• The blog was once on a subdomain of my company, and now has its own domain.
• I started at infrequent posts, then went to 2-3 posts a week, and now am at 5-6 posts per week.
• The topics have changed as my voice has developed and my experience has grown.

I have thought a long time about what the purpose of my writing really is. It does not build my client list, so it’s not for promoting my business. (Although, in all fairness, I rarely promote myself on this site.) It hasn’t produced income for me. It hasn’t opened up new job opportunities. It has introduced me to a lot of really wonderful people that I have been glad to message back and forth with. It has helped me sort thoughts in my head and put them into words in a more focused way. Being responsible for posts on a regular schedule and extras such as the Carnival of the Capitalists has made my writing production more disciplined. So I guess you could say that blogging has been more of a writing exercise or a hobby for me for the past year, rather than an actual job.

This is where I got to the point of advertising. I have been debating advertising for a long time, and the debate had taken a new intensity since rebranding the site on its own. While having additional income for my efforts would be nice, there are many cons to putting ads on my site.

Advertising is a Distraction

Unlike linking to more content which would provide value to my readers, advertisements just take them to a place where they will be sold something. I suppose if these things are of value to them (what small business owner doesn’t need supplies or a computer or search engine services?), then that is not too bad.

Blogging is about Trust

For me, placing ads on my site would require very strict control over the content. I couldn’t use a program like AdSense because with small business content, those scammy work at home ads were bound to pop up. The only way I would feel comfortable hosting advertisers is if I had a strict system for selecting exactly which ads and offers would appear on my site. I would then not have to worry about the trust I have built being destroyed by unscrupulous advertisers. I would not accept things like link-buying or paid content, because without transparency I feel like that erodes trust.

Aesthetics are Important

If I didn’t care what my site looked like, I wouldn’t have paid an artist to design it or hand-code all the templates myself. I see so many blogs out there where advertising has just taken over, and it makes me not want to come back to that site. It is easy to do ads the wrong way, and have your site take a turn for the worse. Recently, on BusinessPundit (not to pick on Rob May, because he has no control over the advertising on that site), there were some talking ads that completely altered the experience of the site, and popups that showed up some time after that. I would want to keep my site as distraction-free as possible to make it a unique viewing experience.

Money Shouldn’t Drive Content

If you read a lot of the stuff put out by those internet marketers, they develop their content based on what will sell. They write posts based on Google popularity, SEO keywording, and other false ways of beefing up traffic. I’d never want to be in that situation, to be writing about what is popular just for the sake of increased advertising traffic. By writing for myself, I get to stay true and honest—to write for writing’s sake.

Evaluating my Peers

There are a lot of people that I respect and content that I value that does have ads, like Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends, Rob May at BusinessPundit, Guy Kawasaki at How to Change the World, and Darren Rowse at Problogger (the advertising juggernaut that teaches other writers to advertise!). There are also others that don’t, like Charles H Green at Trust Matters, Chris Anderson at The Long Tail and, well, Rob May at Coconut Headsets. (It is interesting to note that when he started writing for different reasons than he does at Business Pundit, and while he is writing for himself, the ads became less important.) Looking at their sites helps me decide what I do and don’t like, but it doesn’t help me with outside influence on my decision here.

Being True to Myself

I start out this year 2008 with a mission to never settle for less than 100% quality in everything I do here on Small Business Essentials. I continued this commitment by adding the links feed, extending my site to other platforms like Facebook and Twitter, participating in the business blogosphere, and creating (what I consider) to be original, valuable content. Somehow, the thought of monetizing this site through third part advertising diminishes that in some way. This may be only an internal perception, however—perhaps my own issues with money cloud my judgement of what is real in this case.

Limiting my Options

If I choose to not monetize the site, it makes me more actively seek out other ventures that would be income-producing. In this way, it is enticing to keep this blog as my writing playground and to use other means to expand revenue. (That revenue, then, would go back into funding this little hobby blog of mine.)

The Future of Small Business Essentials

I have decided to try a few hand-selected advertising items for the time being to try it out while I consider if this is really what do to. After about a day of thought on this subject, and as of right now, I am leaning towards removing them again and just continuing to write as I always have. I will give it a few weeks to make this decision though, and if the ads are permanent, I may have to do another site redesign to make them fit better with the site.

