Poor Richard 32
#032/06-Aug-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/
28,000 Subscribers in More Than 100 Countries!
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------------------------------------------------------------IN THIS ISSUE
- Beginner's Column: The 10 Great Myths of Internet Marketing
- More Uses for MP3
- A Recommend-It Winner, and More Results
- Graffiti on Your Web Site
- Stock Market Tumbles on PR Web Site News Predictions
- 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 10 Great Myths of Internet Marketing
By Linda Cox J.A.M.G. (Just Another Marketing Guru)
I recently discovered the work of Linda Cox. Some of it is very funny (I hope to be able to bring you one of her more humorous articles soon). Some of it's just plain good advice. And some seems to be a bit of both. Here are Linda's Ten Great Myths of Internet Marketing.
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Greetings...
For the purpose of illustration, let's use the superhighway analogy. Let's think of your business as a hotdog stand located on the superhighway along with millions of other shops, malls, cafes, stores, restaurants and, yes, hotdog stands.
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GREAT MYTH 1: Free Sells
So your hotdog stand offers something for free... what?
Napkins? Great. Wow. Excellent. But remember, sell the sizzle, not the steak! So what excites you most about the napkins?
Are they printed with horoscopes? Are they recyclable? Extra absorbent? Two ply? Then say so!
But remember that your freebie is kinda lame and everybody kinda knows it and nobody is really forking over actual cash out of gratitude for free napkins.
MORAL: Free is highly over-rated.
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GREAT MYTH 2: All Traffic is Good Traffic
It would be more accurate to say that MOST traffic is POTENTIALLY good.
If you have a hotdog stand, virtually anyone can be converted to a customer, whether they came for your ridiculously excellent napkins, clean washrooms, or snappy banter.
But, if you sell '82 LeSabre windshield wiper screws, then you might want to be a little more targeted in your efforts.
MORAL: Focus. Focus. Focus.
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GREAT MYTH 3: All Businesses Should Be On the Net
The best advice I've ever given as an internet marketer was "Stay off the net."
Nobody listens, of course. They know that the internet is the fabled El Dorado where the rivers run gold and cash is common as dust-bunnies.
(Maybe the local bait shop owner just thought I wanted it all for myself.)
MORAL: Leap before you look, quoth the lemming.
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GREAT MYTH 4: Drive Your Hit Counters Insane!
Hit counters don't actually go insane... netrepreneurs do. If you want your hit counter to go insane, tell it about your childhood.
Any traffic generating trick that works will stop working next week when everyone is doing it and no one is falling for it.
MORAL: Tricks are for dogs.
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GREAT MYTH 5: The Great Marketing Secret!
Oxymoron.
In any type of marketing, if it's a secret, it's a failure... definitively.
MORAL: Stick to basics.
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GREAT MYTH 6: It's Come As You Are
It's okay to work in your underwear in your partially remodeled basement as long as everyone assumes you're wearing a suit in a high-rise on Success Avenue.
It's NOT okay to broadcast your slovenly habits to the world at large via ill-formatted email, poor spelling, sloppy grammar and inept punctuation.
If every second line of your email breaks after the first word, we're done.
You see, if I'm gonna buy a hotdog from you--a scary prospect at best--I wanna be pretty dang sure you're not a shortcut kinda guy, know what I mean?
MORAL: Don't slouch.
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GREAT MYTH 7: There's No Such Thing As Excess
There is.
Caps. Exclamation points. Red. Hyperbole. Blinking... (actually, ANY blinking is excessive).
MORAL: It's a hotdog, not the second coming. Settle down.
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GREAT MYTH 8: Banners Work
Banners should only be used by big companies for branding and for hyperinflating IPO prices, not by hotdog stands for traffic generation.
MORAL: Banners suck. Free banners suck for free.
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GREAT MYTH 9: Get Rich Quick
The internet is still real life. Cyber doesn't mean fantasy. WWW doesn't stand for Whatever We Want.
Set up an honest business, cook a decent hotdog, pay for advertising and don't quit your day job just yet.
MORAL: Get rich slowly.
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GREAT MYTH 10: Free Marketing
I saved this point for last to emphasize it.
Overfondness for free marketing methods is the number one killer of happy success stories on the net...
But wait!
You CAN send 100,000 spam-free emails a month with your own free-for-all links page, right?
And you CAN reach tens of thousands with multisubmitters and free classifieds, right?
And you CAN email millions by subscribing to hundreds of opt-in group lists, right?
And 94 million netizens WOULD swallow a little spam to get to one of your hotdogs, right?
