Outside The box

You can get to the top of Google SERPS (Search engine Results Page) for any key word pretty easily. Simply pay Google and they’ll put your website at the top. 

This is how they make their money – and they make lots and lots of money. 

So supposing I paid the hideous amount of money to get my website up at the top of Google for a keyword such as “Website Builder”  I guess that would cost around half a million bucks per month. 

After a while lots of visitors will have bookmarked my site some will have written articles  blogs etc.  and I should start to rank organically for the keyword “Website Builder”  

So I stop paying Google because I should still get lots of visitors right? 

Now imagine you are the owner of Google – What would you do?  as a business? last month you were getting half a million bucks and this month zilch. 

Would you put mechanisms in place to prevent your company cutting its own throat? 

I would.  

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I’ve redesigned page maker online to be more inline with industry standards.

The site now has flash and videos to help small business get online instantly 

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I’ve been checking out the competition for pagemakeronline.com and boy o boy it’s tedious. as a programmer and web developer with 20 years experience I should breeze through these tools. Unfortunately I don’t, in fact I rarely complete a website using any of them, I either fall asleep through boredom, screw up the forms or just get writers block staring at a blank page.  

Making a website is a chore! The only people who get excited about creating websites are web developers. Small business owners have a lot of things they’d rather be doing, watching TV, Playing Golf, listening to music etc.  They just need a website for their business so people can find them in Google and contact them. 

RSS Blog Hosting CSS font HTML Email forwarders this is all Jargon and the only people who understand it are people in the computer industry, and to be honest most of them don’t know either.   People shouldn’t need to know any of that stuff to make a website. This is the philosophy behind pagemakeronline.com fast simple and online instantly.

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 [tag]Page Maker Online[/tag] is the fastest  [tag]online website builder[/tag] in the world;
Within 60 seconds the visitor is looking at their new  [tag]company website[/tag] complete with images and content related to their company their locality and their  [tag]industry[/tag].The site is  search engine friendly and online in 24 hours - once the new domain name is chosen. 

 [tag]Page Maker Online[/tag] is also the simplest website builder available.
Rather than start with a blank canvas page maker online creates a full blown SEO friendly website including content and images then allows the visitor to change the content style and theme. 

Not just a  website but a web service:
 [tag]Small business websites[/tag] not only have to look good, they have to attract visitors and generate sales. The page maker online subscription service includes ongoing content changes, Domain registration, Hosting, Search Engine optimization SEO, Directory submission, and constant performance monitoring.    

Focus on  [tag]ROI[/tag]
The pressure is on Kane Research (creators of Page maker online) to deliver that  [tag]Return on Investment (ROI)[/tag] through  [tag]Search Engine Optimization[/tag] and online  [tag]website marketing[/tag] , or the client can simply cancel their subscription and go elsewhere.  The service is launched at $9.99 (USD) per month, with no contract, no minimum term, cancel anytime and nothing else to pay. 

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Websites are like flowers they have to be useful and attractive, both have to send out signals to attract visitors.
And visitors are like bees, they’ll stay around as long as there is something useful to be had, then its off to the next one. And if they find something useful they’ll return again and again.

This is the whole idea behind email business cards they travel around the internet passing information from person to person helping businesses and websites to grow.

Also from an advanced marketing point of view with particular reference to web development: we live in an age where business “logic” dictates the right and the wrong approach very precisely, and that stifles creativity.
So I believe you have to throw a spanner (wrench) in the works right at the beginning. Something crazy and abstract for no reason.

In the game of cricket this is known as a “Googly” also commonly referred to as a “wrong’un”. It’s a type of ball delivery that is unexpected and seems to defy all logic. It is very powerful and serves to unnerve the batsman.

The bee is my business Googly

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A friend got a new family computer and asked for my help setting it up.
This is their initial experience as I witnessed it, and I do know about computers having been in the industry for over 20 years from programmer to business analyst.

