Another way to attract potential customers to your site is to issue press releases. Trade-related sites are always happy to tell their readers about new products. Hobby-related sites are even more interested in publishing stuff which might be of interest to their readers. The same goes for educational sites.

What is a Web Press Release?

The concept of the press release dates back to the early part of last century when newspapers began to get popular and gain a large readership. If you wanted to get something publicised you had three choices:

• You could take out an advertisement - this cost money.
• You could write a letter to the editor and hope that he would consider your letter interesting or controversial enough to publish it. This cost nothing.
• You could send the Editor a letter, not for publication as such, but merely to inform him (they were all “hims” in those days) about an upcoming event, or something that happened or about something new. This also cost nothing, but the editor was under no obligation to do anything about your notification. If the editor found this interesting, he would send a reporter to get the story. This was called a newspaper press release.

Nowadays in our Internet culture the principle is still basically the same, but the concept of the press release has broadened to include sites which are not necessarily newspapers. There are many sites that act as a hub of information for specialist trades and hobbies and that often run a sort of news column in their blogs or on their home pages. There are many bloggers who have immense influence because they have a huge number of readers. But they all need something to write about.

When a new course comes out and is put up on Fundisi.com, we try to find sites that might be interested. For example, when we add a new course to the series on electronics, we notify a large number of electronics related sites that such a course is now available, and that they would be doing their readers a service by telling them about it. Or, to take another example, when we produce a new course on household tips and how-tos, we try to notify all the women’s magazines, whether the medium is electronic (web based) or traditional (print based). A link on a web site pointing to ours is of great value in boosting the search engine ratings.

The watch word here is publicity. It is better to be mentioned in an article than to place an advert because the advert is obviously biased while the article is created according to the editor’s/webmaster’s discretion.

It’s a long hard full-time job.

Yesterday I wrote about how not to build an e-mail Newsletter list. Today, we’ll look at what does work.

The first newsletter that you create would be an introductory one, telling the reader all about your site and what the newsletter would do for them. It should be very carefully written so as to make the reader really want to receive the newsletter. In our case, the content tells the reader about what kind of courses we offer and what they will do for the reader to make his/her life easier. We stress the very low unit cost per course as well as the fact that it doesn’t take hours and hours of reading before you get to the “meat”.

It is vitally important that you inform the first-time recipient of your newsletter of the opt-out possibility. This should be big, bold and unmistakable in the first newsletter. In subsequent newsletters you can relegate the opt-out link to “small print”, but not on the very first one. This inspires trust up-front.

Here’s the Trick

Have just one standard introductory newsletter which you manually and clearly mark with today’s date. This very same letter gets sent to every new person on the list. Personalize this letter as much as possible (within time constraints). Thereafter, slot them in with all the other readers who all receive the same e-mail shot.

Where do you get those valuable e-mail addresses?

• The first method is to send the introductory newsletter to everyone you know on your current list of contacts. Everyone - your customers, past customers, friends, social acquaintances etc. They presumably all know you or about you, so it’s ethical.
• Got a full inbox with good stuff mixed up with junk? Next, you send the introductory newsletter to everyone who e-mails you about anything. Even send a newsletter to someone who has spammed you. Once again, that’s ethical.
• Start a blog. Maybe more than one. Like this one, or maybe like my other blog - Photography by Example. If someone leaves a comment, you’ve got their email address. Modify the introductory newsletter so that it has relevance to the blog, and send them a copy.
• When customers gradually start dribbling onto the site, make sure that after they have browsed around, they need to log-in to browse more. This requires them to initially register and leave a valid e-mail address. On the sign-up form, let them un-tick if they would not like to receive the newsletter.This is what our sign-up form looks like:

Fundisi.com's Sign-up Form

• The next method is to collect everyone’s email address that you meet, and ask them verbally if you might send them a copy of your newsletter. They are unlikely to refuse a personal request. In our case, Fundisi.com is not specialized on any particular topic or profession, so every single person that we meet who has an e-mail address is a potential customer. This last option will only net you local e-mail addresses, but it’s amazing how the word about something good can spread internationally very quickly.
• Promote your newsletter and your site with press releases both on-line and off-line.

Once you have some sort of a list, the next step is to automate the newsletter as much as possible. You should only work manually initially. Here I recommend that you take a look at the services of a company called Aweber Communications. They take over the whole newsletter rigmarole for a very reasonable price, leaving you free to do other non-repetitive work. These guys have really got it together!

