Ringing in the New Year
1st in Our Category 10 Years in a Row

WSI Makes Entrepreneur Magazine's Franchise 500 Listing Again

We are pleased to announce that WSI has been ranked as the #1 Internet Services Franchise in Entrepreneur Magazine's January 2010 Franchise 500 listing - an honor maintained for 10 consecutive years. Additionally, WSI ranks #13 in the Top Home Based Franchises and #49 in America's Top Global Franchises. Overall, WSI increased to the 56th spot in the 500 listing this year. Click here to read more about WSI's rankings.

We are thrilled about this announcement, as it is a true testament to the leadership position that WSI maintains in the Internet marketing and franchising sectors.

This amazing new product is a complete on-line business management system. Websites are dead!

It is a SaaS – “Software as a Service”.  What is SaaS?  In the software space, and particularly in the SMB market, the landscape is shifting quite rapidly where increasingly businesses are tapping into the hosted application service model.  In 5-10 years there will not be many small or small to medium sized businesses not running the majority of their software online.  The value proposition is compelling.  For our clients:

• The service is monitored 24/7 with a 99.98% commitment to uptime
• Improved and enhanced regularly at no additional cost to the Partner/end user
• Shorter time to market for implementation (for the designer)
• More affordable implementation - in terms of business function
• API frameworks allow integration with other platforms/databases
• Access your business toolset anywhere in the world (for Partner and end user)

So our service is really a set of business software tools, which happens to converge with hosting and pop email etc.  We empower web designers to implement these ‘Business-in-Box’ solutions, without you having to do any back end coding and without design limitation (including our Dreamweaver interface). This includes:-

• CMS
• Integrated CRM
• Integrated Email Marketing
• Integrated eCommerce
• Forums, Blogs, RSS
• Secure Zones
• Searchable database tools (Web Apps)
• Management reporting across all touch points!
• …and much more...
  

Last week WSI held their annual E&I conference in Orlando. The 3-day event was attended by more than 300 WSI Consultants from around the  world. It's a great opportunity for consultants to share experiences, learn about new technologies and tools, and new methods to help our clients to grow their businesses.

The main focus this year was on the use of Social Media, such as Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in to leverage the millions of conversations taking place on the Internet to drive customers to business websites. Some case studies were presented in which WSI Consultants had helped businesses increase revenues for their clients by incredible multiples, as much as 400% in one case, in less than one year, mainly using Search Engine and Social Media optimization techniques!

Social Media has become the new Word-of-Mouth, and the correct use of these media allows businesses to use viral marketing to increase their website rankings on the search engines.

WSI has developed amazing new tools and methodologies to make the best use of Social Media and search engine optimization.

Just one year ago, the Internet was all about PUSH Marketing - companies could use their websites to tell visitors to the site what the  company wanted them to know. Social Media has changed the Internet Landscape completely! Customers are now doing the talking, and telling others what they think about your company - PULL marketing. If you don't take part in that discussion, your company is missing out on a huge opportunity!

My pet peeve is probably shared by a majority of Americans - there is something seriously wrong with the way the country is run by the Banks and Financial Institutions.

There is general agreement world-wide that last year's financial meltdown was caused entirely due to greed on the part of the major financial institutions, taking unnecessary risks to improve their bottom lines so that they could pay their top executives ridiculously high salaries and bonuses. Even after they were all bailed out by the Government, they still awarded themselves huge bonuses, in spite of the huge losses they were responsible for!

There are millions of examples to be found of cases where the general public are being screwed by banks, such as being lured with attractive offers of cheap credit, credit cards offers, etc. but then pouncing on them when they make the slightest mis-step, increasing interest rates to ridiculous levels - as one woman stated on TV recently "I could have gotten a better rate from a loan shark"!

The fact is that these huge payouts should be funneled back to the investors whose cash is being manipulated to generate the returns. Banks and financial institutions are in a unique position where they create financial instruments that only they understand, then use other peoples' money to create huge profits, skim off the cream for themselves, and pass the rest off to the clients. Madoff is just one example - in my opinion he represents what is happening at the top levels of most of the large financial institutions, they have just found a way to do it legally.

This is just not right!

Welcome to our new website. This website has been created using WSI's new e-Fusion Product. It's NOT just a website. This is a complete Internet Business System that incorporates ALL the tools any company would ever need to manage their on-line business, whether you sell services or products. The system incorporates all the tools you need integrated into a single package, such as:

• Website
• Content Management System
• e-Commerce
• Blog
• Forums
• Secure pages (members only)
• Announcements module
• Bookings module
• Affiliates module
• Email marketing (like Constant Contact)
• Website Analytics
• Customer Relationship Management
• and many more

See a demo here: http://www.wsiefusion.net/

This is my first blog post on this website - this online business to be exact!

Feel free to grab a cup of tea and a cookie, put your feet up and take a look around. You'll find heaps of great content and information about my business, and there's plenty of goodies.

I hope you enjoy and feel free to let me know what you think!