JimWorld Gazette Issue #31 13/05/1997

Gazette - Issue #31 - December 5, 1997

CONTENTS

-- From A Loyal Gazeteer
-- Stuff
-- Your Email Signature File
-- How To Submit To Search Engine & Rule The Web
-- The Flavor Of Spam
-- Tips From The Hitman - Part XVII
-- Gazeteer Launches Newsletter
-- A Book Review And New JimTool
-- Snippets
-- Personalizing Spam
-- Use Video To Energize Your Web Site


Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g31

FROM A LOYAL GAZETEER

"Some numbers.... I put up some counters and trackers in April... was getting about 5-10 hits a day on my page... started reading your stuff and putting it to work... My counter is now (as of 20 minutes ago) at 5577. Since I am dealing in a very specialized market (international travel), that is amazing!! Some days, Trakker shows 80+ unique hits a day! Before I started using your tricks and REALLY THINKING about what I was doing, I might get 50 a week.

Of those 50-80 hits I get on the page, I get about 30 requests for prices. Of those 30, I close (put $$ in my pocket on) 2-3. I know that this seems like some really crappy numbers, but they aren't. I make a lot of money off of those 2-3 sales a day.... much more than my "regular" paycheck."

If you want to save some serious $$$ on international travel, visit this Gazeteer at http://www.connect.net/gevans/travel.html

STUFF

Thanks go out to Dave Bancroft of Focus Associates http://www.focusa.com/ His very popular Award Sites site, which rates Web Site Awards according to how valid they are and how hard they are to earn, has given the Way Cool Hot Site Award a 5 Star rating (the highest you can get) If you want to check out hundreds of awards in detail, stop in and take a look. You might as well submit for a few while you are there.

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Hello,

I just wanted to say that since I started reading your newsletter and site (about three weeks ago), I've already had a major jump in daily impressions. I don't run a business, but any web page can benefit from what you've got to say. Keep up the good work!!

P. S.: Yes, I would shop at a store that still had tie-dyes and platform shoes in its window display. ;)

-David Borenstein
The Land of Quotes http://www.quoteland.com/

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I stopped by The Land of Quotes and picked up some personal favorites. Here they are for your consideration:

"I have a spelling checker
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I've run this poem threw it,
I'm sure your pleased too no,
Its letter perfect in it's weigh,
My checker tolled me sew."
-Janet Minor

"Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature."
-Rich Kulawiec

"Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand."

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."
-Michael Sinz

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Hello:
I love your newsletter and have used so many of the great tips and ideas to keep my site moving forward. Just wanted to say that I saw in the new issue how you mentioned sweeptakes as a way of promoting traffic to your site. I list ongoing sweepstakes on my site daily, weekly, monthly, one time, 800#, and mail-in types.

Sweepstakes are a great marketing tool which I use and many many others online use. I recently started a Free Email Sweepstakes newsletter and each week have increased my circulation by over 100 and going strong. What a great way to promote your site. When they enter my sweeptakes I ask them if they want to sign up for a Free newsletter.

This gives me a reason to keep going back to them and giving them more information, yet building traffic to my site. Thanks for such a great service you offer. The response to my site has been fantastic and I owe some to your great service and advice. Keep it up....

Sincerely;
Terry J. Delosh http://members.tripod.com/~TDelosh/index.html

YOUR EMAIL SIGNATURE FILE

I've placed this article at the top of the Gazette for this week so that everyone would know that it is very important. Not that anybody actually skips a single word of the Gazette!

One of the most powerful traffic and community building tools you have at your disposal is the signature lines that appear at the end of every email you send. There is nowhere on the Net that it is considered bad form to include a SMALL blatant commercial for your web site or product. Many, if not most, of the discussion lists and newsgroups prohibit postings that are self-promoting in nature. You can't post an ad about yourself or your site or product. But you are always allowed to tag a sig onto any post you make and it can be very self- serving without being considered bad form.

Every email you send to someone will give them an opportunity to visit your site by clicking on the URL in your sig. Every post that you make to a newsgroup or discussion list will forever carry your little commercial to the thousands of people that read it. Sigs are powerful and one of the basics that must be in place to have a successful web operation.

