SuperTips Ezine: Issue 21
IN THIS ISSUE
2. "How To Create A Profitable Little
Ad"
3. Readers Forum
4. "Getting Your Online Business Up
and Running!"
5. More "Super"
Tips 6. Next Issue
1. Greetings! Hello Folks, The first ever article in SuperTips was "How To Create A Captivating Headline" written by Bob Leduc. So it's nice to welcome Bob back again with his latest article. And if you want to 'get your online business up and running' read what Joe Reinbold has to say. And I can't agree more with his main point - get yourself a DOMAIN name. Another tip that I often stress is the publicity you can get from making contributions to discussion lists. And here's a real example ! One name that I continually see on my travels is that of Rod Aries providing informative answers to questions about search engines.
So I had an idea. I'm delighted to say that not only did Rod provide the answers but he gave additional useful tips, and all with the fast response which I notice is a hallmark of the best marketeers. So I've devoted the whole of our usual section - More "Super" Tips - to Rod's answers. Harvey
2. "How To Create A Profitable Little Ad"
A small ad can generate a greater return on your investment than any other type of advertising. You can also use it in a variety of media. For example, I often get profitable results from the same small ad in all of the following:
* Internet - posted as a classified ad at websites and in email newsletters
(ezines). A small classified or display ad doesn't provide enough space to generate sales directly from the ad. Instead, use the ad to generate inquiries from prospects seeking more information or to generate visitors to your store or website. Apply your usual selling procedure to close sales when you get the inquiry or visitor. A SIMPLE 4 STEP PROCEDURE By trial and error I developed the following 4 step procedure for creating successful little classified or display ads. You can follow this same simple procedure to successfully create your own profitable little ads. STEP 1: PROMOTE ONE PRODUCT TO ONE TARGETED MARKET Select one product or service to promote and tailor your ad to one targeted market. You can develop ads for many different products and target them to many different markets. But each ad will be most effective when it promotes one product to one targeted market. STEP 2: DEVELOP A HEADLINE WITH YOUR STRONGEST BENEFIT The headline is the most important part of your ad. It captures the reader's attention and provides a compelling reason to read your ad. The most effective headline clearly promotes your strongest benefit to readers in your targeted market. For example, "How To Build Your MLM Downline Fast" will immediately attract the attention of most network marketers. It offers the solution to their biggest problem... how to build their downline sales organization. STEP 3: REINFORCE YOUR HEADLINE WITH BODY COPY Keep your body copy brief. Include a few power words to reinforce the benefit promoted in your headline. For example, "Quick! Easy! Immediate results guaranteed!" could be used as body copy to reinforce the sample headline in Step 2. End your body copy by telling the reader exactly how to respond to your ad. Keep it simple and make it easy. For example, "Call 1-800-123-4567 for FREE information TODAY!" STEP 4: REVISE AND TEST -- OVER AND OVER AGAIN Keep trying to increase the number of responses from your ad. Test different headlines, different body copy, different media. Test even minor changes in your ad. I've seen ad responses jump dramatically after simply enclosing the headline in quotation marks. I've also seen ad responses to a different ad drop after making the same change. The only way to know if something works is to test it. Test only one change at a time or you won't know which change produced the new result. Be sure to code each version of your ad so you can track the results from it. Whenever a new "test" version of your ad produces better results than your standard version, make it your new standard version. Continual testing enables you to gradually increase the response rate and profitability of your little ad. I once built the response to a recruiting ad printed on a postcard from 3 percent to over 20 percent this way. Use this simple four step procedure to create your own small ads. If you already use small ads, apply this procedure to your existing ads to increase their effectiveness and profitability. The results will surprise you.
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3. Readers Forum 3.1 Compliments from our subscribers
Eirik Johansen wrote in to say
He then went on to offer an explanation for the cryptic question raised
by a reader in our last issue
Eirik suggested that what he was saying was... if you had some instructions, like an E-book on how to make a web site like yours, he would buy it. Maybe an idea for your business? Making such an The E-book, that is...
Well I'll pass this idea on to our readers.
