Advertising is truly like fishing.

When you fish, you are in a dual with fish.  Many will look at your offering, and most will not bite.  It takes the right fish at the right time in the right place to make the catch.  Just like selling any product, you need the right bait, but you also need the right place and the right time.

Do you want to be the fisherman with a single pole in an Ocean?

True, on the Ocean you may catch that monster Marlin, but its going to be tough and a lot of work to land it.  You will be elated to make the catch and you will eat well for a little while.  But who knows when you’ll catch the next big one.  There will be a lot of trial and error and your chances are pretty slim.

Or would you rather be in a lake with a really, really big net?

For providing a constant profit of fish, its much smarter to cast a wide net.   You might not land “the big one” but you significantly increase your chances of being successful.

The moral of the story is, don’t risk everything looking for the big one.  Be conservative.  When it comes to advertising and buying ad space, select a variety of smaller sources first.  Many times I see people choose one or two higher priced spots and they aren’t successful immediately, so they simply give up.  Get experience before moving up and spending the big bucks on expensive space.  If you can make it work on a small scale, it will work on a large scale.

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Branding is hardly an obscure concept; if you don’t know what branding is, ask any high school kid with an Internet page. The largest companies in the United States clearly believe in the value of branding. Usually when Coke runs a commercial, for example, the goal is branding, rather than immediate and direct sales. Bank of America is also big on branding – almost every advertisement that company runs is designed to make you feel more familiar and more comfortable with the Bank of America brand. When you see a company’s advertisement focusing in intangibles, it’s a good bet that company is trying to build up its brand.

Think about it. You’re driving across I-10 on your way to Florida, and you stop for food at one of those exits made for travelers. There’s a McDonalds and a Denny’s restaurant, and also a third diner named “Abbie’s Place.” If you said “Abbie’s” then congratulations on your adventurousness, but you’re also in the minority. The vast majority of interstate travelers are going to pick McDonalds or Denny’s simply because they are familiar with those brands – and believe that they know what to expect. The branded restaurants could be run by managers who don’t ask their employees to wash up before work, or after using the bathroom, where Abbie’s could be run by the cleanest people in America – but when the traveler makes that split-second decision on where to eat, “Abbie’s” will seem like the biggest risk.

Online, smaller companies tend to focus on sales or conversions – branding seems like a luxury. This, I think, is a mistake. The delivery mechanism for branding campaigns doesn’t matter – television, magazines, the Internet – regardless of your platform, branding is important. If your website converts 1 sale from every 500 visitors, does that mean 499 out of 500 are worthless? Hardly.

It may take a while for the more timid online consumers to grow comfortable with your brand. Face it, the Internet is full of scam artists. We’re reminded of that every day when we open our inbox and get the latest phishing scams or clever attempts to infect our machines with a tojan. When a consumer first encounters your brand, he or she will probably have a trust deficit – and rightly so. If you can’t close a sale on first contact, then it’s your job to at least help those consumers grow more comfortable with your brand in order to close that sale some other day.

We know branding, in that general sense, works. If it didn’t work, why do we routinely pick Coke and Pepsi over other colas? Why would anyone drink Budweiser beer? Why did Microsoft feel compelled to answer Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads with an “I’m a PC” campaign of their own? The problem isn’t whether branding works, the problem is how do you measure the success of your branding efforts.

This can be especially problematic when you market online, and in many ways branding is an exercise in faith. That doesn’t mean though that you can completely ignore any measurements from your branding efforts. Don’t despair, there are some effective methods that you can use when trying to get a feel for the success of your branding campaigns.

Page views per visit. Take a close look at your traffic and try to get a feel for how many pages your website’s visitors are viewing per session. If you have a one-page website, this is irrelevant of course, but for most websites a larger number of average page views means the audience is interested. If you have engaged your audience, there’s a much better chance that your branding efforts are having an impact.

Average time spent on site. One visitor arrives on your site and loads four pages, while another visitor only loads three. The second visitor, however, spent ten minutes on your website where the first only spent two minutes. Which visit was more valuable? Likely the answer is the second – assuming he wasn’t just pausing to answer the phone or go to the bathroom between page loads. If you are buying traffic from two different sources, one way to measure the quality of that traffic is by how long visitors from each source spend on your website. If source A sends visitors that spend an average of 4 minutes on your site, while visitors from source B spend only 2 minutes on average, then source A is probably sending you traffic that’s a better match for your website – and the longer people spend looking through your site, the better for your branding efforts.