What makes a good sig?

1. A horizontal line to separate your sig from the body of your message.
   
2. Not more than 5 lines.
   
3. No wider than the average mail reader window (about 70 characters wide)
   
4. Your name and email address (clickable)
   
5. Your site URL and site name.
   
6. For commercial sites: contact information like phone number.
   
7. A 1 or 2 line mini-commercial.

Not that mine is perfect, but let's take a look at my infamous sig file:

---------------
Jim Wilson
mailto:jim@jimworld.com
JimWorld http://www.jimworld.com/index.html
First aid for the walking wounded of web site promotion.
Subscribe to the Gazette - Free weekly promotion newsletter.

I've got a line to separate my sig from the body of the email and draw attention to my sig.

My name is there so that my message comes from a person, not from a company or web site. Companies and web sites don't send email. Individuals do. My email address is right there next to my name, and it is clickable no matter where this message winds up. By having the mailto: with the address lets most email readers and browsers display it as a clickable address. Without the mailto: someone would have to cut and paste it into their email program to send me a message. This is very important when posting to a newsgroup or discussion list where the information is included in a longer message from multiple people so the reader cannot just hit Reply to reach me.

Next comes the name and complete URL of my web site. Notice that the URL is complete and clickable. I want to make it easy for people to visit. If I don't make it clickable by including the complete URL they would have to cut and paste the URL into their browser. Unless I'm giving away free money, they probably aren't that motivated.

Next comes what's known as a 'tag line' in the advertising world. This is my little commercial to make people curious enough to visit my site. Put some real thought into this line. I see lots of people waste this valuable advertising space by including some quote from some famous person. If your site is about that person, great. Otherwise, let him or her do their own promotion. You should be promoting yourself, not them.

Next comes my plug for the Gazette and finally my plug for JimWorld, which is the Personal Web Server running here on my desktop and has lots of stuff to look at and chat rooms to gather in.

Of the hundreds of posts I've made to discussion groups, I've never had a moderator cut out any of my sig. When they get one much bigger than mine, it is common for them to cut most of it off before adding it to the digest for the day.

When I send someone an email, I don't have to take up time and space telling people how to reach my web sites. The information is in the sig. And since it is always the same, I don't have to worry about making a typing blunder and giving someone a URL that doesn't work. . Imagine slaving for an hour over a beautiful post to a discussion group that really establishes you as an expert on the topic at hand, and including your URL or email address that doesn't work. You've just wasted the hour and actually done yourself some damage.

There is one more blunder that is made by enough people that we should discuss it. If you really want to brand yourself as a world class non-communicator, include some ascii art in your sig. You've seen it. 10 lines of characters aligned in a way that you can read the result as several giant letters or some picture of something. This wastes bandwidth and is a guarantee that your entire sig will be deleted from every post you make to any list except the Geekspeak Discussion Forum. These types of sigs also usually include other subtle hints that the sender has had some developmental problems in his past (I say 'his' because I've never seen this type of sig from a woman, girl, female, Ms. - God, things were easier in the 50's.) Things like weird quotes from obscure people and and statements like 'No matter where you go, there you are'. This is all a waste of bandwidth and brands you as a communication challenged individual and guarantees that no one will take you seriously.

If you do nothing else this week beyond setting up your email program to send a great sig with every email you send, you will have taken a giant step forward towards improving results from your web efforts. I get email every day from people running beautifully developed sites that have major blunders in their sigs, if they even have one. This is too important to continue to be ignored.

If you think you have a great sig, send me a message and let me see it. But be forewarned. I intend to build a page of both good and bad sigs as part of the sig tutorial on VirtualPROMOTE. You could wind up in either category. (I can't believe I just asked for more email.) Please make the Subject = MY SIG FILE

That way I can sort it without having to go through each one until I'm ready to build the page. Thanks.

