JimWorld Gazette Issue #21 09/19/1997

Gazette - Issue #21 - September 19, 1997

CONTENTS

-- Personal Web Server
-- A Bit Of Bragging
-- Snippets
-- Fun Break
-- Creating Site Income
-- This One Is Pretty Scary
-- Need More Hits?
-- Technology Corner


Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g21


Here we are finally for the 21st issue of the Gazette. Steve and I have been obsessing over how to use a personal web server to enrich the environment for a web community. To that end, the Gazette will probably continue for a while to discuss these issues. For those of you that don't plan to run a personal server in your web plan, there is still plenty to learn about tools that can enhance your web efforts. Chat rooms, vertical directories and many other tools are available without running your own desktop server.

As I sit here writing this issue on my birthday, I decided that you should get the birthday present. I've asked Steve to whip up a program that I can offer here on my desktop server that will allow anyone to analyze the content of any web page to get a better idea of how it will perform on the search engines. This involves an analysis of the META tags and page title letting you know how well you have complied with the search engine limitations.

The report will show your title and description as it will appear to a searcher. It will analyze your keywords against the limit in length and number of repetitions. It will tell you which keywords don't appear in your title. Then it will analyze the actual body copy of your page and tell you what problems exist. Like not showing body copy for keywords in your META tags. And how far into the body copy each keyword first appears. These are all critical pieces of information. It's not enough just to analyze the META tags. You have to analyze the complete page. There's more, but you'll see it when you come try it out. This analysis tool will evolve quickly to offer more exact information about how your page will perform in each search engine.

The service is going to be free. With our compliments. And anyone who has a copy of WebSuite will get the program for free to run on their own machine where they can analyze pages on their local hard drive. This service will go online Monday. Check my desktop home page at http://jimworld.nu/ for directions.

Enjoy Steve's birthday present to me. I know I will. Thanks Steve.

A BIT OF BRAGGING

Several new awards to tell you about next week, but one just came in that is pretty nice and generating lots of traffic to VirtualPROMOTE. Russ Finney the MIS Guide at The Mining Company featured VirtualPROMOTE this month on two separate pages of the Mining Company. http://mis.miningco.com/ and http://mis.miningco.com/msub35.htm/ Russ's pages are a frequent stop when I'm out tracking the elusive Perfect Link Resource. Stop in and see Russ. Bookmark it. He comes up with some good stuff, some of which I don't even steal for the Gazette. I try to steal from everyone equally.

We also received the following from the MIS pages at the Mining Company. We think it's pretty cool.

Congratulations!

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."

SNIPPETS

There is a good article on the Internet News site http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/1997/09/1901-where.html that points out the trends uncovered by FIND/SVP at http://www.findsvp.com in their recent research into where advertising dollars are soon going to be found. They feel that the trend is towards a more local Web, with more and more people turning to the web for their local area news and information. While it is not an easy road now to generate advertising dollars from local businesses, that could change very quickly.

FIND/SVP predicts that by 1998 more than 24 million adults will be using the Web to obtain local news, sports, weather, yellow pages, and locate community resources, also indicates that to really succeed, local Web sites need to be accessed as often as newspapers or city magazines. Otherwise, the ad revenues may wither on the vine.

The study found that 5l% of Web users already access local information today. Things like television schedules, movie schedules, school information, maps to local addresses, local sports coverage and church information.

Peter Krasilovsky, author of the report said "Most (local community) services are being developed as enhanced directories and probably won't get used more than once or twice per week. To really succeed, these sites need to be used nearly on a par with daily newspapers or city magazines. Anything short of this could prove fatal to their advertising-based business models."

If your need is for immediate cash flow from your web site, this is probably not something for you to consider. If you can take the longer view, it could be nice to be in place and known as the local market starts to mature.

Be careful to select a vertical market that several advertisers would be interested in reaching.

If you are in a farming area, how about the definitive free farming-equipment classified ad site? Who could you sell advertising to? Try NEW equipment dealers, mechanics, farming supply companies. Bank loan departments. The local auctioneer.

City dude or dudette? How about everything to be known about the local theater scene, including everything from school plays to Broadway road shows. Not just the dates, but in depth, behind the scenes stuff. When it's up and running and drawing traffic, who could you sell advertising to? Try restaurants, baby sitter services, coffee shops with nice desert menus. Why not even sell tickets on your site?

For this to work right now, you need to target one demographic group. Something very vertical. Like farmers or stamp collectors. Get them coming to your site for information or help that makes their lives easier. Then, and only then, do you have value to sell to your carefully selected advertisers.

