|
|
The Promotion World InformerIssue #48 December 1, 1998Contents Of This Issue:
Editor's NotesYou know, it's hard to think up something new and profound to say in this space each week. I think I'll just leave it at this. Enjoy the issue! We respect your privacy! The Informer is only sent to those who subscribe to it. We will never give our subscriber list to anyone. If you don't remember signing up, let me jog your memory. You probably signed up on my site, found at http://www.promotionworld.com. If you don't want to receive this newsletter anymore then just follow the simple unsubscribe instructions at the end of this newsletter.
Cool Quotes
Feature Article
KNOCK! KNOCK! My doorknocker is getting rusty! I don't know about your neighborhood but it seems only the occasional vacuum cleaner saleskid flashes free dishsoap through my screen door anymore. On the other hand, the phone sure rings a lot more and I'm sorry to have to announce to telemarketers several times a day that Mr. Beneteau, or the "man of the house", has passed on. Is it just me, or has the daily newspaper gone on a diet? Looking a little thinner these days with less display ads. My eyes and ears don't deceive me when the now several hundred TV channels pump out hour upon hour of infomercials. And radio has put its hyper-than-ever voice onto the Web, electing to follow you out of your car and onto your computer. Have you also noticed it's a 24 hour-a-day news broadcast on the Internet? The times they are a changin' one songwriter said. Question is, are you changing with the times? Being aware of this giant media shift and being a part of it are two totally different things. I've written this article mainly for those entrepreneurs whose businesses might not seem to them like a logical candidate for Internet exposure and marketing. If that is not the case with you, please keep reading, as I'm sure you will get something useful from my ramblings. Knock, knock, still with me? There is no business as apparently "far away" from The Internet as drycleaning. Customers have to show up live and in person at your counters with their cleaning. And, it's a drycleaning business I used to own and operate so this will serve my purpose well. Although I sold my company just prior to the laying of the pavement of the Information Super Highway, I would like to make a theoretical case study of how I would "marry" my drycleaning business and the Internet if I still owned MyCleaner (fictitious name of course) today. Ok, these were the areas of advertising that worked best for me: Newspaper (I ran a Dr. Drycleaner column once a week in our 200,000+ local newspaper plus seasonal institutional and promotional ads) Television (1 general commercial and 1 wedding gown commercial, run seasonally on the only local station at the time) Direct Mail Coupons (run seasonally, rotated in upscale neighborhoods) Welcome Wagon Bridal Parties (we specialized in wedding gown restoration and preservation - 4 large bridal parties a year) Local TV Guide (I ran weekly wedding gown service ads) The reason I mention the above advertising mediums will become evident soon. Knowing what I know today, this is how I would apply the Internet to MyCleaner.
GENERAL INTERNET APPLICATION The History of MyCleaner (old and recent photos of buildings, delivery trucks, staff, pricelists, memorabilia etc.); All About Drycleaning (history, evolution to modern-day techniques); We "Green" Clean (how we protect the environment - a large issue today); Wedding Gown Restoration & Preservation (explaining the process, perhaps using video streaming); Links to all the national and international trade organizations MyCleaner belongs to; Links to our local Better Business Bureau and Chamber of Commerce; Our Testimonial Page (featuring letters of praise about our services); Online Coupon Specials and a refer-a-friend program (you will see this soon); Employee of the Month. And, I would include advice from good old Dr. Drycleaner. But this time, I would make the column into an interactive web board where customers could write in and ask, and get posted answers to, particular questions about garment care. Knock, knock, try to keep up here, ok?
