JimWorld Gazette Issue #99 09/02/2000

JimWorld Gazette - Issue #99 - September 2, 2000

CONTENTS

• From Our Sponsor - Atomz.com Search
  
• Award Design Contest
  
• From Our Sponsor - Webmaster's Choice
  
• How Your eGarden Grows
  
• From A Long Term Gazeteer
  
• Using Promotion Resources
  
• Snippets

Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g99

FROM OUR SPONSOR

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AWARD DESIGN CONTEST

The time has come to update the JimWorld Way Cool Hot Site Award and it
represents and opportunity for some talented designer to receive some well
deserved recognition and advertising.

The prizes for the winning design will be:

>> Permanent credit on the winners pages and submission form.
>> Recognition in the Gazette for the winner and top 5 finalists
>> 50,000 banner impressions on the JimWorld web sites. A US $1,250 value.

The rules are simple.

Create an award graphic that is fast loading and small enough to be displayed on any web site's home page or awards page. You can view the current award graphic at < http://jimworld.com/hotpg.html >

I will select the top finalists and the Get High Forums and Search Engine Forums moderators will select the winner.

I am currently setting up a new database driven award management system to allow us to evaluate more submissions and recognize a new award winning site each week.

Submit your entry via email before midnight California time on September 20th. < mailto:jim@jimworld.com >

That's it. Now get to work!

FROM OUR SPONSOR

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HOW YOUR eGARDEN GROWS

As I've commented many times in the past, your Web site should be, and is, an
extension of yourself. When you visit a new site you immediately begin forming impressions and opinions of the person operating the site. When others visit your site, you are subject to the same judgements. This is the natural order of things, so let's talk about ways to turn that process to our advantage.

First, let's debunk the common myth that we should, or must, extend the unfettered rights of free speech to our visitors. Hogwash.

Free speech exists as a right in relation to government power. When someone enters my home and begins to exhibit behavior and attitudes that I find offensive, I am well within my moral rights to evict them from my home. I have not limited their right to say anything they want, only where they can say it. Not in my home.

If your goal is to simply build hits on your server, attention to these rules of behavior is probably not necessary. However, if you expect to build repeat traffic and referrals from your visitors, you need to offer them a community in which they feel comfortable and secure.

This can only be done by you as you exert control over the public face your site presents to visitors and to the ways in which your visitors interact with each other. Remember that you always get what you ask for. If you ask for rude and offensive behavior, that is exactly what you will get.

If you want a friendly haven in which your members can grow and nurture each other, you will have to create that environment for them.

These are only a few of the items that you should employ in setting the foundation for your community. Evaluate your existing sites and correct any items that are working at cross purposes to your goals.

CONDITIONS OF USE STATEMENT

It is critical for several reasons that you have a comprehensive "Conditions of Use" statement. This document clearly spells out what use visitors may make of the resources and services available on your site. If you offer anything that has restrictions, clearly spell these out.

For instance, if you offer free graphics that can be downloaded and used to create web sites, and you want them only used to create personal pages, make that clear to visitors. Most people want to honor your restrictions but can only comply if they understand the limitations. For those that do not comply, you will have trouble enforcing unwritten or ambiguous terms and limitations.

This is also the place on your site where you inform your visitors that you are not assuming any responsibility for problems and losses they experience by using your site's information or services. In other words, if they take action on some information they find in your forums and that information causes them to take an action that results in a loss of money on their part, they may not sue you to recover that money. Considering the growth in e-lawsuits, you might want to spend some quality time with your attorney drafting your Conditions of Use policy statement.

PRIVACY POLICY

You site should have a detailed privacy policy that accurately describes the uses to which you will put any and all data about people collected in any area of your site. Be specific about how you will use email addresses, name, addresses, phone numbers, demographic information and other data you may collect.

Especially pay attention to the legal requirements in the U.S. for compliance to the COPPA law regarding information collected from young people under the age of 13. Other countries have privacy laws, many of which are more restrictive than U.S. laws. State clearly how you will comply with these international laws.

Given some well known recent happenings, you should address ways in which your policies might change. If your site/business is acquired by a new owner, will the new owner be required to honor your policies? If so, that could cause you problems in selling the resource.

You can generate a basic privacy statement page using the wizard at http://www.the-dma.org/library/privacy/creating.shtml

CLEAR SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Does your site accept submissions of any type? They might be in the form of articles submitted for you ezine, content to be published on your site, book or movie reviews, web sites submitted for a directory on your site. These are just a few of the many types of submissions you might accept.

