JimWorld Gazette Issue #104 11/01/2000

JimWorld Gazette - Issue #104 - November 1, 2000

CONTENTS

• From Our Sponsor - WindowsTracker.com
  
• Will You Be Voting?
  
• From Our Other Sponsor - Internet Marketing Conference
  
• Time To Get Your Affiliate Links Ready For Christmas
  
• Avoiding The Site Blockers
  
• It Still Is What It Was
  
• Are You Really Plugged Into The World Economy?
  
• Are You Gator-Ready?
  
• Delegate It!
  
• Got A Happy Advertiser?
  
• Snippets
  

Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g104

FROM OUR SPONSOR

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WILL YOU BE VOTING?

To all of the American readers, it is time to make your plans to vote.

Are you one of the 50% of registered voters who never seem to get around to visiting the voting booth. It's just such a bother to make time in your busy schedule to spend half an hour deciding who will run your country and what laws will be passed. Get over it.

Being allowed to vote is about the biggest privilege anyone on Earth can have. Don't leave it up to others to decide your future. If any group should have 100% participation it is the Web professional community. We have serious issues to be decided over the next four years. If you don't vote you are allowing your entire future to be dictated by the people who do vote.

I don't care who you vote for, as long as you vote.

It probably comes as no surprise that I intend to vote for Gov. Bush. What a shock, right?

I would like to talk to the Ralph Nader supporters who are under serious pressure to vote for someone else. The slogan "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" is a crock. The main reason to stick to your guns is not in this election. It is the need any third party has in gaining enough votes to be considered valid when it is time to select participants in debates and all of the other roadblocks thrown up in front of any new party in order to protect the two main existing parties.

If you truly want to effect change, stick to your guns. Don't let the TV ads stampede you into losing sight of your real goals.

If you don't know who you will vote for, let me appeal to your fiscal common sense. We have tons of left over napkins imprinted "President Bush" and we can save some serious money that way.

Just a thought.

FROM OUR OTHER SPONSOR

Internet Marketing Strategy Day Conference
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g99imc

It's time to make your reservations for the March, 2001 conference in Las Vegas. The conference organizers have gotten so much feedback from U.S. web professionals that being the smart business people they are, the first U.S. conference has been scheduled.

The schedule has been expanded to a three day event to allow time for several new presentation and workshop subjects.

Attendance will be limited to keep the conferences tightly focused and highly interactive, so don't procrastinate and expect to be able to get tickets any time you want.

This looks to be an early sell-out.

TIME TO GET YOUR AFFILIATE LINKS READY FOR CHRISTMAS

I'm amazed at the number of people I meet who have "tried an affiliate program and it didn't work" and never tried again.

Think of affiliate programs as being similar to a baseball game. Every batter approaches the plate dreaming of a home run. While home runs are big and splashy and give you bragging rights, usually it is the piddly little single base hits that become the turning points of a close game. Often even "failure" by being thrown out at first base can send a team mate into a position to score the winning run.

This all holds true in our efforts to build community and earn a living on the Web.

A link to a web site offering real value to our visitors can be a winning play for us. If it also offers us a few dollars in addition to helping our visitors, that turns it into an even more important play.

And occasionally that simple link posted in hopes that it will help our visitors and earn a few bucks can turn into a home run cash cow.

You never know until you try, and going into the heaviest of all shopping seasons is a good time to try out a few programs looking for those that work either OK or Great.

Spend some time looking through categories of affiliate programs that could work for you. I usually wind up at Refer-It.com because they have hundreds of affiliate plans listed and the information is presented in a way that lets me blast through the process of finding a few new plans to try out.

If you run a web site directory on your site, consider looking into each of the sites you have already listed to determine if they offer an affiliate program. There is nothing wrong with joining affiliate programs to pick up a few bucks from links you were already offering your visitors. Just don't start making your decisions about listing sites based solely on the availability of an affiliate program. Your content quality is the first priority.

http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g104ri

AVOIDING THE SITE BLOCKERS

It probably comes as no surprise that I consider that most, if not all, site blocking providers are somewhere around Pond Scum on the evolutionary scale. But they are an evil that must be accommodated in our e-marketing plans. Because they do such a bad job of delivering their products, we must pay even more attention to them than if they actually provided a usable service.

