Poor Richard 29
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#029/25-June-99
POOR RICHARD'S WEB SITE NEWS
Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site
Editor: Peter Kent
Top Floor Publishing
http://PoorRichard.com/
Over 25,000 Subscribers in More Than 100 Countries!
IN THIS ISSUE
- Beginner's Column: The Problem With Long Forms
- The Power of Newsletters
- Fax-to-E-mail -- Free Fax Services II
- Voice Mail, Too
- You Must Have .Com!
- Solutions
- Yahoo! Sells Banners ... But Does it Buy?
- Online Transaction Failure Rate
- Poor Richard's Web Site and Other Top Floor Books
- Book Reviewers Wanted -- MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution
- Reading Back Issues
**** IF YOU FIND THIS NEWSLETTER USEFUL ... FORWARD IT TO FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES ****
Beginner's Column: The Problem With Long Forms
Here's a quick tip -- don't use very long and complicated forms at your Web site.
This wouldn't have occurred to me had I not spoken with a colleague who has run into this problem. The problem wasn't with _his_ forms, but with a client's, a city government's employment office in a major U.S. metropolitan area. This employment office put a long and complicated application form on the Web, only to discover that many users were unable to complete the form.
The problem occurs when the person filling in the form is working with an Internet connection that automatically disconnects if the connection software sees no traffic passing to and from the Internet. If you put up a very long form, one that perhaps also requires the person filling it in to leave the computer to seek information, it may take so long to fill in the form that the user exceeds his disconnection time. While the user is typing information into a Web form, no data is being transferred across the Internet, so the service provider's software doesn't know the user is working in the browser ... and so closes the connection.
The solution is fairly simple. Break forms down into smaller pieces. Each time the user finishes one form and clicks on the Submit button, the second form should be displayed. And each time the user clicks on the Submit button, the connection software will see the data being transferred, and so start the disconnection timer over again.
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The Power of Newsletters
E-mail newsletters can be very powerful things, as I've mentioned in these "pages" before. Here are two examples that I've observed just recently.
A couple of weeks ago Chris Pirillo mentioned his new book in his newsletter, Lockergnome ( http://www.lockergnome.com/ ). Chris is the author of "Poor Richard's E-mail Publishing," which my company, Top Floor Publishing, is publishing in a few weeks.
Lockergnome goes to around 160,000 subscribers every day, and has a very loyal readership. Chris told his readers that "Poor Richard's E-mail Publishing" was available at Amazon.com -- not that it was in print yet, but that Amazon.com was taking orders for it.
Now, you may have noticed that Amazon.com ranks books according to their popularity. If a book is ranked at 10,000, for instance, it's means that there are 9,999 books selling faster, and millions selling more slowly. (Exactly how Amazon.com calculates these rankings is unclear--over what period are the calculations made, for example--as they refuse to publicly explain the basis for the calculations.) Well, within two days or so of Chris announcing his book in Lockergnome, the book had reached #48 at Amazon! Not bad for a book that isn't even in print. The book is still around #1,450, three weeks later.
I recently had dinner with a fellow e-mail publisher, and we chatted about finding advertisers for our newsletters. He mentioned that a colleague, a man who publishes a couple of joke newsletters, had sold out all his advertising space for 1999.
Now, this joke publisher e-mails a total of 300,000 messages every day. He sells ads for a cpm (cost per thousand impressions) of $2, and has two ads in each message.
Let's do the math. A total of 300,000 subscribers a day means there are 300 advertising "units." (Remember, with a cpm calculation you're paying for advertisers by the thousand.) So each ad costs $600 (300 units times a cpm of $2). He has two ads in each message, so the daily income is $1,200 ($600 x 2 ads). He's transmitting these e-mails 6 days a week, so the weekly total is $7,200 ($1,200 x 6 days). And, as most of you are aware, there are 52 weeks in a year, so he's grossing $374,400 a year.
Of course there are other factors. Perhaps he's selling some ads at a lower rate, when advertisers pay for several at once. On the other hand, he's probably selling some ads at a higher rate (near Christmas, for instance). Also, although he's sending out 300,000 messages now, his list is growing quickly, so over the next 12 months his daily average will be much higher. He's got his costs, of course -- sending out almost ten million messages a month is a major operation. But it doesn't bite too far into the gross income.