Return visitors. How many times does a person come back to your website over a certain period of time? The more a visitor interacts with your brand, the more familiar she or he will become with your brand. If visitors are returning, there’s a good chance something caught their attention, and you’ll have multiple opportunities to build brand confidence with those repeat viewers.

Ultimately, every branding campaign needs to result in revenue. If you’ve been branding your website for many months but haven’t seen any increase in traffic or conversions that might be attributable to better brand awareness, then something is wrong. That doesn’t mean you should abandon branding. If you know you have a solid product but you choose to reject branding, your long-term business prospects aren’t very bright. If your branding campaigns aren’t yielding results after a reasonable period of time, at least six months of consistent branding, then it might be time to ask why that’s the case – perhaps it’s a problem with the product or the presentation – and start making some changes.

Note: If you don’t have a more powerful analytics solution, you can always use Google Analytics for free. Just note that Google Analytics tends to under-report traffic. It should still give you a good idea of the behavior of your visitors, but keep in mind the real number of visitors is probably higher than what Google Analytics is reporting.

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What do a photography site, a web referral site and diesel fuel site have in common?  They have all been identified as sites that attempt to install malicious software on we user’s computers.  For the record, I am not affiliated with any of these websites nor with any of the companies who have identified these sites as serving malware.  The sites are:

www.supermodels.com

www.referral-secrets.com

www.dfwdiesel.com

As you can see, all three sites have been rated as possible security risks.  The point of this article is not to point out sites that serve malware, but to show webmasters that their sites can be “black-listed” without them ever knowing.  For the sake of our discussion I am going to assume (perhaps mistakenly) that all the sites I mention in this article are intended as legitimate sites and to provide some useful product or service to web users.

Let’s say that you have a website where you write an article about sites that spread malware, and then you provide links to these sites as a warning to your readers.  McAfee’s Site Advisor, along with others, will probably flag your site as a possible risk.  This very thing happened to the SANS Institute (one of the most respected computer security organizations in the industry). 

In August 2008 McAfee’s Site Advisor blacklisted SANS and warned about potentially harmful malware on the site.  Fortunately for SANS, their webmaster had the phone number of point-of-contact at McAfee.  But what do you do if you don’t happen to have this kind of “insider” clout?  How can you get your site “de-listed” from these blacklists?  How long and how difficult is this process?  Well, McAfee’s site promises to reassess sites between 10 and 365 days once they receive a complaint about a bad rating.

Yes, that’s right, it can take up to an entire year for them to change a site rating!  And what happens to potential customers who land on your site only to be greeted with a huge banner exclaiming the potential risks of your site?  Rather than give you example after example of this system gone wrong, I think it better to offer actions that you can take to prevent these things from happening.

1)  The first step is knowing that your site has been blacklisted.  In the SANS example above, it was a security advisor, not McAfee (or even SANS), who first noticed the rating.  Your first chore is to check to see if any of the site rating services has blacklisted your site, not an easy task because there are dozens of these “reputation based filtering” services around (complicated because they all have different methods for rating sites and complicated still further because some don’t review sites with adult content).  But start with some of the most popular services: McAfee Site Advisor1, Norton Safe Web2, Web of Trust3 and hpHosts4.

2)  Check with your web host to see if they employ Shared hosting or Virtual Hosting.  Either of these techniques could subject your site to a rating from another web site sharing the same IP.

3)  Regularly check to see if ANY content on your website has changed.  And by “changed” I mean not by you! Some of the worst malware sites are actually legitimate sites whose owners simply don’t watch the store. Websites cannot be “set it and forget it” any longer!

4)  If your site has been blacklisted, take quick, decisive action.  Document what the rating software found and seek professional (legal and computer security) assistance immediately.  The longer your site goes without being fixed, the longer it will take for the companies to remove it from the blacklist.

5)  Finally, as a last resort, if you simply don’t where to turn, you can drop me an email and I will help as I am able.

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Google has updated its position on blog commenting in this post on their official webmaster blog:

Hard Facts About Comment Spam

What is clear from the post, crystal clear, is that Google is out to spot and “at best” ignore your efforts:

“Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links.”

So if your current link building strategy relies heavily on finding blogs to add comments to for the purpose of getting a link, you need to re-evaluate right now.

I personally still intend to find relevant blogs, and will post relevant comments that add value to the site, and I will continue to add my site name and URL to create a backlink in that comment.  What I will be stopping is visiting any old blog, either personally or using automation, to drop links through comments.

Google has spoken, again, so it is time to mix things up again and evolve your link building strategy if it involves comment spam.

