| LED Digest 2063: The 'Net Habit of Skimming |
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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 .............................................. December 28, 2005 Issue #2063 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Marketing and Selling with eBay ==-- ~ Joe Halbrook "eBay [will] launch a new type of selling option to marketers of digitally-delivered goods..." ~ David L. Spahr "eBay can be a major marketing tool and a builder of some of the most targeted traffic..." --== Pepperjam Search? ==-- ~ Michael Linehan "...not in the first 500 in Google for their primary keyphrase..." <Moderator Comment> ~ John Smart "...why would [one] not want pitches for the very market that [LEDers] are experts in." --== Screen Display Sizing ==-- ~ Kris Driessen "Allow me to delurk for a moment and tell you what I am doing..." ~ Marty R. Milette "Why not take *advantage* of the flexibility of the media?" ~ Viggie Bala "Having a liquid-design may not be a best remedy." ~ Tom Anson "...a majority of people...have no idea that monitor resolutions can be adjusted." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== The 'Net Habit of Skimming ==-- ~ Mada Tuedate ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Joe Halbrook Subject: eBay > I would be interested in finding out how many LED'ers > have tried this dual marketing technique [with eBay > sales] and if they have been very successful. - Rebecca Neilson, LED 2062 Hi Rebecca, My response is not so much my experience in using eBay to drive traffic to my web site -- which is most certainly being done -- but to make LED'ers aware that eBay is preparing to launch a new type of selling option to marketers of digitally-delivered goods such as eBooks, songs, software, etc. Of course, you will need to have a PayPal Verified Premier or Verified Business account to do this, and you'll need to be able to prove ownership of your information products. But, this new format will allow publishers to sell information products from eBay without the standard auction style format. Here are an announcement and detailed information pages that describe the new Selling format: http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200512141728192.html http://pages.ebay.com/choosingformats/digitalitems/?ssPageName=CMDV:AB http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/downloadable.html There will also be an eBay workshop on January 9th to learn all the aspects of selling digitally-delivered products on eBay: http://pages.ebay.com/community/workshopcalendar/current.html This new format will open up an exciting avenue for marketers of eBooks and other digitally-delivered products. I can only imagine that it will help in securing better rankings in the search engines for marketers who promote on eBay as well as through their regular web sites. I look forward to finding out just how to optimize this marketing mix myself, and would be happy to report my findings, as they become evident. Best of success in 2006 !! Joe Halbrook http://www.info-for-life.com/kyc.html "Monitor Your Kids/Spouse Internet Activity - Without Software" -------- new post - same topic ------- From: David L. Spahr Subject: eBay I have used ebay as a marketing tool for my website since 1997 with excellent success. I have mentioned using ebay in specific ways for marketing on this forum at least 10 times in the last 6 or 7 years including very recently. Ebay used to have more wide open rules than they do now. They no longer allow dot.com user IDs or email address IDs. My dot.com user ID is grandfathered so when I use the system (as a buyer only) other users see stereoviews.com as my ID. That works. Get creative and smart about the user ID you choose! It can explain what you sell. If yours does not, consider changing it or developing a second ID. Ebay does allow you to publicize and link your site on your free "About Me" page that creates a big red/blue "Me" icon next to your user ID whenever you use the system to bid, buy or sell. "About Me" is a separate small ebay web page with limited but very useful capabilities to promote your business. It takes just minutes to create. I get a good amount of traffic from my "About Me" page. Doing a lot of bidding on items puts my user ID on the bidder list with all the other users interested in the exact same (unique) item! How much more targeted can you get than that? Remember, I do not need to win the item to show up on the bid history/bidder list. I'm always bidding on stereoviews. "Stereoviews.com" shows up on a lot of bidder lists. Lots of the others who were bidding on the item look at the bid history to view the bidder list after the item is sold. Since they were bidding on a stereoview, there is an excellent chance they will visit stereoviews.com. Although most people do not have a dot.com ID, they can still have the "Me" icon showing next to their ID when they bid or buy. Putting your dot.com name into the description can be done legally by saying "If you have any questions about this item, email This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it for a quick response (where widgets.com is your descriptive url). They read the description and