FUNDING OF MY WEBMARKETING
ADVERTISING ADJUSTMENTS/ADDITIONS Also, as we re-order our printables, the new website and its features would soon appear on our letterhead, envelopes, invoices etc. As mentioned above, I would design and print good-looking flyers announcing the "Grand Opening of the MyCleaner Website", again highlighting all its features. Ever seen I.D. IT! Plates? At 39.95 per set, these are a great marketing tool! I would invest in a set for each of my employees, delivery vehicles, family and friends so that their vehicles become "travelling billboards" for the MyCleaner website. Check these out later at: http://www.iditplates.com . But here is an 'option' I might use because I'm a fan of first-class flamboyancy. I would probably purchase mid-line PC's (which I could write-off and later give away as gifts to my employees or customers) and install a monitor and mouse on each stores' counter, proudly displaying the new MyCleaner website. Invite our customers to surf the site. They will receive a flyer anyway on their drycleaning order so the "connection" is strengthened and we of course, look more "leading edge". Today, MyCleaner would be the only techno-cleaner in this market of over 300,000. The promotional exposure and image enhancement benefits would be immense to say the least.
GENERAL DEMOGRAPHICS
MORE PROMOTION The MyCleaner website and its features are also appearing on television, what newspaper I am still running, my TV Guide ads, and I would definitely make sure my about-to-be, mainly computer-literate brides-to-be from Welcome Wagon receive my flyer highlighting the online presentation of the entire wedding gown process. Also, I would set up a meeting with the large local online mall in this region. Knowing me, I would talk a deal where I would offer the Dr. Drycleaner column as a service for their customers in trade for a main page link. OK, let's say another 2,250 people visit because of all the above.
IS THAT NOT A REASON TO PUT OUT A NEWSLETTER?
MAKING THE MOST OF A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE Yes, I'm talking about affiliate programs. I would include books, music CD's, videos, software and a mainstay shopping site. Promote to my customers using the "for your convenience" approach. Knock, knock, I'm just about done.
'NET' RESULTS This has been a rather lengthy article but I'm confident that if you've stayed with me this long you will understand that the Internet CAN be made to work for you, regardless of the nature of your business. It is this writers hope that if you are aware of what's going on and still haven't made plans to expose yourself on the Internet, that you will consider doing so now. There is a country music saying, "where there's a Willie, there's a Waylon". You CAN make the Internet work for you and your customers. It's simply a matter of some creative thinking and developing the right application. If I were still in the drycleaning business, I'd be cleaning up in town right now just using the basic approach I've outlined in this article. OK gotta go, there's a knock at the door!
Written by Rick Beneteau Rick is a partner in the Internet Marketing firm NetProfit 2020 Inc. Their newest product and affiliate program, I.D. IT! Plates (URL/EMAIL/NAME plates for your car and office), at http://www.iditplates.com is taking the Net by storm. Rick also publishes/edits his own newsletter, The Hallway Mirror (subscribe@thehallway.com). EZINE OWNERS: to subscribe my column Of Mouse & Man, please go to http://www.thehallway.com/MOUSE%20AND%20MAN/MM1.htm . Rick is a for-hire freelance writer and you can contact him at rickbeneteau@netprofit2020.com.
Sponsor MessageBoogie Jack's - goofy name, excellent resource. For webmasters: eye-popping graphics, easy-to-understand html and graphics tutorials, a color machine to find the code for that just right color, and a free newsletter to help you tweak your pages and promotional efforts. Browse selected articles online. For everyone: Guess the Celebrity is a contest like no other, photo warps, humor and more. All original content, growing rapidly, wildly popular, and best of all - it's FREE! Get jacked! Boogie Jack's Graphics Plus.
The Discussion BoardThis week's quote from the discussion board: "For getting a good listing in Excite, all I can say is make sure you have a well written title, and the content in your web page is to the point. That is what the spider uses to rank you in searches.
David Handlos This seems to be the way with most search engines... thanks for the tip, David! Visit the message boards to comment on this quote or just to catch up on the other exciting discussions going on! If your message is quoted in the Informer, you will receive large amounts of free advertising!
By the way, the board have recently been given a new design. They look much
better now!
