A few minutes ago I signed up for a reseller hosting account with Site5 (affiliate link). My current supplier OsWebHosting provides incredible support and great value but falls down on a few points which are important to me:

1. Fantastico is hopelessly out of date. I have quite a few WordPress blogs with OsWebHosting, and the latest version available for Fantastico installation is 2.6. WordPress is now up to 2.8.1, and the manual upgrade process is just too time consuming to consider (even though it’s easy, it just takes too long).
2. PHP is still at v4.4.7, whereas the latest is around 5.2.8. This is not a huge deal but there are a few WordPress plugins I use that need PHP 5. To be fair, Mark at oswebhosting has offered to move me to another server but I still have a few old (but active) phpwebsite sites that need PHP4 to operate. A better solution is to switch between them on a per-site basis and this is one of the features offered by Site5.
3. Bandwidth and disk quota are limited. Again this would be a non-issue if I could move to the new server – but every month I have to fine-tune quotas between sites so the higher-traffic ones don’t fall over.
4. Shell access (SSH) isn’t offered at oswebhosting, as far as I know. It’s not under control panel and there’s no feature to be turned on in web host manager (WHM)… but what makes me uncertain is that when I change control panel themes, there’s one of them that displays a SSH option. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not.
5. The automatic upgrade feature within WordPress doesn’t work (this is for plugins as well as WordPress itself). I guess this has something to do with PHP 4, but nonetheless it just adds complexity and time.

I will be sticking with oswebhosting for some time yet, and I hope to move to the new server Mark’s offered me real soon. In my opinion oswebhosting sets the standard for customer support; if the above points are solved by the server move, then my important production sites will stay right at oswebhosting. Meantime, my new Site5 account will be my online sandbox.

Which account did I get? I went for the smallest reseller account. It offers per-site control panels and web host manager for overall account management (this is important to me). It also offers 25 GB of disk space and 250 GB of bandwidth. I know, I know… these are rubber figures but I don’t think I’ll ever go close to testing them. There’s also what appears to be an active user forum, and that’s not a bad thing.

It’s worth finishing up with the comment that it’s not too hard to find some uncomplimentary comments about Site5 (and some glowing reports as well). Whatever. I read what I could find and made my decision, and I’m looking forward to making my own mind up.

So now I have a short leg cast for the next six weeks, and plenty of time to write stuff. Plus I will have the time to finally move the new look for this blog – based on WordPress, Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme and a few selected plugins – into production. It’s been lurking on a hidden server since before Christmas and it’s really, really time to get it out into the open.

I plan to put up content that’s more oriented towards the needs of the micro business and small business community that makes up most of my client base. While it’s true there’s plenty of content already out there that addresses many of the things I want to talk about, it’s also true my clients have no interest in spending the time to search it out, separate the good from the bad, and then apply it. They just want to know what to do to get their website humming, and they are prepared to spend a little cash to find out.

The risk is that I’ll just end up with another ‘me-too’ blog that pukes generalist Make Money Online (MMO) advice. I have to be on my guard.

But the demand is there. Not only from my client base, but from others I interact with on a regular basis who aren’t clients. The demand looks big, as well. In Australia, the Bureau of Statistics tells me we have 2,011,770 businesses as at June 2007 (latest figures available). Of these:

• 84% were micro businesses (0-4 employees)
• 11% were small businesses (5-19 employees)
• 4% were medium businesses (20-199 employees)
• <1% were large businesses (over 200 employees)

The clients I work with fall into the first two categories. Meh. That’s only 95% of all Australian companies. Leaves me with some marketing to do, doesn’t it?

In fact, it’s been 123 days since I last posted to this blog. Four months, to the day.

It’s not like nothing’s been happening. In fact I’ve been busy with a host of consulting engagements – new clients and existing – and the time has just slipped past.

It’s not that I haven’t got anything new to say, either. There have been changes in the SEO/ blogging/ social networking landscape over the last four months and even though many have been talked about throughout the online SEO community, it’s simple bad manners not to give them brief mention here.

I’ll cover these in posts over the next few days. However, today I want to share an observation and response with you.

