| LED Digest 2045: The Key to Community |
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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 .............................................. November 8, 2005 Issue #2045 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== What Makes Community Sites Work? ==-- ~ Dejan Bizinger "For real success on the Internet you have to build a community." ~ Susan Kubitz Sprachdienst "Everything we write on the Internet can be read by absolutely anybody..." --== Where to Start? ==-- ~ David L. Spahr "You might try selling some items on ebay." --== Marketing Political Sites ==-- ~ Michael Drucker "I recently looked at some hosting companies that provide the services you are looking for." ~ Ray Hadorn "I have built a political site for my sister using CMS technology called Mambo..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== PayPal Comes of Age ==-- ~ James Miller --== Google Droppings ==-- ~ Jonathan Webb ~ Michael Martinez ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Dejan Bizinger Subject: Community sites > ... I'd like to know what experiences (good or bad) > other people have had with building and monetizing > niche community websites (or blogs)... - Ian Smith, LED 2044 Principle #1 - For real success on the Internet you have to build a community. Communities have many advantages but there can be disadvantages, as well. And the biggest disadvantage is - what to do when there is no money from the community but you spend hours and hours in management and you have to pay your offline and online bills like your bandwidth which is usually very big in community web sites? You have to spend time in building your community but you also shouldn't neglect one very important thing - marketing. For example, you can't expect that your advertisers will be waiting in the line to place their ads even if you have a popular web forum. Web forums are not so much profitable for gettting "directly paid" ads. However, you can monetize your web forum by joining in some reputable ad networks, especially those that offer CPM ad model. Some good services that you can consider for your community web sites: http://www.google.com/adsense http://www.adbrite.com http://www.doubleclick.com http://www.mediaplex.com http://www.tribalfusion.com http://www.falkag.com http://www.publisher.yahoo.com http://www.valueclick.com You will monetize your blogs much easier, even with direct contacts with advertisers. Blogs are perceived as an important way for reaching influential people, a so called decision-makers. Some reseraches show that many blog readers are people with higher education, salaries and positions so that's why they are considered as valuable. This can prove the fact that Weblogs, Inc., one of the largest blog networks, has been recently bought by AOL and another popular blog publisher Gawker Media signed a partnership deal with VNU. Also, Ian asked: > What makes these sites sticky? What features do people use? > And how do you convert and audience interested in your daily > content into some kind of cash flow? Principle #2 - Give to get Sticky web sites are those that offer many useful information and that are often updated. Technology is not the most important thing in building great communities - people are. If you offer blogs, your staff have to be highly skilled and to provide your readers with quality articles and news. Later, you can monetize your popularity with advertising, selling books and reports or making specialized conferences and webinar. Even if you don't have so much cash flow, but you have a great community you can be sure that many companies will be interested to buy your company. Good luck with building and monetizing your community. HTH, Best regards, Dejan Bizinger Infacta :: Email Marketing Solutions http://www.infacta.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Susan Kubitz Subject: Communities Dear all, I am still here, lurking, after quite a few years. Not much time to write, but wanted to say even the lurkers are part of your community... and the generosity you non-lurkers all show to each other has been to me, too, so that when I finally get time to get someone to help me organise my East German Holidays website I shall be a less ignorant interlocutor. Very many thanks. And your generosity has been a good antidote to all the worrying aspects of American society as an international influence of which we are very conscious here (I am a Brit who was and is jubilant that Britain now had a government which wasn't ashamed to talk about redistribution of wealth, and achieve some, but was horrified that Tony Blair thought that an invasion would be a good way of improving human rights in Iraq; and I live and am self-employed in Germany, the old "East" - have just done an interview for BBC World Service's Outlook programme if anyone is interested to listen - stays on line 7 days, from 3rd Nov). Am *not* writing this to introduce politics to your threads but only to remind you of the very wide context of even a "community" website. Everything we write on the Internet can be read by absolutely anybody - I sometimes do vocabulary searches and find the most amazing stuff being said... and this is only in English, German and French! I may sound like a total layperson. Maybe LED is as it is because it is