WEB MARKETING RESOURCES

AWARDS BOOST YOUR SITE'S POPULARITY

If you've made the investment to build a quality website, go the last mile and enter it into competitions. Entry fees typically run $100-$200. If you win, you can expect more site traffic, more inbound links and higher search engine rankings. Awards help establish the credibility of obscure sites, and you'll enjoy publicity from the award sponsor. Some contests to consider:

http://www.webaward.org/

http://www.webaward.org/iac/

http://www.webbyawards.com/

http://www.webpageawards.com/

Google provides a list of additional awards:

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Best_of_the_Web/Site_Awards/

"Sweet Reward," Entrepreneur, January 2004

(February 2004)  

E-COMMERCE TAX NEWS

Cash-hungry governments won't give ecommerce a free pass much longer. Track the taxman's steady march across the globe.

http://www.ecommercetax.com/

(July 2003)

THE END OF FREE and THE START OF FEE

http://www.theendoffree.com/

http://www.thestartoffee.com/

These weblogs report what happens - good and bad - when publishers try to convert visitors into paying customers. Plenty of attention is given to methods of payment, scams and fraud.

(January 2003)

GOOGLE ADWORDS SELECT - THE DIRECT MARKETER'S DREAM

https://adwords.google.com/select/

Up in direct response heaven, John Caples and Dick Benson, rest their souls, are content to spend eternity playing with Google's AdWords Select program. AdWords is an inexpensive, easy-to-use automated way to advertise on the Google search engine. Create your own text ads. Select your keywords. You pay by the click - minimum $0.05. You can run several different creative executions in rotation. Google's easy-to-read reports show which ads generate the most click-throughs, as well as which keywords pull best for your offer.

     Bottom line: In just hours or days you get valuable scientific information about which ads stimulate the most interest, all for as little as $100-$200 in expense. You're sure to find some surprises. Let your Google results suggest approaches for your other promotions, whether online, in the mail, or in other media. AdWords can be addictive. You may start tweaking your campaign every day because it's easy and feedback is quick.

     Never heard of John Caples or Dick Benson? Buy copies of Tested Advertising Methods (Caples) and Secrets of Successful Direct Mail (Benson). You will never market the same way again.

(January 2002, revised November 2002)

NAMEBOY HELPS YOU BRAINSTORM

http://www.nameboy.com/
Enter a keyword or two, and NameBoy spins out dozens of variations, telling you which URLs are available to buy. Suggest "hot" and "news", for example, and you'll find that hotnews.com is taken, but hotternews.com is not. If a URL is taken, NameBoy makes it easy to find out who owns it, how to monitor it in case its registration lapses, and how to contact the owner with a bid. NameBoy is remarkably fast considering how many URLs it suggests. An invaluable site for anyone who needs to name a new product or service.

(August 2001)

NASH EQUILIBRIUM - COMPETITION ON THE INTERNET

http://www.nash-equilibrium.com/

How ferocious is competition among online stores? Professors Michael Baye and Patrick Scholten of Indiana and John Morgan of Berkeley can tell you. They have assembled a database of 10 million price observations for over 5,000 products. Each week they poll this database to update six indicators: Internet Competitiveness, Price Gap, Market Thickness, Relative Dispersion, Price Range and Value of Information. During the past year, Market Thickness increased from 101 to 120, indicating an increase in the number of competitors per product. At the same time, Price Range increased from 31 to 39, suggesting that the gap between the highest and lowest prices for the typical product widened.

(January 2003)

PAID: THE ECONOMICS OF CONTENT

http://www.paidcontent.org/
Journalist Rafat Ali tracks developments in the field of getting people to pay for content. Most recently he interviewed Economist.com's David Grossman on their latest experiment. They emailed a qualified selection of registered users an offer to enjoy a year's full access to Economist.com, a $69 value, in exchange for providing personal information to Oracle, sponsor of the promotion. "The response rate has been described by Oracle as 'incredible,' with some of the emailings obtaining a 1 in 5 pick-up rate."

(December 2002)

PAY PER CLICK ANALYST

http://www.payperclickanalyst.com/

Reviews the major pay-per-click search engines from a marketer's point of view, and includes a comprehensive list of the minor sites. News feed keeps track of mergers and launches in the industry.

(July 2003)

REFERRAL BLAST AND RECOMMEND-IT

Referral Blast

Harness viral marketing for pennies per day. Put "Send this page to a friend" buttons all over your site. Referral Blast provides a mini-form for your visitors to spread the word. At the $149/year service level, you get real-time bulletins on who's recommending which pages. Referral Blast has an aggressive pro-consumer, anti-spam stance.

(March 2002, revised March 2004)

RETURN PATH FACILITATES EMAIL CHANGE-OF-ADDRESS

http://www.returnpath.net/

Dead email addresses are the bane of mailers. An NFO survey in 2000 found that 32% of consumers change their email address every year. Return Path has teamed up with Veripost to offer an email change-of-address service. Consumers register their new and old email addresses for free. Businesses then pay to submit their dead email addresses and see which ones can be updated. Consumers can let updates proceed automatically or approve each one case by case. Return Path says they have 2 million email address changes to date, with 700,000 more coming each month.

(December 2001)

SEARCH ENGINE ADVERTISING

http://www.keywordtextlinks.com/

Bone up on search engine advertising, the ultimate in target marketing. Subscribe to Catherine Seda's free monthly newsletter. Learn all about the latest wrinkles, such as Overture's new Auto Bidding feature. Seda explains in her July letter how Auto Bidding can save you lots of money in spots 2 or 3, but might cost you if you're gunning for spot 1.

(August 2002)

SURVEYS ONLINE

http://www.surveymonkey.com/

Build, execute, and analyze surveys online. Collect up to 1,000 responses per month and more for fees starting at $19.95/month. Boldly provides links to a variety of competitors and challenges you to find a better value.

http://www.insightexpress.com/
Get survey results in hours or days. Prices start from $450 per survey. Select from panelists recruited by Insight Express or provide your own sample (customers, subscribers, employees, etc.). Survey templates make it easy to get started.

http://www.zoomerang.com/
Individuals can conduct limited surveys for free. Businesses and organizations can conduct larger, customized surveys for $350/year (1,000 survey responses), plus $200 for each additional block of 1,000 survey responses. Supply your own sample, or draw on Zoomerang's list of 10 million "willing survey takers." Templates available.

(April 2001, revised November 2002)
 

WEB AD SIZES

http://www.iab.net/standards/adunits.asp
From the Interactive Advertising Bureau. See sample banners, buttons, rectangles, pop-ups and skyscrapers, complete with their sizes in Interactive Marketing Units.

(April 2001, revised November 2002)

WEBMASTERWORLD FORUMS

WebmasterWorld has active, well-maintained forums on topics of vital interest to marketers and webmasters. "We are here as a forum for the members to share and gain knowledge in operating and promoting a website. Think of us as part of your extended site development and process team." A good place to start is the Pay Per Click Engines discussion at http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum85/ . A few minutes' browsing reveals which search engines deliver quality clicks and which send "trash traffic." More boards are found in these sections:

The Marketing World (over 99,000 posts)
http://www.webmasterworld.com/category5.htm

The Search Engine World (over 300,000 posts)
http://www.webmasterworld.com/category3.htm

(December 2003)

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