Sure! And you CAN eat out of dumpsters, right?
MORAL: Uh... don't be an idiot?
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Linda Cox (J.A.M.G.) was actually a real-world corporate marketer for many years before going on the net without a net. Now she's Just Another Marketing Guru. Write to her at: Linda@LindaCox.com
Visit http://www.LindaCox.com/ for more articles and the obligatory free ezine.
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****sponsor****************************************************More Uses for MP3
MP3 just keeps chugging along. The music business is trying to find an alternative, such as LiquidAudio or A2B, but nothing matches MP3. MP3 is just so _open_, that it's going to be hard for the music business to convince us we should be using something else. MP3 has only the most basic of restrictions -- in order to play an MP3 track, you need an MP3 player. While the other digital-music formats have all sorts of restrictions, such as timeouts and limits on the transfer of tracks between computers.
Real MP3 players are coming to the hardware world, too. Not just little players, such as Rio, that store a few minutes of MP3 tracks on a memory card, but players that will play MP3 tracks stored on a CD. A company called NetDrives recently introduced a machine called Brujo, which they claim is the first instrument that will play both audio and MP3 CDs. (Brujo, by the way, is Spanish for witch, or, to be more precise perhaps, warlock.) While an audio CD can hold 74 minutes of music (though most music CDs are generally around 30 - 45 minutes), an MP3 CD can hold over 600 minutes. In other words you could copy music from perhaps as many as twenty music CDs, convert it to MP3, then save it all on a single CD.
But, to get to the point ... it's not just music. As MP3 proliferates, and as more and more people have MP3 software players available, using MP3 for a variety of purposes becomes more practical. (Incidentally, most Windows users now have MP3 players, though they may not realize it -- Windows Media Player can play MP3 tracks).
A lot of comedians now use MP3 to promote themselves. Selling poetry books? You could have the poets read their work. Selling tapes of speeches? Put excerpts into MP3 format. You might tape customer testimonials for your products, and use MP3 to allow prospective customers to hear them. There are lots of ways to use MP3, and at just 1MB for every minute of sound, it's a relatively efficient way to put sound online. (If you're working with voice, rather than music, you can create smaller files.)
Check out the table of contents for "MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution," published by Top Floor Publishing: http://TopFloor.com/mp3/
The book, by John Hedtke, explains everything you need to know to create MP3 files. It doesn't have to be complicated or expensive to add these things to your Web site.
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****sponsor****************************************************A Recommend-It Winner, and More Results
In the last issue I discussed the Recommend-It system I'm using at the top of this newsletter. Well, I'm happy to announce that one of my subscribers did in fact win a Palm Pilot! I received e-mail last week from the winner. I don't know how many Palm Pilots Recommend-It gives away, but this winner was one of just a few hundred of my subscribers who used the Recommend-It system.
Speaking of which, here are the latest figures. The following shows the number of Recommend-It e-mails sent, during the week beginning on the specified date, from my subscribers to their friends or colleagues (a single subscribers may send the message to multiple recipients, so I'm not sure how many subscribers this represents):
- 7/11/99: 145 [The first time the Palm Pilot ad appeared in the newsletter, going to around 26,000 people]
- 7/18/99: 17
- 7/25/99: 297 [The second time the ad appeared, and I discussed the system in the body of the newsletter]
- 8/1/99: 6
As you can see, the numbers are not huge. But then, they don't really cost me anything. It would be nice to know how many of the recipients actually subscribed to the newsletter, but that's information I don't have!
You can use Recommend-It to send a message about this newsletter (and perhaps win a Palm Pilot) here: http://www.recommend-it.com/l.z.e?s=141385
Graffiti on Your Web Site
I've written before about the importance of knowing what people are saying about your company and products, and the various tools you can use to "listen in." Well, there's a new phenomenon blossoming on the Web, a new way for people to talk about you ... right at your Web site. There are now several tools that can be used for posting notes about your site, your company, and your products, and in some cases even insert those notes into your Web pages. And the notes are probably invisible to you.
Here's how it works. You install a special program -- let's call it a graffiti program (or annotation program, if you prefer to be a little less negative about these things). Then you start moving around the Web, visiting Web sites. Each time you open a Web page, the graffiti program sends the URL to a program running on a server owned by the graffiti-program company. The server looks up the URL in its database, and sees if it can find any information. If it finds something, it sends it back to your computer. What is actually done with that information depends on the system you're using. In the case of Third Voice, perhaps the most publicized of these systems, a little note icon is placed inside the Web page in your browser. If you click on that icon, a note box pops up with text that was placed there by another Third Voice user!
