JimWorld Gazette Issue #20 09/12/1997

Gazette - Issue #20 - September 12, 1997

-- Snippets
-- More About Sweepstakes
-- A New Feature In The Gazette - Week 2
-- Need More Hits?
-- Tips From The Hitman - Part X

Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g20

We seem to have survived last week's conversion to RevNet GroupMaster http://www.revnet.com as our new way to send out this newsletter. I have to tell you, it was wonderful not having to handle all of the bounced mail and bad email addresses. That alone saved me several hours this week. And the mailing itself took me less than one minute as opposed to having my machine tied up for 20 hours.

It's a good thing I saved all that time. This week was exciting. Many of you stopped in to chat with me in my new chat rooms. I didn't get to chat with as many as I would have liked, but I was buried building the new dealer sales site for our new Personal Web Server - WebSuite. It's open for looking now and you are all invited to stop in and take a look. It's running on the server on my desktop computer at http://jimworld.nu/websuite/index.html and I would appreciate any comments or things you observe that aren't working right. It goes out to the dealers next Wednesday, so I don't have a lot of time to keep compulsively making changes.

I will be much more available this coming week in the chat rooms at http://jimworld.nu/. When you go into a chat room that is empty, my computer pages me with a Star Trek sound file (Nick's choice) so give me a minute to join you. Don't run off. I really enjoy this idea of having chat rooms right on my desktop computer.

SNIPPETS

If you publish a zine or newsletter, stop in at The Book of Zines web site and check out their new page on How To Publicize Your Zine at http://thetransom.com/chip/zines/resource/publicz.html. Lots of links to places to publicize your zine. This should be a regular stop for any e-publisher. Browse around the rest of the site. I promise, the rest of the site doesn't have nearly as many links to VirtualPROMOTE - yet.

Stearman's Choice Awards http://www.samsays.com identify specialized software best suited for special needs of business users. While there are literally thousands of software applications available for various specialized business needs, most receive little if any press and are marketed direct by the various publishers. This makes choosing the best software for individual business needs an almost impossible task.

A doctor is a doctor, not a computer jockey. If he or she is looking for software, most opt for what an associate is already using. The Stearman site reviews software in four major business segments: not-for-profits organizations, medical practices, professional services and small-to-medium businesses. If you're looking for business software, stop in and do a bit of research. If you publish software, try real hard to get it reviewed here. It generates a lot of traffic.

Stop by Bruce Clay's site at http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm for a well written tutorial on improving your rankings in the search engines. The other don't miss page is his description of what to do if someone rips off your web site. Bad, bad webmaster.

If you are a Promotion Spider user and haven't upgraded to the Pro version, you really should. Stop by http://www.beherenow.com/spider/ and take a look at the Visibility Checker that comes with it. Spider Pro lets you find out how well you rank in the top 8 search engines and directories, under as many different keywords as you want to check. It lets you know where any page in your domain stands in the top 100 hits on each engine. This has gotten me very spoiled. It is always accurate every time I've gone out and verified it on each search engine. Now I've built a little file to keep my results in that I can sort by date within keyword and plot how I'm doing. Very helpful. Wish I ranked higher in a couple of them. Boy, this site promotion stuff takes a lot of time, doesn't it?

I keep telling you that the stuff in the Gazette and at VirtualPROMOTE works if you just keep your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel, your feet on the path, and your hands on the keyboard (that seems to about cover it although it sounds very uncomfortable.)

Here is yet another example from Tina Stamper mailto:writelady@inetone.net

"I've just spent yet another day working almost entirely from your site. And it occurred to me how I really couldn't have done any of this promotion of my website if it hadn't been for the wonderful tutorials I found at your site and read over, and also how my very first submissions to search engines and indexes came from your site as well. So, I thought how very wonderful it would be if I could place a link to your site from my HTML Basics tutorial page that I offer on my site, for the people who take the tutorial and put webpages up to go and learn how to promote their sites. I found your page with the buttons and banners for linking back, and I grabbed a banner for my page. You can find your link at: http://www.io.com/~frogway/"

Thanks Tina. Hopefully your experiences will help a few people stay motivated until they get through the process. That is as much a part of what the Gazette is all about as anything. I can list all the sites on the web for you to visit and submit to, but if you give up, your site just stops growing. So, take a deep breath and go forth and promote. The end does come. Of course, that is about the time you start over, but don't even think about that. I don't.