Eirik Johansen publishes the Netmaking Newsletter and offers a FREE site
review. ---------------------
And this is from T. Williams
T. Williams publishes "The Internet Business Newsletter"
3.2 Any CGI experts ?
Carol Jensen asks: Can anyone help ?
3.3 Web pages - does size matter ?
In the last issue I suggested some basic principles of web site design:
these were Reader Jean Wilkes raises a further issue '... and what about the length of a web page ?' Obviously, if your page is so huge that it takes a long time to download then your visitors will give up before they can read it - so we'll exclude this case. At the other extreme some people say it should not exceed a screen. My view is that if you can sustain the interest of your reader then length is not that important. The master of this is Corey Rudl. Corey has a magnetic writing style. From the very start he excites you with the benefits supplied by the product he is describing. As he progresses he builds on these then throws in more and more benefits. Take a look at two examples: There's Corey's famous Internet Marketing Course here.
And also Mailloop here . And yes, before you ask, I am an agent for Corey's products but - regardless of whether or not you intend to make a purchase - I'd urge you to read his sales letters just to give yourself ideas of how to entice your reader.
4. "Getting Your Online Business Up and
Running!" If you are thinking about developing an Internet presence for your business or improving your presence, there are a number of things you need to consider. Some new online marketers start with a free site, rent a page or two at someone else’s site or get their own site or domain. We started like many others, with a free five page web site. It allowed us to experiment. We got our feet wet with setting up several pages, researching what was out there and actually developing a marketing plan for the future. But we found that the free site was good for just that, getting our feet wet. Your space is limited, you don’t have all the tools available that you really need, nor the flexibility to expand as you see fit. Our next step was to move up to our own domain package at a low to moderately priced hosting service with our own domain name, www.homebizlink.com. After a number of continuing problems and the lack of support to correct them, we moved to our present service who we believe to be one of the best on the Net. Domains -vs- Domain Names A domain package is the space or real estate you are leasing from a hosting service, of which there are a multitude on the Net. The packages come in many sizes and with or without many services you will need. You can get packages as little as 2 megs (about 50 pages), 30 megs (about 500 pages) and 60 megs (about 1000 pages), which is the size we currently have. There are many combinations available, these are only examples. The estimated number of pages is dependant on how much each page takes and what other uses you make of your space. Plus you want to look at the options that come along with your domain space, such as marketing tools, ease of uploading and downloading of your pages, and other services that will assist you in succeeding in your venture. A domain name is a separate process, and a good hosting service will include "registration" of your chosen name for free. Don’t pay a hosting company or any other vendor $50 or $100 to register your domain name. Find a hosting service that does it for free. First you want to make sure the name you want is available. The easiest way is to go to InterNic (or Network Solutions as it is known now) at: http://www.networksolutions/cgi-bin/whois/whois, and do a domain name search right on their home page. All you have to input is "yourname.com" (you don’t need to put in www.yourname.com) ".com" is the normal extension unless you are choosing ".org" for your organization or .edu if you are an educational institution. It will show you the results of your search in seconds. If it is not being used it will show "no record". If it is being used, you can review the contact information which will show you who is the registered owner. If it is registered, you will need to come up with another name. It could be just a slightly different wording or spelling. InterNIC is the organization that centralizes the registration process of domain names on the Internet. You could actually register yourself if you know all the technical information. But I found that it is easier to let the hosting company do it for you. Two items show up on the registration, the Administrative Contact and the Technical Contact. You, as the owner of the domain name, should be the Administrative Contact. Your hosting service, or an individual at the hosting service will normally be the Technical Contact. If your hosting service shows up as both then they are the registered owner of the domain name. Make sure you are the Administrative Contact, the owner. If at some future date, you want to transfer your domain name to a different hosting service, you will have a problem if you are not shown as the Administrative Contact/owner. InterNIC bills you directly for their annual registration fee. Currently your first bill will be $70.00 for two years, then $35.00 each year thereafter. Choosing A Name This is a critical area to consider. Your domain name is your unique business name online and is important to your business. Once you register it, it is yours and only you can use it. It is very similar to a trademark. With your own domain name your address will be www.yourcompany.com (or .org or .edu). If you were to purchase space at someone else’s domain, rather than getting your own, your address might look like this: www.theirname.com/directory/yourname/file.html or some other long combination. Which one looks more businesslike and professional to you? The name you select can project the unique theme of your business. It will assist you in building online recognition. Think about Amazon.com, Microsoft.com and others. They have become household names just like the traditional businesses such as Sears, Woolworth, etc.
