JimWorld Gazette Issue #55 06/12/1998

Gazette - Issue #55 - June 12, 1998

-- New And Old Ideas For The Gazette
-- Tips From The Hitman - Part XXXIV
-- Surfin' Into '99 With Yahoo!
-- Online Raffles???
-- Get Linked
-- Snippets
-- Are You Spamming -- Without Even Knowing It?

Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g55

NEW AND OLD IDEAS FOR THE GAZETTE

My mail box has been filling up with some interesting trends. Such as the requests from a steady flow of subscribers asking that we address 2 different issues:

Bring back the Get Listed column. This is where we had short tips and links to places where you could go submit your site. Over time, it sort of got blended into the Snippets column. Apparently Get Listed filled a need for a no-talking -zone list of places that you could just click and get listed. OK. It's back.

Lots of requests for a column each week addressed to the webmasters of Personal Sites. Something that focuses just on personal sites instead of the business sites. My first reaction was that this was not needed, since almost everything we publish applies equally to personal sites and business sites. But I think what is missing is the explanation of how to put the Gazette tips into operation for personal sites. On that basis, I agree that this could be a valuable addition to the Gazette, so the It's Personal column will run as often as we can, evolving into a full time column if the response is positive.

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Dear Jim,

When I finished my exams in the University the first thing I did, after I spend 24h sleeping, was to download all the Gazette's and read them one by one, always keeping notes of the interesting links and tips.

The reason I am writing this email is that after reading all the Gazette's I have the impression, and perhaps it is only my impression, that you are mainly addressing web sites maintained by companies, or speaking more generally web sites that can generate an old fashion money outcome.

The problem is that there are millions of personal home sites that will never make any profit, not a single dollar. On the other hand most of the time they have to pay in order to maintain them and most of the time they have only 3-4 visitors per day. Do you really believe that all these people can follow all the tips you are giving us every time we receive the Gazette?

If you ask me I would say no, judging from personal experience. I can give you an example of what I mean in practice. I am a student, which means that I have to spent most of my time in the University. Do you think I have time to "work" on each keyword separately or to submit my site manually in 200 sites? I do believe that you get the point. The question arising of how I am going to increase the traffic in my site, which has "nothing" to offer? The only reward that a web master that runs a personal site receives is his pleasure of having 5-6 visitors each day. Imagine how much bigger this pleasure would had been if he had 15-20 visitors per day.

You may think that what's the point in telling you all these ideas as you already know them? Well, I would like to suggest that you could help us if you could add a small section in one of the Gazette's each month with tips especially for us.

I am not suggesting that the Gazette does not help us. I have followed many tips and advises, applied them in my special case, extended them sometimes and in 2 weeks I had an increase of 1800% as I transformed the 3-4 visitors per day to 40-60 visitors and still increasing! I even managed to get from the 4,500th position in the hitbox.com, to the 500. The Gazette gave me a great hand of help, but I do believe that you could help in a more effective way all these people, including me!

I hope that you will take into consideration my suggestion and that you will apply it in any you may think it is the best.

Thank you for reading this awful long email!

Savvas
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/savvas.papagiannidis/main/index.htm
http://www.students.ncl.ac.uk/savvas.papagiannidis/

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The above message goes a long way in explaining the problem. After reading the Gazette and only able to spend limited time on his site, Savvas increased his traffic 1800% in 2 weeks. So we know that the Gazette works for personal sites as well as business sites.

But the question is: do the webmasters know that? The thousands of webmasters for personal sites that subscribe to the Gazette may not be trying our ideas. Maybe they need to have a little nudge towards the opportunities discussed here to let them understand that most of our content is aimed at everyone.

When we talk about building a web site community, we mean that just as much for personal sites as for anybody. How to publish a newsletter is every bit as relevant to personal sites as to anyone. Maybe more so.

I'll admit that the credit card fraud and a few other things are not going to be helpful to you... for now.

So, from here on out, we will make a greater effort to show personal site webmasters exactly how the Gazette will help you.

