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Antion & Associates
tom@antion.com
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December 2002

Print and Go

Here is the entire ezine for you to print and take with you. Simply print this entire web page by using your "File/print" command. All of this month's articles are included and there is plenty of room in the margins for notes

Website Technique
Navigation

Having a poor navigation system was one of the biggest mistakes I made with my website when I first started. I had six-teen main navigation buttons plus many sub navigation buttons. . . .way to many to be effective.

You really need to think about the type of person who is your targeted visitor and what he/she would be looking for. You can have several different types of visitors, but more than a couple means you should have more than one website so that each site can be more targeted. This is more necessary than ever in our increasingly competitive web environment.

Global Navigation
Try to keep your main navigation buttons to an absolute minimum. The more of them you have the more you will confuse your visitor. Keep them the same on each page of your site so that the visitor always feels like he/she can get to the main areas of interest quickly. Also, having the main buttons on every page makes the visitor more comfortable because they never feel lost. These buttons are referred to as your "Global Navigation" Buttons.

Sub Navigation
Once you get a visitor to one of their main areas of interest on your site you can have more targeted and content specific buttons taking them deeper into your site. The mistake I made was to try to put all these Sub Navigation buttons along with my Global Navigation buttons. I wanted to make sure no one would miss anything and in my efforts to do that I made absolutely sure that everyone would miss everything because there was too much to pick from.

I see this scenario over and over again on websites of my students who are trying to act like Yahoo! and be everything to everybody. As I always say, "Yahoo! has enough money to advertise on every bus in America and you don't, so don't try to be like them."

Check your site
Yes, I know it will be a royal pain to redo your site after you have put 32 navigation buttons on it, but you want to chance to make money don't you?

Before you even look at your site, determine the one or two profiles of the types of visitor you want to attract, then make global navigation buttons that will specifically suit them. If you come up with ten different types of visitors, either you are unrealistic or you need about five more websites.

The biggest lesson I ever ignored was when people told me not to try to be all things to all people. My pigheadedness kept me from being rich at a much earlier age. I haven't made that mistake since and my bank account is happy that I haven't..

Traffic Generation Technique
Postcards

Using postcards is an effective way to get targeted traffic to your site and it is especially effective in converting your snail mail database to and email database.

Use see 'em in your mail box all the time. Small postcards and oversize ones too. The reason is that they are relatively inexpensive to print and mail as compared to regular direct mail pieces that require much, more printing, stuffing, and postage.

Post cards generally get more attention than full blown direct mail pieces. This doesn't mean that they get lots of attention. It just means that a recipient can generally assess what the post card is about quickly. Many direct mail pieces never even get opened, so by definition any attention is more attention.

If your database is small, you can enormously increase the attention your mailing gets by handwriting the note and / or address on the reverse side of the post card. Yes, I know this is a giant pain in the fingers, but your overall response will be MUCH greater. Hey what are you doing the mailing for in the first place? To get response, right? When someone gets a postcard with the mailing address printed on it and the postage machine-printed it negates the personal feel of the post card. Some companies are using fonts that look like handwriting to overcome this drawback.

Direct mail marketers study response rates like crazy, so if they tell you something, you can pretty much believe it. One thing they say is that putting regular stamps on a mailing will get you a better response, so do it.

Web Cards
One use of post cards that will save you lots of design expense is to put a picture of your website on the main graphic side of the post card. There are companies that will do this for you automatically. Here's a link to a company that will do it for you. (I've given you a link to the page where they give you extra ideas on how to use your web cards) http://www.web-cards.com/top10.asp

The Message Side
You can use the message side of the postcard to give the recipient an incentive to visit your site/sign up for your ezine. You could say something like,

"15% off your first order, just for trying out our new ezine"

or

"Free consultation if you register at our site."

The whole idea, besides getting traffic and maybe a direct sale is to get the person to leave their email address. I think this is infinitely more important than getting them to buy something on the visit stimulated by the post card because once you get that email address, you can reach the person over and over again for free. No printing. No mailing, No postage. No design work.

Here's a link to a great course by Alex Mandossian that will teach you everything you need to know and give you lots more ideas.

http://www.marketingwithpostcards.com

Product Development Technique
"Best Of" Products

"Best Of" products are really easy to produce because the really hard work of creating the individual products in the first place has already been done. You simply repackage the work.

I'm in the process right now of creating several "Best Of" products. The first one I'm creating comes from all the work I've done over the past 4 years publishing "Great Speaking" Ezine. I'll get at least five new products out of this. Each product will be based on one of the regular four sections of the ezine and the fifth product will be a package deal with all the sections included.

Here are the products I'll get from "Great Speaking":

  • The Best of "Great Speaking" Quick Tips

  • The Best of "Great Speaking" Advanced Tips

  • The Best of "Great Speaking" Humor Tips

  • The Best of "Great Speaking" Marketing Tips

  • Get em all  for one special price!

