AeNews

The following is from InternetWeek. I think you will find it both interesting and valuable as you continue to hone your internet marketing skills.

Brand Matters On The Internet

The Internet has crushed many assumptions. During the dot-com boom of the late 90s, scores of chief executives thought they knew how business would be conducted in cyberspace, only to have their beliefs turned upside down. Unfortunately, many of those businesses failed and their employees sent to the unemployment lines.

So it's not all that surprising that researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management have disproved one more erroneous belief, the topic of today's Leading Off, about the medium that's changing the world.

The study indicated that 51% of online shoppers chose reputation over price offered by an online retailer as most important. It goes to show that all of us who use the internet to market our ideas, travel, music, books, or shopping malls must strive to offer the highest levels of service, quality and performance to our customers and clients.

You can read the entire article at:

http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/ek4Q0GMqGh0G...

It's the largest buying season of the year. Don't forget building relationships is one of the important long term goals of any business. So think of ways you can build better relationships with your customers and clients. Offer more and more, overwhelm them with gifts and value.

Let's Get Started!
Andrew

Bullets, Bullets, Bullets.....

Have you ever been to those freeware clipart sites that have all kinds of web graphic stuff? And to add insult to injury they are horribly organized. Page after page of silly stupid, insipid stuff that your kids wouldn't dare to put on their site.

But wait a minute! copywriting is about getting attention.... so you need something to grab the reader's eye

You need something that stands out.....

You need something that lets them know this is an important point in the presentation

By now you're getting the point. Stop using those regular simple bullets you find in the regular web or text editor. Standard Bullets don't work nearly as well as using somthing with some interest in it. Find an image with a Different color, shape or visual texture to give any bullet the eyecatching effect you are after.

Long ago I started capturing all kinds of images to use as bullets and saved them in a special place so I could go back to them easliy. So start grabbing all the great bullets you see and save them in your own bullets directory for later use.

Next time I"ll have some ideas on those breakout boxes called "Johnson Boxes". You know the ones used to highlight testamonials, guarantees and the like.

Until then,,,,
It's time to Get Started (using bullets)
Andrew

P.S. dont forget to use the RSS feed so you get AeNews as soon as you login

The following is a guest article I thought you would find useful and interesting. Seems people will thieve just about anything.

Andrew

** Copyright Thieves Beware **
Jim Daniels

A free service at www.copyscape.com allows you to see if anyone out on the Web has copied the text from your website and to what degree.

Just enter the url of your webpage, article, or blog post, hit the submit button and the site will show you if another website contains substantially the same text as your page.

If you get a hit, then click the links provided to go to the sites that may have copied you and see highlighted text that matches your site.

The free service on the home page only displays 10 results, and if you want to see more, you can pay $10-20 a month and the service will monitor your web pages and let you know of everyone who copies them.

A positive use for this tool I thought of for anyone who operates an online business: put in your competitors' url where they display the ads, articles, and other tools they give their affiliates, and see who links to them.

They may have active affiliates posting their content (with permission of course) and you may find some great potential partners to help you promote your business.

Another way you can watch for this type of activity is by
signing up for alerts at Google.

Go to http://www.google.com/alerts/ and enter in your name, product title, article title, or some specific keyword
combination that would tip you off that someone had taken your stuff (or was posting your competitors' material).

You can then receive an update with links any time Google finds a new reference to your keyword phrase.

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We continue our series on unusual web copywriting visual techniques. As I mentioned earlier, all of these are stolen directly from examples in the hardcopy print world.

Today I are going to show you the circled text emphasis. This is kind of crude way to highlight, but it is dynamic and effective. It only works with text you present as a graphic. You won't get this to work on text that is just floating in the html format. You editor must allow you to either insert transparent images with text, or to send graphic images behind text input. I have also use layered editors that also allow the order of layers to control this effect.

If you are presenting your copy in the form of a PDF file then the formatting of your original source document will allow you to insert the scan of the hand circle as an image and then impose text on top of it. The following example was taken from such a document.