I've spent some time playing around with the Press Release Factory http://prweb/factory/default.htm over at PRWeb http://www.prweb.com. This cool wizard takes you through a question and answer session and then for 20 bucks, it generates a well crafted press release. If you are not doing press releases because you think you can't write well enough, now you have no excuse. Zero. Zip. Nada. This wizard writes good stuff. If you think 20 bucks is a lot, you've never had a release written before, have you? I wish I had all the money back I've spent having 'professional marketing writers' prepare press releases for me that weren't nearly as good as the ones cranked out by the Press Release Factory. I just hope nobody comes up with a wizard to write newsletters. I'll have nothing left to do. I'd have to get a job. Yuck!

MORE ABOUT SWEEPSTAKES

Are you running a contest of any type on your web site? Since Susan Donahue got us all thinking about sweepstakes in last week's issue, I imagine many of you are thinking about starting one, or already have one going. It's a great way to build traffic, but I would imagine that you are saying to yourself (and a few friends) "That's great Jim, but now that you got us all motivated, what now? How do you suggest we get people to come enter our contest?' Funny you should ask.

An interesting thing about contests and 'free stuff' of all descriptions. You don't have to work very hard to get lots of people to come and enter. I've been having some conversation with the operator of a great web site for party supplies called BirthdayUSA at http://www.birthdayusa.com/. They started a prize drawing for free boxes of party supplies and posted it to their site. They did a bit of promotion for the drawings and guess what? Their traffic has tripled in about 3 weeks.

Is this necessarily a good thing? If you are running a site whose purpose is to generate large traffic counts because you make your money from selling advertising, this is not just a good thing, it's a great thing. If you sell something on your site, this may not be a great thing, nor even a good thing. It could even be a disaster if everyone who comes and registers receives a free gift or sample. Every one of those free gifts or samples probably costs you money. Product cost, mailing, postage, bookkeeping costs. This can all mount up very quickly on the Internet.

You might think it a good idea to let 100 or 1,000 people try your new product and turn a nice percentage of them into paying customers. That is the goal of promotions, isn't it? But what if 10,000 or 100,000 people show up and register for something free?

Got enough scratch around to meet that demand? If so, I have a great investment opportunity for you. Custom designed bridges.

So, how do you get around this? One way is to have drawings instead of free samples or free-to-everyone-who-registers giveaways. This lets you control the total expense. Give away prizes to 5 people a week, or 20 or 30. Just don't say 'everybody' or 'every 5th person' and you will have a firm cap on your exposure.

Now, some places you can go to announce your Sweepstakes (other than all of the usual places, of course.)

The Contest Catalogue at http://contest.catalogue.com/contests/entry.html keeps a current directory of all of the contests they can find on the web. The listings are free and they get good traffic.

All Star Sweepstakes at http://www.allstarsweepstakes.com/allstarsubmiturl.html lists contests and sweepstakes. Like most sweepstakes directories, they don't list anything that requires a fee to enter. Nice site.

Alt.Consumers.Sweepstakes news:alt.consumers.sweepstakes is a newsgroup to announce new sweepstakes and contests. Their FAQ is at http://www.sff.net/people/toymgr/acs/faq.htp and the most recent edition is at http://sff.net/people/toymgr/acs. When posting a sweepstakes or contest to this newsgroup include the URL as well as any restrictions, such as age, country or number of times you can enter. Include a brief summary of the prizes as well as any closing date.

ThreadTreader's WWW Contests Guide at http://www.4cyte.com/ThreadTreader/addform.html announces that they are the original contest directory on the web. Don't know if that's true, but they have a lot of content.

