Monthly Archives ⇒ April 2010

List Building – Cookie Tracking

· Brandon Hann

Despite all the negative you hear about tracking cookies, they’re actually not that bad. In fact, the majority of websites out there use cookies in one way or another to save information about your visit to their site. When you log into a site like eBay for example, a cookie is placed on your computer that allows eBay to recognize you the next time you come back.

In the case of your website, you can utilize tracking cookies to tell you a little more about your visitors such as what web browsers they use, what countries they come from and how they got to your site. This information will help dramatically with learning your site’s demographics.

Advertising cookies

Tracking cookies are most commonly used in advertisements to help keep everything organized and most importantly, relavent. Ad networks use these cookies as you travel from site to site where the same ad network(s) are used. This allows that company to follow your movement (tracking) and show you ads that are based on your previous activities.

From an advertising perspective, this makes perfect sense. If you were on eBay searching for car parts, eBay might show you ads related to cars and then if you go over to Amazon, the first ads you see are likely to be car parts. Amazon could also use previous cookies to show some car-related products on their homepage in hopes of selling something to you.

Tracking cookies

Essentially all cookies have some sort of tracking element to them and their sole purpose is to carry Internet usage data with them as you travel from site to site. Some people are fearful of tracking cookies simply because of their name. The words tracking and Internet don’t play well in a lot of people’s minds and they immediately have visions of companies hoarding personal information.

This is simply not the case. Sure, cookies do store information that is specific to you, but it’s nothing that could identify you. However, due to privacy concerns, you have the option of turning cookies off in your favorite browser. I don’t recommend it because I actually like going to a website that remembers who I am and is able to show me products and ads that are related to my preferences.

Spyware

These days, software called spyware can be installed on your system and you may not even know it. But, as mentioned above, not all spyware is bad. One example would be your printer software. Most printer manufacturers install spyware on your system as part of the driver installation and it’s used to “phone home” to make sure that your device is always up to date.

However, every positive has its negative and spyware is no exception. There are many malicious programs out there that can harvest much more than driver versions. Things such as keyloggers can be used to gain unauthorized access to machines, but this is a separate topic!

<< Back to Demographic Info Forward to Spam Prevention >>

List Building – Demographic Info

· Brandon Hann

Have you ever watched tv at certain times during a day and wondered why the commercials you see are so different than what you see at night? Or how about a magazine about cars–why are all the ads related to car parts? Of course the second example is more obvious, but the point is that every media outlet has demographic requirements that it must follow.

Your website is no exception. There’s no sense in promoting your products and services to people who have no interest in using them. Learning your demographics for your niche or market will help you find people in particular age groups, cultural societies and various interests groups that fit your ideal customer. Knowing this information will help you better serve your customers and allow you to market specific segments of your business. The hard (and expensive) part is finding out who your customers really are.

As a small business or even smaller website/blog owner, you will likely not be able to afford a big budget market research campaign, so what options are you left with in discovering who your customers are? I found an interesting blog post on Sean Jordan’s website that discusses just this question. I’ve outlined and summarized a few of the important points here.

Finding your demographic

  • Competitors – A perfect way to start out with any area of your new business is to look at what your competitors are doing. It might sting a little to see other businesses doing what you plan to do, but the best part is that you can learn from their mistakes or take the high road and do things better/differently. In terms of demographics, you can sometimes find this information in media press kits or by searching online.
  • Census Bureau – To find your own demographics, it might help to view the demographics of the country, or your local area. This will tell you who lives around your business and can point you in the right direction to finding out who you’ll be marketing to.
  • The Internet – Searching online can yield tons of information about loca demographics. A lot of real estate websites offer basic information to inform potential home buyers. There’s a website called Claritas that allows you to search your own zip code to discover what kind of demographics there are in your neighborhood.
  • Small Business Administration – This website is not just for locating demographic information, but also for starting a new business or growing an existing one. There is a TON of free resources on this site and it should be explored from top to bottom.
  • Existing reports – Most likely, you’re operating in an industry or field that already has some extensive market research reports already created, so why not use them? This will save you so much time and possibly even money in the long term although these reports can cost quite a bit up front.
  • Hire someone – Undoubtedly this is the most expensive approach to market research. You hire a large firm that specializes in such areas and allow them to do the footwork for you. This option is probably not the best approach for a small business because even once you have the results, you may not have the financial requirements to properly manage your marketing campaigns.

Why is this information important?

As an example, your business sells computer games. If you found out that the majority of people buying computer games are between the ages of 13-26, but your local demographics show you that the majority of people in your area are between the ages of 35-55, would you go door to door offering to sell computer games? No. Had you not known this information, you would have exhausted precious time and resources to gain no additional customers.

