Boomer eZine - The Online Entrepreneur Magazine

For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-zine.com/V1I50_032307.htm and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com.

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Table of Contents for this issue.....

1. Authors Comments

2. Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

3. Launch of Jim Cockrum’s Members Only Site

4. Video on YouTube.com

5. How to Defeat the Email SPAM Robots

6. Gear Up Your Site For Social Media Mark eting

Author's Comments

We are rapidly approaching the one year anniversary of Boomer eZine. It is amazing how fast time has passed and the issues have been published. On April 13, 2007 , we will publish the first issue of Volume 2 marking the start of our second year.

We are planning to make a few changes. The first is to change the format of the text email to give article summaries with links to the entire article on Boomer-eZine.com instead of the email containing the entire article.

From our surveys, we found the vast majority of our readers are on broadband and industry stats show that the installation of broadband is growing at a rapid pace.

The main reason for the text email was to assist those who were on dial up. Now that appears to be a fading reason. We have surveyed some of the other top ezines and most of them are using this publishing format.

We are evaluating whether to continue publishing the eZine on blogger.com at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com. From our survey, very few readers use that location to read the eZine. We have not reached a decision on this yet.

Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

I received an email from Brian as follows:

I just wanted to bring to your attention that using the <mailto> tag the way you display your email address on your boomer-ezine site may cause unwanted spam. You can read about it here

(URL deleted by author to protect the website location)

by copy and pasting this address into your browser. Please use this information to your advantage, you may have reasons to leave it how it is but I thought I should inform you.

hope this helps

Brian

I wrote Brian and thanked him for the great tip. I asked him if we could publish this in the eZine. He consented which generated an article in this issue.

If you have anything for this section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article, please go to http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Suggestion_Form1.htm and give us your input. With your input, we can improve the Boomer Video eZine.

Launch of Jim Cockrum ’s Members Only Site

Since you received my special email last Monday, you are aware that Jim Cockrum’s “Silent Team” website launched on 3/20/07 .

It is being hailed as one of the major recent events on the Internet. Here is some of the feedback on the site forum:

"I've been looking around the site and I'm very impressed from what I've seen so far..."

"...thank you for showing me the light!"

"I really think this Members Only Site and Forum are absolutely wonderful!! I really appreciate all the help..."

"I am so glad to be a part of this!"

"...I got up at 2am to join and then went back to bed!"( 11am launch here was a 2am launch Australia - sorry about that!)

"...I feel very excited about joining this group."

"What an awesome opportunity we are undertaking..."

Since I am on the panel of experts for the site, I admit, I am prejudiced. I think it is a great site which will be of assistance to all who are serious about learning more about eBay and Internet business.

If you have not yet taken a look at it, there is a video tour that you can take by clicking the box in the upper left corner of the home page of the site at http://www.silent-team.com. Take a look. I think you will be impressed.

Video on YouTube.com

I am proud to be an expert on Jim’s website. I am also an affiliate of the site. I recorded and produced a video to post on YouTube and other video sites promoting Jim’s new site.

We will not cover the details of producing this video in the issue, but all you need for what I did is to know how to use MS Power Point (not very detailed knowledge) and have a screen recorder. We use Camtasia Studio, but there are other video recorders that will do the job.

We will cover using video in more detail in future issues.

You can view the video at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3zYCo_ms5k

How to Defeat the Email SPAM Robots

We all know that SPAM robots roam the Internet looking for email addresses in HTML pages. They are programmed to look for the format for an email address (name@website.com). When they find one, they record it and lo and behold, here comes the SPAM.

You have seem many people write their email address as (name (at) website.com) to fool the “bots”.

When you see an email link on a page that opens your email composer page when you click it, it is encoded in HTML as a “mail to” reference tag. These are encoded in HTML in the format (the “a” HTML tags are removed from this so the browser does think it is HTML and execute it).

href="mailto:email address">Display Text

the SPAM robots look for these “mail to” tags and harvest them also.

Here is the JavaScript that Brian sent to help us beat the “bots”:

To create a clickable "mailto:" hyperlink that is spam resistant, use the following JavaScript on your web pages.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

</SCRIPT>

This will result in a mailto: like this:

Steps to create a clickable "mailto:" hyperlink:

Copy and insert the above JavaScript into your html source code at the “mailto:” insertion point.
Note: Some html authoring tools may require you to use an automated tool for inserting the JavaScript (e.g., Insert > Script Object in Dreamweaver).

Edit the script to include the user name and mail host.

For example, suppose email should be sent to jdoe@andrew.cmu.edu. Within the script, the lines that read:
user = "myusername";
site = "myhost.com";

must be changed to:
user = "jdoe";
site = "andrew.cmu.edu";

Save your html file. The JavaScript will generate a clickable link that reads "Email me!".

(Added by the author) - You can substitute whatever text you want the reader to actually see on the webpage for the “Email me!” in the script.

Spam Resistant E-mail List

If you must maintain a web page of e-mail addresses, restrict it to one page. You can limit the number of SpamBots from indexing the page with the following meta tag:

"meta name="Robots" content="noindex,nofollow"

Most SearchBots, SpamBots & web crawlers ignore pages with this tag.

End of Brian’s suggestion

I have already changed the email address on the home page of Boomer eZine so take a look at the results.

Our sincere thanks to Brian for a really helpful tip.

Guest Author

I read the following article in “Site Pro News” and I thought it was worth publishing in the eZine. I have been on my “soap box” about using the “Web 2.0” tools for creating traffic to your site. I wanted you to hear it from someone else in a very well written article.

Gear Up Your Site For Social Media Mark eting
By Deepak Dutta

The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffíc.

You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interactions on more and more sites and they may have an expectation of the same from your site also.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus this year should be on the social aspects of your site.

Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.

The central theme of these sites is user generated content used for sharing among the end-users. The social aspects of these sites are to allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.

You don't have to change your site completely within a month or so to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally throughout the year and you will be on your way to meet these new challenges.

The first step is to declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don't like to deal with unknowns. Create an About Us page and líst your achievements and skills.

Create a MySpace page and link your bio in the About Us page to the MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of these new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.

Install frëe blog software and start publishing at least one article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. This is done by providing an action button for each article on your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.

Also, provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to your site.

Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don 't delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.

If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your contents. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers draw their attention.

Publish all your feeds at Feedburner. Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services.

Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube and Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post these videos using catchy titles, teasing descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them discoverable.

Provide embedded links to your posted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites.

Besides videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.

Provide a Send to Friend feature for all products and services you offer. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.

For starters, Yahoo provides a service called Action Buttons that adds links to your website for users to share, save, and blog about your website. The Yahoo action buttons use del.icio.us for social bookmarking and the Yahoo blog site for blogging. It also has a print feature.

Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in profound changes to web surfers' experiences. It is the right time for implementing features that will make your site social media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffíc to your site.

About The Author

Dr. Deepak Dutta is the creator of http://www.semanticbay.com - an interactive social network website based on user shared text and picture contents on any topics. His other website http://www.classifiedsforfree.com - is one of the oldest online classifieds sites where users can post ads in more than 600 US cities and 60 countries.

That wraps up our issue for this week. Until next week, stay tuned.

John and Linda Howe

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