Sweepstakes Online at http://www.sweepstakesonline.com/contestsubmit.html will post your contest for free, but only for 5 days unless you put one of their banners on your home page. I saw the banner. I wouldn't.

Links To Free Stuff On The Web at http://uv1.atlantica.net/public/yellow/freebies.htm Lots of listings.

Ray's Links To Sweepstakes at http://www.sff.net/people/sweeper/Sweeps.html Submit yours by email.

That's more than enough. Trust me, every one of these sites has links to dozens of other sites that want to list your sweepstakes or contest. Just keep going. There doesn't appear to be an end to the interest in freebies on the web, which leads us right back to: be careful what you offer to give away. You'll be broke and then you won't be able to afford Net access and I won't be able to send you the Gazette. Bummer.

A NEW FEATURE IN THE GAZETTE (WEEK 2)

Each week I'm going to give a lucky person the opportunity to tap into the enormous resource that is the subscriber base of this newsletter. I will select one or two questions from my never-ending In box and publish them here.

If you have any answers to the question, please send the answers to me at mailto:jim@jimworld.com with Diana as the Subject. and I'll post the summary next week.

Some of you heavy-hitter engine watchers, jump in here. This is a very good question. I'll include my observations with the summary.

As this list has continued to grow, I have been amazed at the number of highly skilled webmasters and web marketers that are part of our growing group. I look forward to learning from this as well.

One final note. This is not a newsgroup where all, or even most, questions will make it into the list. Please understand that I will only be picking out questions that I think will be of broad interest to the rest of the subscribers. If your question doesn't make the list, it doesn't mean that it was a bad question.

Now, our second question:

This week's great question comes from Bonnie Bucqueroux mailto:bucquero@pilot.msu.edu. Sorry Bonnie, but you didn't have a URL in your email, so I couldn't give it a plug. Shame on you for not having a Signature file for your email program to automatically add to all of your messages. I'm not picking on you Bonnie (yeh, right.) Too much of the email I get from Gazette readers still doesn't have sigs. Don't make me post a list of your names. Put those sig files together. They are one of the 5 MOST Important Ways To Promote. I hate it when you guys make me nag at you.

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I would like to see the Gazette help me figure out how those who put up Diana sites succeeded in getting listed on search engines so quickly. (Or is that not how people were finding them?) I put up my one-page take called Deconstructing Diana, went to your site and listed it on most of the big search engines, yet my hits remained puny. Meanwhile, I visited sites that already had hundreds of thousands of hits. How did they do that? (And did that mean that other sites that were not on Diana had a longer wait to be listed?) If another situation (hopefully not tragic) presents itself, how do Virtual Promote readers get the edge?

NEED MORE HITS?

Get listed in Planet Search's search engine http://www.planetsearch.com/. Submit your URL and their spider "Fido" will pay you a visit in a few days and spider your site. You should be in the data base within a few days and generating traffic. Fido reads the META tags, so make sure yours are up to snuff. They will revisit your site on a regular basis (we hope) so they will be able to keep track of the changes to your site. Thanks to Eat Mor http://www.vol.com/~spycow/advertise/ for finding this one.

Jump over to Cyber Squall and submit to their free directory. http://www.cyber-squall.com/websearch/AddURL.html. They are promoting it so it should generate some hits.

One very good way to get new traffic is to put up a real fight for it. And you can do just that at The Site Fights. http://www.thesitefights.com/ The Hector/Oscar fight just finished tonight with another fine showing by both fighters, and somehow it made me think of The Site Fights. Kinda weird, but hey. Whatever works.

The Site Fights let your site duke it out with other sites and every time your site wins, you move on to the next round. Win enough times and you wind up in the finals where they send you a lot of traffic. Enough to make the whole thing more than worth the effort. Besides, it's fun. Fun is good. Traffic is better. Winning is best. Winning and getting more traffic is probably against the law, or taxable. Watch those head-butsand low blows and come out fighting.

