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December 2002
Print and Go Here
is the entire ezine for you to print and take with you. Simply
print this entire web page by using your "File/print"
command. All of this month's articles are included and there is
plenty of room in the margins for notes
Website Technique
Navigation
Having a poor navigation system was one of the biggest mistakes I made
with my website when I first started. I had six-teen main navigation
buttons plus many sub navigation buttons. . . .way to many to be
effective.
You really need to think about the type of person who is your targeted
visitor and what he/she would be looking for. You can have several
different types of visitors, but more than a couple means you should
have more than one website so that each site can be more targeted. This
is more necessary than ever in our increasingly competitive web
environment.
Global Navigation
Try to keep your main navigation buttons to an absolute minimum. The
more of them you have the more you will confuse your visitor. Keep them
the same on each page of your site so that the visitor always feels like
he/she can get to the main areas of interest quickly. Also, having the
main buttons on every page makes the visitor more comfortable because
they never feel lost. These buttons are referred to as your "Global
Navigation" Buttons.
Sub Navigation
Once you get a visitor to one of their main areas of interest on your
site you can have more targeted and content specific buttons taking them
deeper into your site. The mistake I made was to try to put all these
Sub Navigation buttons along with my Global Navigation buttons. I wanted
to make sure no one would miss anything and in my efforts to do that I
made absolutely sure that everyone would miss everything because there
was too much to pick from.
I see this scenario over and over again on websites of my students who
are trying to act like Yahoo! and be everything to everybody. As I
always say, "Yahoo! has enough money to advertise on every bus in
America and you don't, so don't try to be like them."
Check your site
Yes, I know it will be a royal pain to redo your site after you have put
32 navigation buttons on it, but you want to chance to make money don't
you?
Before you even look at your site, determine the one or two profiles of
the types of visitor you want to attract, then make global navigation
buttons that will specifically suit them. If you come up with ten
different types of visitors, either you are unrealistic or you need
about five more websites.
The biggest lesson I ever ignored was when people told me not to try to
be all things to all people. My pigheadedness kept me from being rich at
a much earlier age. I haven't made that mistake since and my bank
account is happy that I haven't..
Traffic Generation Technique
Postcards
Using postcards is an effective way to get targeted traffic to your site
and it is especially effective in converting your snail mail database to
and email database.
Use see 'em in your mail box all the time. Small postcards and oversize
ones too. The reason is that they are relatively inexpensive to print
and mail as compared to regular direct mail pieces that require much,
more printing, stuffing, and postage.
Post cards generally get more attention than full blown direct mail
pieces. This doesn't mean that they get lots of attention. It just means
that a recipient can generally assess what the post card is about
quickly. Many direct mail pieces never even get opened, so by definition
any attention is more attention.
If your database is small, you can enormously increase the attention
your mailing gets by handwriting the note and / or address on the
reverse side of the post card. Yes, I know this is a giant pain in the
fingers, but your overall response will be MUCH greater. Hey what are
you doing the mailing for in the first place? To get response, right?
When someone gets a postcard with the mailing address printed on it and
the postage machine-printed it negates the personal feel of the post
card. Some companies are using fonts that look like handwriting to
overcome this drawback.
Direct mail marketers study response rates like crazy, so if they tell
you something, you can pretty much believe it. One thing they say is
that putting regular stamps on a mailing will get you a better response,
so do it.
Web Cards
One use of post cards that will save you lots of design expense is to
put a picture of your website on the main graphic side of the post card.
There are companies that will do this for you automatically. Here's a
link to a company that will do it for you. (I've given you a link to the
page where they give you extra ideas on how to use your web cards)
http://www.web-cards.com/top10.asp
The Message Side
You can use the message side of the postcard to give the recipient an
incentive to visit your site/sign up for your ezine. You could say
something like,
"15% off your first order, just for trying out our
new ezine"
or
"Free consultation if you register at our site."
