Poor Richard 11
#011/03-July-98
POOR RICHARD'S WEB SITE NEWS
Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site
Editor: Peter Kent
Top Floor Publishing
IN THIS ISSUE
- Beginner's Column: Another Way to Differentiate URLs
- Free Web Hosting
- Promoting an Email Newsletter - Part 2
- The Internet -- Don't Forget It's an International Forum
- The Myth of Highly Targeted Advertising -- Part 2
- Banner Advertising May Not Work
- A Great Way to Use an Associates Program
- Poor Richard's Web Site in the Press
- Reading Back Issues
- In Future Issues
**** IF YOU FIND THIS NEWSLETTER USEFUL ... FORWARD IT TO FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES ****
Beginner's Column: Another Way to Differentiate URLs
Here's another clever way to differentiate URLs. I discussed using mixed capitalization in earlier issues (http://PoorRichard.com/, for instance), but I noticed another method a few days ago when I received a mailing from an Internet bookstore, Computer Literacy (a real-world, snail-mail mailing). Their URL is http://www.computerliteracy.com/, and in printed materials they make the individual parts of the URL stand out using different colors.
Of course I can't show you how this works in this black and white newsletter, but it really is quite effective when printing a URL in a color publication. They print the www. and .com pieces as white or gray; that makes sense, because it pushes those pieces to the background. After all, you don't really need to remember these bits, they "go without saying." Then they print the computer piece in bright red, and the literacy piece in black (that's how they display the name of the company on their main Web page, too).
It all works very nicely. When you look at their URL you clearly see the computerliteracy part, the important part. I think it could be improved a little by printing it as ComputerLiteracy, but nonetheless you can clearly see that it is two separate words, computer and literacy. This is a very effective way to clarify a URL, and make it more memorable, when printing it.
Free Web Hosting
GEN International, a Web hosting company, is "giving away" Web-hosting accounts. Well, the accounts are not quite free; you have to pay a $50 setup fee if you want 1MB of disk space (which really isn't a lot of room), or $100 for 5MB. After that, the account is free -- no monthly fees. These are Microsoft FrontPage accounts, too -- that is, you can use FrontPage's "Web bots" to set up forms and various other little things.
I've no idea if this service is a good deal; it may be perfect for some people, perhaps not quite good enough for others, depending on the Web services you need. If you want to check it out, visit ...
Don't forget to read my free report, "20 Things to Ask a Web-Hosting Company" before you sign up with this or any other hosting company; there are many things you need to know, and if you pick an account without understanding all your options you may regret it!
http://PoorRichard.com/freeinfo/special_reports.htm
Why are GEN giving away these accounts? They say that "Our long-term focus is on building the world's largest community of entrepreneurs and businesses, and supplying them with additional high-quality e-commerce solutions as needed." In other words, you get a free account, then they're hoping to "up sell" to a more advanced account, or to add a shopping-cart or whatever. This may be a way to get started with a Web site at a low cost.
Promoting an Email Newsletter - Part 2
I found a few more places to publicize an email newsletter, to add to the list I gave you in the last issue.
Dominis Interactive ezines - You can actually view your access statistics here -- that is, once registered your email newsletter you can return later and see how many people have read about it. They also review newsletters, and have lists of the 100 Hot and 100 Popular lists. They currently list around 3,000 publications.
http://www.dominis.com/Zines/
Good Free Stuff Web Review - This is a newsletter that lists free stuff on the Web ... including newsletters.
http://www.slife.com/
LifeStyles - This is a business site that sells a directory of newsletters that carry advertising. You can register for free if you want to be included (assuming that you have advertising, of course.) The directory costs $19.95 (including three months of updates) or $24.95 (with twelve months of updates). They also have a mailing-list discussion group about publishing ezines and newsletters, Ezine Directory Notes.
http://www.lifestylespub.com/
McDaniel's and Associates Free Ezines List - Over 250 free email publications are listed here.
http://www.rmcdaniel.com/
CyberMessenger E'Zine - Email them about your free newsletter, and they may include it in their newsletter.
http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/9611/
You can find a full combined list, that includes all the places I've mentioned in this and the previous issue, at my Special Reports page:
http://PoorRichard.com/freeinfo/special_reports.htm
The Internet -- Don't Forget It's an International Forum
I decided to take a look at this newsletter's subscriber information recently, to find out how many countries it goes to. I was surprised at the number: 60 different countries (at least 60, perhaps more, as it's not always possible to identify the geographic location of an email address). This newsletter currently has 3,100 subscribers, and although most are in the US I was still surprised at how many live in other places. When I look at my Web logs, I see the same kind of profile, of course; visitors to my Web site come from scores of different nations.
