Top 10 Ways to Peeve Your Website Visitors

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

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

Six Questions That Produce Successful Web Advertising

You would think that everyone in business would be able to tell you what they do and why you should be doing business with them; unfortunately the sad truth is many business executives can't. In fact one of the biggest problems in designing websites has always been getting appropriate raw material that can be turned into meaningful presentations: a handful of badly written brochures and a few out-of-date photographs are not going to make much of an impression.

And now that the Web has involved into a sophisticated communication platform, able to deliver audio and video content, the problem has become even worse; not only do websites need to deliver appropriate copy and image content, they need to present audio dialog and video performances that demonstrate how products and services improve the business or personal lives of website visitors.

As a company we are good at what we do, we can turn the mundane into the memorable but we can't do it if clients don't know or can't express their own marketing story, or are unwilling to allow their multimedia advisor to develop that story for them.

At the heart of the problem is fear, fear of making a definitive statement, declaring loud and clear what you do, and why anyone should care. It's no longer good enough to apply technical solutions to marketing problems: you are not going to engage your audience with SEO, XML, CSS, or PHP. You must have a story to tell and you can't be afraid to tell it as boldly as you can.

Do You Know Who You Are and What You Really Do?

We know who we are and what we do: we deliver our message knowing that some people are just not going to buy into what we have to say, but those that do get it, really get it, and they are our potential clients. As far as the others are concerned, well, there's lots of business for everybody, and nobody is going to get it all.

You can't be afraid to loose a customer you never had in the first place. In our case our job is clear: we deliver marketing stories using Web-video and audio in memorable Web-presentations. We are not afraid to tell clients that they need multimedia, and that an over dependence on search engine optimization or any other technical answer is a mistake - a big mistake.

Are You Doing All You Can To Attract Business?

There are many methods that can be employed to drive appropriate traffic to your site: search engine optimization is only one. Have you written and published articles and advice on what you do, have you created a blog or a MySpace page to create a community of interest, or have you issued press releases on new developments and product releases? If you're relying solely on search engine optimization as a substitute for marketing, you are not doing everything you can to attract new business.

Even if your search engine tactics are attracting large numbers of visitors to your site, what is your conversion rate, how long are people staying on your site, and do you have enough compelling content to get them to come back?

If you're in the business of selling banner and text ads on your site, if that is how you make your living, then lots of random traffic may serve your purpose; but if you are in the business of providing something useful to people, then you better pay more attention to what your visitors see once they arrive on your site. After all, all the traffic in the world is useless if those visitors don't get your message. It all starts with the message, so what's your message?

What's Your Story?

Crafting your marketing story is not as easy as it sounds, and you may have to let go of some outdated thinking in order to bring your story to life.

Web-videos are not feature films or even viral videos intended to show how clever you are. You are making a commercial: special effects may be cool but they are not a substitute for a finely crafted script delivered by a professional performer.

Websites Don't Close Sales, People Close Sales

Web-videos are designed to make a statement: "this is who we are, and this is what we do, so contact us to find out how we can change your life." Websites create leads, not sales; so don't expect your Web-video to make the sale, that's your job.

Now you know the purpose of your website presentation, it is time to figure out what you want to say. Below are a series of questions that will help you develop your marketing story.

1. How will your product or service change your customer?

All stories or marketing messages have to do with change: a cosmetic company provides change from plain to beautiful, from self-doubt to self-confidence. A vitamin supplement supplier provides change from poor health to good health, from sluggish to vitality. A self-help motivational program provides change from defeat to victory, from depression to wellbeing, and so on.

All good marketing stories highlight the change that your audience wants to make in their business or personal lives. Go deeper than the obvious look for the psychological, emotional, cognitive or spiritual change your company delivers.

All successful campaigns are about change. People who are satisfied with their work and life aren't motivated to be customers; you want to target people who are motivated, people who want to be better, stronger, smarter, prettier, healthier, and richer; people who want more out of work and more out of life.

If your audience isn't motivated to change and if your product or service can't deliver that change, then you're wasting your time and your money.

2. Is what you have to say different?

If you are saying the same thing, the same way as your competition, you're in trouble. You must differentiate yourself somehow; you must standout. Your product or service must provide something different. The world is full of 'me-too' companies, businesses that do the same thing as dozens of other businesses. You must find that unique something in what you offer that makes you different; that says you are not a follower but a leader.

If your product or service is substantially the same as your competitors, perhaps you should market it differently, or maybe you should concentrate on the 'High Concept' need it delivers, rather than the standard 'same-old-same-old' that everyone else is touting.

