This article is an exhaustive overview of how to design, create, and use an editorial calendar with links to additional articles, templates, and more. It brings you up to date on how best to create an editorial calendar and process to manage online and offline publications, including content published in email newsletters and social media sites Twitter and Facebook. This article strives to provide a comprehensive overview of all possible resources online compared to other articles which may be publication-specific or focus on one viewpoint of how to create an editorial calendar.

When this article was first published in 2003, most online publishers had never seen an editorial calendar unless they came from a publishing background. Today it is far more common to find bloggers who understand editorial calendars, how they work, and their benefits. The publication management problem also has expanded to include how best to organize publishing for email newsletters, Twitter, Facebook fan pages, and other social media sites.

However, many articles about how to create and use editorial calendars either are not comprehensive (for example, few mention tracking micro-content like subheads or alt and title tags) or they’re link bait for search engines like eHow articles. There also are a few templates out there that are worth a look as you design or improve your calendar. Finally, this article always has had a focus on small businesses and how they might use editorial calendars, a focus I’ve not found elsewhere.

Most importantly, this article is written for people with no little or no publishing experience. What is an ideal editorial publishing process, for example? What guidelines should be used to write and edit content?

With this as background, let’s get started describing how to create an editorial calendar and editorial process that meets your needs.

• The Editorial Process
• The Editorial Calendar
• Editorial Calendar Documentation
• Writing and Editing Guidelines
• Ideas for Web Publishing Best Practices
• Media Journalism vs Corporate Journalism
• Learn More about Editorial Calendars
• Updates to this Article

The Editorial Process

The Publishing Process

Based on what content is published, the editorial process can be elaborate or simple. A small business owner, for example, might follow this process:

1. Brainstorm a list of content to publish, where, and when for a set time period
2. Write each piece of content based on the publication schedule
3. Edit each piece
4. Publish each piece

A corporate web team might have a much more complex, and flexible, publishing process:

1. Brainstorm a list of content to publish, where, and when for a set time period; include backup content items for each item slated for publication; include break points to determine whether to delay or kill each content item.
2. Assign each piece of content based on the publication schedule
3. Write each piece of content
4. Review first draft of each piece of content
5. Give go/no go based on first draft edits (adjust publication schedule if/as needed)
6. If go, finish writing each piece of content and submit draft as FYI to layout team
7. Perform final edit, copy edit, fact checking, and rewrites as needed
8. Submit for review by legal team
9. Make changes if/as needed based on legal input
10. Submit content formally to layout team
11. Post content on development server and make changes if/as needed
12. Publish content on production server

In both the simple and complex process, movement is forward and iterative. You encounter and cross a series of hurdles that lead to publication. If you don’t have a calendar of content to be published, for example, you cannot progress to writing content. Well, you can but you risk publishing content that does not meet the needs of your readers.

The Content Creation Process

You also have a process to create each piece of content. For example, an interview requires some number of emails to line up the interview subject, as well as time to research the interview subject and the topic, create then refine your questions, interview your subject, email your subject any follow up questions/clarifications, and then write up the interview.

Make time to document the different processes for each type of content you publish. Some types of content will have an identical process. But don’t assume they do. Sit down and map out the content creation process to be 100% certain. This step alone will avoid delays in your publishing schedule.

Feed the Beast: How to Create Content Ideas

For both small and larger publishing outfits, deciding what to publish is the start point. Usually this begins by identifying your audience then listing all possible topics of interest to your readers. You might organize some topics into recurring features, for example, publishing fun offbeat articles on Friday, research-related articles on Tuesdays, or interviews on Thursday. Recurring features train readers to return to your blog or Facebook fan page on specific days of the week.

In my experience helping clients with blog publishing and social media planning, there are three types of content you can include:

• Your Product or Service
• Your Customers and Prospects
• Industry News

Whatever you publish, be sure to include stories that cover these three types of content. For example, stories about your product or service might include new feature announcements, how-to step documentation and screencasts, and invitations to readers to provide ideas about how to refine features. But these types of content also can mix. You might, for example, do a how-to screencast that features a customer who uses your product or service in an interesting way. Or you might cover an industry news story through a feature in your product or service, or from the point of view of an actual customer or prospect.

Also realize that, despite your best plans, what you publish on any given day or week will change. And, if you publish daily, you’ll need to add topical stories as they happen. You want to leave room to cover news as it happens. It’s also a good idea to have at least one story held back that you can publish when you get sick, an interview subject cancels, or other mishap.