As to trying to follow every suggestion and technique in the Gazette, no one can do that. There are just too many ideas in each issue. The idea is to try to reach each subscriber, each week, with one or two new things that will fit into their web presence and get them more traffic. There are so many ideas because no one suggestion is going to be of interest to every subscriber. Just try to pick one each week and make it work for you. That's enough progress for any web site.

TIPS FROM THE HITMAN - PART XXXIV

This is long overdue, I want to thank those of you who have taken the time in the past to write to me about this or that article. As a whole, those who do write are doing so to tell me they have gotten some useful information and put it use with good results. I know I stirred things up with my 1000 hits an hour article with a few of the readers. Some of you may even have taken the whole thing with a grain of salt. After all, thousands of hits an hour from a single page that may only have a listing on one or two search engines does sound like I might have been embellishing the facts to get your attention. I would like to share this note with the readers from Patrice Williams (edited)

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After the death of Phil Hartman, MANY people were filled with questions and wanted more information. We provided that information. We created a page at: http://www.theBroadcaster.com/BREAKINGNEWS-2.html where people could find information. We also provided a list of links to other resources on the Internet.

Less than an hour after registering the page with search engines, people came by the hundreds. Within four hours, we had over 7,000 unique visitors. Within two days, 17,000 visitors. The traffic has slowed down, understandably, but we received around 21,000 visitors as of today.

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Moving on to new things, this week I am going to eat my words from an earlier article. (Jim, would you pass me that catsup?)

I recall mentioning the death and passing of the WWWWeb Worm. This was one of the first of the Web search engines and in 1995 and 1996 it was on all the top 100 lists. It was another of the search engines with it roots in an academic project, I don't remember who ran the original. It always struck me as on the less useful of the lot and was little more that a submission page in my bookmarks for years. It seems that there has been a reincarnation. The new kid on the block <http://www.goto.com/> was started by Internet Entrepreneur Bill Gross.

Bill bought WWWWorm and gave it a new name and a new look. But if that were the end of the story, it would not have caught my attention. What did get my attention was the advertising model that they are trying out on GoTo.

Many of you are no doubt familiar with the terrific growth and success of the auction sites on the Internet. The auction model is doing very well not only for moving discontinued models of merchandise, but is now being used to move brand new merchandise successfully and at a profit. It is possible to get a real bargain on new or last month's model merchandise (I recently bought a new Okidata laser printer for $127) You need to know your prices. I gave up trying to buy a notebook computer. In the heat of bidding frenzy many were going for more than I could get them by mail order.

Why the talk about auctions? Well, Goto has adopted an interesting and controversial method of advertising, they are selling the top search positions to the highest bidder. This means if you go to their page and do a search for a hot topic, say "stock market" you will see a little note at the bottom of the listing that reads (Cost to advertiser: $0.05) What this means is that the first listing is willing to pay 5 cents for every click through to his/her site in order to have this number one spot. If you want the spot, you can go to the advertising application page and put in a bid for 6 cents and you will get number one and he will be number two unless he decides it is worth his while to outbid you.

I find this a very bold experiment, and I am sure it bothers many of the readers, especially many of you I know from the Search Engine Forums. This is a controversial move and if it turns out to be successful, it could change the way the search engines operate. After all, they are businesses and profit is their bottom line. Any of you who are active in the stock market know that many of the Internet related sites, especially the search engines, have stock values that are totally unrealistic in relation to company profits or assets. This "honeymoon" status of Internet sites cannot continue in my opinion, and the search engines are going to have to show profits to justify the value of their stock. This means they are going to be making hard decisions about the advertising models and are no doubt watching GoTo with interest.

With the projected growth of Internet Commerce, the search engines are positioning themselves as portals, or entry points, to the world of the Internet and cashing in as the world goes shopping on the net is at the top of the list. I know this is just another cloud of uncertainty on the horizon for the little guy, but knowing a storm is coming is the best way to prepare for what follows.

Since I don't want to end an article on a gloomy note, I will point out I found something that Gazeteers may find useful in creating pages to draw in people who are looking for your product or service but may be using a search phrase you might not have thought of. This is courtesy of GoTo by the way and is actually part of the set up for bidding on a word or phrase. It is there to help customers who may not be able to afford the most searched term, but still would like to buy a top position related to their Web site.