Can you sell adds earlier than I'm suggesting? Probably. Should you? No. If you can't deliver results for your advertisers, why should they ever buy again. Just wait and do your job. Then the advertisers will come to you (with a little gentle prodding from the cattle prod.)

Once you tackle one vertical market in your community and deliver value to your users and your advertisers, launching the next vertical market solution is a lot easier. You are a proven commodity. Advertisers will back you because of your track record.

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San Antonio became a leader in the development of virtual local communities with the release of their new kiosk system allowing all local residents to connect for free to the Web through a kiosk and conduct secure, private financial transactions with City government, or to get information from the many departments of the city government that are on the web.

By connecting to a number of the City's homepages on the World Wide Web, providing a standard credit card reader, and enhancing the program with motion video and stereo sound, the ATM-like devices open up the world of electronic commerce to all citizens, in convenient public places like malls. The sophisticated multi-media systems are completely controlled by the touch of a finger, and are easy for anyone to use, regardless of computer skills.

For a closer look, visit the city's home page at http://www.ci.sat.tx.us./ and nose around for some good idea starters.

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The Internet Advertising Bureau has released a new report http://www.iab.net/advertise/metricsource.html covering the methodology needed to allow advertisers to know the value of the advertising they are buying. This is a difficult situation for both advertisers and web site operators. How do you accurately measure and report traffic? How does an advertiser know that she is getting what she paid for? This is a great document to introduce you to the world of Net advertising and the issues involved. For the more experienced, this report offers some very good information of the nature of current Net advertising. Everybody should read it and file a copy away for later reference.

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Yahoo for Yahoo! They have installed some new Submission forms and they are a lot easier for new people to use. That is of course, assuming that you always submit to Yahoo! by hand. You do, don't you? Yahoo! is such an important directory and has sooooooooooo many categories to chose from that automatic submission engines shouldn't even offer it as an option. If you choose even a slightly wrong category, you will wind up getting little, if any, traffic from Yahoo! Are you willing to risk that? And don't forget. They don't spider your site to get keywords and such. They only work with what you submit. So, when you type in your title and description, remember that if you don't put a word in there, you won't come up in a search for that word.

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I got this inquiry this week and thought that several of you might also be interested in the answer.

"I am using Internet Explorer 3.0 and have Java activated. Why do I get the "This is what non-javascript browsers see?" message?"

You are confusing Java with Javascript. They are not the same thing. You can turn them on and off separately in your browser preferences. Javascript is translated right in your browser and does not have an applet that needs to be downloaded. Java is download into your system as an applet which is in fact a complete program that is then executed.

But the real question you should be asking is "Why do I insist on using the browser of choice of almost 5% of the users on the Net?" I don't have an answer for that one. Maybe it is a symptom of your rebellion against the establishment. Or maybe your Mom didn't take you to Disneyland like the other Moms. Or maybe you didn't read the last issue of the Gazette.

The real bottom line here is that most webmasters assume that if you were interested in seeing their cool stuff you would use a browser that could understand things like Javascript. IE3.0 only understood some of Javascript. Microsoft figured that was enough since everyone was going to jump onto the Active-X bandwagon just because they told us to. Guess what? Nobody noticed that Active-X was around. We were all too busy doing cool stuff with Javascript.

Now this week Microsoft has taken the first step towards telling you that you aren't supposed to use Java any more either. You didn't hear about that one? You're not alone. Most people had real issues to concern themselves with. The message to Microsoft in all of this is "Stop trying to tell us what to do. If you want us to use your products, make them worth using. You can't push this many people around. Put some real power in your browser and you won't have to give it away for free."

The IE vs. Navigator battle will rage on as long as Microsoft has gazillions of dollars to throw away on it. If you are serious about being a full member of the Internet community, get the tool that most people use. Navigator.

While I'm ranting, let me push this a bit farther. If you have built a web site that is optimized for Internet Explorer, meaning that all the cool things you have done can't be viewed by most of the people on the web, and you are wondering why award reviewers don't notice how cool your site is, the answer is: think about that for a minute. The judges come to see your site with a standard browser and your site just sits there. It doesn't do diddly. How cool is that? Oh, you want me to switch browsers and check it out with Explorer? Get real. Who has time? Who cares? Being fluent in Active-X is kinda like being fluent in Latin. It's cute. But how are you going to make a living?

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Global Advertising Inter-Network at http://www.classifiedcentral.com/ looks to be a new tools for the marketing of classified ads. If your site has a classified ad section, you can join this group of about 300 other sites offering classified advertising. You can then offer your users the opportunity to place their ad all over the 300 other sites for a fee. Ads start at $30.00 for a 50 word ad for 90 days on all 300 sites. The site that created the sale gets 25% off the sales price.

