JimWorld Gazette Issue #98 08/19/2000

JimWorld Gazette - Issue #98 - August 19, 2000

CONTENTS

• From Our Sponsor - QuinStreet
  
• Sometimes You Just Have To Put Out
  
• From Our Sponsor - LookSmart
  
• Snooping Will Kill The Internet
  
• The Etiquette Of Capitalization
  
• Four Ways To Profit From The Most Affordable Advertising Tool
  
• Snippets

Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g98

FROM OUR SPONSOR

RUN A WEBSITE?

INTERESTED IN EARNING REVENUE?

Get additional income with QuinStreet, the first specialty product affiliate program on the Internet.

By becoming a QuinStreet Member, you will have access to a portfolio of high commission programs - branded, quality products that are proven sellers. Plus a lucrative 2 tier program for all merchants.

• High commission rates for sales and referrals (2 Tier)
  
• Comprehensive, user-friendly Tracking and Reporting for Members

Come and check out our site - it is designed with you in mind - ease of use is our goal - we hope you like it.

http://start.quinstreet.com/sc/jim

SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO PUT OUT

While the Web is still a great place for free advertising and promotion, there are some times that you simply have to put out... money, that is.

I hear a lot of whining about how the Internet is meant to be FREE. Why should we have to pay to be listed on a search engine?

The answer is simple. Money.

Not your money. The search engine's money. As in payroll, rent, servers, insurance, computers and so on.

Do the math. Assume it takes even as little as 3 minutes to process a site submission. That means an average employee can review at most 20 sites each hour. Or only 160 sites each day.

Let's pretend that Yahoo! only gets 200,000 submissions per day. That would require 1,250 employees just to keep up with the reviews, not counting supervisors, managers, support staff and all of the other needs that 1,250 employees would have.

That only takes care of the new submissions. What about all of the maintenance required to a database as large as theirs? URL changes. Dead links. Name changes.

So what it really comes down to is this: the people that say the Net should be "Free" really mean that it should be free to them, as in somebody else should pay for it.

Unless you want to wait a long time to start getting traffic from search engines, you are going to have to pay a few fees. Consider the following four directories and the solid value they offer in return for very reasonable fees.


LookSmart
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g98LookSmart

Not being listed in LookSmart is like being the Invisible Man. Oops. I guess that should be the Invisible Person.

The reality is that LookSmart reaches a larger Internet audience than any other entity. Because they supply search results to such portals as CNN, MSN, Excite and AltaVista as well as through their own search site, LookSmart is able to expose your site to over 77% of the Internet population, or in round numbers, 58 million people. That's an impossible market penetration to ignore.

If your site is non-commercial, you can submit your site for a listing at no charge. However, there is no guarantee as to when, or even if your site will get reviewed.

If your site is commercial in nature, or if you want to get listed quickly in order to start your traffic flow, you have two options.

Option 1 allows you to submit for a review that is guaranteed to occur within 8 weeks. The fee is $49 US.

Option 2 costs $199 US and you are guaranteed to have your review within 48 hours. This is the fastest path you will find to long-term, free traffic as the fee is one time only.

These options do not guarantee that you will be listed in the LookSmart directory, but rather a guarantee that your site will be considered with the stated time frame.


GoTo.com
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g98GoTo

GoTo.com started the whole business of paid listings. Their model was unique when it launched. Site owners don't pay for listings - they pay for each visitor GoTo sends them as a result of the site's listing.

When you set up an account on GoTo, you select as many keywords as you want that are relevant to your site and you enter the amount you will pay for each visitor. The more you pay, the higher you are listed in the results. Some keywords only cost two or three cents to be listed on the first page of results. Some are well over a dollar per visitor. The cost is determined by all of the people bidding for traffic through that keyword.

In the past my advice has been to only bid enough to be on the first page of a search result. That way you were assured of getting a good flow of traffic without paying to be number one in that category.

Times have changed and I now suggest that you bid to be in the top five results for your primary keywords. GoTo has begun supplying results for other search engines, but usually they are only supplying the first five results and the search engine then uses its own database to supply the remainder of the results.

This makes it a better investment than ever before to have an active account at GoTo.


Yahoo!
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g98yahoo

Yahoo! is just what you've always heard - the largest single concentration of web searchers on any search engine or directory. You'll have a very hard time building your e-empire without traffic from Yahoo!.

The reality is that only a small percentage of free submissions even get looked at by a staff reviewer at Yahoo! - the volume is simply too massive to effectively deal with. You can keep taking your chances for success by submitting and waiting, submitting and waiting, submitting and...

Or, you can pay the modest $199 US and be guaranteed that your site will be reviewed within 7 business days. If traffic is your goal, this is an offer that is too good to refuse.

Again, paying the fee does not guarantee that you will actually be listed in Yahoo! but your chances are better than submitting and hoping.


Rocketlinks
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g98Rocket

Similar in structure to GoTo, Rocketlinks has been growing steadily over the past few months and is now generating good traffic flows for many search categories. It has grown so much that many site owners are reporting it as their lowest cost source of Pay For Performance traffic. Many very good keywords can be had for one or two cents per visitor.