Are your guidelines regarding submissions clear and understandable? Are you only looking for submissions of articles dealing with pet ownership? Or only brown dogs with long ears and no tails? If you are not specific about your requirements, your visitors will not be able to limit their submissions to only areas of interest to your site.

When content is submitted to your site, what happens to the copyright? Do you have the right to make unrestricted use of the material? What rights does the submitter retain?

If you have limitations on the length of articles, spell them out. If you have a standard way of giving outside writers recognition for their contributions, let them know up front so no hard feelings develop.

OFFENSIVE MATERIAL CONTROL

The definition of what is offensive varies by the goals and make up of each community. In order to maintain a standard of behavior and adherence to a set of behavior boundaries, those boundaries must be fully spelled out and available to each community member.

Most mainstream sites do not carry content or links to adult content or hate content. If this is also your policy, make sure you let all of your visitors know that they are not welcome to post or submit these types of content.

Also be sure to inform your visitors that while on your site, they are safe from objectionable material. This will make your site more attractive to your visitors and return traffic should increase.

PARTICIPATION EXPECTATIONS

Do you expect anything from your visitors? If so, let them know what is expected of them. Make sure that information is universally available throughout your site. Most people will try to honor your expectations if they are aware of the requirements.

In the Get (Traffic) High Forums http://gethighforums.com you will find many responses to questions that remind the person seeking help that they have not held up their end of the relationship. When a member only takes and doesn't offer their help to other members, at some point the members will stop offering help until the person starts contributing their knowledge. That is a sign of a healthy community but the rules must be published and enforced.

GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES

What happens when one of your community members feels that they have been wronged? Maybe a forum post was deleted or edited, or their site submission was denied or edited? Do you have a readily available, simple process through which they can ask for an explanation or even a reversal of the decision?

Without such a process, bad feelings can fester and create anger and flame wars.

The process can be as simple as ours at JimWorld. If you experience a problem in the Forums, send an email to Mother or Stepmother who are empowered to resolve these issues.

EVICTION PROCEDURE

When you attract a troublemaker into your community, you must have a way to eliminate that person from your community. This is especially important in Forums. Fortunately it is simple to revoke posting rights in most well written forum software.

Whether you are building a personal hobby site or an ecommerce business, if you build your Web community on a foundation such as the above you can only succeed. You will be enlisting the help of all of your happy community members in making your community a constantly improving and expanding haven. You will free yourself from the roller coaster rides of search engine traffic and paid advertising as the life blood of your online existence. You will instead harness the active participation of every member in helping the community to grow.

And you will free yourself from the need to interact daily with fools, scumbags and hate filled beings.

FROM A LONG TERM GAZETEER

Hi Jim,

I wanted to share with you the ways that JimWorld and the Gazette have been the bible and inspiration for my growth on the Internet.

I used your tutorials to get my site Internet ready. I did the Search engine submitter, then worked my way thorough the 1,000.com. I delved deep into the web, looking for similar sites or directories that were slanted toward my subject. Through kindness, exchanges of products or links, I found a lot of people willing to give my site a link. Your Get High and Search Engine forums were invaluable, the information I learned there was how I finally figured out how to be included in Yahoo (And I've got a pretty decent rating there for the moment, knock wood.).

Meanwhile, I worked on continuously improving my page and its design, making it more user-friendly, more informative, not just sales oriented, as well as search engine friendly. I learned to create themes so I could offer something fun and free, a treat for visitors. I've developed my newsletter content (people sign up for it, and I've hit 1,000 enrollees), where I offer monthly musings, drawings for free readings, and try to extend the relationship in my own community. Because most of all, I work to make my customers happy, and to create a rapport with them. About 65% of my business is return customers, and in a business like mine, I feel proud of those averages.

In the Gazette I devoured the articles on getting your site attention. Then I took the ideas and suggestions and tried to open my mind to new ways to get my story across. Upon consideration, I decided my story is interesting in several ways. I'm a mother who stayed home with her kids (angle #1), who created her own home-based online business (angle #2) doing the kinda funky thing - Tarot readings via email (angle #3). That's some semi-cool stuff there to work with. But the world never notices you, unless you let them know you're there.

So I sent out respectful letters explaining my story to magazines, ezines, and newspapers that might be interested. Targeted audience is the way to go. Hits from people who don't want what you're offering are empty hits.