Thoughts?

I’d love to hear feedback on the ads as they are now, your blog/monetization strategy, the purpose of writing, or anything else for that matter.

Update

I’ve been contacted by the support department at Akismet, who say they have fixed this problem on their end. I am going to test that theory out today and see if it is true.

In English: I can now share links to quality content from other blogs on my site, and combine those links with my own feed on my Facebook and Twitter profiles. This serves multiple purposes: to add value for my readers, and to increase my reach both through my blog and other social media sites. I will start with an explanation of the whys, and then get into the code in a stepwise fashion.

Purpose, Goals and Reasons

Why would you want to republish a feed? I’ve heard the argument that publishing partial feeds or not publishing your feed encourages people to read it from your site and therefore increases your pageviews. In my experience, the opposite is true—syndicating your content gives you a greater reach, increases your subscribers and your pageviews, and creates new sources of traffic for your site that did not exist before.

My purpose in creating a links feed was to create another source of value for my readers, and to reward other authors creating good content with an additional source of traffic by tapping into my audience. I wanted this particular content—the links feed—to be separate from my regular content unless I was discussing it further, because simple links are not the kind of content my readers have come to expect from me.

As for Facebook and Twitter, I am still trying to use these platforms as a source of developing business relationships. I think that republishing my feed is a good way to increase my reach and continue on with my quest of making business contacts through social media.

If you are interested so far but I lose those of you who are business- but not technology-savy with the code section below, just remember—I’m for hire! ;-)

Creating a Links Feed

1. Enter content using a new post, a new category, and custom fields.

To start, you need something to work with, so you’ll need to make a new post. I made a new category called "Links", with a slug of "links", and put my post in that. The post was relatively simple, following this format:
Post Title [link]
<p><a href=”url”>Title of Post being Linked To</a></p>

I added the designation of [link] to all the article titles for the benefit of the Facebook feed below.

To this post, I added custom fields in WordPress using the Custom Fields section in the bottom of the post editing page. For the key "link_desc&quot:, I put a short description of the article; for the key "link_title", I put the name of the article I was linking to; and for the key "link_url", I put the url of the linked article.

2. Create code to appear in sidebar.

Some people use the sidebar.php template that comes with WordPress and call it with get_sidebar(); I put my sidebars in my header file because I have more than one and call them with get_header(). Regardless of how you have your formatting set up, you will have to find the place where your sidebars appear in order to insert the following code:

<ul>
<li><a href="FEEDURL">Subscribe to the Links Feed</a></li>
<?php $my_query = new WP_Query(’category_id=CATID&showposts=NUMBEROFPOSTS’); while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>
<?php if (in_category(’CATID’)) : ?>
<li><a href="<?php echo post_custom(’link_url’); ?>"><?php echo post_custom(’link_title’); ?></a><br />
<?php echo post_custom(’link_desc’); ?>
<?php if (post_custom(’link_addl’)==’yes’) : ?><br /><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">Additional Discussion</a><?php endif; ?></li>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

For this, you will need the category number (CATID in above code) for your links feed, which you can find in your WordPress admin in Manage -> Categories. (The ID is listed in the left column.) You will also need to know how many posts you want to display (NUMBEROFPOSTS) and the URL for your new feed (FEEDURL) which we will create and insert here in a later step.

In English, this code means to make a new query separate from the main Loop, use it to pull the posts from your links category, display them in a loop, and then close it all up.

3. Burn the new feed.

My blog runs on the /topics/ slug for category archives, but yours may run on /category/ or whatever else you put in there. To find the feed for your links archive, click on one of your other archives and look at the url:
http://www.yoursite.com/category/business/ (for example)
and then change the category to links (or whatever you set it to be) and add the feed designation:
http://www.yoursite.com/category/links/feed/
This will be the URL that you will burn into a feed at FeedBurner. What you choose to call it, and what other options you turn on, are up to you.

Take the feed address you just created and it back into the sidebar code at the step before this. You will also need this URL for some of the instructions below.

4. Hide the links feed from the rest of the site.

To keep the links feed off the rest of the site, you will need to do some coding for exclusion. Also, if you have viewed the site since making the sidebar changes, you may notice some funny things going on. We will fix both of those right now.

