I think spam is a fascinating subject….in fact, I have an email folder where I collect my favorite spam emails. I particularly enjoy collecting ones that have lost their true intention through poorly written English.
Truly malicious spams are sent to your inbox for two main reasons:
- To gain control of your computer
- To get your credit card number
So, most spams that have a computer virus associated with them are sent to you with the intention of taking control of your computer, and turning it into a zombie. As a zombie, your computer become the unwilling participant in a much grander scheme. Once a spammer has secured a substantial network of zombie computers (known as a botnet), they can use their collective power to attack specific web targets. By bombarding a web server with requests from each computer within a zombie network, a spammer can bring down significant websites. This type of activity is known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack.
The other common intention behind a spam email is fraud: the spammer simply wants your credit card. There are two basic types of emails designed to steal your credit card number; phishing and spoofing. A phishing scam can take many forms, but the most common are “Nigerian-style” messages and product messages. “Nigerian-style” scam messages offer the recipient an opportunity to make money in exchange for their credit card or banking information. The phishing scams might look like a legitimate service provider or store. The service provider phishing scams are the ones that might ask you to reset your banking password, or update your Ebay account. On the other hand, product phishing messages typically appear to sell pharmaceuticals, watches, hand bags, foreign brides, and adult items. In reality, nothing is for sale; the sites are just designed to capture your payment information.
Once a spammer has acquired your personal information, there are three things they’ll do with it:
- Steal your identity
- Take your money
- Sell your information to someone else
Ok, so identity theft doesn’t mean there is someone out there with a wig on, literally pretending to be you. When your identity is stolen, the thief uses your good credit score to secure loans for goods, and leave you hanging with the bill. In really bad cases, your credit can be permanently damaged.
When spammers take your money, they do so very cleverly. They’ll charge your credit card a little bit each month, under an unassuming name, with the hopes that you won’t notice a random, small purchase. These guys are clever! Not only will they vary the name of the charge, they’ll vary the amount too. This makes it harder to catch them or dispute the charges. Think about it. If a spammer has 1,000 credit card numbers on file, they can charge them each an average of $10 per month and walk away with $120,000 per year!
Finally, spammers can sell your personal information on the black market for a quick profit. This option is often the most attractive because it requires little or no technical expertise, and is typically he most difficult for prosecutors to bust.
I don’t know about you, but I really enjoy watching the Winter Olympics. Each athlete is out there competing for honor and country at the highest level. What makes these games so intriguing, is their severity. The athletes are the best in world, the courses are the most challenging, the judges are hyper critical, and the slightest miscalculation can send a competitor home without a medal.
I find it a little unfortunate that only the three best athletes are celebrated for each event. In most cases, all of the participants have given their event everything they have, and truly delivered a world class performance.
What’s also unfortunate is the coincidental correlation between the Olympic awards and the click-through trends for organic search. A recent eMarketer article pointed out that roughly 95% of click-throughs for non-branded searches come from the first page of results. This trend was supported through data provided by Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Apparently, the first page of search results is just like the Olympic podium….in most cases, its all anyone cares about.
When reviewing website traffic, here are the four most misunderstood pieces of data:
- Unique Visitors
- Visitors
- Pageviews
- Hits
So, lets take a moment to get to know each of these data points. Unique visitors are measured by tracking the number of times a computer using an IP address has visited a website. In some home and office networks, many computers can share a single IP address, which can result in a miscalculated number of unique visitors.
The number visitors your website receives refers to the total number of visits your website gets. One unique visitor can visit your website several times. Each time they visit, they are counted as a visitor.
Pageviews describes the number of times your website’s pages have been viewed by your visitors. In most cases, a visitor will view several pages before leaving your site. If a visitor only views one page, and then leaves, they are considered to be a “bounce.”
Your hits can be the most misleading piece of data. A hit is counted each time your website displays an image to a visitor. Your website’s design alone could have several images embedded into it. Therefore, each pageview your website receives could several hits. In the early days of internet advertising, many companies would tout the high number of hits their websites received in order to exaggerate their traffic volumes. Even today, some people incorrectly refer to visitors or pageviews as hits.
Web app review site AppVita has reviewed the Eden and calls Eden great with a rating of 4 out of 5 stars. Stephanie Miles from AppVita mentioned the following in her review:
- “Preation allows you to set up a site in just a few easy steps”
- “One of the best things Preation offers for small business owners is its automated search engine optimization tool”
- “Preation’s templates are well-designed, stylish, and targeted for businesses”
- “Preation is an excellent tool that’s worth checking out.”
The single point mentioned under “what we didn’t like” points out the large number of features in Eden. We certainly don’t mind taking that sort of feedback.
Ease-of-use is one of our primary goals with Eden because we want to empower small business owners to build more traffic to their websites without the need for them to have any prior technical experience. Check out Eden for yourself with a free 15 day website CMS and SEO trial.
Bass Ackwards is the best way to write content for your website. No, really, I’m being completely serious.
So, basically, your website is an excellent example of persuasive writing. If it isn’t, you and I both know that it should be, and that you’ve got some work to do. Back in grade school, we’re all taught to follow the academic formula:
- Start with a hypothesis
- Support it with details
- Express a compelling conclusion
That process probably works fine in school…you’ve got a captive audience, your teacher, who’s required to read your work and evaluate it. In the real world, we’ve got lots more challenges. We’re not dealing with a captive audience…its our responsibility to hold our readers’ attention and persuade them.
