How did peeves become pets? Don't know. Don't really care. But all of us have our pet peeves when it comes to surfing the net for information.
Here are the top 10 according to many surveys:
1. Pop Ups
Pop ups come in many flavors: entry pop ups, exit pop ups, delayed, small, large, multiple, Flyin, scrolling, always on top, browser stopping, surf interrupting, must be cleared to move on, viagra, and the ever popular porn.
Except for an occasional squeeze page to get a free ebook or report, web surfers HATE pop ups.
So why do they continue to litter the Internet landscape? Simple. They work.
2. Extra Software Needed to View Site
Don't blame Canada. Blame Adobe.
Adobe made the Acrobat reader a must for viewing PDF files mainly because:
- It solved a need. Every page now printed out the same regardless of which printer or operating system was being used. It could even be made interactive for form completion.
- Adobe gave away millions of the free readers before publishers adopted the new PDF format as a standard for ebooks.
Acrobat users now demand PDF files in most instances where ebooks used to have various formats including "exe". Hackers have made downloading exe files from unknown sources an unsafe activity.
As standard as Acrobat now is, the same is not true for Flash, Shockwave, Deja Vu, and a host of other add-ons with various degrees of support.
I don't need to sit through a 2 meg Flash intro when what I want is information. Apparently, many others agree. You can add Flashblock to your FireFox browser and decide for yourself when to allow the Flash to load.
3. Dead Dead Dead Links
Nothing hacks me off faster than finding a spot on anchor text link that goes nowhere.
It's like having you mouth water over a menu special only to have the kitchen say they have run out.
4. Registration Required to Visit Site
Some sites think their bytes don't stink. They think you should register and login to see anything beyond the home page.
What they are doing is asking me to get married before the first date.
What's in it for me?
In this Internet day and age, a company and site has to build trust before a random visitor is going to cough up a name and email address.
Show me a little leg first.
5. Slowwww Pages
If I have to wait more than 4 or 5 seconds to begin viewing your site, I am gone - never to return.
If your servers are slow, find a new ISP.
If you loaded your pages with Flash, MIDI, audio, video, or other files that load with the page, dump them. Put up links instead. Let the visitor choose if they want to read or watch the video.
6. Outdated Content
One huge advantage of the web is the ability of bloggers and other Drudge wannabes to bypass traditional media and post news online instantly.
If you have not updated your website in 14 months, what does that tell me about your company. Certainly, you are less than a cutting edge solution for my problem.
7. Bad Navigation
Web designers prefer dazzle over function. Function is boring. Who wants a simple text link when a pop up Javascript navigation bar impresses the client?
I do.
So do the search engines.
Every web page needs recognizable, underlined text links on every page, preferably top and bottom.
Don't make me waste time trying to find the internal page I am really looking for.
8. No Contact Information
Poor contact information is a binary pair of bad navigation. How many sites have you been to where you cannot find a phone number, a street address, or even an email address? Plenty.
I think it's sweet that you put up an email contact form on your site, but I prefer to use my default email compose screen. Every web-based email form is different. I don't want to waste time learning to use your form when my email client works fine.
What are you hiding?
9. No Decent Site Search Tool
There is no excuse for this one. If you have a large website with dozens or hundreds of pages, give me an internal search box to find what I need.
Google and Yahoo! and many others will give you the tool - free - to put on your site. Use it.
10. Disabled "Back" Button
I don't want a website to dictate how I experience their site. I am a guest on your site. I don't need to come back to your page when I hit the back button. That's why I hit the back button in the first place. You don't have the information I am looking for.
In a similar vein, I don't like to see other right click functions like "view page source" disabled. I don't need to steal your HTML code, but if I want to, disabling right click will not stop me. I might want to see how you achieved a certain formatting effect. If I am impressed, you can bet I'll be back.
Pet peeves take many forms online. No list like this is complete, but any webmaster that can avoid these 10 major annoyances is a hero in my book.
About the Author: Charles Lamm is a retired attorney who can be reached via email at focus@clixforbrix.com. His articles are posted on his blog at: http://www.virtualjoefriday.com
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Monday, June 11, 2007
Using Social Media Marketing to Promote Your Specialist Information Website
Before I get started, it is worth defining social media. It has become a widely used and abused term that means different things to different people.
My definition of social media is:
'online technologies and practices that people use to share their opinions, insights and experiences with each other. Information can be shared as text, images, audio or video via blogs, message boards, wikis, RSS, podcasts and social networking sites'.
At the heart of social media is the ability of individuals to interact with other people so that they feel involved and part of a community. A big part of this phenomenon is the activity of finding, sharing and recommending products, services, events and experiences to like-minded people. This is where social media crosses over with marketing.
Social media can be a great way to have your website promoted by word-of-mouth.
If you can get people to talk about and recommend your services to their peers, it is more powerful than any marketing you can buy. So how can you get started?
How Can You Make Social Media Work for You?
The good news is it is easy to start the process of using social media to promote your website.
