SuperTips Ezine: Issue 27
IN THIS ISSUE
2. "The Search Engine War!"
3. Readers Forum
4. "When Less Is More: A Website In
Focus"
5. More "Super" Tips
6. Publications of Interest 7. Next issue
1. Greetings! Hello Folks, Welcome back to our first edition in the year 2000. I hope you have not experienced any Y2K bugs. I noticed some oddities in my Pegasus Email folder of deleted mail; for example a message sent on Nov 29 1999 which is showing as 29 Jan 43. There's been no other problems - mainly because my PC was purchased new last April and was Y2K compliant. I also have an old PC for use as backup which would definitely have caused problems - so I simply changed the date to 1972 where the days of the week correspond to year 2000. I must remember to check this out again in December 2027 when it thinks it's going into the year 2000 again. You'll notice some small changes - plus one big change - in the SuperTips Ezine. As I'm sure you know your Email addresses are kept absolutely confidential but just to keep some people happy I've added a privacy statement at the end.
By the way, if you ever want to prove that a newsletter publisher is not
giving away your address here's how to check. If you can set up a default
email address so that anything@yourdomain.com gets routed to you instead
of getting bounced then you can use whatever name to subscribe e.g Then if you ever receive an Email, other than the newsletter, at say ezine1@yourdomain.com you know that ezine1 has given away your name. Another change is that I now include the issue number in the Ezine not just the date. The main change is to do with the frequency of publication. Taking a lead from some other publishers I've decided to abandon a fixed schedule, which up to now has been weekly and then bi-weekly. Instead I will be publishing two or three times a month as and when appropriate which means when we have useful advice and tips to share with you, and when the newsletter reaches a reasonable length. So those issue numbers will help you know if you think you may have missed an issue. And of course you can always see an index of all back issues by visiting the archives. Regards, Harvey
Wouldn't it be nice to receive hundreds of hits in a week from the search engines for free? Is it the best targeted traffic you can get? Maybe or maybe not, but who can turn down free traffic. Not everyone can win at the search engine game, but you can give yourself the best odds by doing everything possible to rank yourself higher. There are numerous of ways to accomplish this. In detail explanation, the information below is every known way brought to my attention. Hopefully, after you finish reading this article, you can get your web site in the top 30 positions in all the major search engines. Meta Tags Before you get started with anything, you need to create some meta tags and place the coding into your web site. To learn how and what to do with meta tags, please visit http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html It is a great resource full of helpful information. Keyword Writing When you write your text for your homepage, try to place a variation of your keywords throughout the page. You want to place the keywords as many times as you can, but do it throughout the entire web page and keep it sounding professional. Link Popularity I have recently read that many search engines are starting to rank the more popular web sites higher, due to popularity. If you owned a search engine, wouldn't you rank the popular ones higher? They believe that the higher traffic web sites must be better or they wouldn't be so popular, and this is why most of them are ranked higher. What is link popularity exactly? The search engines base on how popular a web site is by how many other web sites link to it. There are many things you can do to increase this number. One way is you can trade links with other web sites, but the numbers will not be very high. Another method is you can submit your web site to the pages people call Free For All Links (FFA). Two good resources you can use to get your site listed on hundreds or even thousands of pages, are http://www.linkomatic.com/special/ and http://www.ffaomatic.com/ The more pages that are linked to you, the better you are off! You can check your link popularity very easily at this web site: http://www.websitegarage.com Paid Ranking Now, you can pay for your ranking on a few search engines to generate your traffic. If you don't want to fight the search engine war or you have some spare money, then you might want to check this out. The leading pay ranking search engine on the market today, is Goto.com They were the first people to start this type of service. A few other companies are now following their foot steps such as: http://www.findwhat.com and http://www.simplesearch.com Search engines in this nature, can be an effective way to market your web site due to the fact that you can get targeted visitors as cheap as one cent per click! The top positions are ranked accordingly to who wants to pay more. Ranking Software There is now software available you can purchase that will help you keep up with your rankings with the major search engines. A very highly rated program that can help you succeed with the search engine war, is Web Position. This software has been highly rated with 5 stars from ZDNet. This software is probably the best and most effective one you can get today. You can get more information on this software here: http://www.webposition.com/ Domain Name It has been known that many of the major search engines like Excite, rank web sites higher if the keyword that is searched for, is in the domain name. What you might want to try doing is get a domain name, if you do not already have one, that has a keyword in it related to your business. Another idea could be to register another domain name that has a keyword or two in it, and point it to your original site. This could bring you extra free traffic from the search engines. New: If you didn't know, you now can register domain names up to 67 characters instead of the small amount of 22, which Network Solutions limited domain names to. So, now you can have a huge long domain name that has several keywords in it related to your business, which might help you with your search engine ranking. A working Example: http://www.wow-this-domain-name-is-really-long-and-it-works.com/ You can register your own domain name here: http://www.imsnewsletter.com/idr/ for only $60 for two years. Search Engines To get ranked, make sure you are listed with the major search engines below. It is a good idea to submit your web site once every few weeks to keep your listing fresh. I would recommend doing this manually, so you know that your site has been submitted properly and was accepted.