HOW TO SUBMIT TO SEARCH ENGINE & RULE THE WEB

>I love VirtualPROMOTE! I run a games site. Man, competing
>with other games sites for traffic is a painful experience. I was
>wanting to know if you had any opinions on "Submission Tools"?
>It seems like you are sold on submitting to search engines, but
>is the manual old fashioned way the best to do it? Are these
>"submit your site to over 600 search engines in one click"
>programs really worth the money? I forked over $25 to use one
>for a month, submitted many URLs to all the engines.
>I don't think it helped at all!
>
>So, if these things really do work, which do you recommend?
>My money to spend on anything for promotion is very low,
>and sometimes these deals do seem like they "might" work.

Yes, I do have opinions on submission tools. Actually, I have opinions on everything. Of course, I don't consider them opinions. To me they are intuitively obvious observations on the nature of reality.

Yes, I do consider submitting properly to the search engines a very important aspect of a well rounded web community building effort. But I'll bet I consider it less important than most of you do, unless you've been a subscriber for a while.

Good promotion requires that you have a good presence in the search engines. It does not require that you claw your way to the top of each engine under every conceivable keyword your site contains. You don't have to give up your whole life to compulsing over the latest web site that knocked you down one notch under some obscure keyword on AltaVista.

I think most people's expectations of search engine placement is that the search engines can't deliver. Most of the time, even being at the top of a search result will not satisfy your needs for traffic. It will contribute, but it isn't the Holy Grail of traffic.

When I do a search and find some jerk that has spammed his/her way to the top by keyword loading the title and description and all I see is gobbledygook on his/her 100 pages that are identical in an effort to 'own' a keyword, I completely skip that site. I don't want to visit someone's site that is that hungry. I want to visit sites run by professional humans. If I had to work that hard for traffic at VirtualPROMOTE, I'd shut it down and get a job.

Fortunately for all of us, Yahoo is really hard to spam (Hell, it's hard to even get listed at all) and InfoSeek has taken spamming advantages away by only listing one page from each web site with a click required to see the rest of that site's pages.

To directly answer your question of "how do you do it", I'll give you the short answer.

I prepare a site with titles, meta tags and keywords high in the body copy of each page. Then I use the Submission Spider Pro http://softwaresolutions.net to submit the site to 300 locations, but not to the primary indices and never, ever to Yahoo. Yahoo is always a hand submission job. Always.

I run the Spider again just for the primary indices, like AltaVista, Infoseek and such. I have the Spider submit every page of the site individually. I never submit more than 40 pages in one day to avoid the spam filters. I then use the position checker built into the Spider. I store all of the session data in the Spider and then I get back to work.

I rerun the Spider for position checking and tune-up resubmissions about every 2 weeks. That's it.

I spend the rest of my time doing things that will build long term, steady traffic and grow the site's community. I develop content. Lots of content, kept fresh. I work hard for links to the site from other good sites. I hold sweepstakes and promote them to sweepstakes directories and newsletters. I publish a newsletter. I make sure the newsletter is in all of the directories to newsletters. I post to discussion groups. I write articles for other people's newsletters. I sponsor a web site award. I enter my site for other people's awards. I maintain a PointCast push channel. I watch my server logs and referrer logs to see what new things are happening on my site. When I detect traffic being sent from a new source, I go look at it and send a thank you note. I read and research to try to detect where the web is going so I can be waiting there when it arrives. I share my knowledge so that others will share theirs with me.

THE FLAVOR OF SPAM

Is Unsolicited Email an Offensive Intrusion or Effective Marketing?

This was the focus of a recent internet survey conducted by a California-based internet research firm, Esearch http://www2.primenet.com/~esearch. Over 2,000 netizens responded to the email survey focusing on SPAM -- unsolicited email. What did they say?

Most of the respondents (92%) reported that they received unsolicited email often or occasionally. When asked if unsolicited mail offended them, most reported that, "yes", it did offend them (77%). As age, education and income increased so did the number of offended respondents. Males and females were equally offended. The group receiving the most unsolicited email (at least one message a day) was far more offended by this type of email. "Offense" drops off quickly when unsolicited email is received occasionally (one message a week).

