WebMaster Tips ‘n Tricks Spotlight by Mike Ludwick

This new site alows you to get folowers fast. The sites name is http://FastFollowers.com and is rightly named so. I’m a big fan of this site. It’s simple and fast.

I won’t be posting for a while because of development on our adult chat site chatropolis.com.www.chatropolis.com

I’ll be back real soon pumping out tips and tricks and marketing stuff.

A sure tipoff that a bricks and mortar business or a new inexperianced operation is in your browser is thier ability to handle email. There is nothing that says "Don’t come back" like an email that never gets an answer or even worse a very late reply. Unfortunately this is the case with most websites/blogs.

EMail should be handled like a phone call. it should be answered or acknowledged the same business day. The next business day is the longest you should take. Taking an hour out of your weekend should be a priority to anwer weekend email. This will be a plesant supprise to your customers/users.

I can say without a doubt a million dollars in sales have been lost to me because the rep got back to me a week later when I wanted to buy right then. If someone doesn’t answer my email right away I will not do business with them. This has cost me a lot of extra money but I figure if they can’t answer a simple email what happens when I need critical support? Waitiing a week if a server explodes just won’t fly and it has trouble lifting off with most people.

With todays technology you should be able to answer an email just about anywhere. Thee excuse "I get so much email" is about the lamest excuse in the world. I have been answering more than 200 emails a day for the last ten years and it never takes that much time as I would say this is too much.

The next excuse is I was out of the office. That excuse no longer holds water because unles you were in the amazon eating psychodelic mushrooms with a undiscovered tribe you can answer. There is also auto reply systems and every *NIX box has the simple vacation program to explain where you are and give alternate contact info. I could have just said answer your email promptly but it’s too important not to really grind it into your mind.

Another aspect of email is a tagline. Every email you send out should have your name,company and telephone number. This is a convience to your customer and it promotes you everytime you send an email. Also emails may get passed around until they get to the person that can make a purchase decision. If your name,company,phone number are thhere it will boost sales. The worst thing you can do is send a reply that is unsigned and has no contact info. Doing this says I don’t care and I especially don’t care about your business.

The final sin is to not answer an email fully. If a customer asks 4 questions you had better have 4 answers. Quoting from the original and breaking your reply down will help you not miss anything. Something you may take for granted as common knowledge may not be known by the customer and there are no silly questions. Not answering an email fully is just as bad as not answering at all. The sender took the time to personally contact you the least you can do is take a minute to craft a usable reply.

Here is an example of a good way to handle an email. I recently applied to google adsense. I know google must get tons of email but I got an instant auto-reply saying that I would be contacted withing one week with thier decision. Given the fact that it was a request to start a business relationship I felt it was perfectly alright to take a week.  If it was any other kind of request I think a personal response would be in order.

You can easily buy software that will answer email as soon as it comes in. If you can’t reply in person letting the person know you got it and will be handling thier request is a great idea. If you have the ability to let someone else handle your incoming email using .forward or a forwarding mechinusm would be a better way to go. "Hi, I’m not in but I will be letting Joe Smith help you during this time. I will contact you as soon as I am back from vacation and go over Joe’s work with you".

Just follow this simple rule. Treat email as you would treat a missed phone call. Chances are you return your calls and while on the phone you would never go silent when asked a question. If you don’t return calls and you don’t interact well with people then let someone else handle the email. Email is the single most important contact you will have. You don’t want to screw it up. So take a look in the mirror and decide if you should be handling email. If not then don’t publish your address. It’s hard to admit your weak points but this is too important to stroke your own ego on.

Everytime the conversation turns to my business I hear "I have this great Idea but I don’t know how to do it". Chances are if you can think it you can make it a great web service and automate 99%.

So you have this great idea. What steps does it take to provide this service? Do you need to manipulate graphics? Do you want to provide realtime info on your favorite topic? Whatever it is if you can do it manually with a computer or a stack of computers you can get someone to write the program and install it. Here are the steps from idea to working web service.

Think of a great name or better make up a word. This will make getting the domain and trademark a breeze. Next spec out what you want the site to do. Post it on guru.com or elance and get some bids. You will probably get a lot of questions if this is your first time. If a programmer says "That can’t be done" forget his name quickly. After you settle on a price get the program written. While it’s being developed get a logo. A professional logo will only cost a couple of hundred. Be very careful a logo/name will make or break you no matter how good your idea is.

You will also need to wrap your idea in a website/user interface. Hire someone cheap because this proces is an evolution. You will want to change and rework things many times before you open for business.

Next you will have to decide on hosting. Depending on how demanding you could land anywhere from a cheap web host to collocation of several servers. For example you most likely won’t be able to host a high resource using application like video sharing on a $5.99 a month web site. For example our chat site went from a single 386 66 to a full rack of servers with 100 Mbit of bandwidth. So consider growth and how you will handle it when you are the next big thing.