The whole idea, besides getting traffic and maybe a direct sale is to
get the person to leave their email address. I think this is infinitely
more important than getting them to buy something on the visit
stimulated by the post card because once you get that email address, you
can reach the person over and over again for free. No printing. No
mailing, No postage. No design work.
Here's a link to a great course by Alex Mandossian that will teach you
everything you need to know and give you lots more ideas.
http://www.marketingwithpostcards.com
Product Development Technique
"Best Of" Products "Best Of" products are
really easy to produce because the really hard work of creating the
individual products in the first place has already been done. You simply
repackage the work. I'm in the process right now of
creating several "Best Of" products. The first one I'm creating comes
from all the work I've done over the past 4 years publishing "Great
Speaking" Ezine. I'll get at least five new products out of this. Each
product will be based on one of the regular four sections of the ezine
and the fifth product will be a package deal with all the sections
included. Here are the products I'll get from "Great
Speaking":
The Best of "Great
Speaking" Quick Tips The Best of "Great
Speaking" Advanced Tips The Best of "Great
Speaking" Humor Tips The Best of "Great
Speaking" Marketing Tips Get em all for one
special price!
I'll get even more products from the many audio tapes I
have. I haven't even figured out all the combinations I
can do yet, but here is a brief stab at it:
The Best of Tom Antion's
Media Marketing The Best of Tom Antion's
Speaking Tips The Best of Tom Antion's
Internet Marketing Tips
and it can go on and on.
Then I can make the best of my Ebooks, CDs etc. This could go on all
next year if I wanted it to.
The idea here falls back into my regular product strategy. Keep
producing products that sell on their own and then bundle them together
in different ways to keep them alive and fresh and cranking income for
you. Email Technique
Offers
If you want to maximize your return from email marketing,
offer one thing and one thing
only.
When you make multiple offers you dilute the value of each of the offers
you are making. You also confuse the potential customer. . . . When
people are confused they vote NO.
Let�s say you are promoting a new tape album. It�s not a good idea to
send a broadcast email to your list that says,
�Check Out Our New Tape Album and don�t forget
all this month we are discounting ebooks by 25%.�
This marketer was undoubtedly fighting internally about the fact that
he/she wanted to maximize the return of the emailing.
Hold your horses! By doubling the
offer, the response will probably be half of what it would have been had
the email offered either the New Tape Album OR the
25% offer off multiple ebooks.
You might think that an offer of multiple ebooks is a multiple offer.
Not exactly. The offer part of the multiple ebook offer is the 25%
discount which is a single offer and should be successful because in the
prospect's mind he/she is saying, "WOW! I get 25% off any of the ebooks
I want." The offer of "25%" is what is dominant at that point, not the
fact that there are multiple ebooks to choose from.
The same thing occurs on a webpage. I had one student make an offer and
then right in the middle of the offer he made a pitch for a charity he
was running. The response was dismal on both.
So, don't ruin your chances of success by muddying the waters. Make one
offer at a time. Copywriting Technique
How to Write a Strong Guarantee
by Tom Antion If you are going to bother
having a guarantee at all I suggest using strong language to really make
it do its work in increasing sales. Don't be wishy washy about it.
The longer the guarantee the better when it comes to reducing the risk
to the customer and increasing sales, but your credit card company may
have its own restrictions on the length of your guarantee. Many have a
six month limit. Here are a bunch of terms you can use
that will put teeth in your guarantee and make people feel comfortable
in ordering. Feel free to mix and match:
Ironclad
guarantee Unconditional guarantee
Unconditional money-back guarantee Satisfaction
guaranteed Lifetime guarantee 30 day
no-risk guarantee Try it free for X days and if you're
not happy send it back for a complete refund. . . . we
will promptly refund every nickel you paid I'll
personally refund your money I guarantee that everything
you see if truthfully described. We stand behind our
products with a full money-back guarantee if you aren't satisfied for
any reason. If this product isn't every bit as wonderful
as we say it is, simply return it to us for a full refund.