You will need to alter your index file and archives file. To start, add this line directly under the get_header() command in archive.php and index.php for your current theme, which should make it the second line on each of these pages:
<?php rewind_posts(); ?>
This restarts the post counter which may have been changed by adding a secondary loop into your sidebar.

Next, for The Loop on the index page, take out this:
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?><?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
and add this line:
<?php if (is_home()) query_posts(’cat=-CATID’); while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
where CATID is the links category number you identified above. (Make sure you leave the negative before the CATID!) This will tell WordPress to exclude any post on the front page which contains a post from the links feed.

To complete the archives page, the process is a bit more complicated. I wanted to be able to display the links as an archive if someone clicks on that Category name, but I didn’t want it to display in any other archive. To to this, I opened up archive.php and added the line
<?php if (in_category(’CATID’)) continue; ?>
within The Loop, after the line
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
where CATID is the id number for your links category. This will make the archives skip the posts your links category even if you are viewing archives by tag.

Now, to add the ability to see the links category back in, in case someone wants to view the entire links feed on the web. After the loop but before the footer, add in these lines
<?php if ((is_category()) && (in_category(’CATID’))) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
where CATID is the ID for your links category. Between these lines, add another copy of The Loop, including whatever was inside it. What this does is display an archive of the links category, on it’s own, if that option is chosen. Your final double loop will look like this:
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php if (in_category(’CATID’)) continue; ?>
Do stuff …
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php if ((is_category()) && (in_category(’CATID’))) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
Do same stuff as above …
<?php endwhile; ?><?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
where CATID is the ID for your links category.

Upload your php files in the theme and try it out.

Note: If you have many links, this will greatly shorten the number of posts you see on your archive pages. You can compensate for this by increasing the number of posts per page in the WordPress Admin (Options -> Reading).

5. Correct the original feed to exclude links.

Now that the links have their own feed, I wanted to take them out of the master content feed for the site. To do this, I went to the original feed at Feedburner and selected "Edit Feed Details". I changed the original feed from a URL like
http://www.yoursite.come/feed/
to a URL that would exclude the links category,
http://www.yoursite.come/feed/?cat=-CATID
where CATID is the id of your links category. Note: it is important that you have the "-"before the category ID number, or it will only have posts from that category instead of excluding that category.

You may need to resync one or more of your feeds to get them up with current information during this process. This button is found on the Troubleshootize tab in FeedBurner.

And now, for Facebook …

1. Create a new feed in Feedburner using your base site URL.
2. Turn on tracking options for that feed in the Feedburner settings.

I wanted to create a new feed just for use with Facebook. This lets me set Facebook-only parameters, and lets me track the usage of my feed from Facebook. To do this, I went to my account on Feedburner, and created a new feed using the base URL of my feed. (For WordPress, this base feed URL is http://www.yoursite.com/feed/) I gave it a special name, "Small Business Essentials for Facebook", and gave it a special feed name/URL, "http://feeds.feedburner.com/FacebookSBE".

3. Install Blog RSS Feed Reader into your Facebook profile.
4. Configure the application with the special feed you created for this purpose.

I had originally been using my Google Feed in combination with Feedheads for Facebook, but that only works with Google Reader or NewsGator. To use my own feed, I found Blog RSS Feed Reader.

Bonus Points: Twitter!

I used TwitterFeed to get both the new links feed and my content feed into my Twitter updates. (The OpenID login process for TwitterFeed is kind of a pain though, sorry.) This uses my feed to generate relationships and traffic on Twitter as well.

In Summary

For those of you who are WordPress developers and found this organically through Google, I hope it helps! For those who aren’t developers, I hope this gave you some sense of the things that are possible by combining freely available software to work for you.

Questions?

If I left anything out here and this solution is not working for me, leave me a comment and I’ll see if I can work it out.

