| LED Digest 1789: Dreaming Outside the Box |
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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 adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ April 23, 2004 Issue #1789 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Keeping it in Perspective ==-- ~ David Yancey "...is this a time to quit, to stop innovating, to give up on helping consumers...?" --== Reciprocal Linking: Dead or Alive? ==-- ~ Mekhong Kurt "I almost daily get a cookie-cutter e-mail or two..." ~ Michael Martinez "...every automated process can be outfoxed..." --== HTML Editors? ==-- ~ Charles Oertel "You should only be using a handful of tags..." ~ Tom Anson "...the time investment makes doing [hand HTML] a luxury." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Patent Attorney Needed ==-- ~ Mark Whitman --== Monkey Encoding Emails ==-- ~ RJ Peters ~ Eva Rosenberg ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: David Yancey Subject: Perspective Lennart Svanberg (LED 1786) "gets it": > I believe that our knowledge about the Internet is getting > more important, day by day, but in the meantime, let us > brand ourselves as *marketers* not Internet marketers. I hope everyone had a smile at the Winnie the Pooh comparison. But, obviously, comparing the collective success (so far) of the paid-search companies to global sales for Winnie the Pooh licensed merchandise is a case of apples and oranges: those of us operating PPC or PFI search services are providing an advertising service, not making and selling "real" goods. I was simply trying to wake us all up to the reality that there is, as Lennart amplifies, a much larger world out there. Lennart properly advises us to see ourselves as part of the total marketing arena, not merely as bit-players in its "online" end-zone or along the sidelines. To be clear, I was not just specifically addressing only us marketing services folks, because, in truth, almost all who work, sell, or publish online are engaged in "interactive marketing" in some form or other. This is easy to see if your web site acts as a sales agent or affiliate for others. LEDers who operate "destination" or web-publishing sites are usually ad-supported, so you, too are part of the online marketing services industry. As are sites that take reservations, orders for books, or sell subscriptions. And as to the many LEDers who participate directly in the larger economy, by operating ecommerce sites, you, too, are part of the "marketing services" food chain, since you provide distribution services. My point with the Pooh was is to get us all to see the web in evolutionary terms. If one has no sense of perspective, it is *very* difficult to judge the distance from here to just about anywhere. My specialty as many long time LED readers know is business and product planning, and so I want to know how great is the "distance" - measured in time, money, sweat, technology innovation, risk, likely divorces - between where my company or client is, and where we want to get to. We need to dream outside the box, true, but we need to *plan* within it, or the chances of fulfilling our dreams are slim. So here is another dose of realistic online business "perspective" - less humorous and cuddly than a stuffed bear, but perhaps more compelling: Altogether, total global 2003 revenues, fees, and commissions for providing *interactive* marketing services to other businesses came to approximately US$ 16.6 billion, as near as I can figure. This does NOT include the goods sold online, or the value of the hotel rooms and air flights booked, or, sadly, the money lost to online casinos. It DOES include estimated affiliate commissions, though, as well as the slimy fees and commissions earned by SPAMmers, porn gateways, and all the others who pander to bored or ignorant consumers. Said more directly: $16.6 *billion* was our total (approximate) gross income before expenses for helping others sell stuff in 2003. Now we all need to take another deep breath. Because, based on numbers from several industry sources, plus my own analysis and our competitive research, the total budget for "marketing" in the US in 2003 was just above US$600 *billion*; globally, the number appears to have been something like US$1240 billion. This means that companies - all of them, all over the planet, from the biggest mega-corps down to the smallest local stores, as well as your company and mine - collectively spent the US dollar equivalent about 1240 *billion* last year to sell their goods and services - not counting the expense of their own sales forces. What this means is that *interactive* marketing - as of this minute - represents about 1.3% of the total global marketing spend. Flip this around, and it says that in 2003 about 98.7% of "marketing" was NOT "online". Understand please: These perspectives are NOT to say that the web, along with email and other interactive media, are so small as to be inconsequential. To the