The Economic Downturn and Website Effectiveness

The economic downturn seems to have had an opposite effect on our business at Stratify. We’ve seen a small but noticeable increase in enquiries (and new clients) who are looking to fine tune their website so it generates a few more leads, takes a few more sales, hosts a few more downloads, or answers just a few more questions. In other words, owners want their website to pull a bit harder.

And this has moved us towards a different deliverable.

Back in October, our work was all about getting traffic. Search engine optimisation. Search engine marketing. Social network leverage. Commenting strategies. Article marketing. Link baiting.

Now, these things are part of a bigger picture. Traffic is one thing, a very important element of online success. But that traffic needs to be encouraged to take action. Unless some proportion of that traffic – hard-won and paid-for traffic – turns into customers, then you don’t have online happiness.

Back in October, we’d work our magic and watch our client’s web pages move upwards, ranking-wise, towards page one. Ranking reports were our measure of success. Now we don’t use ranking reports at all, nor do we crow too much about an absolute increase in traffic.

What’s more important now is conversion. The number of dollars that end up in our client’s pocket, compared to their situation before Stratify got involved. So now, we touch not one but three elements of online presence:

1. Traffic. He with the most visitors usually wins. This remains a cornerstone of our work and I don’t see this changing anytime soon.
2. Usability. There way individual visitors interact with websites is impossible to predict – but in aggregate, patterns and trends emerge. Our role is to identify these and aim to (i) discourage non-qualified visitors off the website, and (ii) encourage qualified visitors to click all the way through to some desired page or outcome.
3. Conversion. Get the first two in place, combine them with an offer that makes sense to a qualified visitor, and that visitor has a good chance of shortly becoming your customer. Why shortly? It may mean, like immediately, the current browsing session. This can and does happen with many online purchases (typically small dollar value and immediate online delivery). But for organisation or corporate websites, the desired outcome is actually filling our a form, dialling a phone number, subscribing to a newsletter or email series. In essence, the purpose of the website is to:

Start a Conversation with your Prospects

Here’s the sequence:

At any point in time there are a bunch of Internet users who are looking for whatever you have on your website. I call these “suspects”:

Traffic Generation Converts Suspects to Visitors

Just because someone looks at your website doesn’t necessarily mean they have an interest in your specific product or service. They are looking for information (the infamous WIIFM – what’s in it for me – question) and think that you may possibly have what they want. Your website is set up so they can quickly determine that you have – or don’t have – what they are looking for. If not, no problems. They are not qualified to buy anyway and it’s right they should leave and go someplace else. However – if there is interest they become “Prospects”, and you want them to have a great experience on your website, better than any of your competitors can offer:

A Clear Concise Website Converts Visitors to Prospects

OK, now they are interested. They may go straight from Prospect to Customer if that’s the focus of your website (and there are thousands out there that attempt to do this in one hit). But there’s a piece of Internet folklore that says, “you need to touch your prospect seven times before they become your customer”. This is more or less true here at Stratify (we never sign up a new client at the first meeting), but I’m not sure about the “seven times” thing. Multiple times, anyway – that bit is true. What’s also true is that you need to strongly encourage your Prospects to do what you want them to do, and oftentimes some bribery (in the form of free information, a whitepaper, an email series, an EBook, etc) does wonders.

A Great Offer Converts Prospects to Customers (Eventually)

That’s a very quick outline of the way things are now. It seems our current clients expect more out of their websites (and their advisors). Plus, there’s a degree of sophisticated understanding that means techniques such as search engine optimisation are way less attractive as a stand-alone service than they were even a few months ago.

That’s how we’ve responded here at Stratify. We think it’s the right response.

I did a bit of research, and this is what I found.

Google and Yahoo!

Both search engines seem to treat the <title> tag the same way. The rules are:

• Display up to 66 characters.
• Longer titles are terminated with a space followed by an ellipsis “ …”.
• Truncation will be triggered by any non-alphanumeric character (ie, anything that’s not "Aa-Zz" or "0-9".
• If the 67^th character is in the middle of a word, the displayed title will be truncated at the last non-alphanumeric character.
• Title text beyond truncation is not indexed and has no search engine benefit.