The next method of finding customers is to build an e-mail list and to send out regular newsletters. Since most existing and potential customers would not normally return to the Fundisi main site on a regular basis all by themselves, monthly newsletters are an ideal way to keep our customers informed about new courses that have just been published. That way, they get continually reminded about the site and enticed to nibble at new courses. The same principle can apply to your business as well.

Spam and Permissions

Spam is simply defined as unwanted, unasked-for email.  If you send someone a newsletter, it is very important to do this on a permission basis - no one likes unsolicited spam, and some countries have even made spam illegal. In fact, it’s simply discourteous. Don’t even think about it.

But how does one build up such an email list of willing recipients for a newsletter?

By the way, if you are just jumping in to this blog here, please understand that this entire blog details the trials and tribulations that we encountered (and still are encountering) in setting up an e-commerce educational web site from scratch. The purpose of this blog is to help others who are also trying to set up an e-commerce site - pointing out many of the mistakes that we made - and offering hard-won nuggets of useful information. Click here to read the beginning of the story which is documented in the very first posts of this blog. Subsequent posts keep to a “sort of” chronological order, so you need to read from ‘the bottom up’. If possible, I try to blog on this topic each and every weekday.

How to Build an Email Newsletter List from Scratch?

First off, it’s not easy and you have to get creative. It’s the old story of the chicken and the egg - which came first? How does one keep contact with past customers and get new addresses without an existing list to work from?

What doesn’t work IMHO (in my humble opinion)

• There are companies that sell huge databases of e-mail addresses all neatly categorized according to perceived interests and demographics. You could buy such a list and add it to your existing addresses (if any). I don’t believe in this method, because the density of potentially interested people represented by such lists is likely to be very low. In addition, they didn’t give you permission to e-mail them. So I feel this is not really a viable option.
• You can go through trade directories or the telephone yellow pages (like Germany’s braunchenbuch - insert your country’s equivalent) and look up companies who seem to fall into a particular category. This is as bad an option as the previous one.
• You can ask colleagues and even competitors in the same kind of business to share their lists with you. Or you could exchange lists. This is nearly as bad an option as the previous ones.
• You could visit a trade-show and collect business cards from exhibitors. At first glance this seems a better idea, but the problem here is that the e-mail recipient is usually not the person that you spoke to on the trade-show stand. So once again, you are a stranger sending mail without permission. It doesn’t build a respectable image.

Tomorrow, I’ll deal with what works better…

It seems that SEO has changed and matured so much over the last few years that SEO boils down to two major factors these days:

• Text content on the page
• Links

Now what’s all this about links? What is so important about them?

Well, there are two kinds of links -

• Inbound links are where other web sites and blogs have a hyperlink pointing to our site. When these are clicked the browser goes to our site. These links may be in the form of buttons that are supposed to be clicked or (sometimes underlined) text which can be clicked. In either case, a direct pathway is created - a link is established whereby the visitor is directed from someone else’s site to ours.
• Outbound links are the opposite. They point visitors on our site to other interesting or relevant sites. For example, this blog has outbound links in the blogroll suggesting good sites.

As I understand it, Search engines place very little importance to outbound links, and great importance to inbound links provided the content between the two sites is relevant to one another. The more inbound links fundisi.com has, the more importance the search engine attributes to our site and the better the search-engine-results-page ranking.

Many inbound links are an indication of the site’s popularity; search engines like popular sites and therefore rank the site higher; which results in an even higher popularity; which in turn gets an even higher ranking and so on…

So, of huge importance to SEO is getting relevant links to our site from other sites. The more the merrier. However, one caveat… Search engines are not stupid - in fact they are astonishingly clever. If inbound links are not really relevant, the search engines will detect this quickly and discount any advantage. So the quality of those inbound links is important.

So, how do you get quality inbound links?

• By asking the webmaster of a site that bears relevance to yours to place link pointing to your site. If he sees value in doing so, he will organize that link.
• By sending out a press release. The site owner or blog owner may inform his readers with a link in his text about this wonderful new site called fundisi.com that has all these super courses available.
• By contacting the webmaster of a site that would benefit from a mutual backscratching session. In our case, that is very difficult to do because of the relative inflexibility of Fundisi’s main site. However, we could offer a link from this blog for example, and ask for a return link to Fundisi’s main site. It’s a principle of “I’ll link to your site if you link to mine”. This works well provided the search engine detects value in those links.
• By contacting your opposition, and arranging a link swap. This is extremely difficult for us because to the best of my knowledge, Fundisi.com doesn’t have any competition. I have never come across a site that offers our kind of short courses so inexpensively. I challenge you to prove me wrong by replying to this post.  However, other sites that sell more expensive or longer courses would not feel threatened by Fundisi, so a link swap would be mutually quite beneficial.
• You can pay for a link. That’s called placing an advertisement on someone’s site.