A couple of points to use this. Make sure you change the color of the hand drawn circle to red, blue, purple, yellow. Use a color that works with the rest of the color pallet. I often use either Red or Orange. They are two of the most powerful colors that can read well on a white page.

Tomorrow I show you bullets. Not those simple dots, but bold, beautiful, bodacious bullets.
Andrew

Yesterday I showed you DropCaps. I forgot to give you a resource on DropCaps. If you want to get some of these special graphic alphabets you should visit www.dropcapitals.com
they have a collection of these available for purchase. But the one I used yesterday was one from an alphabet I created and use on the Put It iN Thought web page. they aren't hard to create if you have a simple graphics package.

But I digress..... Today we are looking at the highlight. You used this one in college. In fact a whole line of products was introduced in the marker industry back in the 70's when those water-soluable transparent markers first made it to the shelves of the stationary and art stores. Pretty soon they were everywhere. It was a hit and everyone wanted to use a "highlighter" to emphasise text.

Copywriters in the hard copy world followed suit very soon after and you have been seeing this technique ever since. Today, it is a little more difficult to get this effect. I have done it by limiting it to areas where I can completely control the text appearance, such as in emphasis boxes or teadings and inserting these as graphic inserts. Usually you can control how the page reads well enough to make this work well.

or the next few days I'll be sharing with you a few techniques that you are probably seeing more and more in web based copy. A lot of them are being copied from hard copy mailer pieces you have been seeing for a long time. As web copywriters, we are still playing catchup.

I just used the first one - the DropCap. Newspapers and book publishers have been using this eye-catching effect for ages. Go back to the illustrated hand made copies from the second century and you will see the height of this method. Monks took hours of care highlighting the handwritten text for effect and instruction. They did it for a reason. focus attention. You should too.

Good Morning AeNews Readers,

I know a lot of you are interested in how to help the victims of the great Southern Asia tusnami. The following link is to the Network For Good. This link gives you access for helping people of specific ethnic heritage, rebuilding infrastructure, healthcare and many other focused relief organizations.

Please use this link to focus your help where you feel led.

Network For Good

Let's Get Started Helping!
Andrew

Fellow Blogger

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This is a great way to get more exposure for your BLOG.

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Here's the link again:


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Sincerely,

Andrew Abernathy

Subject: New~Powerful~FREE~Advertising~Program

Advertise free and get Guaranteed top search engine ranking.

You can make your own fortune giving away ~free~advertising. I know it is hard to believe that you make more money off your free members than you do off your paid ones but it's true.

Here is why. This is a product that everyone wants and it is free. Most people sign up as a paid affiliate because they see the income potential from just signing up free members. You see free members don't
get paid they only get one level of free advertising. As a paid member I get 7 levels of advertising. So for every free member I get, I receive 6 levels of advertising with and every paid member that they bring in down to infinity. Only 10% of my people are free members yet I make more of them then all the rest combined.

My free members can upgrade when they see how much money they are loosing but I keep all the people they brought in before that.

Free members also bring in more free members who also become mine and all of their paid~members. The funny thing is it is actually hard to get someone to join for free. It is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. I still make money off the paid members but it is less than what I get off the free ones.

Check it out. Free or paid I know you will love it.

Sign up here

Sincerely,

Andrew Abernathy
Your AeNews Editor

All of us are wondering how the millions of people involved in the disasterous tusnami that spread havoc throughout Southeast Asia earlier this week. The following organizations have proven in the past they can and do deliver the kind of immediate aid necessary right now for the survivors.

Give as you feel led. Already donors from the US have given or pledged more relief for these people than was pleged for the survivors of the 9/11 disasterous attack. The naysayers in the world often refer to the US as a cowardly, bullying and expansionist country, but we consistantly give more to world relief, development and support than any other nation in the world. Once again we are proving liberty and freedom are the basis of generosity.

Save the Children

Doctors without Borders

Salvation Army

International Red Cross

Direct Relief International

Your AeNews Editor
Andrew