What's New At Promotion World
Feature Article
The Candy Store As you "surf" the Web, you run across many good-looking web pages and find some really attractive images. You can download any image you find by simply clicking on it with your "right" mouse button. But while many people look at the Web as if it were a candy store with all of those goodies free for the taking, that just isn't the case. Everything on the Web is copyrighted, whether it bears a copyright notice or not. Unless it gives specific permission to reproduce it, you may not copy it and redistribute it. What is copyrighted? Any image or text on a web page, and the complete web page itself. But you can copy a web page to your computer to see how they used the HTML code. You can use their code as an example. But you can't take their page and substitute the name of their company with yours, or make other minor changes and call it your own. That would be a violation of the copyright laws. If you see something you like, your best bet is to send an E-mail to the owner. Many people are receptive to this and will grant you permission to use it. The candy store does have a lot of goodies, and they are free for your personal use. But if you decide to put those goodies in your store which is open to the public, you may have a problem. - ----- Bob publishes the free weekly "Your Business" Newsletter Visit his Web Site at http://adv-marketing.com/business to subscribe and place a Free Ad for your business.
Ins and Outs of Affiliate Programs
The Power of Residual Commissions [This is the third article in a series of three describing some of the special types of affiliate programs now available. Please visit the Free Help Desk at: http://www.clickquick.com/helpdesk/ for the previous articles which discussed pay-per-lead opportunities and two-tier commission programs.] In the last two issues we have looked at the special advantages that pay-per-lead and two-tier commission programs have over many of the more standard programs. This issue we look at a third type of special opportunity: affiliate programs that offer residual commissions. Residual commissions can defined as any commission you receive each and every month for sales you previously made, as long as the person you referred remains a customer. An example of this would be the AWebers Autoresponder program. If you refer a visitor who purchases one of their autoresponder services, you not only receive an up front commission for the initial sale, but also a residual monthly commission for as long as that person remains a paying customer. The advantages of residual commission programs is that you can reap the benefits of your referral for an extended period of time. Perhaps for months, or even years, you will continue to receive a commission. Obviously, these residual commissions could really add up over time. Even better, as your base of sales also grows, your monthly residual will continue to increase. And the best thing about residual commissions is that it is income you can practically rely on, since you will continue to earn as long as they remain a customer. So, how can these programs offer residual commissions to you? Mainly because most, if not all, residual programs are selling services for which they charge a monthly rate. Similar to your Internet access charges, the customer receives a monthly bill for their service. And you are paid a percentage of this monthly fee. This represents the only major disadvantage residual programs really have. Since the type of services involved are not one-time purchases, and since this generally makes it a larger decision for the customer, these programs do often experience lower conversion rates than programs that rely on one-time sales. However, unlike most pay-per-sale programs, with a residual program you do not have to worry about losing future business. If you refer a customer, you can be assured of receiving commissions from them each month. By comparison, with standard programs such as Amazon and CDNow, there is what I call a leaching effect. You refer the customer, and make that initial commission on their purchase. But after this, the customer bookmarks the home page of the merchant, and is solicited with direct offers by email, neither of which will help you earn a repeat commission, unless they are thoughtful enough to remember your site and use your link to purchase. So, if you are interested in adding a residual income program to your site, be sure to visit the Residual Commission program category in the Affiliate Programs section, http://www.clickquick.com/affiliate/residual.htm . Several of the programs reviewed have also made it to the ClickQuick Top Opportunities listing including Virtualis and AWebers Autoresponders (both of which also offer two-tiered commission structures - a great combination).
