| LED Digest 1967: Writing on the Web |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest post, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. May 10, 2005 Issue #1967 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== <Moderator Comment> --== Merchant Account for Infrequent Transactions ==-- ~ Mark Roberts "...I would only need to do this 20-25 times a year..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Problems with Web Design ==-- ~ Greg Watson "...it will be far more cost effective to work with a...pre-existing application." ~ Beth Earle "Most people aren't very good writers." ~ Martha Retallick "...permit me to share the following insights on dealing with small business..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Traffic Stats from RSS Feeds? ==-- ~ Tom Aman --== Blog Robots ==-- ~ Emily Hall ======== NEW ==================================== <Moderator Comment> Great issue today. Be sure to read Beth Earle's post (found in the "Web Design" thread). She makes some interesting points that may spur more discussion. Hope you have a great week, Adam ------------------------ From: Mark Roberts Subject: Need Merchant Account Info I have broached this subject a couple of times several year ago an did not get a workable solution. Would like to see if there have been any new developments lately that I could take advantage of. I would like to be able to take credit cards. That is easy enough to do, except that the financial overhead with fees and discounts have been beyond my reach. I currently have a website where I use PayPal for orders. That has worked great. I have never had a problem, it is inexpensive, none of my customers have balked and I will continue to use it. The problem is that I do a number of shows during the course of the year. 99% of the time there is no electricity available, needless to say never any internet access available. 98% of my customers at these shows pay cash or check. However, I would like to be able to accept credit cards from those few who just really want to pay that way, or else have already spent their ready cash. If I would total it all up, I would only need to do this 20 - 25 time a year and total amount of the sales could only be $500 - $750/yr. As you can plainly see, this would not justify a traditional merchant account. The fees would be more that my total sales. I haven't really lost that many sales...people usually want my product bad enough that they can borrow money from a friend or locate an ATM....it is just a matter of courtesy. Anyone have any new ideas? Mark Roberts Roberts Computing Systems http://www.robertscomputing.com ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Greg Watson Subject: Web design > 1. Are you happy with the current company and do > they provide a professional service? > 2. Can they do the additional work you want, at a > reasonable cost and in a reasonable time-scale? - Malcolm Bailey, LED 1966 Actually, there is a third question that should be asked. Is there an off-the-shelf third-party shopping cart that already does 90% of his wishlist; because if there is, it will be far more cost effective to work with a developer whose business is focused on customizing a pre-existing application. The quality is often higher and more cost effective than a one-off custom project. Many off-the-shelf commercial web applications have specialized developer communities that have grown up around the products providing customized addons, enhancements, modifications, interfaces to commercially developed and tested solutions; often meeting the needs of a unique business model at a fraction of the cost of a custom project. Use the right tools for the right projects ... Greg Watson -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Beth Earle Subject: Web design > Plug And Play web's ... assure the prospective customer > such as businesses effective sites, real SEO ... - Rick Gortatowsky, LED 1964 I don't have anywhere near the background in coding needed to reply to most of your post, Rick, but I do have a lot of background in business writing and in optimizing web site content for search engine performance, which makes me question how the "plug and play web's" can assure their customers of "real SEO". Through the years (even before the web), a couple concepts have proven themselves time and again to be true (for at least large portions of the population): 1. Most people aren't very good writers. 2. Even if they do write well, most people who run small- to medium-sized companies are too busy running their companies to do anything except that. Pre-web, they didn't have time to write press releases and strong marketing material, and, now that we're in the Internet Age, they don't have the time to keep up with SEO best practices or to write the kind of content and copy needed to motivate site visitors. Are the plug and play interfaces going to edit copy, both for readabiity and search engine performance? If not, they seem likely to doom their users to failure. Given the choice between contacting a company with a site that's easy to understand and connects with my concerns or contacting a company with a site that's hard to understand (and hard to find on the search engines), it's easy to figure out who most people would go with. Plug and plays seem as if they'd be useful for site owners who know how to write (or have the money to hire staff members who can write) and who provide products and services that can be sold on the web. But most of the companies I deal with (and dealt with before the web) are manufacturers, who either make industrial machinery or custom products that are sold to other businesses. They aren't the sort of things that can be bought on-line, like toys, books, clothes or even web hosting. I'm willing to admit the plug and plays may have an up-and-coming role for certain companies, but I can't imagine they're going to replace all web designers and content writers -- at least not until you create programming that writes as well as many of the LED'ers do. Yours in all that is SEO and Internetty, Beth Earle Polysort LLC ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Martha Retallick Subject: Web design Much interesting