The E-mail Question

With the growth of the Internet came an explosion of new advertising techniques. If you have a connection to the Internet and a very inexpensive software program it is possible to reach thousands of people every day.

With print advertising you have expenses that must be recovered from every mailing. Think about just the mailing cost of a single letter and multiply it by only a thousand. Bulk mailing has worked and even the high costs of printing and mailing each offer didn’t stop the flood we all saw in our mailboxes. Plus, the costs helped keep the field restricted to companies that could afford to properly plan their message to ensure they would see the correct return.

Enter the Internet and the virtually cost free expenses of an e-mail campaign. It was inevitable that this medium would become a nuisance for so many people. In just a few minutes you can type out a message and in an hour the message can be broadcast to thousands of people around the world.

It’s not even difficult or expensive to find the e-mail addresses you need. Every week I get sent offers to buy e-mail lists that number millions of people. The cost – usually under $300. By comparison bulk mailing lists cost much more.

So the people as a whole fought back. Several different avenues have been tried with very limited success. Even the enactment of the CAN-SPAM laws have not really stopped the stuffed inboxes. It was a valiant attempt but fell short of the goal.

The various SPAM filters that are available use a list of trigger words or phrases to tell your e-mail programs something is possibly SPAM. That also means that perfectly innocuous messages can be filtered by mistake. If you’re curious what the most common words are, send me an e-mail and I’ll send you a list of the two hundred most common triggers you should avoid using in your message header of in the body of the e-mail.

What the population wanted was to stop getting junk e-mails. I think many people expected CAN-SPAM to do that. Well, it didn’t. The legislation only requires an easily found way to “opt out” of future mailings. Other measures are supposed to make it a crime to use false headers or pretend to come from someone else. That’s the area designed to prevent “Phishing”.

I got a very realistic e-mail that looked like it came from PayPal last week. It warned me that someone had attempted to access my account from overseas. Then it told me to sign-in to my account and verify that my account had not been compromised. The link they provided showed that it would take me to the PayPal site. Fortunately, I know that the PayPal site opens in a secure mode, using https not http. I forwarded the e-mail to PayPal who were quick to tell me they didn’t send it. I wasn’t surprised.

If there’s one message I hope to get across each week it’s that you must take your skepticism to the Internet. The scams can be very sophisticated and hard to detect. If an offer looks too good it’s probably a scam.


Mike Myklin is an author, a lecturer, and an e-commerce owner. If you have questions about the Internet and e-commerce, you can send them to him and he will try to answer them in his column. You can also read this article on-line at http://www.myklin.com/.

Website Metrics and the World Wide Web

One of the advantages to using the Internet to advertise your products is the detailed information (website metrics) you can get back about specific ways you advertise. Every time someone looks at your website they leave a record behind of which pages they saw, the time of day, the day of the week, how much time they stayed on each page, where they came from, the page they landed on coming to your site and the page they left from.

That doesn’t mean I know your name or any other specifically personal information but I can tell which operating system you were using (Windows XP, ME, or 2000, Linux, etc), which browser you use (Internet Explorer users were less than 57% of my total use, or Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla), what screen resolution your monitor uses, your connection speed, your address as far as which town you live in, which Search Engine you used and what specific search term or phrase brought you to me.

What a wealth of information! I know from my own log files that last week I had visitors from France, India, the Netherlands and Germany; and even know the town names as well. From within the USA most of my visitors came from California and Delaware. I even had 15 visitors from Poteau (11 used Cyberlink to access my website) and 1 from Cambridge, England.

As a business I can see the immediate results of advertising done in different parts of the country. A classified ad done in South Carolina can be compared with ads done in South Dakota, or New York, or Washington. If different ads are used in the same area and direct you to different pages at my website I can even evaluate the specific messages using the same groups.

Plus, I can see what pages of my site you found interesting; how you followed information trails I built for you, and where you left (even when you don’t buy something or leave any contact information.) For anyone who really wants to see exactly how effective different marketing campaigns can be the Internet is a gold mine of information.

The Internet does not exist in a vacuum. It is influenced by seasonal trends and geographic preferences just as any other marketing tool. An ad that works well in a New England winter will most likely bomb in a Southwest summer. It’s the summertime in the USA. Most websites have seen a sharp drop in Internet visitors as we all head outside to enjoy ourselves. Yes, some businesses may have seen an increase in visitors but the larger number must wait for us all to get back from the lake. Hopefully, everyone is taking advantage of this time to evaluate their marketing plans.

Mike Myklin is an author, a lecturer, and an e-commerce owner. If you have questions about the Internet and e-commerce, you can send them to him and he will try to answer them in his column. You can also read this article on-line at http://www.myklin.com/.

Searching the World Wide Web

Part of understanding any industry is understanding the “jargon” used. This week I’m answering a reader’s question, “What are SERP’s and SEO?”

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s the page of answers you get when you type a search term into your favorite search box. In Yahoo you’ll get a page of results with a light blue area at the top and sides called “Sponsor Results”.

Sponsor Results are paid advertising from companies that want you to see their ad when you enter a particular search term. They can pay either for you to see them (Pay Per Impression or PPI) or when you “click” on the ad to go to their website (Pay Per Click or PPC). The prices they pay for this advertising can be quite high. PPC tends to be higher cost and some terms can easily cost $5-$10 per click.

That’s not a misprint. I have recently done research for clients that showed a $7.50 per click cost for their advertising. It doesn’t matter if you buy from the advertiser or not. If you click on their ad you will cost them money. It all depends on the product and how badly a company wants you to see their products how much PPC advertising will cost.

In the middle of the Yahoo page you will find a list of websites numbered from #1 to #10. At the top there’s a heading of Search Results that will tell you how many websites have what you want. Sometimes this number can be in the 10’s of millions.( Try entering the term Christmas Present and see how many turn up.)

These websites are at the top of this list because the Search Engines found them to be the most relevant to your search terms. You can’t buy your way into these results and it doesn’t cost the companies anything to have you look at their site. These are called the “natural” or “organic” results.

This is where you get the term, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Websites can be optimized (designed well) so they are shown at the top of this list. It’s a good way to get advertising that doesn’t cost the companies any money. Plus, if the company doesn’t have to pay lots of advertising costs, you should be able to save money on your purchases. It’s a winning situation for you both.

So why don’t more companies use SEO to save money? The short answer is, it’s not easy. The Search Engines constantly change the way they rank websites in relation to each other. Most website designers don’t know how to do this. You have to work at double guessing how the Search Engines think. This is where the difference between most website designers and Internet Marketers becomes apparent.

A good Internet Marketer can show you how to get your website to the top of the organic results. You can always get a #1 result for your own unique name. Many unscrupulous companies promise you high rankings (for a fee) and only show you your own name.
The better companies can help you get high rankings for the search terms that apply to your product. Don’t settle for less. Always ask questions and take a healthy dose of skepticism with you to the Internet.

Mike Myklin is an author, a lecturer, and an e-commerce owner. If you have questions about the Internet and e-commerce, you can send them to him and he will try to answer them in his column. You can also read this article on-line at http://www.myklin.com/.