Additional Information

• Using Custom Fields in WordPress
• The Loop in WordPress
• Advanced Category Excluder Plugin for those who don’t want to touch php.
]]> http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2008/01/14/new-things-links-feed-wordpress-facebook-twitter-feedburner-and-some-geek-code/feed/ 0 http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2008/01/10/the-joy-of-stumbleupon/ http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2008/01/10/the-joy-of-stumbleupon/#comments Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:00:21 +0000 nhgnikole http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2008/01/11/the-joy-of-stumbleupon/ I have been getting a lot of traffic in the past few weeks from StumbleUpon. I was discussing this with a colleague of mine, and he asked me how I attract traffic from StumbleUpon. The answer is: I don’t. I do my best to write good content, and the links will follow.

It’s not about writing for search engines or links or anything else. You write for people.

If you’d like to learn more about what I mean by that, check out the recently released podcast I did on using content and code to market your website. You can also read the discussion that came out of it.

]]> http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2008/01/10/the-joy-of-stumbleupon/feed/ 0 http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/12/06/launch-faster-12-tips-for-avoiding-web-project-delays/ http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/12/06/launch-faster-12-tips-for-avoiding-web-project-delays/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2007 18:20:43 +0000 nhgnikole http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/12/06/launch-faster-12-tips-for-avoiding-web-project-delays/ It seems like everyone I’ve talked to lately is in the middle of some kind of web development project delay. (We even had an entire thread about it in the StartupNation Community.) I started asking around and thinking about the delays I’ve had or heard about in my own webdev business to figure out why these kinds of delays happen. What I’ve found that if you want your site to be launched several months after you thought it would, do one or more of the following things:
1. Don’t plan anything.
   A website should be thoroughly planned out from the start. When building starts without proper planning, trying to add features to the site while maintaining proper user flow can greatly increase the development time. If you need help with website planning, see the links below.
2. Do It Yourself (DIY).
   Many bootstrapping entrepreneurs follow a similar path: first they make their own site and put it up, then they go with some low-budget company to toss a site together, and finally they find some professionals to help them. If your goal is bootstrapping, that method is fine—but if your goal is getting up to speed quickly, I’d skip the first two steps and go straight to number three.
3. Reinvent Amazon.com with a single programmer.
   Large programming projects often take several programmers to complete them in a reasonable amount of time, so if your budget or resources only allow for one programmer, you can expect lengthy project delays.
4. Insist on a complicated design or backend.
   Web design is not an exact science—sometimes a perfect design will be a bear to get working in all browsers, or a program will crash with a small variation in input. Unforeseen delays do happen, and they need to be accepted and discussed in a realistic fashion. More importantly, good design does not have to be complicated.
5. Change orders frequently.
   Changing the focus of your site, your target market, or your core product line during the development process is a sure-fire way to extend the project timeline.
6. Don’t devote any time to the project.
   Many web startups are done by people with other things going on. If the client and the developer can’t devote their full effort to the project, delays will occur.
7. Don’t make a project timeline.
   Websites are often built in modules—that is, the features are built in a compartmentalized fashion and then rolled out one at a time. This serves three purposes: one, it allows easy project milestones to be made; two, it softens the blow to the support team to not release all new features at once; and three, it allows the team to get the site up faster for marketing and traffic-building purposes because the time between start and launching phase one is shorter than the time to complete all phases. Not releasing features on a timeline delays the site launch and stops all marketing and traffic-building efforts until the site is finished.
8. Call constantly.
   Programming takes focus and concentration. Calling your programmer several times a day cuts into vital programming time. To keep momentum going, use e-mail instead of calling, or set up scheduled times for phone updates and communications.
9. Disagree with your developer when you can.
   When a client and a developer are talking apples and oranges, either the developer has failed to ask the client the right planning questions or the client has failed to give complete answers—or both.
10. Don’t manage your team of contractors.
    When many contractors are coming together on a single project, such as artists, user interface designers, programmers, copywriters and SEO experts, they must all be carefully managed to avoid communication and delivery problems. When one part of the team falls behind the others, the entire project can get delayed.
11. Have no working capital.
    Cash flow problems are the death of any business, but they can be especially troublesome when they happen in the middle of a development project. When change orders and other unplanned issues come up and the client runs out of money, the project will typically stop unless the developer can agree on payment terms. This is especially true for large projects that involve months of programming.
12. Frustrate your team.
    When either the client or the developer doesn’t hold up their end of the agreement, the project usually loses momentum and stalls out. This can take many forms: The client not paying on time, the developer not producing results by milestone dates, or either party not responding to communications in a timely fashion. Micromanaging, over-controlling, and other sinful habits during project by the client are also really great ways to get development to screech to a halt.

