• Promoted List

  That’s a list built with give-aways or other incentives. “You can have this e-book for free, if you subscribe to my list at least long enough to download your e-book.”

• Organic List

  An organic list is a “hidden treasure”, that people find through links and comments and endorsements, and sometimes also through search engines.

I probably don’t have to point out that promoted or incentivised lists don’t have much long term value. So, CAN you convert them to organic lists?

Rarely.

Keep in mind, when you appear on the scene as a reluctantly tolerated penalty for downloading something that MIGHT be interesting, but most likely will be shelved for a rainy day, you don’t have a lot of credibility.

You can slowly brand your name and URL by doing a lot of incentive stuff and hope for eventual name recognition. Beware that branding may take a long time.

So, how DO you get an organic list?
Unique content, referrals, and accessibility.
Does that sound too much like work for you?

Believe it or not, but unique content is actually the easiest.
Just pick a topic that YOU don’t know enough about, research it thoroughly, and write about it.

Referrals and links are more difficult. Sure, you can get your buddies in the same sand box to politely mention your list, but chances are that they have even less clout than you. Even though all the SEO goorons tell you that the number of links count, don’t fall for that! Large numbers of low power links smell like “Link Farm” and attempts to cheat on relevancy, and trigger Anti-SEO formulas, as soon as you reach a certain amount of traffic.

One or two links from high traffic sites will do a lot more for you. They will move you up. Tons of links from link farms, that link to anybody, will get you penalized. The relevancy ranking actually works very much like you would rank a directory. If you see a directory with five Million entries, then you know it is a waste of your time. But if you see one that has two hundred entries ranked by subscriber votes, then you know you have hit a gold mine. The same goes for the search engines.

A good example of one of those gold mines is the EzineFinder. Not my site, and not affiliated with it, and they are not a client either. They are a totally neutral site, and only subscriber VOTES count.
Even if you are at the bottom, the links from there DO count for a lot more than links from insignificant sites or from list-all sites. In addition to that, you get nice exposure to fresh eyeballs.

So, once you have a steady newsletter at least once a week, get listed at the Ezinefinder.

OK, enough for today.
In the next post I will write about accessabiity.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

(I’m not worried about spammers, I got MailWasher)


What does that address evoke?
Ohhh, nice, you say, easy to spell over the phone.
Must have gotten
onto the net when the good names were still
available.

"dearwebby@" sounds like a tech support address.

(It actually is the address I use for tech support,
and has been the tech support address for the last 14 years)

Use that as an example. What do YOU want to evoke with
YOUR address?


Forget a name that just promotes somebody else’s business.
That makes you look like a sidewalk pimp, and it’s easy
enough to get around your cloaking attempts.


If you don’t come up with a good name in a week,
brainstorm with your mentor. A good mentor won’t badger you
into using his suggestion, but will coax you into finding a good
solution. I have helped many hundreds of people find a good
domain name over the last dozen years. Quite often suggesting
a humorous and ridiculous alternative triggers the right solution.


A few things to keep in mind for your domain name:
It should be short
memorable
easy to spell
not a typo magnet.


For the acid test, I always suggest
to sing it in the shower.
If it sounds awkward or ridiculous in the shower, it will
sound awkward or ridiculous when you mention it on the
phone, in an elevator, or yell it across a bar.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Got more excuses? Keep them. I have heard them all.

It’s time to wake up and look at the situation from
the viewpoint of clients and prospective clients.
When I signed up for AJ’s course, he had a working
email address. THAT is why I signed up, not because
of the windmilling.

I find exactly the same with my clients. They don’t
want to argue with auto-responders or dawdle around
on some forum. They want a real person,
really accessible.

By being instantly accessible via Skype or email,
I can manage the tech support for 50,000 postcard
sites. People can get hold of me before they
complicate their problem with experimenting.
That saves them, - and me - , a lot of time,
and is appreciated all the way around.

If you don’t make yourself accessible, then you are
not serious about wanting to be in business.
People have to know you first, before they can
learn to trust you.

Spam is no valid excuse. Any kid and any granny can
get Mailwasher for about $30. That’s just the
cost of doing business, just like your business license.

Most of the spam these days has your own address
forged in as the sender address. But they don’t forge
in your name. So you simply filter all mail, that has
your address as the sender address, but not your name
in the FROM field, into nowhere, unseen.

The same goes with any other spam. Look what is
common, then make a filter. It’s really not that difficult
to win the spam game.

Mailwasher is by no means the only spam control
program, but for the long run, it seems to be the best
one. No matter which one you use, get comfortable
with making filters. They weed out the bulk, so that
the program only has to deal with the few that don’t
get caught in the filters.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Best of luck with your 2009 plan, and I hope a year from now you can write: “Mission Accomplished” under it.
Have FUN!
DearWebby

The flow of froms

Before you worry about inserting the input box,
first you need “THE FORM“.
Placing the actual input box is the last thing.

“THE FORM“ consists of
1. input box
2. primary thank-you page
3. confirmation request email
4. secondary thank-you page
5. thank-you / password / download link email
6. Success / download link page

Usually your form manager program generates those six items
for you, but roughly. You have to pretty them up with your
corporate colors, logos, and a few kind words.
Upload those components.

Only THEN do you copy / paste the generated and prettied up
input box to wherever you want, including your blog.

To paste the input box into the sidebar of your blog, decide
on the exact location, find the last word above it,
open the sidebar in the blog editor and look for that word.

Paste the input box below that word,
save and upload.

