| LED Digest 2235: Press Releases for Niche Sites |
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Are press releases suitable for niche sites? What kind of ROI have LEDer's
had when contracting out the service, and has its marketing influence helped?
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=========== NEW ==================================The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration 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 ............................................. August 29, 2006 Issue no. 2235 ............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== <Moderator Comment> --== Press Releases ==-- ~ Joe Bodnarchuk "We are considering a press release for one of our niche sites..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Small Business Sites ==-- ~ Kerri Mackenzie "Small business owners are now and will remain the backbone of the Internet." ~ Tracy Coyle "I am not a professional developer. I hand code everything." ~ Mark Roberts "...I totally agree with everything Mark Whitman mentioned in his post..." --== Extra Code & Load Times ==-- ~ Bob Gladstein "...the cleaner a page's code, the less bandwidth it uses." ~ Mary Findley "...there are sites I come across that take close to a minute and more to load." ~ Roy Williams "...many of us can be subject to extra bandwidth costs." --== HTML Editors ==-- ~ Steve Pronger "...it comes down to keyword research, good content, building trust with the engines and relevant links." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Site Analytics - Terminology? ==-- ~ Ray Hadorn <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, The thread on "HTML Editors" is forking in about three directions. I've organized posts into two new threads as follows: "Small Business Sites" and "Extra Code and Load Times." Posts on "HTML Editors" remain under that thread. There's some crossover, but this helps clarify the discussions a bit. Have a great week, Adam ------------------------ From: Joe Bodnarchuk Subject: New Topic - Press Releases I have been following this list for quite some time with interest. We are considering a Press Release for one of our niche sites. I have searched the list archives without finding any recent relevant information. From my preliminary research press releases seem to be a rather inexpensive way to get the word out. I would be interested in any input from members who have taken this path regarding their experiences and results from doing their own press release to paying a company to provide this service. As always, your assistance is greatly appreciated! :-) Thank You! Joe Bodnarchuk http://www.mrconey.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Kerri Mackenzie Subject: Small Business Sites [was: HTML Editors] LED Digest 2234 carried a post by Mark Whitman to which I want to respond. I'm not going to argue the merits of compliance with the W3C, valid HTML, SEO techniques, browsers or any other techno speak. But I do want to comment on Mr. Whitman's statements about small business owners. > A small business owner (without professional level > website development skills) doesn't have the slightest > chance of creating a website that will incorporate effective > operational strategies, one that will convert to the max, > one that will place well in search engines for effective > keywords that searchers actually use, one that incorporates > useful tools, or one that is anything but pathetic on all > important levels. This is simply not true. While small business owners (SBOs) may not all be web savvy designers or SEO gurus with the ability to create sites full of bells and whistles, thousands of us DO create successful websites that convert well and place well in the search engines. Plenty of well-documented proof of this exists. > Website development is not just a matter of > putting some text and images on a webpage. > Website development is a science and an art, > it's not intuitive and it's not something that > any software could possibly automate. Absolutely correct - text and images placed on a site don't matter unless they come together to form useful content that people want and need. Fortunately, there are thousands of passionate SBOs who are very talented at doing just that, and a respectable percentage of their sites rank well with the major search engines. > A small business owner who wants to create > a website, and especially one that can't master > DreamWeaver, should have the sense to know > he's out of his league and needs the help of > a professional if he wants the job done properly. Dreamweaver and other HTML editors like it are simply tools that enable small business owners to develop web pages. Instead of spending a lot of time learning how to write code, SBOs can make the most of their time writing useful content that people want and the search engines love. > Do-it-yourselfers never and I mean NEVER > create professional level websites in terms > of getting the best results possible from the site. Once again... simply not true. There are thousands of examples of proof to the contrary. I know of many, many sites created by SBOs without any help from professional web designers that are getting excellent results. While a web developer may be able to help SBOs achieve high site visibility, it doesn't necessarily mean that SBOs aren't talented enough to run their businesses AND develop popular, in-demand sites. Many have... successfully. > Then of course we have the affiliate marketers > out there. They're a different breed, often bottom > feeders with useless sites... To categorize affiliate marketers as a whole like this is unfair. Bottom feeders exist in every corner of the web, including web designers and SEO pros. But most are honest, sincere, hard-working people who provide a useful service. Some may not like the whole concept of affiliate marketing, but done properly, it's the epitome of win-win. And while it's true that some affiliate marketers have clogged the Net with trashy affiliate sites, they will soon self-destruct and disappear, just as other trashy, useless sites have before them. The bottom line is this... people come to the Internet to get information. Sites that provide it succeed. It doesn't matter how they are created or who creates them. I'm not a professional anything. I'm simply a small business owner who makes a comfortable living with my small business niche website. