SuperTips Ezine: Issue 29


March 12th, 2000
Harvey Segal, Editor:

IN THIS ISSUE

1. Greetings!

2. "10 Sure-Fire Phrases That Will Increase Your Traffic"
     - by Larry Dotson

3. Readers Forum

4. More "Super" Tips
    4.1
The strange case of 'My Documents'
    4.2
Thanks for the Memory
    4.3 Good news for affiliates
    4.4
Is there a book in you ?
    4.5 Correcting an incorrect Url
    4.6 Even the best publishers overlook this

5. Contact Information

1. Greetings!

Hello Folks,

An error in the SuperTips Ezine !!

Yes for the first time there was an error - in the last issue: an url was incorrectly written.

But only 4 people were affected.
How is that you ask ?

No it's not because I only have 4 readers.
And there's no way that you can retrieve mail once it's been sent.

The whole episode turned out to be the source of a useful tip which you can read about further on.

                                                         ==================

And now I'd like you to try this experiment.

Go to the folder 'My Documents'.

Create a new folder. I'll wait a minute while this happens.

What's that ? It only took a second, who needs to wait for a whole minute ?

Well I have to wait when I create a new folder or open existing ones.

Or, I should say, I used to wait because I have now solved this problem which has given me months of frustration.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that my PC has been out for repair for nearly 3 weeks and that is why you've not seen the SuperTips Ezine for a while.

But again this problem generated a great bunch of tips which you can read about in
"The strange case of 'My Documents'"

Regards, Harvey

2. "10 Sure-Fire Phrases That Will Increase Your Traffic"
     - by Larry Dotson

1 "Bookmark This Web Site Now". Tell your visitors to bookmark your web site. They may see your web site listed in their bookmarks and visit again. You should also give then a good reason to bookmark your site. For example tell them you add new content everyday.

2 "Subscribe To Our Free E-zine". Tell your visitors to subscribe to your e-zine. When they subscribe you'll capture their e-mail address. Every time they read your e-zine, it will remind them to return to your site.

3." Participate On Our Discussion Board". Ask your visitors to participate on your online discussion board. By participating they will meet other people. By meeting other people, they will revisit your web site on a regular basis to stay in contact with them.

4. "Sign Our Guestbook". Ask your visitors to sign your guest book. When people sign your guestbook you may get valuable feedback or constructive criticism on how to improve your web site. This may help you increase traffic to your web site.

5. "Use Our Free Content On Your Site Or In Your E-zine". Allow your visitors to use your articles on their own web site or in their e-zine. Just ask them to include your resource box. This will spread your advertising all over the internet.

6. "Refer This Our Web Site To A Friend". Ask your visitors to refer your web site to a friend(s). They may know someone that would benefit from visiting your web site.

7. "Fill Out Our Online Survey". Ask visitors to fill out your online survey or questionnaire. You could use it to get valuable feedback on ways to improve your web site to increase traffic.

8. "Enter Our Contests". Ask your visitors to enter your online contest or sweepstakes. People love to win stuff, and they will visit your web site to try.

9. "Give Away Our Freebie To Your Visitors". Allow your visitors to give away your online freebies to people that visit your web site. Include your ad on the freebie and those freebies will multiply your traffic.

10 "Join Our Affiliate Program". Allow your visitors to make money selling your products or services. This will increase your traffic because they will link to your web site.
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1075 FREE Internet Marketing eBooks, Courses,
And Web Books! FREE Content For Your eBook,
Web Site Or E-zine! http://www.ldpublishing.com
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3. Readers Forum

Is there another Supertips Ezine ?

The information in the newsletter looked very familiar. The whole issue was devoted to a selection of tips taken from past issues of my newsletter.

A pirate ?

No not at all.

Publisher Al Montero had previously asked if he could use extracts from my newsletter. This is what he told readers of his excellent newsletter ZeroCost Digest:

I subscribe to about 90 different ezines. Some daily, some weekly and some monthly.

So, as you can imagine, sometimes I do not have time to read, sort and archive all the emails I get as soon as I get them. I just catch up over the weekend.