because there are formal rules operating even over and above the "Netiquette" classic - but I think the personal morality of the moderator and all participants must be a big factor. No time to write more - except one quick point on a tactic I saw in another well-loved forum - someone flamed mildly. I have seen this put a stop to a whole forum. In this case, however, the person attacked wrote explicitly, "I am ignoring the last remarks as I think they are based on a misunderstanding" - I thought that was a brilliant technique, don't know whether it was just good nature or a written rule but thought I'd pass it on. As ever, Susan Kubitz Sprachdienst www.qualitytranslations.de ------- new post - new topic ------- From: David L. Spahr Subject: Starting > I am setting up a new website to sell maternity wear. > I don't know where to start to get people to come to > my website. Any suggesitions are greatly appreciated. - LilianPhuong Dang, LED 2044 Lilian, You might try selling some items on ebay. There should be a way for you to describe your website within your description without breaking ebay rules about hotlinks. You could say something like "Please direct all questions to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it " etc. You may publicize your site on ebay's free "about me" page too. It may not bring in huge numbers but it will bring in targeted traffic. I don't think ebay stores are the way to go though. Try to get a descriptive domain name and be sure your title is descriptive, succinct and to the point. Your title tag can be exceptionally important in search engine rankings. Good rankings will give you good traffic. You might try incorporating the Google Adsense and Adwords programs. The Adsense income could help you pay for the Adwords clickthrus. David L. Spahr Stereoviews.Com Antique-Photography.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Michael Drucker Subject: Political Sites > ... I would like to know if anyone has any suggestions > as to how I could help [my politician son] with a separate > web site devoted entirely to his election. - Don Coggan, LED 2044 I am the webmaster for the Independence Party of NY and for the national Indpendent Movement. I recently looked at some hosting companies that provide the services you are looking for. Here are two: www.campaignoffice.com www.completecampaigns.com Michael H. Drucker www.mhdconsulting.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Ray Hadorn Subject: Marketing Don Cogan: I have built a political site for my sister using CMS technology called Mambo (http://www.mamboserver.com/). It took me a little while to learn but feel it is well worth it. Updating the site is a breeze and can be done much quicker than using standard HTML. Check it out at http://www.karenlinn.com Ray Hadorn rhadorn2, fuse.net ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: James Miller Subject: PayPal Comes of Age An interesting insight into how far PayPal has come appeared in a journal called Modern Railways in the UK. MR is very much an industry publication and explains a lot of technicalities and policies about railways in the UK and worldwide. In the latest issue, they published a list of suppliers, who are bidding to extend the Oyster system in London from just being a smart card that lets you pay for your Underground ticket, to a micro-payments system for coffees, newspapers and other purchases. All the usual suspects were there; EDS, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland. But there in the middle of the list was PayPal. It'll be interesting to see if they get the job. But it does show how the Internet is now becoming the tail that is wagging the dog. James Miller Daisy Analysis: www.daisy.co.uk ------- new post - new topic ----- From: Jonathan Webb Subject: Google droppings > ... my website (Est. 1999) dropped in the Google natural > listings from about number 6 to somewhere that I can't > even find! It has constantly been appearing at around > number 6 for the last two years... - Sanjeev Sachdeva, LED 2044 Welcome to the club. This happened to me on May 25th and its still not fixed. I've tried everything possible and have previous discussions on LED and in other places all to no avail. My first and most important advice is if you have just one website get some more quickly ... set up some other similar (not identical duplicated) websites that are totally independent and not interlinked to the original website. I had all my eggs in one basket so it has been VERY expensive to loose the source of most of my customers. The only drawback with that is that Google also Sandboxes new websites so they are ineffective for 6 months. I set up my first alternative website manpic.co.uk in June and only yesterday did it emerge from the Sandbox and actually get listed on the fist page of Google for searches of "aerial photographs of Manchester" Meanwhile my original WebPages on the subject are still buried somewhere between result 250 and 650 even though my original site has 100 times as many aerial photographs as any other competitor indeed there are more on my website than all other internet sources put together. It's annoying but I have gotten used to seeing hundreds of irrelevant pages and directories in front of my listing. I did have a sudden slight improvement about a month ago when