Datacomm Research Company – Technologies & Markets

May 12, 2022

Why Email Marketing Remains An Essential Marketing Tool For All Businesses

Throughout the years that digital marketing has existed, several tactics and marketing channels have come and gone. My Space, considered by many to be the first social media platform, was cast aside by the masses in favour of Facebook and Instagram, AOL went from the #1 website to an also-ran (#483 to be exact, according to SEMrush), and Google updates transforming the SEO landscape, all confirm that digital marketing develops and evolves.

On the flip side of the coin, several digital marketing strategies remain highly effective and should be part of every business’s online marketing armoury, and one which is likely to continue to remain in that category for years to come is email marketing.

The first email was sent by a computer engineer called Ray Tomlinson in 1971, and we wonder if he ever imagined that fifty years later there would be 4 billion people worldwide who use email and that over 330 billion emails would be sent every day. That second statistic is staggering and is the equivalent of every person on the planet sending over 40 emails daily.

Examples of the myriad of reasons that emails are sent include personal emails between family and friends, emails sent in the course of a business’s daily tasks such as invoices and order updates, and emails sent within the arenas of both local and national government.

January 19, 2022

5 Reasons Why Your Business Blog Might Be Failing

Having a blog as part of your digital marketing campaign is one of the simplest, yet most effective, ways of connecting with your website’s visitors and gaining their trust, whilst at the same time boosting your search engine rankings, given Google’s love of high-quality content.

Unfortunately, despite the benefits of having a blog, not every business can realise them, and this is often down to flaws within the blog in question. If you have a blog and are perplexed as to why it is not producing the many advantages to your business that it should, then read on as we have outlined five of the most common blog issues that might be causing the issue.

Your Blog Content Is Not Good Enough

We will start with the most common problem blogs have and that is the content therein is simply not good enough. Having spent the time, effort, or marketing budget to get traffic to your blog, it is unforgivable that when that traffic gets there the content on offer is sub-standard, boring, uninspiring and induces them to do nothing other than click away.

If you do not wish to write the content yourself, then you can hire freelance writers who can create superbly written blog posts for just a few dollars. That small investment will produce massive returns in terms of ranking, building trust and retaining visitors.

November 23, 2021

3 Business Website Pages You Can Improve To Boost Conversion Rates On Each Of Them

No matter what type of business web designers are asked to build a website for, there will be common elements that are included in every website. That will extend to certain pages too. For example, all websites have a home page which is the page visitors land on when they enter the website’s main URL in their browser, or when clicking through from a search on Google.

Other pages that you usually find on most websites are a page with the terms and conditions of using the website, a privacy policy page, an “About Us” page, and a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) page. Often, business owners will give little thought to these pages as they do not think they offer anything towards converting visitors into prime leads or customers.

However, the exact opposite is true, and if a website’s owner were to take some steps concerning how these pages are designed and the content which goes into them, they will find that these pages can indeed help conversion rates on their website. In particular, three common website pages are often given little thought and they are the FAQ page, the “About Us” page, and the “Why Choose Us” page.

Below you have details of each of these pages, and how these can all be turned into high converting pages.

Frequently Asked Questions Page

There are several reasons why you want an excellent FAQ page. The obvious one is that it helps your visitors get answers to questions they may have, the answers to which might be enough to convince them to purchase, or at least to provide their details for a follow-up.

August 12, 2021

7 Backlink Tactics That Can Incur A Ranking Penalty From Google

If petrol is what can fuel a fire, then for many SEO experts it is backlinks that fuel rankings. It is not difficult to understand why this is the case because for Google to determine the relevancy and more importantly, the authority of a website, it is backlinks that give it the best indications of these.

For relevancy, it will be the anchor text included in the backlink, and as for authority, the more established and authoritative the website being linked from, the more beneficial the backlink. This is because some of that authority from the first website is being passed by association via the backlink to the second website.

The ability of backlinks to heavily influence where Google ranks a website page for a particular keyword has meant there is a huge emphasis on website owners to find and obtain backlinks. Many take the sensible route and employ a professional SEO agency to create a backlinking strategy for them. Unfortunately, others are not so sensible and decide to obtain backlinks in any way possible.

The danger they face is that many of the blackhat tactics used to gain those links are identified relatively quickly by Google. The result is at best Google reducing rankings until the links are removed. In the worst case, they will simply delist the website from search results completely. To ensure these do not happen to you, here are seven backlinking tactics you must avoid.

#1 Automatic Backlinks Generators: These paid services offer to create lots of links for a fee with ridiculous offers like ten thousand backlinks within a week for fifty dollars. Created by software, these backlinks are easily identified by Google and a website that obtains that many backlinks so quickly will also raise a red flag.

November 12, 2020

Different FTP Connection Modes

Amongst the many shortened terms that you might come across concerning your website and its security, there is File Transfer Protocol, which is shortened to FTP. FTP is the process by which files can be transferred between users and to specific locations, such as a website.

One simple example might be a pdf file, whereby the person who has created it might wish to send it to an associate via FTP, or they could upload it to their website to make it a free download. As such they would FTP the pdf file from their computer to a folder that exists on their website’s hosting server and once it is there a download link would automatically be created which people can click to download the pdf to their computer or device.

You should be aware that FTP can be implemented using different modes, depending on the security protocols that are being used. To help you better understand what these FTP modes are, here are some of the details.