The recent Gazette article featuring Congressman Dick Armey's problem with having his site blocked because of his first name pointed out what many of you wrote me to explain that it was a purely random example of a system that can't be perfect.

I understand "not perfect" which doesn't apply here. The lack of quality in the blocking world is so severe that anyone with any content on a site runs the tangible risk of being blocked.

Take a look at your site. Try to think like a blocking spider might "think" and see what it sees.

Statements like "for our adult visitors" will surely flip a spider's switch. Never use the word "adult."

Do you operate a model's agency and have "pictures of our most recent young girls available for assignments?" Goodbye traffic.

Have you written an article about the dangers we face on the Net by allowing anyone to find instructions on building bombs? Someone surely has banned you or soon will.

Don't be confused by the rising "intelligence" of the spiders developed by the search engines. They become smarter every day because they must if they are to stay ahead of the competitor's spiders.

Not so among the blocking community. They have a partner with a huge influence to help them avoid the difficult task of developing a quality product. Their partner? The government. Government in the U.S. only cares that they have passed a law, not about the effectiveness of that law.

So take a careful look at your site. Look for anything that could make a low-intelligence spider think that your site is dangerous to kids. You might think that the examples above are just examples to help me illustrate my point. Actually they are all real.

One thing you can do is to turn words that might cause problems into graphics. Just don't name them using the words you are trying to avoid. Or find other words to convey the same information.

This won't help you with the search engine spiders that might send you traffic from casting agents looking for fresh faces for their next commercial.

Next you will want to ask me how to find out if your site is blocked. Sorry. I haven't a clue. The blocking producers have convinced the lawmakers that revealing that information will place our children in danger. In reality they don't want people seeing just how stupid their spiders are.

IT STILL IS WHAT IT WAS

I'm sure you know the story, the one describing the origins of the Internet. Back when there was no World Wide Web. No browsers. No e-commerce. Not even domain names.

There was a growing network established to enable the sharing of information between academics at universities, colleges and research centers. A way to help researchers stay abreast of the rapidly escalating technology knowledge. The theory being that it was easier to build upon existing knowledge if you knew what that knowledge was. The world was repleat with examples of research breakthroughs that turned out to have already been achieved elsewhere.

On the early Internet we didn't have access to search engines. Those were still to come. We found information with tools like Archie, Veronica, Gopher and FTP. What developed was an exploding participation by average, every day people throughout the world. Access to information of all sorts was such a magnet that it fueled the most rapid deployment of a technology ever experienced.

With exploding stock markets, portals, vortals, e-communities and all of the other headline grabbing Cyber culture developments, it's often forgotten that the Internet was built to serve a real need to organize the sum total of Man's knowledge to allow scientific knowledge to continue its growth.

Has all of the Web's growth completely driven the research world off the Internet? Has it become, as the academic community so feared, just a place to play?

No. Academia's growth on the Net has kept pace with, even out performed, the more visible aspects of the Internet.

If you want a glimpse into the realities of scientific progress, written for the non-scientist, head over to New Scientist at http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g104ns

Recent stories include a new lawnmower that cuts grass using four lasers, mulches it, adds fertilizer and puts the mix back into the ground. The articles go on to a new gadget to identify colors for the visually impaired and color blind, ocean creatures that can create balls of plasma almost as hot as the surface of the Sun, and details of the rapid growth of genetic engineering knowledge.

The stories are written to be easily understood by even the least technical among us. They are brief, interesting and addicting.

They are also the newest winner of our Way Cool Hot Site Award.

Sometimes it just feels good to know that there is more to the Internet than the ability to enter sweepstakes and download obscure music files.

ARE YOU REALLY PLUGGED INTO THE WORLD ECONOMY?

We all know that other countries have ups and downs in their economies. We understand that not everyone in the world is playing with the same financial resources.

What we don't always understand is that doing business worldwide requires that we not only understand the facts of these realities, but actively do something about it.

To succeed in a global marketplace, you must pay attention to your results, or lack of results, and adapt quickly.

In America we think it's great that our economy is breaking records. The dollar has become so strong that buying imported products that have seldom been available for so few dollars. While I was in Sweden last week, I was pretty happy when I discovered the Swedish products I could afford. The dollar goes a long way.