A large group (70%) reported that the topic of the email message determined whether they would read an unsolicited message and that they were not overly offended by this type of email. This crossed age, education, and gender boundaries. However, as income increased, this did not apply and they were more apt to "never" read unsolicited email and viewed it as "offensive".

When unsolicited email was received, a very small group (2%) thought they could always determine where the sender got their address. A much larger group thought that in some instances they could (Yes, 42%) or that they never (No, 44%) determine the sender. When they could not determine this, they became increasingly offended by uninvited email. The respondents who reported that they deleted uninvited email without reading it also thought it offensive. Many (38%) reported that the action they took depended on the content of the email, so uninvited email is not arbitrarily deleted from in boxes.

The respondent group (n=2041) was characterized by being young, educated, and relatively affluent with males (49%) and females (51%) evenly represented. Their marital status was also evenly represented (married 49%; not married 50%). Half of the respondents live in households with two members contributing to their annual income. Over half (58%) of the respondents did not have children under the age of 18 living in the household. The households were relatively small with a majority containing one to three members (68%).

If you're interested in finding out more about this topic, you can view the topline summary at the URL listed above. The entire reports package is available from Esearch for $500. The study was conducted by Esearch at 43 Hidden Valley Road, Rolling Hills Estates, CA 90274, phone (310) 373-1894 (contact Janet Westergaard) with reports and findings developed by NorthStar Interactive at 520 5th Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10036, phone (212) 398-1919 (contact Cheryl Harris.)

Esearch is an internet market research firm specializing in data collection via email. The company has a database of thousands of individuals willing to participate in on-line surveys, including complete demographic information on all panelists. Individuals interested in becoming an Esearch panelist or companies interested in on-line research should visit http://www2.primenet.com/~esearch.

----Article by: Janet Westergaard mailto:janetw1@ix.netcom.com

Jim,
Is there any way I can invite all of the Gazeteers to sign up for our Esearch panel??? It's strictly market research (NEVER selling/soliciting and we NEVER rent/lease or otherwise disclose panel info). We do quite a lot of studies on web related topics (what, why, how people buy on-line), networking, etc. and the Gazeteers would be a valued addition to the panel. And, in about 1/2 the instances there's compensation ($$$$) related to responding.

Let me know. All they would have to do is visit http://www2.primenet.com/~esearch and complete our demographic profile.

Jim's take on this--- This is a good thing to get involved in. You won't get bothered a lot and when you do get a request, it is an opportunity for you to make your voice heard. Webmasters are the toughest group to get survey response from. We're all too busy. Don't let that be your excuse. Somebody has to help guide the development of the web and its tools, and it might as well be us. The ones that know where the web should go. Sign up. Respond when invited.

AND -- we get paid? What a novel concept. Think it will catch on?---

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Another of their surveys:

Esearch Web Site Evaluation Survey - Top Line Summary

• The three most important web site attributes were considered to be:
  1. Content/information
     
  2. Download Time
     
  3. Organization
• Consistent with these ratings was the fact that 65% of respondents cited "Content/Information" as being most important to them, followed by download time.
  
• The attributes that generated the highest satisfaction ratings were Information/Content and links to other sites.
  
• Close to 80% of respondents had their graphics turned on when cruising the web.
  
• The two most important web access attributes were clearly the ability to visit web sites and access to large amounts of information and data.
  
• The following three attributes were tied for the next most important attribute: Links to other sites -- Email -- Access to Public Databases.
  
• The three most commonly cited sources of information for web site visits were: Search engines -- Links -- Advertisements.

Jim---This may sound familiar to the Gazeteers that have been around here for a while. Content - Speed - Navigation. Jim's mantra. He mumbles this to himself 20 hours each day. You'll notice that nowhere did they rank huge graphics as important, regardless of their 'beauty'.

TIPS FROM THE HITMAN - PART XVII

Let's continue with the tips for building a better page for the single purpose of improving the position on the major search engines. This week we will move on from title to meta tags. The meta tags we are interested in are two of the many types. We are interested only in the keyword tag and the description tag. If you have never used meta tags on your page, they are lines of code that go in the head of the page. The head is at the top and is the area between and tags on the page. This is also the place the