Did I make that clear enough? If you're using this particular program, you may see little icons in the Web page, placed there not by the Web-site owner or designer, but by someone using Third Voice. And when you click on those icons a note, provided not by the Web-site owner or designer, but by someone using Third Voice, will appear in your browser. To put that yet another way, it means that a Web site -- perhaps _your_ Web site_ can contain information posted on the site without the knowledge of the Web-site owner. The notes are completely invisible ... unless you're using the correct software.
That information can be relatively innocuous. It may be a note on a site related to, say, Ford Mustangs, offering an old Mustang for sale. (Of course the site owner may not want people using the site as a kind of For Sale bulletin board.) It might be complimentary, a note saying how useful the site is and telling people not to miss a particular area of the site. Of course, it might be something very critical, derogatory, or downright slanderous. (Install Third Voice and then visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/ and see what I mean.)
Someone told me recently that these tools will never last -- that the publishers are going to get sued for slander by site owners. I'm not so sure, though. Strictly speaking nothing is being placed on the Web site -- the HTML code of the Web site is not being touched at source, it's being modified when the site is displayed in the browser, and only under certain conditions: if the viewer requests, in effect, notes from the server. It's rather like someone buying a book, then passing it around friends and colleagues and allowing them to write notes in the margins.
Furthermore, I think there are precedents that will protect the software publishers. It's generally accepted now that online services such as AOL and CompuServe, for instance, are not held accountable for the comments of their members posted to discussion groups and chat rooms. The online services are merely providing a forum for people, and are no more responsible for what those people say than the phone companies are responsible for what people say over telephone lines. (Maybe that's an exaggeration. There are certain issues to consider, such as whether the online service censors or edits speech in the forums for instance.)
I think these tools are here to stay. Right now they're not a big problem for Web-site owners, because very few people know these things exist, and fewer still use them. They could easily become so, though. On the other hand, it might be argued that if you've nothing to hide, and if you are acting in an honest and reputable manner, then they can't really do you harm. More than that, if you are providing genuine value through your Web site, they could even become another great promotional tool, a way for your fans to sing your praises!
Right now there are several of these systems. I've tried a couple, Third Voice and Odigo. Third Voice's installation documentation is incorrect, an error of omission -- it says that once you download and install the program (which for the moment only works in Internet Explorer, though a Netscape version is due soon), Third Voice will automatically open in a frame on the left side of the browser window. What they don't say (or realize, perhaps), is that if another program has installed its own icon on the IE toolbar (as, for instance, Real Audio does now), Third Voice may not work. You can fix it by selecting View|Toolbars|Customize and removing the other icon. Once you've got the program running it's really quite easy to use.
As for Odigo, the documentation leaves much to be desired. I could figure out how to post a note at a site, but the documentation doesn't explain how another user finds out that I've set a note at the site (I could have experimented to find out, but wasn't willing to spend the time, as it appeared that I'd have to set up another account and come back to the site as that other user.)
Note also that these programs are intended for more than just leaving notes. Odigo, for instance, allows you to see what other Odigo users are currently at the site, and to start chat sessions with those people. Or you can search for other users at any site, or a specified type of site. And some of these systems may not allow you to actually post notes (I haven't checked all of them). Some tools are designed for collaborative surfing -- Gooey, for instance, allows visitors to a particular Web site to chat together about site.
Here are a few of these systems:
Third Voice: http://www.ThirdVoice.com/
Odigo: http://www.odigo.com/
Gooey: http://www.getgooey.com/
Utok: http://www.utok.com/
Feedback Request:
- If you know of any more of these systems, e-mail me and I'll mention them in the next issue.
- If you load one of these systems, and find notes at _your_ Web site, notes you had no idea were there, let me know!
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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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Stock Market Tumbles on PR Web Site News Predictions
In the last issue I discussed the valuation of Internet stocks, and pointed out that even the open market has decided that Internet stocks are sometimes way overvalued. (Specifically that PointCast dropped from an offer of $450m in 1997 to an actual sale for between $7m and $10m a few weeks ago.)
The market took my words to heart, and last week we saw serious drops in the valuation of public Internet stocks. Clearly Poor Richard's Web Site News is more influential than I'd ever realized! You never know what you'll learn in the electronic pages of Poor Richard's Web Site News, so keep reading ...
Poor Richard's Web Site and Other Top Floor Books
Top Floor Publishing now has four 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/
MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution: Turn Your PC into a CD-Quality Jukebox
http://TopFloor.com/mp3/
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." 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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