You get the picture. I don't know exactly how much money this newsletter makes ... but you can bet that it's a pretty healthy income, whatever the actual number.
The mainstream press talks about e-mail publishing rarely, so few people realize that e-mail publishing is becoming both powerful and profitable.
Fax-to-E-mail -- Free Fax Services II
In the last edition I mentioned a couple of free fax-to-email services. First, a word about JFax ( http://www.jfax.com/ ). I mentioned I couldn't get it to send me a fax, but I may have been a little unfair. There may have been something wrong with the e-mail address I was sending it to; I'm looking into it, trying to figure out what went wrong, and will test JFax again soon. I did hear from one reader, though, who said that he'd worked with JFax successfully and was very happy with the service.
A number of readers sent me information about other fax services:
http://www.ureach.com/
http://www.fax4free.com/
http://www.faxme.co.uk/
Then David Strom contacted me. He's a freelance writer, and is working on an article about these services for Computerworld. He's been compiling a list of them, which you can see here:
http://www.strom.com/places/faxtable.html
The table is a simple summary of, currently, 13 services, listing features such as the ability to send faxes, whether or not a special fax viewer is required, and so on.
One Australian reader told me that he uses eFax as a service for customers in the U.S. (he markets videos in the U.S. -- http://www.g-vision.com/ ). His American customers can fax him at a U.S. number, and within seconds the fax is delivered to his computer thousands of miles away across the Pacific. The world really is getting smaller!
But how about if you're in the U.S., and want to provide a fax number to your customers in other countries? Well, there are fax services with numbers outside the U.S. Jfax, for instance, claims to have numbers in 60 cities around the world (including in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. There's also FaxMe, in the United Kingdom ( http://www.faxme.co.uk/ ), and possibly a number of other services. Note, however, that some of these services may not allow you to set up an account unless you're actually based in the same country. FaxMe, for instance, say you can only have an account if you are in the United Kingdom. (On the other hand, they don't seem to check ... )
Voice Mail, Too
There's more to these services than just fax to e-mail. Some of these services will even take voice messages for you. The voice is encoded into a sound file, and e-mailed. I haven't used one of these services myself, but I've been told they work reliably enough. Jfax is one of these voice-mail services: http://www.jfax.com/ . And David Strom's directory lists several others: http://www.strom.com/places/faxtable.html
Again, what a wonderful tool for expanding operations around the world. Now you can have a fax numbers _and_ voice-mail numbers around the world.
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You Must Have .Com!
The domain faxme.co.uk reminded me of something I've been meaning to mention for some time. I've noticed people getting .org or .net domains, or non-U.S. domains, that match somebody else's .com domain. The faxme.co.uk domain seems to be owned by a British company called Nildram Ltd. Yet there's a faxme.com domain that seems to be owned by someone else, a company called Z P I in Chicago (it's currently unused, but we can guess what sort of service it may turn out to be).
Getting a non-.com domain that matches someone else's .com domain is a bad idea! It's a bad idea that seems to be particularly common outside the U.S., because many people regard the .com domain as somehow an "American" domain. It's not. It's a _commercial_ domain, regardless of geographic location.
Nildram now owns a British domain that can now never become an Internet-wide brand. They can never go out and promote the name FaxMe ... because they'll always have to promote the domain FaxMe.co.uk.
I occasionally run into people who have registered, or are thinking of registering, a .org domain, "because the .com version has gone." Well, if the .com version has gone, maybe you should steer clear of the .org version. If you heavily promote a .org domain name, you know who you're helping? The owner of the .com domain. Many people will forget that it's .org, and type in .com instead. For instance, CDnow promotes their brand name, CDnow. They don't have to promote CDnow.com, because everyone assumes that it's a .com domain. If they had just the .org domain, and someone else had the .com domain ... well, the situation is too ridiculous to consider, isn't it? Would Amazon.com do business as Amazon.org? Would Priceline do business as Priceline.net?
Interestingly enough, neither CDnow nor Amazon own the .org or .net versions of their names (see for yourself, at http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois/ ). But it obviously doesn't do them any harm. After all, nobody's going to type in anything but the .com version. (Amazon.net is actually owned by a Feminist bookstore, while Amazon.org is owned by a site for lesbians and bisexual women.)
Solutions
Please everybody, in particular you marketing people, stop using the word "Solutions"! The word no longer has any meaning!