This all takes time, and at Fundisi, it’s a full time job!

Although there is much doubt about the exact methods that search engines use to rank sites, the following stuff seems to be valid and should be included on each web page one way or another - mostly in the form of metatags. In our case, this would apply to all the course description pages, since we want these to be the landing pages.

Title

This should be a brief description (5-15 words). We preface all our Titles with the words “Fundisi Learning:”. This title appears in the ribbon at the very top of the browser. It’s important that this title has great relevance to the textual content on the page. Exactly how the search engine evaluates what is a good relevance to the text on the page is one of those deep dark secrets that we site owners are not permitted to know. So it’s trial and error. This title is usually used in the first line of the Search engine result.

Description

This tag is really a more elaborate version of the title and is also often (but not always) used in the subsequent lines of the search engine result.

Text Content

This is the important one. This is not a metatag, but the actual body text itself as well as picture captions, table text, alternate text etc. The search engine spider crawls through the first few hundred text words, and tries to extract informational value for a search result. Relevance to the Title metatag is paramount.

Don’t forget: Any text that is of a graphical nature and not actually text is useless and cannot be seen or evaluated by the search engine.

Headings

Text formatted with the ‘heading’ HTML tags is assigned greater importance than just paragraph text provided it has relevance to the title and description metatags.

Keywords

A keyword metatag list used to be extremely important but my understanding is that nowadays these words are mostly ignored by most search engines including Google. There is no way to evaluate just how true this is, but if you look at the code of many pages that receive first-page search engine rankings, you will see that there are often no metatag keywords at all, or just a few. It seems that the text content is much more important. However, to include keyword metatags won’t hurt, so we do it ‘just in case’.

Tags

In contrast to metatags, the tags that are added to a blog to enable users to find other relevant blog posts on your site seem to be very important, however, and often appear in the Search Engine listings. I haven’t been able to find much information on the exact effect of blog tags on search engine rankings. If any of you readers know of a good source of information about this relevancy, please be so kind as to leave a comment.

Blog tags act as internal links to other blog pages on your site, and search engines just love links. More about links tomorrow…

From yesterday’s post:

The methods that I know of are as follows:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Customers come to the site because they have posed a question to a search engine, and one of the results has directed them to the site.

Briefly looking at the first method of marketing and publicizing a web site, it must first be clearly pointed out that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a huge science in itself. Thousands of books have been written on this subject by people far more knowledgeable than I. All I will attempt to do here is to put down some of the most important lessons that I have learnt. My knowledge on this subject is very limited and if I make any mistakes here, please feel free to correct me via comments.

The first lesson is that the rules for search engines are continually changing and the search engine corporations do not publish a definitive guide on exactly how the search engine evaluates your site. In a sense, one is therefore shooting at a moving target. It also seems clear that the guidelines laid down in the extensive tools and documentation provided by Google-for-Webmasters do not necessarily apply to the way MSN or Yahoo evaluates and ranks the importance of your site.

Each Search Engine corporation offers hints, tips and guidelines about how to make your site “Search Engine Friendly”. However, for some reason which eludes me, they seem to hide this information making it sometimes quite difficult to find. Here are a few starting points:

For Google, go to:
http://www.google.com/webmasters

For MSN, go to:
http://webmaster.live.com/

For Yahoo, go to:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webmaster/webmaster-01.html

And for DMOZ, the open directory project, you’ll have to hunt around because the help for webmasters seems to be very scattered. As a start, go to:
http://www.dmoz.org/help/

The next thing to take notice of is the concept of Google’s sandbox. It’s an undocumented aging delay that Google seems to penalize some sites with. You should read up on this at: http://www.rightclickwebs.com/seo/google-aging.php. Moral of this story:  - submit your site to Google ASAP and continually resubmit as its content gets built.

More about SEO on Monday…

We have a functional site in place. Now we need customers.