Which one of 'Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs' does your product or service fulfill: physical, safety, social, self-esteem, aesthetic, cognitive, or self-actualization? Chances are your competition has completely ignored the psychological and emotional marketing angle and is focusing on specifications and features that have little to do with why people really choose one product over another.

3. Do you know how to tell your story?

You must have more than a story to tell or a message to deliver; you must know how to tell it. Your marketing should create a recognizable corporate image that establishes a unique identity in the mind of your audience. If your audience sees no difference between you and the competition then you become interchangeable.

Apple didn't capture the lion's share of the MP3 market just because their product is arguable better than everyone else's, they did because iPods are more than MP3 players, they are a life-style choice, clearly delineated in commercials and advertising.

4. Can you say it boldly?

The meek may inherit the earth, but if they're in business, they'll probably go broke. If you got something to say, SAY IT, and say loud and clear. There are just too many companies, too many websites, too many advertisements, and too much everything to expect people to pay any attention to you if you are afraid to stand up and be noticed. Go boldly or don't go at all.

5. Who is your target audience?

Decide who you want to target and what motivates them; then design your website, videos, and advertising campaigns to trigger every hot button motivating message you can. Develop your message so it speaks directly to that audience.

Your message must have purpose, be focused and concise, and deliver a clear impression of identity. This means you can't be all things to all people. By focusing on a clear audience with a precise message you may even have a better chance of capturing non targeted audiences: the fact that Apple iPod commercials are aimed at a hip young audience has not stopped Apple from capturing MP3 market share across all demographic profiles.

6. Can you take the heat?

Last but not least, do you have what it takes to tell your story in a way that people will remember? Are you prepared to deliver your message in the boldest, most audacious manner you can? Are you ready to give up on none productive audiences and concentrate on those motivated to say yes to your message? Are you able to ignore the odd complaint or nasty email objecting to your cutting-edge approach? Are you ready for the Web-video revolution?

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About the Author: Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit
http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads,
http://www.136words.com, and
http://www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info(a)mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

Methods to popularize your website

Do you have a website that is getting very little or no traffic at all? Well, I can put you on a path to changing that within the time it will take you to read this article. We will review each of the strategies you can use to promote your website, and then we will try to assimilate them into a single, uniform strategy that is both highly effective and affordable.

First of all, TV commercials, radio ads, and print advertising are very expensive. This is undoubtedly the best way to launch a business, but the costs are prohibitive. A full page ad in a prominent magazine or other publication can run as high as $50,000 per ad. TV commercials can run just as high; if the commercial runs during a popular television show or sporting event, the cost will be enormous.
So, if you do not have enough money in the coffers for traditional advertising, you need to resort to online marketing. This is not a bad thing. Offline advertising (i.e. radio, TV, print ads) is sometimes not effective. Marketing on the internet is cheaper, and if done correctly, can give you much more bang for your buck.

Obviously, the cornerstone of internet marketing is search engine submission and optimization. There are hundreds of different search engines and directories on the internet where you can submit your web site for a listing. This is fairly easy to do. Simply sign up for a monthly submission plan with a credible search engine submission service. There are literally hundreds of these submission services on the internet; you can find them by performing a search on Google.
However, be wary of submitters that claim to be able to submit your site to 75,000 search engines. Such services are scams, and they will submit your web page to FFA pages and bogus link pages that can actually get you banned from the search engines. You should only do business with submission services that submit to the major search engines and directories.

Now that we have covered submission, we need to talk about search engine optimization (SEO), which is even more important. To optimize a site, you need to maximize keyword density and optimize the positioning for the words or phrases that best characterize the subject matter of your site, and you need to use proper Meta tags so that the search engines can interpret your web pages.
If you do not know how to optimize your web site, you should search for an optimization professional on Google. Steer clear of SEO experts who want to charge $1,000 per month or more. Their goal is to bleed you dry before you figure out that they really can not help you get to the top of the rankings. Stick to providers who will optimize your site for a one-time fee.

More important than SEO is link popularity. Link popularity is the number of web sites that currently link to your site. The more inbound links you acquire, the higher your search engine ranking will be. There are more than a few ways to acquire links, but I have a certain strategy that worked well for me.

My advice to you is to write articles and press releases and submit them to article directories and press release distribution services who will then distribute your articles and press releases to other websites who will publish them and in return link back to you. Also, you can submit your site to bloggers through a popular service called Blogitive (Blogitive will get blogs to post one-way anchor text links to your site in their blog, which will greatly enhance your search engine ranking).
If you are not patient enough to wait for your search engine ranking to improve, you can attract visitors to your web site instantly by using pay-per-click advertising (PPC). With PPC, you pay a certain cost per click to have an ad for your web page run at or near the top of the search engine listings for certain keywords. This can be extremely costly and ineffective. It is not uncommon for webmasters to blow thousands of dollars on PPC advertising and make only a few sales.