http://www.infoseek.com This should get you started with the search engines. Once you are listed, you might not even have to fight the war, and sometimes when you step back, it can just fall into place. Good Luck!
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3. Readers Forum 3.1 We were all newcomers once Some readers of our last issue have asked how I handled the person who sent, unsolicited, a collection of all his articles as two huge Email files. (And to make matters worse he addressed them to "Dear Sir/madam"). Well we often forget that what may be obvious to us may be new for someone starting out say in the online marketing field. So I replied: Please note: if you want to submit articles the normal practise is to provide a summary of the articles and ask if the recipient would like to see more. It is not advisable to send, unannounced, 2 huge files (62K and 177K) which took me several minutes to download. If you want to see an example of how to summarise your articles send an Email to a00@sendfree.com Well again it seemed obvious to me that a00@sendfree.com would be recognised as an automatic address (an autoresponder) - but our friend thought it was an actual person and wrote
Hi there,
So instead of getting involved in a war of words it ended with a genuine apology and I was able to send him a helpful article "Newcomers: how to succeed on the Internet" which you can read here
We also had a lady who asked how to go about producing and distributing
an ezine. I suggested using the same list provider that sends out this ezine
- www.onelist.com - and gave this tip: She came back with a really basic question which I had overlooked due to familiarity. Just how do you actually send out the newsletter ? For those who don't know the answer is very easy. You just send it out as an Email. I send mine to supertips@onelist.com so you would replace supertips with the name of your list (newsletter). Hope that inspires some of you to start up your own newsletters.
3.2 Article submission guidelines In answer to the reader who asked what are the guidelines for submitting articles to the SuperTips Ezine (surprisingly the first time anyone has asked this):
We welcome articles related to Internet marketing.
3.3 Awards SuperTips Website: SuperTips has been named in John Kremer's "Top 101 Internet Marketing Sites" at www.bookmarket.com
SuperTips Articles: The article 'How to Profit on the Internet' was the most read in the Computing category by readership of Whisper's ONline Magazine (http://www.whispersmagazine.com). For all our lady readers - you may like to know that this is a magazine for women. Articles cover Image, Food, Home, Finance, Computing, Romance, Travel and Arts & Entertainment as well as forums and chat. For your free subscription subscribe at mailto:subscribe@cyberpathway.com
SuperTips Ezine: Our newsletter is featured at the ZeroCost Marketing Site which is a guide to the best free ezines about marketing, advertising and selling products and services on the Web.
Webmaster Al M. Montero described it as Take a look at Al's site www.ZeroCost.Com - he has produced a profile of all the top ezines with sample articles from each. An impressive job.