• The virtual electronic doors are open and the site looks beautiful.
• There are courses available for sale (not a large number at the moment, but growing every day).
• The banking infrastructure is in place - we can accept credit card payments.
• The Tusker shopping cart is tested and functional.
• The course shopping cart is tested and functional.
• The customer can find the courses using various different methods.
• Each course has its corresponding description and sample pages.
• The small print and legal stuff is in place.
• The log-in and password system works.
• In short, the virtual shop is functional.

But where are the customers? They are out there, for sure, but they just don’t know about Fundisi.com yet. It’s no use having this wonderful shop if no customers are, virtually, running in and out.

In modern-day commerce, marketing often starts before the product even exists. Companies try to get the edge on their competitors by selling  “vapourware”.  I’ve always found that idea intriguing, but somehow not right. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘dishonest’, but I feel you must know that you can deliver what you say you can and have confidence in your product. How do you do that if the product doesn’t exist yet and the vehicle to sell it (the virtual shop) isn’t functional?

Well, now that everything is in place, at last, it is time to start the marketing phase.

How do you get your product to the Internet marketplace? How do you get customers?

The answer is easy, but the implementation is not - you need lots of Internet traffic. People must come to the site in their droves. If the product is good, they will buy, but no matter how good the product is, if there are no customers coming to the site, no one will buy.

There are a number of different methods to bring traffic to the site, and there are probably other methods which I have not thought of. (Note, Dear Reader, if you know of an effective way to get customers to the site which is not mentioned here, please, immediately, reply to this post by leaving a comment.)

The methods that I know of are as follows:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Customers come to the site because they have posed a question to a search engine, and one of the results has directed them to the site.
• Newsletter and Email list building. Gather the email addresses of potentially interested customers and send out regular newsletters enticing them to the site.
• Viral Marketing. Physically speak to people about the site, or use social networking sites like Facebook. Entice people to tell their friends about the site.
• Pay-per-Click advertising. An advert is placed by a search engine company and whenever the link to your site is clicked you get charged. No click, no charge.
• Banner/display advertising. A more traditional form of advertising where you pay for space on a busy site and hope that your ad will be clicked.
• Get other sites to link to yours. This is like a mini-ad on someone’s site or an entry on their blogroll, but usually necessitates a reciprocal link. (With our heavy graphic design, this is a bit difficult to implement on an ad-hoc basis.)
• News/Press releases. Trade related sites are always happy to tell their readers about new products.
• Blogs that offer some useful content to attract visitors. You can then put as much advertising as you like on your own blog. Like this one for example, or my other photography blog.

Over the next few weeks, I will blog about these options in detail…

While the advantages of a beautiful design with heavy graphics are obvious, this wonderful visual effect comes at a price. Speed. Heavy graphics make each page load distressingly slowly. The more images on the page, the more bits of image data have to come down the pipe to your computer before the image can display properly.

The Complexities of Slow Browser Speed made Simple

It works like this. The contents of a web page fall into one of three categories: Text that you see reproduced on the page; text that you don’t see; and graphic images.

1. Text that you see provides the words for the page and is usually selectable and copyable (but not modifiable) and is similar to the text in a word processor.
2. The text that you don’t see provides programming instructions to the browser and metadata that search engines can read (like the page title, description, keywords and technical messages to the search engines).
3. References to Graphic Images must also come down the electronic pipe from the server far away to your computer at least once.

All three types of information merely consist of a very large number of “packets” which contain the electronic binary information. (It gets very technical here, but we only need an overview to understand what is going on.) The main thing to grasp is that text (in its visible or invisible form) doesn’t take long to download while graphic images take much longer.

The reason for this is that the text which downloads merely instructs your browser to use a text font which is already installed on your computer to display a character. The font itself may be quite large, but it is already located on your computer (put there when your operating system was originally installed) so it doesn’t need to be downloaded again. Text is therefore quick to download, and web pages with lots of text and very few graphics load very fast indeed.

Graphic images, on the other hand, first have to be downloaded to the computer before they can be displayed, and because they are quite large, they take a while to come down. So, heavily graphicked pages are consequently slower to download, and can make the page so slow that the user gets irritated and clicks away.

So, a compromise must be struck between lots of graphics and page loading time. But what if you just have to have a heavy pictorial presence like we have on Fundisi.com?