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Here's one we haven't talked about for a while. Web Cards at http://www.printing.com/ is one of the interesting traffic and business getting tools I've run into. For less than $100 US you can get 500 full color postcards with a picture of your home page on them. Give them out at meetings instead of business cards. Mail them to prospects. There are a lot of ways to use these handy cards. When you give someone a business card, they might completely forget to visit your web site. But with a 4 by 6 inch picture of your site they aren't likely to forget.

printing.com, now that's a domain name.

FUN BREAK

Now for a fun look at another group of people as much in touch with reality as the Microsoft clan.

Here is a big chance for you to become a citizen of the world's first completely underwater country. No, there wasn't another earthquake in Southern California.

Lazarus Long, one the founders of New Utopia, says the constitutional monarchy has existed since September 1996. "New Utopia is a new country in the Caribbean," says Long. "It is comprised of three submerged islands, on which will be constructed large platforms, forming a base on which we will build the newest, most beautiful city/state in the world," he wrote in a letter to the United Nations, asking for membership for the new country.

The islands lie between 13 feet to 37 feet underwater, necessitating large 90,000 square foot platforms on which structures will be built. Long says he foresees waterways similar to those in Venice, instead of streets, with gondolas and water taxis providing transportation.

I would imagine they are having problems finding open bodies of water in each country around the world where they can build underwater embassies. How do they set up the speakers for a rock concert? Enough of this. We've wasted time now on two different groups that seem to have had a break from reality. http://www.new-utopia.com

CREATING SITE INCOME

By popular request (or at least by a couple of requests) we are going to start talking more about tips and trends towards creating more income at your web site. Many of us base our ability to offer the content of our sites on the ability of the site to create dollars to not only pay for the expense of putting the site on the air, but to generate some revenue that can be used to spend on frivolous things like house payments, utilities, insurance, food and health insurance. Plus the money for the necessities of life like hard drives, memory and software upgrades.

Let's talk realities for a few minutes. Money is not a four-letter word. It is a necessary good thing. If you spend time and energy offering content on your site that could be spent earning money, then it is necessary to create income from those efforts if you are to continue to pay your bills. It's just a fact. Publishing on the Internet is no different than any other efforts you could spend your time on.

If you are able to spend the time in addition to earning a living doing something else, than this is not a concern for you. You are fortunate to be able to put forth the effort and reap the rewards of satisfaction. Many of us envy you. But what happens if your site grows and starts to consume time that you can't afford to give away without cutting you style of living? Should you have to give it away just to 'keep the Internet free?' No, you shouldn't.

The model I am most familiar with is the one that allows VirtualPROMOTE to exist. If you've been to the web site, you know that a lot of time and energy have gone into creating and maintaining it over the past two years. No, I'm not independently wealthy nor am I just plain crazy (of course I'd appreciate your not asking my wife Cathy) I am however very fortunate to be able to do what I love, which is spending most of my time on VirtualPROMOTE and the Gazette while still doing what Cathy and Nick enjoy, which is having the bills paid. I get lots of mail asking how I can afford to give away so much free information that obviously takes a lot of effort to create, so this article kills two birds with one gift-horse, as the old saying goes.

The answer is, I can't. Nobody can. So how does it get done?

Slightly over two years ago, I met Steve Repetti who was in the throes of developing some software technology that I believed was going to break some new ground. I was 12 years into running my advertising agency and producing video projects and Steve and I thought it would be a real advantage to have the multimedia expertise in-house. So my agency and I joined the SmartDesk team. (trust me, this all leads somewhere if you can hang in long enough.)

One of the first things needed at SmartDesk was to establish a solid Web presence. I knew most of the ad agencies in the area and we started interviewing them all to see who should tackle the web goal. Guess what? I knew next to nothing about the web but I knew more than any of them. The web was just too new to have captured the attention of ad agencies who can't sell something for which there is no demand. So I raised my hand and said 'I'll do it. How hard can it be?' Duh. NEVER RAISE YOUR HAND. So off I went and two months later had created the world's latest corporate sponsored butt-ugly web site. And of course, no traffic other than all of our Moms.

But I had caught the bug. Hooked for life. So I raised my hand again (are you starting to think that maybe you shouldn't take my advise on stuff if I'm no smarter than that?) and I disappeared for 3 months and actually learned what was going on, web-wise. And managed to create a SmartDesk site that actually was pretty good. And we still had all of that traffic from our Moms. Actually by involving more staff people at SmartDesk we had even more Moms.