Running a business online is a little different because you have the whole world at your fingertips, but it would still be beneficial to know how to market your website to get better response to your products.

This has been an extremely concise article about locating demographics, but my purpose was to emphasize how important it is to know your customers. If you’re faced with this issue right now in your business, I’d strongly suggest you begin a search online to explore these topics in depth.

<< Back to Opt In Capture Forward to Cookie Tracking >>

List Building – Opt In Capture

· Brandon Hann

Oh, the infamous opt in! This is the gateway to your profitable mailing list. Don’t abuse it or underestimate it; otherwise you might be in for a rude awakening. If done right, you’ll get a nice group of loyal and dedicated readers of your material and offerings. If done wrong, you can say goodbye to all the extra income you were hoping for.

The key to the opt in form is to make it accessible, but not to make it obnoxious. Feel free to promote it wherever you get the chance, but don’t force it in your visitors’ faces. You may have seen websites that throw out popup or popunder windows and you already know how annoying these are.

Proper opt in techniques

  • Static page – Create a static page that talks about your newsletter or marketing materials and clearly outline what it is someone will be getting if they sign up at your site. Link to this page from your home page as well as anywhere else you talk about your newsletter.
  • WordPress widget – There are many plugins and themes that offer you the option of placing custom HTML code in your sidebar, header or footer. Create an instant webform that asks for their name and email address so they only have to click submit to sign up.
  • Email signature – Start promoting your newsletter to everyone you email! This the best anti-spam way of letting people know what you have going on. I don’t know about you, but I always look at people’s signatures.

No matter how you promote your opt in form, the most important thing to remember is that you don’t want to spam it, force it or oversell it, which brings me to my next list!

Improper opt in techniques

  • Popup windows – Back in the old days, a popup window was used as a useful way to show someone information without having to change pages or open a whole new browser window. Today, they are the most annoying form of advertising and your opt in form should never appear on one. Besides the high probability of being blocked anyway, you’re likely to lose people just because your site looks tacky.
  • Popunder windows – A popunder window carries the same annoyances as its popup counterpart, but this one is designed to show up behind the window you have open. This way, when you’re done surfing and you start closing your browser windows, this mysterious window will be left open. While it does have some potential for catching people off-guard, it too can make your site look tacky.
  • Forced – Forcing someone to signup to your list just makes you look desperate. One way this can be done is when someone emails you to ask a question and you immediately add them to your mailing list just because you now have their email address. Remember that just because they sent you a message does not mean they want more emails from you.
  • Spam – It should go without saying, but obviously you don’t want to spam your visitors to get your newsletter. Not only does this look bad, but it’s illegal and your visitors are likely to get the idea that all of your future communications will be spam-like.

Building a list is not easy and it takes a lot of work to get it right. I’m still amazed at the amount of people that visit my site each day compared to the amount that sign up for my newsletter! However, having patience and doing it right will create a better experience for you and your visitors.

<< Back to Spam Scoring Forward to Demographic Info >>

List Building – Spam Scoring

· Brandon Hann

Nowadays, spam is so prevalent on the Internet–it’s everywhere. And just as soon as you think you’ve escaped it for good, you get more spam. Even after you deleted your old email address and created a new one, you start getting spam within the first week. It’s a wonder that people even still use email anymore.

Anyway, spam scoring is a feature that email servers use to “hopefully” capture spam and either delete it or place it in a separate folder. The scoring rules vary from service to service, but one of the most common spam blocking services out there is SpamAssassin. Depending on where your users get their mail, your messages may or may not have issues getting to them.

The score

All emails that pass through a SpamAssassin filter are scored from 0-10 after being subjected to a laundry list of checks. To see the full (and very confusing) list of rules, go to the SpamAssassin website. Generally, an email with a score of 5 or lower will get passed the filter and hit the user’s inbox.

Your goal is to test your messages before you send them out because even though someone has legitimately signed up to receive your emails, your messages can still be blocked.

Email tips

There’s a huge list of tips on the SpamAssassin website as well, but here’s a brief idea of how you can prevent your emails from being marked as spam:

  • Don’t use strange characters like replacing o’s with 0’s or writing the work LOOK as L@@K
  • Don’t put invisible text inside HTML messages
  • If using HTML emails, don’t included blank tags
  • Keep your emails on topic or at least focused if you have multiple topics

Testing

If you have a third party managing your email list(s), you can run tests within your account for all of the messages you wish to send. If you’re doing all this manually, you may want to send some emails to yourself provided that you have SpamAssassin enabled on your email server.