While buying is great with a pumped-up dollar value, it creates at least as many problems as it solves. When the Euro falls from a value of US$1.15 to its current value of US$.85, it makes selling American products to Euro buyers a little tricky. American products have a much harder time competing against products available from other countries.

What does this have to do with each of us on the Net? Does it only apply to American Net companies?

It has to do with all of us. If we are to succeed, we must adopt marketing policies based on an understanding of the world's economies.

We've all seen the press "expose" what they call predatory pricing policies. A company that sells their products for different prices in different countries. The stories lead us to believe that these practices are simply a way for the sellers to take unfair advantage of countries with higher performing economies. They don't explain it that simply because it might make sense to the reader, so it is presented as a scandal.

Usually it is simply good business practices. If I'm developing software in America, I can sell it in America for top-dollar. I can charge what it is worth in light of the costs I incurred to develop it using American workers earning American dollars.

But what does the value of the dollar do to me as I try to expand my sales internationally? Can I charge as much when I sell in countries with falling currency values when converted to dollars?

If their economy is strong and if my product is unique on the market, I probably will not suffer any loss of sales. They will pay whatever is necessary if they must have my product.

The reality is that most products can be purchased from manufacturers elsewhere in the world. If their quality is adequate and they are selling for less because of their currency's relative value to the dollar, they will get the sales.

The problem becomes even more severe when trying to expand our offerings into the world's emerging economies. Their currency values usually preclude them from buying from "hot" economy producers.

If you want to compete globally, you will have to adopt pricing policies that let you sell to each country for the number of dollars that residents of those countries can afford. It means that you may have to accept less than you had hoped on each sale.

Take a long look at where your products are selling. Is a company from another country getting sales that should have come to you?

Maybe you need to get in there with some competitive pricing.

Remember that the economy that is down today might well be up tomorrow. Then you'll be happily selling to them for higher prices.

The above can rightly called an almost over simplification of international economics, but it does contain what is needed to understand how to take effective action.

ARE YOU GATOR-READY?

As we move rapidly into the biggest shopping season on-line, I'll be researching and identifying both little and big things you can do to improve your results.

Being Gator-Ready is one of those things. If you are not familiar with Gator, you need to read the Gazette more frequently. Gator is a desktop program that watches everywhere you go on the Net. When it sees you access a page requiring a username and password, it watches you log in the first time and remembers how to log you in each time you return.

Gator also stores your personal information and credit card information. When you arrive at a page containing a form, Gator offers to fill in the form for you, including credit card data if asked for.

Download Gator and visit your site after you install it in your browser.

Make sure that your forms and password access areas are recognized by Gator. If your sales form does not cause Gator to respond, you have probably used field names that Gator doesn't recognize.

I see many sites that don't invoke Gator at all, and many more that use field names that Gator doesn't recognize. Use field names that Gator recognizes and you make it much simpler for your customers to place their orders.

That is what you are after, isn't it?

http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g104gator

DELEGATE IT!

"I wish I had a 48 hour day!" many have said to me during the last twenty years as a professional speaker. "I'd be able to get so much more done!"

Of course we can't get more than 24 hours out of each day (assuming we don't take time to sleep) but we can get the equivalent through delegation when we plug into someone else's time stream when we don't have the time or the expertise, thereby multiplying our results.

Here are five ways to Delegate It!

STAFF

If you are fortunate to have staff, utilize this resource. You don't have to do it all yourself. People around you tend to rise to your level of expectation for them. Elevate them, that's how you grew and got to your level. And if YOU are the staff with no one to delegate to, to share the workload and increase your results, think of ways to get a staff. Many high school and college intern programs offer eager assistants, often at no cost. For example, our local high school will provide a student to most any legitimate for profit or non-profit organization for up to 15 hours per week during the school year to help with the filing, running errands, photocopying, etc., to free you from those tasks to do more productive things with your time.

REVERSE DELEGATION

Often during my week, co-workers, my students, friends, and even family members will come to me and ask for my help. I'm flattered when that happens, that they would think enough of my opinion to ask. The problem though is I sometimes get all caught up in their problem and don't have time to get the things done I need to get done. For example, my office manager, Kathy, came to me one afternoon, all in a tizzy because she had two clients requesting that I conduct our time management seminar for the same dates. Before I get all caught up in this problem I asked, "What do you think we ought to do?" I don't mind taking my share of the load, but much of the time the person bringing me the problem is just as well equipped to solve it as I am. By the way, Kathy came up with two ways to resolve her situation so the problem was solved, she did it, and I was free to focus on other matters.