This family is a typical well educated family 2 parents 2 kids 2 cars 2 holidays and they’re not stupid.

Their experience is not unlike entering a brothel where every company large and small is prostituting their wares in the most explicit and underhanded way possible.
Not porn! The PC was set up with so much anti spam, child protection software it barely had the resources to bring up a browser window.
No it was unbiased high pressure marketing on paper, disk and screen all designed to Sell sell sell, it all read like you had no option other than to use their brand or you would be in real trouble.

This served only to alienate the parents they see these cheap sales techniques in the media all the time. The main question was “do we need that?” or “Do we have to have that”, “do we have to buy that?” The problem is: with the information they had to hand there was no way they could answer those questions. I was struggling myself to figure out what they’d been suckered into buying and what they hadn’t.
Example:
Setting up the router (a very simple thing)

• Step 1 stick the install CD in
• Step 2 plug the cables in
• Step 3 test the connection
• Step 4 sign up for VOIP service

Roy “what?”
Parents “Don’t we need that?”
Kids “yeah I think we need your credit card mum”
Roy “No you don’t – you don’t need a credit card to set a router up”
Parents “are you sure?”
Roy “yes I’m pretty f$*!ing sure”
Roy “Sorry its just this wav file playing a most annoying female voice in a patronising nasal manner that is getting on my nerves”
Roy “and the fact there is no way past the voip signup without actually signing up”
Parents “I’ll get my credit card”
Roy “NO ! do that and I will have to kill you!… sorry”

• Step 4 abort install program
• Step 5 kill popup window begging me to buy voip service
• Step 6 test router (working fine)

Let me describe the environment, its a room off to the side with an overly large radiator, they’ve bought a “computer desk” with features like the PC restart button next to my left knee, desk space with almost enough room for a keyboard and mouse mat. A “computer chair” which I feel is about to brutally rape me with its gas lift shaft if I wobble it to much.
Empty boxes everywhere, disks, useless Multilanguage manuals and advertising literature on the floor where I threw it. 2 lovely teenage girls keen to have a working computer and 2 parents looking at me like I’m some crazed cyber butcher. And I left my coat on because “it won’t take long will it?”

So we have an expensive working computer with broadband connection running on a cheap 17inch lcd at 1024×768 resolution with (for our convenience) 5 yes FIVE preinstalled browser toolbars. Craving white space I head to Google.com which magically changes to google.co.uk (so annoying) and it is desperately trying to get us to download the google toolbar !!

Parents “Do we need that?”
Roy ”This is your browser window as you can see over 50% of it is obscured by toolbars so NO you don’t need that”
Roy “okay – I’m installing firefox and yes you need it believe me you need it”

I set them up with a few rules

1. you are having a hotmail email address this is the address you will use for everything on the internet
2. I will send you a gmail invite and you will use that email instead of the one you have written down.
3. Do not download or install anything until you’ve spoken to me

I Added them some good favourites YouTube Google WikiPedia Blogger imdb Flickr Digg google maps Windows Live amazon skype etc.

All in All it was not pleasurable and it should have been!!

I’m sure its not only the UK that has to go through this internet initiation minefield I am guessing that Americans going Online for the first time have the same experience.

The reason I wrote this is:
There are so many great websites, clean clear useful fun places to visit but they’re all to often hard to find. Search engines are dominated by big budget high profile money orientated sites.

The favourites I gave this family didn’t include traditional “News” sites because they’re typically swarming with advertising, flashing ads and popups.
I’d like to set up some sort of sanctuary for new internet users a list of these good websites where they can go to escape the advertising madness. If you have any ideas please comment. I have tried in the past with VotedTop.com but it didn’t really get going which is entirely my fault.

I’m not against commercialism not by a long shot but there are ways to sell and then there is annoying high pressure desperate marketing.

The internet is like a busy city street in the far east with neon flashing everywhere beggars and robbers jumping out and New users are like holidaymakers getting more and more annoyed and stressed.