Imagine the huge waste of time you’ll experience if you have 100 users on your list, but your email becomes blocked from 99 of them!

<< Back to Support Time to Response Forward to Opt In Capture >>

List Building – Support Time to Response

· Brandon Hann

This topic is relatively small, but it essentially involves creating a better response time for customer support issues in regards to any and all questions you may receive for your website. More specifically this pertains to your users asking about or needing support for your email subscription list.

If you’re managing all of your email campaigns manually, meaning you’re not using an third party email service provider, you need to stay on top of you support requests. This is vitally important for users wishing to stop receiving your information via email or those wishing to change what information they are getting. Fortunately for those of using an email service such as Aweber, you don’t have to manage support requests as much because 99% of all mailing list features are automated.

Average response time

Trust me when I say that your visitors will rate your whole business (and your reputation) on your response times for customer support issues or general questions about your services. This fact may be more important to those running full-scale businesses online because this can affect your sales, but all websites can suffer to some degree including the loss of web traffic and backlinks.

Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes and ask yourself if you’d like to be “placed on hold” when you need urgent assistance. Make sure you respond to your visitors/customers as soon as possible. My theory is if you’re running a website, you’re more than likely on it at least once a day, so same day response times are not that unlikely.

Communication is key

Just like I mentioned in the article about proper commenting techniques, communication in any form is vital to your site’s success. If visitors think your site is dead, they won’t be coming back and this becomes an issue very fast if you lose communication with your users.

The easiest way for you to provide this support to your users is to provide a very easily found page on your site that includes a basic webform, visible email address, phone number or all three!

<< Back to Delivery Rates Forward to Spam Scoring >>

List Building – Delivery Rates

· Brandon Hann

Here’s a little underestimated topic–the deliverability of your email campaign. It’s a wonder that some people pay little attention or no attention to this at all. Maybe it’s one of those “out of sight, out of mind” things, but it really shouldn’t be. Imagine if you sent out a message or newsletter to 100 email address and it only reached 75% of them? You now have 25 people not getting your message.

So what keeps 25 valid email addresses from receiving your message? SPAM filters are the number one reason. Another would be IP address blacklisting. It could even be whether you’re sending attachments with your email. Of course, if you have a list with some invalid email addresses, that’s a whole other issue! Let’s breakdown some of these email issues:

Invalid email addresses

List pruning is an important task and should be done periodically to ensure that you’re not sending emails to people who don’t want it, making sure that you’re not using excessive system resources and also to keep an updated count of your active list.

Better yet, let the users prune themselves! If you’re users signed up one month, but lost interest the next, they would be happy to know that you don’t have them jumping through hoops to try and get their email address off your list. This is one less thing to worry about if you’re using an email provider such as Aweber because they follow anti-spam laws to a “T”, therefore all of your messages will provide instructions on how users can unsubscribe.

SPAM filters

A lot of people have spam filters, but some may not even know they’re there and some might not have control over what comes in. The point here is not to force your users to try and find out ways to sneak your emails past the guards, but to ensure your emails are designed properly so they can get to the inbox without trouble. Have you ever been to a website that tells you how to subscribe to their newsletter and then somewhere on the same page, they tell you that before you can get anything, you need to make sure such-and-such email address in on your whitelist?

How often do you continue with that subscription and do you even remember to add the right email address? Don’t put this type of stuff in your user’s hands. They want access to your information and they want it fast and easy. The moment you let this fact out of your head is the moment you lose readers.

IP address blacklisting

If you’re not using an email service provider, you’re likely sending emails from your own system(s). Be careful as some ISPs and webhosts don’t allow the sending of mass emails over their networks. This can cause your IP address to be banned on certain ports or worse, you can be placed on worldwide spam lists. To check your IP address, you can visit some (or all) of these blacklists:

More information on how to remove an IP from these lists can be found on each page.

Attachments

Don’t send people attachments if you can help it! Even if they’ve purchased or requested something downloadable, don’t attach it. Make it accessible to download from your server and then link to it in your email. Attachments don’t always make it on the other site. Some users have automatic attachment removals, some send all emails with attachments to the trash and sometimes attachments can get corrupted.

So, unless you’re communicating with someone one-on-one, try not to attach any files.

Frequency

One sure way to increase delivery rates is to let your readers know when to expect your email(s). This way they can look for it and if it did happen to end up in the spam folder, they can make adjustments on their own to ensure that won’t happen again.

Also, by telling a user when they should expect your mailings, they can get a better idea of the “value” in signing up for your mailing list.

Following the tips above will guarantee that your messages are delivered on-time and to the right people.

<< Back to Bounce Handling Forward to Support Time to Response >>

Apple's New iPhone?