Ryan Adams
Bits And PiecesSome of you may have read my review speaking of the poor response I have received from ValueClick http://www.promotionworld.com/reviews/vclick.html. However, I think I have found an alternative. I have been testing them for the past few weeks and they seem to be working reasonably well, and are so far paying much more than ValueClick. Teknosurf at http://www.teknosurf.com/cgi-bin/refer.cgi?jreimer is a brand new ad network paying anywhere between $.10 to $.20 cents per click through, averaging at around $.12 a click. They use a nifty smart targeting system that will display the ads that make you the most money the most often. That way, the longer you stay on the system the better response rate you will have, as the system collects data about your site. They also have a great referral program! Why else do you think I would tell you about them? (Just kidding... really!). They will pay you $5 for every webmaster you sign up, and $2 for every webmaster that that webmaster signs up. That may sound like a lot, but Teknosurf recently said that: "The average response rate we have seen is roughly 10 percent of visitors whom you refer APPLY to become a webmaster. Of those 10 percent roughly 10-20 percent of them are accepted. Unfortunately an overwhelming majority of sites fall under the following conditions which preclude them from the Teknosurf Network." They then went on to list the sites that are not allowed in the network: "Illegal Content, Immoral/Offensive Content, Copyrighted Content, Free Hosting Company (i.e. Geocities), Under 100 hits per day, Make money on the web webpages, Non English Language. So if your site is right, you should apply. I am going to be sticking with them for some time now, as my stats seem to be improving each day.
http://www.teknosurf.com/cgi-bin/refer.cgi?jreimer
BizWizards site has a great tutorial on starting and promoting a newsletter.
There are many ideas in there that I will have to try to find time to use!
If you are going to be starting a newsletter, this is a must read.
http://bizwizards.net/DIYE.htm
Here is an interesting looking promotion site in German. If you read German,
this could be a good resource for you. All I can say is that it looks
interesting, and I wish I could read German! http://www.surfpromote.com/ David Handlos has created a very informative checklist for the website promoter. Well worth the visit. http://www.crosslinkz.com/checklist/index.html
Website Usability
Human Memory Limitations and Web Site Usability The usability of your Web site depends upon your users' ability to encode, store, and remember information. If your users can't remember what they need to remember, they will be disgusted and they will fail. If they fail, then your site fails. Supposedly, humans are able to hold 7 #177# 2 items in memory. This number is based on George Miller's (1956) work on digit span recall tasks. In particular, Miller examined how people encode and recall lists of increasingly difficult digit sequences. He found that people were generally only able to recall between 5 and 9 "chunks" of information (even when given other types of material to study, e.g. words). He concluded that the human memory system has a capacity of 7 #177# 2 chunks. I think that 7 #177# 2 is a squishy concept since chunks are so very flexible. On the one hand, you might only be able to use small chunks. On the other hand, you might be able to employ huge chunks. You can potentially pack a lot of information into a "chunk". For example, an entire movie passage could be considered a chunk; a lengthy passage is still a chunk. This can be very good to know because, if properly motivated, you can help users chunk information in memory by grouping information on your site. For example, you could structure your global navigation mechanisms at the top of the page (e.g., 'Contact Us', 'Site Map', 'Search', etc.), and you could group your sub-site navigation to the left of the page (e.g., 'Engineering Department', 'Chemical Engineering', 'Quality Control', etc.). In this way, you are taking these ideas and you are chunking them for your users. While users have limited memory capacities, you can optimize your pages to take advantage of what users do have. It Gets Worse... So far, I have made it sound as if memory is not all that bad. However, this is seriously wrong: realistically, users' memory capacity in a dynamic environment (e.g., the Web) is only about 2 or 3 chunks (Yntema & Mueser, 1960; Yntema, 1963; Venturino, 1997). That's right, 2 or 3 chunks. Put another way, as your users navigate and digest your site, they are actually only able to keep track of about 2 or 3 things. Your users might not be able to remember information from just a page or two back. Miller (1956) did not require people to remember changing information. The Web is dynamic. JavaScript, CGIs, hyperlinks, animation, and so forth, all make the Web a volatile environment. The paradigm for memory capacity of users must be put on more realistic footing. Put another way, users are not able to remember information very well at all. So, while Miller's (1956) research is great, it simply does not reflect users' dynamic tasks on the Web -- the Web is an enemy of human memory. Several people have advocated that Web sites be built shallow and wide, whereby users are not