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Whilst there has been an explosion of various forms of e-billing in recent years, most of these are powered by plastic and cash still remains the preferred form of money in the eyes of most people: it’s tangible, government backed, and guaranteed to be accepted with a smile at most points of sale throughout the world.

However, despite the public’s love affair with it, cash clearly has some drawbacks: checking in to a hotel or hiring a car can be difficult, and it is clearly not suitable for e-commerce – or is it?

Well, thanks to a patented payment mechanism powered by UK billing company Ukash now it is – customers can now pay by cash at over 320,000 physical issuing points such as convenience stores and gas stations in return for a secure and unique 19-digit number which assures payment when it is presented online.

Currently available in 26 countries worldwide, Ukash is the largest global prepaid cash collection network in the world. In the past year, the company has expanded into Australia, South America, Canada, a number of new European territories, and more recently, China.

Such billing is ideal for those who wish to shop online but either do not have a bank account/credit/debit card or belong to the growing army of people who are fearful of becoming a victim of credit card fraud or identity theft.

Moreover, since the payment is pre-paid, it is therefore guaranteed free of any chargebacks, allowing webmasters to start reaching this viable and potentially very lucrative market of card adverse customers, which is currently being overlooked by the vast majority of websites.

Other USP’s of note include: no registration needed by customers, hence one less barrier for them to start using it. Furthermore, customers can get change: if the value of the transaction is less than the customer’s Ukash value, they will receive a new Ukash number, value and expiry date.

Such billing is proving popular with a growing army of digitally nervous customers: it’s secure and anonymous. Moreover, research conducted by the company has shown that the vast majority of Ukash users already have a bank or credit card, but would prefer not to use them online.

Whilst various forms of online processing are now available, cash is still king with many people which is why this product is unique in the payments market as it enables customers to transact with Cash online, discreetly and securely with absolutely no risk to the merchants. Moreover, it will effectively open the door to all of the cash consumers within Europe and elsewhere, bridging the gap between your product and previously unattainable consumers.

For more information, visit http://staging.ukash.com/business/emjay.aspx or contact me, marcjarrett@gmail.com

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As a surfer, you know you hate popups.  You hate interstatials, and know that girl from your city doesn’t really want to talk to you.   So if this is all true, then why would anyone ever annoy their surfers like this?

What is really more important?  Making more money from your website, or keeping your visitors happy?

Its easy to get caught up in short term gains, and a quick buck.  Every day I see websites so cluttered with ads from every ad network imaginable that its actually difficult to find the content.  Its also difficult to find a reason to come back.  Then there are the websites that have multiple popups, an interstatial, and then a fake “Instant Messenger” ad that pops up from the bottom.  You’d think that the average surfer was under attack by the people running these websites… and in a way, they are.

Those with the experience and long-term vision know that these tactics are more hurtful than helpful.  The reality of the situation is that in the long run, websites that use excessive advertising slowly drive away their visitors.  The great thing about the internet is, for every page about a topic, there are a million more on the same topic.   They can (and do) go elsewhere.  Conversely, when people find a website they love, they come back again and again.

In a recent study, web surfers indicated that they find “interstatial ads” 3-times more annoying than banner ads.   If you are not sure what Interstatials are, these are the full page ads that take over your screen and require you click the ad, or click a “skip ad” button.  Both advertisers and webmasters are quick to point out that they are lucrative.  If used on a limited basis, these are a great way to monetize individual pages or data that is being provided for free.  Too often, however you will see webmasters add these to their index pages which open immediately.  Surfers are immediately splashed in the face with an option to go somewhere else, before they have even had a chance to view the current site’s contents.

How to avoid losing touch with your users:

• Its easy to lose your “surfers eyes” and forget what its like to surf the web as a regular joe.  Take a moment and review your website, think about it, ask other people to surf your websites and ask for their feedback.
• Don’t expect your visitors to do anything you wouldn’t do.
• Don’t annoy your surfers.  There is a fine line between monetization and making your visitors upset.
• Never trick or mislead your visitors.  Creative marketing is one thing, but knowingly lying to your surfers or tricking them is quite another.

Its a myth that more ads equals more money, as the more ads that are added to a website, the less each of those placements earns.   Ultimately I can’t tell you how to run your website, but you should always consider the surfer as a person, not as a revenue stream that needs to be pushed until it breaks.

