Top 10 Ways To Irritate Your Visitors Written by David Bell
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6. Sign up to use a really slow-loading hit counter and put button inside of a TABLE so that nothing appears until hit-counter responds. This is possibly best way to keep visitors from stealing from you as it keeps them from even reading your content and possibly typing it into their site from memory. For this to work reliably, you must avoid putting height and width into call for hit counter graphic. You can improve effectiveness of this technique by inserting not only a hit counter button, but a long string of banner exchange banners. 7. For occasional visitor that inadvertently makes their way to your ezine subscription form, fear not. All is not lost. You can still rid yourself of them by asking lots and lots of personal questions. Don't just ask for their email address. Ask for their mailing address, phone number, sex, age, hobbies, religion, race and some other things best not discussed here. This technique works equally well when applied to your order forms and minimizes your trip to UPS office to ship products. 8. Splash page. You gotta have a Splash Page. Lots of slow loading animation. If you can combine this with requirement to download another obscure plug-in, you'll have hit a home run. I'm especially impressed by many sites that have upped ante to include two splash pages before you ever get to even first word of content. Stunning! Brilliant! 9. Reconfigure visitor's browser window. This will drive them crazy! People hate it when you run a script on your pages that expands user's browser window to fill entire screen and then do away with all of browser Toolbar features such as Navigation Toolbar and Location Toolbar, 10 Finally, an oldie but goodie. Make your background dark and your text just a shade or two brighter. This makes it impossible to read your text and will rid you of visitors before they have a chance to clog up you server logs. If this is not possible on your site, use alternate technique of putting most of your content in PDF files so that visitor has to download them and launch another application. Very effective. Did I mention that all of these cool ways to irritate visitors work even better at driving away people reviewing your site for places like Yahoo, LookSmart and other directories to whom you've paid large sums of money to review your site and add it to their directory? I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.
David Bell is Manager, Online Marketing, at http://www.wspromotion.com/ , a leading Search Engine Optimization services firm and Advertising Agency.
| | E-mail VS The WebWritten by David Bell
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A valuable lesson learned. My response dropped and I found out hard way there are literally millions of people who use email but DO NOT surf web. Many simply do not care to surf web and there are a good number of folks who do not have access to it. My autoresponders immediately went back into my ads and since I was paying for each word or line, I decided to stick with ONLY AR's. The extra few bucks to add my web site address was probably not worth it, I guessed. Wrong again. Luckily I had my own email newsletter to do a little more experimenting. I changed my ads so they contained BOTH my autoresponders address AND my URL. Bingo. The perfect mix. My total inquiries (autoresponder plus page hits) went up by about 20% and remained there as long as my ad contained both contact methods. Along with these increased prospects came increased profits. Another valuable lesson learned. I know, a lot of you are saying hey, that's not a tough decision. Well to you I say take a look at classified ads in almost any ezine on net. Count number of ads that have both an AR and a URL. You'll find that about one out of every three of them qualify. Point made. I hope I've managed to shed a little light on YOUR marketing campaign today. If you're not marketing with both AR's *and* a URL, you're missing out on some revenue! Remember, as many have said before me, marketing is now, and always will be, a numbers game. The more numbers you reach, more numbers you'll count! I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.
David Bell is Manager, Online Marketing, at http://www.wspromotion.com/ , a leading Search Engine Optimization services firm and Advertising Agency.
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