| LED Digest 1797: What are Open Rates Worth? |
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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 ................................................ May 5, 2004 Issue #1797 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Demise of Email? ==-- ~ Dan Thies "Newsletters are only effective if there's a reason to open them." ~ Bill Davison "...the public views you as much a nuisance as any spammer!" ~ Mike Banks Valentine "Whomever comes up with real solutions to this mess will surely become wildly rich, eh?" ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== WebAward Call for Entries ==-- ~ Bill Rice --== Webalizer for Site Stats ==-- ~ Erik Perkins --== Changing URL ==-- ~ Lorelle Smith --== Internal Links ==-- ~ Micah Jackson ~ Vishal Verma ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Dan Thies Subject: Email demise > I'd like to solicit specific percentages of decrease that email > publishers are experiencing these days... I'm assuming a direct > correlation between the decrease in Open rates and ad revenues. - Joe Halbrook, LED 1796 The conventional internet marketing wisdom is for everyone to publish a newsletter, use autoresponders, etc. Newsletters are only effective if there's a reason to open them. Pushing out the same content everyone else is using will get you nowhere fast. We rarely see open rates below 50%, but we only mail when we really have something to tell our subscribers and customers. An active effort to encourage your subscribers to whitelist your mail-from address helps. Gathering all the feedback you can helps - both by asking and by using tracking links. The trend over the last year is increasing, not decreasing. As far as autoresponders go, they're definitely becoming less useful, and we don't even use them any more. Personal responses from real people generate a lot more sales anyway. Dan Thies SEO Research Labs http://www.seoresearchlabs.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Bill Davison Subject: Email demise > ... I have become increasingly aware of my customer base > avoiding... e-mail. Does anyone see a solution to this insanity? - Dave Ushkow, LED 1794 Could it just be that someone who registers on a website isn't doing that to volunteer for every dodah's email advertising advertising useless widgets? Maybe it's time that the "opt-in" types realize this simple fact: If your "opt-in" registry is being used to market widgets - the public views you as much a nuisance as any spammer! They could care less about your claim to legitimacy. Bill Davison bizwebpage.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Mike Banks Valentine Subject: Email demise This thread interests me simply because I'm suffering from the problem from both ends. When I send outgoing email, I use the "return receipt" function so I know the intended recipient opened it. I've found that this annoys many people, but have gotten clients and family to accept it. My email marketing effort (email newsletter) has slowed to a crawl because I get so many bad addresses, bounces and challenge / response mails. I just can't spend any time to answer the challenge / response, clear out the bounces or remove bad addresses. Admittedly, my newsletter has taken a back seat to my ongoing Search Engine Optimization work for existing clients. Meanwhile, my incoming mail has reached about 4000 daily emails, of which about 40 to 50 or so are requested newsletters, client communications and private email. About 65% of the worst sp*m is caught by my hosts filters and another 50% of those that get through those filters are dumped by my own message rules and filters. This means I'm still dredging through about 1000 to 1500 emails looking for those important client emails, newsletters and other requested things. Most of what is left, besides my important mail, is made up of randomly generated gibberish words strung together and then there are those creative spelling exercises from drug and body enhancement vendors. Who opens that stuff anyway? We all know that the sp*mmers are getting rich and driving exotic cars purchased with the profits from their dubious or non-existent products. Who is buying those things!? I routinely miss things from clients that they must send repeatedly in order to get through to me. Family often ask why I don't reply to their email. Sometimes I don't receive things I send to MYSELF via email from my Mac to the PC in order to work on the other machine with needed files. I've resorted to using my email client search function to find specific addresses when I'm expecting client communications or communications from business partners. That way I don't have to scan those 1000 to 1500 subject lines to find the important stuff I'm looking for. I actually agree that email is dying as a useful medium for the above mentioned reasons and more. Whomever comes up with real solutions to this mess will surely become wildly rich, eh? Mike Banks Valentine http://seoptimism.com email: http://privacynotes.com/cgi-bin/M/msb.cgi?3 ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: William Rice Subject: WebAward Call for Entries The Web Marketing Association has begun its call for entries for its 8th annual WebAward Competition ( www.webaward.org ), the Internet's premier award competition that judges website development against an ever increasing Internet standard of excellence and against peer sites within an industry. The deadline for entry is June 30, 2004. For compete information and to enter, go to www.webaward.org Bill Rice, President Web Marketing Association ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Erik Perkins Subject: Website Stats > I'm wondering if anyone is familiar with Webalizer... - Joanne Cannell, LED 1794 I use Webalizer with my host (pair.com, advertised here in the LED, I highly recommend them), and while I have not gotten it to give me EXACTLY the statistics I want, it can be configured to give meaningful statistics. The process is not exactly user-friendly or obvious, but it is fairly simple. Log onto your FTP site and find the directories where your web logs are stored, it will usually be a higher level directory than your "public" directory. You need to find a text file with the word 'configure' or 'config' in the name, and probably the extension '.conf'. It is usually called webalizer.conf, but your host may have a different name. Mine was called www_webalizer something or other... There is a sample configuration file here: ftp://ftp.mrunix.net/pub/webalizer/sample.conf That file shows you all the things you can change, and gives examples of the kinds of things you probably want to alter, such as hiding your own site as a source of referrals, grouping referrers that have permutations of search engine web sites in them (.google., msn. , .yahoo., etc.), and possibly even grouping search terms. There is support for 'wild card' variables that I haven't experimented with too much, but I'm fairly sure you can group related search terms together. This would be useful for grouping plurals and alternate spellings, if you didn't want to analyze them separately. Now you just need to change a few of the lines, add some lines on the bottom, save it as text, and upload it again. I'm just figuring it out myself, so I can't be much more help than this post, but feel free to send me an email. Erik Perkins Liberty Graphics, Inc, http://www.lgtees.com web, lgtees.