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles a web designer might include, it isn't W3C compliant, and many would be horrified by the code. In fact, there's plenty of room for improvement. Still, without any assistance from a web designer or SEO pro, it's a successful site. That didn't happen because I'm a foolish, inept bottom feeder. Small business owners are now and will remain the backbone of the Internet. Without us, web designers and SEO pros wouldn't have nearly as many clients, search engines wouldn't be what they are, web design software wouldn't be written, and the Internet would look very different than it does today. I sincerely hope Mr. Whitman's client list doesn't contain any small business owners. They would likely not appreciate his opinion of them. Best, Kerri Mackenzie Tristar Publishing LLC -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Tracy Coyle Subject: Small Business Sites I am sure someone will give Mark Whitman a chance to defend himself, but this in LED 2234 just turned me livid. > A small business owner (without professional level > website development skills) doesn't have the slightest > chance of creating a website... that is anything but > pathetic on all important levels. A third of our business comes from the website we built. The ROI is over 100 and we are complimented by clients all the time on the friendliness and usefulness of the site. I am not a professional developer. I hand code everything. I use not flash or special graphics. Our site generally loads in less than 10 seconds on a 28k dialup feed. I am sure it loads at your monitor refresh rate on a broadband connection! We generally have been a page one result for the last 8 years, first in Yahoo, now in Google for the keywords we aim for. Most other search engines list us in the first 5-8 attorney results (directories, of which we participate in 4 of the top 6 or 7 often are a significant portion of first page results). We receive at least one phone call or email a month from people offering us a more "professional" look on our website. The brochure-ware examples of their work indicate a general incompetence with regard to the market they are aiming for.... Does our site convert every possible visitor? No. Does it convert every probable client? No. Does it result in more clients for the office consistent with our own style? Absolutely. I have been a member and participant of this list for many years. I can tell you that Mark's attitude would not only result in an abrupt termination of any sales call he made on us, but a warning to anyone else to avoid him like the plague. Tracy Coyle Office Manager, Webmaster and Janitor http://www.cazelaw.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mark Roberts Subject: Small biz sites A few more thoughts on html-editors vs. hand coding, etc. etc. First of all I totally agree with everything Mark Whitman mentioned in his post [issue 2234]. One of my pet banes over the years has been trying to understand why people will invest thousands of dollars of their own time in order to keep from paying a professional a few hundred dollars to develop their web site. I recently had a new kitchen floor put in my house. I paid someone $700 to do it. Yes, I could have done it myself, however, It would have taken me a couple of days verses the three hours the professional took, and I could not have done nearly as nice a job. And lets see two days of my time at $50/hour, plus the tools I would have had to purchase / rent, plus lost time from my business....well, it just didn't add up. Someone else made the statement "Web designers tend to forget that what's important to them isn't necessarily important to small business owners. You might think that stripping out code is a priority. Small business owners are more concerned with generating a profit." [Steve Pronger, LED 2232] I would challenge that if small business owners start losing sales due to extra code, loading times, lack of site responsiveness, etc., it will become important to them. Case in point. Due to security and virus concerns, I strictly run Firefox browser, Thunderbird email and AVS Virus protection. As a result, I have never (to my knowledge) had a virus and my spyware and adware scans rarely find anything. Last weekend I was wanting to make some purchases, I found a website that appeared to have what I wanted, but I couldn't see or navigate it. Why?, it was some type of generated code and it could only be viewed my Microsoft IE browser. I examined the code, but could not tell whether it was FrontPage or Dreamweaver generated...some of the generated tags looked like Dreamweaver, but I couldn't be sure. Obviously, wasn't anywhere near W3C compliant. I refused to load IE and expose my computer just to be able to load their code. I proceeded to another site to make my purchase. Unless you think I might be out in left field using these products, they are rapidly becoming the browser of choice and some arguments state that Firefox may soon overcome IE in popularity. Mark Roberts Roberts Computing Systems http://www.robertscomputing.