JimWorld Gazette Issue #22 09/26/1997

Gazette - Issue #22 - September 26, 1997

-- Stuff
-- A Bit Of Bragging
-- Snippets
-- I Just Hate When That Happens
-- Creating Site Income
-- Need More Hits?
-- Tips From The Hitman - Part XI

Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g22

STUFF

I have a good place for you to submit your site and at the same time do a good deed for VirtualPROMOTE. Surfer's Choice is having their voting for their 1997 Best of the Web awards and I'd really like to have one. VirtualPROMOTE is nominated under Web Promotion. Cast your vote at http://www.technomax.com/surferschoice/vote.htm After you vote, you will have the opportunity to submit your own site, so everybody wins. We need to get this done by the end of the month, so vote early, but only vote once. Thanks. While you are at Surfer's Choice, wander around and experience a beautifully constructed web entity. It has a very clear focus on it's purpose and can act as an inspiration to all of us that don't see the goal so clearly.

Nick wanted me to thank everyone that responded to his ad for magazines subscriptions to help his school. He was thrilled. If you are going to contact him about a subscription, do it soon as the contest is over soon and he still needs 3 more sales to get the day off school.

OK. Where is the METAbot? As Steve and I worked on it, I kept asking for more features every day. We finally reached the point where it was issue version 1.0 right away or wait a few days and get everything in that I wanted and then put it into testing with you folks. I opted for the 'wait till it's all done' (don't tell Steve, but I do have some more features written down.) Sometime this week, the button on my personal server home page will contain a link and you will be able to use it. The main thing it is missing is actually up to me to catch up on. When the METAbot finds problems in your page, I need to write the directions and help text that let's you know how to fix them.

Next week the Gazette will have a lead-off article by Amy at coolshopping.com http://www.coolshopping.com You're gonna love it. I do.

A BIT OF BRAGGING

"We have finally finished our award stuff, and you are a winner. Actually you were a winner before we had the award together, but now it is official.

Congratulations - you have won the SmartClicks SmartSite Award!

This award is very hard to win (because we are very picky). We review hundreds of sites every day, and your site has proven itself outstanding. http://www.smartclicks.com/contests.html#smartsite

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"Thanks for helping to make Suite 101 a winner. As one of Suite 101's Homepage Authoring Top 5 sites, you've played a big part in getting our readers to the best of the Web quickly. To show our appreciation, we're sending you a Top 5 award of your own. Because we could point our readers to excellent sites like yours, Suite 101's Beta 4 version won seven of the eleven Canadian Internet awards for which it was nominated.

Your site, which has been chosen by me Nathan Lebovic, contributing editor for Homepage Authoring, as one of the "best of the Internet," deserves particular recognition: http://www.suite101.com/topics/page.cfm/401 Best wishes to you and your site. I know the effort, time and dedication it takes to be the "Best."

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Computerworld Magazine has listed VirtualPROMOTE on their short-list of Webvertising Resources. http://www.computerworld.com/links/970609adverlinks.html This listing is cranking out bunches of visitors each day. In general, the 'short-lists' all over the web are real traffic producers and are something you should be striving to get within your industry. Almost everyone has a 'short-list' and you can best get their attention by sending the webmaster a nice email about your site. Look at the magazines and associations for your industry.

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"Your site has been selected as one of the "MIS Best of the Net" by The Mining Company! This is a real honor as very few sites get to display our graphic. Your site will be featured in our MIS "Net Finds" section at the Mining Company's web site. Sites receiving our MIS award graphic must either make an outstanding contribution to the MIS profession, or provide an exceptional on-line Management Information Systems resource. VirtualPROMOTE, by its usefulness for corporate MIS webmasters, certainly qualifies in this regard." Russ Finney, MIS Guide, The Mining Company http://mis.miningco.com

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"The Ultimate Exposure 200 has picked your website as a "Top 25 Website Of The World!" for their August / September 1997 edition. This is our ninth edition of the Top 25 listing. We would like to honor your website by presenting you with our latest graphic award. Our award is like no other on the Internet today." http://turnpike.net/~hotspot/exposure.html Check out this cool site and while you're at it, submit your site.

