WebMaster Tips - Do's and Dont's of e-commerce

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Trying to publicize my workshop on how to make your site sell I sent an email to Allan Gardyne of Associate Programs as he had introduced me to the MYSS associate program in the first place. In my excitement and haste to get the info out I omitted to include the URL. So this page was born:

1. If you send an email and want a response by phone include your phone number.

2. Include your web site address in all your emails.
        In particular If you are publicizing a particular web page remember to include the URL of that page.

3. Put the URL on a separate line - without a period.

All English textbooks should be changed to read: All sentences must end in a period except if the last word is a web page address. Include the http:// as this should make the URL clickable eg:
http://www.amcho.com/myss-workshop.htm

4. Do not use all capitals - it is difficult to read and considered to be SHOUTING.

5. If doing a mail merge do not send messages to $forename $lastname

6. Let people unsubscribe easily

- do not ask them to go to a special web page to unsubscribe
- if possible include their email as part of your 'from address' so you know what email address they are subscribed under eg: from:unsubscribe-yourname-yourdomain@mydomain

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Website Do's and Dont's

1. Include contact details on all your pages.

Do you want your visitors to contact you? Each of your pages should include a contact name and email address, also a phone number and postal address. Even if you do not want feedback, without these details your website will look like some sort of cheap scam.

Put your URL on every web page so that if someone sees something useful on your page and saves it to disk, or prints it out they can get back to your site.

2. Eliminate Spam

The problem with the above tip is that sooner or later your page will be discovered by the lowlife that harvest email addresses. One solution is to have the same email address in more than one place on the page and on more than one page - you just delete all the duplicate messages received. You can make it difficult for the spambots by using a feedback form instead of a mailto link.
I use a number of techniques: My .htaccess file does not allow specified robots into my site - I have noticed that some harvestors are now pretending to be ordinary browsers so this method is starting to not work. I am just starting to change my mailto links so that they go through a script that checks for a valid referrer page (see the email link at the bottom of this page).

3. Make your Dates International

To avoid confusing your visitors write your dates as dd/Month/yyyy eg:19 June 1999. The normal way of writing dates in the US is mm/dd/yy in the UK and Europe dd/mm/yy and in Japan yy/mm/dd. (If you were looking for the other type of dates try One and Only Personals).

4. Check your Meta tags and Title tags before submitting to search engines

If (like me) you copy an existing document and then change the content - you must update the meta tags to describe the new document. If you have many similar pages then check that your meta tags are as different as possible. How did you feel the last time you did a search and found the first 50 pages to be identical?.

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Miscellaneous Do's and Dont's

Put a smile on your page and in your documents.

J Tip from Paul Bird on a boat somewhere in Korea: MS Word 97 is so clever J that if you type in colon hyphen r/h bracket :-) it prints a smiley face J the right way up - try it and see J Beware when using this tip on web pages - if the user does not have the Wingdings font on their machine it will just display J instead of the smiley.

Convert HTML to plain text?

I have found that (in windows) a quick way to convert html to text is to copy/paste from the browser into notepad: position the mouse just in front of the text you want to copy - press and hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse - the text that is being selected will then become hilighted. When you have selected all the text that you want to copy let go the mouse button. Ctrl-C to copy the selected text, then in notepad or wherever you want to copy the text: Ctrl-V to paste. This should work in netscape and internet explorer.

You can also convert any webpage to text: just enter the web address below and hit the convert button:

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Other Tip pages:

Top 10 Internet Marketing blunders.

These costly mistakes are common and they provide a good starting point for you. If you steer clear of these
Top 10 blunders, you're absolutely guaranteed to be more successful.

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Other Webmaster Resources:

Web Site Setup.

A step - by - step guide to creating your website, registering your domain name and maintaining your site.

Web Master Tools Page.

Links to scripts for searching the web and submitting your web site to search engines.

Swap a Link.

Link to other pages and put your affiliate link on their pages so you get the credit.
If you have good content allow other webmasters to link to your page. In return for the extra traffic you will allow them to substitute their affiliate code so that they will to be credited if their visitor clicks on your affiliate link.

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Make Your Site Sell - The paper version of the ebook is now available Ken Evoy has just announced the availability of the paper version of his ebook. If you want to sell anything on the web you must read this book. It tells you how to select a product that can be sold on the web. How to build a website to sell your product, and then how to drive targetted visitors to your website. The ebook retails at less than 20 US$ the paper verion can be yours for approx 30 US$ or you can get both for about 45 US$. If you are at all interested in ecommerce than why not add this book to your reading list, or if you know someone who wants to sell on the web - this book would make an excellent present. Order your copy from www.sitesell.com/amcho.html

AMCHO Computer Services Ltd, Tamar Way, Gunnislake, Cornwall, PL18 9DH, UK
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