If you go to the "Advertise on Goto" page and scroll down to Bid entry form 1, you will see a little note that says 'Want a suggestion? Enter a search term below and click here.'

If you enter a search phrase such as stock market in our example in the search box and click on the link I just mentioned, you will get back a list of about 100 search terms related to stock market that were done in the last month showing the frequency each was searched. Typically, search engines guard this kind of information like the crown jewels. This data may just reveal keywords you would never have thought of using in your meta tags.

By aggressively going after some of these alternate keyword phrases instead of the obvious, you may just find you can get that page in the top 10 on one of the major engines. Goto may not have the traffic that Infoseek does, but I would bet that the statistics on the use of these lesser but still viable keyword phrases is very much the same.

Hayden Mitchell
Web Themes

--- Hayden continues to amaze me. I must get 20 emails a week asking for information about keyword popularity. Now Hayden just gives one of his secret weapons away to everyone. Don't go spreading this around to the whole world. Gazeteers really should have a leg up on the rest of the world, shouldn't they? --

SURFIN' INTO '99

by Janet Berg

The world's largest supplier of personal computers, Compaq, is changing the way the new Internet users will be introduced to the web. Yahoo! has secured a distribution agreement with Compaq, making My Yahoo! the default start page for Internet browsers on the new Compaq Internet PCs. It is now critical for a site's success to be part of that initial introduction with new surfers.

The new services feature a co-branded, My Yahoo! start page enabling Compaq customers to fully personalize their Web experience. It will have all the standard default My Yahoo! features; updated national news, sports and financial information, local weather reports and search button. The My Yahoo! page will also feature a customized area for Compaq Internet PC owners to access information, services and online customer support for their computer, which will encourage them to keep their default start page.

"This agreement with Compaq further expands the distribution of Yahoo!'s programming and services to Compaq's vast consumer audience," said Ellen Siminoff, vice president of business development at Yahoo!. "My Yahoo! optimizes the Internet experience for all levels of users, offering individuals the opportunity to personalize and fine-tune the Web's resources to suit their individual needs."

As "Compaq's vast consumer audience" is also YOUR vast consumer audience it is in your site's best interest to study the default My Yahoo! Is your site findable there? If past statistics hold true for the new Internet surfers of today, they will use their default as their gateway into the net. This makes your Yahoo! listing more important to your site's growth then it was yesterday, and it was important even then.

---- Jim Note --- Yahoo! continues to prove that they have a good grasp on maximizing their core resources to stay ahead of the Internet 'change curve' and have done better than most at keeping an eye on their core product - information searching - and avoided the total shift to trying to become all things to all people. We should all be thrilled whenever Yahoo! finds a creative new way to keep their content as a valued resource. The better they do with their directory as a viable product, the more they will be inclined to keep their focus on that product and not wander off into areas that do not help in organizing the Web into an information source instead of just a giant list of sites that we find in too many places already. Congratulations Yahoo! This is one community that is behind you all the way!

To Gazeteers, I strongly suggest you get yourself over to the Yahoo! Search Engine Forum and get your Yahoo! act together. It can't be done overnight, and you are already late to the party. ---

ON-LINE RAFFLES???

I've received a question from a Webmaster this past week that made me think about another aspect of sweepstakes and contests that we haven't really addressed yet. That is, raffles! The question was simply, "Can I sponsor an online raffle?"

Can you sponsor an online raffle? Of course -- the mechanics of that are quite simple. I think the underlying question is "SHOULD you sponsor an online raffle?" And will it be successful?

My answer: DON'T DO IT! Run away... far far away...

I'm sure we have all bought a raffle ticket at some time in our lives. They are usually sponsored at local events such as county fairs, church bazaars, town barbecues, local charities, Veterans Administrations, the local Elk's Club, and so forth. By their nature, they are very local events.

The Internet is changing that, however. What seem to appear as locals events are being broadcast all over the Internet. But, is it really a good idea? The biggest problem with opening an event like this up to the outside world via the Internet is, well... no one wants to be taken or involved in a scam. The single biggest problem in sponsoring a raffle via the Internet is the question of credibility. How can you advertise a raffle and prove it's legitimate?