If you use a spreadsheet to track your editorial calendar, your content ideas should be included in your editorial calendar as a tab called Pending Content or similar label. I’d put this tab first in your spreadsheet so you can create a natural flow from your ideas to calendar to published content, with each step in its own tab.

At the least, if you use a paper calendar or piece of paper to track your editorial calendar, your story ideas should be written down and kept with your editorial calendar. A small business, for example, might create a folder for this purpose and put both the calendar and the story ideas together in the folder.

With a list of content ideas, and possibly recurring feature ideas, the next step is to talk about your editorial calendar, tools to document your calendar, and guidelines to write your content.

The Editorial Calendar

The editorial calendar is the heart of any successful publishing process. Without it, content publishing online and offline is guaranteed to be random in terms of what readers want to read, full of gaps (content doesn’t get published because some pieces take longer than needed and backup pieces are not in the pipeline), and poor quality.

For simple web publishing, the editorial calendar needs these elements at a minimum:

1. What to publish based on audience needs and your brainstormed ideas
2. Prioritized list of what to publish
3. Work effort required to publish each piece of content
4. Micro-content needed (e.g., page titles, headlines, navigation link labels, ALT tags, footers, blurbs)
5. Dates assigned for writing, editing, publishing for each piece of content
6. Publishing location (e.g. print, blog, email newsletter, Twitter, Facebook)

For large groups, the editorial calendar should include these elements:

1-6 above with line items added to #5 for copy editors, fact checkers, photographers, layout team, legal approval, and other participants

7. The author who will create the content plus their contact information
8. Backup content identified for each piece of content on the calendar
9. Go/No Go breakpoints identified for each piece of content and/or within the process (e.g., if interviews are not possible or a writer gets sick)

No matter the size of your publishing team, when you design your editorial process be sure to consider the scarcity of approval resources. Lawyers should be brought in as late as possible and as little as possible to maximize their time. Otherwise you risk endless (and avoidable) rewrite cycles and complaints. With lawyers, this might mean one review towards the end of the process. With the layout team, it might mean showing them early drafts of stories so they know what content will be included in each issue.

One prime use of the editorial calendar is to push back when others in your organization make unreasonable demands. A good editorial calendar makes a wonderful educational tool to teach those outside the publishing team the steps, time, and resources required to publish content. It can help with budget battles. Development and maintenance of your editorial calendar also can be an opportunity to include those who will pressure your schedule. It won’t buy you extra time in some cases but it will give you more leverage than if you have no calendar.

Another interesting use of an editorial calendar is to mesh it with performance metrics, for example, the number of tweets, Facebook Likes, page views, and inbound links each story receives after publication. This expands the editorial calendar so you can make future decisions about what new story ideas might do better than other ideas. You also might want to track maintenance dates in your editorial calendar to ensure you know when site upgrades or changes might impact your ability to publish.

Finally, anyone with project management experience will recognize that a good editorial calendar is, in fact, a good project plan. There is one key difference, however. An editorial calendar is a rolling affair: individual pieces of content are completed but you never get to the end of the calendar until you’re fired or you quit or the publication shuts down.

Editorial Calendar Documentation

Once you have identified what to include in your editorial calendar, how do you organize your information? Most people use an Excel spreadsheet, Google Docs spreadsheet, or similar spreadsheet document with tabs. There even are WordPress plugins for publications that use WordPress to publish content. (However, if you publish a blog, Facebook fan page, Twitter, and email newsletters, a WordPress plugin only helps with the blog portion of your publishing empire.)

There are at least four technologies you can use to track your editorial calendar:

• Pieces of paper and a file folder
• A paper calendar or online calendar
• A spreadsheet or online spreadsheet
• Tracking software within your publishing software

Each of these tools has advantages and disadvantages. Paper, for example, works great for a small business that only needs to publish new content every week or month. Calendars work well if you have only 1-4 stories a day, or less frequency, and you’re the primary or sole author or a one person team. Spreadsheets can intimidate because they can hold so much information. It’s tempting to think you have to track every last detail in a spreadsheet when, in fact, you should track only critical information.

Whatever tool you use to track your editorial calendar, the secret of success is simplicity. Your calendar will evolve and adapt. But simplicity should be a key goal when you design and change your calendar. The more complex your calendar, and what you track, the more likely you are to not use it and benefit.

