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Table of Contents for this issue.....
1.
Authors
Comments
2.
Q & A,
Suggestions and Comments
3.
eBay
Classified Ads Revisited
4.
Other
Auction Sites
5.
Recent
Poll Results
6. Guest
Author
7.
Web 2.0
Websites for Rookies
Author's
Comments
Linda
and some of her girl friends are off to
Lake
Medina
for some girl time and some kayaking.
She
will then attend a baby shower in
San Antonio
for our grandson, John
Mark
-Thomas who will arrive in September.
Next, she is off to
Lake Jackson
,
Texas
to help her mother recover from a
knee replacement.
I
am going to be alone for a while and I already wish she were home with
me. I am proofing this issue
by my lonesome so “cut me some slack”.
Q & A,
Suggestions and Comments
Ana
is evaluating Site Build It against other web hosts.
She and I have had a running email conversation about this
comparison. Here is an email
in which my answers are embedded after her questions.
-----Original
Message-----
From:
Ana – Email address deleted
Sent:
Saturday, June 30, 2007
1:47 PM
To:
John Howe; John Howe
Subject:
Some concerns about SBI (I know, I promised, but ...)
Hi John,
A concern about the SBI forum: I would advise anyone
to be very, very careful about going on a public forum
talking about your business details. Ideas are not
easily copyrightable and are stolen all the time.
I'd want to communicate only with my advisor --
privately. After all, the company has many sites in
similar niches competing with each other.
On that forum are not just potential communicators,
but competitors. Has anyone else raised this concern?
JH - What is discussed on
the forums are not so much about the content of the sites, but how to
make the sites work. People
on the forums know that competitors are on the forums with them and they
have to make the decision what to divulge.
Also, to clarify a previous answer: The site
"owner"
does not actually own the SBI site; it's owned by the
company. You own only the content and any graphics or
other design elements you added yourself. Moving would
be very difficult if not impossible.
JH - The ownership is not
much different from any web host. If
you host on GoDaddy, you do not own the GoDaddy site.
You are just purchasing space on their server for your content.
You can move the content to another server when you want.
Anyone who wants a forum on their site would not be
able to have one. Isn't that among the software SBI
can't host? Also, videos would be difficult for the
same reason -- or at least good-quality ones.
JH - that is true.
SBI does not host server side applications like forum software,
blogging software (Word Press), etc.
My experience with forums has been poor.
I established the forum on Boomer-Entrepreneur.com and it has not
been popular and it costs me time to keep the spammers off.
Ok, accepted. I don't plan a forum at present. In my
niche there are hundreds of forums; there's nothing I
can possible add. Blogs would be more appropriate. I
admit I was considering more than one, as I have
sub-niches. Videos, too, may be in the works once I
get the equipment and learn how. So ... some
challenges.
JH - SBI recently improved
the handling of special files. You
still cannot post an .exe file on SBI.
I post those on my non-SBI sites and download them from there.
What if you buy SBI and decide to design your own
site, providing your own template? Do you own your
site then?
JH - you own the content
of your website whether it is SBI or any other host.
You own your domain name. It
is your website, but it is hosted where ever you choose.
On a further but related point: Ken Evoy made some
telling remarks about design in his latest newsletter
-- telling considering how SBI kind of poo-poos the
concept. I'll address those in a separate post to you.
Maybe others will be interested.
JH - Ana, in previous
emails, we have discussed site design and how it is perceived.
I am turned off by what some consider great site design.
When a flash intro page comes up when I first visit a website, I
find myself frantically looking for the "Skip Intro" link.
I don't have time to watch what some webmaster spent untold hours
creating thinking it was "cool".
I do not know what your
ideal vision is of good site design so I cannot really address your
concern. The bottom line -
on the Internet people are searching for information.
Anything that gets in the way of that search is not appreciated
by the users of the Net.
Great ezine. Thanks and have a good weekend.
JH - Thanks for your
complement. Take care of
yourself.
Ana
If you have anything for this
section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article,
please send us an email with your suggestions or your input.
With your help, we can improve the Boomer Video eZine.
eBay
Classified Ads Revisited
Last week I wrote
about a making an error on a classified ad and then not being able to
easily change it.
The initial work
around was to add to the description in the form of a postscript (P.
S.).
Well, if you use
the infinite number of monkeys and infinite number of typewriters
theory, you can finally find a way to do it.