some of my smaller towns and villages got listed no1 under "aerial photographs of "+ Town name however I can't find any difference between those that they list and those not listed and all the big cities are hidden. I have a theory and a bit of evidence - when I add content to my website Google moves me down in the listings, the more photographs I add the further down I go. It could be that they are looking at the ratio of Text to links or pages .... and you like me have an awful lot of links on your website and not much descriptive text. However this is not the main reason for the drop, this is only how to make small adjustments in position. I also have a more likely theory and this is just Google's way of selling advertising ..... build them up then knock them down so then they have to pay...... "Googethical business" ! A word of warning if you try to spend your way out of trouble, Google addwords is as dishonest (" Googethical ") as their search results. I paid to be listed for searches for "aerial photographer" but then found they were showing my adds under "aerial photographs" .. a small difference you might think but people looking for the former are expecting to pay whereas 99.99999999999% of people looking for the latter are searching for something free, I'm not sure if this will work with your clothing but I have survived by getting links from other websites. I do this by giving away my pictures free of charge as long as they have a link adjacent. This has been very successful for me and I have more visitors from a Manchester focused website than I do from Google text search. Of course it is no long terms strategy for any business to give away what they should be selling. I would advise against making large destructive changes to your original website as what you do based on a theory one week you might want to change the next week in the light of a different theory. Only make changes that improve the website anyway (maybe add a little text ), but better still spend your energies on alternative websites and wait. You might want to put some alt tags on your product images ... google image and text resultts are seperate. They do take 6 months or so to list an image and how many buyers you can get from image results is another question. Regards, Jonathan Webb www.webbaviation.co.uk ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Google droppings About two weeks ago, Google started rolling out a 3-part update. The October 2005 Google Update addresses several issues, and it may be a few more days before the index settles down. Matt Cutts, a Google engineer with a popular blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) had suggested the 3rd phase was released yesterday (November 2) but today he says he doesn't think it's visible yet. Maybe by tomorrow (Friday). This update was named "Jagger" by Brett Tabke of Webmasterworld, but many of us in the SEO community (including Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch) prefer to name the updates by the month and year in which they are released. The 2nd phase of the update (released last week) supposedly addressed some spam issues, although Google doesn't say what they are. The 3rd phase is supposed to address the canonical URL issue (how Google indexes domain.com versus www.domain.com). You can find a list of Matt's posts on the update at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/ if you want to review the history of the update. Google apparently targeted sites which are heavily dependent upon AdSense. They acknowledge that some innocent sites may have gotten zapped. Generally speaking, it is best to wait until an update is over before concluding that your site has actually been hit by a penalty or filter of some sort. The search results during the update rollout process are often unreliable. When the update started, I asked people at HighRankings whose sites lost rankings to share URL info with me. I posted the results of my investigations in a thread titled "Notes on October 2005 Google Update" http://snipurl.com/jmdp [highrankings.com]. You can find a condensed version of the notes at Spider-Food http://snipurl.com/jmdr [forums.spider-food.net] -- there is less followup discussion, which tends to drift off-topic. By Monday or Tuesday, November 8, we may be able to start determining how this update has affected the listings. As happens with every update, many people jumped the gun and assumed that Google targeted specific industries for delistings (they did not), but it looks like the initial wave of bad analyses has been shoved aside by most forums. I did ask Matt to address one of the most common assumptions about Google's updates at Threadwatch (http://www.threadwatch.org/node/4494). Unfortunately, the question by its very nature is so loaded that Matt may not feel comfortable answering it, or if he responds, he may answer it indirectly and vaguely. It is most likely that the people who are prone to conspiracy theories (and they often tend to be loud and prolific in a variety of SEO forums) will interpret silence or obscurity from Matt as an acknowledgement that they are right. Michael Martinez http://www.michael-martinez.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Obstinate people can be divded into the opinionated, the ignorant, and the boorish." - Aristotle |