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Lorelle Smith Subject: Changing URL > ...when you type my URL (ie. www.mystore.com), > it goes to "store.mystore.com" on Yahoo. Does > this "re-direct" effect my search engine rankings? - Allen Chou, LED 1796 It's okay, Allen; this is a "legal" type of redirect that is taking place on the server so technically it should have no bearing on your ranking. However, the search engines don't want duplicates of your pages (considered a form of spam) under different URLs so they will only index the first version they find. As for your second question, this is addressed by Google at http://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html#A3. -------------------- "...To preserve your ranking, you will want to inform any sites that currently link to your pages of your change of address. As long as the links change as you move your site over to a new location, your PageRank should not be adversely affected." -------------------- (On the other hand, a Google rep at last year's San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference said the best way is to set up a 301 permanent redirect to preserve your PR and that probably wouldn't hurt either.) Google's Webmaster page goes on to say that you can check for all the sites that link to you by using their link syntax in a search. Yeah, right! For some reason, it is mostly inadequate for this purpose. Try searching using these queries instead: www.mystore.com -www.mystore.com store.mystore.com -store.mystore.com These will only reveal sites that mention your URL or link to your site using the URL as anchor text. (Replace "mystore" with your actual domain name, of course.) A better way to find out who's linking to you is to search at HotBot using this syntax: linkdomain:www.mystore.com linkdomain:store.mystore.com But the most important thing is to be sure to point your old domain name to the new one so that your customers will still be able to find you. People might have bookmarked your site in their Favorites or kept your old emails so they can get to your site that way. It would be best if you could keep your old site active with just a link on each page to the corresponding page on the new site, with a note on each page asking people to update their bookmarks. I would keep it active for at least a year, and monitor how many people are still finding your site through the old domain name so you know when it's safe to drop it. You may want to set up hosting outside of Yahoo to do this more inexpensively. Just make sure they provide good logs so you can see how many are still accessing the old site. One last thing -- don't be so sure you don't have a legal right to your domain name. Many small biz operators cave in at the first notice of a trademark dispute without even checking to be sure it's actually valid. Did you know that two companies can use the same name as long as they're not selling the same type of product or service? Research your rights at http://www.uspto.gov/ and ask an attorney before you give up a domain name. There's specific wording regarding domain registrations and ownership disputes at http://snipurl.com/65ux [uspto.gov] and http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrp.htm, respectively. Your domain name may be worth more and be more rightfully yours than you realize -- don't give it up without a fight! Hope this helps, Lorelle Smith Search Engine Marketing & Keyword Phraseology Consultant http://www.keywordsmith.com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Micah Freezedried Subject: Internal links > ... when I did a backward [link check at Google], I noticed > that on some websites, their [sub-pages] show up as > a link to their homepage, while mine don't show up. - Joanne Cannell, LED 1796 The problem is that your internal links to your homepage do not include the filename of your homepage. rather, your link refers to the 'base' URL " http://kitchendesignbyjoanne.com/ ", when it should read " http://kitchendesignbyjoanne.com/filename.html ". edit line 26 of your code. i'd use notepad, but that's just me! if you type a 'base' URL into a browser, it automatically defaults to 'index.html' or 'home.html'. although the browser is seemlessly redirected to your homepage, Google doesn't count a link unless it specifies the *exact* address. similarly, in terms of link popularity / pagerank, a link to " www.kitchendesignbyjoanne.com " is counted differently to a link to " kitchendesignbyjoanne.com ", although they both lead to the same website. hope that helps! best regards, Micah Jackson Team Freezedried http://www.freezedried.co.uk ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Vishal Verma Subject: Internal links Joanne, Google has indexed your entire site. You do not need to resubmit each page individually. When Googlebot reaches your home page or any page on your site, it follows the links and spiders through the entire site. To find out which pages are indexed enter site:http://kitchendesignbyjoanne.com on Google. You have used images to create links on your site. It might help if you use text links as well. Make your links important. To achieve best results, create several links to each page, and make your link descriptions count by inserting your keyword phrase like this: <.a href="key-phrase.htm">Key Phrase<./a>. For example, create a page named 'planning-your-project.htm' and use the key phrase 'Planning your project' to link to this page instead of creating a page named 'planning.htm'. Hope you find this useful. With kind regards, Vishal Verma www.innovision-india.com vishal, innovision-india.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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Happy Cinco de Mayo! |