Yahoo! Sells Banners ... But Does it Buy?
I heard a Jupiter Communications analyst speaking the other evening. (Jupiter is a firm that publishes research about the Internet.) This analyst pointed out that Yahoo!, though it is one of the largest sellers of Internet banner ads ... does not buy any banner ads itself.
That's not to say that Yahoo! doesn't spend money on advertising, it does, millions of dollars. But it doesn't spend money for online advertising. Rather, its entire advertising budget is spent on traditional advertising. Magazines and TV, for instance. That's worth remembering the next time you hear that banner advertising is a great way to promote your Web site. (It might be, but there's a good chance it isn't.) And it's worth remembering that one of the most important firms online, one of the largest sellers of online advertising, thinks that offline advertising is a better buy than online advertising.
Yahoo! isn't alone. Although it's unusual for a company to do _no_ online advertising, most large online businesses spend _most_ of their advertising dollars _offline_. The Jupiter analyst stated that typically an online business spends 60% of its advertising money on traditional advertising. Some large companies are spending 70% to 80%, some more some less, but most are around 60%.
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What book did ZD Journal's Daily Buzz column describe as "an invaluable resource to better understand how the new 'networked economy' works"? What book did InfoWorld call "a pleasing mixture of practical technical advice and business guidance"?
"The CDnow Story: Rags to Riches on the Internet." Learn how two kids in a basement beat MCI and Tower Records to build the world's largest online music store.
Visit http://TopFloor.com/cdnow/
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Online Transaction Failure Rate
Here's an interesting snippet from a recent edition of _Interactive Week_. On average, only 1.75% of visitors to commerce Web sites actually make a purchase. Furthermore, of three people who begin putting things into a Web site's shopping cart, only one completes the transaction and buys something -- two out of three abandon the transaction.
I've heard similar numbers elsewhere, for quite a while. For eighteen months I've been telling people that a reasonable rule of thumb is 1% of visitors are buyers; for some Web sites the number is higher, for others it's much lower. And I've heard that aborted transactions are very significant (Matt Olim of CDnow told me that way back in 1994 they noticed a significant number of people were putting things into the CDnow shopping cart, and then leaving without buying). I've never seen an actual percentage stated, though -- two out of three seems very high to me.
These numbers are interesting, because they highlight something else that I've mentioned before. That tweaking the numbers very slightly can lead to a huge increase in online sales. For instance, if you're selling something to one person in a hundred, what happens if you tweak something very slightly, if you do something that convinces just one visitor in two hundred to buy something? Well, you've just increased your sales by 50%.
And the large number of aborted transactions says something about how visitors view online sales. I suspect it means that there are still plenty of people who feel a little insecure about the process. To me that says two things. First, that there's a huge group of people who want to buy online, who are a little wary of doing so ... but who will end up buying once they get over their fear. A very good sign for the future of e-commerce. And secondly, it seems to indicate that online merchants need to do everything they can to allay people's fears, to convince potential clients that buying online is safe. (I'll have a few ideas about how to do that in later newsletters.)
Poor Richard's Web Site and Other Top Floor Books
Top Floor Publishing now has three books in print:
Poor Richard's Web Site
http://PoorRichard.com/
Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions
http://PoorRichard.com/promo/
The CDnow Story: Rags to Riches on the Internet
http://TopFloor.com/cdnow/
Order direct from the publisher, and you'll get a 100%, 1-Year Guarantee. If you feel the book wasn't worth the money, send it back for a refund!
And remember, these books are discounted at the Web site, and you pay just one shipping cost regardless of how many books you buy!
Book Reviewers Wanted -- MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution
Do you review books for newspapers, magazines, newsletters (electronic or paper), Web sites, or other media spots? If so, perhaps you'd like to review Top Floor Publishing's latest book, "MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution: Turn Your PC into a CD-Quality Jukebox," due back from the printer any day now. Or perhaps you'd like to review one of the books I mentioned above?
Contact my Marketing Director, Missy Derkacz, at reviews@TopFloor.com. Include your full mailing address, the name of newspaper/magazine/whatever in which the review will appear and the probable date of publication, and the editor's contact information.
Reading Back Issues
If you need to refer to back issues of this newsletter -- and search the archives -- you can find them at the following location:
http://PoorRichard.com/newsltr/
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