Help Stefan CampaignCeltnet WebInfo eZine
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
In This Issue
- Window on the Web
- Featured Article:
Fear of Change can Hurt your Business - Classified Ad Board
- Comment
- Business Tip
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Window on the Web
Over the past week or so I've been teaching myself PHP. Partly it's a desire to know something about what's becoming an ubiquitous web-based interpreted language. I'm already a decent PERL programmer and I can code in Java but as my ISP doesn't include server-side includes (SSIs) in web pages I can't use PERL to perform many of the functions that I need for my websites; hence this plunge into PHP. Knowing PERL already it took me about a day to get to grips with the language and another day to be able to write enough to be a danger to myself and others. I'll soon see whether the various projects I have planned with PHP actually come to fruition.
This month's newsletter focusses on one of the constant issues facing all web marketers — the changing environment that we are all faced with. This has struck me more than ever as I've been updating the code on my own web pages whilst adding new features and functionality. This issue's comment deals with the nature of the internet's changing environments using the examples of Google's indexing and the demise of framed web pages.
Dyfed
Editor/Publisher
Email me @ editor@celtnet.org.uk
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Feature Article
Fear of Change Can Hurt Your Business
by Bonnie Kotch
Most people dont like change. It means having to readjust routine, change habits and throw your order of process into upheaval. You are leaving your comfort zone. Most people dont want to do this, so those people fail. Even when that change could mean something GOOD, people balk.
Internet marketing is no different. You get used to doing something one way; you use the same ad sources for your marketing; you go after promoting the same products; and your web pages even start looking the same. I have heard this saying from just about every successful businessperson I know:
If you keep doing what youre doing . . . youre going to keep getting what youre getting.
When my income, my websites activity (visitors) and my fulfillment hit a plateau and I wasnt at my goal, I knew I had to do something different. I totally believed in what I was doing; I enjoyed it, but it became routine. When that happens a complacency takes effect and its picked up in your written content, your follow-ups, and even phone communication with your customers.
Somehow, you realize that you have gotten away from your purpose, but you are doing everything you know to do, and nothing new and exciting is happening. This also happens when you TRY to do something different, but slide back into the same habits and routines because they are COMFORTABLE. Even seasoned Internet marketers run into these roadblocks.
When I began working on Single-Parents-Help.com, I was excited. It wasnt because I saw all this potential money in it, because the site really wasnt about income. The subject matter of that site was something I was passionate about because its focus was on helping people that felt they couldnt help themselves.
I began working on the site, but I was getting lost. I had to stop and take a step back.
It was starting to look and read like an Internet marketing site. It looked good, but it was not appealing at all to single parents who would come looking for help and support. It looked like I expected them to BUY something!
So I scrapped it. I went to visit various single parent support sites, like parentswithoutpartners.org, and single.parents.about.com. As a relatively new single parent myself, what would I look for if I went online looking for help or direction?
Thats when I felt it. And thats when I began rewriting content. I took the focus off attracting sales (which was evident all through my text) and instead stressed the position single parents found themselves in, and how to get out of the rut. I wrote from a single parents point of view, not from a marketers point of view. Then I realized something!
I REALLY DID want to help people! I had been there! These people werent looking for money! (Well, not JUST money). They wanted someone to understand!
In getting down to communicating, you sometimes have to insert a personal empathy for the situation your target visitors are experiencing. I knew what it was like to have a car repossessed. I knew what it was like to have to ask to borrow money to pay bills, yes! I was an Internet marketer. I was successful and made five figures in sales and went down to nothing over a period of three years because my routine changed. I no longer had a home. My family was breaking up and my kids were hurting . . . we no longer had health insurance. My whole security was gone!
Thats what most single parents deal with on a day-to-day basis and this was HARD for me to write about. I had to leave my comfort zone and talk about things I dont talk about. (You dont talk about personal tragedies on a website about making money!)
Now even though this is a rather extreme example of fear of change, it was an eye-opener and a wake-up call.