Take some time to create your own domain name, it will be with you for
a long time.
5. More "Super" Tips 5.1 Search Engine issues - with Rod Aries
QUESTION 1)
ANSWER If you do the math, the top two engines/directories account for over 50% of searches and the top 10 search engines produced about 94% of all search engine referrals.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Get listed in Yahoo!
QUESTION 2)
ANSWER Some people feel that even one extra visitor from one of the smaller engines or links is worth it... and it could be - but for most people, it is not. TIP: If you do submit to a multitude of engines and directories, use a specific e-mail so you can keep track of spam. An example might be submit@yourdomain.com. So if an email comes back to 'submit' then you will know that you can, generally, delete it. You can also set-up filters in Eudora and Outlook that automatically place any e-mail addressed to submit@yourdomain.com directly into the trash.
QUESTION 3)
ANSWER For example at Infoseek, http://www.go.com/AddUrl?pg=Guidelines.html they state "A maximum of 50 pages per day may be submitted through Add-URL". Obviously, if you have 105 pages on your site, it would take three days to submit all your pages. MSN, until they just switched to a directory format, only allowed one submission per day. Yahoo! generally accepts only your index page, and usually just in one category. These rules often change and the best way to stay current is to go to the 'add url' link of an engine or directory and following the link to the FAQ's. TIP: If unsure of how often to submit - then submit one page per day per engine.
QUESTION 4)
ANSWER TIP: By submitting ALL of your most important web pages to the engines, in conformance with their guidelines, you can save months off the time it takes to fully get your site listed in the engines.
QUESTION 5)
ANSWER: Automated submission companies will argue the time and cost effectiveness of using their service to rapidly expose your web site to the full power of the net. Software submission companies will point to the alleged short-comings of their competitors and the method used to actually 'automatically' submit - whether browser based or not...
I have tried most of the software submission programs (I have had weeks
where I did 40,000++ submissions) that are available and I use several different
software submission programs currently. I submit my site, then check to see
if the site was indexed. If so, then I know the software submission program
worked. The two programs I use the most are Having said all that, you MUST submit manually to any directory, such as Yahoo!, Open Directory and now AOL. Automated submission will not work as the form you have to fill out to apply for admission has multiple steps and varied answers.
QUESTION 6)
ANSWER Some of the URL's above are meta-search engines, meaning they search a multitude of search engines and directories. Dogpile is a meta search engine retrieving information from multiple sources: Looksmart, GoTo, Open Directory, About, Direct Hit, Infoseek, RealNames, Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos http://search.cnet.com/ is 'Powered by Infoseek" so if you are in Infoseek you are in cnet.com. Three of the URL's above - http://www.askjeeves.com/ - -http://www.aj.com/ -- http://www.ask.com/ are all Ask Jeeves, different URL's all leading to the same place. Ask Jeeves searches Yahoo!, WebCrawler, Infoseek, Excite and AltaVista all at once. SUGGESTION: My favorite is MetaCrawler http://www.go2net.com/index_power.html as it searches AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo, Thunderstone, LookSmart, About, GoTo and DirectHit all at once. Then it INTEGRATES the results so you can see the top ranked sites from all these engines/directories in a reasonable order.
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www.HowToInternet.com/?supertips
6. Next Issue SuperTips Ezine will be with you again on October 27th. If you have any suggestions to improve this newsletter so that we can make it a great resource for all our readers please drop me a line.
Thanks, To SUBSCRIBE to the SuperTips Ezine:Click here ARCHIVES: Click here Copyright (C) 1999 by Harvey Segal, SuperTips
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