4. "When Less Is More: A Website In Focus" The objective of this article is to explore a seldom-used method of internet marketing: Complete focus on a single product. This approach offers valuable lessons for all webmasters and net marketers. The site we'll look at is one of mine, Smart-Traffic. Yes, this seems like shameless self-promotion, but I think you'll agree that the content of this article justifies the selection. The first point to note is that it's a single-product site. This is one of the issues that occasionally flares up in the marketing forums... should entire domains be dedicated to a single product? Not often. Very few products lend themselves to - and benefit from - such focus. TopDog, the search engine software on the Smart-Traffic site, is a good example of one that does. Besides specialized software, membership sites and knowledge products are other good examples. Look at the site: http://www.Smart-Traffic.com Primary Site Objective: Visitor Downloads Trial Secondary Site Objective: Support Primary Objective Tertiary Site Objective: None Look at the first screen. What's the first thing you notice (besides that fact that the title graphic is too large)? Look at the components:
o Product title and tagline Left-side navigation establishes a large and complete site. Awards on the right side convey status and prestige while lending credence to bold claims. So? So, the first screen tells the whole story. The rest of the Smart-Traffic site is extraneous. The first screen is the entire primary objective. The other 95% of the site only serves the secondary objective. The first screen isn't making visitors work or think. It doesn't tease or bait or cajole. It's not burying the price. It's not offering variety and making the visitor read or compare or discriminate. There's no newsletter offer or bookmark push. The site doesn't try to build rapport, create a brand or convince visitors to tell a friend. There's no banner to compete with the core message. The only motion is the ordering graphic. Even the body copy has yet to make an appearance. The visitor doesn't even have to scroll. If they do they'll find my second best shot; sales copy, user testimonials, more awards, a Palm III drawing and so on, but it all just reinforces that first screen... that first directive. Download. That's not the end of the marketing process, but it's the end of my website's role in the process. The site only exists to guide prospects smoothly into the next leg of a carefully crafted marketing sequence that began with a link in a search engine or an article, and ends on a secure page. Is your website out of focus? The next time you're wondering how to improve your site, try thinking less about more and more about less.
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5. More "Super" Tips 5.1 Who is linking to you ? I found out that two of the sites in the Awards section above (3.3) were linking to mine before the webmasters even told me.
I did this by my regular scan of the logfiles at my site. It's vital to
know where your visitors are coming from and this is one of many reasons
for having a proper web hosting service with a domain name site.
5.2 How to avoid "Url not found - error 404" Each time your web site visitor sees this message - when he tries to view a page which is no longer there or when he mistypes an Url - you may lose a potential customer. Here is the solution: You can create a customised error page which your visitor will see instead of the 404 error page. On this page you can put whatever you choose to inform your visitor or redirect him. So, for example, I have created an error page at www.supertips.com/misc/404.htm (you can call it whatever you like). To see what I have put on this page you can visit it but better still type in an incorrect Url to see how the process works e.g www.supertips/com/abcdef.htm How is this achieved ?
In my main directory (where I have my home page) I have set up a file
".htaccess" (without the quotes) with one line
So here is the general rule In order to name this file ".htaccess" (the period must be included) you may have to upload it first under another name and then rename it.
5.3 Where did that web page go ? After all the trouble of locating a page on the web and downloading so it can be read offline you open it and get the message "This page cannot be displayed" If this happens to you the answer may be that the page contains Javascript. It seems that Internet Explorer may throw up this message but not Netscape. If you don't have Netscape just remove the Javascript commands and your page will be viewable.
5.4 Selling your own products Do you have a product which you would like to sell on the Net but you don't want to go through the hassle of setting up and running the payment operation, including getting credit card acceptance ? Well there are third party companies which will relieve you of this burden and take a share of each sale.
Two such companies are If you don't have a product of your own but would like to purchase one and have complete control over selling, such as setting your own price, take a look at the Electronic Marketing Business Kit 5.5 Don't turn off your PC
Am I unlucky ? I took the opportunity of asking the engineer about the advice that you now see quite frequently - keep your PC running all the time. He confirmed that this is indeed what they recommend to their customers. The surge of power when you switch on gradually weakens the components. But you should turn off your monitor if you don't plan to use it for a while. Or should you ? I asked the question in the PCBUILD discussion forum and got this reply : I have found, however, that my monitors last longer if I never turn them off. I have actually tested this out several times. I take two identical monitors and instruct one user to keep it on all the time, regardless of whether or not they shut down their computer, and the other user gets instructed to shut theirs down every night no matter what. Invariably,the monitor that gets shut down all the time goes out first. What do our readers advise ?
6. Publications of Interest
HUMBLE GUIDE to AFFILIATE PROGRAMS
7. Next issue Thanks for reading "SuperTips Ezine". As mentioned at the start we won't have fixed dates for future publications. If you have your own article or tip please feel free to contribute it, with your bio information, and you will receive full credit if it gets published. 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) 2000 by Harvey Segal, SuperTips
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