I'll get even more products from the many audio tapes I have.

I haven't even figured out all the combinations I can do yet, but here is a brief stab at it:

  • The Best of Tom Antion's Media Marketing

  • The Best of Tom Antion's Speaking Tips

  • The Best of Tom Antion's Internet Marketing Tips

and it can go on and on.

Then I can make the best of my Ebooks, CDs etc. This could go on all next year if I wanted it to.

The idea here falls back into my regular product strategy. Keep producing products that sell on their own and then bundle them together in different ways to keep them alive and fresh and cranking income for you.

Email Technique
Offers

If you want to maximize your return from email marketing, offer one thing and one thing only.

When you make multiple offers you dilute the value of each of the offers you are making. You also confuse the potential customer. . . . When people are confused they vote NO.

Let�s say you are promoting a new tape album. It�s not a good idea to send a broadcast email to your list that says,

�Check Out Our New Tape Album and don�t forget all this month we are discounting ebooks by 25%.�

This marketer was undoubtedly fighting internally about the fact that he/she wanted to maximize the return of the emailing. Hold your horses! By doubling the offer, the response will probably be half of what it would have been had the email offered either the New Tape Album OR the 25% offer off multiple ebooks.

You might think that an offer of multiple ebooks is a multiple offer. Not exactly. The offer part of the multiple ebook offer is the 25% discount which is a single offer and should be successful because in the prospect's mind he/she is saying, "WOW! I get 25% off any of the ebooks I want." The offer of "25%" is what is dominant at that point, not the fact that there are multiple ebooks to choose from.

The same thing occurs on a webpage. I had one student make an offer and then right in the middle of the offer he made a pitch for a charity he was running. The response was dismal on both.

So, don't ruin your chances of success by muddying the waters. Make one offer at a time.

Copywriting Technique
How to Write a Strong
Guarantee
by Tom Antion

If you are going to bother having a guarantee at all I suggest using strong language to really make it do its work in increasing sales. Don't be wishy washy about it.

The longer the guarantee the better when it comes to reducing the risk to the customer and increasing sales, but your credit card company may have its own restrictions on the length of your guarantee. Many have a six month limit.

Here are a bunch of terms you can use that will put teeth in your guarantee and make people feel comfortable in ordering. Feel free to mix and match:

  • Ironclad guarantee

  • Unconditional guarantee

  • Unconditional money-back guarantee

  • Satisfaction guaranteed

  • Lifetime guarantee

  • 30 day no-risk guarantee

  • Try it free for X days and if you're not happy send it back for a complete refund.

  • . . . we will promptly refund every nickel you paid

  • I'll personally refund your money

  • I guarantee that everything you see if truthfully described.

  • We stand behind our products with a full money-back guarantee if you aren't satisfied for any reason.

  • If this product isn't every bit as wonderful as we say it is, simply return it to us for a full refund.

  • No questions asked money-back guarantee

You can put variations of the above phrases into paragraphs like the ones below:

"Everyone says I'm crazy for giving such and awesome guarantee. If you don't think this is the greatest blue widget you've ever seen, return it within 60 days and I'll personally refund every nickel you paid."

"We believe so much in our red gizmo that we're going to let you try it out for 90 days in your home RISK FREE. If you don't like it send it back and we'll even pay the shipping and give you a no questions asked refund."

"Our green whatchamacallits are delivered with no risk to you. Everything you see on this page is truthfully described. Use them for six months. If you don't think they are worth three times what you paid, send them back for a full refund."

Here are some guarantee guidelines:

  • State the time period the guarantee is good for and make it as long as possible relative to your offer.

  • Use strong language

  • Make sure the prospective customer understands that they have no risk.

  • Let them know that there will be no hassles if they return the product.

  • Tell them the reason why you are offering such a great guarantee.

Start cutting out guarantees from all the print advertisements you get and copy all the ones you see on the web. You'll be able to pick out all kinds of great guarantee language by doing this that you can use in your ad copy.

I just completed a two hour audiotape seminar on this topic called
Copywriting 901: The Fast Track to Writing Words that Sell. It is awesome and could make you a thousand times it's cost by learning the above technique and all the other techniques I put on the tape.

Click here to order

Search Engine Tips
Keyword Spamming

There are many tricks that used to work to manipulate the search engines that will get you in big trouble now. Big trouble means your websites will get banned from the engines . . . a fate worse than death when it comes to getting new business on the Internet. At the very least these tricks will guarantee a low ranking for your site.

If you are new to search engine optimization techniques, you may not realize that the things you see in this article are bad. Even worse is if the webmaster helping you with your website does one or more of these techniques on your behalf because they are ill informed and not up to speed on what is currently acceptable. Your site will get banned and all you will get from your poorly trained helper is a pitiful . . . sorry.

