An Actual SOLUTION to Spam?
March 30, 2005
Spam. No matter what you do, it just keeps coming. The more you filter, the more aggressive it gets, until some days you start to feel like you’re going to drown in the deluge.
Microsoft and Yahoo, among others, have been promoting fixes to basic mail handling protocols to (theoretically) solve the problem, but it will be 2005 at the earliest before we see how they work.
Is there anything you can do today?
Possibly — a Challenge/Response system might be just the thing to turn the tide.
It’s a drastic solution, but could it be right for you? This review of MailBlocks Challenge/Response system may just have the answer.
Surging Net Driven Sales
March 30, 2005
A spring 2003 survey indicates that more than ever, people are turning to websites to make their purchasing decisions — regardless of whether they actually purchase online, or purchase their goods in person.
Over half of the respondents (55%) indicated that they had immediate purchase intents. 11% immediately bought online, 6% immediately bought offline. Of the remainder, 21% indicated that they would buy within 48 hours, and 17% within the week.
Now more than ever, it is clear how important it is for businesses to be accessible online — even if they do not sell or deliver services online; if they can’t find what they want to know from and about you, then the odds are that they will find it from your competitor.
More info here.
The case for syndication
March 30, 2005
In “Syndication Made Simple“, Presstime outlines the simplicity and benefits of using syndication techniques, such as RSS for news sites. Most of these same arguments can be applied to any e-business site. As I’ve mentioned several times here recently, weblog (”blog”) software has come to commercial sites big-time. Many of our e-commerce customers have been expressing an interest in integrating this kind of technology in their sites.
Recently I had an opportunity to help one of our largest clients evaluate just how they could adopt and leverage using “personal publishing” technology on their site. The approach I settled on involved embedding a mature, off-the-shelf package (Movable Type) into their site.
E-Mail Copywriting Tips
March 30, 2005
One of the attendees of last week’s Direct Marketing to Business show put on by the Direct Marketing Association has posted some helpful notes on e-mail, direct marketing, and copywriting tips that are worth reviewing if you do follow-up emails or newsletters to your clients and prospects.
In the article (here), Alexis Gutzman offers some great advice regarding not only the content of your message, but also the formatting.
Worth a read.
More on Business Weblogs
March 29, 2005
I’ve mentioned before the idea of using web log (”blog”) technology to keep your web site fresh and up-to-date, and to add a more personal experience for the users. The kind folks over at Blogroots have made a couple of chapters of their new book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs available to read free online (here).
Of particular interest is Chapter 8, “Using Blogs in Business”. In addition to to using a weblog to enhance your online site, the authors also discuss a lot of ideas on how blogs can be used as knowledge bases, team coordination points and project management tools. Very nice.
More On Writing for the Web
March 29, 2005
In Microcontent & Macrocontent, Diana Lott gives some useful, practical advice on how to structure both headlines and body copy to strike a balance between what will get the attention of a site visitor, and what will get attention in a search engine, and why
Coming from a very different place, one of my favorite sources, A List Apart, this week offers 10 Tips On Writing the Living Web. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of the, “10 Tips” is a lot more about attitude and motivation. If you write any noticeable amount of content online, you should spend a few moments giving this list some serious thought.
Writing For the Web (Sales)
March 29, 2005
On “Writing For The Web” you’ll find a substantial amount of material about optimizing online pages for readability and usability. These are good as far as they go, but e-commerce site designers would do well to bear in mind an important fact. Just because users will uniformly indicate a distaste for “marketeese” and sales writing does not mean that it doesn’t work.
Back in the early days of pop-up ads (which first hit their stride on the “adult internet”), the lesson was learned time and again — people complained furiously, but they still bought 25% more with the pop-ups on than they did with them off. Thus the pop-ups got to stay, and eventually ended up everywhere.
Getting Link Popularity The Safe Way
March 29, 2005
Once you understand how link popularity effects page rank (see "How Google’s PageRank Works"), it may be tempting to start looking for "links programs" to try to enhance your site’s link popularity. These programs mostly work by you going to a website and adding your link, then downloading a page or multiple pages of links to add to your own site (there are a lot of variations, but this is the general plan).
STOP!
Unfortunately, these programs not only aren’t likely to help, they might kill your site’s link popularity.
Newsletters Revisited
March 29, 2005
Of course, we all are sending out regular newsletters to users of our sites, keeping our customers updated on new products and keeping our names and concepts in front of our prospects (what, you’re not? you’re leaving money on the table…)
But maybe it’s time we consider just WHAT we’re sending, and how we’re sending it. Not the content, but the form and format.
Life in the Slow Lane
March 29, 2005
Like most web developers, I do most of my work on what would have been an obscene amount of bandwidth back in the bad-old-days.
A recent connectivity failure, however, made me re-learn some old lessons and home truths that many of us have forgotten, and that are costing us money every single day. After 18 months of nearly trouble-free service, my cable modem died late last week. Naturally, that meant several days before a technician would arrive to repair it. In the meantime, I dug a conventional modem out of my old travel kit, and got to re-learn the joys of dialup.
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