1) Create a MySpace Page
MySpace (www.myspace.com) is the largest and best-known social network. Individuals create profiles about themselves and then invite similarly minded people to become their online friends. When someone becomes a friend, you can communicate with them and subtly direct them towards your own website.
Setting up your own page is simple and free. Go to www.myspace.com and follow the instructions. Put up a brief description about yourself and a link to a more detailed biography page on your own website. Remember, the goal of this page is to drive people to your own site so make sure you get plenty of links included without overtly promoting your website.
Spend an hour every week developing your site and building your list of friends. Invite relevant people to comment about your website.
2) Add Bookmarking Links to Your Article Pages
A big part of the social web is the ability for people to build lists of their favourite sites or articles. People with similar interests can then share their lists and benefit from other people's recommendations. If your website has free content, you should make these articles easy to bookmark or add to favourites lists. There are a lot of internet sites that now host and share bookmarks. You can add links to these sites to your article pages.
There are two ways of doing this. You can go to each of the leading bookmarking sites and download their code and links onto your site. The ones that you should include are:
* Digg - www.digg.com
* Technorati – www.technorati.com
* Del.icio.us – del.icio.us
* Reddit – www.reddit.com
However, if you go this route it can be time consuming and you will omit many of the potential bookmarking sites. The alternative is to put a link to AddThis.com on the foot of each page. This gives your users access to over 30 bookmarking sites.
3) Add an RSS Feed
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, depending on who you ask. RSS allows people to be notified every time new articles are added to your website so they can keep up to date with your content.
Ask your developer to create some RSS code for your website and then put a link on all of your pages to the RSS code page. The link should be a small orange rectangle with the letters RSS in white.
Publish your RSS feeds at Feedburner to encourage distribution and interest.
4) Email to a Friend
Enabling people to easily email an article to a friend is not typically bundled under the heading of social media marketing, but in my view it is another way to encourage people to share and recommend your content. Add an 'Email a Friend' link to all of your content pages.
5) Add a Forum
Having a Forum on your website is a great way of building a community around your subject area. Monitoring the forum will both give you a chance to understand what people are discussing and promote your expertise by adding your own comments.
The downside of a forum is it does need to be carefully managed. You need to allow people to make negative comments so they don't feel they are being censored, but you have to stamp out aggressive behaviour, personal insults, sp@m and meaningless rubbish. This can be time-consuming work, so don't bother with a forum unless you have the time to do it properly.
Non-technical people can pay to use vBulletin. More technical people can use a free open source solution such as PHPBB.
You can register your forum with BoardTracker to make it easier for people to find.
6) Create How-To or Product Review Videos
It has never been easier to create short videos that can demonstrate your expertise. How-to videos are very popular. For example, if your website is about Making money on eBay, you could create a short video on "How to Take Perfect Photos for Your eBay Listings". Make sure you have your website URL on the opening and closing sequence of your video to promote your website.
Post your videos on YouTube and Google Videos. Give it a catchy title and teaser to get people interested. Also link to the videos from your own website.
7) Share Your Photos
If you have photos related to your subject area, post them on photo sharing websites such as Flikr and PhotoBucket. For example, if your website is about steam trains, take a camera to your next steam train show and post the pictures on these sites. People searching for steam train images are likely to try these sites. They can then follow the link on the photo to your website. P.S. Remember to include links back to your own site from the images.
8) Create a Blog
Blogs are very simple content sites where short articles are listed one after the other on the home page. They are usually used to write about current events or comment on news.
Some successful content websites are blogs. Some are much more like magazines with feature articles. If your site is more feature-based, consider starting a separate blog that can be more informal and brief. Update the blog every day even if it is with just one- or two-sentence comments. Blogs that are infrequently updated quickly lose their audience.
Use the blog to drive traffic to your main website.
You can get basic blogging software for free. Try Wordpress or Blogger. For a managed service, try Typepad.
In many ways, today's social media technologies are still fairly primitive, but I can say with confidence that the phenomenon that they have created - of customers taking control of the buying process – is here to stay. Customers will continue to get stronger, so publishers, manufacturers and anyone else with customers better start listening to what they are saying.
One last point before I finish. It's really a word of warning. Once you adopt the social media marketing techniques, you are inviting people to comment about your service. You must be ready for negative as well as positive feedback. Good companies listen to the feedback and make positive changes. Poor companies ignore it or worse still, call their lawyers to fight it. If you jump into the social media world, be ready to participate, listen, learn and take action.
Thanks to SubHub:
SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profít on the web. Website: SubHub.com
Feed: SubHub Articles Feed
My definition of social media is:
'online technologies and practices that people use to share their opinions, insights and experiences with each other. Information can be shared as text, images, audio or video via blogs, message boards, wikis, RSS, podcasts and social networking sites'.
At the heart of social media is the ability of individuals to interact with other people so that they feel involved and part of a community. A big part of this phenomenon is the activity of finding, sharing and recommending products, services, events and experiences to like-minded people. This is where social media crosses over with marketing.