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"This is to inform you that your Web site has been featured in Internet Update, a daily feature on the Newsbytes wire service. It appears in the September 8 edition, which will be available on our wire and Web site from early Monday morning (EDT) and from our customer sites later in the day. Such sites include CNN Custom News, USA Today, Newspage and many others." http://www.newsbytes.com

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"At my Muses & Knowledge site, I offer an award called the Best Kept Secrets Award to sites that I find to be some of the Net's Best Kept Secrets. I really don't know if you're site would still be considered a Best Kept Secret, as I believe your popularity has soared now a'days, but you've been the greatest help to me, to the promotion of my own site, and it's in my opinion VirtualPROMOTE is one of the best, if not THE best site around for not only promoting a site, but LEARNING HOW to get one ready to promote. Therefore, if you'll accept my humble award, it would greatly please me to present you with The Muses & Knowledge Best Kept Secrets Award. And once again, thank you so much for just being here, on the net, free to the public and doing what it is you do. Virtual Promote has been the greatest help to me and my site." http://www.io.com/~frogway/

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"Hi, um, I guess I'd jes like to letcha know you've won the first Nitrotic Award...you're also linked someplace on my website, don't quite know where. ack. Sorries to be informal but i'm not an experienced award giver or anything, this is the first award I've presented to anyone but myself. (hehehe...its contenting, at least, i have an award on my homepage!! whooee!! to bad its my own award)

Er, your site has won the award on the basis of the following: exceptional content, appearance, and loading time. I know this is quite non-original but sites also haveta have a few certain touches, like exhibiting personality in certain areas, to win the award." http://members.tripod.com/~Nitro461/home.html

SNIPPETS

Want to pick up several awards for your site - guaranteed? Stop in at the corporation's site at http://www.thecorporation.com/icon/icon.html and pick up as many as you want - free. Make sure to get the 'Stop Kitty Porn' award. It is a much sought after icon. But somebody will probably steal it from you as soon as you post it to your home page. Well, that's just life happening.

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If you publish an electronic journal, newsletter, whatever - you should be listed in NewJour at http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/. It's free.

I JUST HATE WHEN THAT HAPPENS

Before I start this one I need to make something perfectly clear: I am not one of the Microsoft bashers that are so well represented on the web. Let's look at the reason behind that claim. I am a partner in a company that creates very advanced software technology that only runs on Windows systems. Talk about biting the hand and all that.

Now, you know there is a 'but' in here someplace, right? Of course. If I were to never write about Microsoft, how would they know that I still love them? But (here it comes) if I write about Microsoft, it is easier to write about the things they do wrong then to search out the stuff they do right. And since I am by nature lazy, I always take the easy way out. So let us take a look at a recent Oops from Bill (Notice I didn't say the 'latest' boo-boo. This item is several days old which is plenty of time for Bill's gang to make several more Oops.

(Jim, get on with it. You're babbling again. Get to the point!)

Ok. Recently Microsoft took a look at their online travel operation and decided that too many people were asking for quotes and then not buying anything. I think we can all agree that this is a legitimate problem. It takes effort and time to service looky-loos, right? You bet. Got a problem there, Bill. Better fix it. Ok, let's trace through the analysis that Microsoft most certainly went through in their search for the Perfect Solution.

First, there is the problem that all of that traffic is bogging down the NT servers. Fewer people = less server slowdown. Or, God forbid, they could fix NT Server so that it didn't run out of steam before reaching a traffic level that allows a bit of profit. This would not only help the Microsoft Webmasters, but Microsoft's NT Server customers as well. Sounds like the right way to go. We'll probably find that this is what they wound up doing. But let's continue with the possibilities anyway, even though this is so obviously what they decided to do.