Live

Microsoft Live does things a little bit different. Here are the rules:

• Display up to 70 characters.
• Longer titles are terminated with a space followed by an ellipsis “ …”.
• Truncation will be triggered by any non-alphanumeric character.
• If the 71^th character is in the middle of a word, the displayed title will be truncated at the last non-alphanumeric character.
• Title text beyond truncation is indexed and will trigger search results.

So What?

What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, Google dominates so Google’s rules rule. Here’s what I do:

• Make sure the title truncates elegantly at 66 characters. This means keeping to this length for the end of the last word or a little shorter. Also, I don’t worry too much about extra punctuation like commas or those weird vertical bars "|" people like to use.
• Use the target search terms in there somewhere, and I also try to get the client name is as well.
• Make it read like proper English not gibberish, but try to minimise the use of stop words like "and", "or" and so on. If you must use and, use the ampersand character "&" because you pick up 2 characters.

Make Your Title the Best On The Page

Above all make your title sensible for human readers, because it shows up in big blue letters on search engine results pages (SERPs). And many non-crafted titles read like crap.

Why is this a big deal?

Because search engines don’t buy anything. There’s no value in getting a page 1 position unless you can convince a real, live person to actually click on your link.

Any focused search (key phrase of two or more words) will generate SERPs with 21 links for people to click on (10 organic results, 3 sponsored links at the top, and 8 sponsored links at the right). A page 1 position only means you’ve narrowed the competition for a click to you & 20 others.

Make your title the best on the page, make it stand out, make it relevant, and you’ll shift the odds in your favour.

There is, though, a small renaissance happening. These are not the thousand page sites full of scraped content; instead, they are small sites focused on a single keyword phrase (or at least, a small number of related keywords). They are not auto-genned, and there’s usually some good original content that does indeed present some value to visitors. Like, ‘here’s some stuff you may want to know about’ (that’s the content), and ‘here’s where you can get it’ (that’s your AdSense units).

MFA sites are not for everyone. They are unashamedly commercial, they take a bit of effort to get going and most of them fail. But if the concept appeals, here’s five tips that hopefully will help you get lots of them up and out there.

#1. Know What PPC Amount Advertisers Will Pay

If you’re into Made for AdSense (MFA) websites, Google’s keyword research tool is a Good Thing. It gives you (allegedly) accurate data about the amount of money advertisers are prepared to pay to snare that top of page 1 ad position for each keyword phrase of interest, along with historical traffic data (average traffic, plus last month’s traffic, plus seasonal variation).

The higher the pay per click amount, the more lucrative that term will be for an MFA site. Ditto for traffic levels – more traffic means more demand, and more demand means more clicks on your (high dollar) AdSense units.

#2. Know How Many Advertisers Want Your Traffic

One thing you will need to check is the number of advertisers competing for each specific term. Again, more advertisers mean more depth of content for your AdSense units, and the potential for more clicks off your MFA site.

Simply fire up Google and search for your keyword phrase, taking a note of the number of advertisers on all pages. Some will run out of steam on the first page (still worth doing if the pay per click amount is high), and others will go to dozens, even hundreds, of advertisers. It’s likely you will need to click through multiple pages of ads to get the total count, at least that’s what I do (I haven’t found an easier way).

#3. Know Where To Put Your AdSense Units

I’ve posted before about Joel Comm’s AdSense Secrets eBook, and I highly recommend it as one of the best (and cheapest) AdSense resources available. If you’re too relaxed to click through the original post, here’s the link direct to Joel’s AdSense Secrets website. You may want to use a disposable email address when you sign up - Joel can get a bit enthusiastic with his followup emails - but it’s a great resource nonetheless.

I place Joel’s AdSense Secrets eBook at the same level as Perry Marshall’s extraordinary Definitive Guide to Google AdWords. It’s that good.

#4. Know Your Traffic

The whole premise of MFA sites is to snare organic traffic (for free), and pass that traffic through to advertiser sites for a cut of the ad revenue. And it all comes to naught if you don’t know enough to win organic traffic.