One of the few exceptions (I always read it as soon as I get it) is the The Supertips Ezine, from Harvey Segal.

I always go straight to its tips section where I can find four or five very good and short tips. As a bonus, sometimes (though not always) I'm able to implement one or two of the tips in less than 20 minutes.

For me The Supertips Ezine is worth every second I spend reading it.

Al tells me he's "always looking for interesting articles that can help my subscribers with their internet marketing efforts"

You can subscribe by sending an Email to zerocost_digest-subscribe@topica.com with any text in the subject line and the body

                                                         ==================

Bob Bradford (Rbradjr@aol.com) was so enthusiastic when he came across my site that I can only highlight part of his long letter:

I just wanted to say thanks for such a brilliant web page. I have been, for the past few weeks, pretty deeply involved in studying everything I could to find out about starting a business on the Internet. This included buying MYSS and Marketing your Business on the Internet. Then I ran across your page. Incredible amount of useful information. It is a useful step by step outline of what one needs to do.
(snip)
Of all the sites I have investigated, and it must be dozens, yours is the most intriguing I have encountered. There is so much helpful free information, information others would charge good money for. It shows that you can be helpful and still make money. My idea is to do something similar to you, but of course with my own twist. Thanks for the help and the great ideas.

==================

From Roney Henderson (roney.h@virgin.net)

The Supertips website is the best site that I have come across on the web that gives information on how to market, promote etc a website.

4. More "Super" Tips

4.1 The strange case of 'My Documents'

Back in issue 18 I raised this problem.

When I start my PC and browse through the folders using Windows explorer, expanding and collapsing them, the response at first is immediate.

But then it gradually deteriorates to the point where it can take 45 or 60 or more seconds just to expand a folder.

If I go back and expand a particular folder on subsequent occasions the response is immediate, it's when it gets expanded the first time that the delay occurs.

For example, once the problem starts, it can take a minute to simply create a new folder !

Well first stop - to ask for help.

TIP - The NOSPIN group have two discussion lists: PCBUILD for hardware, PCSOFT for software. To sign up for either of these visit <http://nospin.com>

I had stacks of useful advice from PCSOFT but no-one came up with the solution.

Next step - the PC supplier. After all I have a free warranty with them so I should get immediate service. Agree ?

Well no. A free warranty means nothing if you cannot get through to the Support Desk. I won't bore you with the details of how often I tried but here's some more advice

TIP - before you make any purchase for an item which may require support check out their service desk first. Phone them up or send Email and see what the response is.

Which allows me to give a plug to a web hosting company who offer the most superb service I have come across on the net. If you have to wait 15 minutes for them to reply to an Email that's a long time! Click here for details

TIP - keep a record of all the problems you had and ask for compensation. I did and received an extra year's warranty. (Mind you is that such a good thing ?)

TIP - before sending your PC off for repair take a backup and make sure you can rebuild your system from scratch in case you have to do a 'restore'

TIP - make plans for how you can cope without your PC. How will you get your Email ? Well a web based Email account could be the answer - and it's free. More on this in our next issue.

Anyway, the supplier replaced nearly every component in my PC and came up with this answer from their 'software experts':
"It's probably because your folders are too deeply nested. Try rearranging them into a flatter structure"

Now for a brief second this seemed plausible until two thoughts struck me

- when I use any other program, such as Word, and browse through folders it does not have this problem

- surely there are hundreds of thousands of Windows users in the world with deeply nested folders. If they are all complaining about taking a minute to open one then I think Microsoft would have heard about it by now

TIP - experts aren't always right. Try to look at a problem from a different angle or make comparisons with a similar situation which does not have the problem.

So what now ?

Well inspiration struck and I tried an experiment. It appears the problem only occurs in the folder 'My Documents'.

If I take a copy of 'My Documents' and put it in an equivalent folder e.g C:\My Docs the problem disappears.

So although I did not get to the bottom of the problem I do at last have a workaround.
And here's another tip ...

4.2 Thanks for the Memory

... In their efforts to find a solution the PC supplier had added more memory, doubling it from 64 MB to 128.