YOUR INNER CIRCLE

Your family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers are the people who are closest to you, they love and care for you the most and they will help you, if you'll ask. Neighbors can pool errand running. Children can do laundry. Co-workers will give a willing hand. But remember the adage, "To have a friend, be a friend." Don't exploit. Offer to help others first and when you need their help, they'll be there for you.

COLLEGE ASSISTANTS

Each of us have 10-20 hours per week of minutia to attend to. We have to go grocery shopping, dust and vacuum, mow the lawn, go to the pharmacy and the cleaners, wash the car, and on and on. Certainly these are important tasks that are necessary to make our lives work and there's nothing wrong with performing them ourselves. All I'm suggesting is if on the one hand you feel you do not have enough time each week to accomplish what you really need to do, to realize your important dreams and goals, and on the other hand, you're spending 10-20 hours per week doing these lower level tasks, you may have an alternative and that is to consider hiring a college assistant for 10-20 hours per week, delegate all these little chores to him/her and literally buy an extra 10-20 hours per week to use more effectively.

HIRED HELP

This is similar to the college assistant idea above, only the next level up. It's hiring people who have specific expertise. For example, I don't know if it makes good sense to give up a whole weekend every April to figure out the latest changes in the tax code to file our tax return. Maybe it makes better sense to go to a tax specialist, let them prepare the return, and free up your time to those things that are more important and lacking in your life. (I'm real good at spending your money, eh?)

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Dr. Donald E. Wetmore, Productivity Institute

If these tips were helpful, you'll want to get your free copy of Don's "Top Five Time Management Mistakes". To get yours now, email your request for "mistakes" to: mailto:ctsem@msn.com

Would you like to receive free Timely Time Management Tips on a regular basis to increase your personal productivity and get more out of every day? Sign up now at http://www.topica.com/lists/timemanagement and select "subscribe". We welcome you aboard!

GOT A HAPPY ADVERTISER?

A happy advertiser is worth far more than the money they will pay you. Handled right, you can turn that one happy advertiser into dozens of advertisers.

While the thrill of success is still upon them, ask your advertiser, who has gotten great results from using your media, to write as glowing a testimonial letter as you can coax out of them. Don't be shy. Tell them that you want it to help you with your marketing to other advertisers.

Most people will be thrilled to help after you've gotten them some good results. It is human nature to enjoy attention and to be publicly acknowledged for making a smart business decision. To be asked to "use their stature in their industry" to help you is almost irresistible to most people.

Avoid "inventing" testimonials. This is a common practice that is usually easily spotted and absolutely destroys your credibility. Always get permission to use the identity of the person or company behind your testimonials. When most people see a testimonial that is not credited to a specific person or company, they assume it is not real. That is the Kiss Of Death in marketing and sales.

Instead of simply creating a long list of testimonials, try to integrate them into your site content. Work a quote from the testimonial into a sentence to give the sentence more impact. Watch how television infomercial integrate testimonials into their shows. Short statements to emphasize the subject being shown.

It is not necessary to publish each testimonial in its entirety. Use meaningful excerpts to maintain readability.

Be polite to your testimonial givers. At the least, a written thank you note. Consider doing a bit more. A pizza at lunch time or an arrangement of flowers is not doing too much. First, because it is the polite way to treat people. Second, because they may be contacted by a few people to verify the testimonial and you don't want them to regret helping you out with your marketing.

SNIPPETS

Looking for help with the search engines?

The Search Engine Forums has a new forum just for people who want to hire or contract with a traffic building specialist.

If you offer that service this should be a daily stop for you.

Looking for some paid help? Post it in the "I Need Some Paid Help!" forum and get some fast results. You'd be amazed how many search engine specialists and traffic building experts hang out in these forums.

http://searchengineforums.com/

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Web Certificates
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g104ws

Sometimes it seems like everyone has a better idea to protect e-shoppers when using their credit cards. Most of them involve extra effort for the shopper and extra cost and effort for the e-merchant.

