How to Start an Ezine
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Web Marketing Ezine 1 Feb'05
LINK TRACKING
With advances in the IT (Information
Technology) world, more than ever share holders and
directors are expecting more ACCOUNTABILITY for their
marketing dollar. Gone are the days of throwing marketing
budgets at an ad agency and hoping for a ROI. People want to
know what works and by how much. How much bang per buck.
Standard site stats which come free with good web hosting
service providers are often very comprehensive but even
after analysis often don't tell you how many people clicked
on a link on a web page or email or who signed up and paid
online.
Digital Junction have been offering me tracking from my
sites for quite some time but until they're ready I've been
using a Canadian company
www.eztrackz.com/tracking.aspx?id=28333 which charge one
cent per click. Notice the unique ID at the end of
their URL. That means as an
affiliate of
EzyTrackz I know how many of you clicked on their link.
I also get paid every time someone signs up for their
tracking services:
-
With each unique EzyTrackz
tracking link you will:
-
Know how many people
clicked on your
banner
ads
-
Know how many people
clicked on your text or hyperlink
-
Know how many people
clicked on your
ezine ad
-
Know how many people
clicked in your newsletter
-
Identify fraudulent
clicks in your
PPC advertising
-
Track your PPC
advertising
-
Know who, in your
mailing list, opened your email message
-
Know who, in your
mailing list, clicked in your email message
-
Know if your online ad
resulted in a sale
-
Know if your online
ad was profitable
Using
EzyTrackz helps improve their
site popularity, which in turn helps push them up search
engine results pages but unfortuantely does little to for
your own site when it comes to search engine, hence another
reason I'm waiting for
Digital Junction so that my own domain
proceeds my unique ID. The good news: with their 14 day free
trial and EASY set-up you won't lose any money and little
time with
EzyTrackz
WEB SERVER RELIABILITY:
Mentioned before but because it is soooo important for
maintaining search engine position, here it is again: What
do you think the search engines would do to your listing if
their users persistantly saw messages like "Error 404 Page
can not be displayed"? Do you think your position might
fall? U bet. There should be no excuses such as a car
crashed into a power poll out side our data centre. All real
data centres which house web servers should have all
contingencies covered such as bomb proof walls, backup power
supplies, spare parts, data security systems ahead of
hackers etc. If they don't look for another web hosting
service provider.
CONTENT:
What keeps
visitors to your site coming back? Ever wondered why Telcos
and electronic goods companies like Sony buy Hollywood
studios? New content. U bet. The line beteen interactive
cable TV and the www will be a blur in the future. Any
one can broadcast sound and vision. Anyone can set-up as an
online news broadcaster. The part
4 Web Marketing
plays is making our client's sites popular. If you don't
have time to create new content for your site, hire someone
or buy it. We have the top university IT student from her
state in Germany working on content for our clients. She
specialises in corporate design.
PROMINANCE:
Keep your
most important phrases near the top of your page. Check this
in html view. Tables will shunt your text arround in html
view. Though search engines won't tell you their secret
algorithems for ranking your listing, I'm guessing some SE's
are also looking for your important phrase near the bottom
of web pages too.
LINK
EXCHANGE:
I can not understate how important
this is. It appears to be a simple as asking your
associates, "Please can we swap links" Then so as not to
offend them with broken promises, someone has to add their
link on your links page and upload it ASAP. ASAP is the
problem. In a perfect world you'd get a batch of associates
wanting to swap links all at the same time on the same day
so you can upload new links on YOUR links page in ONE
BATCH. Unfortuantely it's not a perfect world but there
are, like stock exchanges, link exchanges and we have
software to automatically access the world's larges link
exchange centre.
4 Web Marketing not only automate this process but also
provide quality assessment of who we agree to link exchange
with on behalve of our link exchange clients.
I've started to archive web marketing
newsletters here 1 Feb'05:
Until the next quarterly free web
marketing tips here is some old info at
FAQs
Web Marketing Ezine 1 Feb'05
Dear Subscriber,
Previously I've gone into technicalities of
search engine optimisation or as you US folks spell "optimization" of
web pages for positioning on search engines but with a
1,900% (sic) increase in reach per million users of one of my
volunteer community sites I want to give you some reasons both technical
and other for such a dramatic increase. The site is
www.scarboro.info The popularity of this site about beach culture
and networking for a suburb of a small remote city being in the top 1.5%
world wide is amazing.
- The hovering at the top of
screen, drop down navigation is consistent on nearly every
page
- The bulletin board is a free community service.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. 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)
- 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
- more work needs to be
done on the
www.perthperth.com and
- there is much less
competition on SEs for the suburb than the city it's
in.
- 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.
- 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.xyz
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
- 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, which after training for me will come via
Digital Junction's Free set-up of their
Digital Interactive Marketing Engine. 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. Next month I'll be looking
forward to staying at
Regency Palms and that free helicopter flight to the
Great Barrier Reef while advising
Tropical Experience in Cairns how to improve their
1,200% (sic) reach to web users over the past few months.
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