The obvious traffic source is the search engines themselves, and you’ll need sharp SEO skills to win. The days of Court Tuttle’s ‘keyword sniping’ techniques are now gone, but there is still plenty of relevant, current free advice available about putting together small sites focused on specific keyword phrases. I recommend you head over to Garry Conn’s excellent blog – he has a series of posts about niche sites that are refreshing and (dare I say) right on target. Don’t skip the comments, either - there’s gold there.

SEO isn’t for you? There’s a world of non-search traffic waiting if you know where to look. One recent post that stands out is on Michael Martine’s Remarkablogger blog, and offers two podcasts about StumbleUpon and Twitter. Of course, the guidance he offers can be extended out to just about every social networking site. If this is of interest head on over to Remarkablogger and put aside 30 minutes to listen and learn.

#5. Know Your Figures

MFA sites are, at best, a hit or miss affair. If one out of ten generate good income you’re doing well. If half of them cover costs you’re doing average. A good analytics package (and Google Analytics is as good as any) will tell you how people find your MFA site, what pages are popular, what keyword phrases they use, and how long they spend with you.

Ultimately, the only test is whether each MFA site you set up pays its way. If not, you can pull it, rework it, or just let it go in the hope that it will somehow get discovered and traffic will improve. At only a few dollars a year for a domain name and hosting, who cares?

What is ‘good income’? If you can get $3 or more a day out of an MFA site, that’s good income in my experience. Say $100 a month. Obviously that’s not retirement income, but once you have 50 at that level (and it’s a lot of work to get there), that’s your mortgage and car covered with a bit left for fancy dinners. And if you’re lucky, it’s not unknown for a single MFA site to pull in thousands every month (just don’t depend on it).

One of the things I like about Google’s keyword research tool is the ability to tailor results for a specific geographic region. For many of you, the only results that matter are those from the USA – and that’s fine – but for the remainder of us it’s very useful to know local keyword demand.

We have many clients whose products and services have no relevancy outside the Australian market, and Google keyword research is the only tool that gives us some feel for local keyword demand.

We use Wordtracker to generate big lists of keyword phrases, and then pump them through Google to get local traffic estimates. It’s always worried me a bit that Wordtracker’s keyword traffic estimates are based on a limited dataset covering 130 days of metasearch queries.

Now we have the best of both worlds. Wordtracker is ridiculously easy to use, and the way it can build big keyword lists quickly is breathtaking. After divvying these monster lists into themes and categories, we feed them into Google to give us regional traffic estimates plus seasonal traffic estimates, in enough details to know when an AdWords campaign may pay bigger dividends.

On another note – we don’t ever pay attention to Wordtracker’s keyword effectiveness index (KEI). The simple reason (and we are simple people) is that competition, for many organic search campaigns, is simply irrelevant. It means nothing that there are 10,000,000 competing websites – after the first two pages of results, the rest don’t matter. I read somewhere that 85% of all search engine users never looked beyond the first two pages (20 results, in Google), so our job is to get our clients’ web pages into that rarefied space. Sometimes it’s really hard (so we have to optimize for different keywords), but most of the time the occupying pages are only there through good fortune, and our job becomes easy.

The takeaway… the only competition that matters is the pages above you in the search results pages, not the ones below. Figure out why they’re there, and be better.

I have subscribed to Remarkablogger now for nearly 12 months, and I heartily recommend you spend some time going through Michael’s posts.

The free thing is the bait, and your email address is the price you pay to get it. Your email address is on someone’s list and you can bet you will continue to receive email until you unsubscribe.

Most Internet marketers honour their Spam Act obligations and remove your details on request, but some don’t. Some pass your details on to other marketers, and before you know it your email address seems to be fair game for everyone who’s got anything to sell you online.

The fix is disposable email addresses, and they can be had for free. When I sign up for free things (I can’t resist free) I use a stand-alone email address account from y7mail, and I use y7mail for two reasons:

1. It’s completely separate from my Stratify email address. Internet marketers can’t link me (Stratify) to me (y7mail), or at least they haven’t managed to yet. So I can give out a y7mail address knowing that the one I use for business is safe.
2. In addition to my y7mail address, they provide me with unlimited supply of truly disposable email addresses that bear no resemblance to my y7mail address. I can set one up, use it for whatever purpose I want, & then delete it when I’m done. Any email sent to that disposable address simply disappears into a great big email black hole, never to be seen again. Yahoo call this AddressGuard, and it’s a great service.