Related Links

• 20 Horrible Habits of Clients
• Communicating with Your Development Team
• How to create a great website from Seth Godin
• Planning for a Website (a StartupNation podcast)

Editor’s Note

I’d like to say thanks to Copyblogger for the format of this article—it was a fun writing exercise!

]]> http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/12/06/launch-faster-12-tips-for-avoiding-web-project-delays/feed/ 1 http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/26/feeds-readers-and-providing-value/ http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/26/feeds-readers-and-providing-value/#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:04:25 +0000 nhgnikole http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/26/feeds-readers-and-providing-value/ I really think there’s not enough said about what feeds can do, and what they can do for your business. During the remodel of this site, and the building of two others that I am working on, I have been doing a lot of thinking about feeds and their uses. And now, I’d like to share these thoughts regarding building value and relationships through feeds with you.

Definitions

For the non-geeks:

• feed:
  Web-based content, provided in a stream that can be displayed in many forms.
• full post:
  The entire entry displayed together on one page, as you can see on this page.
• excerpt:
  A snippet of the beginning of a feed entry, usually a certain number of characters long. On the front page of this site, you can see excerpted functionality that is created by manually inserted a break in the beginning of each post.
• feed reader:
  An online or installed program designed to download content from multiple sources.

Full Post or Excerpt?

If you subscribe to this feed using one of the links on the right, you’ll notice that you will always get the full post with your subscription. I use the excerpt function in WordPress for display purposes on the front of this site, but I don’t make people click through to read the rest if they are subscribing in a reader or through e-mail. Why? Well, the simple truth is that I find the practice annoying, and I’d rather provide value than annoy my readers. Consider this: I have, on more than one occasion, refreshed all of my subscribed feeds in my NewsFire feedreader while connected to the internet, and tried to read them offline on BART or in an airport. Every excerpt-only feed didn’t get read because I had free time to read, and yet I couldn’t get the whole post. If this happens enough, I’d probably just delete that feed out of my reader and stop bothering with it.

Need more concrete reasons? How about these:

• Excerpts don’t encourage clickthrough.
  According to Feedburner, excerpts do not drive higher click-throughs. And if you couple that with my feed-deleting annoyance, you’re actually losing readers.
• You don’t need the clickthroughs.
  If your content is advertising-driven, just monetize your feed. Feedburner now supports the AdSense CPC model through their ad network along with their original CPM model, and any traditional ad sales that can be made through a static site can be made through your feed.
• Bandwidth is endless.
  I’ve heard someone argue against full feeds because they say it takes up too much bandwidth. Seriously? It’s text, people! Even your feed with your ad in it takes up less bandwidth than your website, and high speed connections are a business standard.
• Alexa doesn’t matter.
  My other favorite is that decreasing your page views by putting the full post in the feed will drop your Alexa ranking when no one clicks through. Trust me, no one takes Alexa seriously anyway—view your results with a grain of salt.
• Duplicate content sucks.
  I hate searching for something on Google, clicking on a link, and then finding some blog excerpt with a link to the original post. People try to do that to this site all the time, and the pingback off me. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, so don’t do it.

In summary, writing is really about providing value, and including the full post in the feed increases that value to the reader. Value is what builds trust and strong readership, not clickthrough gimmicks. When you work on great content and building relationships, your subscriber levels will build organically along with your inbound links (and therefore your web traffic). So if you want to build trust and readership, put the full posts in your feed!

Feeds as Social Media

I have been using NewsFire for Max OS X for a while now, but I was recently turned on to Google Reader. While NewsFire (and other standalone-type feed applications) has the ability to let me download the feeds and read them offline, using an online program like Google Reader does have the added benefit of social networking. For example, I created a page in Google Reader with my favorite feeds, and then chose to share certain articles via a link on this site. (You can also see those results here.) As a content provider, if you can get influencers to share your articles on their reader pages, they can then spread your content around for you, ads and all!