Within the document you use for your editorial calendar, you might want to create these tabs or pages:

• Story Ideas
• Production Calendar
• Published Content
• Glossary of Terms

Within each tab or page label your columns according to what you need to track, as defined in the Editorial Process and Editorial Calendar sections above. If you use a spreadsheet, this tab organization lets you move a spreadsheet row for each story as the story evolves from idea to production to published. The glossary tab or page contains a list of copy edit decisions over time to enforce consistency across articles.

The Production Calendar tab or page might or might not be broken into tabs for print, blog, email newsletter, Twitter, Facebook fan page, and other venues. Or you might create a column to hold this information so you can sort out your stories by publication destination.

Larger organizations might need a second set of documents to track each issue published, for example, to ensure that a particular theme is adhered to when story choices are made, ensure the correct number of stories (and backup stories) is accounted for with each issue, and related data. For a blog or brochure site or Facebook fan page, however, a basic spreadsheet or pages works fine.

Here is a basic template I’ve created with Google Docs that you can download and modify: Editorial Calendar Template. Note that, like other templates, the left hand columns are the same (e.g. Title, Author) so you can copy/paste one or more rows of stories to the next tab in the spreadsheet with little fuss or adjustments needed.

Writing and Editing Guidelines

In addition to the editorial calendar, your publication process should include style guidelines for writers and editors to follow. These guidelines are in addition to any layout guidelines used to control the publication design. Writing guidelines can include:

• Length of pieces published as well as the different kinds of pieces
• Examples of appropriate tone and structure for each kind of content piece
• Examples of things to avoid (e.g., first person, insulting the CEO, using less than 2 sources for each fact)
• Examples of file names and how they evolve through the process (e.g., to indicate versions)
• Grammar, punctuation, and language guidelines

The first four items are created in-house by the site publisher or publication team. Grammar and language guidelines are either adopted from existing sources (the Chicago Style Manual or Associated Press Style Guide, for example) or modified from several sources. The Washington Post, New York Times, and Newsweek follow the latter route with their own internal style guides.

The primary benefit of these guidelines is a consistent experience for readers as well as all members of the publishing team. Guidelines minimize the number of times the team has to reinvent the wheel when they assign, write, edit, and publish. Consistency does not mean boring, however. Cheeky writing full of attitude may appear to be written off the cuff. More often cheekiness is the result of deliberate writing and editing choices defined well before the writing happens.

For a small business, writing and editing guidelines could be the Associated Press Style Guide and printouts of a few articles that serve as best practice examples. Large publishing teams might document and publish a style guide with extensive examples and links to resources for the team to follow and consult as needed. They also might create and maintain a large glossary as copy edit decisions are made over time.

Ideas for Web Publishing Best Practices

In addition to an editorial calendar and guidelines for writing and editing content, here are some ideas for best practices specifically for web publishing:

Include author name with link to short bio. A reader of this website sent me an email stating that while I had written what appeared to be a useful article, he could not trust my article because he did not know the author or their background. Until he had that information, he insisted most readers would dismiss my article. Being raised Catholic, my first response was to assume guilt and fix the problem. Further reflection, however, led me to the conclusion that he was right. The author bio is an important bit of context needed in any publication but especially on the web where facts and lies can appear equally credible.

Include Publication Date. I see a lot of content on the web that lacks a publication date. My hunch is that the content is evergreen, useful at any date or time, and the site publisher is afraid dating their piece would make the content appear old. Dated content, in turn, would compel the publisher to replace the content, update the content, or add new content. I would argue, however, that publication date is as critical a piece of context as author information and for the same reason: it increases credibility. Issues about content freshness can be handled easily as noted in the next idea.

Include Changes section at bottom of the content. Except for blurbs or other short content pieces, every bit of content should have a heading at the bottom titled “Changes To This Content” (or similar language). If there are no changes, the heading should be followed by a sentence, “No updates at this time” or similar language. In addition, when you do update the content, be sure to put a single sentence at the top of the content that says, in effect, “Changes to this content are noted at the bottom.” This approach will allow you to provide publication date as context, a mechanism to easily note to readers what content has been updated, and take advantage of the immediacy of the web. Specifically, maintaining a change list allows you to expand your content easily over time.

Pay Attention to Version Control. If several people share an editorial calendar, keeping track of the most current version can become painful. Look at using Google Docs spreadsheet. Or ask the IT group to set up something that puts the file in a central location online and lets you track edits to your calendar over time. For individuals, obviously, this is a fairly easy problem to solve: always put the date in your calendar file name when you create a new version, for example, my-calendar-2010-0701.xls works.

