May 2004

5/24/2004	We discussed the prospect of changing our class night from Monday to either Tuesday or Wednesday evening due to classroom conflicts. More to come on that later! We are also looking into presenting more structured classes through the SBDC on HTML, Photoshop, and "Creating a site from scratch". These classes would require payment to attend and would constitute a separate program from our continuing free classes. All will be custom designed to supplement the materials offered in our free sessions. We would appreciate any feedback you may have about the attractiveness of such classes. BusinessCheck.org is a new site offering free certification for participants in this marketing class. This offer is being made to establish a base clientele for the site, and is being made for a limited period only. If you would like to apply, complete this form and send it to John Jackow indicating your interest. Indications from participants who have signed up show that users are clicking on the logo to see what information it provides about the site. Stats can be checked by looking for your URL in the "Top Referring Sites" section of the statistics. Several class members have begun using Google's AdSense program with some success. A question arose about how many times the ad bar could be placed on a web page, and Jerry Hobby checked it out for us. Google FAQ says you can place more than one ad set on a page, but the clarification message received from them says, We understand that you would like some clarification about the language concerning multiple ad units. Essentially, our policy concerning double-serving (showing two identical ads on a single page) has not changed from before the updated Terms and Conditions were released. As there is currently no mechanism in place to prevent double-serving if two ad units are on the same page, publishers may only place one copy of AdSense ad code on each page. Double-serving also includes showing AdWords ads through an ad network -you may not have AdSense code on a page that also displays AdWords ads through such a network. The recently updated language on ad placement was added to allow us to introduce new features as we move forward. If we do add a feature that will allow multiple ad units on a page without any duplication of ads, we'll certainly let you know via email. Until then, please ensure that a maximum of one ad unit is placed on each of your pages. Jay emphasized again the value of Usenet as a marketing tool. He described a business named Cruisemax that is conducted almost entirely over Usenet. One of their postings can be seen in a Google search of Groups. The recommended program for working on Usenet is Free Agent. Brian is now reporting over $1,500 in income from AdSense (he has been working hard on putting the ads in lots of places on his many sites!)
5/17/2004	General question and answer session on marketing issues.
5/10/2004	Statistics are generally provided by the host of your site from the server logs. Different statistical packages are used to report these statistics in different formats, but the site owner has little discretion in the matter after choosing the host. Another approach to obtaining statistics is to contract for them from a third party provider. Code is provided that you insert into the pages you want to track, and the statistics are recorded and maintained on the third party server. One advantage of this approach is that the stats are "live" (actually, about a 10-20 second delay). They also provide more accurate information in some respects as they bypass the issue of caching of pages. Brian Nelson reported that he placed AdSense from Google on parts of his sites last week and has already earned $193 in income. We asked him to keep us up-to-date. Page rank is susceptible to management by the webmaster by controlling how the internal links on the site connect the pages, in other words, it is possible to increase the page rank of selected pages on your site by properly linking your pages. The class worked with a free tool on the internet that allows you to experiment with different structures of links to see how the changes effect the rank of various pages in a site. Ray Campbell sent us (after the class) his list of search engine submission sites (and some other assorted links).
5/3/2004	Google AdSense is a program that will pay the site owner for traffic generated from the site. It could have some value as a marketing tool, but should be approached with caution for sites that are selling product. Traffic is taken away from your site, and could be directed to competitors (you do have the power to filter sites). It should be considered for sites that contain a lot of content, but are not traditional "retail" sites, with a product list they are presenting on the site. It appears that Google is much more likely to index pages that contain the AdSense code, making this another means of ensuring that your pages are covered by the Google bot! Tracking your statistics over time is necessary in order to see and evaluate the impact of changes that you might make to your content, or to changes in the search approaches taken by the search engines. Most data that you need to consider can be extracted from the statistics screens that you have available on your site, and inserted into Excel, where the numbers can be retained indefinitely, and can be easily manipulated to provide you with more usable information.

Internet Marketing Class Notes