Depending on your great idea all this could cost as little as 2000 dollars trademarked,written and making money. The funny part is it isn’t that hard. For example I am putting up a site certification service. It will be geared to the webmaster that can pay etrust 10 grand. But the whole thing will cost me 800 dollars and be running shortly with a killer domain. It’s not as new idea which brings me in another direction.

There are many ways to make money on the web but the easiest is to do one that is popular cheaper than the big guy.  Company’s that have tons of venture capital tend to over employ and not do things the cheapest way possible. As a new guy you can do almost anything cheaper than the big guy. It’s the same reason car dealers cluster together. They all od the same thing they just hope they can get a piece of the pie.

So next time you have a great idea don’t just sit on it. Do it!. If you get stuck you can call me at 352-436-4185 7-7 CST. I’ll be glad to help and I won’t steal your idea. Believe me I have more than I need and can be developing until I’m dead and beyond. I will keep that developing from beyond the grave to myself though. 

We have all seen the bbuttons to add your site to "Social Bookmarking" sites. I never put much stock in them and this month is the first time we have used one. We got ours from add-this.com for free.

To my supprise it looks like we will do 10,000 bookmarks a month. A large percent are tweets but about 10% are on other services. This has already positively impacted traffic and given us backlinks all over the place. Tha add this button comes with some nice stats. I gotta say this little + sign has supprised me and really caught me off guard. After 15 years that’s a little hard to do. 

If your not promoting social bookmarking your missing out. It’s free. It’s effective and obviously it’s something users like. So slip one in on your main page and just see what happens. I think it’s a great way to keep traffic and build more. This is the second "dumb dent" I have in my head in less than two weeks. If your not promoting social bookmarking your mising out and mising out big time. This one is a no brainer.

If you don’t know it already "Content is king!" Look at Twitter. Twitter is the next big thing. Twitter is basicaly people reading one liners about other peoples lives. In the end I think Twitter will be sold for a ton then quietly dissapear. In it’s current form I don’t think it has any legs. But 15,000 people a month tweet my url on my chat site so I should hope they live on.

So we know people are interested in other peoples lives no matter how boring. You can compete with the big guys in this area. I write a column on oour other site about my life every day when I can and it is immensly popular. If you have a membership content site writing about yourself will improve all aspects. Users will get to know who they are dealing with or atleast who is on the stick. When they get to that allimportant join form if they know you and feel good about that they will buy. I have proven this. Talkcity could be concidered my competition they are better financed, spend a million dollars on promotion and I stil bury them with numbers. Why? Because my users know me. Personally I write about the most embarassing aspects of my life. That’s just my style. But this is the edge I have over my so called competition. Sure they have something to read but it’s syndicated or generic. I open myself up to my users and let them know the dirty truth.

If you don’t write 5-10 personal articles about you and your site you will be missing out on a relationship you can have with your users that the big guys just can’t compete with. Even if they could they wouldn’t get as personal as smaller operations can. There is nothing worse than a site where the main page was created a year ago and hasn’t had an article on it since. Writing about yourself lets you users know your alive. It let’s them know you care. Remember they are used to dealing with the big guys and getting a call center in India when they have a question. So writing and answering the phone are the two most important aspects about building loyal users.

Let me tell you how impoortant users knowing you is. My phone rings constantly so much so that after hours I have all lines redirected to my bedroom. Last week the phone rang late and I jumped up to answer it. Well I slipped and broke my ankle. Now I’m not suggesting that you write and talk so much as to cause bodily harm but it does let you know how much value I put on it. Honestly I don’t know why every site doesn’t have someone making fun of people in the office,themselves and have an 800 line. My 800 line with vonage costs me 60 bux a month and it is priceless. My articles about myself are as much therapy for me as they are funny for the users to read. So if you put it all together it’s an affordable way to build user loyalty,traffic and in the end more money.

So if you think you can’t compete with the big guys like facebook or twitter just ask yourself who owns these sites? When was the last time I talked to the owner? You never will and this is our edge over them. I’ve run the same site for 15 years and I’ve always done the writing about my follies ritual.  That’s how I can do twice the business of talkcity on a shoestring.

Unless your some kinda wizzard that can make tons of money off one visit per user you’r gonne need to make them come back and come back often. There are many ways to do this but the best way to build community is through the addition of a chat room. A chat room can do some great community building, let customers interact and most of all let you interact with your customers.

My main operation on the web is a site with 200 chat rooms and we do some incredible numbers. According to various gurus like Alexa and others users spend 20 minutes on average on our site and traverse 16 pages. Most users will return once daily to check in with friends but our "addicted" group will come up to and beyond ten times daily. Our bounce is just over 4% and we constantly grow. Infact we are growing too fast this year so I am replacing 20 servers with Intel 9550 Quad core chips and dual nics in a 100 Mbit (full on not burstable) and a CDN. I’m very proud of the site and it’s numbers.

