The Silent Avatar Speaks

I'm sure you've heard about people who have "IT" - that something which makes them stand apart from the rest. Sometimes the "IT" is almost indefinable, but whatever "IT" is we all would like a piece of it for ourselves. This "IT" is that undefinable something that is alluring, almost magical about the person which draws you into their space, and makes you happy to be there. The same can be said about websites. Only after much learning I have determined what makes a good website, and what makes a great website defines for me the "IT" factor. When I come across a website with "IT", invariably the site has all the components of a website which makes you come back again and again. It takes time to know how to define "IT". I've spent thousands of hours looking at websites, and diving into Internet marketing circles, following those who have "IT", and discovering how they translate their "IT' to their websites. If you look at enough successful websites you too will get to know elements which encompass a successful website. These elements (and they are simple), greatly enhance the chances of establishing customer (or reader) loyalty. So just what are these elements? Keep reading and I will reveal all. 1. Top of the list is a way to capture email addresses. Whether you have a sell a product, information, or offer a service no website is complete without offering a way to capture email addresses. There are many ways you can capture email addresses - offer newsletters, product updates, free reports, competitions, upcoming product launches, notification of "specials", free giveaways (products). Start looking at successful webistes and see what they do to lure visitors and always offer a way for your subscribers to unsubscribe. 2. A Blog A blog is a great way for your site visitors to get to know you. Keeping the blog topics relevant to your site is a way to share information about your particular niche. It's also a great way to add content to your site and keep Google happily indexing your site for new content. Comments posted by visitors are also a great way for them to communicate questions and add to your content. 3. Newsletter Successful sites offer their visitors the opportunity to keep abreast of what is happening with their business. It's not hard to put together a newsletter which contains information about your site. It doesn;t have to be a long drawn out newsletter. In fact, with most people being time poor, newsletters which omit "waffle" are appreciated by us all. Writing about your services, tips, advice, and the like will keep your subscribers in contact with you and continue to build relationships. 4. Great sites give things away for free. Creating a relationship requires you to instill trust in your site visitor. Giving away something free enables your site visitors to get the "warm and fuzzies" about you and your site. Offer quality information, free products (if you can), in fact anything which relates to your niche enhances the perceived value of what you are giving away. 5. Tell-A-Friend Give site visitors the opportunity to Tell-A-Friend. While visitors are on your site they may find information which they feel would benefit a friend. Make it easy for them to tell their friends about it. Personal recommendation is the best recommendation and using this method allows you to grow your business virally. 6. Their websites are professional. Credibility starts with your website. If you are intending to present yourself as a professional, then getting a professional looking website is a must. 7. Offer video (or at the least audio) Video is a great medium for engaging your site visitors in a more personal way. Broadband is becoming more mainstream and using video to present products, show "how-to's", or even to introduce yourself goes a long way to putting a face to what really is a faceless medium. 8. Contact details or help desk So often I go to a website and the contact details are non existent, or worse I have made contact and no one responds (even after repeated attempts). No matter how good the product or service or information you offer, be prepared to offer support for your site visitors when they need it. Lack of support for your customers can seriously damage your online efforts. Remember the relationship with your site visitors doesn't end with the purchase. 9. Successful websites network with others. Sourcing a Joint Venture parture is one of the quickest wasy to grow your business. I've included an ebook to download on Joint Venturing which is worthwhile reading. JV Givewaway Secret Special Report. If you have any questions or comments feel free to post. Enjoy!

Tags: Hot Off The Press, Web Design by the silent avatar
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The robots.txt file is probably one of the least understood aspects of the search engine optimization world. Essentially, a robots.txt file tells the various search engine spiders (a.k.a. robots or bots) to crawl or not to crawl specific sections of a website. The robots.txt file can indicate files or pages not to be indexed at all, or can instruct spiders and bots with specific instructions about how to index your site. Many search engine spiders routinely look for the robots.txt file as they arrive on a site and many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree that including this file makes good sense because it acts as an invitation to crawl and to index your websites content. There are however some important instances when you may want to limit or to even exclude bots from crawling a site. Some examples of this are

• when there are rogue spiders that are crawling for the chief purpose of indexing your site for their own use
• when there is sensitive information (e.g., unfinished projects you do not want indexed such as site redesigns or exclusive beta-tests)
• in situations when site owners decide that there is no need to index portions of their site such as image files, download files, or cgi bins.

