| LED Digest 1823: Are Mailing Lists Dead? |
|
|
|
================================================== 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 ................................................ June 18, 2004 Issue #1823 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The End of I-Sales ==-- ~ Martha Retallick "Then I stopped reading. And then I unsubscribed." ~ Ian Dickson "Are Mailing Lists dead? God no. But they are a limited technology..." ~ Clint Whitsett "Call it user migration." --== What are Alexa Rankings Worth? ==-- ~ David Jonah "Alexa's calculations and sampling are remarkably instructive..." ~ Dan Thies "There are plenty of good uses for Alexa ranking data." --== Google AdSense ==-- ~ Brad Waller "I'm not a big fan of AdSense on the home page." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== ShareYourExperience Scam? ==-- ~ Willie Crawford --== Outbound Links ==-- ~ Bob Wakfer ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Martha Retallick Subject: End of I-Sales > I'd really love to hear your thoughts - not just on the fate of > I-Sales [and the other I-Lists], but on the bigger picture here. - Adam, LED 1821 I joined I-Sales after Glenn Fleischman shut down his discussion list in early 1996. (Glenn's list-focus was on Internet marketing, but the exact name escapes me.) [Glenn's early list was INET-Marketing. You can find a complete history of discussion lists, including interviews with Glenn and others, right here in the About section of LED-Digest.com: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/38/79/ -ed.] Although I found I-Sales and several other "I" lists to be a valuable part of my business and Internet education, something went badly wrong in the transfer of ownership to Wonk/Vox/Speed. Or whatever it was called. The most notable thing from my perspective was that my beloved text-only versions of I-Sales and the other discussions just up and disappeared. They were replaced by these HTML e-mail behemoths, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to post messages to them. With the old text-only e-mails, this was a snap. All you had to do was click on the "Comments" link. Thus, with this added layer of difficulty, I stopped posting. Then I stopped reading. And then I unsubscribed. Martha Retallick "The Passionate Postcarder" http://www.postcardmarketingsecrets.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Ian Dickson Subject: End of I-Sales You neatly open a whole can of worms regarding technology. Are Mailing Lists dead? God no. But they are a limited technology and most lists are failures. (This one is the only moderated list that I belong to that actually works as a moderated discussion. From which we can conclude that Adam is brilliant.) There are very good psychological reasons for this. I have spent the last three years working on better technology. People interested in this field should look at http://commkit.com/ckfe2a.cfm?Whichone=9&flag=1&pwd=0 It isn't written for a marketing audience, but I'm sure that most people here will be able to see the relationship. It is (I hope) in plain English, not jargon. PS - The Wisdom of Crowds. Buy it or borrow it. Cheers Ian Dickson http://www.commkit.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Clint Whitsett Subject: End of I-Sales Call it user migration. Three years ago I was working for a different company in a different industry - telecom. When the entire marketing department was suddenly let go one day, we were all in a state of shock. The last thing on my mind was forwarding myself emails from the lists that I had subscribed to. Then a couple months down the road with a new employer and a completely new set of work priorities, I finally have time to start reading subscriber email again. The spam starts flowing into my virgin mailbox and eventually I find something worth reading I.E. LED-digest. The content and comments are rewarding and fruitful and I soon forget all about the discussion I was reading previously. Terms of my employment have now changed from just making things look pretty to making things work really well. The discussion on design is no longer as important as improving my search ranking and coordinating online promotions with print and direct mail. I've moved on. I'm sure the same is true of many people in similar situations. Maybe all the "I-sales" folks need to do to resurrect themselves is change the name and give the discussion a new tangent. Clint Whitsett, Marketing Coordinator United Coatings Manufacturing CO. www.unitedcaotings.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: David Jonah Subject: Alexa Two comments on Ms Thurow's Alexa riposte to Ken Evoy and the disappearance of I-Whatever Alexa is to web site traffic analysis and predictive patterns of behaviour what polling practices are to electoral campaign among parties and candidates. It is not so much a snap shot of accuracy of actual data, but a perception analysis tool of comparative error that combines to create a message of visual trend tracking. Having had to interpret polling data ahead of the poll that counts on election day for my client, when the real conversion rate of votes won comes in from the traffic count through voting boxes resulting in a final winner tally, I find Alexa invaluable in much the same way as K. Evoy argues. The thing about web sites is that they are always a work in progress for content and user attraction. The Alexa popularity meter is a trending tool that samples user behaviour in such an unscientific manner that by its sheer sampling size is actually predictive, but not necessarily accurate. For me, based on a dozen sites I monitor and have access to actual log data, the remarkable thing about Alexa is that in the same way a electoral poll can sample a 1000 random voters and get a predictive picture of intent come voting day, Alexa's calculations and sampling are remarkably instructive. Instructive in the same way that a weather forecast 5 days out for next weekend or a poll three weeks before the final tally is valuable in terms of perception and knowing where one site stands in comparison with others, which is the publishing model