About then I hit upon the idea of VirtualPROMOTE, which was at that time only 200 links and about 10 pages of information. But guess what? It was getting hits. And every week it got more hits. Not tons of hits, but when added to the Mom traffic, it out drew the product site. And I noticed something interesting. Visitors were coming into the site at VirtualPROMOTE's few pages and a lot of them went to see what the sponsor SmartDesk was all about. Could I make use of that fact? Sounded like it was worth a try. Yep. I raised my hand again. I think it's a physical disorder of some type. Makes me raise my hand all the time.

What I really wanted to do: build VirtualPROMOTE into its own community with the goal of generating goodwill for its sponsors, including SmartDesk, from a large number of people. I settled on a mission statement that remains unchanged over the past two years. The mission was to create an independent site that was high in value to a large number of people on the Internet and to create a community for those people that caused them to return frequently and participate actively in the VirtualPROMOTE community. To be entirely up front that VirtualPROMOTE was a community outreach program created to offer free information in order to create awareness of its sponsors and to impart a professional image to their offerings.

And last was to offer a site that had no agenda. Not just no hidden agenda, but none at all. Just information that was accurate and non-biased. Not only wasn't I going to compete against other sites with similar or compatible information, but I was going to promote them on our site. Offer information to our users no matter where it was to be found on the Net. When products we were to review turned out less than we had hoped, I wouldn't slam them in public. Send them a report of what was wrong and just wait to see if they fixed it. Software developers don't need bad reviews. They do need feedback.

So, here we are today. Two years later. Has it been worthwhile to SmartDesk as the longest running sponsor? Yes. Absolutely. Without a doubt.

How has it been worthwhile? Let me give you a couple of examples. When SmartDesk is dealing with other companies and VirtualPROMOTE is mentioned, it immediately imparts several brownie points to SmartDesk for being affiliated with such a well known site with a lot of awareness within its web community. This is always a benefit to them. There is no way to know but they feel it has helped to bring in some very good business and business relationships.

The other example to discuss is the benefit that is going on right now. The Internet has a very high noise level when you want to announce a new software product. It's a hard uphill climb to become known on the web. But the response from you in the VirtualPROMOTE community have surprised us with your overwhelming response to SmartDesk's Personal Web Server. A steady flow of you looking into the information about it and the free trial is being downloaded at a pretty furious pace. My hope is that you have done this because SmartDesk is part of your world through its sponsorship of VirtualPROMOTE and you assume that they are honest about what they offer you.

Because of the awareness you have created for VirtualPROMOTE and the Gazette, SmartDesk has gotten excellent press coverage and interest in their products. The media sees the postings you guys make to newsgroups where you quote VirtualPROMOTE or from the Gazette. Every time one of you posts a message to a newsgroup and mention VirtualPROMOTE, we see the traffic impact right away. When other people see all of the great references, banner ads and subscription forms on your web sites, the awareness grows. Not just for VirtualPROMOTE, but for its sponsor SmartDesk as well.

And that, in a nut shell, is the benefit of building a community for your company that has little or nothing to do with selling stuff every day. Throw your support behind an existing community and stay there long enough for your company name to become associated with that community's reputation.

Many of you write me asking how to build a community and generate business from it. Our example is one way. I'm glad I chose to do it this way. I get a lot of satisfaction from VirtualPROMOTE and the Gazette, and in the long run, as its long running sponsor, SmartDesk is a big winner.

How does all of this relate to your needs? I have no idea. But hopefully you now understand why you might want to take this approach within your own company. Maybe you'll start from scratch and build a community, or you'll 'adopt' one of the many fine sites that offer great content and could really get going if they had a steady source of income to count on. That made VirtualPROMOTE's life easier.

Probably the larger audience that this story addresses is the hundreds of you subscribing to the Gazette who need to find a direction that will compensate them for all of the hard work. I hope by printing out this article and using it as a marketing tool, you will find a solid supporter that lets you focus on the content while building a community for you and your sponsor that does credit to both of you. A company that has the vision to take the long view. That is what made the difference for me. SmartDesk was willing to take a long view of the goal and allow VirtualPROMOTE to grow naturally without daily pressure to produce hard dollar benefits. In the end they had affiliated themselves with a dynamic community and shared in its reflected glow.

Next week I'll try to have some good information about another way to generate income from your site. I'll also be inviting others to contribute in areas I am not as knowledgable as I would like. If you have a suggestion for this series, send it to me.

THIS ONE IS PRETTY SCARY

Hayden sent this one along to me to see if I knew anything about it. At first we both thought it was some sort of joke. When we figured out that it was for real, we decided that it was the scariest thing we have seen yet in the world of search engine spamming. I'm not going to reveal the company doing this, as the goal is not to create a 'blacklist' but rather to warn people of the penalties they can wind up paying when they do certain things.