discussion about dealing with the small business market. Having been part of the business community for more than a decade, permit me to share the following insights on dealing with small business -- profitably: 1. Office supply superstores like Staples, Office Depot and Office Max make quite a bit of money dealing with small business people. Like other superstores, they do so by keeping their staffing levels low. Meaning that when you're looking for file folders and a new floor lamp for your home office, you're not going to get a lot of hand-holding. In fact, you probably will have to send out a posse to locate an "associate" to help you find what you're looking for. 2. In addition to keeping staffing levels and customer hand-holding to a minimum, automation is crucial. Hence, the proliferation of "no human being present" voice mail ordering systems -- Fedex's phone system provides a good example of this -- and the increasing use of self-checkouts as opposed to human cashiers. And, those of us who sell e-books and software online can vouch for the fact that these sales systems work best when the customers come to our websites, buy the product, download it, and then go on their merry way. Customer follow-up is handled via autoresponders. (Not the lack of hand-holding in this purchasing system.) Some enterprising Web designers have used this same purchasing system to sell prepackaged website templates to (you guessed it!) small business people. 3. Offering of customized work to people who don't have the money to buy it is a big mistake. That's why you don't see custom home builders targeting the entry-level, first-time homebuyer market. Reason: Those people usually don't have much money. But they're a prime market for those large, mass-produced "all the houses look the same" communities that were much reviled in Tom Lehrer's song, "Little Boxes." Or they do what I did, and buy fixer-upper specials. And let me tell you something about buying a fixer. It will indeed need fixing. (In fact, as I write this, I'm waiting for Tom the Handyman to show up to make a couple of repairs.) When you call the various tradespeople out to do your house repairs, they are going to charge you whatever they feel they need to charge in order to do the job. They're not going to cut you any sort of deal because you're a struggling small business person. And don't even bother asking for such a deal. Because the next thing you'll see is your trades guy or gal getting back into the truck and driving away. Web designers would do well to value their work in the same fashion. Martha Retallick http://www.westernskycommunications.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Tom Aman Subject: Traffic from RSS Feeds > My sites get widespread exposure and visibility through RSS feeds. > They are a good source of generating inbound links and traffic. I > have been using RSS feeds to build links and traffic since 1998. - Michael Martinez, LED 1966 Since Michael has used RSS feeds for some time and is obviously pleased with the result, maybe he can give us some real stats on the subject. An RSS feed is almost guaranteed to generate lots of inbound traffic since the server will record a hit everytime an aggregator / reader checks for an update and that can happen fairly frequently. If a subscriber's reader checks every 10 minutes, that becomes 6 hits per hour. Multiplied by a large number of subscriber's and that equates to a lot of server hits but not necessarily a lot of page views. Assuming an 8 hour day and a once a day single page update on the site that subscribers actually check out, then the server will record 49 hits, but the number of page views will only be 1 (maybe - only if the subscriber is interested in the update). If the subscriber leaves his / her computer on 24 hours per day that becomes 1 page view per 145 hits. Multiply that by 1000 subscribers and you can see that the feed will generate a lot of traffic but not necessarily a lot of page views - 1000 page views (if the subscriber actually checks the update) and 14,500 hits (6,000 per hour). If a site is hosted at a location where bandwidth limits apply, then this may not be a desireable situation. The same applies if the server is not really able to handle high traffic volumes. Basically, my point is that an RSS feed is very likely to generate a lot of traffic, but that does not necessarily mean that it will generate a lot of page views. And all the proponents say a feed "will generate lots of traffic" but never back this up with numbers. So my question to Michael (and any other LEDers that have RSS feeds on their sites): Can you give us some actual stats of how many inbound hits you get per day to the feed document and, of those hits, how many of those actually translate to page views of the referenced page(s)? Also, when you do an actual update that appears in the feed, do the page views of the referenced page(s) increase significantly and by how much? I suggest info like (this is all made up data): Hits per day to feed document: 29,000 Page views per day of referenced page: 1850 Average views per hour of page: 77 (1850 / 24) Views per hour for two hours after an update: 675 This kind of information would be really useful to anyone contemplating the addition of a feed to their site. And to anyone who can supply stats, it would also be of interest (and maybe significance) to have a brief description of the subject of your site and feed. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Emily Hall Subject: Blog bots > I started receiving referrals from blogs to my website... > They fill up my statistics and block good referral from > showing in my stats, by their numbers. - Baruch Avraham, LED 1965 Baruch, My recommendation would be to contact your host with the IP address of the offending party. They should be able to take care of this. Most likely they would have to contact the ISP of the offending party and inform them of the activity. If the offending party's ISP does nothing to resolve the issue, your host should block all traffic from that ISP. Best of luck, Emily Hall ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. 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