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Hello fellow Web Craft-ers! I’m glad to finally be here in the “blogosphere” and I apologize for the delay. It turned out that getting a photo I could use in this forum was a much bigger problem than I ever expected. Normally I simply advise the powers-that-be that I am planning to contribute to a web forum aimed at Independent Web Developers. However this time a few “issues” popped up. You see, I work in the shadowy world of “cyber security” and while I am definitely a “White Hat” my work frequently has me traveling pretty far into the “badlands” and dealing with some very evil people. What I will try and do is to relate information in a timely manner (or at least as timely as I am permitted); information that can help protect everyone who owns or maintains an on-line presence.

So, having said all that as an intro, let me start with an old story that keeps getting updated as technology progresses.

The idea of malware infecting and then encrypting a user’s files first came to my attention back in 1994 with a piece of malware called “Half Virus”. The virus would secretly infect a computer running MS DOS or Windows 3.11 and then encrypt on-the-fly portions of the hard drive. Overall this virus was fairly harmless unless it was carelessly removed, unlike the variants circulating today. Half Virus still exists and is still circulating in the wild.

But today’s cyber landscape has changed drastically from “hacker pranks” to “organized crime”. Just about 2 weeks ago a new variant appeared called LoroBot. This piece of malware encrypts users’ MS Word, MS Excel, MP3, JPG, PDF and Data Base files. The malware then demands $100 for the key to unlock the encrypted files. Fortunately several big international anti virus companies have provided the decryption key for free. But what about the next time, when the decryption key is different for every infection? Or worse, if your website has been targeted for extortion and there is no cavalry riding over the horizon to your rescue?

Well the unfortunate answer is that you don’t have many choices: you can either pay or accept the total loss of all files on the compromised computer. And as you can see, neither of these options is very good. What is you pay and the hackers don’t send the decryption key? What if you pay but the hackers have hidden some more malware in the “decryption software”? The following is a true story of a very large state agency where this exact scenario occurred.

A particular state government recently had an entire database of critical data encrypted and then ransomed back to them (approximately 8-1/2 million critical records in all). Like all kidnappings, they were given an amount to pay and a “pay by this date or else” ultimatum. The state informed the Federal Government which tasked several Agencies to work 24-7 to break the encryption before the deadline.

The outcome? The state wired $10M to a bank, which then wired it to an offshore bank, and then another, and another, etc. The Federal Agencies were able to see the transactions for approximately the first 5 hops, but then the money went to a country where the US has no diplomatic contacts and the trace was lost.

The fable of the story: Backup EVERYTHING! With external 1.5 Terrabyte hard drives selling for $109 at membership warehouses, it really is a case of an “ounce of prevention…”.

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It is official, Google’s “Caffeine” algo-update is coming very soon.  Described by Google as “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search,” Caffeine will be the largest update for several years.

According to Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Caffeine will be “the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Sounds serious…

You may or may not know that Google has been soliciting feedback from the online community for months now, by making their Caffeine update publically available at http://www2.sandbox.google.com. However, that URL now just displays a “thank you” message.

So if you already know via checking that your site will take a nasty SERP fall, or you are unaware of how your site will react to Caffeine, then now is the time to take action and educate yourself, rather than leaving yourself open to a nasty traffic drop as a New Year present.

If you employ an SEO company, and have not heard from them about Caffeine already,  phone them and ask them what impact Caffeine may have. If they cannot tell you then I would recommend making a new years resolution to find a new SEO company!

Matt Cutt’s has now confirmed that the Caffeine update will go live “after the holidays” (not particularly clear terminology for those of of use living outside the USA, but hey Google has always been bizarrely global in audience, while at the same time failing to educate it’s spokespeople to talk in a non-USA-centric manner).

“The feedback on Caffeine has been very positive, so we’re ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center. This means that a small percentage of Google’s users will benefit from the technology behind Caffeine in their regular searches.

I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.”

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The operating system that Apple named “Tiger” was introduced in 2004, and many felt it was the finest to date produced by the California-based technology company. Its main competition was, of course, the powerhouse up in Redmond, Washington – a company that went by the name of Microsoft. While announcing Tiger at a technology conference, Apple had commissioned banners that hung from the walls and gleefully poked at the giant to the north; the banners read, “Redmond, start your photocopiers.”

That of course was a jab at Microsoft, who Apple (along with countless other software companies) had accused before of stealing its innovations. Apple had previously sued Microsoft over the initial Windows operating system, which Apple felt was far too close to the Macintosh approach to be ignored; defenders of Microsoft pointed out that Apple’s own hands were not clean, having “borrowed” the whole idea for the original Mac OS from Xerox.