· Brandon Hann

I’m not the first to report this, but I will toss in my two cents. First off, if you haven’t heard, someone is claiming to have found an iPhone at a bar in San Jose and upon closer inspection, noticed that it was not your everyday iPhone! They go on to further claim that it is the newest iPhone expected out this summer and was disguised in an iPhone 3GS case.

[nggallery id=4]

The new iPhone is speculated to be called iPhone 4G or iPhone HD due to its faster network speed and HD screen. If the new phone is to sport a screen like the iPad, the price might still be too high for most. The HD screen for the iPad costs around $60 while the same screen in iPhone size might reach as high as $500. Gizmodo has launched a full story on the issue, and here is what they found in terms of hardware:

What’s new

  • Front-facing video chat camera
  • Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
  • Camera flash
  • Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
  • Improved display. It’s unclear if it’s the 960×460 display thrown around before—it certainly looks like it, with the “Connect to iTunes” screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
  • What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
  • Split buttons for volume
  • Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic

What’s changed

  • The back is entirely flat, made of either glass (more likely) or ceramic or shiny plastic in order for the cell signal to poke through. Tapping on the back makes a more hollow and higher pitched sound compared to tapping on the glass on the front/screen, but that could just be the orientation of components inside making for a different sound
  • An aluminum border going completely around the outside
  • Slightly smaller screen than the 3GS (but seemingly higher resolution)
  • Everything is more squared off
  • 3 grams heavier
  • 16% Larger battery
  • Internals components are shrunken, miniaturized and reduced to make room for the larger battery

Is this real?

According to John Gruber at Daring Fireball, Apple has has lost a prototype although Apple is considering the phone “stolen” and they would like it back. Gizmodo apparently got wind of this phone from the individual who found it and subsequently purchased the phone, disassembled it and created the exclusive article and breakdown as summarized above.

The person who found it also mentioned that at first, he/she was able to play with the operating system for a bit before Apple apparently remotely wiped it (naturally). Now, all they get is the “Connect to iTunes screen”. However, it has been said that when the OS was working, it appeared to be that of iPhone 4.0 which is due out around the same time as the expected new phone.

My two cents

I don’t really care if it’s real or not. I won’t be buying a new iPhone this year anyway. In an effort to save money, I have started a plan to skip a year for new phones, so I’m staying with my 3GS. However, this phone does look pretty slick and if this is the new design, I’m pretty happy with it.

I was just thinking how funny it would be if this whole episode was planned by Apple in an effort to generate more buzz while at the same time diverting attention away from the actual design of a new iPhone. I wouldn’t put it past Apple to send this out in the world so other phone makers can copy the look and feel and then turn around and release something completely different!

At any rate, if this is legit and the phone was “lost” or “stolen” and if Gizmodo actually paid a price to exploit it, I believe they’re going to have some tough questions to answer if Apple decides to pursue this issue legally.

UPDATE 4-20-10

This phone is indeed “a device that belongs to Apple” according to a letter sent to Gizmodo by Bruce Sewell, Senior VP and General Counsel for Apple. Here’s the full letter:

Also, we all know the who the person is that lost it! His name is Gray Powell an Apple software engineer. He truly did leave the phone on a bar stool after getting drunk on his 27th birthday. The bar is a place called Gourmet Haus Staudt and it’s located in Redwood City, CA. All you crazy Apple fans can now go here and see the very stool that the new iPhone was left on for the world to discover months before it came out. They have the stool behind bullet-proof glass and you can’t take pictures of it, but it’s sure worth the drive!

Get the full story on how this whole fiasco unfolded at Gizmodo.

As for me, I feel sorry for Gray and I hope Apple doesn’t fire him for this mistake. Apple (as well as all of us) knows that this won’t hurt sales at all! In fact, it might even boost sales. They can now use the constructive criticism that’s sure to come to make improvements. Of course we lose the excitement of seeing the latest device from Apple being unveiled, but isn’t this whole story exciting enough?

There it is folks…the new iPhone has been leaked and the most uptight and secured company in the world has had a major blow dealt to its ego. My thoughts? Let’s move on to more important things in life–like when will the iPhone come to Verizon?!

UPDATE 6-9-10

We all know now that the iPhone 4 has just been announced and all your dreams of owning one can now become a reality on June 24th. In fact, AT&T has even allowed early upgrades for previous iPhone owners. This means that I might actually be getting the new phone! All I have to do is find someone that wants to buy my 3GS from me. Good thing there’s people on eBay looking to buy phones without having to sign up for a 2 year contract.

UPDATE 6-21-10

After a crazy and disasterous pre-order system and a bunch of drama later, I finally ordered my iPhone 4 and can expect it at my door sometime this week!