Search engines scan through files that surfers will never see and this is reason enough to put a robots file on your site. If your site stats include a section on 'files not found', it's possible to see many entries where search engines' spiders looked for and failed to find a robots.txt file on your site. Creating the robots.txt file Creating a basic robots.txt file is a relatively simple process. Open notepad or your favorite text editor and follow along with the instructions below. Every robots.txt file contains records of two fields : a “User-agent” line and a “Disallow” line. The User-Agent line specifies the robot or spider that you are instructing, and the “Disallow” line provides the instructions on what can or cannot be indexed. Here are two examples... Example #1 allows robots to index everything while Example #2 prohibits robots from indexing anything: In the case of the User-agent, the asterisk (*) is the symbol for ‘all’ – so in the example it allows all ‘User-agents’ or robots. The ‘Disallow:” field informs the robot (User-agent) what to crawl or what not to crawl. If you want to allow all of your website to be crawled leave the Disallow field blank (see example #1). If you want to disallow all crawling include the wildcard forward slash (example #2). You can use this disallow command while creating a website. Just don't forget to remove it once the site is live. The majority of websites welcome robots to freely index a website, however there are some instances where the robots’ crawling may be unnecessary or is forbidden and therefore "off limits" to the robots. Say you have some confidential documents, or downloadable files for users, by indicating these sensitive files are not to be indexed by the robots you eliminate them being indexed and the subsequent files being accessible to all. You can exclude files files from all robots or from individual search engines. For instance, say you have a file called TopSecret.htm in a directory called ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ that you do not want to be spidered by robots (because you don't want everyone to have access to these files). You would simply add the following lines to your robots.txt file: You can disallow whole directories by: If, for some reason, you choose to prohibit some robots/spiders from crawling your site, the User-agent should include the name of the specific spider indexing your site. For example, if a rogue robot keeps indexing your forum, you would include the following in your robots.txt file: Alternatives to Robots.txt file: Having said all of the above about the robots.txt file you do not have to actually create one if you don't want to, however it is an older, more respected method of controlling robots and webcrawlers. The alternative is to use the “noindex,nofollow” attribute in their HTML meta-tags. Though not a foolproof way to eliminate robots that routinely burn up bandwidth, such an attribute does mesh with the general objectives of many websites. Here's an example of a "noindex,nofollow" HTML meta-tag: There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of bots and spiders crawling the Web which will take note of your robots.txt file, but not all of them will, so if the information is very sensitive then better no to store it on a server. If you would like to use a cool tool to generate your robots.txt file you can check out my Resources page on my website.

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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I couldn't resist making this post in the wake of the launch of "Review Crusher". What? You haven't heard of Review Crusher? Where have you been? Mike Filsaime is at it again churning out yet another "buy this and it will make you money" product. I sat through the whole painful video introduction which (if you took out all of his bragging and name dropping, and who he rubs shoulders with), it could easily have been condensed down to 10 minutes. (C'mon Mike! Do you think we all have tons of time to just sit and watch a "brag fest"?) Now don't get me wrong. I'm no party pooper and good on Mike for getting to where he is (and no doubt his skydiving exploits are testimony to the money he has made to enjoy his down time) As Mike freely confesses.. he work's hard and parties hard. I've been reading Mike's emails and watching product launch after product launch since I purchased the Butterfly Marketing script. All up I am probably on about 5 of Mikes lists (which means I get copies of all of his emails from all 5 lists! - which is another peeve of mine), and I've unsubscribed from others because it was just getting ridiculous with the duplicate emails). But seriously.. lengthy product introductions like Review Crusher is enough to send me (and I'm sure many others) screaming up the garden path saying "Get to the point!". Was the waiting the 50 odd minutes worth it? In my opinion? No. Look.. the premise for this product is to be able to open up your own "Review Site" and without taking anything away from Mike I'm sure the product does what he says it does. BUT... I couldn't help thinking that even though you can customise your own template (so individual sites can be different), it still boils down to a few more hundred review sites hitting the internet courtesy of Mike Filsaime. Now there is some benefit in creating your own review site, and before we get into what those benefits are, what about the competition who is already out there? Mike Filsaime has his own site for reviewing internet marketing products called MarketingProductReview.com. As at the time of writing MarketingProductsReview.com's Alexa rank was 28,927,768. Compare that to this sites ranking of 1,213,502. Enough said. Dig a little deeper and I find that the traffic stats for MarketingProductReview.com is 140,832 (down 27,135) The Reach, Traffic and Page Views are all down. So one has to ask the question... is having a "review site" a good thing? Well.. if you look at the stats then it's not an earth shattering site for a niche (and this is Mike Filsaimes site). However if you are in looking to pad out this site with your affiliate links and someone buys on the strength of a review, then it could be a money making proposition for you. If you're into Internet Marketing, then forget grabbing this product for a site which reviews Internet Marketing Products. Go review another niche as Mike's got that one covered. By The way.. if you are interested in purchasing Review Crusher software only it's US$1997, or you can get a payment plan option: US$497 down and US$67 per month buys you the software and membership to Job Crusher. You can watch Review Crusher Video here (you can download the video and fast forward Mike "bragfest") to save time. If you want to throw your money at Mike then go ahead. If I want a review I will just Google it. So Is there any benefit in having a review site? I'll let you be the judge.

Tags: Hot Off The Press, Internet Marketing by the silent avatar
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