Media Journalism vs. Corporate Journalism

I would end this piece by commenting on the perceived differences between content published by media outlets and content published by corporations and businesses. Typically, corporate journalism and writing is considered to be a pale version of the more rigorous and transparent standards followed by media journalists. Media journalists are supposed to be better trained, more thorough, and more fierce than a Director of Communications writing articles for an internal newsletter or website.

Some of this is true, of course. But much of it is not.

While it is true that media journalists are trained to fact check and to be skeptical, these benefits can be undermined by deadlines and subtle issues such as the perceived priorities of different beats. White House reporters, for example, see their stories on the front page of their papers more often than reporters covering the state house. Important stories at the state house level can be buried beneath comparatively less valuable stories from the national level. Reading several different media outlets on the web also quickly shows reporters often omit critical details reported elsewhere. It is unclear if these omissions happen due to deadlines, laziness, or the journalist’s ability (or inability) to refute (or confirm) facts. Readers are left to wonder which reported facts are true.

At the same time, corporate journalists and editors I have worked with realize fact based reporting of corporate activities reads better and is better received than watered down writing. Employees buy into organizational changes, for example, if facts are reported in detail with context that relates to their job situation. They don’t buy in if change is presented with boilerplate happy talk. And there may be little difference between a corporate journalist who does not offend their CEO in print and a media journalist whose editors achieve the same result (intentionally or not) in editing their stories.

Bottomline, an editorial calendar and guidelines for writers and editors are only a start. It is equally important to pursue content that is factually accurate, fully in context, relevant to your readers, and timely. If you’re a corporate journalist or writer, for example, don’t assume your standards have to be lower than media journalists. Force your editors to cut you back rather than self-edit. That’s the only way to ensure you publish good content and make the most of your editorial publishing process.

Learn More about Editorial Calendars

There are many online resources for writers, journalists, and editors. I have listed the most basic resources a small business might need to use to develop an editorial calendar and process to publish content.

Editorial Calendar Process (Some with Templates)

Save Time & Stress – Blog Editorial Calendar Template

Both the article and the template are the best I’ve found online over the years. Some of the ideas in this article come from this source, for example, including performance data for each story you publish and how to organize tabs in your editorial calendar spreadsheet. However, I’ve not included all her ideas and it is well worth reading yourself. Note that, like other templates, the left hand columns are the same (e.g. Title, Author) so you can copy/paste one or more rows of stories to the next tab in the spreadsheet with little fuss.

Creating an Editorial Calendar for a Blog

Short article has some great ideas to organize blog content into types of content. Her spreadsheet is fairly simple, however, which may or may not work for larger groups.

Editorial Calendar Template

My spreadsheet editorial calendar template that incorporates most of the ideas in this article. Note that, like other templates, the left hand columns are the same (e.g. Title, Author) so you can copy/paste one or more rows of stories to the next tab in the spreadsheet with little fuss.

Build Your Blog’s Traffic with an Editorial Calendar

The post and template has a blog focus but it could be adapted for a small business brochure site and email newsletter publishing.

Pattern Your Audience: How Editorial Calendars Can Increase Your Readership

No templates but some great ideas for organizing content into recurring features that train readers to show up at your site on a more regular basis.

How to Create an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog

A good video about how to create editorial calendars with a calendar instead of a spreadsheet.

How to Create and Use an Editorial Calendar

Excellent example of a simple approach to manage an email newsletter and website.

Editorial Calendar Documentation

Google Docs

Create and share an Excel spreadsheet for your editorial calendar. Another benefit: it’s always online in case you find yourself somewhere without your computer but you do have a hotel computer and an internet connection

WordPress Plugin: Editorial Calendar

WordPress Plugin: Edit Flow

After light testing, both of these plugins appear worth a try if you publish with WordPress. Edit Flow appears to be more elaborate and configurable while Editorial Calendar works within each Add/Edit a Post page. Both these plugins appear well supported and under development. As with any software, pay attention to date last updated. Orphaned software can work fine. But it also means any problems are yours to sort out.

Editorial Copy Resources

Associated Press Style Guide
http://fredericksburg.com/FreeLanceStarCompany/Newsrooms/newsroom/FLSstyle/flsstyle.htm;;

RefDesk Grammar, Usage, and Style Resources
http://www.refdesk.com/factgram.html;;

Rensselaer: Revising Prose
http://www.rpi.edu/web/writingcenter/revise.html

Updates To This Article

This article has been published online since 2003. Here are the most recent changes:

• Completely rewrote article to reflect changes to the subject matter area since publication, including links to additional resources for templates and WordPress plugins. (August 20, 2010)

Please note a version of this article is published at SitePoint which includes links to related articles on their site. This article has been online since 2004.