No questions asked money-back guarantee
You can put variations of the above phrases into
paragraphs like the ones below:
"Everyone says I'm crazy for giving such and awesome
guarantee. If you don't think this is the greatest blue widget you've
ever seen, return it within 60 days and I'll personally refund every
nickel you paid." "We believe so much in our red gizmo
that we're going to let you try it out for 90 days in your home RISK
FREE. If you don't like it send it back and we'll even pay the
shipping and give you a no questions asked refund."
"Our green whatchamacallits are delivered with no risk to you.
Everything you see on this page is truthfully described. Use them for
six months. If you don't think they are worth three times what you
paid, send them back for a full refund."
Here are some guarantee guidelines:
State the time period the guarantee is good for
and make it as long as possible relative to your offer. Use strong language Make sure the prospective customer understands
that they have no risk. Let them know that there will be no hassles if
they return the product. Tell them the reason why you are offering such a
great guarantee.
Start cutting out guarantees from all the print
advertisements you get and copy all the ones you see on the web. You'll
be able to pick out all kinds of great guarantee language by doing this
that you can use in your ad copy.
I just completed a two hour audiotape seminar on this topic called
Copywriting 901: The Fast Track to Writing Words that Sell.
It is awesome and could make you a thousand times it's cost by
learning the above technique and all the other techniques I put on
the tape.
Click here to order Search Engine Tips
Keyword Spamming There are many tricks that
used to work to manipulate the search engines that will get you in big
trouble now. Big trouble means your websites will get banned from the
engines . . . a fate worse than death when it comes to getting new
business on the Internet. At the very least these tricks will guarantee
a low ranking for your site.
If you are new to search engine optimization techniques, you may not
realize that the things you see in this article are bad. Even worse is
if the webmaster helping you with your website does one or more of these
techniques on your behalf because they are ill informed and not up to
speed on what is currently acceptable. Your site will get banned and all
you will get from your poorly trained helper is a pitiful . . . sorry.
I�m talking about �Keyword Spamming� or using keywords on a webpage in a
fashion that is deemed unacceptable by the search engines. The following
list will most likely either get you banned altogether or virtually
guarantee you will never get a high search engine ranking for your
pages.
Never use the same
keyword consecutively over and over again on your webpage or in your
metatags, graphics or anywhere on your page. It used to be that the
more keywords you had the better . . . not any more. Never make the text on
your page the same color or even nearly the same color as the
background of the page. In the old days you could do this to make the
search engine spiders see many keywords, but the people looking at
your page wouldn�t see them. Don�t use extremely
small text. You have to really watch this. You can even accidentally
violate this rule with a simple copywrite notice at the bottom of your
webpages. Don�t allow any really small text on your web pages. Don�t use popular words
in your meta areas that have no relationship to the content of your
page. Don�t use celebrity
names in your meta areas and on your pages in an effort to grab
traffic looking for the celebrities. These celebrities can sue you for
stealing their traffic. Don�t use brand names
unless you have a legitimate reason. Putting the word �Sony� on your
page for no reason can get you in hot water. Don�t use the backdoor
method of �not� or �just like� to try to steal traffic. This method
means that you put a term like �not Sony� or �just like Sony� in your
page and meta areas. If you legitimately review Sony products or sell
them, then none of this applies. Avoid using keyword
laden drop down boxes that have unrelated keywords in an effort to
divert traffic from legitimate pages that address those keywords.
Use of these techniques is not only dangerous because it could get you
banned from the search engines, but dangerous because it will irritate
the visitors you do get that were looking for something else.