Rocketlinks has several new ways for you to participate. Check these out:

• Home Page and Contest Page Featured Listings
  
• Banner Bidding
  
• Cost-Per-Click Banner Advertising
  
• Email/Newsletter Auctions
  
• Contest Sponsorship and Email Advertising

For newsletter publishers, the Newsletter Auctions represent an interesting way to acquire paid advertisers for your publication. It sounds confusing at first, but it does work.

FROM OUR SPONSOR

Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Site!

Express Submit Your Site to the LookSmart Network

http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g98LookSmart

LookSmart's Express Submit gets your submission reviewed within 48 hours and makes your site accessible to 58 million Web users in the LookSmart Network of partner sites. Leverage this huge reach and the precision targeting of our search directory to get new customers now.

The LookSmart Network reaches 58 million people, or 3 out of 4 US Internet users. How? LookSmart powers the search directories of the Web's leading portals and more than 370 ISPs.

This means your Web site will be displayed in the search results of such top sites as:

MSN - AltaVista - Excite - CNN - Juno - Netzero

Target new customers through our 170,000 categories and our keyword search.

Express Submit gets your submission reviewed within 48 hours - guaranteed!

Get Listed Now!

http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g98LookSmart

SNOOPING WILL KILL THE INTERNET

"Drug Companies Pay Firm to Track Consumers on the Web"

This is the L.A. Times headline that hit me. Here is the latest in tracking done by Big Business without your consent. The outfit is called Pharmatrak, and it is used by Pfizer, Pharmacia, SmithKline, Beacham, Glaxo Wellcome, Aventis Pharmaceuticals, Nvarti Pharmaceuticals, American Home Products, Hoffman-LaRocke, and others.

Pharmatrak uses "cookies." Originally, "cookies" were introduced to "help" the visitor to a given site. But now this outfit evidently combines information from many "cookies" to form patterns and profiles. And they do this without the visitor's permission.

Pharmatrak claims that its clients may improve their web sites from the information provided. But read what they say on their site:

"In the future, we may develop products and services which collect data that, when used in conjunction with the tracking data base, could enable a direct identification of certain individual visitors."

Is there such a thing as privacy anymore?

Does it make any difference whether you use opt-out or opt-in?

Small Business debates whether to use opt-out or opt-in. Big Business does not debate. Their only question is, "How can we find out everything we want to know?" And they are doing it surreptitiously. Today, an outfit like Pharmatrak has only 11 "snoop stations." Tomorrow, they or a similar company, may have 100 or 1000 "snoop stations."

Privacy is being obliterated systematically.

Privacy is being replaced with Big Brother. The great Internet, the great decentralizer, the wonderful level playing field, the hope of the little fellow all over the Globe, will be squashed by Big Brother.

Big Brother is coming, not from the government, but from Big Business. They say they are gathering information to "help the consumer."

But what about those of us who do not want their "help?"

Big Brother is killing, not only privacy, but Small Business. All this snooping is bringing more and more power into the hands of Big Business. Small Business cannot compete. It does not have the same kind of resources for snooping that Big Business has. If snooping is not stopped, much of Small Business will disappear from the Net.

If nothing is done about snooping, eventually the Internet will be dead even for Big Business. Would you be willing to make everything in your life available to Big Brother?

Let's fight to stop Big Brother's snooping.

----------

Paul is a provocative keynote speaker on Internet Marketing and Community Building. He is the founder of the Learning Fountain Network, at http://www.learningfountain.com and moderator of LearningFOUNT, a discussion list on Business Problem Solving. To subscribe, send a blank email to: mailto:LearningFOUNT-subscribe@topica.com. Because of his performance on the platform, he is called Paul-the soarING-Siegel.

THE ETIQUETTE OF CAPITALIZATION

We often take for granted that grammar is a well-taught and well-practiced educational tool. However, when we critique our own work, it is often easy to overlook mistakes. Capitalization is a part of grammar that often causes us to question the accuracy of our work. For that reason, I have compiled a useful list for your convenience including information concerning how and when to use capitalization when you are writing.

• The first-person singular pronoun, I.
  
  
• The first word of every sentence.
  
  
• Proper nouns: Names of religions and religious terms; specific people and things; days of the week, month, holidays; races, nationalities, languages; brand names; specific places; historical events; exact names of educational courses; names of newspapers, journals, publications; the first, last and important words in a title; and institutions
  
  
• Governmental agencies
  
  
• Internet resources
  
  The first two rules of capitalization listed are basically self-explanatory. However, let's go into further detail by looking at some examples of the proper nouns. These can be confusing under certain circumstances.
  
  
• Names of religions and religious terms: God, Baptist, Nazarene, Christians.
  
  
• Specific people and things: William Shakespeare, Mel Gibson, Nabisco.
  
  
• Days of the week, month, holidays: Saturday, September, Christmas.
  
  *Note that the names of seasons are NOT capitalized.
  
  
• Races, nationalities, languages: Poles, French, Arabic, English, Dutch.
  
  *Note that most of the time "blacks" and "whites" are not capitalized.
  