I�m talking about �Keyword Spamming� or using keywords on a webpage in a fashion that is deemed unacceptable by the search engines. The following list will most likely either get you banned altogether or virtually guarantee you will never get a high search engine ranking for your pages.

  • Never use the same keyword consecutively over and over again on your webpage or in your metatags, graphics or anywhere on your page. It used to be that the more keywords you had the better . . . not any more.

  • Never make the text on your page the same color or even nearly the same color as the background of the page. In the old days you could do this to make the search engine spiders see many keywords, but the people looking at your page wouldn�t see them.

  • Don�t use extremely small text. You have to really watch this. You can even accidentally violate this rule with a simple copywrite notice at the bottom of your webpages. Don�t allow any really small text on your web pages.

  • Don�t use popular words in your meta areas that have no relationship to the content of your page.

  • Don�t use celebrity names in your meta areas and on your pages in an effort to grab traffic looking for the celebrities. These celebrities can sue you for stealing their traffic.

  • Don�t use brand names unless you have a legitimate reason. Putting the word �Sony� on your page for no reason can get you in hot water.

  • Don�t use the backdoor method of �not� or �just like� to try to steal traffic. This method means that you put a term like �not Sony� or �just like Sony� in your page and meta areas. If you legitimately review Sony products or sell them, then none of this applies.

  • Avoid using keyword laden drop down boxes that have unrelated keywords in an effort to divert traffic from legitimate pages that address those keywords.


Use of these techniques is not only dangerous because it could get you banned from the search engines, but dangerous because it will irritate the visitors you do get that were looking for something else.


The above is an excerpt from Click: The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Marketing for Speakers http://www.antion.com/click.htm

Cool Software and Gadgets

Software
http://popuprotator.com/

http://mastersyndicator.com/ You can see an example of this in our new section on advanced web tips by William Bontrager. All we did was insert one line of code and his tips will be updated every week automatically. (See the Misc. Section)

Gadgets

http://www.lonezone.com/2000/catalog/6915.html Floating Message Clock

http://www.dupont.com/safetyglass/lgn/stories/1004.html Heads up display for your car . . . now you can play fighter pilot in your  minivan

http://www.dinapoliopt.com/computer_glasses.html Clip on lenses that help you see the computer screen with less eye strain.

http://www.mymailstation.com/products/mivo250.html cheap email station when you don't need all the computing power of a laptop.

http://www.irobot.com Vaccuums your floor while you surf the net or play tennis.

http://www.vprmatrix.com Wide screen laptop . . . your DVD movies will look great!

Useful Websites

 

http://www.popuprotator.com/ Rotate your pop up ads to show more boxes to the same people without upsetting them.

http://www.e-zinez.com/ The handbook of Ezine Publishing

http://www.adobe.com/products/tips/acrobat.html Tutorials for making pdf ebooks and optimizing your ebooks for handheld devices

http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/orr/handouts/TW/web/FP.htm Front Page Tutorials

http://www.nailitnow.com.au/word/ Easy Microsoft Word Tutorial

http://oregonstate.edu/aw/tutorials/html/ Simple HTML Tutorial. It comes in handy once in a while for you to know just a smidgen of HTML coding.

http://ezine-swap.com/ Find other ezine publishers that want to swap ads with you.

http://list-news.com/ Email marketing news

http://www.web-source.net/  All kinds of pretty good articles.

Computer / Automation Technique
Sorting
More techniques

I primarily use this technique when sifting through the volumes of emails I receive. It makes it much easier to find and deal with my most important messages.

I use Microsoft Outlook as my main email program, but the same technique works for many other programs whether they are email programs or not.

The simple technique is to click at the top of the column that you want to sort on.

For instance, if I wanted my newest emails to show up at the top of my email inbox, I would click on the top of the date column. Oops what happened? Well if the emails were already sorted with the newest at the top and the oldest at the bottom, and I clicked the top of the column, then the order would reverse. The oldest email would now be at the top and the newest at the bottom. Click on the top of the column again and you reverse the order again. Now the newest are at the top where they belong and the oldest are at the bottom. I find this the most convenient because I don�t have to scroll down to see new emails arrive.

FLAGGED EMAILS
This is the most common way that I use the sort function. I get such a high volume of emails I usually go over them very quickly eliminating the obvious spam. Then I go over the ones that are left and try to notice if any need immediate attention. If they do and it�s a quick answer, I go ahead and answer them immediately. If it�s going to take a more in depth answer, I right click on the email and click on �flag for follow-up.� The rest of the emails I usually drag individually to respective folders that I have already set up. Anytime I want to address the topic of those emails I can simply go to one of those folders and find emails related to that topic.

