Cisco and Windows XP Help

Yesterday I attended a conference sponsored by Adhost in Seattle. The speaker was Terry Miller from CRMGROUP, the topic: Email Marketing.

Email Marketing list segregation

Terry suggested we send different messages to people who

1. open
2. click
3. forward
4. transact
5. open, did not transact

Also segment people who made a purchase vs signup only, by recency, by sales volume.

Design to Build bigger lists

• List signup on every page
• Special coupon promotion? Giveaways to get people to give email addresses.
• Refer a friend: get three entries in the contest if you refer a friend to the drawing via email.
• Have an email list signup sheet at the physical front desk.
• Have the direct paper mailer ask people to go to the webpage and provide an email address.
• Have our contact form add people to the email list.
• Click to forward to a friend links

Newsletters vs. Promotional Email Marketing

• A newsletter should have short blurbs with links to landing pages (blog entries)
• Promotional emails (not newsletters) shouldn’t require scrolling.

How to write great copy for your email marketing campaign

• Subject Lines
1. Less than 40 characters
2. promise to deliver benefits
3. beware spam filters: subject shouldn’t contain “advertisement”, “! and $”, “! and free”, “$$”, “order today”, “order now!”, “money back”.
• Write with a Sense of Urgency
• Instruct users on how to add you to their safe senders list
• CAN-SPAM Compliance
1. The list source should be permission-based
2. Opt out options should be provided by an Automatic Link, Email, Snail Mail options
3. From Address and subject line should not be deceptive
4. Physical Address should be included.

When to send email?

• Test different days to send email. (Tuesday might be best)
• Most people would like to recieve email Monthly.
• Try sending emails at 10:30am (Pacific)

I’ve been resisting the geeky, and helping save the environment by not running a server in my house all day. There are two projects now that I can’t do by ssh’ing into 1and1’s servers, so it’s time to run a linux box again. I decided to run SUSE. It’s Novell’s version of linux, and though they’d like you to pay for it, there is an OpenSUSE project, which allows you to download the remote installation cd, which is always my prefered method to install linux.

The SUSE 10.1 installer is pretty easy to use, but to download the linux system using the remote installer you’ll need to know where to download the files from. This never seems to be apparent, I always need to figure it out by trial and error.

• Choose HTTP install
• the IP address for OpenSUSE’s installation repository is: 195.135.221.130
• enter this for the path: /pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source

The installer is pretty easy to use. My complaints about the installer:

1. When you change an option, it reconfigures the packages, every time. On a slow machine this takes like five minutes. I changed five options. Big waste of time.
2. The install hung up halfway through downloading the 2.5 gig I needed. There was nothing on the hard drive to boot to, and I couldn’t figure out how to convince the cdrom installer to pick up where it left off. It insisted on formatting the drive. I had to start all over. I let it download overnight, and the second time it completed.
3. The installer is pretty, but there are long periods of time with just a spinning mouse cursor. I’d like to know what it’s doing to make me wait.
4. I let it auto-detect everytime, even when I knew I had no hardware for it to detect and it worked just fine. It would be nice to have it just auto-detect without requiring user intervention.

Now the SUSE is hanging up on boot. I had to get to work, so updates tonight!

I attended a Search Engine Marketing Seminar sponsored by Adhost yesterday. When they get the audio and slides of the presentation up I’ll link to that here. It was pretty interesting, here’s what I took away:

Pay Per Click talk by representatives from Point It

• More specific (and relevant) search phrases are more likely to convert than broad terms
• Yahoo offer’s ‘paid inclusion’, which is paid ads in natural listings.
• 62% of users cannot distinguish between paid and organic listings.
• The search pie: Google comprises 49%-55% of the market, while Yahoo is 23.8% and MSN is 9.6%
• Google, Yahoo (which was Overture), and MSN are all separate PPC systems
• Instead of short keyword lists matching on broad, it’s better to have long keyword lists of all permutations with exact matching. They claimed you get a little boost for an exact keyword match.
  • Use Webtrends to find what keywords people actually use to get to your site
  • This Tool helps you pick keywords.
• You want to turn off optimize the ad for click through rates in google analytics, and do it manually. GA doesn’t wait for statistically relevant responses before it starts favoring ads. Also, turning it off allows you to test two (or more) ads against each other. There may be an ad which leads to more clicks, but actually costs more because it doesn’t lead to conversions.

Organic SEO by Larry Slivitz of SearchWrite

Organic SEO

• Don’t Target your Company Name. His rationale: If people know your company they have found you. You want people who don’t know you to find your company.
• Google and Yahoo have separate Sitemaps. You should use this to ensure your entire site gets crawled, especially if you have dynamic pages. He also liked my idea of including your (local) blog in your sitemap. I’ll see if there is a script to generate this for Word Press, and if not I’ll write one and link to it here.
• You want to increase your PageRank. You do that by Link Building:

Link Building

• You need “Four 4’s to get in Google”. Meaning you need four pages with a PR (Page Rank) of four or above to be ranked well in google.
• Create a “Link to Us” Page. Give code for people to use to link to you, this is important because the text people use in the links to you will be considered by search engines.
• Don’t link to pages with Low PageRanks. These are bad neighborhoods, and Google doesn’t like it when you associate with them. Bad neighborhoods linking to you doesn’t hurt you though.
• Reciprocal Links are a zero sum game. Try to encourage people to link to you without you linking back to them, if possible.
• You can pay for some high-quality links. Being listed in these business directorys will also increase your PR because search engines know you paid for the following links, and so you are a more established site.
  • Yahoo Business Directory ($299 annual fee)
  • Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory ($49 annual fee)
  • Business.com ($199 annual fee)
  • The ODP directory is free but will take a few months for the human editors to approve you
• Find out who is linking to your competitors and see if you can get them to link to you as well (or instead?) on google using the ‘link:www.competitor.com’ operator
• Get listed on Local Listing sites.
• Yahoo Local
• Google Local
• SuperPages.com
• SwitchBoard.com
• Local.com
• Judys Book
• Insider Pages