contrary, our focus should be on the *huge* opportunity we have, collectively, as advertisers and marketers learn the value of shifting a substantial part of their present spending from traditional media and selling channels to ours. . Since this post is about numbers, I'll offer one more: I predict that by the end of 2010, just a bit over five years out, "interactive" marketing will represent at least 5% of the global advertising and promotion budget. Figure something northward of US$70 billion. Fellow survivors, that means a 320+% increase in "interactive" ad and marketing-related revenues for *all* of us. *Maybe* Google/Yahoo/MSN et al will capture as much as 1/3 of that 70 billion. The rest is up for grabs. I ask you: is this a time to quit, to stop innovating, to give up on helping consumers and business people learn how to use the web to save time, save money, and expand their horizons? David Yancey http://www.vivante.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Mekhong Kurt Subject: Reciprocal linking > Why the heck should I agree to exchange links with > people I don't know and don't have anything in common > with? It's not going to help either me or them... - Michael Martinez, LED 1785 Not having the slightest expertise in the effectiveness of reciprocal linking, I'm staying out of that debate, other than to say I hope that if I get enough inbound and outbound links of good quality my traffic will be positively affected, even if just a little. I have an invitation in a couple of places on my site for people to contact me if they want to cross-link, and openly state their site must be related to Thailand in some way, preferably to Bangkok itself. (I also state for porn site operators not to waste their time.) I couldn't agree with Michael more. I almost daily get a cookie-cutter e-mail or two saying the sender has found and likes my site, and feels cross-linking will be mutually beneficial. Then I see, for example, the site promotes Chile, from where almost no one comes to Thailand and to almost no one from Thailand goes, so if to cross-link would indeed be of benefit to both sites -- well, in that case, I'm missing the plot somewhere. I used to try to be polite and e-mail back I was declining the offer (and, if the other site already as a link to my site, saying I understand if they want to take it away), but after getting a cross-link solicitation from a site selling land on the Moon (!!!), I thought, "To heck with this; I'm not going to waste my time even replying to irrelevant requests." IMHO, such requests skate perilously close to being part of the cesspool of unsolicited spam. Now, it's a different matter in one highly specialized circumstance. A company in Europe was organizing a large group tour for employees and their families to Southeast Asia and had put up a private web site to help those people learn more about the region. That company wanted to link to me until the tour began, and for me to link back. I could detect no real difference in my traffic during the time that exchange continued, and had the company (an industrial one) not been organizing such a tour, I would have declined. I imagine it's clear why I did accept. Just my two cents' worth. With warm regards, Mekhong Kurt, Web Master http://bangkokatoz.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Reciprocal linking > ... I have a customer who paid a SEO company a pretty hefty > price and all they did was [create] full-on spamdex pages that... > have top 5 positions in the Yahoo index for really tough keywords... - Mark Whitman, LED 1787 Yahoo! DIRECTORY listings cannot be influenced by meta tags, inbound links, or even content on the pages. Yahoo! determines its search results rankings on the basis of the title line, descripiton, category, URL, and click popularity of its directory listings. The Web results are primarily ranked according to internal linkage (outbound links to other sites, and links to other pages on the same site), title tags, URL, and on-page content. External linkage is still important for tie-breaking. Yahoo! looks for relevance first and popularity second. > I've been suspecting that the search engines use > scare tactics to dissuade spamdexing but in fact > put little effort into actually controlling it. They put a great deal of effort into controlling it, but every automated process can be outfoxed by some people. Simple link farming isn't the silver bullet so many people continue to believe it is. Michael Martinez http://www.xenite.org/ ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Charles Oertel Subject: HTML Editors > And as for the purity of hand-coding... I respect those that can > do it - but I don't want to learn that much programming. Look at > just a moderate page. Imagine doing all of that in a text editor! - Michael Linehan, LED 1788 The programming only looks like a lot because you are looking at pages that weren't efficiently coded to the W3C XHTML 1.0 standard (by hand or by