Well, that met with limited success. In fact in this whole promotion crusade there have been a LOT of places and people that were total dead ends. I just kept going. Dead end, change direction. Then, I was featured in a story for our local newspaper. (They got my web site address wrong!! Sigh) I approached the About.com New Age guide for an interview, and she was wonderful. The interview was fun. That experience gave me a lot of confidence. After her article for the Gazette I wrote Liz Folger, http://www.bizymoms.com to tell her she was really inspiring to me, a mom in the trenches, wading through web promotion on my own. She was kind enough to feature my bio in her "business ideas" section. (From that I get a lot of email from other women, who want advice and encouragement. I consider that my "Helpware' work.) Recently I contacted http://www.ehow.com and arranged to write a "Tarot ehow" for them. (As well as getting some promotion, I got paid! Whooo hooo!)

I noticed in this Gazette issue you say it's necessary to spend money to get promoted. And in many ways, I agree. I started my adventure in promotion about three years ago, and my goal was to do this with as little overhead as possible. Just my own manpower. (Tarot-diva power? ) These days the web is much more flooded. Trying to find free links, and search engine placement is way more time consuming, and much less fruitful than it once was. I have often wondered if I was starting out today if I would have realized all the links and connections I have, could I replicate my work? I kinda doubt it.

I feel proud of what I've accomplished. I'm making a tidy second income and I'm home with my kids. I have met some wonderful people, and I love my clients and I love what I'm doing.

And I owe a lot of my success to Jimworld and the Gazette. It gave me a place to go to learn, keep current, and keep expanding. I just wanted to let you know that.

Jim, you rock.

Thanks,
Laura Desmet
aka Pesky
< http://www.atasteoftarot.com >

USING PROMOTION RESOURCES

When launching a new site, your most important promotion related function at is to learn about keyword ranking. Even if you are going to hire a consultant to optimize your site to the search engines, you need to have a solid knowledge of the process so that your expectations are realistic and you are able to evaluate the quality of the service you are receiving from your consultant.

There are a couple of tutorials that will give you a good knowledge foundation to get you oriented:

< http://jimworld.com/promotea.html >
< http://jimworld.com/metatag.html >

Next, you should learn about the server traffic logs and reports that will help you track the sources of your incoming traffic:

< http://jimworld.com/trafficreports.html >

Next, find out what is happening in the promotion world by visiting (and reading extensively) at:

< http://searchengineforums.com >
< http://gethighforums.com >

Then you need to do some keyword popularity research to find out what people are actually searching for. You'll find an extensive free database of popular keywords at:

< http://www.keywordwizard.com/ >

Live searches are visible at:

< http://keyholesearch.com/ >

At JimTools you'll find several keyword tools that will help you in your research.

The Keyword Research Tools allow you to check the keywords used by the top positioned sites on several large search engines. Knowing what your competitors are targeting will help you target major keywords and phrases.

When you are ready to submit your site, register at Yahoo by hand. Then use the Free Submission tools at < http://jimtools.com > to submit your site to all of the major engines and the directory submitter to get your submission into about 200 directories.


Use the Analyze Keywords Tool to check on your position under different keywords, or check the position of your competitors.

Use the Link Popularity Analyzer to find out how many links to your site are known about by the engines. Also analyze inbound links of your competitor's sites. The number and quality of links to a web site are important to a site's ranking in many of the engines.

To continue your directory submissions, you can use the list of 1,000 directories at:

< http://www.the1000.com/ >

The above resources are basic in nature to help both new web promoters and long-term experts. You will come out of the above process as a seasoned professional.

SNIPPETS

Internet Marketing Strategy Day Conference
http://www.internetmarketingconference.com/

October 26 and 27, 2000 will see the second gathering of webmasters and site promoters, and the list of speakers has grown. The conference has also grown to two full days.

If you are planning to attend this conference in Stockholm, bring a few problems with you and take advantage of the second day's small group workshops to get some excellent advise on resolving the problems.

I look forward to seeing you there. I'm already working on my presentation and should be able to squeeze in a lot of good advice.

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AskMe.com
http://jimworld.com/ca/redirect.cgi/.482195677716057

I mentioned in the last issue that I was participating as an "expert" at AskMe.com. Anyone can register to be an "expert" in any of their hundreds of topic specific categories. Then you answer people's questions and as your number of answers mounts and the quality of your answers is rated by other participants, your popularity rises which gives you more visibility on their site.

The question I wanted answered was: does it actually generate traffic to my sites if I participate?

The answer is that it is starting to. I am seeing a steadily rising number of clicks from AskMe.com in my logs. Not enough to turn JimWorld into a Top 100 site, but a respectable number.

The trick is to stick to what you know and concentrate on subjects that are supported by content on your web site. That way you are able to build a reputation in your subject(s) and work in the occasional reference to specific content on your site.

Don't just use AskMe.com as a way to spam your link into every post you make. Use your common sense to avoid building the wrong kind of reputation.