Web Certificates actually appears to have come up with a better solution and I expect most of you will be seeing their system when you check your credit card sales.

You make no changes to your current process of accepting credit cards.

The shopper signs up at the Web Certificates site, or they receive a Certificate as a gift, and off they go to shop until they drop. When ready to pay for an online purchase, they select Master Card as the method of payment and simply enter their Web Certificate number. Your card processing service approves it as if it were a Master Card, but you never actually see the customer's credit card number. Only Web Certificates sees that.

This system will be popular with the large number of shoppers with security concerns and will help e-merchants close more sales.

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RudeMountain
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g104rude

Sometimes sending an e-greeting card with sentiments such as "Isn't life wonderful. I love everyone. Kiss. Kiss. Kiss." just doesn't get the job done.

Sometimes you need something with just a little bit of bite to it. Rude Mountain can handle that for you.

Their e-cards are not meant to make people feel better about themselves or improve their self esteem. They are meant to tell them what you really think.

When handled as well as the creators of this site managed, the offbeat can be a powerful traffic magnet. Going against the tide can build high return visits, especially when the tide is over populated with services.

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Free Computers For The Poor
http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g104uk

I remember how things were when I first started investigating and writing about this new "Internet thingy."

Newsgroups ruled the Internet and much of the Gazette was filled with advise on how to avoid stepping on land mines in the newsgroups. DejaVu was king of the hill when it came to promotion. Those "search engine thingies" were trying to find ways to gather information and get people to use it.

Dejavu is now a portal of some kind or other and no longer archives the newsgroups. Many of today's Net savvy entrepreneurs have never even read a newsgroup. The search engines have conquered the technology challenges and every radio commercial ends with a URL.

Few things have highlighted the inroads the Internet has made the way this event has:

"If we're to succeed in Britain, we must equip not just some but all of our companies and we must put the new technologies that are increasingly available within reach not just of a few people but all," Chancellor Gordon Brown said.

Chancellor Brown has announced an aggressive program to make every citizen Net savvy and open the world's markets to his country's businesses. 100,000 free computers for lower income families, significant reductions in Internet access costs and major upgrades to the Internet infrastructure.

News such as this is surfacing from all areas of the world. Countries are waking up to the need to compete effectively in the world market.

If you haven't turned your eyes to this world-wide revolution, now would be a good time to start. Learn to play on a much bigger stage. Find markets for your services and products where they are needed, not just where you live.

Seasoned veterans of the Net Wars will be in high demand in emerging e-markets. Start drawing your daily news input from a bigger pond. Get in touch with the needs of communities just beginning to join us on the eworld stage. They will be hungry for what you have already learned through your hard won successes and skills.

If you know of, or operate a community such as JimWorld targeted at other languages or countries, please let me know about it so I can help direct JimWorld visitors to it. As I am mono-lingual, send it in English please.

mailto:jim@jimworld.com

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Want to read what $10 million doesn't buy?

http://www.soundbitten.com/verde_c.html

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A Dot Com By Any Other (Top Level Domain) Name

The trends are in and sometimes the .com is not the best top level domain name if you operate outside of the United States.

A domain name registered in your own country can send a powerful message to your potential customers that they can expect the security of doing business with a local company.

Just something to think about as we move into the busiest ecommerce season.

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A subject that we began talking about in the Gazette over a year ago is gaining some attention today. I've always felt that someone was able to watch which domain names I was checking in the Whois system and was able to buy those domain names before I could get back to purchase them. However, it is hard to prove even to myself. It doesn't always happen so it could just be a coincidence.

Now it appears that others suspect the same thing. A scary article appeared recently at InfoWorld.com which sheds a bit more light on this issue.

http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g104iw

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An interesting question came up at the Stockholm Conference.

We all know that keywords placed in an H1 heading carry more importance to a search engine spider than does a smaller heading or even body copy. However, H1 headings can sure mess up a page layout, can't they?

So, what happens if you use a Style Sheet to set the font size for H1 headings to a smaller point size? Does the spider still see that as being a true H1? Most agreed that indeed it does see it as valid and gives extra weight to the keywords it finds in that H1 heading.

I said it was interesting, didn't I?