| LED Digest 2190: The Case of the Missing Web Site |
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List Moderator: Published by:
Adam Audette LED Digest
adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com
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June 26, 2006 Issue no. 2190
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.....IN THIS DIGEST.....
======= NEW =====================
--== The Case of the Missing Web Site ==--
~ Dirk van der Werff
"My website with 2.5 million unique visitors
per year has 'disappeared'..."
==== CONTINUING =================
--== Who's Using AdWords? ==--
~ Chris Allen
"Adwords is very effective for niche product sites
like Gentleman's Emporium..."
--== Top Email Marketing Services? ==--
~ Ivan Jimenez
"...for a low-cost solution that really delivers, I'd say
AWeber.com is hands-down the best."
--== Success Stories ==--
~ Rob Bishop
"Our company still focuses on B2B online,
but we now do trade shows..."
--== How Important are H1 Header Tags? ==--
~ Dave Mead
"New sites tend to be using a lot more HTML
tags correctly..."
==== BILLBOARD ===================
--== Tracking Keywords ==--
~ Martha Retallick
========== NEW ===================================
From: Dirk van der Werff
Subject: Ouch! Site Disappeared?
Ouch!..........
My website with 2.5 million unique visitors per year has
'disappeared'... the developers seem to have gone... can't raise
them on landlines, cell phones, their premises is closed and I'm
stuffed basically.
Any direction on how I can rescue my website?
It wasn't my main source of income but it has been established for
almost 11 years now, new developers rejigged it for me in 2005 (in
the UK), screwed the payments section up badly before it got going
'almost' properly again, and then screwed the ASP database up which
took a long time to get back in order. The whole thing has been a
nightmare, and just when I was trying to get the site on a different
server (to one in Germany) it's all disappeared together with
pending orders, all the database of everything...
It's been offline for just over 48 hours or so, so it must be out
there somewhere... there's lots of very knowledgeable people here,
any ideas at all what my first and second moves are?
Cheers
Dirk van der Werff
======== CONTINUING ===============================
From: Chris Allen
Subject: Is AdWords suited to small consulting businesses?
> ... I was wondering if we could take a side trip
> over to the world of AdWords. As in, who's using
> them? What successes are you having?
- Martha Retallick, LED 2180
Martha Retallick asks who's using AdWords:
We are, and have been since we launched our store
(www.gentlemansemporium.com) over three years ago. We also use
Yahoo / Overture and MSN Adcenter.
Good results all around, but we've put lots of effort into getting
the right keywords and ad copy. We use something like 3000
different keyword / phrase combinations, and most of them hardly
ever get any searches or clicks. Low click keywords do add up over
time, however, so we keep a close watch on keywords that produce for
us and what product names people search for on our site (e.g.
suspenders = braces) so we can cover synonyms.
Adwords is very effective for niche product sites like Gentleman's
Emporium, but I would assume it's less so for widely supplied, local
services like consulting, design, gardening, etc. There are
thousands of little consultancies out there, and I've gotta believe
the cost of hitting the top three or five listings nationwide on
Adwords would be prohibitive.
I've consulted for the last five years, and can say that the most
effective marketing has always been the most personal (i.e.
referrals and word of mouth) and rarely did our website serve for
much more than a business card AFTER we'd already been introduced to
someone.
If you're trying to market your web design consultancy, consider
other routes too. Check out www.actionplan.com. Lots of great
material covering professional service marketing, and Robert
Middleton puts out a great periodic newsletter that I read as
religiously as LED digest . There's also a slew of good "services
firm consulting" books out there, but the bible of consulting is
"managing the professional services firm" by David Maister. I've
read it several times, and keep going back to it to remind me of how
people buy consulting services.
Good luck!
Chris Allen
-------- new post - new topic --------
From: Ivan Jimenez
Subject: Email marketing
> What would be your top 3 online
> email marketing services and why?
- Eran Adams, LED 2188
I've worked with a few different providers and for a low-cost
solution that really delivers, I'd say AWeber.com is hands-down the
best. This could be a little overwhelming at first which is good
because it forces you to read the short tutorial before using the
program. All in all, it's got the best bang for the buck and offers
scalable solutions for email marketing.