Here’s how it works, and I assume you already have your y7mail address set up. First go to Options > Mail Options > Spam, and find the section at the bottom:

The first time you click on the "Set up a disposable address" link, you will be asked to choose a base name. Once that’s done you set up as many addresses as you want by appending a keyword to that name. The base name can be anything you want (as long as it’s not already taken), and it’s a good idea to make it totally different from your real name, email address or any online persona you want to adopt - that way no-one can make any assumptions. The keyword can also be anything you want, and there doesn’t appear to be a limit to the number of disposable addresses you can use.

Yahoo have put together an excellent tutorial about AddressGuard, which explains everything.

I have about 15 disposable addresses set up, all with the same base name, and I use the keyword to identify who I signed up to with the address. y7mail also lets me use disposable addresses to reply to emails, so there’s simply no way (unless I do something dumb) that my real email address can be compromised.

This wraps up my short series about managing email spam. To quickly summarise:

1. Use anti-spam software to catch anything that may slip through the defences of (2) and (3). I use and recommend Cloudmark Desktop.
2. Use the free anti-spam capabilities of Gmail, y7mail or Live to "bulk filter" most spam before it even hits your computer.
3. Use disposable email addresses when you sign up for free stuff - leave your real email addresses safe.

]]> http://stratify.com.au/managing-email/damn-that-spam-part-3/feed/ http://stratify.com.au/managing-email/damn-that-spam-part-3/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/stratify/~3/LVKANhUaROo/ http://stratify.com.au/managing-email/damn-that-spam-part-2/#comments Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:00:32 +0000 Mark http://stratify.com.au/managing-email/damn-that-spam-part-2/ In yesterday’s post I talked about anti-spam software, which we here at Stratify used initially to get on top of the spam problem. We still use Cloudmark Desktop on all our computers, but as we’ve educated ourselves about the ways to manage spam, we’ve come to realise that anti-spam solutions like Cloudmark are only part of the solution. And they are best used as the second line of defence, rather than the first.

The main reason for thinking this is that third-party email filtering keeps junk email right out of our organisation. It doesn’t make it to our router, it doesn’t get downloaded to our computers, and we don’t have to worry about the bandwidth it represents. Our two-step approach is, therefore:

1. Use an external email filter to remove the bulk of our junk email, and then
2. Use Cloudmark to capture anything else that’s sneaked through.

This is a fine-grained approach that we’ve found has all but eliminated our spam problem.

I do mean, "all but eliminated". There’s still one issue we need to resolve. Essentially, anyone who’s been on the Internet for any length of time will have subscribed to some newsletter or another, or a news group, or some subscription site, or whatever. Your email address is on one list, at least, and the list owner is legally obliged to honour your unsubscribe request when you’re done with it.

Most do - but every so often you’ll find that your email address has been passed on to others, and your unsubscribe request achieves nothing (except to prove there’s a live person who’s using that email address). That’s when disposable email addresses come in handy, and I’ll cover those in tomorrow’s post.

But right now, I need to tell you how to set up an external email filter for free!

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Most of my clients are small to medium businesses who have set up a few email addresses under their domain name (ie, provided by the web host), or they use the default email addresses provided by the Internet Service provider (ISP). And they really suffer, because it takes time to get rid of junk manually and there’s always the risk that a crucial email will be deleted by mistake or not responded to quickly.

Spammers are adept at finding email addresses in the code of web pages, and it’s not long before they get put on the lists and the junk mail barrage begins.

Outlook’s junk mail filtering is woefully inadequate, and something better is needed.

There’s two ways to attack the problem:

1. Install anti-spam software; and/ or
2. Use an email filtering service.

There are pros and cons to both solutions, and the best approach is a combination of the two (which I use at Stratify). Let’s start with anti-spam software, and in tomorrow’s post I’ll cover the email filtering service I use.

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