The best way to promote your site, if you are actually selling something, is through an affiliate program. You need to provide an affiliate code to other online merchants so that they will place your banner on their site; every time you make a sale that resulted from an affiliate referral, the affiliate gets a commission. Some internet companies have thousands of affiliates, and get all the business they would ever need or want this way; and it costs you nothing.
To recruit affiliates, you should submit your affiliate program to as many directories as possible (there are directories where you can list your affiliate program for free). The best way to find affiliates is by listing your program on forums or message boards visited by webmasters who are looking to generate additional revenue for their online business. You will have to consult with an experienced programmer who can set up the affiliate program so that the codes used to track sales for each affiliate will work properly.

So, to summarize, you should first optimize your website and submit it to search engines. You should then begin submitting articles and press releases to article directories and press release distribution services. You should also submit your site to Blogitive so that bloggers will write a review of your site and link to it, further boosting your link popularity. You might want to join a link exchange, but trading links often proves fruitless. Also, you should set up an affiliate program. And finally, you should budget a small amount of money to spend each week on pay-per-click.

If you are persistent and use all of these methods, you will continually increase your traffic over a period of time. It will probably take approximately 3 years of performing each of the tasks outlined in this article, on a daily basis, to get where you want to be. Just stick with it and your efforts will be rewarded in the long run.

About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com/, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form.

More on Google Tools

Tailor your users' search experience with Custom Search Engine

Create your own tailored search experience for your users with a Custom Search Engine that reflects your knowledge and expertise. If you're using AdSense for search, you can link your account to your custom search engine and add a new revenue stream from the ads within the custom search engine results. In a few quick steps you can create a search engine that looks and feels like your site. It's easy to use and set up, and you can prioritize search results based on your interests; invite members of your community to participate in growing your search engine content. And just like AdSense for search, you can integrate your custom search engine directly into your site so your users stay on your pages. Keep in mind that while our site is in English only at this time, you can create a custom search engine that searches across content in the following languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian.

Make your site more Google-friendly with our Webmaster Tools

Google's Webmaster Tools provide you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. They allow you to get Google's view of your website & diagnose potential problems, see what queries drive traffic to your site and how users find you. The tools can also tell Google about your pages, what is important, and how often they change. The more eyeballs you have on your useful content, the better for your AdSense performance.

Understand your audience with Analytics

More and more AdSense Publishers are discovering Google Analytics . It's free and as easy to set up as AdSense, and will give you the data you need to back up your AdSense decisions. For example, if you're wondering where to put your AdSense ads, you can look at Google Analytics reports to find out which pages on your site get the most traffic, and where visitors spend the most time. All you need to do is add a couple of lines of code to each page on your site. Sign up for a free account and see results today.

Promote & enhance your website using Gadgets

You can enhance your own website and promote your website's content, for free, by using Google Gadgets. To enhance your own website, you can add fun or content-rich gadgets by copying and pasting a little HTML you can generate from the directory of gadgets for your webpage. To promote your website's content on the Google homepage and on other sites across the web, you can create and optimize your own Google Gadget.

Embed a searchable Google Map without writing any code

Let your users search for places on a Google Map without leaving your site. The best part is you don't need to write a single line of JavaScript or HTML. The Map Search Wizard will generate code for you, and all you have to do is copy and paste the code into your page just like AdSense. You can also customize how you want the map to look and the center location. It's easy, fast, and free. And if you're interested in doing more with a dynamic Google search box, check out the AJAX Search API

Collaborate on your site content with Docs & Spreadsheets

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is our new web-based word processing and spreadsheet program, perfect for managing your site's content and sharing it with others. You can edit and save in HTML to create mockups of your webpages, access your files from any computer via a web browser, easily send them to collaborators to review & edit, and view all past revisions to any document. Docs & Spreadsheets also provides an easy way to distribute content. Your users won't need to download anything from your site; just create your content in Docs & Spreadsheets or upload an existing file, publish it, and then link directly to the file from your website. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is free, secure and easy to try out. Check out the product tour for an overview, or just sign up here.

Communicate better with others with Google Apps For Your Domain

The more you can focus on your site content, the more successful you can be with AdSense. Now available in 18 different languages, Google Apps for Your Domain allows you to spend less time, energy, and money on one of the biggest distractions for publishers: maintaining IT systems. Now you can offer powerful communication and collaboration tools including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk to everyone with an account on your own domain, people within your organization or members of your community. Best of all, everything is managed on Google's scalable, secure systems, just like AdSense.