Changes to this article are noted at the bottom of this article.

This article brings you up to date on how best to code HTML email so that it will display well in most email software. It provides an exhaustive overview of how to code html email newsletters (even in Outlook) with links to free html email templates, CSS compatability tables, services that test your html email, and much more. This article strives to provide a comprehensive overview of all possible resources online compared to other articles on this topic which may be vendor-specific or focus on one aspect of how to code html email, for example, testing CSS styles across email software clients.

Here are some quick links if you only need specific information from this article:

• The Building Blocks
• Step 1: Use HTML Tables for Layout
• Step 2: Add in CSS Styles
• Step 3: Add HTML Email Best Practices
• Step 4: Code for GoogleMail, LotusNotes, and Outlook 2007
• FAQs: Create HTML Email in Outlook, Background Images, Create Anchor Links in Email, Add Video to HTML Email
• “How to Code HTML Email” Slide Presentation
• Where to Learn More about Coding HTML Email, Including Free HTML Email Templates
• Changes to this article

The Building Blocks

Whether you use a template or hand code (my preference), there are two key building blocks for html email:

• HTML tables control the design layout and some presentation
• Inline CSS controls presentation, for example, colors for backgrounds and fonts

The quickest and easiest way to see how HTML tables and inline CSS interact within an HTML email is to download templates from Campaign Monitor and MailChimp, two email delivery services that provide free templates (links are below in the Where to Learn More section).

When you open up their templates, you will notice several things we’ll discuss in more detail later:

• CSS style declarations appear below the BODY tag, not between the HEAD tags. If a template has CSS declarations above the BODY tag, it’s simply a convenience: the email delivery service (Campaign Monitor, in particular) moves these declarations down to inline styles as part of their email delivery process.
• No CSS shorthand is used: instead of “font: 12px/16px Arial, Helvetica” break this shorthand into its components of font-family, font-size, and line-height.
• SPANs and DIVs are used sparingly to achieve specific effects while HTML tables do the bulk of the layout work.
• CSS style declarations are basic with no hacks required.

Step 1: Use HTML Tables for Layout

Determining the layout design is the first step in coding an html email. Single column and two-column layouts work best for emails because they control the natural chaos that results when a lot of content is pushed into such a small space as email.

• With a one column layout, typically there is a header that contains a logo and some (or all) navigation links from the parent website. Below that are the intra-email links to stories further down in the email. At the bottom of one column layouts are the footer (often with links that repeat the top navigation) and detailed unsubscribe instructions.
• Two-column email layouts also use a header and footer. They also typically use a narrow side column to contain features and links to more information. The wider column holds the main content of the email.
• Promotional emails follow the same rules but with much less content and links. They often include one to two messages and sometimes one big image with small explanatory text and links below the image.

No matter how your email is designed, the most important content (or reference to that content) should appear at or near the top of the email design, so it is visible immediately when a reader opens your email. The top left of an email often is the first place people look when they open an email.

All of these email layout possibilities can be coded easily with html tables to divide up the space into rows and columns. Using html tables also helps with problems caused by different email software and how they can read the same email code differently.

The basic approach follows these steps in coding the email layout with html tables:

• For a two-column layout, create one table each for the header, the center two content columns, and the footer. That’s three tables. Wrap these tables into another table that “wraps” or “frames” the other tables. Use the same approach for one column layouts except the content table has one column. This approach helps with email designs that break images into multiple table cells. Otherwise, a single table with TD rows for header (with colspan=2 if the design is two column), content, and footer should display fine for all but Lotus Notes email software.
• Use the HTML table attributes within the TABLE and TD tags, for example, to set the table border=0, the valign=top, the align=left (or center, if that is the design), cellpadding=0, cellspacing=0, and so on. This primarily helps older email readers to display the html email in a minimally-acceptable way.
• Set the HTML table border=1 to help debug any problems with the internal alignment of TR and TD tags in development. Then change it back to border=0 for testing and production.

While this approach might offend purists who prefer to code to the latest standards, you do not have to be a complete primitive. No matter how badly LotusNotes displays html email, resorting to HTML FONT tags is not required (although use of FONT tags cannot hurt, honestly). And while Outlook 2007′s HTML rendering engine is less than perfect, it does display basic HTML tables just fine.