No matter where Apple got the idea for the original Mas OS, there’s no denying that Apple has succeeded in launching revolutionary new technology products again and again: it created the personal computer, revolutionized the market a second time with the release of the Macintosh, dominated digital music with iTunes and the iPod, and now has launched a “smartphone” revolution in the United States with its iPhone. Most of Microsoft’s success has come from leveraging its position of power as the leading OS maker to sell its own versions of products that already existed. Microsoft seems less interested in innovation, and more interested in adapting and dominating.

The movie Pirates of Silicon Valley was released in 1999 before Apple had risen from the ashes of its historic fall at the hands of a more aggressive and better positioned Microsoft. In a memorable scene from the film, volatile Apple CEO Steve Jobs unloads in an encounter with Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates. Gates admits that there maybe be “a few similarities” between his new Windows OS and the Macintosh OS. “Similarities,” Jobs replies, “Try theft.”

Since the rise of the Internet, however, innovation has taken on a new form of prominence with technology companies. Some companies who have embraced innovation have seen wild success; Google decimated a number of far less sophisticated early players in Internet search, Facebook smashed a less aggressive MySpace, and of course Apple found its groove again with the iMac and, later, the iPod.

“Microsoft’s business model was based around waiting for others to innovate, then making cheap knockoffs of what others were selling,” wrote columnist Daniel Lyons recently for Newsweek. “Microsoft copied Apple to make Windows. They copied Lotus and WordPerfect to make Excel and Word, then bundled those apps into a low-cost suite called Office. They copied Netscape Navigator to make Internet Explorer, and then gave it away free, tied to Windows, and killed Netscape. But then the copycat model stopped working.”

Why did it stop working? Lyons says, and I agree, it was the rise of the Internet that threatened Redmond. Microsoft suddenly seemed unable to buy or muscle its way to the top with failed music projects and a disastrous Windows Vista. The rise of Open Source software also made its mark, since developers from around the globe now found it a lot easier to collaborate on projects like Open Office, Firefox and countless others. Fighting wars on a number of fronts, Microsoft found itself in a dire position; it was not irrelevant by any means, with more than 90% of the market share for personal computers, but was in danger of heading down that path if it didn’t start to make the right moves.

“Before the Internet came along, Microsoft ruled the computer industry,” Lyons wrote. “Tiny software companies lived in Microsoft’s shadow, and they knew that if their business struck gold, Microsoft would offer them an unpleasant choice: either sell your company to us for a pittance, or we’ll create software that mimics your product and put you out of business. Microsoft bullied rivals and business partners alike, until the latter squealed to the U.S. Department of Justice, which brought an antitrust case against the software giant, resulting in a judgment against Microsoft in 2002. These days nobody fears Microsoft. The company has become a stumbling, bumbling joke.”

Enter the Windows 7 operating system. The hype surrounding the release of this OS has been deafening, with Microsoft all but pleading with consumers that it has learned its lesson and reformed. But there are no really good signs yet that the hype has penetrated through to those consumers who aren’t rabid technology fans. In fact, any way you look at it the Mac’s market share has only increased slightly since the release of Windows 7, although it’s far too early to have a really good sense of what the OS will mean to Microsoft.

As the marketing battle heats up between the two archrivals, the real question might be if Microsoft has changed its approach to development, learned the lesson of a new Internet age, or if it’s still the same old company that lets others do the hard work.

Incredibly, Microsoft partner group manager Simon Aldous had this candid comment when talking about his company’s latest OS that might shed some insight into that question: “What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is to create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics.”

Others at Microsoft have since rushed to repair the damage, denying the validity of Aldous’s comments and insisting that he was flat wrong. But the comments have already served like a shot of euphoria to loyal Apple fans everywhere who have hopped up and down and pointed with glee at their latest smoking gun.

In the final climax of Pirates of Silicon Valley, Jobs and Gates square off in a private fictional encounter. After a heated exchange, Gates turns to leave and Jobs calls after him, “We’re better than you are. We have better stuff.” Gates stops and slowly turns to deliver the films final word on innovation in business. “You don’t get it Steve,” he says calmly. “That doesn’t matter.”

Time will tell if the fictional Gates was right.

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So here we are about eight months out from Cybernet Expo San Francisco and I haven’t slowed down in my pitching for sponsorships, brainstorming for speaker and panel ideas, search for promotional partners, etc. My lists grow daily and in typical fashion my head is swimming with ideas. Yes, I’m excited to get things going for our show next year! Many of the attendees will travel to San Francisco from all over the country and, in a number of cases, from outside the United States. It’s important to us that all attendees feel like that got tremendous value from Cybernet Expo, and that means we have to get started as early as possible on planning the show.

Capri Anderson

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