To participate in the most effective way without having to spend valuable time checking for new questions, or to miss opportunities to show your stuff, use the AskMe option that notifies you by email when there are questions in your category.

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Ezine Click Through Tracking Follow Up

As you know, I have been trying different ways to track the popularity of both articles and ads in the Gazette. The results were published recently in the Gazette and the story is at http://jimworld.com/reviews/linkinlite.html

There is another reason to use a click redirector in your ezine.

The clicks from Gazette articles go through a redirector script on JimWorld and it is starting to generate new links to JimWorld. The reason is simple.

When an ezine reader clicks on a link and goes directly to the site being written about, the click through shows up in the site's log as coming from the reader's email domain or as "Unknown" as to source.

By funneling all of the clicks through a redirector on JimWorld, webmasters who have been written about suddenly see the source of all that traffic as JimWorld and it gets their attention. As often as not, it results in a new webmaster becoming aware of JimWorld and frequently generates a new link to JimWorld.

Wouldn't you like to have webmasters of sites that were good enough for you to write about suddenly become aware of you?

One final point: When you approve another site to republish one of your articles, in addition to requiring that they credit you and your site as the source of the article, add one more requirement. Make sure that they leave the links in the article just as you published them. That way they flow through your redirector.

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Evaluating Your New Web Site or Upgrades

Many people each day ask for and receive valuable input from their peers by requesting a site review in the Get High (Traffic) Forums http://gethighforums.com

All too often, that is the only feedback people receive on web design. They are not using the full power of personal networking to their full advantage.

When mainstream businesses design new products, services or media, they hire high-priced consultants to organize "focus groups" to measure the reactions of members of their target market to the new offering.

This is out of the reach of the average web designer, but there are other ways to fill that gap.

Each of us has a network of our own that moves through life with us. Friends, family and acquaintances whose opinions and judgement we respect. They can make up the best focus group for you. They are interested in your success and will strive to give you the best feedback they can in order to support your efforts. They will put forth more effort and time than any group of strangers.

Ask them to evaluate any significant design or functionality upgrades you create. Don't ask them to evaluate every day's work output. If you request their time too often you will burn them out.

When you suspect that one of your Personal Focus Team is trying to only tell you positive thoughts, remove them from your list. Their input will not help you improve your skills. Pretty soon you will have collected a dedicated and trustworthy core group whose feedback you can trust and act upon.

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A few months ago the Gazette covered the launch of Affinia.com, an affiliate program affiliate program. Yes, that's what I meant to write . Affinia allowed any webmaster to create a cobranded shopping site with products made available by an extensive selection of ecommerce site affiliate programs. Payments were based on click throughs.

Since we covered the launch of Affinia, we thought it only appropriate to cover their demise. The service and company are gone. If you have an Affinia storefront, take the necessary steps to unlink it from your site.

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Curious about the e-bloodbath occurring since the downturn in the stock market? There is a site with a steady stream of e-obituaries but I can't include the name of the site. Not even the URL. The site has become very popular and several ezines published reviews and came under heavy fire as a result. One popular ezine included the name of the site in the subject line of its ezine and got a much bigger response than they anticipated. All bad.

So I will include a cloaked URL for you to click on if you are interested. Just be warned, while the information is very interesting, the language on the site is about as vulgar as it gets. I have yet to find an article on the site written by anyone with enough command of the English language to construct a sentence without resorting to their short list of profanity.

http://fuckedcompany.com

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Are the demands of shipping products to consumers becoming a roadblock to your site's growth? Maybe you need some help.

NetShip has 450 shipping centers and can handle all of your order fulfillment functions. Fulfillment centers have always been the backbone of the infomercial and mail-order industries but have only recently begun to market themselves to the e-commerce world.

If fulfillment is a problem for you, check into a fulfillment service. There are not many planning days before the holiday shopping season begins.

NetShip uses a business model that is new in the fulfillment industry, and I have not used their services, so "let the buyer beware" and check them out fully.

On the other hand, I have heard nothing bad about them.

http://www.netship.com

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Snoop Central

Concerned about revealing your identity on the web when visiting competitor's web sites? Don't want to leave identifiable trails when cruising ecommerce sites or even the steamy side of the Web?

Here are some services and products that will hide your location and identity while surfing. You will lose some functionality when visiting sites that personalize your experience on return visits, so these are not techniques you will want to use all of the time.

< http://www.anonymizer.com/ >
< http://www.idzap.com/ >
< http://www.privada.com/ >
< http://www.somebody.net/ >
< http://www.zeroknowledge.com/ >