Active And Passive FTP

For FTP to occur, a user will usually log in to a server, although there are some exceptions referred to as anonymous FTP where the server does not require a login. For those servers that do require it, once a user is logged in they can upload files, download files, delete files, rename files, move files, or copy files.

Regardless of what the user is using FTP for, the connection they have made to the server will have been created using one of the two different data transfer modes with which FTP operates. The modes are called passive and active, and they have peculiarities specific to each of them.

March 18, 2020

10 Psychological Triggers To Improve Conversions On Your Website

We are going to discuss a subject that can not only help web designers boost their income, but when it comes to designing websites for clients, it will also give insights as to how they can maximise the performance of their website too. The subject in question is website conversion, and specifically some of the psychological triggers that can turn a website visitor into a buyer. Here are ten of them.

Psychological Trigger #1 – Scarcity

People hate the thought of missing out on something, or equally love that they are getting something few others can have. You might show a countdown to a date and time when your special offer ends, or highlight you have a limited number of discounted website designs available.

Psychological Trigger #2 – Anchoring

Believing that the price of something is high, and then being offered a lower price, even if only slightly lower, can induce a prospect to buy. This can be facilitated by displaying the prices of your very highest priced web design services which include all the extras.

Psychological Trigger #3 – Authority

More than ever, customers want to know they are dealing with a business that has authority, even if that is only a perceived authority. You can show authority by publishing testimonials and any badges relating to industry associations and organisations you are a member of.

February 12, 2019

Should I use a template or get a custom built website?

This will very much depend on what your website’s purpose is, how much functionality you want and how much you are prepared to invest in it, both in terms of money, and time.

With templates, there is no doubt it is going to be a cheaper and quicker option than having a custom-built website. You could literally have a templated website live within minutes. That may be ok if all you want is a simple website that acts as a place holder online for your business, but beyond that, it is not going to do much to drive customers to your business, nor get it ranked on Google.

For a start, the functionality of templates is limited, plus, unless you have knowledge and skills in web design, you are not really going to be able to make that many changes to how it looks. This means your website will not be able to build your brand, and it will look much the same as all the other websites out there who are using the same template.

December 4, 2018

Why 5G will be disruptive

With more spectrum and friendlier small cell regulations, 5G will have the wind at its back.

Every next-generation mobile phone standard is greeted by some skepticism. Fifth-generation technology has certainly endured its share. Critics say it’s just a collection of incremental improvements, is being used as an excuse to restrict competition (for instance, by banning Chinese vendors from the US market), and will drive up prices.

However, in a report published by my company in collaboration with Rysavy Research, we conclude that 5G is uniquely positioned to enable new products, services, and business models. While no next-generation technology is a panacea, 5G’s flexible and scalable architecture comes with expansive new spectrum and rules easing the deployment of small cells. That’s a powerful combination.

Take a closer look at the new spectrum allocations being made in anticipation of 5G. Up until mid-2016, the total amount of spectrum available to US mobile phone operators was about 750 MHz. In July of 2016, the FCC allocated 3,850 MHz of new spectrum in the 20 and 30 GHz bands for 5G. That single action increased the amount of spectrum available to mobile operators by more than 500%. And we aren’t done yet: The FCC has begun proceedings to allocate additional licensed spectrum for 5G, and operators have been testing the use of unlicensed spectrum in the 57-71 GHz band.

November 13, 2018

Press Release Broadband2

Report Announcement from Datacomm Research and Rysavy Research:

The Cost of Building Out 5G Wireless Is Not as Bad as Some Think

November 13, 2018 – St. Louis, Missouri – Business Wire – Estimates suggesting that 5G networks will be too expensive fail to consider that operators have a wide choice of deployment strategies, that recent regulatory changes ensure small cells can be built and operated economically, and that operators can make extensive use of existing infrastructure. That is just one conclusion of the 71-page, second edition of Broadband Disruption: How 5G Will Reshape the Competitive Landscape, a collaborative report released today by Datacomm Research and Rysavy Research.

“Wireless operators have different 5G strategies, and our report shows how they can leverage factors such as spectrum and cell density to achieve specific coverage and performance goals,” said Peter Rysavy, co-author of the report. “We also examine the cost of building 5G infrastructure, various financing options, and the viability of 5G fixed wireless broadband business models given different deployment scenarios,” he added.

August 22, 2018

Networks for a yottabyte world

The future requires networks that are qualitatively more flexible, scalable, efficient and manageable. Network function virtualization and software defined networks are the way forward

The rate at which telecom networks are growing and changing is nothing short of fantastic. It’s always risky to embrace a new paradigm, but for network carriers and customers, the risks of waiting could be greater.

Network function virtualization (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN) represent a radical departure from the traditional way of building, managing and evolving telecom networks. It’s often described as a switch from proprietary boxes to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. While there is a potentially significant cost-savings in making such a switch, cost-savings is not the main driving force. The ability to quickly implement new business models, to deliver applications on demand, and to automatically provision and tear down resources are what make NFV and SDN so potentially disruptive.

Not your father’s networks

The growth in telecom traffic over the last 25 years has been mind-boggling. Since introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, Internet traffic has grown by a factor of 10 million. Since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, mobile data traffic has grown by a factor of 1,000.