I thought about this for a while, and while I came up with a viable solution, I still don't think I'd recommend it. I would establish the history of the event with pictures and testimonials. This would have to be an event that was already well established within the community, such as a drawing that's held every year in the town festival. Show pictures of past winners. Show the write-up of the event in the local paper. Interview the winner or provide a testimonial. I think these things would show the legitimacy of the event. Then, you could think about the marketing aspect of it and determine exactly who your audience is.

Think about it carefully, though. Would you want to win a prize 8 states away that doesn't include shipping and handling?

Would I suggest holding a raffle if you've never done one before?

DON'T DO IT! Run away... far far away...

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Susan Donahue, Publisher
Winning Ways Sweepstakes Newsletter
http://www.onlinesweeps.com

GET LINKED

Xerus
http://www.xerus.net

A new site directory just for adult content web sites. Looks like it should generate good traffic. Lots of promotion going on, and well designed.

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Doubletake Gallery
http://www.doubletakeart.com/cgi-bin/doubletakeart/links

Long time Gazeteer, Bob Varner has built a very nice reciprocal links page to build relationships with other sites to get, and give, traffic. If you're willing to return the favor, visit and get linked.

Bob has been working on this site for a long time. It is very mature and generates a lot of traffic and hopefully, sales. Getting listed there should get some goo results for you.

SNIPPETS

Imagedrome Products
http://www.imagedrome.com/productools1.html

Photoshop users - Mac and PC, should head over to Imagedrome and download their free Photoshop plug-in that make bevels. You know-- buttons.

Imazine the Tools-Bevel SE is the first edition of Imagedrome's Photoshop plug -in. It is a tabloid edition for the promotion of Imazine the Tools-Bevel Pro which is coming soon. It has functions to have a bevel effect in Photoshop, to save up to 10 settings made by a user, and to control the bevel's width and shade of each corner in real-time. It focuses on user-friendliness in GUI. Especially in the version 1.5, multiple bevels can be generated at the same time and the speed is much more enhanced. Therefore, users can produce buttons and banners for web designs or buttons for multimedia projects effectively in Photoshop without extra expense. Currently, users can download this product free after filling in a simple survey.

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Multi Media Lab
http://www.multimedia-lab.com/

More for the Photoshop junkie. Sorry Windows only. Add 3D modeling to your Photoshop toolkit. This plug-in is a real workhorse, but has a bit of a learning curve. And, it is a 1.8 MB download. But don't let that stop you. Give it a try. The demo is 15 days which should let you get the feel of it. I'll give you a full review as soon as I get the boxed version in.

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i/us
http://i-us.com/

Now, for a dangerous link. This one could eat up a whole day, at least, of your on-line time.

Hundreds of pages of Photoshop tutorials, forums, articles, reviews, lists of plug-ins. You name it, they've got it.

My first reaction was that trying to fill up a site with nothing but Photoshop Plug-ins would be hard. There aren't that many plug-ins, are there? Yes. There are. After I visited the site, I looked at how many plug-ins I have in my Photoshop folder. Yes, there are plenty of plug-ins to fill a site. They are filling up 80MB of my disk and I don't have all of the ones that are out there. Not yet anyway. I thought I had all of the good ones, but I missed more than a few.

Even if you don't have any interest, you should spend some time here if you have any interest in the 'right' way to build an e-commerce site. Build content and let that drive sales. Does that sound familiar? It should, unless you just started getting the Gazette.

i/us has done it right. They have so much content that it is about an hour before you even notice that they sell anything. Miles of content. Piles of content on top of piles of content. And a software store. I hope it is working like gang busters for them because they have the right answer to building a healthy community around a retail site.

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CanadaOne
http://www.canadaone.com/promote/pressrelease.html

This progressive search engine has been building community at a furious rate lately, and it is great for all of us. They are deploying tools for all of us to use.

The most recent is their Press Release Workshop. It teaches you how to write a press release and then helps you write it with their press release Wizard. I used it. It's cool. Try it.

If you are a Canadian site, submit yourself for the Top Sites award just launched. http://www.canadaone.com/promote/awards.html

It will not be easy to win, but that just makes it more tantalizing.