Since your website’s visitors have very little patience, we need reverse the order of the old academic model. Therefore, we start with our conclusion. Make your point quickly and succinctly. If you’re website’s visitors are interested, they’ll continue reading or they’ll move to take action (become a lead or a customer).
Once you’ve made your point, then you can go on to support it with facts, data, tables, testimonials, and basically anything else you can think of. In most cases, you’ll want to spread these supporting points out across multiple sub-pages of your website. Trust me, pages like these are just waiting for you to optimize them for your target keywords. By building your content from the top down, you’re ensuring that your visitors will see your main offering, and that they can selectively navigate through the further reading that’s available.
In the academic model, your hypothesis is a statement that conveys the point that you intend to prove. At the end of each supporting page you create for your web content, you’ll want to reiterate your conclusion and provide your visitors with another opportunity to take action.
See how simple this is? If you use this method, you’ll avoid the pitfalls of burying your most compelling content while still having the ability to build a very large, robust website.
This is another subject that seems to get discussed frequently whenever I’m meeting with website managers. If you’re considering a reduction in the number of pages you have on your website, be careful!
You could jeopardize your site’s overall search engine rankings.
Search engines evaluate your website by indexing as many pages of it as they can find. If your website is both easy to index, and your keywords are used consistently throughout its pages, then the search engines should have a pretty clear understanding of what your website is about.
In the eyes of the search engines, more is more.
As far as on-site optimization is concerned, a website that has 300 pages about a certain topic is probably a better resource than a 40 page website on that same topic, and could therefore receive a better ranking. However, it should be understood that other factors, such as Page Rank and website structure, also affect the search engine’s evaluations.
Deleting pages without setting up the appropriate redirects is also a potential danger. You can lose credit for the incoming links that were once connected to your site. You’ll also no longer receive any of the traffic that was previously delivered through those incoming links.
Instead of deleting pages, a better way to reorganize your site is to adjust its content in order to fit your new corporate message. In my next post, I’ll provide some tips on writing for websites.
We were highly flattered last week to see a glowing review of Eden in the Search Engine Journal. Ann Smarty of the Search Engine Journal says that Eden is a “…slick, self-explanatory interface that easily guides you though the whole process of creating, optimizing and managing a website.” Ann reviewed Eden to determine how it could be used to optimize a website while working as a marketer on a web development team. “Working in an SEO team, I always prefer the tool I am using to allow a flexible platform for permission management. I want to effectively distribute tasks among my team members. The Eden Platform offers a really nice option for that.”
In her review Ann also included the following notes about Eden:
- “The platform is really really easy to use due to extensive help guides”
- “…very fast and efficient customer support”
- “Each page editor looked very usable: I could change the placement of any element by simply dragging and dropping.”
- “The sign-up process was quick and easy.”
- “You are highly encouraged to go ahead and try the platform…”
The team at TemplateZine, a community that reviews and provides website design templates for content management systems such as Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress, recently took a look at Eden and posted their thoughts about Eden’s website CMS and SEO features on their website.
Statistics show that most folks simply choose to use the browser that came with their computer, and in most cases, that’s some version of MS Internet Explorer (IE.) There’s nothing particularly wrong with IE, but you’ve absolutely got to keep it up to date. Its a shame that I’ve run into so many people who refuse to keep their windows computers up to date. If you fail to keep your computer up to date, you’re creating lots of problems for yourself.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to clog this post up with a detailed description of why you need to keep your Windows system up to date. Just remember that an outdated system is less compatible with new applications, more vulnerable to viruses and malware, and it can prevent your from accessing the newest version of IE.
The latest version of Internet Explorer, IE 8, is a pretty solid browser for causal internet surfing. However, you should consider test driving some other browsers. Firefox can load pages faster, and overall, Chrome seems to be the fastest. Unless you’re a die hard geek, there is no shame in using IE….unless you’re using an outdated version!
If you’re accustomed to IE, Firefox feels basically the same. Chrome is very different, and you might experience a short learning curve.
…for attracting new customers……is the end of that sentence. Give me a break, I’m shooting for an attention grabbing headline!
I guess I’ve been in the industry too long. This seems like common sense to me, however, every month or so, I have to explain to someone that email marketing is an absolutely horrible solution for attracting new customers.
Let’s start with a definition of “New Customer,” shall we? I consider a new customer to be a complete stranger who visits a website, and then takes an action in order to fulfill a website’s goal.
A website’s goal is different for each site; getting a website visitor to fill out an online lead form, sign up for a newsletter, create a free trial, or initiate an online purchase are common examples of website goals.
Basically, email marketing involves sending out an email to a large list of recipients (aka, and email blast) who have agreed that they’d like to receive communications from your company. If you already have their permission to email them, they’re not a stranger, and therefore, they’re not a new customer. If they’ve provided you with their email address, then they’re no longer a new customer, I consider them to be a prospect.
I suppose you could just go out and buy a list of email addresses. But buying a list is probably one of the worst things you can do to promote your business. Though not illegal under the CAN-SPAM Act, it is a terrible business practice. How do you treat unsolicited emails that find their way into your inbox? Personally, I mark them as a spam, and I make a mental note to avoid the nefarious business that spammed me. If a significant number of people admit that they won’t shop with a company that sends them too many emails, think about how they treat companies that send unsolicited emails.
My conclusion, use email marketing to retain customers and convert prospects.
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