Solutions

There are three tricks that we used to reduce download time:

1. Graphic images can be optimized in Photoshop to display fewer colours by tricking your eyes. This is a whole science in itself.
2. The design can be broken up into a series of “image tiles” which gradually display as soon as they have been downloaded. This results in an effect where the image is gradually being built up, and the user realizes that the site hasn’t frozen and is being “entertained” as the image is being assembled. This effect and the actual order in which the image tiles are displayed can, to a certain extent be controlled by the programming of the web page.
3. Large areas of uniform graphics can be split into small identical pieces. If these pieces are absolutely identical, they need only be downloaded once and the browser just references the same image again and again. This means that download time is saved and a large area can be “painted” quickly by the browser.

All this web page optimizing of course takes time and effort - which increases the cost of the site. There is, unfortunately, another not so obvious consequence to this: A site page with a large amount of graphics is not easily modified. The design must be right before the page is built. This can, to a certain extent, be done by approving the original Photoshop design, but then little things like input boxes and drop-down lists which are not graphic elements behave differently in different browsers.

Text in different browsers takes up an unpredictable space (especially in the new browser version that is released the day after the web page is created!)

If all the text were rasterized into pixelled images, this would cure many such problems, but then the page would get slower still. It’s all a process of compromise and frustrated tweaking. It’s no wonder web site programmers tend to have frayed nerves.

The Zen-Cart “Default” Product Pages vs. Fundisi.com’s Product Pages.

The original Zen-Cart product display system is relatively simple and the style is instantly recognizable to someone who is familiar with the on-line stores created by the Zen-Cart software. A typical “Zen-Cart look” is a 3 column home page, with Categories in the left column, information in the right-hand column and “featured products” in the main center column as shown here:

A Typical Zen-Cart-Style Page. (Click here to have a look at the original page)

Briefly, the “populating” of the store stock works like this:

1. The Administrator accesses the back-end of the site through a special web interface.
2. A new product is added by filling in a form with the relevant data - description, price, metadata etc. A picture can be uploaded. This information is automatically added as a new record to the database, and the product is immediately available for sale. This is the beauty of a CMS (Content management System).
3. The software then allows users to use a virtual shopping cart to select the products from a hierarchical menu system and pay for them via credit card.

Because we wanted a very different unique “look and feel”, but still use the CMS system, the original software had to be modified to an outrageously large extent. (Zen-Cart is open-source software so one is legally allowed to do this.) Our trusty programmer put in countless hours pushing the Zen-Cart code to its limits. We wanted a reference menu on the extreme left, a scrollable course listing on the centre-left of the page and a course description with a couple of example images on the right hand side:

Our Main Product Page which Resembles an Open Student Folder.

If you look at our actual course page in more detail, and then compare it to some of the showcase Zen-Cart designs, you will see an enormous difference in how the products (in our case - downloadable PDF courses) are displayed.

Unfortunately, all this graphical “eye candy” comes with a speed price…

Last week’s blog post ended with:

However, unbeknown to us, the graphic designer would get her way after all, in a turn of events that none of us expected…

If you’ve been following this blog from the beginning, you may recall the blog post I made about the Search Engine Friendliness of the URLs, and our subsequent solution to that problem. This solution also settled the argument once and for all about search-box vs. menu system, because SEO is very high priority for us.

There are two kinds of menu systems:

1. The first is an array of high-level categories, each category unfolding to more specific lower-level categories. Sometimes these menus are fully visible in their hierarchical tree structure, but above a certain complexity, they would need to be hidden, and expand with a deliberate click or “mouseover” movement. These menus are either built using CSS or can be built using a DHTML menu creation tool which writes all the javascript for you. An excellent example of such a menu system is called Allwebmenus and is available from a company called Likno Systems, but we didn’t go this route. Instead we went with the second option below.
2. The other sort of menu system is where the actual web pages themselves form a hidden hierarchical system. The first (top) page contains a list of the major categories, and when one of these categories is clicked, the appropriate second-level page appears, which in turn has further more specific clickable links.

Since for search engine optimization reasons we had to have a series of descriptive web pages, with the lowest level containing the actual course details, the menu system in option 2 above was obviously the way to go. So our Graphic Designer got her wish and actually got two menu systems. The first being our three tiered system of:

• Home page with main categories.
• Second level Category pages listing the courses available within that category.
• Third-level pages each containing a specific course’s details and example picture, designed to be indexed by a search-engine.

The second one was the alphabetical course listing built into the Zen-Cart section of the site. This course listing is automatically re-built when a new course is added to the database. More details about this process tomorrow…