When A Web Business Becomes Transparent - Part 1

What happens when the key words or phrases that directly associate with your company or brand increase your visibility at the top in all search engines? Pretty soon you get email requests from strangers like this: “Hello I Have An Interesting Business Proposal… I found your site really enchanting… and would like to buy a number of text-links on your site.” Now It sounds both flattering and fishy at the same time… Right? My response to this recent request: Please tell me more?

But let me backtrack a bit to provide a frame of reference.

When I was in China I was incapable of tending to our Codedsignal.com website. China blocks all Godaddy servers and Wordpress blogs and this Wordpress blog happens to be hosted on our Godaddy server. Now this is a dilemma for any individual or group wanting to maintain their online presence. Yes there are proxy servers but I decided to wait till I got back to the states to make more sound decisions with my team.

Anyway, since I am the sole blogger for our site, I do have to consult with our internal team when we make decisions for the site. Due to our inactivity, our rankings in Google had significantly dropped in relevance. Since I have been back in the USA, we have strategically added new content to the site and enhanced our SEO (search engine optimization). So within one months time we have now pushed up our visibility on all search engines. Here’s several examples: in Google we rank in the top #5 among search results for “Digital Media Network” | “Media Tips” | “Digital Media“. That’s quite an accomplishment considering we did this all the old fashioned way, hard work and patience and we did it all free with no extra SEO costs.

Now that that’s out of the way. Let me bring you back to the theme of this post. To be continued…

Digital Media 101: Say Goodbye FTP - Part 2

continued from previous post

Yesterday we talked about the departure from FTP to the web browser. Today I want to discuss some free alternative dedicated media store and share websites that upload directly from the browser.

Rapidshare has a simple Google like interface, it an excellent upload feature, possibly the best that we tested thus far. Megaupload on the other hand is hella confusing. Once you catch your bearings you can navigate pretty easy. For the one time upload they are both solid services and neither require you to login, but you can set up a profile if you wish. On the receiving end; however, as the recipient attempts to download they are met with an obnoxious countdown and bombarding ads strategically posted on the download page. That alone is a HUGE turnoff and a terribly bad decision for their business.

Both FileFactory and Yousendit are also good services, they also offer a simple upload and share feature. The big let downs are that there is no resumed support if disconnected and there are both storage and bandwidth limitations. The biggest issue of all is expiration date of the media media. Yousendit only provides 7 days from the date of upload FileFactory has extended from 7 days to 90 days. Yousendit does have a ton of features for their subscription service along with the ability to create a custom branded download page.

To be fair, the above mentioned services work perfectly fine for most instances and they are free after all. But some clients and people not so tech savvy may find them each to be off putting.

The Codedsignal 1st Pick
There can only be ONE!!!! In the free web sharing market, Mediafire wins convincingly. It has no time limit for hosting uploaded medias. It provides unlimited storage capacity, unlimited simultaneous downloads (that resume if disconnected), unlimited bandwidth to serve any medias under 100MB, Public and private password protected medias, Public and private password protected folders. The interface is user friendly for both the sender and the recipient. Learn more.

The Codedsignal 2nd Pick
Our second choice is Box.net. First off it stands out because it works for mobile. Users can upload and view media medias directly from their mobile phone (if the media is supported). The second thing you notice is that its got one of the most simple utilitarian interfaces of all the hosts mentioned. The biggest obvious drawback is that there is a 10 MB upload capacity. This would be a service for people serving small media medias. It has some great offerings and it plays well with Web 2.0 services, we feel that this is the hosting service to watch out for.

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