time and resources.

A respected and very popular (but expensive) e-mail broadcast program called Lyris ListManager has this capability built-in, as does an alternative service at MailChimp.  Lyris ListManager can run as a hosted software solution on your own server or you can subscribe to have access to the software on a SaaS (software as a service) model with Lyris.  MailChimp functions as a powerful web-based software solution running off of mailchimp.com.

The power of RSS to e-mail technology really comes into play when you want to issue multiple e-newsletters in a limited time window.  For instance, you might be used to only sending out a weekly newsletter when now you have the option to distribute multiple newsletters out in the same week period, perhaps focusing on specific niche topics, or in the event you have a niche publication, focus on ’super niche’ topics.  You may wish to consider creating multiple RSS feeds from categorized articles and it might be a good idea to start doing this if you don’t already do so to leverage the automation capabilities available to you (through your CMS or at least updating individal feeds manually at the initial stage).

The process may be tedious at first but in theory, this should not require any additional resources after you become acquainted with how your mail distribution program sets up the e-mail blasts.  I would recommend that whoever you choose as a vendor that they include X amount of time to properly train you in the contract you sign to help alleviate upfront costs.  If you select a popular software package such as Lyris, you may also find useful information on the web to help you get started and there is always the possibility someone in a trade organization you may belong to can help you along as well (a non competitor of course).

From a revenue standpoint, the more playing fields you create (new advertising space in newly developed e-newsletters), an increasing amount of ads will trickle in converting to increased cash flow — perhaps faster than you think.  This will be particularly true if you create very niche-focused newsletter content as it elevates targeting opportunities for your advertiser base and still allows you to position/reuse ads from your more generalized weekly newsletter if desired.

With respect to giving due credit, this concept was introduced to me by a colleague, Matt Goodwin.  You may wish to check out his blog over at www.ttamniwdoog.com for some great tutorials and information on various Information Technology topics.

E-newsletters tend to be either heavily bogged down with marketing/advertisements, swamped with articles and other non-marketing content or somewhere in the middle.  You’ll need to find the happy medium through A/V and multivariate testing and definitely want to make sure you don’t deter potential prospects by littering your content with too many ads and marketing ‘junk’ — emphasis on the later because no matter how well designed your campaign might be from a marketing content perspective, if it looks like spam/junk mail, no one will read it and/or no one will enable images to be viewed if applicable, disallowing accurate open rates from being tracked, etc.

Using the stealth fighter analogy pointed out above, the newsletter itself should really be used as a clever marketing piece — transparently marketing a product, service or trade conference.  The more transparent the message is (without completely invisible), the more effective your campaign will be in collecting revenue.  You’ll need to keep in mind your readership audience will be receiving the same e-newsletter every week (or other pattern) so you’ll want to switch the marketing pitch around as well so they don’t become completely oblivious.  In other words, if someone sees the same thing over and over again, they won’t be as susceptible to noticing.

Rule of thumb: don’t be lazy!  Be clever with your e-mail marketing balancing content with advertising while at the same time switching the marketing placement around.  You just have to be careful not to change your e-mail template too much during a campaign because it does create brand identity.

If you can deliver quality, original content to your audience, they will continue to follow as a subscriber and look forward to receiving future issues, likewise allowing you to continuously convey marketing messages in a very forward-facing format that arrives in someone’s inbox.

I particularly like WordPress’s built-in SEO system utilizing Apache’s mod_rewrite capabilities (URL rewriting). I’ve evaluated various open source CMS products and noticed (based on my experience alone, working on very targeted, niche-centric sites) that search engines such as Google tend to favor content delivered WordPress over other platforms such as Joomla. To clarify, I am speaking of the CMS’s default, build-in SEO features. There are certainly many plug-ins – both free/open source and commercial – you can install for popular CMS products such as Joomla that are designed to enhance the default SEO functionality.

Previously, I stayed away from utilizing WordPress for many of my web sites due to the obvious blog-style architecture (I was looking for a bona-fide CMS appearance). However, there are a number of commercial WordPress templates available to you for low cost (and even some decent free templates) that are designed to leverage WordPress’s core CMS capabilities by delivering content such as articles in a more traditional CMS style. A popular commercial WordPress template developer is WooThemes – http://www.woothemes.com/ — you can purchase a subscription to access various templates or you can purchase templates on an individual basis as well. If your budget is limited, you will sacrifice some of the nice features made available with these commercial templates but if you ‘don’t need a Porche’ as they say, there are a number of very nice open-source templates available for download at the WordPress template depository – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

I’ve heard a few professionals indicate using WordPress beyond a blogging platform, as a true CMS product can experience some growing pains if you wish to upgrade the core system, add more features via installation of 3rd party plug-ins, etc. Performance may not be optimum as well, per the system being designed for blogging. But the advantages may outweigh the disadvantages per WordPress’s solid SEO capabilities and ease of use.

Don Nicholas of the Mequoda Group (www.mequoda.com), recognized as a top SEO strategist and forerunner in emerging web marketing research reported at a Washington, DC Specialized Information Publishing Association (SIPA) conference in June 2007 that they like to utilize this platform specifically for its excellent SEO capabilities. So there is definitely additional some proof out there to validate the use of WordPress as a true CMS platform vs. merely for blogging.

Just a quick word of caution – while using a pre-designed WordPress template can save you time, etc., from Google’s perspective, they may see your new site utilizing one of these templates as a duplicate web site with alternative content. For this reason, many developers/web marketing professionals prefer to make a few adjustments to both the front-end appearance and even in the code – perhaps renaming CSS style classes, etc. to prevent this from happening.

• http://aloestudios.com/2008/08/pixel-precision-with-diagnostic-css/
• http://code.google.com/p/shepherd-interactive/wiki/OverlayComp (tool)
• http://www.pixelperfectplugin.com/ (tool)