Archive for the 'Webmaster News' Category
Oh,Pick Me!
One of the first things I learned early in my career is that when you are selling something, you will never make a sale unless you ask for the money! Just like the famous expression from Jerry Maguire, “Show me the money”.
So we all agree that every website and preferably every page of a website should have some sort of call to action in order to convert a visitor to becoming a customer.
But when is it too much? I came across the below web-page and even though I am involved in digital marketing on a daily basis, I was overloaded and clicked the back button within one second….then of course I came back to take a screen-shot, count the calls to action and write this post.
On the page below (and I don’t mean the whole page, just the initial visible area) there are 47 requests for action and I just find that to be way too many.
My advice would be to limit this to 10-15 total actions per visible area of your web-page, preferably less. In my opinion you have a way better chance of getting the action you want with less choices and if you present too many choices most people will be overwhelmed and the only likely action will be the back button of the browser or the close page X.
Here is an update to my previous post! Traffic has been down to 20k visits per day for the last two days but the buzz is still alive! I actually heard my fake news story on the radio (102.1 The Edge) on the way to work this morning!!
It seems this story has gone viral WORLD-WIDE! The smoking gun has called it out as fake after some research (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/
One story even called my web site sketchy but hey, it was all in good fun and it will be interesting to see how these new links effect the long-term growth of my website. Here is a short list of websites carrying this story, from Germany, Mexico, Italy, China, Nigeria and across North America!
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/
http://perezhilton.com/2011-
http://www.fox26medford.com/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/
http://news.gather.com/
http://www.metro.us/newyork/
http://abovethelaw.com/2011/
http://globalgrind.com/news/
http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/
http://urbanlegends.about.com/
http://www.northwestohio.com/
http://informe21.com/
http://noticias.terra.es/2011/
http://www.elporvenir.com.mx/
http://www.cnbc.com/id/
http://world.huanqiu.com/roll/
http://www.nieuwsblad.be/
http://dunya.milliyet.com.tr/
http://www.sigmalive.com/news/
http://www.nownews.com/2011/
http://www.net1news.org/ex-
http://www.fakt.pl/Zrobil-
http://noticias.r7.com/
http://virgula.uol.com.br/ver/
http://www.bellenews.com/2011/
http://www.nollywoodgossip.
http://kissfm969.com/the-girl-
http://www.deceptology.com/
http://whatsgoodington.com/
http://www.examiner.com/culture-events-in-chicago/a-tattoo-revenge-saga
I was told by a friend this evening that he heard about this news story on The Howard Stern Show Thursday morning, I just confirmed it by looking it up at http://www.marksfriggin.com/news11/11-28.htm#thu – it seems Howard and Robin talked about this on her news feature at 8:50am and then then Howard mentioned that the news was a hoax at 9:35am.
December 7, 2011 update – As you can see below the news story is still going strong but it has spread so far that I am no longer being noticed as the original source. Traffic on my site is down to just a couple of thousand a day.
While I still find some small value in print advertising I really dislike it when a sales person throws out a totally irrelevant statistic to try and sell me on it. I don’t like being sold like I am stupid.
Just to recap our conversation, wanted to reach out and see if you’d like to restart your advertising in the xxxxx xxxxxx Newspapers. You had mentioned getting business through Google but why not capture both markets, Internet AND Print? Doing so helps you get the best of both worlds. Remember, only 21% of people have internet worldwide!
We are located in a major metropolitan area and I would guess the statistic here is 98% of households have Internet access.
I watched about an hour of the live feed from the Senate antitrust hearing on Google and caught about 15 minutes o f Mr. Schmit’s testimony and what I heard wasn’t very good. I felt he did not answer the questions posed very clearly and instead used each answer opportunity as a mini PR piece.
It seems the gossip around the blogesphere is mixed, many think Schmit did a good job at deflection the accusations and many more think Google is going to be facing an official inquiry by the FTC shortly. My personal belief is that Google will come up with a proposal to self-regulate because they definitely don’t want the government dictating what they can do.
Forbes had a good article that was mostly against Google and some of the statements were very powerful, like this one:
The grand disconnect at the Google hearing was that Google was oblivious to the concern that they represented their business as non-threatening with no competitive conflict of interest in order to gain content owners trust and business, the bait, and then they violated that trust by flipping their business model mid-game and switching to be the most serious competitive threat these companies could face – all while publicly denying that they are now competitors at all.
Full article here http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcleland/2011/09/22/googles-bait-switch-deception-exposed-at-hearing/
This whole bait and switch conspiracy might be a tad far-reaching but there are lots of factual examples to back it up. I think Google would be smart to make a move to bury this whole thing before it reaches the general population because soon the pitch-forks will come out.
Just finished reading the submission by Jeremy Stoppelman and all I can say is ouch!! He makes a really strong case (with lots of factual evidence) which points to Google participating in very unsavory behavior. I don’t know if Google can talk their way out of this one. I will be watching this news closely, there is no doubt Google is a modern day success story and they have done some really amazing things (I love gmail) but I think their shareholders are so used to sky-high returns that it is pushing them out of the search game.
Read the full submission by Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp here.
Draw your own conclusion from the info below. Personally I think a clean, easy to navigate site is more important than the exact color scheme.
Love this one! Very funny.
Back in 2009 I took a look at some web directories that got their page rank and indexing sniped by Google.
Around a year and a half ago Google unleashed its’ wrath on general web directories. With bolts of lightning (not quite but just as painful to the directory owners) it struck down the page rank of some of the best know directories for buying links. Let’s see how they have faired 18 months later.
http://www.ewebpages.org/ still sitting at page rank 0
http://cdhnow.com/ stuck on page rank 0
http://www.dirspace.com/ zero it is
http://www.linkforever.net/ zero page rank bar love
and it goes on and on….it seems that almost all of these directories have remained in Google’s ‘bad’ list and in addition to having their page rank stipped they also don’t rank for their domain names.
I thought it might be fun to take a look at where they are now?
http://www.ewebpages.org is sitting with a healthy PR4 and is looking like it gets regular traffic
http://cdhnow.com/ is also back up to a PR4 and it looks somewhat active
http://www.dirspace.com/ also has a PR4 but is looking mildly neglected
http://www.linkforever.net/ chimes in with a PR2 and seems to get the odd submission
A quick peek at my first directory (I don’t own it anymore) www.2ListNow.com and it is still holding on with PR3 but the details pages seem broken.
All in all it looks like web directories have made it through the storm and I still think they have some limited value in building backlinks.
So as fast as Google can think up new ideas it seems the darker parts of the web are ready to profit from them!
There is already many websites out there selling this service. Here are the promises made by one of them.
- All +1′s come from people with a google account that has been verified by phone (Phone Verified Accounts)
- All +1′s come from real people. No bots are being used!
- All +1′s are being given by manually going to your website and clicking the +1 button It’s untraceble because the +1′s are being given from different IP’s
- All +1′s are given dripped over a couple of days so it looks natural
So what does it take to be successful on the web these days? Sometimes a bad idea can be really successful, well sort of….
Over at snail mail my email the idea was for people to send them an email and they would have it written out by hand and mailed out via snail mail to the receipt for free. My first reaction was – mmmm interesting, 2 seconds later I thought…what a waste of time. My third reaction was, how or more importantly, why would they do this for free? Then I thought maybe this was just some sort of joke, so i clicked on over to their website and found
So I guess this is successful but a pretty bad idea!