Additional Resources

• Save Time with Subscriptions
• Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes
• Burning Questions from Feedburner
]]> http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/26/feeds-readers-and-providing-value/feed/ 0 http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/09/lets-talk-about-spam/ http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/09/lets-talk-about-spam/#comments Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:48:32 +0000 nhgnikole http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/09/lets-talk-about-spam/ Today’s post is a montage dedicated to SPAM: what it is, why it’s bad, how to prevent it, how to not send it, and what happens when people just can’t take it anymore. Enjoy!

The Definition of Spam

When most people think of spam, they think of bulk emails with odd subjects, like “Enjoy your wanted meds” and “The most insane action”, but spam can come in many forms: bulk e-mail, unwanted/soliciting e-mail, junk blog comments, forum spam, text messaging from unknown senders, and so on. Simply put, it’s the abuse of electronic media to send other people something that they don’t want.

Spam comes with many costs that most people don’t consider. These costs can include:

• Wasted Time.
  I get several hundred spam messages a day. This means that I spend a significant portion of my workweek dealing with spam instead of actually doing productive work. If you multiply that by everyone else getting the same amount of spam, it adds up to a serious hit to our economy. Additionally, practices like spamming search engines, forums and blogs waste the time of the staff that have to deal with them as well as the people searching for information that have to sort through multiple pages of spam to find what they are looking for.
• Hardware costs.
  On an average day, I get 1-10 spam messages for every legitimate message. This means that my e-mail provider must give me at least 10 times the amount of mail storage capacity that I would require if I wasn’t getting any spam. This concept works across the board—blog and forum spam requires extra server space to handle the increased database load, text messaging spam requires additional infrastructure to handle the load, search engine spam requires additional server farms, and so on.
• Software costs.
  Developing software that can prevent and handle spam is expensive, and it must be updated frequently to stay ahead of the spammers’ capabilities.
• Payroll costs.
  Who handles all this spam? Your employees, from your IT staff right down to every user on your network who deletes spam messages from their inbox on company time.
• Theft losses.
  Malicious spam, usually in the form of phishing scams, is responsible for personal losses such as credit card fraud and identity theft. These personal losses also work on a corporate level for the fraud teams that handle these kinds of cases at banks, credit card companies, and other financial institutions.
• Legal fees.
  The cost of fighting spam through legal means, both criminal and civil, is paid both by private companies and taxpayers. Our government spends both time and money fighting spam that could be allocated to other resources.

The bottom line is this: Spam costs us all! So what can we do to prevent it and fight it?

Anti-Spam Technology

After updating and relaunching this site, I began to receive numerous spam comments on my posts. To combat this, I installed a piece of software based on CAPTCHA technology. The idea behind CAPTCHA is to use a simple task to tell a computer and a human apart. For the most part with blogs, humans are legitimate posters, and computers are automated spamming devices. I am using a piece of code called reCAPTCHA, which fights spam while also digitizing printed material! (I don’t have space to explain this here, so check out the link—it’s pretty cool.)

For your e-mail, many programs contain spam filtering. I use gmail for my e-mail servers, which does a pretty good job of spam filtering. The real problem with spam filters, however, is not the ones the filter misses that get through—it’s the accidental legitimate e-mails that the filter catches. I found that out a while back when I got PM from Rich Sloan in the StartupNation Community, asking me why I wasn’t responding to his e-mails. Apparently Google decided he was a spammer for a few weeks and was filtering out his e-mails! (I told gmail to mark them as not spam and it seemed to resolve itself, so the technology can learn.)

How to NOT SPAM Anyone, Ever

This blog uses FeedBurner to distribute posts in a newsletter-like fashion. To get on this list, you must sign yourself up and confirm your subscription. I use this same technology for a lot of my clients, and I can’t tell you how many have asked how to import their mailing lists into FeedBurner. The answer is this: You can’t. This is opt-in technology. Your users have to sign themselves up—you can’t just toss them on your list. This is the way it should be! Here are a few of my tips on how to not become a spammer yourself:

