My Marketing, Useful Resources

April 27, 2007

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Below is this week’s commentary “blurb” portion of the weekly newsletter we run every week here at WebbyOnline. I don’t usually post these things on the main site as a blog post, however today I thought I would. To recieve this content in your inbox each week, just subscribe in the form at the top of the site. It is free and I work hard to make the email useful each week.

Well, I’m a day late on this newsletter. Been awhile since that has happened, but this week I have been so busy working on various internal marketing and enhancement projects that, yesterday, I literally FORGOT to look at my todo list. And therefore the newsletter went undone. But, here I am today. So, what have I been up to that led me to overlook my sacred Webby duties? Well, I mentioned that I had picked up the Traffic Secrets course. So far, I have only watched two of the DVDs of the course. But, at the same time, I have been following other material. For example, this week I attended web seminars being put on by Marketing Experiments and Michael Fortin. As I would have expected, I’m getting a lot of common themes out of all of this, such as:

The importance of ad copy
The use of landing pages
The importance of testing and analytics

Well, even though I have just gotten started (and have about 80% of the course still ahead of me), the ideas start a-rollin’ and I find myself moving ahead with other things. So, in short, I am looking at my business from more of a marketing perspective and seeing the opportunities that are out there if I can couple the delivery with good, solid marketing. So, I am getting a few things going in order to pick up sales of PCMech products. We’re also on the cusp of releasing our second DVD video tutorial on the site. I am also putting some work into enhancing the subscription model (called Supporter memberships) over at PCMech. This stuff takes a lot of work to implement, but that’s been a big part of what I’m doing this week.

On another local note, I have just posted the second edition of the new WebbyOnline podcast. This is a little experiment of mine and we’ll see how it goes. This week’s show covers 10 Effeciency Tips for Today’s Web Business. I hope to consistently increase the quality of the presentation and perhaps, later, even get into some two-way conversations with guests. I am new to podcasting (not the concept, but to doing it myself), so this is an interesting exercise for me.

I noticed the guys over at Internet Business Mastery posted a rant against Third Sphere Hosting. I never even heard of Third Sphere, but the reason I bring this up is twofold: (1) He posts some good lessons regarding the selection of a web host, (2) this illustrates the power of bad publicity. Those of us who work in this business who have popular sites have a certain kind of power, and that is to let the world know when a company does you wrong. And, bad publicity goes WAY further than anything good that is said. I mean, here I am, never having heard of Third Sphere, and yet if I ever were hunting for hosting, I would never go with them simply because of what this guy said. So, if you’re a company providing a service, take care of your people, man. That bad publicity can kick your ass in a big way.

Matt Cutts, the well known Google blogger, posted an interesting take on privacy concerns with Google. Now, he works for Google, however I don’t hold that against him in terms of slanting his view unfairly. Often it is those “in the know” who are your best sources, those most connected. He holds the position that Google goes out of its way to maintain user privacy. Of course, Google has raised eyebrows because of the sheer volume of info they do have. But, there is a certain degree of human nature to this debate as well. As companies get successful, they often become the target of the mob that is large groups of people. People have this reactive need to tear down those who stick their head above the crowd, as we have seen with other successful companies like Microsoft and Wal-Mart. So, does Google really work to respect privacy? I would assume yes. And his point that your ISP would be in a position to know MUCH more than Google is right on par.

Those of us who use a lot of stylesheets know that those things can often bloat up. Especially if you don’t really understand stylesheets very well, you can often make CSS files that are REALLY bloated pieces of work. Well, I ran across a service called Clean CSS. It is free. It is a web front-end to CSSTidy, and will take any stylesheet and optimize it. I ran one of my stylesheets through it and it shaved off a good, solid 3 KB. That’s 3KB less that every single visitor will need to download. Go check it out. It’s not going to make a gem out of a piece of crap, but it can shave off filesize.

The Michael Fortin webinar I mentioned above was based on this blog post, entitled My Seven-Step Copywriting Process. For those who never heard of him, Mike is one of the most well-known and effective copywriters on the internet. A great read for those interested in producing their own copy.

Lastly, many of us know that Dreamweaver is probably the most notable webpage editor among pros in this business. I own and use Dreamweaver 8 and I love it. Well, after Adobe bought Macromedia, Adobe went to work on the next version of Dreamweaver, called CS3. PC Magazine has posted a review of Dreamweaver CS3. Overall, it gets great reviews, however the overall look of the software looks about the same. What is even more interesting is that PC Mag is actually comparing this thing to Microsoft Expression Web. I have heard good things, too, about Expression, and that it is supposed to be lightyears ahead of the now joke of an editor known as Frontpage. It is a bit of a shift to hear a staple like Dreamweaver being compared to a Microsoft product.