If you have an information resource that would be of value to Canadian businesses and web site operators, try to get listed in their exclusive Resource Directory. It has to be compelling content to get in, so I have no idea why Julie added JimWorld. Must have been a slip in judgement. Just don't point it out to her. We're already getting traffic from it.

Thanks Julie. We appreciate the endorsement implied by that listing.

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Link-O-Matic
http://www.linkomatic.com/index.cgi?10097

If you are running the free Free For All script that Link-O-Matic has made available, you should go get the newest version. It has some improved reliability and has the ability to send a thank you message.

Do yourself a favor and don't send a message to every submitter unless you really have something worthwhile to say. You will get a flame or two for a good message. You'll get buried alive for a piece of fluff.

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If any of you find the Scumbag that is spamming everyone with his/her email spam program for sale, please let me know. I really want to have a talk with his ISP.

The spam looks like this:

EMAIL MARKETING WORKS!!
Bull's Eye Gold is the PREMIER email address collection tool.
CALL FOR MORE INFORMATION 213-427-5820
WorldTouch Network Inc.
5670 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 2170 Los Angeles, CA 90036

None of the above reach a human being, just a machine and I suspect that the address is a mail drop in L.A. If anyone has actually bought it, please look up the company that shows on your credit card statement. At least that name must be real.

He is very tricky. His email addresses are all fake, and he keeps changing from MCI to Sprint to AT&T and a long list of others. He is certainly stealing email server time and faking his address to hide his identity. If I find out who this dirtbag is, I will let all of you know where to complain. He deserves a lot of attention, and we are just the group that can deliver it.

If you have feathers, I have a bucket of tar.

ARE YOU SPAMMING...

Without Even Knowing It?

This week I ran across a site while reviewing new listings submitted to the Helpware Directory, that had a doorway page that flashed up a few graphics including the Helpware logo, and then immediately refreshed to the real home page of the site. The refresh rate was set to zero seconds and you had to be quick to see anything on the page at all.

The site in question obviously didn't make it into the Helpware directory. This technique is considered spamming by most of the search engines, and by me, of course. When you send someone to a page that refreshes faster than the eye can see, you are obviously just trying to pull the wool over the reviewer's eyes, right?

Wrong. I wrote a lengthy message to the 'offending' webmaster and got back a panic note. I mean panic!

It seems the site is in the U.K. and there the speed of Internet access is slow enough that the page was actually staying up long enough to be viewed comfortably by the visitors. By the time the last graphic loaded, and the page refreshed, U.K. visitors had been given plenty of time to view it.

You know me. Sounds like whining to me. So I dusted off my modem, disconnected my cable modem (scary stuff) and tried his site. Wow! Big difference! Turns out that the refresh didn't kick in until I was actually getting a bit bored looking at the page.

So, what is my advice to the panicked webmaster now?

You still have a problem. I thought it was spam and didn't list it in the Helpware Directory. If one of the big search engines catches you doing that, they aren't going to hold a dialog with you to determine the reasons behind the page. They will just drop you from their index and move on. And you might get lucky and be able to grovel your way back into the search engine, but maybe not.

So now we have a webmaster who has not really done anything unethical, but what he has done is not smart promotion. Can he stand up and declare how 'right' he is? Of course. Will anybody care? Of course not. He just won't have any traffic.

This particular case has already been resolved. The refresh is gone from the page. The site is now in the Helpware Directory. And in a week or two he can relax if the search engines hadn't already found him.

I'm not going to embarrass him by posting his site URL here. But I will mention it in a week or two because I did enjoy my visit to his site.

Now, let's talk for a minute about the Helpware Directory and what it is teaching me. You might want to put a bit more paper in your printer about now.

Had I known the extent of the education I would receive by starting a site directory, I would have done it long ago. I now know things that no mere mortal should ever be privy to.

Given that our community is made up of some pretty savvy site promoters, I expected to see some interesting things. And I have.