Social media can be a great way to have your website promoted by word-of-mouth.
If you can get people to talk about and recommend your services to their peers, it is more powerful than any marketing you can buy. So how can you get started?
How Can You Make Social Media Work for You?
The good news is it is easy to start the process of using social media to promote your website.
1) Create a MySpace Page
MySpace (www.myspace.com) is the largest and best-known social network. Individuals create profiles about themselves and then invite similarly minded people to become their online friends. When someone becomes a friend, you can communicate with them and subtly direct them towards your own website.
Setting up your own page is simple and free. Go to www.myspace.com and follow the instructions. Put up a brief description about yourself and a link to a more detailed biography page on your own website. Remember, the goal of this page is to drive people to your own site so make sure you get plenty of links included without overtly promoting your website.
Spend an hour every week developing your site and building your list of friends. Invite relevant people to comment about your website.
2) Add Bookmarking Links to Your Article Pages
A big part of the social web is the ability for people to build lists of their favourite sites or articles. People with similar interests can then share their lists and benefit from other people's recommendations. If your website has free content, you should make these articles easy to bookmark or add to favourites lists. There are a lot of internet sites that now host and share bookmarks. You can add links to these sites to your article pages.
There are two ways of doing this. You can go to each of the leading bookmarking sites and download their code and links onto your site. The ones that you should include are:
* Digg - www.digg.com
* Technorati – www.technorati.com
* Del.icio.us – del.icio.us
* Reddit – www.reddit.com
However, if you go this route it can be time consuming and you will omit many of the potential bookmarking sites. The alternative is to put a link to AddThis.com on the foot of each page. This gives your users access to over 30 bookmarking sites.
3) Add an RSS Feed
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, depending on who you ask. RSS allows people to be notified every time new articles are added to your website so they can keep up to date with your content.
Ask your developer to create some RSS code for your website and then put a link on all of your pages to the RSS code page. The link should be a small orange rectangle with the letters RSS in white.
Publish your RSS feeds at Feedburner to encourage distribution and interest.
4) Email to a Friend
Enabling people to easily email an article to a friend is not typically bundled under the heading of social media marketing, but in my view it is another way to encourage people to share and recommend your content. Add an 'Email a Friend' link to all of your content pages.
5) Add a Forum
Having a Forum on your website is a great way of building a community around your subject area. Monitoring the forum will both give you a chance to understand what people are discussing and promote your expertise by adding your own comments.
The downside of a forum is it does need to be carefully managed. You need to allow people to make negative comments so they don't feel they are being censored, but you have to stamp out aggressive behaviour, personal insults, sp@m and meaningless rubbish. This can be time-consuming work, so don't bother with a forum unless you have the time to do it properly.
Non-technical people can pay to use vBulletin. More technical people can use a free open source solution such as PHPBB.
You can register your forum with BoardTracker to make it easier for people to find.
6) Create How-To or Product Review Videos
It has never been easier to create short videos that can demonstrate your expertise. How-to videos are very popular. For example, if your website is about Making money on eBay, you could create a short video on "How to Take Perfect Photos for Your eBay Listings". Make sure you have your website URL on the opening and closing sequence of your video to promote your website.
Post your videos on YouTube and Google Videos. Give it a catchy title and teaser to get people interested. Also link to the videos from your own website.
7) Share Your Photos
If you have photos related to your subject area, post them on photo sharing websites such as Flikr and PhotoBucket. For example, if your website is about steam trains, take a camera to your next steam train show and post the pictures on these sites. People searching for steam train images are likely to try these sites. They can then follow the link on the photo to your website. P.S. Remember to include links back to your own site from the images.
8) Create a Blog
Blogs are very simple content sites where short articles are listed one after the other on the home page. They are usually used to write about current events or comment on news.
Some successful content websites are blogs. Some are much more like magazines with feature articles. If your site is more feature-based, consider starting a separate blog that can be more informal and brief. Update the blog every day even if it is with just one- or two-sentence comments. Blogs that are infrequently updated quickly lose their audience.
Use the blog to drive traffic to your main website.
You can get basic blogging software for free. Try Wordpress or Blogger. For a managed service, try Typepad.
In many ways, today's social media technologies are still fairly primitive, but I can say with confidence that the phenomenon that they have created - of customers taking control of the buying process – is here to stay. Customers will continue to get stronger, so publishers, manufacturers and anyone else with customers better start listening to what they are saying.
One last point before I finish. It's really a word of warning. Once you adopt the social media marketing techniques, you are inviting people to comment about your service. You must be ready for negative as well as positive feedback. Good companies listen to the feedback and make positive changes. Poor companies ignore it or worse still, call their lawyers to fight it. If you jump into the social media world, be ready to participate, listen, learn and take action.
Thanks to SubHub:
SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profít on the web. Website: SubHub.com
Feed: SubHub Articles Feed
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