• Don’t purchase lists, and don’t sell your list.
  Building a list from the ground up is time-consuming but it is just a fact of life for businesses these days. Purchasing a list guarantees that you will end up sending unwanted advertisements to people who did not ask to be on your list. EVEN IF this practice is somewhat effective for you because 10% of this list buys from you, you have just spammed the other 90% of the people. (Refer to the costs above and quit being so selfish!) The only exception to this rule is if you are submitting material to an already-established list whose readers have chosen to receive information from you. An example of this is an opt-in list which asks its users if they would like to receive information from related 3rd party companies.
• Only send e-mail to people who expect it.
  The worst offense is people who send large attachments to unsuspecting victims. If you don’t know who the e-mail should go to at a company, or if they will be interested in your business/product/pitch/information, do your research or pick up the phone and ask!
• Don’t spam your friends.
  When clients of mine launch a new company, they often have a list of family, friends, former colleague and business associates that they want to tell. Go ahead and group your contacts and send each group a tailored message about your launch, but you only get to do it ONCE. After that, they can sign up for your newsletter or updates if they want to. (Encourage signing up by making it easy and giving them a valuable reason to do so.) If they don’t sign up, let it go.

For more tips, see the resources section below.

When SPAM Pushes You Over the Edge

To end this article on a slightly funny note, I think it’s worth mentioning a few recent extreme spam-fighting measures.

Our first comes from Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, who got so fed up with spam that he decided to post a long list of people who have recently spammed him. The even longer discussion in the comments that follow is just priceless.

Our second link comes from a guy who was unfortunately given a very common name. So common, in fact, that he’s been privy to way too much information about other people. Read about it in Return to Sender.

Additional Resources

• Nine ways to combat spam
  Note: Writing your email as "name [AT] domain [DOT] com" really doesn’t work anymore. The automated e-mail harvesters have wised up to that practice.
• Best Practices to Help Prevent Spam
  with Microsoft Outlook
• Security and privacy 101: how to prevent spam
  from HP
• WordPress SPAM Tools
• Preventing Comment Spam
  from Google
• Proper Usage of Forums, Blogs and Mailing Lists,
  part of my 5 Steps to Marketing Your Website series at StartupNation
• Preventing spam on your website without using captcha
]]> http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/09/lets-talk-about-spam/feed/ 3 http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/06/amazoncom-redid-their-site/ http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/06/amazoncom-redid-their-site/#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:48:54 +0000 nhgnikole http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/06/amazoncom-redid-their-site/ I owe a lot to Amazon.com; back in the mid-90s, when I had just entered college in the middle of nowhere, Amazon fueled my entrepreneurial spirit by providing me with all the content I needed to learn my craft. (These were the days before the entire documentation for languages like PHP and CSS could be found online.) In fact, I bought so many books that Amazon sent me Christmas gifts each year with a letter from Jeff Bezos himself.

Since then, Amazon has grown considerably and still remains my favorite shopping destination online. Why? Because they do something right. From their package tracking and speedy delivery, to their excellent customer service, they just "get it right". This is why I was so pleased to discover that Amazon has redone their site in order to help their users navigate more efficiently through the massive amount of products that Amazon now carries.

Now, most people would just look at the front page and think "oh", not realizing how it is different in many fundamental ways. To illustrate this, you can view today’s Amazon in one window, and compare it with 1998’s Amazon or early 2007’s Amazon in another window. To demonstrate what has been changed and why this is important, I give you this list:

• Graphical Header.
  From the top, you’ll notice that they condensed their header into something more visually pleasing using illustrations. This gives the site a feeling of warmth instead of the sterile feeling of the solid header they had before. More comfort equates to more trust and more buyers.
• The "ME ME ME" Factor.
  All of the Amazon personalization features are now located right at the top, which gives you one-click access to everything that makes this store your own. This gives shoppers the feeling that the store is personally catering to them, even though it is all automated programming. Additionally, having easy-access wishlists creates additional purchases by reminding customers of important dates and making purchasing for others fast and convenient. (No guessing what your best friend or Uncle Harry wants for their birthdays!)
• Condensed Department List.
  As I always say, if you give someone 100 choices, they will choose none. If you give them a few, they will pick one. By condensing the department listing menu, Amazon has reduced their previous clutter and made navigation less overwhelming for the users. The ability to browse is an important one: A searcher who is looking for something specific will usually only purchase that item. Someone browsing a store will be more likely to purchase more. It is the same principle that a brick and mortar store uses in creating end-cap displays and by placing candy and magazines by the register.