List Building – Bounce Handling

· Brandon Hann

If you send an email to someone based on an email address they gave you some time ago, but this time you receive a bounce-back message, it’s usually because that person has changed their email address or their inbox is full. When you’re running a business and a successful mailing list, you don’t want to have bounced emails.

Some mail servers are configured to delete all bounced mail automatically, but you don’t want to do that. In fact, you want to know about every bounced email your system gets because this gives you an opportunity to rectify the situation. In most cases, there’s nothing much you can do. If someone changed their email address and didn’t provide you with the new one, all you can do is prune your list accordingly.

However, this is exactly what you want to do. You don’t want to maintain a working email list with hundreds of dead emails in there because all you end up doing is wasting valuable system resources.

Bounce handling

If you’re using a proper email provider, bounce handling will usually be handled automatically, but if it’s not, it’s important to check your email lists for email address that are no longer valid or accepting your email. If you don’t, you can be marked as a spammer and this is not good.

Being labeled a spammer will not only tarnish your professional and/or personal image, but you can affect your webhost, ISP and email service provider!

<< Back to Email Service Provider (ESP) Forward to Delivery Rates >>

List Building – ESP

· Brandon Hann

ESP stands for Email Service Provider and it can mean the difference between a successful email manager with proper, spam-free email marketing campaigns and the “stuff” you send. It’s hard to comprehend paying for an external email service when you clearly have email access as part of your webhosting service.

However, the difference is that ESPs allow you to create and manage that email much better. As an example, if your website offers visitors the ability to sign up to a newsletter, you might have these emails being stored in a simple database and then extracted to Outlook. You probably then create a newsletter or some other content and blast off an email to all your contacts.

The problem with this is that these days there are tons and tons of spam being sent all over the world, so the element of trust is important. What this means is that you have less of a chance of your messages actually getting to your visitors when sending email from your own Internet connection.

Benefits

  • Ability to create templates for sending to contacts and/or the use of pre-made templates
  • A subscriber list, which is uploaded by the user for distributing messages. This may be enhanced with custom fields in order to hold additional information for each subscriber for filtering and targeted messaging purposes
  • A send engine, which allows users to distribute their message to the subscribers
  • Updating of the subscriber list to suppress those requesting to be unsubscribed
  • Statistical reviews of each email sent to measure the success rate of the campaigns
  • Testing of templates for compatibility with email applications
  • Spam testing to gauge the score of the email against known factors that will place the template at risk of being blocked
  • The ability to send both html and plain text formats to improve delivery success rates (known as Multi-Part MIME)

To get you on the right track, I’ll recommend the provider that I use. They’re called Aweber and their pricing is cheaper than some of the other services I’ve found out there, like MailChimp.

<< Back to List Building Forward to Bounce Handling >>

Twitter Announces Advertising

· Brandon Hann

For the first time since Twitter showed up on the web scene 4 years ago, they have announced advertising over their network. Companies already use Twitter to promote their products and services, but they face one fundamental problem–they have to have followers to get their message out.

This problem has now been solved by the use of Promoted Tweets that will appear at the top of search results very similar to that of Google’s AdWords program. Tuesday is the day that an initial rollout of 10 advertisers containing the likes of Starbucks and Best Buy will provide Twitter users with the first ads. However, these ads will only be visible to 2-10% of users for the time being. I’m not sure if these users will be chosen randomly or if it’ll be based on account usage, amount of followers, etc.

Twitter has long been slightly opposed to the whole advertising thing, suggesting that ‘ads could irritate users’, but the reality is that venture capital doesn’t last forever and if we expect Twitter to stay free, they have to make money somehow. Twitter says that in time, these ads may start appearing in the stream of posts that users see when they log in.

There is some good in all this; businesses will now have the ability to promote their offerings without having to first promote themselves to get followers. As a user, you no longer need to actually read any tweets for promotions and whatnot–just login to the site and click on every ad you want!

And just what kind of ads can we expect to see in all this? In the beginning, I’m sure all will be fine and dandy, but what happens once all the affiliates or spammers (is there a difference?) get on? Will we be faced with another over-saturated market of useless products and ebooks? I sure hope Twitter can get this one right. Who knows…maybe they’ll set the new bar for how advertising is done online.

My two cents

It may seem like I’m completely against all this and most of you might wonder why considering I run a website about how to make a profitable business online, but I’m really not–if it’s done right. What I am against is when legitimate ads are washed out by spammers and thousands of the exact same affiliate links because it causes users to become “blind” to ads and overall, it creates a horrible experience.

But I’m openminded…let’s see what Twitter’s got before we start judging!