- The hovering at the top of screen, drop
down navigation is consistent on nearly every page
-
Maybe you've had a look at
www.scarboro.info
by now and if not some other subscribers would have, so there
is another tip for you. Provide incentive such as prizes, sample
vouchers, discounts, information, etc to encourage subscriber to
receive your
ezine ( email
newsletter ).
Just for the right to post messages on the BB, I can turn on the
switch when I'm ready so that only registered BB users can start
a new topic. To vote in on online polls or start a new topic all
registrations would involve giving an email. I won't sent
any Scarboro subscribers any emails unless there is an emergency
such as war, but the ability is there. (Time limitation
makes it difficult to even get this out to you )
- The bulletin board arrived just in time
for the most divisive controversial issue to hit our community
for a long time and as the volunteer moderator it is interesting
and important to keep the debate balanced. Empowering citizens
with tools for freedom of speech is very powerful motivation for
both contributors to interact and for others to return to read
something new. There is no way with a busy full time job that I
can provide new content all the time to keep readers
interested. Creating interactivity with your website is not
as expensive as you may think. Digital Junction do offer
discounts for not-for-profit sites. Fear of bad stuff happening
beyond your webmaster's control is just that: fear and not
reality. For example with a bulletin board one can set
various levels of control. Postings are picked up by the
search engines.
- The
Perth Calendar is orthwhile interactive
.
- Good position and site popularity go
hand in hand. Popularity helps with position but in the
beginning it's difficult to get sites linking to you without
being in good position on the search engines (SEs) - catch 22.
Answer: Long ago I used software for a
link
exchange programme (or program as
you US folk spell it). The site didn't need many links to
do well in the SEs because (A) it was reasonably well optimised
and (B) there are not too many sites about Scarborough Beach,
Perth Australia competing with it.
- A marketing mix including distribution of
www.scarboro.info
bumper stickers helps keep the address in the mind of locals and
is quite inexpensive.
- Joining
networking organisations (z?)
can be time draining but also a rich source of referrals.
- I hate repeating the obvious but I see an
oversight by my clients often so I'll write it again:
- "You can't expect a search engine to
give your page position for a phrase that's not even on
your page" (ie in the body text that every one
sees.) Last week I had a whole bunch of keywords from
my client which she was trying to target. Most of the words
were not even anywhere on her page.
-
Whilst it takes work to manage other websites
it can also boost popularity by providing interaction in
your web. The
Perth
site is not as popular as the site about the suburb contained
within it because
-
Though it's new
www.perthperth.com
has hit top spot for "business directory perth" at
www.yahoo.com
Notice the
keyword rich domain name.
Currently repetitive domains do work with SEs
like Yahoo and Google so if that great name you want is gone and
it's not too long, just repeat it.
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- While on the subject of spelling:
Because English is my second language, my spelling sux.
The irony is that words put food on my kid's table. I've
discovered I'm not alone so deliberate miss-spelling pays. For
example one of the most common and lucrative words in the search
engine war is "accommodation" so it is wise to deliberately also
target:
-
accomodation
-
acommodation
-
accommadation etc.
Whilst one of my pages is already 1st world wide for "linked
banner ad" without a nice
domain name because like "scarborough.xya and
webmarketing.xyz they were all gone so diluting the
character density with a dash etc is often done. When
that option runs out using one extra character such as "4"
like I did with
www.4webmarketing.biz is
a next best option. I was pleased the other day when I
discovered that while all options for bannerads.xyz
and banner-ads.xyz had gone that a useful
one extra character "d" came in handy for buying the
commonly miss-spelled "adds" for advertisement:
www.banneradds.net
- A client I recently
registered for
was glad most of the English speaking world don't spell like
Americans.
- If the site you're creating a banner
ad to link to has some graphic you want to capture
- Minimise (z?) the window to approximately the same aspect
ratio of a standard banner, around the graphic
- Hold the Alt key down and tap your "PrtSc"
screen button
- Paste into a new blank file of your graphics program such as
PhotoShop. If you have an older version size your new file
to be 648 x 60 pixels. Resize (Ctrl+T) the layer you pasted
(Ctrl+V) to fix over this dimension.
- Don't forget to use URL's you're trying
to promote in your email signature file. Click "Scarborough Beach" in mine below and
you'll see what I mean. If you can't get a graphic
designer to make a nice signature file then just stick a banner
ad from your site and your contact detail in it for now.
- Here's a
free plug for some very new clients. Tell them to give
you a 4 Web Marketing Ezine subscribers discount or else I want
to know from you if they don't.
- If you have an interesting tip, product
or service useful 4 aspiring web marketers, let me know so I can
mention it in the next quarterly newsletter.
Sorry I can't email any individual answers to
FAQs
but one of the problems of managing a number of my own popular
web sites in the
top 0.1% (sic) of www popularity is the flood of about
1,800 emails and many phone calls each day. After another 14
hour day this was not proof read at 2am so too bad about
mistakes. Of the 200 legitimate messages that get past my
Spam Arrest service
if I spent half an hour on each
that'd be 100 hours a week with no time for work getting my
clients on page 1 of the SEs. Will be looking forward to
staying in Cairns
Australia and that free
helicopter flight to the Great Barrier Reef while advising
www.tropicalexperience.com.au
how to improve their
1,200% (sic) reach to web users over the past few months.
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