What's this mean? A couple of things. First, you probably need to consider that you're not speaking to a homogenous audience ... so I guess it might be worthwhile avoiding words like homogenous. It's easy for people living in the US of A to think of the World Wide Web as the US Web, but it's really not. Some things you may write may make perfect sense to people living in the USA, but be completely incomprehensible to people outside.
Another thing, if you're selling a product or service. Don't ignore the rest of the world. The Internet provides a perfect way to reach people all around the world -- I've shipped books to the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, Iceland, Australia, Austria, Argentina and elsewhere. Look for ways to work with foreign markets. For instance, do you know about Global Post, an international system that allows you to send small packages to many countries at a low cost, yet very quickly? For instance, on Monday this week I shipped a book to Singapore. The buyer emailed me on Thursday to tell me that he'd already received it.
And of course for people living outside the USA, the Internet provides a way to access the world's most lucrative market.
Just in case you're interested, these are the nations that Poor Richard's Web Site News is delivered to:
United Arab Emirates, Armenia, Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Bermuda, Bolivia, Brazil, Belize, Canada, Switzerland, Chile, Cameroon, China, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, Finland, Fiji, France, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Croatia, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, India, Iceland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Lebanon, Moldova, Mauritius, Mexico, Malaysia, Namibia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Singapore, Slovenia, USSR (former nations), Turkey, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States, and South Africa.
If you want to check your own newsletter subscriptions or Web-site logs, you'll need a country-code table to figure out all the domains. You can try these places:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/websoft/wwwstat/country-codes.txt
ftp://rs.internic.net/netinfo/iso3166-countrycodes
The Myth of Highly Targeted Advertising -- Part 2
When it came time to write the last issue of this newsletter I was feeling a little irritated with advertising sales people, so I quickly threw in a note warning people about the myth of targeted advertising. It's not true, I said, that carefully targeted advertising is always better, despite the claims of people selling banner advertising and of colleagues who think they understand basic principles of advertising. I'll explain why. But first, a few quick definitions:
cpm
This means "cost per thousand" -- the m in cpm comes from Latin, and represents a thousand. So for instance, a cpm of $20 means that you will pay $20 for every thousand people who see your ad.
impression
One time that your ad is viewed. For instance, each time a banner ad is displayed, that's one impression. Each email message including your ad is one impression. Note, however, that with email newsletters it's difficult to know how many impressions you'll really get. Most companies tell you how many messages they send out, and charge accordingly, but the message may be forwarded, so the number of impressions could actually be much higher (especially with joke emails). By the way, cpm usually refers to cpm impressions; cost per thousand impressions, _not_ cost per thousand click throughs.
Click through or clickthru
When someone clicks on a banner ad, or a link in an email ad, in order to visit your Web site, that's a click through, often known as a clickthru. Note by the way that a click through is not the same as a visit to your Web site. While people clicking through may intend to visit, a proportion will change their minds and cancel before or soon after your first page loads.
Click through rate
The percentage of people viewing your ad who click through.
targeted and untargeted
A targetted ad is one that is displayed to people who are probably interested in your product. An untargeted ad is one that is shown to a group of people you have no reason to believe want your product. These terms are relative, of course, and targeting of ads is often very imprecise.
Right, now we've got that out of the way ... how on earth can untargeted ads be better than targeted ads? It's really quite simple. If someone is selling what they claim to be targetted advertising, it's going to cost you more, perhaps much more. For instance, the cheapest advertising I've bought so far had a cpm of 42 cents. Now, I'll admit that such deals are not easy to find, but they are out there if you look hard. Targeted ads can often cost $20, $50, or much more. I've actually paid the ridiculous sum of $150 for 1,000 contacts. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that, except that I know I'm by no means alone, and many large and important companies have bought from this same source. Of course the cpm of $150 was justified because this ad was so tightly targeted.