Next, they could ask those hoards of looky-loos why they didn't buy from Microsoft. This may sound radical, but asking people why they don't buy is 3rd day, Marketing 101. It does little for you to talk to the ones that did buy. What are you trying to find out from them? How to turn them off as well? No, go ask thousands of those non-buyers what it would have taken to get their business. At Microsoft the assumption is that these non-buyers aren't really traveling and just want to spend their time filling out forms for a trip they never intend to take. What? Huh? Yea, right.

Let's take a leap of faith here and make the unlikely assumption that something is not exactly perfect here. Could all of those people posting to the newsgroups with complaints about the Microsoft travel service actually have a valid issue? Could the product be flawed, and if MS fixed those flaws that more looky-loos would become valued customers? You have to understand that Microsoft advertises that their travel and ticketing service has the best rates available anywhere. They've got ALL the fares. But the Looky-Loos (non-buyers) are complaining that calling a travel agent can almost always get you a better fare. It would seem that the Microsoft data base is a bit shy of a full load, to use the standard new-baby analogy. This particular analogy is probably more relevant than you might at first think.

Wouldn't it make a lot of sense to fix the product so that the percentage of customers to Looky-loos goes more in Microsoft's favor? I'd bet that people would love to buy from their web site if they could get access to all the fares. They did go to the trouble of trying to buy from MS, didn't they?

So, you can tell that this is so obvious that Microsoft surely did both the NT fix up and this product fix up. Now they have a spiffy server product. NT customer are sending Bill flowers and the travel site is humming along racking up new levels of sales every week. Life is good.

So, here we have two very good ways to attack this problem, either one of which would turn the whole thing around. Of course Bill doesn't need me to tell him this. He is actually a very bright guy. And he has surrounded himself with MBAs and PhDs that I'm sure suggested these ideas and probably many more that I would never have thought of. Let's face it, Microsoft didn't get to where they are by making monumental blunders -all- the time.

Ok. Which one of these ideas did they go for. The envelope please. And the winner is: None Of The Above. Thank you for playing.

What they did is zero in on a solution that I readily admit I am not smart enough to have come up with. Since the problem is that not enough buyers are coming in and the non-buyers are dragging down the system: Ah-Ha! Let's get rid of the non-buyers so that more buyers can come. This has the added advantage of getting a lot of press by taking the lead in the battle to make e-commerce profitable for one and all. Throw the bums out. If they can't whip out their credit card and buy, black-ball them from the site. Don't let them come back and there is now room for all of those cash customers that were desperately trying to get into the overloaded server and force money on MS. No wasting money on fixing the NT Server. No throwing away good money on fixing the travel product. No need to bring in the suits to talk to all of those deadbeats that didn't order. A real stroke of marketing genius. That's why their suits get the big bucks.

Now Microsoft is being hammered from every direction for making a dumb move. And since they are genetically incapable of ever saying "Oops", they now have to turn this into a crusade to help us all make more money. Get rid of those non-buying moochers.

How does this particular tirade apply to your web-life? Haven't a clue.

Let me digress for a moment. I know you are shocked that I would digress, but yes, we shall. I had to say the "Haven't a clue" line here because I got a note last week from someone really irritated with me for telling my shaggy dog story about how SmartDesk benefits from VirtualPROMOTE. He was upset that I didn't tell all of you exactly what to do at the end of the article. Fortunately I was able to offset this one message with a bit over 300 from you-all that thanked me for giving you something to think about and with enough detailed information to help you reach an informed decision. That's my job folks. You know that I'm not here to tell you what to do. I've got enough work running my own business. I don't have time to run yours. My goal is, and always has been, to tell you what can be done, and trying to tell you more than you want to know about the subject under discussion.

Now back to Bill. The decision Microsoft made was, in my opinion, the only bad decision that was even open to them. They must have had a real struggle coming up with this bad of a decision. We don't need to talk about why it was a bad decision. I think it explains itself.

