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.

Today if the final part to this series. If you have found cool tools you think others should know about, post a comment so others can get the info too. Helping out is how all this gets done. It's what AeNews is all about and why I changed to blogging instead of a static page format.

OK. Here are today's tools and tips.

Comprehensive Guide to .htaccess
http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml

What is .htaccess? simply put it is a way to secure web pages in a subdirectory on your web server. Pretty simple to do. Some web hosts give you tools to do this. The link above is a tutorial about how to use .htaccess effectively. Every webmaster needs to know about this one.

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes for 2002
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021223.html

I know it's 2005, but a lot of you are still making the same mistakes many of us made back in 2002 so it bears repeating what we alredy learned. You will pick up on readability, content, and navigation as well as a whole lot of other great stuff you should be aware of. (I just hate horizontal scrolling!)


Well that's it for now. I know I left out something. So let me know about your favorite freebies for webmasters. I also give away a great set of freebies when people subscribe to AeNews. I know, I know I just told you earlier I use a Blog for the News now, but I do give special offers and secret tips to my online subscribers. They also get access to the old issues as well.

If you are interested, you can subscribe and get a great set of freebies, including how to use audio to make your eBay items sell better.

Subscribe to AeNews Here

See you soon! Remember, It's time to Get Started!

Andrew
AeNews Editor

Ok, Today I'm giving you a few tools that will probably open you eyes about security. A lot of press has already been given to the issues of security diring this coming year. 2005 is seen, by many as the year of security. Corporations are finally awakened to the real issues they face with securing information from prying eyes. While the following tools can't fix all your security holes, they will alert you to potential problems you need to take care of.

Website Security Report
http://security.computer-concierge.net/security/website_s...

Not all web hosts are alike. Use this tool to find out how security minded and proficient your web host is. You might be looking for a new host after your run throgh this peice.

Your Computer's Security
http://grc.com/default.htm

Gibson Research Corporation offers a really neat (and free) tool called ShieldsUp for checking the security of your computer. Look for the Hot Spots area, where you'll find the link to ShieldsUp. Be sure to go through each of the checks in the ShieldsUp section (File Sharing, Common Ports, etc.). I guarantee you will find something you need to change......Everyone does..

Reverse DNS Lookup
http://remote.12dt.com/rns/

This service converts an IP address to the host name by searching domain name service tables. This is useful when trying to find out where malicious attackers came from and then you can notify their web hosts and ISP's to their naughty behavious. I know I have shut down more than one pesky peeker using Reverse DNS lookups. You should get involved too.

Tomorrow will be the last installment of Cool Free Web Tools. I hope you have found something useful.

Until tomorrow,

Andrew
Your AeNews Editor

Welcome!

Today's continuation includes a couple of tools you can use when making those new pages with Netscape Composer.

Doctor HTML

http://www2.imagiware.com/RxHTML/

I'll warn you that this site can be a bit intimidating at first, but if you stay with it, you will will learn a lot about how the humble web page is structured and what can make it work for you. Click on Single Page, and the free service will analyze your Web page based on document structure, image syntax, table analysis, browser support, verify hyperlinks, and much more. Don't feel compelled to correct every item shown. Learn and move slowly, soon you will be a real webmaster.

GifBot by NetMechanic

http://www.netmechanic.com/accelerate.htm

All of us have experience the web site that took foreeeeeeeever to load. If you are in the sales business, pages must load quickly because you only have a few seconds to capture their attention. GifBot can give you some of that edge you need. It will compress your GIF, JPEG, and animated GIF images by decreasing the file size without sacrificing the quality of the image. So, your pages load faster! Now that's something all of us can use....and profit from.

Tomorrow be on the lookout for a couple of security sites to help with both your web host and your local machine. I know this will be eye-opening for you.

Andrew
Your Editor

Today is Part III of the Cool Free Tools series. I hope you are finding something useful. I know a lot of you may not have web pages because it seems soooo much trouble. I'll let you in on a secret. If you can use MS Word (ugh) or Excel you can learn how to create web pages without a lot of effort. All it takes is learning a few new software tools and you can be a webmaster too. It is fun and who knows, you might make some money with it as well.

4. Web Page Editor of choice
http://netscape.com

For ages now Netscpape composer has been one of the most powerful "quiet" secrets on the web. It gives you a simple, effective web page editor with the Browser download. Now it's not fancy Cascading Style Sheets or dynamic page generation, but you can use most page templates and edit them directly with Composer and see them just like they will appear in a browser. It's easier than working with MS Word, really!

Give it a try and I know you will be surprised. Pretty soon you will need a domain to upload all your great pages.

Until later,,,,,,,

Andrew
AeNews Editor