Now, look at these numbers. $150 is more than 357 times 42 cents. That means the expensive ad has to be more than 357 times as effective as the cheap ad just to balance out. In fact the ad campaigns were about the same as far as bringing people to my site goes, but the expensive ad was about half as effective at bringing in sales. So the sales I got from the highly targetted ad -- sorry, the _sale_ I got from the highly targetted ad -- cost 714 times as much as each sale brought in by the cheapo ad.
This, to an advertising salesperson, makes no sense. Of _course_ a highly targetted ad will do better for you. And in fact in most cases it may do so. A highly targetted ad should bring you more sales than an untargeted ad. But simply bringing in more sales than the untargeted ad is not good enough. It has to bring in _proportionally_ more sales to balance out the higher cost.
There's another problem. You may _think_ you're targeting carefully when you're not. For instance, let's say you're selling a product to a business audience. Compare a general-interest email newsletter or bulletin -- such as a daily joke mailing going to 100,000 people -- with an email message, containing nothing but your ad, going to an opt-in list of 100,000 business people. The second is more targetted, isn't it? But as these are different mediums, you can't be sure that the people receiving your ad -- and nothing but your ad -- are actually reading the message. You can be fairly sure, though, that most people are opening and reading the joke message.
Don't let advertising sales people confuse you -- in particular people selling Web-site banner ads, as that's where the big money is. Targetted ads may -- but may not -- bring in a higher response than untargeted ads. But that doesn't mean they're worthwhile. You still have to factor in the difference in cost, and the fact that it's difficult to compare an untargeted ad in one medium with a targetted ad in another.
Here's another example. I'm currently advertising with a banner ad at a business Web site. I'm paying a cpm of $20, which is good considering that the ad is pretty well targetted; I could be paying two or three times that rate. I seem to be getting a click through of 9%, which is very, very good. (So far I haven't had many impressions, and I suspect this number may drop as the campaign continues.) So each click through has cost me 22 cents. On the other hand, I've paid a cpm of 42 cents, with a 1% click through; each click through cost me 4.2 cents.
Which was better?
Which brings me to another subject ....
... Banner Advertising May Not Work
I've done a little experimentation with banner ads, and come to the conclusion that they often don't work well, at least for me. I'm selling a $37.95 retail product -- Poor Richard's Web Site -- at a 15% discount that brings the price to $32.26. It's next to impossible for me to get a high enough click through rate to make banner ads pay, unless I can get a cpm of $20 or below -- probably well below -- for a targetted ad.
I've been told that banner ads are often quite effective for Web-hosting companies. If you're charging, say, a $50 setup fee, and $30 a month, and you expect someone who signs up for an account to stay with you for perhaps 18 months, then each sale is worth $590. If you sell ancillary products and services, too -- design services, upgrade hosting services, and so on -- then your income per sale may be much more. With a possible income ten or twenty times my paltry sales, banner advertising may be very effective.
I'm not going to say that banner ads don't work. They do in some circumstances. But before you jump into some expensive banner-ad program, run all the numbers -- see what sort of click through you'll need into order to break even, and if possible do a small test. And don't believe a sales person who tells you that in order to test properly you need to spend a minimum of $5,000, as one recently told me. This ignores basic rules of statistics -- you can get a damn good idea of your possibility of success with a _much_ smaller sample than 100,000 impressions!
In the next issue I'm going to include an article that directly compares three real-life "advertising" campaigns. Joke emails, banner ads ... and another low-cost system that is extremely effective ... but you'll have to wait until that issue to find out what it is.
Oh, and one more thing. Although I believe cpm's of $30 or $40 won't work for me ... it's possible to find targeted banner ad placements with a cpm as low as $3. I'll explain how in a future issue.
A Great Way to Use an Associates Program
Tens of thousands of people around the world have signed up with a variety of "associates" programs. CDnow's associate program, Cosmic Credits, has 30,000 members for instance. Amazon.com's associates program is even larger.