Sidebar:
If you have never heard of the monkeys and typewriter theory,
check it out on Google. I
first read it in the novel “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute in 1958.
The
theory says that if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite
number of typewriters (that dates the saying) one of the monkeys will
eventually type the Bible.
I
have adapted the saying to mean if you keep trying combinations of
possible solutions, you will eventually find the right one.
(Just keep hitting the keys and something will pop up).
I kept looking on
eBay and the solution was right there under my nose.
I was trying to
use the Edit function (see picture) which seemed logical. I
checked the box and clicked Edit.
For some unexplained reason, eBay did not like this.
To me it seems obvious that Edit means to change, but logic did
not prevail.
I kept poking
around and in the drop down box on the right of the listing summary, I
found a “Revise” option. I
tried that and lo and behold, it allowed me to change the links that
were wrong. Notice the other
options that are hiding in the dropdown box.
This brought up a
page that for all practical purposes is just like the listing page.
I was able to modify the HTML in the Item Description field and
correct the bad links that I put in earlier.
If you use
classified ads, keep this one filed away for future reference so you do
not waste you time like I did trying to find how to correct a classified
ad.
Other
Auction Sites
It
is amazing what you learn just cruising around the Net.
I was on Eons.com reading posts in some of the groups to which I
belong when I came across mention of etsy.com and ecrater.com. Never
having heard of them, I checked them out.
Etsy.com
is a craft and handmade products auction site.
It appears to operate like eBay with listing fees and selling
fees. It is popular and has
great traffic with an Alexa rank of 2,309.
I looked and there are books and magazines listed so I may list
my ebook on etsy.com to generate traffic to Boomer eZine.
Ecrater.com
is a free auction site.
The Alexa rank for ecrater.com is 12,046 which is great traffic
too (rough rule of thumb – anything under 100,000 is great).
Ecrater appears
to be more relaxed on its rules and regs.
It makes its money by selling you advertising position in the
website. If you want your ad
to stand out, you pay them for having it displayed more prominently on
the site. I will probably
double back to this site to list my ebook for traffic generation to
Boomer eZine.
Check these out
and see if they might help you generate traffic to your website – or
you might have items to list for sale on these sites.
Recent
Poll Results
This is short and
sweet.
A Harris poll showed that 72% of households
want to start a work-from-home business. An
online
business is THE best way to change
their
lives.
This is not
surprising. This seems to be
a major trend in our world. This
is why Linda and I write Boomer eZine and why I continue to preach that
Site Build It is the way to a successful work-from-home business.
Take three
minutes to watch this video by Ken Evoy, President of Site Sell, Inc.
If you have any questions about Site Build It, you
can speak with an SBI owner (other than myself) who can answer any questions
that you might have. Follow
this link for more details.
Guest
Author
I always scan
“Site Pro New” for some interesting or informative article.
We mentioned Site Pro News in Boomer eZine Volume 2 Issue 4 (http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V2I4_050407.htm).
Bogdan
Badulescu published an article in Site Pro News from his blog at http://bynapse.blogspot.com.
We
have discussed various aspects of Web 2.0, but I felt that this article
does a great job of summarizing it for us.
I
wrote Bogdan and he was kind enough to reply.
Hello
John,
Thank you for visiting my blog and leaving a word.
As I state in my blog's footer, you may publish any article from my blog
providing that you link back to me and give me the credit for it. Please
also read my disclaimer on the blog at http://bynapse.blogspot.com.
I shall be happy to link back to your ezine as well.
BTW, great domain name !
Best Regards,
Bogdan Badulescu
Web
2.0 Websites for Rookies
This
age of the internet is all about decentralization.
Only
a few years ago, during the “bursting
of the dot-com bubble”, almost an entire generation concluded that
the internet is over hyped and turned its attention elsewhere, thus
leaving place to a new generation of technology and models to get center
stage and turn the tables out in cyberspace. Web 2.0 does not mean
there’s a new version of the internet out there, it’s not a
technical specification. The term was promoted, according to Wikipedia,
by O’Reily Media in 2003 and it’s explained in depth in the “What
is Web 2.0” article.