Some of you on the Gazette list are in the travel industry. I hope to see you running banners this week proclaiming "Microsoft might think you are trailer-trash, but we don't. We have -all- the great rates in our computer. Come on by and visit a while." BTW, if you think I wouldn't run that banner, you haven't been reading the Gazette long enough. I'd run the banner, send out press releases, talk to every reporter who called and build a complete site around that theme. I'd probably get a million dollars worth of free advertising space in the articles that would be written about this bizarre travel company. Yahoo! would make me a pick-of-the-day. And I'd retire with all the toys.

This is why you have to watch your competitors every day. EVERY DAY. Just wait for them to do something stupid. Trust me, they will. We all do. Then turn that boo-boo into an opportunity for you. And don't be shy. Newspapers and magazines don't write about companies that are trying to be oh-so polite about their competitors. They write about corporate street brawls. You don't lie about your competitors or their products. You don't lie about your products. You don't take personal shots at the competition. You don't bite his ear off in the clinches. But if they make a dumb decision, make the most of it. That's marketing.

How do you take advantage of these fleeting moments of opportunity? One thing you need is an adman on retainer to you company all the time. This need not be terribly expensive. Find a semi-retired adman that has done great work all his life and cut a deal with him. Tell him you want 2 hours a month of phone consultation to just talk about what you could or should be doing. Ask her or him about each boo-boo you see and ask the adman for an opinion and some creative thoughts on how to turn it into an advantage.

Expect to pay from $100 to $150 an hour for a good adman. Consult him/her every month at least. Their job is to think over-the-top and outside the box that you are in. Adman can see things that you are too close to see. Should you do everything adman says? No. Of course not. The only person's advise you always act on is mine. But adman will give you enough ideas in an hour to trigger several new projects for you every month. That's their job.

That's all. That's all I wanted to say. I feel better now.

CREATING SITE INCOME

Another way to create income to your site is the 'Peep-show' format. The concept is simple: "Come over and look at my site. You'll see a lot of slick marketing prose explaining the wonders to be yours as soon as you use our secure order form to pay us for a membership." This is a perfectly acceptable way to support the effort required to produce and maintain a web site that has content not leading you to purchase a product.

You are going to be hard pressed to get people to subscribe in order to come see your sales brochure for your products. As attractive as it might sound at first, if I tried to get everybody to pay a membership fee before they could look at the sales site for WebSuite, I know for sure I could put that site on a much slower server. Who needs all that bandwidth for one visitor per day? While this might seem an obvious thing to all of us in the Gazette family, I put this in for the wayfarers that wander through the archives.

Even beyond that, I hear you saying "But Jim. Nobody would try to charge for that type of content." Yeh, right. I've seen sites with lots of promise of content and absolutely nothing behind the password login screen except hype for some product. This is not the way to fame and riches on the Internet. What is the way? If I had that answer as an absolute I would be beaming the Gazette via satellite from the deck of my yacht in the middle of the ocean. But I do know a lot of ways that don't work. And some pretty good guidelines of ways to get to the holy grail of webdom.

Let's take a look at a site that I think is on the right track. Healthlinks. http://www.healthlinks.net/

Healthlinks is based on a need. That need exists in the healthcare field. The explosion of information on the web has created a demand on healthcare workers for knowledge that they have never been educated for. How to efficiently use the web to stay abreast of new knowledge in the healthcare world. There is healthcare data under every virtual-rock you turn over. Tons of it. Some of it is even reliable. So, where do people trained to be entrusted with a very precious comodity - namely our very lives, go to find out what is a hit, and what is a miss - information-wise? Enter Healthlinks.net.

The health care force behind this site is Stan Gelber, a long term lecturer on accessing healthcare information by healthcare workers. During his lectures, Stan explains how to use the Internet, how to use computers, and how to evaluate the validity of sites. But the people in Stan's classes wanted more. They wanted a service that would let them access information on the web that had already been screened and the crackpots eliminated.