say "aha!" Here is another one that seems obvious that few people use. Use email signatures in your correspondence to your ebay customers that includes your web address(es). It doesn't hurt to use the signatures in most of your email activity. I send around a lot of jokes to my friends, relatives, etc. with my email signature/web addresses at the bottom. Each time a person on my list sends it on to their list using "forward" my signature goes with it. Viral marketing. Selling items on ebay works. This is obvious. A creatively written description can be what makes you stand out. Does everyone know about the "Leather pants guy"? eBay: DKNY Men's Leather Pants I Unfortunately Own (item 8335653541 end time Sep-23-05 12:50:38 PDT) It put him on national television and made him much money! "Brian Sack leather pants" now has 74,000 listings on Google because of his creatively written description! Lycos 50 with Dean... Bid On This - Wacky Auctions Whether opening an ebay store is a good idea or not is debatable IMHO. I really dislike visiting most ebay stores. They are only a little different than just clicking on "View seller's other items". The fact that stores are not categorizable is the biggest problem. Long lists of tom, dick and harry items that you must wade through to find the particular one(s) you care about. Often there are pages and pages of them! Not fun. Just another ebay page and not like a real website at all really. You can search a store but if you don't use the right keywords you may not find all the items you might want. Many ebay sellers have very little smarts about putting proper keywords in their item titles. If store items show up in a search, that's fine but browsing is the pits and you definitely cannot do many of the things there you would want to do on a real website. Adsense? Forget it! If you sell widgets, you must keep your price REAL low to compete with all the other stores selling the same widgets Their "site"/store looks exactly like yours. Just another ebay page. Stores can be expensive too. Not everyone can sell well in the store environment. Ebay can be a major marketing tool and a builder of some of the most targeted traffic you could possibly get. It has done a great deal for me over the years. It's pretty much of a slam-dunk to invest time marketing there if it is done right. David L. Spahr Stereoviews.com Antique-Photography.com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: Pepperjam > What I am looking for is anyone with experience dealing with, > heard about, or have used the services of Pepperjam. - Rob Hegemann, LED 2062 Re pepperjamsearch.com: not in the first 500 in Google for their primary keyphrase - search engine marketing. A bad sign to me: 13 million returns isn't sooo many. If they really were the "world's most recognized search marketing firm", headed by "The Nation's Leading Search Guru", shouldn't they, at least, be able to make an optimization showcase of their own site? If I were looking and saw that claim, I'd expect IMMEDIATE evidence in their own position. Congratulations on the new LED site! Michael Linehan www.marketing-alchemy.com <Moderator Comment> Thanks, Michael! Not too filled out content-wise, but that'll improve soon as I continue to chip away at the stone. After I get things up and presentable, I'll post with questions and feedback. I really hope the site turns out being useful. Planned functionality: browse archives by issue, date, or topic (this last feature will take some time). Searchable, too. Subscription center, about / history pages, testimonials, posting form, RSS feed, etc. Let me know what you want to see! -adam -------- new post - same topic ------- From: John Smart Subject: Pepperjam I find it strange that Rob Hegemann doesn't want pitches from LEDers, just help from them. This doesn't affect me - I don't offer SEO/SEM services. But if he values the input of the LED, why would he not want pitches for the very market that they are experts in. If he doesn't trust their pitches, why is he asking for their help? It strikes me as a touch unusual, although I may well be missing something obvious (it wouldn't be the 1st time!). John Smart, Technical Director InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World -------- new post - new topic ------- From: Kris Driessen Subject: screen size > Do what the big boys do... As billion dollar > companies with lots of $$ to research these things... - Scott Marino, LED 2060 Allow me to delurk for a moment and tell you what I am doing to cope with the screen size problem. I designed a site with three "columns". The two on the left are my main content screen - the one on the right is stuff I would like people to see, but it won't impact the content if they don't. For example, little hints and tips, an Amazon vertical banner, an Adsence skyscraper, etc. There is still a horizontal scrollbar, but it doesn't seem to be intrusive. Kris Driessen ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Marty R. Milette Subject: Display Size Why do so many people try to 'force' hard-coded display and font sizes? The Internet is not paper -- that's the beauty of it! Why not take ADVANTAGE of the flexibility of the media? Don't be afraid to set