Many of you remember in 1989 when Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) is working in his cornfield near dusk. He hears a voice whisper, "If you build it, he will come." No one else can hear it. The next time he hears the voice, he has a brief vision of a baseball field in the middle of his cornfield, and Shoeless Joe standing in the field. The movie was Field of Dreams. Unfortunately, the world does not seem to work that way. I have heard this mistaken sentiment over and over again until it becomes frightening. I am afraid that the magical world of the internet has made people believe things that just won't happen. If I build a website for you, they might come. What am I saying? This is sure to hurt business right? Not exactly - I am a firm believer that not everyone is suited for the world wide web just yet. Some people will never get it while others just need a little push in the right direction.

Here's your push.... Remember when you opened your business? Sure you do. There was a ton of things that needed to be done. Most likely, one of the first things you obtained was a phone line. With that came a phone number. The day the telephone man arrived was a grand day for you. He promised to be there between 8am and 8pm and he kept his word! He did some magic and ta-da - you have a way for the customers to start communicating with you! I'll bet the you waited around all day waiting for the phone to ring and it didn't ring, right? No? Well, how did people know to call you or even what number to call? Ah, must have been that entry in the phone book or the friendly voice on 411. Most likely, if you were at all successful, you had advertised the number and name of your business in as many places as possible. Signs, banners, flyers, phone book ads, magazine ads, newspaper ads, maybe even TV and Radio. But one things is for sure, out of the billions of phone numbers out there, you needed yours to reach your customer base. Folks, you aren't going to believe this when I tell you, but the WEB IS EXACTLY THE SAME CONCEPT! You can't just get a domain name and a pretty website and then expect people to come flocking to it by the thousands. You have to ADVERTISE.

"But your company said you would get us in the search engines"

Yes, I know we said that. And we do. You are there in the search engines. You will improve your ranking over time and by ADVERTISING YOUR WEBSITE. How exactly to do this is another conversation entirely, but one we will have at one point if you are a Sagentic customer.

But just like your phone number, you have to tell everyone you have a website. They won't just automatically know about it. Think of the search engines as a phone book. Sure, they will give a listing for free but, is a plain listing good enough? Do you think you might get lost among all those other listings? Maybe you need to stand out among the crowd some how.

Getting your website through us is only the BEGINNING. You must advertise! I assure you it works! We have a large amount of customers that will spend moderate to heavy on advertising. ( I can attest to that since we are a full service advertising firm that handles all of their advertising). They either experience a great amount of growth in business or maintain the comfort level. They know exactly how much to advertise to moderate and control growth. Why? Because we tell them, for one, but also because they have been doing it for a long time. They have achieved proven and desired results.

There are a lot of myths about what a website will do for you, but in a nutshell it won't do anything for you if you don't market and promote it. Being in the search engines helps, but it is not the only thing that needs to be done. We design your website to be very search engine friendly, we submit to all major search engines, and we make sure you doing the right things with your content to help you achieve better ranking. Take Google for example. Have you taken the time to read My site's ranking in Google? This may help you understand how search engines work and maybe you'll believe me when I say you must not depend solely on search engine traffic for your business.

One former client of ours was very disappointed when there were very few online sales generated from their website. We had them listed very high in the search engines for their industry and their website traffic was very nice for a first year website. I was actually impressed with what we had achieved for them. But still, no sales. Why? My belief is because they refused to advertise. Absolutely refused. Being found in a search engine is not advertising. How many times have you came across a website and backed out because it wasn't what you were looking for?

Let's say you sell portraits of sunsets. You are number 1 in the search engines when someone types in "sunset pictures". You are getting thousands of visitors per day but little to know sales. Why? Because you are attracting the wrong people. These are people wanting to view pictures of sunsets on the internet. Now, a few of them may like one of your sunsets enough to make an impulse buy, but this accounts for very little of your traffic. Advertise to your market. Not just everyone who surfs the internet, but people who are looking to actually buy from you.

We wound up losing this client because we could not convince them that they need to advertise. I was not disappointed. After a few weeks, they found another "web design company". This "company" (operated out of a basement somewhere in the northeast) designed another website for our former client and made a load of promises I'm sure they can't keep. The design was horrible, but they had a working website. Now, the sales should start rolling in, right? Probably not. I received a phone call from them a few months later complaining that the website we had done for them shows up higher in the search engines than their new one. Not much I can do about that - that's what you paid us to do. Of course, the site we did for them is no longer there and that will certainly disenfranchise customers, however, we can't control the search engines like that. You won't advertise and your "new website" won't show up in the search engines. Go figure.

There are many ways to advertise your website - online and offline. We can help in both areas, so don't be afraid to give us a call and ask us how you could be doing better.

As I traveled to Michigan this past Thanksgiving, I couldn't help but notice one thing in particular. Airtran.com. It was everywhere. At the terminals. On the wings. On the plane's body. On the gates. On the baggage equipment. On the tow trucks. On the power units. On the baggage. On the uniforms. This is a company that apparently wants you to visit it's web site. Search Engine Optimization can only take you so far - it's imperative that you use other methods to get the word out about you domain name.

At the start of my 10 years in the Marine Corps, I noticed something right off - we plastered our emblem everywhere. No wonder it is very recognizable by civilians. ALL successful companies do it. It's called branding. Are you recognizable to anyone besides your family and friends? There's only so much money you can make there.

Call us about printed advertising, signs, banners, stickers, or pay-per-click advertising for your website. Especially if you are running an e-commerce website. A good pay-per-click advertising campaign can do wonders for getting traffic to your website really quick. Printed materials give customers something to walk away with and ponder - even it doesn't turn into a sale immediately. That person may refer you the next time they're asked if they know anyone that offers the services you offer. That's called "word-of-mouth" and it's the best advertising a company can hope for.