An associates program amounts to this: you send a Web store traffic, and you get a commission on any sales on that traffic. Commissions vary, of course, from around 5% - 7%, up to perhaps 15%, depending on the volume of sales. How many of these associates sites are really making a lot of money? Not many, a tiny percentage. Most are either making nothing, or perhaps enough for a beer or two a week. But some really are making good money. It takes work, though. You've got to bring people to your site, and give them a good reason to follow a link from your site to the store you're associated with.
I don't believe many associates think this through. It's generally a case of "here's a load of links to books/software/music, why don't you follow the link and buy something." But a few days ago I saw a Web site that gives people a really good reason to buy books, and to continue buying books. The site is Amanda Bennett's Unit Study Adventures:
This is a site set up by a mother who is home-schooling her kids. Home schooling is a booming business in the Western world, not only in the US but also in some European countries. Many people are dissatisfied with their nation's education system, and can afford to have one parent stay home and take over the schooling of their kids. There are now thousands of home-schooling sites on the Web.
One of the major problems that home-schooling parents face is knowing where to start -- what subjects should you cover?, how do you fit everything together?, what are the most appropriate books to use?, and so on. There are thousands of parents who want to home school, but don't know where to begin. They want someone to tell them, to lead them.
Amanda Bennett has written twelve "unit study" books herself, each covering a particular subject: from Computers and Electricity, to the rather more obscure Christmas and Thanksgiving. She doesn't have complete curriculums, but parents who want to teach one of these particular subjects can buy her book from Amazon.com, because she provides a link to that site. Each time someone buys a book, she gets a commission, of course.
But there's more. For every unit study, she also recommends several other books by different authors; these books are recommended in her books as additional resources. Again, each one links back to Amazon.
What I like about this is that she is giving people a reason to buy. She hasn't just provided a big list of books and said, "hey, check out these neat books." Rather, she's helping people with a problem, and recommending books to help them with that problem. I wouldn't be surprised if people come back over and over; as they finish one unit study, they come back to pick another one ... and buy more books.
By the way, most associates programs give commissions on every sale made. Until recently Amazon.com would only pay a commission on books that the associate actually links to, but they changed their rules a month or two ago (I recently earned commission on "Memoirs of a Geisha," for instance!). Consider, then, the kind of people visiting Amanda Bennett's Web site. They're educating their kids, so they're buying books. There's a good chance that when they visit Amazon, they'll pick up a book or two recommended by Bennett, but also run across one or two others that they want and buy those, too.
Poor Richard's Web Site in the Press
- The highly respected Library Journal reviewed Poor Richard's Web Site recently, and said this: "Covering all the basics in jargon-free English, he considers what you need to start, where to put your web site, finding a host, how to pick and register a domain name, creating a site, choosing an editor, adding interaction and taking orders online, distribution lists, and registering your web site. Very well written."
- Tina Velgos, writing in The Review Zone, gave the book a favorable review. "I liked Kent's motto," she said; "when it comes to building web sites, 'Forget Cool, Think Useful!' Definitely, words to live by!"
For more reviews, and many readers' testimonials, visit ...
Poor Richard's Web Site is in many bookstores, and can be ordered by others; it can also be ordered on-line, through the mail, by fax, or by phone.
See ...
Order direct from the publisher, and you'll get a 100%, 1-Year Guarantee. If the book doesn't help you set up a low-cost yet effective Web site, send it back for a refund!
Reading Back Issues
If you need to refer to back issues of this newsletter, you can find them at the following location:
http://PoorRichard.com/newsltr/
In Future Issues ...
- A simple credit-card processing system for Web sites
- Getting the Word Out about your Web site
- Setting up an email mailing list for newsletters, bulletins, product announcements, etc.
- More on promoting newsletters
- Secure servers: why you want one, how they work, who has them
- Mail-merge programs and mailing list programs
- A quick way to inform Web sites when you change your URL
- Are people cheating at the award sites?
- Charging purchases to the buyer's telephone numbers
- Electronic press releases _do_ work!
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