The above is an excerpt from Click: The Ultimate Guide to
Electronic Marketing for Speakers
http://www.antion.com/click.htm
Cool Software and Gadgets
Software
http://popuprotator.com/
http://mastersyndicator.com/ You can see an example of this in our
new section on advanced web tips by William Bontrager. All we did was
insert one line of code and his tips will be updated every week
automatically. (See the Misc. Section) Gadgets
http://www.lonezone.com/2000/catalog/6915.html Floating Message
Clock
http://www.dupont.com/safetyglass/lgn/stories/1004.html Heads up
display for your car . . . now you can play fighter pilot in your
minivan
http://www.dinapoliopt.com/computer_glasses.html Clip on lenses that
help you see the computer screen with less eye strain.
http://www.mymailstation.com/products/mivo250.html cheap email
station when you don't need all the computing power of a laptop.
http://www.irobot.com
Vaccuums your floor while you surf the net or play tennis.
http://www.vprmatrix.com Wide screen laptop . . . your DVD movies
will look great! Useful Websites
http://www.popuprotator.com/ Rotate your pop up ads to show more
boxes to the same people without upsetting them.
http://www.e-zinez.com/ The handbook of Ezine Publishing
http://www.adobe.com/products/tips/acrobat.html Tutorials for making
pdf ebooks and optimizing your ebooks for handheld devices
http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/orr/handouts/TW/web/FP.htm Front Page
Tutorials
http://www.nailitnow.com.au/word/ Easy Microsoft Word Tutorial
http://oregonstate.edu/aw/tutorials/html/ Simple HTML Tutorial. It
comes in handy once in a while for you to know just a smidgen of HTML
coding.
http://ezine-swap.com/
Find other ezine publishers that want to swap ads with you.
http://list-news.com/
Email marketing news
http://www.web-source.net/ All kinds of pretty good articles. Computer / Automation Technique
Sorting
More techniques
I primarily use this technique when sifting through the
volumes of emails I receive. It makes it much easier to find and deal
with my most important messages.
I use Microsoft Outlook as my main email program, but the same technique
works for many other programs whether they are email programs or not.
The simple technique is to click at the top of the column that you want
to sort on.
For instance, if I wanted my newest emails to show up at the top of my
email inbox, I would click on the top of the date column. Oops what
happened? Well if the emails were already sorted with the newest at the
top and the oldest at the bottom, and I clicked the top of the column,
then the order would reverse. The oldest email would now be at the top
and the newest at the bottom. Click on the top of the column again and
you reverse the order again. Now the newest are at the top where they
belong and the oldest are at the bottom. I find this the most convenient
because I don�t have to scroll down to see new emails arrive.
FLAGGED EMAILS
This is the most common way that I use the sort function. I get such a
high volume of emails I usually go over them very quickly eliminating
the obvious spam. Then I go over the ones that are left and try to
notice if any need immediate attention. If they do and it�s a quick
answer, I go ahead and answer them immediately. If it�s going to take a
more in depth answer, I right click on the email and click on �flag for
follow-up.� The rest of the emails I usually drag individually to
respective folders that I have already set up. Anytime I want to address
the topic of those emails I can simply go to one of those folders and
find emails related to that topic.
Now back to the flagged emails. This is where the sort function comes
in. By the time I get through 50 or 100 emails I usually have a bunch of
flagged emails separated by miscellaneous stuff that I didn�t know what
to do with, but wanted to save in case I need to refer to them. I simply
click on the sort at the top of the �flag� column. This brings all the
flags to the top and I can quickly go through and answer all of them. If
I can�t get them all done, I can easily find them again the next time I
sort on the flagged column.
You can sort on any of the column, but I hardly ever do. Sorting on the
�Subject� column sorts the subject line of the email in alphabetical
order. I guess that could be useful, but I can�t think of how or why.
You can sort on the �From� column and again, I virtually never bother.
Occasionally I sort on the �Attachment� column if I know I�m looking for
an email that has one.
I think you�ll find that the method I use above by using flags and
sorting will really speed you up when it comes to handling your emails.
Next issue: Using the Find/ Search Function
More
automation techniques:
This section will be an ongoing effort to keep you
from grabbing your mouse which slows you down, and is bad for your wrist
and an area where various shortcuts will be explained. We don't want you
typing any more than you have to.