As of late, many of Sagentic's customers have noticed a large increase in the amount of spam in their inboxes. We have a very robust anti-spam system installed on our server called SpamAssassin. We have tweaked SpamAssassin to the max to filter out unwanted emails and still allow desirable email. We are working with the software vendor to see what is possible as far as upgrades to the system to combat the crafty spammers.

Every time a fix is made, a work-around is established by the spammers. We will continue this fight. You can help by installing anti-spam programs on your computer. Sagentic can take your account a step further and enable BoxTrapper. BoxTrapper protects your inbox from spam by forcing all people not on your white list to reply to a verification email before they can send mail to you. Let us know if you want this enabled. It works on an account-by-account basis - we can't "blanket" enable it for your domain with one white/black list.

Make no mistake about it - Sagentic deplores spam! It is costing us (and you) a lot of money. The surge in spam increases our server load, sucks up valuable disk space, increases the amount of support time we have to spend on the phone and email, and takes away from your productivity as well.

The recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers.

Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to a well-organized hacking gang controlling a 70,000-strong peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru Trojan.

According to Joe Stewart, senior security researcher at SecureWorks, in Atlanta, the gang functions with a level of sophistication rarely seen in the hacking underworld.

For starters, the Trojan comes with its own anti-virus scanner-a pirated copy of Kaspersky's security software-that removes competing malware files from the hijacked machine. Once a Windows machine is infected, it becomes a peer in a peer-to-peer botnet controlled by a central server. If the control server is disabled by botnet hunters, the spammer simply has to control a single peer to retain control of all the bots and send instructions on the location of a new control server.

Another sign of the complexity of the operation, Stewart found, was a database hacking component that signaled the ability of the spammers to target its pump-and-dump scams to victims most likely to be associated with stock trading.

The SpamThru spammer also controls lists of millions of e-mail addresses harvested from the hard drives of computers already in the botnet. "This gives the spammer the ability to reach individuals who have never published their e-mail address online or given it to anyone other than personal contacts," Stewart explained.

"It's a very enterprising operation and it's interesting that they're only doing pump-and-dump and penis enlargement spam. That's probably because those are the most lucrative," he added.

Even the spam messages come with a unique component. The messages are both text- and image-based and a lot of effort has been put into evading spam filters. For example, each SpamThru client works as its own spam engine, downloading a template containing the spam and random phrases to use as hash-busters, random "from" names, and a list of several hundred e-mail addresses to send to.

Stewart discovered that the image files in the templates are modified with every e-mail message sent, allowing the spammer to change the width and height. The image-based spam also includes random pixels at the bottom, specifically to defeat anti-spam technologies that reject mail based on a static image.

All SpamThru bots-the botnet controls about 73,000 infected clients-are also capable of using a list of proxy servers maintained by the controller to evade blacklisting of the bot IP addresses by anti-spam services. Stewart said this allows the Trojan to act as a "massive distributed engine for sending spam," without the cost of maintaining static servers.

With a botnet of this size, the group is theoretically capable of sending a billion spam e-mails in a single day. "This number assumes one recipient per message, [but] in reality, most spams are delivered in a single message with multiple recipients at the same domain, so the actual number of separate spams landing in different inboxes could be even higher," Stewart said.

According to data from Barracuda Networks, an enterprise security appliance vendor in Mountain View, Calif., there has been a 67 percent increase in overall spam volume and a 500 percent increase in image spam since Aug. 2006.

Stephen Pao, vice president of product management at Barracuda Networks, echoed Stewart's findings, noting that the bulk of the spam is linked to the trading of penny stocks. "Across the board, we are observing more spam and more sophistication in sending the spam," Pao said.

Here's a few tips -

1. Quit giving out your professional email address to every website that asks for it. Some companies will sell your address to other companies that send spam. If you want Sagentic to create a "throw-away" email address for you that you can give out instead of you@yourdomain.com, let us know. OR use free Web mail accounts. For merchants and legit others you don't correspond with regularly, use Web mail, such as Hotmail's or Yahoo!'s. You can abandon it if it gets spammed. Many have spam filtering built in.

2. Install anti-spam software on your computer. Also, install anti-virus software. NEVER run a computer without it! NEVER! Make sure that your anti-virus software is up to date. Many viruses and Trojans scan the hard disk for e-mail addresses to send spam and viruses. Avoid spamming your colleagues by keeping your anti-virus software up to date.

3. Never reply to spam messages, even when they entice you to reply to "remove" you from their mailing lists. Often the instructions are either bogus, or a way to collect more addresses. Replying confirms to the spammers that your e-mail address is active, and you may receive even more junk mail.

4. Assume Mail from Unknown Senders is Spam - I don't know you... you must be a spammer! Carefully check out the email real good before you go clicking on any links in the email. When in doubt, delete it.

5. Watch Out for Those Checkboxes- Make sure you don't opt in for emails you don't want, and watch out for checkboxes when you submit any form on a Web site.

6. Do not open spam messages wherever possible. Frequently spam messages include "Web beacons" enabling the spammer to determine how many, or which e-mail addresses have received and opened the message. Or use an e-mail client that does not automatically load remote graphic images, such as the most recent versions of Microsoft® Outlook® and Mozilla Thunderbird.

7. Never forward spam chain letters. You will not have good luck. Don't forward to everyone you know. Bunny rabbits will not die if you don't. It doesn't matter how tragic the story is about some person, some where, with some unfortunate event happening to them - quit forwarding them and ask your friends to stop forwarding them to you! You will not receive five dollars for every person you send this message to - I promise!

8. Over half the crap your friends, relatives, and colleagues send to you about some bizarre happening that is just too unbelievable is, well, crap! Before you even think about believing it, go to www.snopes.com and see what they have to say about it.