What do you think about the new design?

]]> http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/06/amazoncom-redid-their-site/feed/ 0 http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/01/tracking-clicks-from-craigslist/ http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/01/tracking-clicks-from-craigslist/#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:49:12 +0000 nhgnikole http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/01/tracking-clicks-from-craigslist/ As Craigslist does not provide information on page views or clicks, I have devised a few methods to determine how many clicks come from a particular ad. Some of these require programming knowledge and some do not, but all are good for tracking your campaigns.

How You Can Track Campaigns

These same methods can be used with any link campaign which is not hosted on your own site and which you are not able to see the statistics for:

• Use Referring Pages (easy)
  Install Google Analytics on your site according to their instructions. In your analytics dashboard, click on "Traffic Sources" and then "Referring Sites". In the listing of referring sites, click on "craigslist.org" (or whatever site you are getting traffic from) and you will get a listing of what pages the clicks are coming from. If you don’t see the site you are looking for on the list, it means you have not received any clicks from that site.
• Use Landing Pages and Stats (medium)
  Set up a special landing page for your campaign that will only be used for that campaign, like
  http://www.yoursite.com/craigslist-ad-0237485.html
  In your ad, link to that page. Then use your site’s stats program to see how many people landed on that page.
• Use Databases and PHP (hard)
  Set up a database to collect hit counts on your server. (I’m not going to explain how to do that here, so if you need help, you’ll have to consult a pro.) Using PHP or another programming language, write a script that will add a count in the database every time someone hits your front page based on a campaign number. Then, when you create your add, append that campaign number to your URL in the ad. For example, your URL might look like
  http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?campaign=20
  and that would put a line in your database that said one hit from campaign number 20.

Tracking page views for your ad is a little more tricky. If you’d like to track page views, I suggest making an image that only appears in one ad at a time, even if it is just a 1px by 1px invisible gif. Link that image from your site in your ad, and then you can use your web hosting server’s logs to determine how many times that one file was downloaded. This will give you an approximate number of page views for your ad.

Why You Should Track Campaigns

Tracking your campaign has many benefits, including:

• Testing Content
  You can set up multiple pages with variations on wording to see which type of ad gets the most clicks and determine the most effective wording.
• Tracking Campaign Effectiveness
  Putting up and monitoring ads takes time and effort, so it’s important to know which ads and advertising sources are worth your time.
]]> http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/11/01/tracking-clicks-from-craigslist/feed/ 0 http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/10/31/transparency-and-analytics/ http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/10/31/transparency-and-analytics/#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2007 07:17:03 +0000 nhgnikole http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/10/31/transparency-and-analytics/ As I was reading the post Ten Questions with Compete on Guy Kawasaki’s blog, I was reminded of a recent conversation I had on StartupNation with a designer named Paula about what kind of site information is proprietary, and if website traffic data should be considered proprietary information.

To get to the point, Compete collects information from web users and gives it away for free. It basically estimates the traffic information for comparative purposes in a more detailed fashion than Alexa, and displays this information for free on its website. But why should we go through the trouble? Why not give away the actual data as well?

For example, a lot of people use Google’s free analytics service. What if Google started compiling all that data and offering it up Alexa/Compete-style? Then these types of comparisons could be made with real-world data, not just data created using statistics and samples. Personally, I wouldn’t mind if my real Google data was used in this way. The benefits of such a system could include:

• Making the data available to other sites and startups for real-world traffic estimation.
• Letting advertisers research your traffic and visitor profiles to decide if they want to purchase advertising space.
• Giving advertisers accurate comparisons to assess fair CPM rates.
• Insuring investors as to the health of the company.
• Creating an open dialogue and truthful communication in the internet community—how refreshing!

What do I have to hide? But maybe I am missing something here and there is some benefit to protecting that kind of data—something other than covering up your failures from your investors and your advertisers, of course. So what do my readers say on this? Would you mind if your real data was being served up Alexa style? Or do you consider that information to be proprietary, so it should be kept protected? What are the pros and cons of making such information available to all?

For anyone interested in the Compete service, I found it very cool—but you can try their free Site Analytics for yourself.

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