When your main focus is on obtaining sales, its going to be evident in your web content, your newsletters, your follow-up emails, etc, etc. Take a step back and look at what you are doing.
What are you offering people? What will spending money at your site help them with?
Now take the last part of that last sentence. That should be your focus . . . What are you going to help them with?
If you change your action sentences from "You need to buy . . ." to "You will have . . ." you will not only see a jump in interest to your site, you will begin to see longer visits, more newsletter subscribers, and more people linking to your web page.
Give a little something. You dont want to just take money from people; theres no fulfillment in that. You want people coming back because they believe you. They trust you. Make them feel good about purchasing from your site. The more you give, the more you will get in return and the more fulfillment your business will give you.
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About the author:
Bonnie is an internet marketing consultant and affiliate marketer as well as newsletter publisher and author. Access her free newsletter at http://www.trinityonlinemarketingschool.com/newsletter.htm and http://www.trinityonlinemarketingschool.com
Classified Ad Board
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Comment
Web Marketing in a Changing World
Though we might all want to deny it, the truth is that the internet is an ever-changing environment in which to do business. Advances in processing power and in programming languages allow us to deliver more complex (and hopefully more useful) content. There are also issues of how one drives traffic to a website and gets that website the recognition it deserves on the web. In this context internet is far more dependent on the whims of a few companies than just about any other marketing environment. Chief of these are the indexing and search companies and of these Google holds the lion's share of the market (45%). Google is so powerful that the fact of whether or not it indexes a website (and how quickly it performs that index) determines whether a business site lives or dies. Perhaps more important is Google's 'page rank' which determines the popularity of your site and ranks its pages accordingly. The better your page rank the higher your pages come in Google's indexes and the more likely you are to be seen on the first page of Google's results for a given keyword search.
Changes to indexing algorithms and what Google (and to a lesser degree the other search engines) considers to be a good website can have a very profound effect on a web-based business. Currently Google's main arbiter of both a site's popularity and its 'worth' in terms of how much of a site should be indexed is the number of inbound links (IBLs) coming into a site. Using this measure the number of uni-directional links counts for more than exchanged links, which is partly to eliminate the skewing effect of link exchanges on a site's popularity. As a result a market in the sale of uni-directional links has emerged with many links sites and pages emerging (many being similar to the one offered on the CeltNet site. If done properly such links pages can be an useful resource for your visitors, they can be an additional source of revenue and they can also aid in increasing your own site's popularity in the search engines.
This is just one example of how changes in the marketplace can reveal new opportunities. Another example of the change in ways that websites are presented (again due to a chenge in the way search engines index web pages) is the demise of the framed page. During the late 1990s pages using frames were very common as they could present static borders to pages whilst having dynamic content. They allowed complex web pages to be designed whilst reducing the amount of text that we need to write. Howeve, as a framed page is a set of different web pages brought together it is difficult for search engines to index them and if your content isn't indexed then your site can't be found. As such framed pages have been dropped to be replaced by cascading style sheets and XHTML coding of pages which can give you the impression of frames whilst allowing the entire web page to be indexed. Indeed, this current web page uses CSS and XHTML to give you the text of the eZine as well as a standard header, left border, right border and footer. I simply drop the HTML code for the eZine into a template, save the resulting page and uploade to my web server.
Business Tip
The Importance of Branding
Branding is as critical for a website as it is for any business. This is why you need a name, a standardized header to your pages which represents your personal branding. This branding can also be extended using Site Icons. These are the little images you get on the left of the URL window in a web page. You can see mine (a little silver oak tree) on any of the pages in my website.
Such icons are important as they represent a visual representation of your site. Moreover, if anyone bookmarks one of the pages in your site then this little icon is also used in the bookmarks tab and gives the user an instant way of recognising your site's pages from the many others in their bookmarks. Familiarity (in this case at least) builds confidence in your 'brand'. You can find more information on how to create your own site icons here.