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A friend of mine put me onto this plugin what it does is put a “share This” link under each post on your blog. When clicked a little dropdown window displays all the social bookmark icons for technorati, reddit, tailrank, furl, blinklist, blogmarks etc.
And “Email this to you friend” form

It works straight out of the box, its free although I would recommend donating at least $1 for this because it really is worth supporting people like Alex King.

If you’ve been reading my womm articles then you will know how bloody important it is to provide the facility for visitors to email friends and add your blog to their favoured social bookmark site.

Alex King, an independent developer based in Denver, Colorado USA and things just don’t work straight out of the box unless someone puts a lot of time and effort into making sure they work properly.
The link to the plugin is here alexking.org/projects/wordpress

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I’m a sucker for cool names

I’m not expert seeing as I’ve only used wordpress a few times and this is my first blog but this plugin seems to be working okay
from what I understand is allows you to add tags to posts and it can display a tag cloud etc.

As I say I’m no expert but I like what I’ve seen so far and it seems to be doing what I want.
I’ve indicated on the image above what and where you do tags, it is very configurable.

you can add “inline tags” while writing the post using the tag in square braces thing like bbcode and/or you can adds to the post in a list at the bottomand there is a tag suggestion thing which I havn’t used yet. You should be able to see the tag cloud on my page also. There is more to this plugin but I’m just taking it steady at the moment
I want to control the my tags not only for SEO but also as my blog will cover quite varied subjects I want to try and maintain a common theme for continuity.

We’ll see how it goes.

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Bees do WOMM:

I have 3 websites that actively use [tag]WOMM[/tag] and they’re free:
The first one actually gives visitors the opportunity to conduct their own WOMM campaign this is how it works:
The site makes email signatures that look like a business card, a simple image which links to their own website or blog.
This is a bigger more attractive “hook” in WOMM terms. These little cards are surprisingly powerful when used for support or enquiry responses. The site is called www.beemailcard.com

I used the humble [tag]Bee[/tag] as a symbol because Bees do [tag]WOMM[/tag] or is it the flowers?. Their free thing (nectar) is given in return for passing their message (pollen) bees complete the cycle by communicating the flowers (host) location back at the hive.

The second of my sites does a very similar thing only it makes business letterheads for email that site is called www.onlineletterhead.com and is also free.

The third site is a bit of fun primarily for [tag]myspace[/tag] users. It makes a copy of a small photo and makes a version which flashes a message every few seconds. That’s called www.blinkingphoto.com

I hope these articles and my websites help people gain a greater insight to the world of [tag]WOMM[/tag].

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How to do a WOMM campaign…

The simplest form of [tag]WOMM[/tag] is the “Tell a friend” link, typically this will evoke the visitors email client and insert some text into the subject and body of the email. The visitor simply chooses which of their friends to send it to.

Tell a Friend

Just because it’s one line of HTML doesn’t make it any less potent,
lets analyse it:
This gets your message straight into the Inbox of someone you don’t even know, bypassing junk and spam filters with ease. That is an extremely difficult thing to do these days.
The cursor is placed in the “To” field ready, [tag]Email[/tag] clients are extremely proficient at offering up friends and lists of friends to make life easy for the user, for this reason it is often sent to multiple friends.
The Click Through Rate for links sent from a trusted friend are astronomical in comparison to ones sent from a stranger.

Incredibly many business websites don’t even have a Tell a friend option and often those that do have don’t draw attention to it.

The “Free thing” in this case is your website and the content within it, That’s something I can’t help you with here.

Other examples of WOMM are free webmaster tools , typically they offer some html for webmasters to cut n paste into their sites, counters, page rank buttons etc. website templates fall into this category. These are limited as they target webmaster and not the general public but with the advent of blogs and myspace it’s a group that’s growing.

In part 4 I will offer some ideas and help…

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