The decentralization is the main concept that made the tables turn on
the web and building a presence out in cyberspace these days has to
consider the beneficial aspects of what took place. For marketers and
brands, it’s still a headache, since the “portal” which was the
key of the “first age” or “first generation” of internet
communities is no longer the key to getting the word out. This time, the
“consumer” is mastering its own universe and products and brands are
orbiting around them.
Bloggers
and online communities go around constraints. It is human nature to
avoid barriers and wherever one is encountered online, the stream goes
around and ignores the constraint to a degree that may throw the site,
brand or portal to internet’s shed and thus dramatically hurting its
business. Blogging, social networking, search engines and friendly
directories on the other hand are the new community and here is where
“word-of-mouth” is happening and getting a recommendation about a
product values more than all the publicity around it.
Excellent examples of Web2.0 websites are YouTube,
MySpace, Flickr,
Digg, Del.icio.us
or Technorati to name a few
and, of course, Google which probably represents to Web 2.0 what
Netscape meant to the internet before the turn of the century. There is
a wealth of information out there so when you start your web presence,
know that you should consider it.
Not everything that has the 2.0 extension at the end is really about web
2.0 though. It’s a concept and an age of the internet and many are
trying to take a profit out of internet rookies by selling web 2.0
related items. Just use your better judgment and look for reviews in
those wonderful online communities. Joining these new and dynamic
communities is exciting and fulfilling as it opens up, literally, the
planet and connects you to whatever is actually making news out there.
There has never been a better and easier time to join and get connected
and for a website publisher or webmaster.
I’ve put together this list of ideas to get you started.
Please comment and add to this list so that the web can benefit from it.
·
Write a
paragraph about what your website stands for and submit it to share
sites like Digg, Reddit
or Now Public.
Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us
and submit your site to StumbleUpon.
Submit your following articles from your press section to those
directories when you publish them on your site. If you’re writing for
geeks, submit your site to Slashdot
too. Here
is a top 10 social bookmark links list from About.com.
·
Create a Google
Group or Yahoo
Group covering your site topics.
·
Create a
blog and use it to be honest about your site or your interests. A blog
is personal and the language used is less formal. You can actually write
in a blog, responsibly but “off your company’s record”. Try using Blogger,
Word Press or MySpace.
I am also using Freewebs but I
find Blogger to be the easiest to use. Now if you do that, you should
join Technorati
and claim your blog.
·
Submit
your site to search engine
friendly directories and DMOZ.org.
This process should be free but it’s time consuming.
·
Most
blogging directories offer Real Simple Syndication (RSS feeds) by
default. You should use it for your site’s news section too. As soon
as you have an RSS, submit it to feed aggregators like FeedBurner
or Squidoo. Some
of those aggregators offer you the possibility to send out a newsletter
with the newest articles, automatically.
·
Test your
site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers. We are
living wonderful times for testing site appearance on different browsers
and making sure that the site is compliant to W3C
standards and looks good across browsers since Safari, the web
browser used on Mac, is now available for windows too so you can have
all the browsers on one OS to test with, unless you develop on Mac and
you have IE5.
·
Use
excellent portals like YouTube
and Google Video
to post video and Flickr, Photobucket
or Picasa Web Albums to
publish photos.
·
Search
engines love XML
sitemaps. You can submit that to Google webmaster tools and keep an
eye on your site’s traffic with Google
Analytics or the new set of tools from Yahoo, the Site
Explorer.
Publishing
advertisement and having high page ranking are good for the morale, but
most visitors use ad-blockers and optimizing for search engines is a
continuous job and there are professionals out there doing just that,
keyword: “SEO Optimization”. Those are not the goals of the new
websites and, if high page ranking helps, it does not guarantee
popularity. For designers, digital-web offers a nice
article about web 2.0 from the designer perspective.
I
will not go into depths about what each of the sites mentioned above
stands for. Research is probably the most enlightening experience one
can have and I leave it all to you. Comment and add items to my lists
and keep in mind that web 2.0 is all about social media, the consumer
takes center stage, and that changes the world.
End
of Bogdan’s article
That wraps up our
issue for this week. Until
next week, stay tuned.
John and
Linda Howe
www.boomer-ezine.com
http://www.entrepreneur-ezine.com
www.boomer-guru.com
www.boomer-entrepreneur.com
www.boomer-marketplace.com
Boomer’s
Amazon Store
(http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Amazon_Page.htm)
That
wraps up our issue for this week. Until
next week, stay tuned.