required to click more than three links to get to what they want. This seems to cohere with the empirical work cited above. Users can't remember what they want and need so it is your job to guide them, and guide them well. These details also help to explain why hyperlinks with greater amounts of explanation (or context) are superior to shallow links. If users must click from page to page looking for what they want, they will forget what they are looking for (or they will get distracted). Some Web sites have decided that certain information (e.g., articles) should be divided into many parts. I will not argue that information should be all on one page; that is silly. However, I will state that breaking pages up for the sake of convenience or aesthetics does not make sense if users must recall information from previous points in time. That is, if users need to remember information from an earlier point in time, then under most circumstances the information should be on a single Web page. Obviously this is not a rule, it is just a statement that memory limitations will prevent users from remembering information from an earlier point. Further, consider that scrolling is easier for users than moving back through pages. Printing even a very large Web page is easier than navigating back and printing previous (smaller) pages. Many of your users print Web pages, since reading off of a computer screen is a hassle. Finally, users can more easily search or scan the information if it is on one screen. You ought to spend a lot of time improving the navigation of your Web site. In fact, you will need to have navigation that is great if you want to minimize the weaknesses of human memory. Visible, easy to use, easy to understand navigation is critical. You can augment your users' performance by having them use recognition rather than recall. That is, give your users the information that they need and allow them to pick what they want. Don't force users to recall information, such as passwords, unless absolutely necessary. Here is some final food for thought. I claim that search engines have largely been successful because they shift a memory burden away from users. Search engines are basically recalling information for users. Furthermore, this is information that users never needed to store. Search engines are so great because they store and recall information for users and then, when the results are displayed, users simply perform a recognition task. It really is an interesting memory phenomenon when you think about it -- in effect, search engines are able shift recall to recognition. Since recognition is better than recall, and since overall performance improves, the usability is augmented. Pretty slick, eh? A Few Quick Tips Work on improving your writing. Online writing (i.e., using hyperlinks, developing good content, formatting text, etc.) is difficult, but it can be critical to improving users' memory. By strategically building context around an idea, and by associating the current idea with other ideas, your users will recollect the information better. (Memory research has shown that humans remember information better when they process the information at a deeper level and when they associate that information with other information.) Remember to provide context and background information in your email messages to people. This will allow them to recognize what you are talking about, rather than forcing them to recall some previous message or event. Using a good signature helps too. Maintain a high level of consistency from page to page. The less your users have to learn, the less they have to remember. The less they have to remember, the easier your site will be to use. Also, you can more rapidly focus your users on the content. When possible, keep link colors standardized: blue unvisited, dark purple for visited. The blue underlining is a population stereotype, so users readily recognize the link as a link. Likewise, the dark purple is a memory cue. References: Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven plus or minus two: Some limitations on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97. Yntema, D. B. (1963). Keeping track of several things at once. Human Factors, 5, 7-17. Yntema, D. B., & Mueser, G. E. (1960). Remembering the present state of a number of variables. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 18-22. Venturino, M. (1997). Interference and Information Organization in Keeping Track of Continually Changing Information. Human Factors, 39(4), 532-539.
News HeadlinesHere is a compilation of URLs to interesting news pieces on an Internet or website promotion theme.
Misc. InformationTo comment on the issues covered in this week's newsletter, use the appropriate forum on our Discussion Boards. http://www.promotionworld.com/discus/ If you are looking for some good advertising deals, you might like to consider Promotion World and the Informer as places to advertise. You can see our media kit at http://www.promotionworld.com/sponsor.html To subscribe put SUBSCRIBE in the BODY of an email to mailto:informer@oaknetpub.com To unsubscribe put REMOVE in the BODY of an email to mailto:informer@oaknetpub.com I appreciate all your mail with your comments and suggestions! mailto:webmaster@promotionworld.com Newsletter Credits:
Joshua Reimer, Editor |