Have you gotten one of these emails?
Dear Sir,
We are the authorized anti-cyber squatting organization in China. We write to inform that we received a formal application from a company who is called Saiberwi Investment Co., Ltd is applying to register “YOURDOMAIN” as their domain name in China on Mar.29th, 2011.

The email continues on to tell you that if you don’t reply, they will automatically give the mysterious Saiberwi Investment Co the .cn extension of your company’s domain name because they must be your Asian business partner. If you inform them you don’t know doodley about Saiberwi Investment Co., the offer will be made to sell you multiple variations of your domain name with Asian country extensions at ridiculously inflated prices.

And then there is the real purpose of the email; to scare uninformed business owners into paying $100-$500 US dollars for additional domain names (.asia, .cn, .com, .tw, .hk etc.). I’ve seen variations of this scam floating around the mailboxes of clients for the last five years or so. A Google search of the phrase “anti-cybersquatting organization in China” results in a flood of online forums identifying these emails as a scam.

So what should you do if you get one of these emails?
Nothing, Ignore it, Delete it!

That’s not to say that it might not be a good idea to register your trademark or purchase a domain name in China. In fact, if your business plan includes introducing product to the Chinese market, it’s definitely something you will need to take care of. But it should be done as part of a larger plan to do business in China not in response to an unsolicited email from a rather shady web company who charges inflated prices.

If you currently or plan on doing business with China and want to secure your domain name, most full service registrars will happily sell you .asia or .cn .com extensions for a heck of a lot less than $327.00 a year.

Have you come across any recent email scams? Let us know we’ll help sound the alarm.

Last week, Illinois Governor, Pat Quinn, signed state legislation requiring large Internet retailers to collect that state’s 6.25 per cent sales tax on all Illinois Internet shoppers. While Illinois brick-and-mortar stores cheered wildly at the newly leveled sales tax playing field, Internet retail giant Amazon.com picked up its ball and went home. Calling the law “unconstitutional and counterproductive,” Amazon said it plans to end relations with its Illinois affiliates by April 15.

This bill is just the latest salvo in the ongoing battle waging between giant Internet retailers, state governments and brick-and-mortar retailers. It started in 1992, when the US Supreme Court ruled that only sellers with a “nexus” (i.e. a physical presence in a state in the form of retail outlets, warehouses, offices, transportation hubs, etc.) were required to collect that state’s sales taxes.

In 2008, the State of New York found a way around the 1992 ruling by claiming that in-state affiliates provide those out-of-state retailers with a physical presence. Affiliates are website owners and bloggers who post a retailer’s advertisement or links and receive a commission on any sales that result on the retailer’s site via clicks from the affiliate’s site. Dubbed the “Amazon Law”, it applies to retailers who receive a total of more than $10,000 in referrals within a 12-month period from New York affiliates.

Amazon immediately challenged the law in court, where it still remains today. As other states started enacting their own versions of “Amazon Law”, Amazon has responded similarly by closing warehouses and terminating affiliate relationships.

What does this all mean for small and mid-sized e-commerce sites? In many ways, not much. Most of the state laws being enacted or proposed are targeted at large retailers. Transaction thresholds used to decide who does and does not have a sales tax collection responsibility have been for the most part set high enough to exclude many small to mid-sized businesses.

The other businesses being impacted by these laws are the affiliates of retailers like Amazon and Overstock.com, many of whom are retailers themselves and may be selling their products on these sites. A small but very vocal group of Vermont bloggers and in-state retailers affiliated with Internet sellers are organizing a counter campaign to fight that state’s proposed Amazon law. Some of these small businesses would stand to lose substantial income generated by their affiliate programs with major retailers.

The biggest danger for small businesses is if the tax collection responsibility rolls down to smaller players. Though the technology needed to calculate and charge the appropriate sales tax amount at the time of the purchase is relatively easy to implement, the reporting and payment of those taxes to thousands of state, county and municipal tax departments would be disastrously onerous for many companies.

One path out of the sales tax quagmire may be the Federal government stepping in to establish a single remote Internet retailer sales tax. Unfortunately, the US Congress tabled the national Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement last year and shows no signs of passing it anytime in the near future.

Until that time, small and mid-sized businesses would do well to keep informed on the sales tax landscape and, use the services of an e-commerce savvy CPA or market-aware web professional.

What are your thoughts on the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement? Good idea or not?

It can’t be said enough … good original content is necessary for the success of a website. Without it, you will not be able to attract search engines or customers.

Long gone are the days when adding 30 key terms to the Meta tags was pretty much what you did to win page rank in Google. Search engines now look at the total sum of the written content on your site; the page titles, sub-titles, paragraphs, image names and captions that appear on the page, and they are looking for that content to be relevant to what you sell.

The challenge for many small businesses is that they do not have budgets that allow for hiring web copywriters, photographers or graphic designers to continually produce content for the website. Luckily for your customers, you already have that meaningful information. Start looking for the content in your own company.

1.) Listen to the Voices Inside
The people in your company who sell and support your products and services are an important source of your website content.  Capture insightful comments about your companys’ products and services from employee’s. Staff can supply founatins of content, ask them to get involved.

2.) Talk to Customers
Ask your prefered clients to write three … just three … sentences on each of your major offerings.  Encourage them to share thier thoughts on how, when and why they use your products and services.

There’s nothing better than a fired-up client … a client eager to spend resources and energy on doing smart things in a smart way … a client ready for results and willing to do what it takes to get them.

And there’s nothing worse than having to tell that client to holster it back up because they aren’t ready to pull the trigger.

That is sometimes the situation we find ourselves in when our small business clients are interested in implementing social media strategies before they have made sure that the location they are driving traffic to – usually their Web site – is prepared to handle the traffic.

When it comes to marketing their own brand, many small- and mid-sized businesses are working with limited resources.  So a decision to increase focus in one area often inadvertently becomes a decision to decrease attention in another.

Embarking on a social media strategy is a major undertaking for any company, an effort that often manages to soak up a lot of internal resources.  This can mean that the more mundane efforts it takes to update the company Web site can often go ignored, leaving the place you are trying to drive more traffic to looking something less than its best. Why is this a problem?  Because social media efforts are just a means to an end, with your final goal being to convert traffic into sales.

It’s important that the first step of your social media strategy be taking a look at your Web site and making sure it is an effective end-destination for every tweet, blog post and shared video.

• Are there clear “calls to action” throughout your Web site?
• Are your products and service pages current, accurate and complete?
• If you are targeting a specific audience with specific services/products needs in your social media efforts, are those services/products easily found?
• Are your contact pages updated and complete?  Is it easy for customers to continue the dialog that you started with a social media vehicle?
• Is your Web site content of interest to your social media audiences?

Pages that need simple corrections should be taken care of right away.  Any section that needs more extensive effort should be avoided as landing pages for social media traffic.  Once you are comfortable that your Web site is ready and able to do handle the new traffic, your company can feel comfortable in taking its first shot at social media success.