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You can save yourself typing
or copying an extremely long link. When you are in Internet explorer
simply drag the "blue e" icon into your email message and the link to
the webpage will be there and ready to email.
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If you have several sites
that you will be working with, download each into a new window and
then pop back and forth between them using your task bar at the bottom
of the screen.
Miscellaneous Stuff You Need to Know
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When using a laptop on the
road it's a good idea to carry the system restore disk you got when
you bought the thing and back up CDs of your critical files. This
has saved me from major disaster several times.
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Wi-Fi is a wireless
Internet connection being provided by parks, airport lounges,
Starbucks and many other public and private places. You can get a
cheap card for your computer (some new laptops are already set up
for it) and be surfing at high speed, while sipping your Cappuccino.
I'm going to use it in my new house to make everywhere including the
pool area connected.
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Windows XP is really
taking over. Many sites are showing it to be rapidly overtaking any
operating system visiting. I love it and rarely have to reboot
anymore even though I push my computer hard all day.
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While we're talking about
XP, know that you can use it's narrator function to get it to read
to you.. Click on "Start", "programs" "accessories" "accessibility"
"narrator" to try it out.
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You can purchase the
Copywriting Combo which includes 2002 instantly usable
headlines at
http://www.professionalspeaker.com/catalog.htm Scroll down to
"e-books."
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I use an opitcal mouse
which has no mouse ball to get dirty or wear out. It's especially
great for traveling because your mouse takes a beating as it's
carried around and packed and unpacked. I've never had a mouse
failure since I started using the optical one.
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Beware of cables. I just
had a pesky problem that everyone thought was my Internet provider.
It turned out to be a cable that was working fine for months, was
never moved around (which might break one of the wires) and was not
suspect at all. It was the culprit. It just went bad and when I
replaced it, everything worked fine. I still can't believe it went
bad on it's own, but it did.
 FEATURE
Advanced Weekly Webmaster Tip from
William Bontrager
(you must check in weekly to see each tip because the current
tip is replaced each week with the new tip)
TRENDS
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According to BIGresearch 50% of US web surfers experience more than
one media at once, i.e., watch television while surfing the web . .
. if you are substantial enough to do some TV or cable ads in your
market, you can easily cross promote.
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The Top Five Activities of Americans Online (as a percentage of
Internet Users age 3 and above.)
Email 84%
Product / Service information search 67.3%
News / Weather / Sports 61.8%
Playing Games 42.1%
Product / Service purchases 39.1%
Even with only 39% buying, that's a lot of people for you to sell
to.
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According to BURST 19% of Internet users have redeemed a coupon on
line and with households making $100,000.00 a year or more 26.6%
have redeemed a coupon on line. . . .The shopping system I
handle
http://www.kickstartcart.com can handle this all for you
automatically.
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IProspect surveyed 1403 people and found that 78% will abandon a
search if they don't fine what they want in the first three pages of
search results and 48% expect to find what they want on the first
page of search results. . . You better get busy making
your sites show up high don't you think?
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DoubleClick reports that Email click through rates are on the rise
again after a fall in the second quarter of 2002. Second quarter
rates were 4.9% with a rise to 6.1% in the third quarter. . .
.Make sure you get your share and you won't unless you build your
email database and send out good information and offers.
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The US Census Bureau confirms that Business to Consumer ecommerce
continues to see solid growth and yet only 1.3 % of business is
conducted on line with an expect rise to 8% in the next five years.
. . . I'm thrilled with this news and you should be doing everything
within your power to start tapping the online sales now and
preparing for a bright future in online sales.
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http://www.emailsanta.com/ Santa is now get more emails than
regular mails
End of this issue You will have to print out
the following reference pages separately. They are included in each
issue, so there is no need to print them out every time. Do,
however, check them frequently because I will put new additions to
these pages at the top of each page until the next issue comes out.
Recommended Learning Tools
Search Engine
Resources
Suppliers
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