Now back to the flagged emails. This is where the sort function comes in. By the time I get through 50 or 100 emails I usually have a bunch of flagged emails separated by miscellaneous stuff that I didn�t know what to do with, but wanted to save in case I need to refer to them. I simply click on the sort at the top of the �flag� column. This brings all the flags to the top and I can quickly go through and answer all of them. If I can�t get them all done, I can easily find them again the next time I sort on the flagged column.

You can sort on any of the column, but I hardly ever do. Sorting on the �Subject� column sorts the subject line of the email in alphabetical order. I guess that could be useful, but I can�t think of how or why. You can sort on the �From� column and again, I virtually never bother. Occasionally I sort on the �Attachment� column if I know I�m looking for an email that has one.

I think you�ll find that the method I use above by using flags and sorting will really speed you up when it comes to handling your emails.


Next issue: Using the Find/ Search Function


More automation techniques:

This section will be an ongoing effort to keep you from grabbing your mouse which slows you down, and is bad for your wrist and an area where various shortcuts will be explained. We don't want you typing any more than you have to.

  • You can save yourself typing or copying an extremely long link. When you are in Internet explorer simply drag the "blue e" icon into your email message and the link to the webpage will be there and ready to email.

  • If you have several sites that you will be working with, download each into a new window and then pop back and forth between them using your task bar at the bottom of the screen.

Miscellaneous Stuff You Need to Know

  • When using a laptop on the road it's a good idea to carry the system restore disk you got when you bought the thing and back up CDs of your critical files. This has saved me from major disaster several times.

  • Wi-Fi is a wireless Internet connection being provided by parks, airport lounges, Starbucks and many other public and private places. You can get a cheap card for your computer (some new laptops are already set up for it) and be surfing at high speed, while sipping your Cappuccino. I'm going to use it in my new house to make everywhere including the pool area connected.

  • Windows XP is really taking over. Many sites are showing it to be rapidly overtaking any operating system visiting. I love it and rarely have to reboot anymore even though I push my computer hard all day.

  • While we're talking about XP, know that you can use it's narrator function to get it to read to you.. Click on "Start", "programs" "accessories" "accessibility" "narrator" to try it out.

  • You can purchase the Copywriting Combo which includes 2002 instantly usable headlines at http://www.professionalspeaker.com/catalog.htm Scroll down to "e-books."

  • I use an opitcal mouse which has no mouse ball to get dirty or wear out. It's especially great for traveling because your mouse takes a beating as it's carried around and packed and unpacked. I've never had a mouse failure since I started using the optical one.

  • Beware of cables. I just had a pesky problem that everyone thought was my Internet provider. It turned out to be a cable that was working fine for months, was never moved around (which might break one of the wires) and was not suspect at all. It was the culprit. It just went bad and when I replaced it, everything worked fine. I still can't believe it went bad on it's own, but it did.
     

FEATURE
Advanced Weekly Webmaster Tip from William Bontrager
(you must check in weekly to see each tip because the current tip is replaced each week with the new tip)

 

TRENDS

  • According to BIGresearch 50% of US web surfers experience more than one media at once, i.e., watch television while surfing the web . . . if you are substantial enough to do some TV or cable ads in your market, you can easily cross promote.

  • The Top Five Activities of Americans Online (as a percentage of Internet Users age 3 and above.)

    Email 84%
    Product / Service information search  67.3%
    News / Weather / Sports 61.8%
    Playing Games 42.1%
    Product / Service purchases 39.1%

    Even with only 39% buying, that's a lot of people for you to sell to.

  • According to BURST 19% of Internet users have redeemed a coupon on line and with households making $100,000.00 a year or more 26.6% have redeemed a coupon on line.  . . .The shopping system I handle http://www.kickstartcart.com can handle this all for you automatically.

  • IProspect surveyed 1403 people and found that 78% will abandon a search if they don't fine what they want in the first three pages of search results and 48% expect to find what they want on the first page of search results.  . .  You better get busy making your sites show up high don't you think?

  • DoubleClick reports that Email click through rates are on the rise again after a fall in the second quarter of 2002. Second quarter rates were 4.9% with a rise to 6.1% in the third quarter.  . . .Make sure you get your share and you won't unless you build your email database and send out good information and offers.

  • The US Census Bureau confirms that Business to Consumer ecommerce continues to see solid growth and yet only 1.3 % of business is conducted on line with an expect rise to 8% in the next five years.  . . . I'm thrilled with this news and you should be doing everything within your power to start tapping the online sales now and preparing for a bright future in online sales.

  • http://www.emailsanta.com/ Santa is now get more emails than regular mails

 

End of this issue

You will have to print out the following reference pages separately. They are included in each issue, so there is no need to print them out every time. Do, however, check them frequently because I will put new additions to these pages at the top of each page until the next issue comes out.

Recommended Learning Tools

Search Engine Resources

Suppliers

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