If you want to exchange banner ads with other Chinese language sites, visit the 1-2-Free Banner Exchange at http://www.1-2-free.com/banner/chinese/ My Chinese being a bit rusty, since I haven't used it in this life, I can't tell you anything else about it. The lettering looks pretty if that helps.

Do you have a cool shopping site? If so, the people at coolshopping.com http://www.coolshopping.com/index.phtml want to know about it. Submit for free, and if you make the cut, you'll be in their directory and attracting 'shop til you drop' visitors every day.

TIPS FROM THE HITMAN - PART X

One of the first new things we are all introduced to when we get that first glimpse of the Internet, be it from that free disc you finally tried out from AOL or when you signed up with a local ISP, was email.

The whole Internet thing is a bit overwhelming to most new comers, and email is one of the items that is new to many if they have not been fortunate enough to have had some introduction to it's use at work.

Email has been around since the days of the old, academic Internet before the advent of the World Wide Web. Email is a powerful tool that you will find essential to doing business on the Internet. It has some great advantages over phone communication, the primary thing being it is the cheapest way to contact anyone anywhere in the world who has an email account also.

Of course email has a couple of drawbacks. For some the first big hurdle is you have to learn to type. I have seen this single reason hold people back from getting involved with email and hurting their growth and learning curve on the Internet. My advice regarding typing is jump in and just start doing it! If you want to learn to communicate effectively by this medium, you have to belly up to the keyboard. There is plenty of 'teach yourself to type' computer software that is dirt cheap. Or, if you insist on hunt and peck, so be it. I have seen some who get by just fine with this method and type over 25 words a minute. Just do it. You will be surprised how fast your typing speed will pick up once you make the decision to dive in.

Why is email so important to your Internet business or adventure? Quite simply it is the chosen and default "official" means of communication. Email in most cases is almost instantaneous. You hit send and it is there in seconds to minutes. Yes, email does get hung up for hours some time and we have all heard stories of AOL email taking days to get to the in box, but all in all it is a very effective and rapid means of cheap communication between parties world wide.

Because the net puts the world on your desktop, you must master email. In a Net business, your use of email is second only to your web page in the daily operation of you business. I would say that in my case it is as important to me now as my Web page in the daily operation of my Internet business. Email is used to send online order forms. It is used to make yourself available to answer questions or handle other inquiries about your business or product or whatever you're trying to accomplish by being on the Internet.

The first thing you need to make sure you have done when you are assigned an email address or chose an email address is to set up your email software to operate with the address so you can send and receive mail. Yes, this seems too obvious, but after almost two years of doing business on the Net, I still get email from people who have the return address in the email software or browser configured wrong, about 5%! I get the order, I send a confirmation, and the email is returned as undeliverable. So, I am forced to make a long distance call if I have a phone number or just drop the order in the trash.

Invariably the same customer will reply days later with the same bad address to inquire why I have not had the courtesy to respond to the order. Take the time to configure your return email address properly, read the online help or call the customer service at your provider. If your provider is not willing to help walk you through the set up step by step, you are with the wrong provider!

(Jim here - try sending an email to yourself to see how it comes out on the other end. Then, try responding to that message and see if everything works right. I still do this about once a week just to make sure everything is working OK. That's how important email is.)

When you first get on the net, you will likely not get much mail, but after you set up a web site and start promoting your site it will slowly start as a trickle and over time the management of your email will become so important that the success or failure of your business may actually hinge on how you chose to handle the influx of email. It is not unusual for a successful Internet venture to generate over 100 email messages a day.

I know people who get several hundred pieces of mail in any given 24 hours. To make it worse, you will become subject to unsolicited email advertising. I do not take the stance of some who condemn this type of email, but if you do not learn to manage the influx of mail that is going to come your way it will have a negative effect on your goals.

Next time around we will get into the methods of mail management, including my suggestions on email software, time management, and using the mail as a sales tool without being branded as a email abuser of one form or another. We will even wade through the controversy of unsolicited mail which always stirs up the pot!

Hayden Mitchell http://www.webthemes.com