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1. Your own website part 5. ----------------------------- In past issues we've covered the absolute basics in setting up a website and promoting it. This issue we look at additional options for your site that would assist it in generating return visits. Obviously not all of these suggestions will apply for every site. This is just to give you some ideas. The site I recommend you look at for free additions to spicing up your own web site is Bravenet. You can find out more by clicking here This site features various tools to help you with giving your site content. They offer free message boards, counters, guest books, email forms, mailing lists and more. In fact I'm pretty sure they're the only site out there to offer so many free tools. There is a downside of course. All free tools come with banner advertising, which may not suit the professionalism of your site. In which case, if you find their tools useful, you can always pay to have the banner ads removed. There are some up and down sides of some of these tools so here are some things to consider. Message boards. These are great additions for your site for bringing people back. Creates communities who regularly return to the discussion topics, which are interactive. On the down side you may get abusers of the system and it would mean monitoring the board and deleting rubbish, spam and offensive posts. Guest Books. People use these to leave much-needed testimonials, which promote your site to new visitors. Unfortunately people also use guest books to promote their own site so you may need to do some deleting every now and then. Counters. These are great for seeing how many hits your site gets but most counters only count access to items on your page rather than unique visitors so that, if you have 10 images on your page then the counter will go up by 10 every time someone visits. The other down side is that counters are for amateur sites only. Don't use them if you have a professional site. You'll either get people wondering why your hits are so low or people not believing it if the hits are high. Email forms. These are very useful additions to your site if you prefer that someone has easy access to be able to send you an email. People don't need to open an emailing program to be able to respond to something on your site. Also, putting your email address on your web site can mean that it gets added to spam mail robots that search for that sort of thing. This allows you to avoid that. The down side is that many people either forget to or don't put their correct email address in the form so it is sometimes impossible to reply to them. There are many other tools out there for use with your site and all
have positives and negatives. Up to you to work out which is the best for
your business.
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Every issue we look at various tools that can enhance your business. This issue I'm reviewing Aweber Autoresponders. Find out more here. An autoresponder is an automatic email system. You send an email to an email address and within seconds you have an automatic prewritten reply. There are really complex autoresponding systems out there that search for keywords in your email and send out prewritten answers to possible questions you may have asked. But I'm only going to talk about the simple ones here. Now how does this work for you? If you have a business and you want to sell something to interested parties, your best bet is to set up an autoresponder system on your site. So, for example, you're selling blue widgets. A customer comes to your site and sees blue widgets, which they may want in the future but not just now. So they sign up for further information and any special offers you may have. They instantly receive a reply confirming that they've been added to the mailing list and that they'll be informed the next time there is a special offer. Great. That is step one. You have an interested customer who may buy one of your widgets. But then what happens? They forget about the site or they only receive one further email from you, which you've sent out especially to that mailing list. They haven't bought even though they were interested. You don't follow it up and you lose a sale. Did you know that it is recognised in marketing that someone needs to see something at least 7 times before they consider making a purchase? Why do you think we get advertisements on television over and over again? Why is it that some advertisements even repeat the product name 7 or more times within the promotion? Because it is unusual for people to even remember a product and consider purchasing it unless they've heard about it around 7 times. Now that you know this, imagine that you've got to keep track of how many times you've emailed particular groups of people who've signed up via your website. It would be a full time job to be able to maintain that, as well as designing appropriate messages depending on which one was coming next. (Each message needs to be different otherwise people will tune out) So how do you get that sale without going mad? The answer is an autoresponder that has 7 or more messages. Aweber do such a system as well as giving you statistics and results and an opt-in and opt-out system so that people don't consider it spam. All you need to do is design about 7 different messages. (You're given suggestions and help as to how to do this) Your potential customer signs up through the autoresponder system on your site, then receive a confirmation email No 1, with information regarding your product. Within a few weeks if they haven't come back to the site and bought anything the autoresponder automatically sends out message number 2. Then message 3, and message 4, etc, over successive weeks. At the end of the messages (which you can set for however many weeks you want them to run) they stop receiving the automatic messages. If they were interested in the product to sign up for further information, it is highly likely that you get a sale before the last message is sent. There are other autoresponder systems out there. Check out Aweber's systems here. They have a test drive system so you can see how it works by signing up for some auto emails. If you wish to compare there are other businesses out there that do something similar. Just search for autoresponders via http://www.google.com and you're sure to find something. It all depends on the type of product you wish to sell, of course, but the possibilities are endless. If you have a hairstylist's site you could set up an autoresponder for your clients to be reminded to come back for another haircut in 3 months. Or you could set up autoresponders for your community groups so that they get a message every month reminding them of the next meeting. This is for businesses who get a lot of email requests. If you only get a few then the best way to respond to these is, of course, with a personally written email. Next month: Holiday ideas. ---------------------------------
Do you exchange emails with someone who uses a Yahoo address? If so you may be interested to know that people who use the html feature in Outlook may have their email automatically edited by Yahoo before it is read. As a security precaution, Yahoo replaces particular words with similar words if those particular words have the potential to cause damage to a person's computer. Huh? How can words damage my computer? I hear you ask. If you've every received email that is coloured or contains pictures amongst the text, then you have received a html formatted email. It is possible to write a java script based program in Outlook that, when read by you in html format (ie through a web browser) activates a program to cause malicious damage to your computer. Some words used to write a program of this nature include 'mocha', 'expression' and 'eval'. These words are replaced in the html format by Yahoo's security system with 'espresso', 'statement' and 'review' respectively. So medieval becomes medireview for example. While this may seem like the meaning will be lost in a html format message, if you think this has happened, simply forward the message to yourself in txt format or look at the source code. The original email is still there. Thought I'd let you know this in case you're suddenly finding that all your mocha-loving friends have switched to espresso! -----------------
On a monthly basis I like to update the site. This month I've added a few more links to the link page, which is set up so that you can use it as your home page - http://www.computerwebhelp.com/ebay-sitesell-amazon.html Some more articles have also been added to the articles page. You
can check them out at
And that's it for this issue. Best regards The Team at Electronic Desktop Solutions Pty Ltd -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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