Healthlinks.net now offers a rapidly growing directory of web sites that have already been screened. They also offer healthcare workers the opportunity to stay abreast of changes in the healthcare segment of the web through their newsletter that is included in the subscription fee. Also included are chat rooms where healthcare workers can meet and chat with their peers. Nurses can talk to nurses about nursing issues. In addition there are forums planned for each peer group in the healthcare field.

This is a well-rounded service to an eager audience and it is priced low enough to be affordable to anyone, but high enough to allow the quality of the site and its offerings to remain very high. This is the key to success. Target a market that has a real need and let them pay to support the effort required to solve their problem.

Drop in and take a look at their site. They are allowing visitors into the Members-Only area right now for a free peek, so this is perfect timing for us to see behind the wall without having to pay or write-away for permission and a password.

The structure of their site is correct for what they are offering. Outside the wall is a free area that explains and sells the service. It is easy to navigate and the information is presented in several different ways so that if you don't get the drift of something, it will be presented again elsewhere in a different way. And so that people will list it as a place to submit a site for a free listing, there is even a submission form on the outside.

Once you use the secure server form to purchase a subscription, you are issued a password and user name that will get you into the Members-Only area. There you find the searchable directory with reviews of each site listed. And more FAQs to help the beginning Net user. And all of the other services nicely laid out for easy access. And notice that there is another site submission form in the Members-Only area. The operators of the site probably give more immediate attention to sites submitted by their paying members. They should, because the sites are being submitted by healthcare professionals and therefore more likely to be desirable sites for the directory.

The site runs quickly because while there are a significant number of graphics, they are re-used throughout the site. This make the site fast but it still has a full look.

Think about what you want to offer when you consider charging for access to a site. And think about what effort is required to offer that content. Healthlinks doesn't have to offer everything that Yahoo! offers. They can limit their content to healthcare issues only and teach their members how to find other categories elsewhere. The bottom line is you have to offer more than a big list of links and a few graphics to sell memberships. There must be great value that can't easily be found elsewhere. Think niche-marketing.

As I write this it occurs to me that I should probably take my own advice and create a membership area on VirtualPROMOTE for all the good stuff and the Gazette. (Bet that gets me a lot of mail.)

That reminds me. I've been getting a bit tired of the VirtualPROMOTE look. I'm thinking of a redesign just to break the monotony. If you have any really strong thoughts on this, drop me a line either way.

NEED MORE HITS?

You should already know about this one, but just in case you missed it: The Internet Resources Database is an online web directory in two parts. One database for personal sites and another for commercial sites. Their goal is to provide a searchable database of web information and sites that can be searched while the user is off-line which saves connect time for users paying a premium for Internet access. You can get listed by starting at http://www.entrepreneurs.net/mbmarkt/cl-phpag.htm

123Link is a searchable directory of commercial web site. You can get a listing for free, or you can upgrade several ways for a fee. Start with the free listing and see what kind of response you get. http://www.123Link.com/forms/addurl.html

A Business Compass's (ABC) http://kelsey.abcompass.com/about.html#submit goal is to list sites that business people can use for market research, industry data, news, analysis, and competitive intelligence. Sites are indexed into four different categories: business function, industry type, location, and language. If this fits your site, submit it to ABC.

EZ Connect at http://www.ezconnect.com/submit.htm accepts listings from all types of sites to be included in their directory. Nice site. Nice presentation and well promoted. Should get you some traffic.

BizWeb http://www.bizweb.com/InfoForm/ is a directory of web links to companies with information about their products and/or services. The intent of BizWeb is to aid the Internet shopper in finding information about products using the web. BizWeb isn't a directory of non-profit organizations, information resources, handy shareware, or cool pictures. But if you are a business with a web presence then they would like to know about your site.