  
• Specific places: Disneyland, Czechoslovakia, Malibu Beach, South Pole.
  
  *Note that directions, if they are used as names (i.e. "Going south for the winter..."), are NOT capitalized.
  
  
• Historical events: World War II, the American Revolution, the Iran Contra.
  
  *Note that "the" is NOT capitalized.
  
  
• Exact names of educational courses: English 101, French II, Geography 201.
  
  *Note that you capitalize when referring to exact classes because these are, in essence, titles. For example, you would not write "I'm signing up for geography next semester."
  
  
• Names of newspapers, journals, publications: the Knoxville News Sentinel, the Quarterly Journal of Medicine, the Saturday Post.
  
  *Note that "the" is not typically capitalized unless it's a part of the legal name.
  
  
• The first, last and important words in a title: "The Fox and the Hound"
  
  *Note that neither prepositions nor conjunctions are capitalized in a title.
  
  
• Institutions: the University of Tennessee, ITT Technical Institute, Harvard University

Hopefully, this information has been and will continue to be useful to you in your writing. The most important principle when writing is to be consistent! If you capitalize E-Zine in one sentence, be sure to capitalize it throughout your manuscript. It will not only enhance the appearance of your work, but also the confidence that you have in yourself. Happy writing!

----------

Bronwynn Johnson is a professional writer and editor of web site content, sales copy, articles, term papers and more and can be reached at mailto:bjohnson@copelandlane.com or by visiting http://www.writebusiness.com Contact Bronwynn today to discover a full writing and editorial services for your business.

FOUR WAYS TO PROFIT FROM THE MOST AFFORDABLE ADVERTISING TOOL

Experienced business owners can tell you about advertising that didn't work. They put up a lot of cash, placed their ads or commercials, and nobody seemed to notice.

When ads don't work it is usually because they aren't being seen by the right people or because media prices are so high you can't afford to place enough to get the job done.

Ezines or email newsletters can solve both problems. Most ezines are tightly targeted to a specific group of readers. Ezine ads are also one of the most inexpensive forms of advertising available.

1. Be Tightly Targeted. Be careful to choose ezines that reach people who are likely to become good customers. Your ad for a business opportunity will do better in an ezine about starting Internet businesses than it will in a newsletter about athletics.
   
   
2. Have Patience. You probably won't get a big response with your first ad. Repeat your ad over and over to get into the minds of the ezine's readers. Customers must first notice your ad, then think about it before they will make a purchasing decision. This takes time, sometimes six weeks or more.
   
   
3. Be Customer Centered. Give your ad a two or three word headline in ALL CAPS. It should point out a problem the reader has or a benefit readers would like to get.
   
   
4. Include a Web Site. Although web sites aren't essential to doing business on the Internet, most readers want to be able to click to a site for more information. Make sure the opening page of your web site prominently displays information that backs up your ezine ad.

Customers hate it when they find an interesting ad, but the web site tries to sell them something else. Usually it is just an oversight on the part of the business, but lots of customers feel like they've been duped.

Email is the Internet's most popular feature. As more and more people worldwide get online to buy and do business, ezine ads will become an increasingly important part of your success.

----------

Jerome Chapman is an expert on marketing with ezines and on the Internet. See his collection of powerful tips and Internet promotion tools at http://www.TopEzineAds.com/ Reach him at mailto:jerome@topezineads.com

SNIPPETS

Politicards 2000
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g98cards

Our own DianeV from the forums has created a dynamite web site for one of her clients. The site looks great, but the product seriously upstages her efforts.

Politicards are a deck of playing cards with hilarious comic caricatures of this election season's primary personalities. Bill as the King of Diamonds and Hillary as the Queen of Diamonds are just the start. You won't believe the one of Rush Limbaugh. That one card makes the whole deck worth ordering.

Diane put just about everything including the kitchen sink into this site. I especially enjoyed the free e-cards that include images from the card deck.

Stop in a see a well done site, but stay to have some fun with our politicians. We need to get some fun for all the money politicians cost us. If you have no sense of humor, this site, like most things in life, is not for you!

----------

Release RAM
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g97releaseram

If you had trouble downloading Release RAM after reading last week's Gazette, try again. It seems that the response was so overwhelming that their server just couldn't keep up.

Obviously I'm not the only person that has some problems with Windows crashes. I sure thought it was just me.

----------

AskMe.com
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g98askme

AskMe.com represents an excellent opportunity for anyone to build a loyal following and serious traffic to their web sites.

The concept is simple:

1. AskMe.com gets lots of people to come to their site to ask questions of their registered "experts"
   
2. AskMe.com sends an email to the experts registered with knowledge for the category of the question
   
3. The experts post their answer to the question
   
4. When the person requesting the information reads the answer they give a one to five star rating of the answer

As your ratings rise you get more and more exposure on the AskMe.com site which leads to more curiosity about you from the knowledge seekers which leads to more traffic to your site.

Simple but effective.

Why not register as an expert and give it a try. It takes very little effort and the results can be substantial.

Remember: it's not who you know. It's who knows you.

Got a question you need answered? Try AskMe. It's free.