Unsolicited Commercial Email

More affectionately known to the public as “spam”, unsolicited commercial email (UCE) is one of the most infuriating things facing mankind today.  Worldwide, it is estimated that there are approximately 183 BILLION spam messages sent DAILY.  Yes, BILLION and yes, DAILY.  Even though we may only spend a few seconds on each piece of spam, all those seconds add up to some staggering amounts of lost time, productivity and money.  Google has a nifty tool to help you find out what spam might be costing you.

In 2003, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enacted the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act” in an attempt to curb the rapidly growing spam problem. Who thinks it worked?  Since then it has been revised a few times, but as far as controlling spam goes, it remains just as ineffective.  We’ll get to why I think that in a bit. more…

Every facet of internet marketing has its own vocabulary, and for beginners it can be difficult to effectively communicate your wants needs without a proper understanding of the terminology.  Terms like “Open Rate”, “Click Rate”, “Conversion Rate” and “Cost-per-Click” can be a little intimidating for people when they are just getting started.

Without at least a basic understanding of the language of email marketing, it can be difficult to know what you need to track and what the measurements can tell you about the success or failure of your campaign.

What follows is a list of ten terms that are commonly used with email marketing campaigns, what they mean, how they are normally calculated and why it’s important to you. more…

Put your visitors before the engines

In my last article I published a list of “TEN DO’s” from the 1998 edition of “Web Publishing for Dummies”, today we review ten things the authors thought you should NOT do. You might be surprised, as I was, that all ten are still applicable today.

The great thing about this book (if you ignore references to CompuServe, Prodigy and GeoCities) is that it was written before the search engines moved to the front of everyone’s mind. The information presented is primarily focused on creating a better experience for your visitors, and that is something that we should all be working towards.

Take a moment or two and review this list – did I miss anything? more…

Am I a Web Publishing Dummy?

I was somewhat startled to discover a copy of “Creating Web Pages for Dummies (1998)” on my desk this morning. The book promises I’ll be able to “Create Dazzling Home Pages – In No Time!” I’m still not sure who put it there, or what they are trying to tell me, hopefully that mystery will soon be solved, and hopefully they were thinking I’d get a laugh from it and not that I’d learn something from it. As I glanced at the table of contents, it did generate a grin or two – there’s a whole section devoted to geocites. However two chapters stood out more than the rest “Ten Web Publishing DO’s” and “Ten Web Publishing DON’Ts.” I just knew these tips from the early days of the web would create some laughs, so I flipped ahead and looked at the lists. I could not have been more wrong. Why I was wrong is connected to the fact that there is something very important to note about this book – the ONLY mention of anything search engine related is this brief definition:

Search engine: Web-based services that help you find things you are looking for.

Why is that important you ask? Because this book was written before web designers/developers thought that getting attention from Google was more important than giving visitors good content. The fact that the authors were concerned with content makes both of their lists still (mostly) accurate. Below is the list of ten “DO’s” along with my comments about how they may (or may not) apply today.
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I’ve had my iPhone for about six months, and I’m always amazed by the wide range of apps available for it.  From the flat-out silly, like “fart machine” to those much more useful like Tweetie and Fandango.  It seems that no matter what your interest is, there’s an app for that.

I spent some time recently scouring the app store looking for tools that might be useful for those who want their sites to rank better on the search engines, for people interested in buying domain names, reviewing web statistics or monitoring the health of their web servers. more…