To make your life MUCH easier, print out the set-up page of “THE FORM“,
where it lists the file names of the six components.

The better form managers let you re-use components from
existing forms, but you need to know their file names.
Quite often you can partially re-use components, so save a
prettied up master copy of each, so that you can quickly
and easily adapt them to the next form.

I know that forms can be initially a bit confusing, so I
drew up that flow chart. Try to get VERY comfortable
with the concept. Forms are the pick-up trucks of
business, whether on-line or off-line. Once you are
familiar with the process, you can snap up a form
in a minute or two, without worrying whether it works or not.

There are forms managers that can be rented, some can
be used courtesy of the hosting company, and some can be
bought.

Obviously, using the forms manager of your current hosting
company is rather reckless. If you have to move, your work
and your forms are left behind, and you get to recreate
everything from scratch.

The cheaper your hosting, the more likely you will get fed up
and move. If you use bargain hosting, and use the web hosts
form engine, document every single step! You will need all
that info for creating the forms again at the next web host.
I can’t overemphasize the need for very thorough documentation!
Save the source code of the prettied up pages, That way
you have the color numbers and whatever you need to
duplicate them reasonably quickly.

There are some form and list services that you can rent by
the month. Aweber is quite popular with beginners. Their
service is only around $25 a month and they have a fairly
easy user interface.

The problem with rented form services is similar to courtesy
freebies included with hosting. If you make a mistake or
get too busy, you are out on your ear.
Document EVERYTHING! Sooner or later you WILL need that
information again.

The final option is to buy your own forms manager or forms
engine. They range from $75 to $5000. They do about the same,
but the $5000 programs have a lot more hype and sales effort.

I use the MagicForms©. from Webby.
We wrote that in 1995, because I realized the need for forms
in business. Initially it was just for our internal use.

You can have thousands of separate forms running simultaneously,
share and re-use components when it suits you, or tweak the
looks of them with normal HTML. MagicForms© is so simple to
use, that I still have not found a need to write a manual for it.

Purchasing MagicForms© ($75) includes professional
nstallation, but you have to be on a UNIX or Linux server,
and have SSH privileges for the installation.

Summary:
start with freebie forms
upgrade to rented form service
graduate to your own form engine.

Document every step and keep copies of every component.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Merry Christmas and all the Best for 2009 from Dear Webby

I wish you a Merry Christmas,
not a pleasant “Seasonal Holiday”.
That one is on April 1st.

Hopefully you can take some time off and spend it with loved ones.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Yes, it was winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.
How many of you monitor addicts noticed that?
Since there is no Gullible Warming in Canada,
it will still be cold for a while, but at least the days
will get longer.

The interactive site review today made one thing very clear.
We need ONE central site where everybody can post
questions.
JUST questions,

OK, so we need to settle on ONE site that we use
just for posting questions, and reading questions.
People who have answers, can post them there,
or on the questioner’s blog, or answer them via
email for those who know how to take care of spam,
and have the guts to post their email address.

We can gladly use my blog for the help bulletin board.
I am not competing for the traffic price, because it
would not be fair to those, who are new to blogging.

Whether we decide to use this blog, or somebody
else’s, we will have to settle on ONE site as a
bulletin board for posting help requests and questions,
and we will have to agree not to peddle our marbles
when we post a question or answer one.

Keep in mind, the person who might be ideal for
answering your question or solving your problem,
might be selling the same marbles on his or her
site, and would be very annoyed, if you spam the
central help request board with commercials.

The person, whose site we use for a central
help request board, won’t have to answer the
help requests, just moderate it, and weed out
thinly disguised commercials.

Feel free to copy this post, or link it into your
blog, and get the message spread around.
Let’s see who else volunteers to host and
moderate the help request board, and then
vote on which choice we settle on.

Anything else is a waste of everybody’s time.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

OK, so how do you get around that?
Quite simply and easily: Set up a download mirror.

When Garry launched TheProfitPullingProject, HostGator
messed up their router and lost access to North America.

I had opened a site there on HostGator on Sunday,
mostly to see why Alex Jeffreys was so insistent that we

host there. That site, http://monetlists.com/ (similar name
as this one, but with an S at the end) was down too,
not just Garry’s site.

So I quickly made a mirror for Garry on one of my servers
at http://monetsite.com/Garry/ and put his download up
there.

Then I contacted HostGator and told them about their router
problem. Once they had been made aware of it, they fixed
it within a few minutes.

Unfortunately, Garry’s problem is not an isolated case.
Set up a mirror BEFORE you launch anything, and
mention in your mails to go to the mirror site, if the
regular site is overloaded or down.

If you set up a mirror beforehand, you can get all your
pages up there, not just the download file. If you are one
of Alex Jeffrey’s students, it won’t cost you anything.
I have big postcard servers in the Hub of the Internet,
and as long as you don’t launch at Christmas, Valentines
Day, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, those servers are
mostly just idling, and can easily handle even the biggest
launch.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

If you don’t, you will wind up with a Chinese Firedrill.

Any time you change or abandon or forward addresses,
or use an auto-responder to tell people to use a different
address, check that spreadsheet and make sure you are
not creating a loop or directing people to dead addresses.

Unless you are a web host and control the servers, it is
also a good idea to have an emergency address for your
buddies to contact you, in case your domain gets blocked
or there is some problem. If that address doesn’t show on
any web page, it won’t attract spam

You can set up your email program to also check that
address. There is no need to check it separately.
However, when you notice that the only incoming mail
is via the secret buddy alert address, then you know that
there is a problem somewhere.

Have FUN!
DearaWebby