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Bob Gladstein Subject: Extraneous Code > To my knowledge, the issue with extraneous code > isn't about the additional time it takes to load a page, > but how it affects the search engine placement. If the > garbage code is at the top of the page, which it typically > is, then it pushes all the important keyword-rich text > down the page. This indicates to the search engines > that the garbage code is more important than the > keywords in the text. - Kathy Wilson, LED 2234 I've never found that to be an issue. Assuming the spider gets through all of the code on the page, I haven't seen any difference in the results between pushing important content to the top of the code and simply coding without that in mind. As far as I can tell, the engines are looking for unique content, but that doesn't mean that hitting the same menu at the beginning of every document on a site is going to lead them to conclude the pages are identical. When the spider gets to the unique content, that's what it'll pay attention to. In the same topic, Phil Chave wrote [LED 2233]: > I think the stated worries about load times and extraneous code > are a bit academic now that broadband is here with a vengeance. Apart from the fact that there are still plenty of people without broadband, it's important to note that the cleaner a page's code, the less bandwidth it uses. I've reduced the size of pages by close to 50% in some cases, and that means that nearly doubling the site's traffic didn't need to involve nearly doubling the server load and bandwidth usage. Bob Gladstein -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mary Moppins Subject: Load Times and Extra Code > ... page load times can be a problem for non- > broadband users. It should be remembered > that for many of these users broadband is just > not available or not available at any reasonable price. - Tom Aman, LED 2234 Tom I could not agree more. This is especially true if you are trying to reach our elder generation. Most of these folks are on dial up at home and that will probably never change. This is a generation so often ignored and yet where the need is just as great if not greater than the rest of the population. I also receive many order from folks living in Montana and Wyo and small towns where you are right, they will never have high speed connections. Even with the very high speed connection I have, there are sites I come across that take close to a minute and more to load. If it were not necessary for me to be on their sites, they would be history and even then some of them are. There are too many resources out there to tolerate that slow of a load time. Mary Findley Mary Moppins http://www.goclean.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Roy Williams Subject: Load Times Another point that seems to be forgotten here is that many of us can be subject to extra bandwidth costs. Keeping file sizes down all helps with this.... Real gone, Roy Williams Nervous Records www.nervous.co.uk -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: HTML editors > To use a wide array of SEO techniques hand > coding (tagging) with HTML and CSS is essential. - Mark Whitman, LED 2234 I don't know what "wide array" of techniques Mark is referring to - perhaps he can elaborate - but this notion that sites built with WYSIWYG editors are incapable of ranking well in the search engines is nothing more than a fantasy which some web designers entertain. You don't actually need a wide array, just a few basic on-page factors which any decent editor can handle. Then it comes down to keyword research, good content (with those keywords in the right places), building trust with the engines and relevant links. Hand coding makes no difference to these requirements what - so - ever. > If you want to get stealthy then programming > is also essential. Stealthy? Is this why "pages I SEO end up in top 10 very often"? Just wondered. I get pages in the top 10 too; "small business website designer" currently #5 on G. "website designer australia" - #4. Heck, I was even top 10 for "website designer" up until last week (back on page 2 now - ah well). Built with Dreamweaver. No stealth required at all. You think those terms are easy to rank for? What about XSitePro, which I offered as an alternative to DW? I gave an example of a site I built for a soccer club in the Blue Mountains Australia (www.hazelbrookhawks.com). We targeted "soccer blue mountains". Hardly ultra-competitive, I grant you, but precisely what this site needs to be found for. It's top 5. No hand coding (apart from the odd tweak). No stealth. > A small business owner (without professional > level website development skills) doesn't have > the slightest chance of creating a website... Any small business owner, or entrepreneur, can build a high ranking, high traffic and high converting website with the right tools, the right resources and a desire to learn and succeed. They do it all the time, and I believe there's plenty of them on this list. Just ask Ken Evoy (if he's still on this list). Hiring a professional level website developer doesn't guarantee success either. > Then of course we have the affiliate marketers out there. > They're a different breed, often bottom feeders... Maybe they use stealthy programming too? I'm an affiliate marketer. Given that affiliate marketing commissions are estimated to reach $6.5 billion (not including ad networks such as AdSense) in 2006, I expect there's one or two others as well. Your assessment of affiliate marketers is offensive and ignorant. I suggest you learn a little about the industry before mouthing off. Try picking up the latest issue of Revenue Magazine. Read the article on Jeremy Palmer, who earned a "few cents" from his affiliate links last year (actually, over $1 million). The bottom-feeders invade all manner of online life, just as they do offline. The problem isn't the tools they use - it's the deeds they do. You think a professional developer never built a phishing or adware site? Or wrote a virus? To portray professional developers as bottom-feeders because of the deeds of a minority would be as ridiculous as your portrayal of affiliate marketers. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Ray Hadorn Subject: Web Site Analytics - Terms? I would like to know EXACTLY in simple terms what each of the web page analysis terms used means. For example, what do each of these numbers actually indicate: Hits, Files, Pages, Visits, Sites, KBytes. A big thanks in advance. Ray Hadorn
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