the width to 100% and let the text flow as it may. It's the CONTENT that's important -- not the way it happens to be laid out on the screen. Do it this way, and it won't matter whether the user has 640x480, 2048x1546 or anything between. It also won't matter whether the user prefers to maximize their browser window or not. One thing that irks me (and many other people who's eyes aren't as young as they used to be) are the "Font Nazis" who decide that if the user can't read 2pt text at 1024x768, then they shouldn't be reading the site at all. Browsers DO have a View > Text Size option for a reason -- but in the vast majority of cases, designers have used CSS and fixed-size type which effectively disables it. If you feel that you really, really must take control over the user's viewing experience -- crack open PageMaker, design a paper brochure that is typographically beautiful and perfect and offer it as a download. :) Marty R. Milette ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Viggie Bala Subject: Display size > I have been a strong advocate of "liquid" sites. What > this means is that the website fills the browser window, > regardless of the monitor size. - Martha Retallick, LED 2060 Having a liquid-design may not be a best remedy. Back in 2001, I redesigned my site to stay full screen (ok, full browser width) right from 640 pixels. There were many curved text boxes, but all of them were liquid. The design stayed intact upto 1280 resolution (haven't checked beyond that), but it quickly showed that reading is not comfortable if browser width is beyond 1000 pixels. Reading even 2 or 3 line text boxes in higher resolution was not pleasant, and you know it is not good to irritate the customer while introducing our business. Perhaps we should start another thread on 'What is the most comfortable text width on the screen display'. In a fixed with 800 res. design the actual width will be around 760 and deducting 160 pixels for a left or right menu, we have 600 pixels for running text. My assumption is that the most comfortable width should be around 550 pixels or shall we say it should not be beyond 6 inches of monitor space? Regards, Viggie Bala Helping Websites to Work http://www.viggie.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Tom Anson Subject: Display size Dave Starr (LED Digest 2062) noted that, from his experience, "A very high percentage of desktops are still set at 800x600 in the business world, even though the machines and video cards are typically modern and capable of much higher resolutions". I'm not surprised at all by this statement. It would be my guess (based on the suspicion that I'm not too far outside the norm, technologically) that a majority of people using computers today have no idea that monitor resolutions can be adjusted. I found out "by accident", and if I had not purchased a 22" monitor specifically to display more pages at one time and been shocked that it still displayed the same thing -- just REALLY BIG -- I still might not know. My chiropractor was working online with a computer that had not been updated since 1997, and all of his setting were at default. He had no idea that settings could be changed or that font sizes on a page could be adjusted. I suspect he is more typical than not. So, unless you really know your target audience and would classify it as made up of "internet enthusiasts", I would tend to agree with Dave that "It's foolish... to design a commercially viable page to any higher resolution". I've started designing my pages with percentages. This way, page widths and font sizes can be easily adjusted by the viewer. The problem with this is: If the viewers still have computers with settings still at the defaults, pages may be unreadable anyway. Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials www.therapeutic-grade.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Mada Tuedate Subject: The 'Net Habit of Skimming I found one of Nick Osburne's articles recently while browsing A List Apart (another highly recommended resource, duh). In a nutshell, Nick delineates the importance of keeping your site navigation and content simple, concise, pointed and substantive. Check out the article here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/helpingvisitors. Here's the thing that grabbed me: we skim. We all do it, at least the majority of us who spend too much time online. We skim over articles, emails, headlines, forms, ebay and blogs. Nick always keeps things to the point - a writing habit I admire - but the question I have for LEDers is, how extensive is this "phenomenon of skimming"? If most of us DO indeed skim, then we should really start writing to cater to that habit, right? Then again - when real substance and quality information are being presented, keeping it tight and simple sometimes just ain't possible (at least without sacrificing something in the content). I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks (Love Live LED!), Mada Tuedate under construction since '97 madatue, gmail.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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "You are wise to climb Mt. Fuji, but a fool to do it twice." - Japanese Proverb |