GunHoo: http://www.gunsgunsguns.com/gunhoo/etc/add.htm Gun Pages Central is a continuation of the effort started on The Gun Page to build an index of firearms related links. It started as a list of less than 50 links (this was years ago - when the web was still young). As the list grew and the job of editing it by hand became bigger and bigger - an automated procedure was started. Eventually this grew into the system used today. There are hundreds (900+) URLs in the database that are used to generate the alphabetical and categorical files on GunHoo.

Rescue Island is a directory of commercial goods and services at http://www.rescueisland.com/search/en/index.html. It's been around for a long time and just seems to keep growing which indicates that it must do a good job for enough people to keep it going. That's usually a tip-off to a site worth registering with.

TIPS FROM THE HITMAN - PART XI

Last time out I started into the use of email in your online endeavors. Email is the great communicator on the Internet. Sure, there are the Internet phones, but these require the party on the other end to be using the same "variety" of Internet phone software you happen to be using. For the time being, Internet phones are still not practical for the average Internet business. There are some great systems that are emerging that work well to save larger businesses with established Intranets money on their long distance and fax bills. For most of us, this method of cheap communication is still down the road as an everyday tool of Internet business. This leaves us with the old standard, good old email.

As I mentioned earlier, your dependence on email and the volume of mail you receive will increase with time. For me, the volume of mail seems to be proportional to the success of my business. When I started in 1995, it was not unusual to get no email in a day at all! This is normal at the start, email is very much like traffic to your web site, it starts off slow and grows with your business.

So, why is the proper handling of email traffic important? Quite simply, people will make judgment calls about your business or service or you in general based on the way you handle your email. What do I mean? I sent an email reply to a company that sent me direct advertising several days ago. They had a service that appeared to be reasonably priced, the information they sent was short, concise and to the point. They had instructions for removal, and they had instructions for more information. I hit reply and entered more info in the subject line. I expected to get a response by auto- responder in a few minutes. That never happened. I figured the email was being handled one on one to personalize the responses, great, I waited two days for a response and nothing. OK, maybe it was the mail server that screwed things up. I went to the web site, found the email address for customer service and information and sent another email. That was 4 days ago. I never heard back on either of my inquiries, so, there is now about a zero chance of me doing business with this company. Why? They had great prices, great presentation and made it easy to contact them or more information. Well, if you do all these great things to get someone interested in your product or service, then just do not make time to follow up with answering emails, you have cut your own throat.

I start each day going through my email and answering as many as I can as soon as I have read it. If the email is something that will require me to get back to the potential customer later, I send them an email saying I need to gather some data to answer their question and will get back to them when I have the information. I then file the email in the appropriate mailbox or mailbox folder with an action flag. If there is someone I need to contact to get data for that potential customer, I try to do that email before moving on to the next unread message. I know this seems like it might be time consuming. Well, you're right! I spend the first two hours or more each day handling email. I give it such a high priority that I do it before I even check my phone messages. I honestly would prefer to handle my online business by email. Almost without exception calls are made after seeing my Web page and they are usually questions that are answered on the same page where they got the phone number, had they taken the time to read. I do realize there are many out there who still like to make a deal on the phone, it personalizes the connection, you can identify someone who does not know what they are talking about quickly or form an opinion about the business based on how they handle a phone message. Well guess what, these same things that apply to phone calls will be applied to the way you handle email. Make answering your email more important than the second cup of coffee! (not the first cup mind you)

I think I made my point here. Make email a priority! Answer email as soon as you can and try to make it a regular part of your day to handle email. If you do not start this process when you are only getting 20 a week, you will be in trouble when it is 200 a day. Next week I will get into the actual techniques of managing large amounts of email, how I do it and why the email program on your browser is just not going to cut it down the road.

Hayden Mitchell mailto:hayden@webthemes.com Web Themes http://www.webthemes.com/

(Jim-- I look forward to Hayden's next article. I am so far behind on email I may never catch up. If you've written me and not yet gotten an answer, hang on. It's coming. Let me make one giant apology to everyone at one time.)