Things like:

Doorway pages constructed just to display the Helpware logo, which is a requirement for being in the directory and enjoying the benefits of the traffic generated by the efforts of the group. Now, I don't think doorway pages are playing fair. The idea is to make the Helpware Directory accessible to all of your visitors so that they have the opportunity to visit another Helpware site when they are finished at your site. This is the whole reason for the Directory.

So, did I catch all of the doorway pages that were submitted? No. Probably not. But I did catch the ones named 'helpwarelogo.html' and 'indexpagehelpware.html' both of which were actual submissions. I might be slowing down a bit, but I hope I never get that slow. But the submitters help me a lot in finding these pages. When I review 2, 3, 4 or 5 pages in a row that look identical but have different names, it smells like spam.

And I caught many that were named 'index1.html' through 'index5.html'. The ones I enjoyed looking for the most was the pages that look like real pages, have reasonable names, and contain links to the rest of the site. However, there are no pages that link to THEM anywhere on the site. None. Smells like a doorway page.

I guess my favorite were the ones that received their notice that their pages had been added to the Helpware Directory, so they immediately removed the graphic from their sites. In the food chain, this is the bottom link. I even enjoyed getting flamed by one woman that was really upset about being deleted from the Directory. Guess she didn't believe us when we said that the Helpware Directory would contain a spider to verify pages on a regular basis.

But at least we know that these types of antics don't go on with our members that are site promoters and designers, right? Wrong.

With one exception, every one of these scams has been initiated by promoters and designers. Sad but true. What a crushing discovery.

Now, I admit that the Helpware Directory is not going to send thousands of visitors your way this month. So, if you are working this hard to scam a community service directory, what are you trying to pull on the search engines and Yahoo!?

Trust me when I tell you that I am a novice at spotting dirty tricks compared to the people at Yahoo! They see thousands of more submissions every day and they probably see it all every 6 hours.

I strongly suggest that you try to play fair and not get a reputation for cheating. There are already several people that I simply won't go to the trouble of checking out their submissions. I've wasted enough of my time on their foolishness.

If you are asking yourself 'Could this be why I can't seem to get a listing at Yahoo!?' about now, then it probably is.

And if you are doing this on behalf of clients, you have entered the Scumbag Zone. You are doing damage to people that have trusted you to do the right thing and not get them into trouble.

Janet Berg, our resident Yahoo! watcher and Forum Moderator is going to review sites for the Helpware Directory for a while. She wants to see this stuff in action. It should be interesting to see what her article has to say after 2 or 3 weeks of reviewing. If you are one of the wanna-be-cheaters, you might want to unsubscribe from the Gazette before your self-image takes too much of a beating.

I fully expect to get the usual ration of hyper-angry email declaring how some of you have been doing it this way forever and never been caught. How nice for you. But please don't go to the Forums asking for help when all of your client sites, and your own sites, vanish from one index and directory after another. We just don't care. You can tell how little everyone cares by reading the posts from all of the people that have been nailed, and gotten no help or sympathy from the community.

If you haven't learned yet that there are better ways to get traffic, then you are just wasting your time reading the Gazette. Spend the time out in the Sun. At least you'll get a nice tan. And don't worry about the skin cancer warnings any more than you do the spam warnings. It will never happen to you. Right?

If you are a site owner that has hired a promoter or designer that is pulling these tricks to 'help' you build your traffic, I can only suggest that you don't quit your day job. You will need something to fall back on when your site dries up almost overnight. If you think I exaggerate, drop into the Forums and see what the real world is like. Then find a different promoter.

Now, in case you are all up in arms thinking that I am telling you to stop the use of all doorway pages, relax. I'm not. I use them myself. But my doorway pages are relevant to the area of the site they reside in and they deliver content. Sometimes I'll take an article out of the Gazette and post it as a page with the appropriate META tags and such. These pages do very well in the rankings whereas the Gazette archives have pages that are so long that no one story can rank anywhere useful in the search engines. This is not cheating. This is smart publishing. When the visitor gets to the page, it is everything it was advertised to be. There is a story there that fits what they were looking for. Thanks to Clyde of the Search Engine Bible for showing me the way to build killer doorway pages that are completely fair.

If you want a copy for yourself, visit http://www.softwaresolutions.net/sebible/