Ivan Jimenez
-------- new post - new topic --------
From: Rob Bishop
Subject: Success stories
> Well, here's the 'quick digest' version:
> 1996 to 2001 - Learn about EVERYTHING
> 2001 to 2003 - Try some stuff - and enjoy minor success
> 2003 to 2006 - Leverage success - and ramp it up!
- Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian, LED 2188
I liked Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian's breakdown. Below is mine,
although it is a little more lengthy.
1995 to 1997 - Learn about as much as I could, and make the rest up.
Struggle with cheap shopping carts like Perl Cart, where every
catalog page is hand coded. Lie to the bank and tell them it is a
mail order catalog to get a merchant account. Make up my own rules
about credit card fraud screening after I shipped 30 Teddy Bears (
$19.99 US each ) to Jordan in the Middle East. ( called UPS that day
and got them back. ( expensive shipping / lesson ) Fight with the
bank about charge backs, where the person, signed for the package,
and still said they didn't receive it. Sales, less then $40,000 per
year online.
1998 - 1999 - Get published and interviewed in several books, and
articles ( which now collect dust ) Ironically, I start doing
speeches at colleges on e-tailing, and after me on the agenda is my
bank manager, telling the audience how the banks are so e-friendly
now. ( took long enough ) Witness the rise in the dot.coms and see
all the free shipping, and selling products for less then they're
worth just to acquire customers. I figure out that competing is
going to get even more difficult and give up on the B2C and switch
to B2B. Sales, less then $300,000
2000 - 2003 - Witness the dot bomb, which thankfully left my company
virtually untouched, and left a rich online world of cheap servers,
and cheap bandwidth. Continue to focus 95% of my energies towards
B2B. 100% of our business comes from our website. We do not have one
paper catalog, human satellite sales rep, or any other offline
advertising. ( didn't even have our name in the Yellow Pages )
Refined our online presentation and procedures. Sales under one
million.
2004 - 2006 Witness the fact that Open Source starts to make online
software super cheap, super good, and even free. Our company still
focuses on B2B online, but we now do trade shows, and are developing
an offline sales rep team. Sales in the millions. I am still
impressed with companies that can sell one product at a time, and be
profitable online. We opted to sell at a 500 piece minimum order to
corporations, and individual inventors.
The majority of my knowledge from the beginning was collected and
shared on LED. I did not start at #1 with LED, but I bet I was
reading during the first few hundred LEDs. I don't recall. Anyway,
it has been a profitable relationship on here, and I hope it can
continue.
Thanks everyone !
Rob Bishop
Binkley Custom Products
-------- new post - new topic --------
From: Dave Mead
Subject: H1 headers
> While Google has undergone a few changes over the years,
> they do still appear to be looking at HTML styling tags.
- Michael Martinez, LED 2188
Though great as historical references I don't think the first two
papers are that valid anymore. The first looks like it was written
when the "Google Boys" were still at Stanford and at that point
you'd be lucky to find sites using CSS to style a:hover let alone
anything else in the mainstream so what size you made the text in a
<.p> would've been important. I would hazard a guess that the size
and weight would have been replaced with looking at <.strong> &
<.em> tags instead - at least I hope so.
New sites tend to be using a lot more HTML tags correctly, whether
through a blog, CMS or hand-coded. Most of the table layout, <.font>
ridden sites are probably grandfathered in at this point.
Though I am not wholeheartedly disagreeing with Martin that the < h*
> tag only plays a part, I think using them, along with other HTML
tags, to give a well structured page that contains content that
people want to read and have linked to from elsewhere will get you
higher in any engine that making your <.p> 200em and bold.
I could be completely wrong as well - that's what makes SEO so fun
:-)
Dave Mead
DMWebsites.com
Website Design | SEO | Consulting
Affordable, quality driven, standards-based
==== BILLBOARD ===================================
From: Martha Retallick
Subject: Does this software exist?
In an earlier edition of LED, it was suggested that I have Google
optimize my Adwords account to get the clickers clicking on my ad.
Well, they just did, and, oh, do I have a boodle of keywords to keep
track of now.
Somewhere, somehow, I hope that somebody has developed an
application to automate this process. Something that you'd just load
your keywords into, then let the software see where the ads are
showing up on the search results pages. Anyone know of any such
thing?
Martha Retallick
Western Sky Communications
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