Now that’s a ot of work but we all start out with one room and many sites build customer retention and community with just one. The great part is there are many free chat rooms for your website all over the net. Check them all out because they vary in capability and function widely. I suggest you get one that can use your domain or you can slip an invisible frame around to make it show only your URL. Of course the les branding the chat room supplier does the better for you. You can sometimes pay a few bucks to remove ads and links.

Chat rooms are a fast and cheap way to increase your traffic and keep those users coming back. The more they come back the more money you will make. Imagine if every visitor that comes to your site would come back ten times a month? What if they came back more? How much more would you make?

The next to best think is chat is a low bandwidth application. Unless you push a huge client to everyone it should not even be noticable on your monthly ISP charges.

So what more could you want to build the traffic you already have and attract new traffic. Whoops you might just be community building.

I think the best thing to happen to the web is probably CSS or cascading style sheets. These files or embedded in page code allow you to change the look of a page or entire site in minutes. This used to take hours. A great place to start is free-css.com. But a simple search will reveal all you could ever need.

One application for CSS is join forms. With some cookies and a simple script you can test a multitude of join form styles and see which converts best. It would work like this. Give the user a cookie. Create a script to show the user a differnt join form every time or for every user. Creat a thank you page for post purchase. Collect the cookie info then decide how you want the stats and you will be able to zero in which form works best. Google has a compare function for free just signup and go to the webmaster section.

You could use the compare function for every aspect of your site. I went years thinking a page didn’t get much use. After some research it ended up being one of the most used pages  on our service. I still feel a dumb spot in my brain over that one.

Another great think is with css you could let the user pick skins rather easily. Depending on your site this could top the cool list on your site.

Webmasters have been using things intended for one thing for another for years. css is no different. Let your imagination loose and see what you can come up with.

Most 3rd party billing company’s will offer 900 number company billing. Most will offer the service but claim no responsibility for the company that provides the service for them. There is a reason and you can probably guess. First off it’s extremely easy for a telephone charge to be disputed and taken off your bill. Like Visa Ma’ Bell is on the end users side and they could care less about the merchants that break thier butss (Me and you) to make the money. It’s just a fact of life.

Also 900 billing has a stigma so bad that all but single men with an extra drink in them will use it in fear of someone seeing that 900 on thier phone bill. In the mind of the public a 900 call on your bill equalls pathetic loser. So income from 900 numbers has fallen by 90% over the years.

In steps Premium priced calling which just means you call a number in another country either keep the connection to have access or stay on a number of minutes to get a password which usually is a pin to your membership system. Most are easy to install and reviews are mixed. My only fear is many calls cost very high prices and some are as low as 60 cents. So there is no wayto gurantee all people get charged the same. In a community site such as what is our flagship this would be death. Content sites could get good results.

So now you have to decide is it worth it to take the 900 gamble? For us it is but if you actually ship a product I’d say no. Are premium numbers worth the bad word of mouth. In our case it’s a resounding NO. But these are hard economic times and every penny counts. I wouldn’t look down on anyone thta tried everything to survive.

As with all methods of billing do your homework. 900 will always be a gamble. We haven’t gotten the bone for about 5 years so maybe we are lucky or maybe the industry is safer. But considering in the not to distant past iBill one of the billing giants lost milions for thier clients…can we really be sure about any method? Due dilligence and a prayer is about all we can do. If you get hurt make sure it won’t take your whole operation with it. That’s what we all want to avoid.

Getting your own merchant account is a nightmare and one of the most difficult things to do. They are also a bear to manage your own merchant account. For credit cards,checks and 900 number billing a 3rd party service is the answer. My first experiance was with Epoch systems and as soon as I complained when a check was 3 months late they didn’t want me as a customer. But never fear companies like CCbill.com (CWIE,llc) are stable and charge a fair rate.

These services charge from 3-15% and are well worth it. They are your entire billing department and doing this yourself would costs as much or more. So even though a merchant account may claim 3.5% there are hidden charges, they hold batches and are worse than a tax collector. When you deal with such banks the reps use false names, won’t give you thier address and use some of the most vile tactics in the business. I have yet to have this type of treatment from a 3rd party service.

Mine does my customer service,and about a dozen things that would cost on top of a merchats accounts 3.5%. Also I ran into a trick merchat account purveyors like to play. They put you in for 3.5% but when the bank starts getting non-swipe and finds out what kind of business you really are that goes up dramatically.

Of shore also called no number acccounts are a waste of a huge application fee. Just say no unless you find something that I’m not familiar with. These accounts charge extremely high rates and getting an approval is harder than Marine Corps. bootcamp.