that Alexa follows. A lot can happen before the weekend occurs or the final votes are counted. Time to take corrective action. Send for Ms Thurow for example. All publishing media love snap shots of trends based on some data set rendered graphically. USA Today has built a business model around snapshot publishing. Alexa is a view and Ms Thurow who deals in the hard nose world of demonstratable and measurable results for SEO is quite correct to embrace real metrics of conversion tallies for customers on a site. But for understanding the bigger picture of the Internet world, recognizing that it has a huge margin of error that is equally distributed among all competing web sites, Alexa offers a trending report that could only be improved if someone built a database calculator that took actual log feeds from every web site and published them online for free. (Priced HitBox / EMetrics lately) Until then the common vox populi have to settle for free Alexa. Speaking of Vox Populi, brings me to the disappearance of I-Whatever. I loved I-Sales and I-Search long before stumbling on this List alternative. This disappearance of Vox Box aka I-(Title) proves that you can take the strongest, more established and most valuable brand identity and destroy it by blurring the value and paying an ultimate price as the fickle fingers of forums move quickly to the new flavor of the moment. Ask VW and New Coke to name just a few that have tanked themselves by confusing the loyalty of adherents who forget to keep drinking the Kool-Aid together. A shame really. I have gained so much from so many. RIP David Jonah www.localintheknow.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Dan Thies Subject: Alexa While I don't disagree with Shari Thurow that an Alexa ranking is less informative to the site's *owner* than their own traffic logs, a few points should be made. There are plenty of good uses for Alexa ranking data. When we work on link targeting strategy and affiliate recruiting, there may be thousands of candidates. Sorting the list of possible targets based on Alexa rankings is a lot more effective than sorting it alphabetically. Comparing spikes in traffic for a competitor vs. the timing of their promotions can give you a good idea of which promotions were more successful. The Alexa traffic chart for our site clearly maps out which of my published articles brought in the most traffic and revenue. All sampling methods have inherent flaws. Search engine market share numbers from NetRatings, OneStat, Statmarket etc. are still used every day in making business decisions, in spite of the fact that they disagree widely, far beyond the reported "plus or minus" sampling error for any of them. Dan Thies SEO Research Labs http://www.seoresearchlabs.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Brad Waller Subject: AdSense > I can't get ANY Adsense ads to kick in for the home page... > any other page usually loads of four ads a time as expected... > but the homepage has none... - Dirk van der Werff, LED 1820 Dirk, I'm not 100% sure why it is not working, as it could be that GoogleBot just does not like what it sees. But your question still gave me two thoughts I wanted to talk about. First, and most important, AdSense allows you to specify a default ad in case they have no paid ads to show and you should be using that feature. Second, I'm not a big fan of AdSense on the home page. Your home page is the "first impression" you give many visitors and I think the AdSense ads don't fit. I would make your home page simpler, and just lose the AdSense skyscraper. Kills two birds with one stone... Brad Waller www.adjungle.com waller, ep.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Willie Crawford Subject: Shareyourexperience > I'm wondering if any of you have any experience > or knowledge of shareyourexperiences.com. - Greg Robbins, LED 1820 Hi LEDers, I get several of those emails a day indicating that someone is investigating me or my sites. Most of them are from domains where it wouldn't make a lot of sense for people to do extensive investigations because my bio is posted on the sites, and many of these sites sell inexpensive items. I have clicked through several times to see what this was all about, and quickly concluded that it was a scam to get traffic or to get you to sign up for their "service." My conclusion may have been incorrect since the purpose of the sites I visited never jumped out at me and I didn't feel inclined to spend a lot of time figuring out what the site was really about. I'd be interested in seeing what others have discovered about these sites. Willie Crawford http://masterthepayperclicks.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Bob Wakfer Subject: Outbound links > Does The Number Of Links On A Page Affect Ranking? - Jon Ricerca, LED 1815 [via Karl Baldwin] There other interesting aspect raised by the Ricerca study is the following. It has been the "conventional wisdom" among some SEO commentators that Google will not read or index more than 50 links on a page. I personally have never accepted that, because Google's own Webmaster's Guidelines counsel webmasters not to put more than 100 link on a page. It is hard for me to believe they would advise this if in fact they were going to ignore all links beyond the number 50. However, getting back to the Ricerca study I would have speculated that if 100 OBLs is in fact Google's upper limit that we would have seen the correlation between the number of OBLs and SERP placement drop off as the number on the page approached this limit. However, we didn't see this. It appears that the correlation is higher for 90 to 100 links than for any lower number. The real shame is that Ricerca didn't test for pages with more than 100 OBLs per page. Regards, Bob Wakfer Computer Partners http://www.compar.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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- [thanks for the quote Mom :-) ] "Though much is taken, much abides: and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are now, we are - our equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield." - Alfred Lord Tennyson |