As you may know, additional memory is often the best way to get more power from your PC, sometimes more than having a faster CPU.

So my PC is now a lot, lot faster.

OK, you say, what's the big deal - I don't need any more speed.

Well that's what I used to say, but I can assure you it's only when you experience this that you realise what you are missing. As I'm always flitting about extracting information from Web pages, Word documents, spreadsheets or running searches I tend to have many programs running at the same time. The difference between waiting just two seconds before calling up another program or document and having it instantly appear as you click is quite dramatic and immensely productive.
Give it a try if you can.

4.3 Good news for affiliates

Whether you are an experienced affiliate or just planning to start I highly recommend that you read "The Affiliate Masters" course.

It's a 5-Day e-mail course on becoming a high-earning affiliate champion.

And it's free !

Just send an Email with the subject "MASTERS" to supertipstams@sitesell.net

4.4 Is there a book in you ?

Many of us have mused at some time about writing a book.

One of the best products to sell is an information product, or in other words a "how-to" guide. There are thousands of people searching every day for information on how to do all sorts of things - if you can provide the answers you will be very successful.

Do you have specialist knowledge to help others ?

The answer is most probably 'yes' - everyone knows something, as they say.

And now more than ever before this is a golden opportunity, because publishing your knowledge as an E-BOOK dramatically simplifies what would in pre-Net days have been a long drawn-out, costly business with rare chance of success.

So where do you begin ?

What tool do you use to write an E-book ?
How do you publish it ?
How do you put it on a web site ?
How do you collect payment ?
Can you pass on the whole handling of payments to another ?

I'm sure you have many other questions. e.g
'What can I write about ?'
'How do I extract this knowledge from my brain ?'

You'll find every question you ask is already answered: pay a visit to this page

Your E-book could be buzzing around the Net sooner than you think.

4.5 Correcting an incorrect Url

Soon after sending out the last issue I went to check my Email looking for early comments. As there was a problem reading the mail I turned instead to my daily check of the website logs.

Here's what I saw in the Redirection Report
== 4 attempts at /misc/imc ==

I quickly realised what had happened. In the issue I had recommended an excellent newsletter, the Internet Marketing Chronicles and set up a link to it at
<http://www.supertips.com/misc/imc.htm>

However the url I published was
<http://www.supertips.com/misc/imc>

This latter url was of course invalid.

(As a side issue, note that the log reports did not show these attempts as 'failures' but as 'redirections'. They were redirected to a special page I have set up when an Url is incorrect. See the tip "How to avoid "Url not found - error 404" " in this issue ).

Now how to resolve the error.
I could send out a correction to all my subscribers but I had a better idea.

I created a directory at my website called
www.supertips.com/misc/imc
Within that I uploaded the original file imc.htm and renamed it index.html.

So accesses to the incorrect Url now found their way to a valid page and when I got back to reading my mail I was able to tell the few readers who had pointed out the problem that it was already solved.

Lessons to be learned:

- it pays to check your website logs: logs are one of the many reasons for getting a web hosting service with a domain name. To read about the others see my article 'Why your Web Site must have a Domain name'

- where possible avoid referring to Urls at other sites, instead put the information on a page at your own site and link from there. For a good example see the article 'Why you should NOT link to a reseller site'

4.6 Even the best publishers overlook this

It's surprising how often I write to Ezine publishers to point out that they have included unsubscribe details in their ezine but not subscribe details.

Well why would a reader need to know how to subscribe if he's already receiving it - you may ask.

One common reason is that readers often change the address where they receive ezines e.g to a special account separate to their personal mail.

Another reason - it enables your readers to recommend the ezine to others.

Hint! To subscribe to the SuperTips Ezine
   Mailto:ezine@supertips2.com or
   <http://www.supertips.com/ezine/>

5. Contact Information

Thanks for reading "SuperTips Ezine".

I always like to hear your feedback, suggestions, comments, and questions.

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.

Thanks,
Harvey


To SUBSCRIBE to the SuperTips Ezine:Click here

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Copyright (C) 2000 by Harvey Segal, SuperTips


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