The offer is in the form of an invitation to become this company's email ISP. Can't imagine why they might need a new one. But the scary part is their description of the service they offer to customers.

>Hello
>
>We are looking for a bulk Email company To be able to add there line of
>products to our arsenal of Web Marketing materials.
>
>What we do.
>
>We take over the search engines for our respected clients.
>
>We have Three Plans.
>
>Level one
>Submission of web pages to the search engines 5 days a week
>approximately 2000 pages per week.
>Cost $2000 per month
>
>
>Level two
>Submission of web pages one day per week approximately 200 pages per
>week.
>Cost $500 per month
>
>Level three
>Submission of web pages BI-weekly
>Cost$250 per month
>
>also with level one the client gets included in our ever growing
>previously submitted pages.
>This gets them hits in the first hour.
>
>All pages are specially designed to get to the top of the search engines.
>We are doing this for everything from Adult Sites to coffee clubs.

Now, there is nothing wrong with offering to help people get to the top of the search engines. But if they are submitting 2,000 pages to the 10 top search engines per week for a total of 20,000 submissions per week, don't you think they just might run into the search engine Spam Patrol? When you bury a search engine under a flood of submissions, they get really upset. They tend to retaliate. They dump your site or move it to the back of the results. And saying 'I'm sorry' doesn't fix it.

This type of approach will most likely leave in its wake a large group of people who used to have a business on the web.

NEED MORE HITS?

The Good People Directory is a little different than anything I've seen before. The Good People directory began in 1993 as a listing of reliable home-based business opportunities. It was distributed in printed form. Currently they offer their directory in print, as electronic files, and as a web site. The electronic file is itself a business opportunity so it gets pretty wide distribution. Check out the web site at http://youonline.net/ If you offer a product or service to the home-based business world, you should get listed here. It could generate some significant sales. Print out the submission form at http://youonline.net/graphico/pubs/goodpeop/order.htm and mail it to Good People to get listed. You have to submit it by mail so that you can sign the guarantee that you run an ethical business.

If you have a site that home-based business owners would find interesting, list it in these other places:

The Homebased Business Connection at http://www.oswego.com/homebase.html features links to sources of just about anything of interest to at-home workers.

Small and Home Based Business Links at http://www.bizoffice.com/submit.html Links to all kinds of stuff of interest to home-based business.

Yahoo has a pretty big category of home-based and small business information sources that you should be listed in .

TECHNOLOGY CORNER

The Balance of Technology

For those of you that have had a chance to visit Jim's Personal site http://jimworld.nu/, you already know the benefit of having a "real-time" web presence. For those of you that have not, I actively encourage at least a brief stopover to see this stuff in action.

In Jim's case, he has crafted a powerful extension to his web presence with the implementation of his own Personal Web Server. This runs in the background on his desktop computer serving up requests while he does his "regular" work in the foreground.

This environment has taken on a personality akin to Jim's, and not just in the look and feel of the site. In Jim's case, for example, when someone enters a chat room a voice announces the visitor to him, and he is never more than two clicks away from joining the conversation. With the included real-time monitoring and logging, there are times when he "sees" the user logging on to his chat system and he is waiting for them with a personalized message when they come in.

But, like everything else, there is a trade off --- there is a price to pay for always being accessible. For Jim this boils down to efficient time management. On the one hand he saves a ton of time and effort as the result of the power and flexibility of his environment, on the other, he must balance the needs of his visitors with his own agenda. This can be both a problem and an opportunity. Jim's goal has been to learn to be responsive to visitor needs yet still be able to get his other work done. The result has been a system of being available during certain hours for visitors for general chat. During other times he stays out of the chat rooms unless a high priority message comes through indicating that someone has a real-time need that he can respond to and then get back to what he was doing.

Because of the volume of demands on JimWorld, we have been able to fine tune some of the monitoring tools in WebSuite to help him learn to meet these goals, and as a result WebSuite has benefited.

Today's web surfer's are used to the "I-want-it-now" syndrome, however, Personal Web Servers take this concept to a level rarely seen on the net. Despite the appearance of real-time, the net is actually a delayed proposition --- log files get updated at midnight, form requests transcend the e-mail links, and data of all types often gets posted immediately only to be reviewed at some later time as the result of collecting, queuing, and forwarding the information to the right authority.

Personal Web Servers bring all of this home and right to your desktop. If someone posts a question, it can be responded to instantly --- while they are still on your site! Providing assistance to your user base becomes significantly easier with the ability to monitor their activity in real-time. To mitigate Jim's time management problem, a host of utilities are provided that enable him to balance all of these efforts --- and more are coming every day.