Though I like doing techy things, I’m also a part time driving instructor. I got the following from the head instructor at the driving school I work for. It is quite the ego boost:

Tony,

During my debriefing with the trainees last week, we spent a lot of time talking about what they saw when observing experienced instructors at work. Your name kept coming up. The instructors that observed you couldn’t stop talking about how great of a job you did. Here were some of the highlights I took from a couple of the eval sheets:

“Tony made both drives fun”
“Lorraine kept seeing 2 ropes when setting reference points - Tony had her close eyes, open them and look way ahead - it solved the problem”
“Gently had her go a tad faster”
“Tony appeared to really enjoy instructing”
“When he had a correction, he always led off with what they did well or what he liked, then added the correction - they weren’t upset nor did they shut down. He really had a great rapport with them”

“Tony is very positive w/ students”
“Lots of questions and looking ahead”
“Noticed her foot to brake and told her he liked it”
“Corrected once about waiting to change lanes, next time she waited and he complimented her”
“He gives feedback. Tony talked and commented entire drive - Either Tony or student was talking”
“Giving examples of what might happen”
“He talked to student while writing eval and explained it in great detail”

Here’s the kicker:
“Tony is the driving instructor I would like to develop into”

Great job Tony. The last time I rode with you, I was very impressed with the work you were doing. It’s obvious to the trainees you’re very talented and have worked very hard to build your instruction skills. I just wanted to make sure you know that we’re all aware of the great job you’re doing.

It’s nice to be appreciated. I teared up a little when I read this.

Then the next day I got the following from one of the founders of the parent company of my driving school. This man was a racecar driver, I saw the matchbox car with his name on it. He makes a good business training racecar drivers.

I just wanted to say thanks for doing an awesome job! When a new instructor, who we know has had the best training we’ve been able to provide yet, makes a claim like, “Tony is the instructor I want to develop into,” that’s impressive. It’s obvious that you’ve put a lot of effort into being as good as you are, and if the instructor trainees noticed what they did, we know the students are getting the training they need. From the comments, it sounds like you’re having fun and interacting really well with the students - way to go!

I don’t even know how to respond to these emails.

I’ve been hearing a lot of great things about Plone from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I don’t have a linux server running in my house (gasp!) mostly because my awe-inspiring dual-pII is very loud.

The Plone installer needs to be run by the root user. While I have ssh access at 1and1, I don’t have root access. I modified the installer to allow it to run, but of course it didn’t! It looks like it tried creating a user called ‘plone’ as well as trying to install things to ‘/opt/Plone-2.5′, stuff that you have to do as root.

Guess I have to get that Linux box up again. Wonder which distro I’ll use this time. Perhaps Debian again?

Word Press make it easy to post content on the internet. It also makes including images on your blogs easy if you know how. Here’s how to get awesome images on your blogs without first uploading images, creating posts that look like this!

1. Log into your WordPress software, click ‘Write’ to begin writing a post.

Cool people want images on the right with text wrapping around. So try inserting the image first thing, before any text.

2. You should have the image you’d like on your hard disk. Click the ‘Browse’ button in the blue ‘Upload’ box beneath your post.
3. Select the file from your hard disk.
4. Fill in something for the Title of the image. This will appear in the alt text, aiding the vision impaired who use screen readers and giving search engines something to read.
5. Click ‘Upload’

A preview of the image appears. This is where it gets a little confusing.

6. Single-click the image preview, a menu appears.
7. If ‘Using Thumbnail’ is the first line in the box, Word Press will insert a tiny image. Single-click ‘Using Thumbnail’ to change it to ‘Using Original’ if you want it to appear the same size as the image on your disk.
8. ‘Not Linked’ means clicking the image will do nothing. Sometimes I like to select ‘Using Thumbnail above’, then click ‘Not Linked’ to change it to ‘Linked to Image’ so that clicking the Thumbnail will open a new page to show the full-size image.
9. Now click ‘Send to Editor’ this will paste some HTML code into your post box (if you’re using the non-graphical editor)
10. You could leave it at that, but the text will not wrap around the image, and it won’t appear on the right. Put your cursor near the end of the inserted text, before the ‘/>’. add in: ‘ align=right ‘.
11. Now write the rest of your post, and save it. It should look like awesome incarnate. If it does not, comment on this post or contact me.

While Google Analytics is pretty nice for a free service, it’s hard getting useful views out of it.

When you first log in, you see the weeks activity. It’s hard getting a feel for how your website is performing over time. Try this:

1. Click ‘Marketing Optimization’ on the left hand side, under ‘All Reports’.
2. Click ‘Unique Visitor Tracking’
3. Click ‘Daily Visitors’

So that’s nice Tony, be we’re still only seeing one week!

4. Under the ‘Date Range’ heading, click this icon: next to ‘View by’.
5. Now you have two calendars, click the start date on the calendar on the left, and the end date on the calendar on the right. I suggest using yesterday’s date on the right, then try going back four weeks, using the same day of the week as the start date on the calendar on the left.
6. Now click ‘Apply Range >>’ underneath the two calendars.

You’ve just made the ‘Visitors Graph’ in the top right somewhat useful. Unfortunately, if you change to a different site you’ll have to go through those steps again. I’m still in ‘like’ with you, Google, but sometimes I want to break up :|

If you have any questions, use the comment feature or contact me.