machine). When I see the 50 thousand table tags in a simple page (many of them empty) I also get a fright. Have a look at SeeingWhite.co.za for an example of what can be done by hand without going overboard. You should only be using a handful of tags (p, a, img, ul, ol, li, div). Tables should only be used for tabular data, NOT for page layout. In my sites most of my typing is the content of the page (which you would have to type in a WYSIWYG editor anyway). For such typing, most WYSIWYG editors are inefficient compared to a keyboard-centric tool such as gVIm. Managing a large site by hand is a mission, unless you have unerring global search and replace tools across all files in a directory structure, or you use a tool that includes and generates code. I cobbled my own together, so that all I type is the page content (with markup) while the footers, menus and common elements get generated (according to my standard). Have a look at the menu on SeeingWhite.co.za and you will notice a list of links only: no tables, no javascript, nothing other than a plain anchor tag. How great is this for a search engine spider? regards, Charles Oertel FineBushPeople.co.za ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Tom Anson Subject: HTML editors With reference to Mark Whitman's comments about HTML and CSS being so easy to learn that he's amazed that people use HTML editors at all, there are good reasons to use them, even if you know the code. When I got started with the internet, I was using a web page construction system that was very easy to use, produced nice-looking pages and all that; but it's code was awful. One thing it gave me, however, was the confidence that I could start a web business. Along the way, I was able to pick up HTML. When I revised my pages this past year, I did all the coding by hand. Since then, I've added a lot of pages, and have been working on a lot of other to be added soon. However, had I used Dreamweaver (as I am now), I could have done the work in a tiny fraction of the time. I still use my knowledge of HTML to tweak things -- just a little; but I wouldn't go back to hand-coding again unless I just wanted the recreational value of doing it the old way -- on the order of building my kitchen cabinets with hand tools. It's uniquely satisfying, and if you're very skilled, gives a better end result than anything else; but the time investment makes doing it that way a luxury. Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials Discover the wonder of therapeutic-grade. http://www.therapeutic-grade.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Mark Whitman Subject: Patent attorney > For a small company owning a patent can be a > waste of time / money unless it is absolutely solid. - Ian Dickson, LED 1786 Thanx for taking the time to respond Ian (and also the others who did) - you hit the nail on the head regarding the reason for my post. I'm looking for an attorney who can structure things so that the patent will hold water in a dispute, even with Goliath Inc. Regarding fighting industry giants who may infringe, what's the alternative? Even as a small business person I can file a lawsuit as easily as IBM can. David vs Goliath disputes also have the potential of getting media attention if Goliath is well known. I would definitely fight, maybe unsuccessfully, but if someone's going to take the time to patent a product the commitment to fight infringement goes along with the territory. Mark Whitman mark at webstuf dot net ------- new post - new topic ------- From: RJ Peters Subject: Monkey encoding > I say forget about it and use the old @ sign. With various > filters and services to keep out unwanted email, I have no > problem leaving my email address exposed and available... > if the bad guys really want it, they can get it. - Brad Waller, LED 1788 I'm on several lists, and on one of them, we all use this protocol for sharing our email addresses within the text of our posts: myname @ domain.com (remove spaces) It seems to be working just fine. RJ Peters ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Eva Rosenberg Subject: Monkey Coding Hi Adam, You have my sympathy about that issue. It annoyed me no end, until Don Morris wrote some code, after a lengthy discussion in the HelpDesk. I've been testing his e-mail cloaker code for newsletters for the last few weeks. It's working. The code for a post would look like this in your newsletter: http://emailcloaker.com/helpdesk/waller,ep.com/AdJungle the first part is your return e-mail address http://emailcloaker.com/helpdesk the next part is the poster, with a comma /waller,ep.com the next part is the subject line /AdJungle or it could be another copy to He also has an affiliate program, so while you save yourself grief and make life easier for your members, you can also make money http://www.emailcloaker.com/a/helpdesk Best wishes, Eva Rosenberg, MBA, EA http://www.taxmama.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance." - Oscar Wilde |