Step 2: Add in CSS Styles

Once the email layout is coded as a set of nested HTML tables, the next step is to add in CSS styles. Here are the steps to follow:

• First, put style information (style=) into the HTML tags, for example, TABLE, TD, P, A, and so on.
• Place the CSS STYLE declaration right below the HTML BODY tag. Do not use the CSS STYLE declaration in the HTML HEAD tags as is done when coding web pages. Google Mail, in particular, looks for STYLE anywhere in the email and (helpfully) deletes it. And don’t bother to use CSS LINK to a stylesheet. Google Mail, Hotmail, and other email software ignore, modify, or delete these external references to a stylesheet.
• For the frame table, the one that contains the header, content, and footer tables, style the table width at 98%. It turns out that Yahoo! mail needs the 1% cushion on either side to display the email properly. If side gutters are critical to the email design, set the width at 95% or even 90% to avoid potential problems. Of course, the tables inside the frame (wrapper) table are set for 100%.
• Put general font style information in the table TD closest to the content. This can mean repetitive style declarations in multiple TD cells. Put font style definitions into heading (e.g. H1, H2), P, or A tags only when necessary.
• Use DIVs sparingly to float small boxes of content and links to the right or left inside a table TD cell. Google Mail appears to ignore the CSS Float property but Yahoo! and Hotmail work fine. Outlook 2007 ignores floats. Sometimes it is better to code a more complex table layout than rely on the Float property. Or, since email is easy to clutter, ask that the design put the floated content in the narrow side column. Floats are the one part of an email design that might require the design be reworked.
• While DIVs appear to be barely useful, SPANs appear to work almost every time because they work inline. In some cases, SPANs can be used to position text above or below content, not just to color or re-size type.

If you download and study the email templates from Campaign Monitor and Mail Chimp, you’ll see they treat the frame table, the one that wraps the tables that hold content, as if it were the HTML BODY tag. Campaign Monitor calls it “BodyImposter” which is a great way to think about the frame or wrapper table. From a CSS perspective, the frame table does what the HTML BODY would do if services like Google Mail didn’t disable or ignore the BODY tag.

Step 3: Best Practices

There are several best practices to follow to ensure your email code works well.

With the html email coded as described above, the next step is to test the email in a variety of email software. Often this will identify problems that require workarounds.

The first test tools to use are the Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers. If the email displays well or perfectly in both browsers, chances are good that testing the email in Outlook, Yahoo!, Google Mail, and other services will reveal only minor problems. You also might want to use the Internet Explorer 6 web browser to test for Outlook 2003 which uses its rendering engine (see Resources below if you need to download IE6).

Once the email appears fine in the two web browsers, use an email delivery service to send the email to a range of test email accounts. Ideally this should include accounts with Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Google Mail.

Which test accounts are used, however, should be determined by the domain names in the email address list of people who will receive the email. For example, if there are few or no AOL subscribers on this list, then it may be a waste of time and money to set up an AOL email account.

Here are the most common code tweaks that are found in this test phase:

• Sometimes a switch from percentage widths to fixed widths is needed. While this is not optimal, because people can and do resize their email windows when reading, sometimes using a fixed width is the only way for a layout to display properly in multiple email software.
• If there is a spacing issue with the columns in the email design, first tweak the cellpadding and cellspacing attributes of the HTML tables. If that does not work, use CSS margin and padding attributes. HTML spacing works better with older email software than spacing with CSS.
• Image displacement can occur when a TD cell is closed right below the IMG tag. This is an ancient HTML problem. Putting the right after (on the same line as) the IMG tag eliminates the annoying and mystifying 1 pixel gap.

In addition, the following best practices are recommended:

• Avoid javascript. Most email software disables javascript.
• If an image is cut up and spread across several HTML table cells, test the email with many test accounts. Sometimes it looks great in Outlook but shifts by 1 pixel or more in Hotmail and other services. Also consider putting the image as a background image on a new html table (set the background= value to the URL of your image) that encases all the table rows and columns that would display parts of your background image; sometimes this achieves the same effect as cutting an image up but with less code and better results. Note that Outlook 2007 does not display background images. Be sure to test your email code with your target email software. (Campaign Monitor has published a solution to the background problem with Outlook 2007 and 2010, Add a Background Image to your Email in Two Simple Steps.)
• If you use background images, use the HTML table attribute background= instead of CSS. It works more consistently across email software, for example, GMail.
• Store the email images on a web server, preferably in a folder separate from website images, for example, in /images/email not /images. And don’t delete them. Some people open emails weeks or months later, the same way people use bookmarks to return to websites.
• Be sure all your images use the alt, height, and width parameters. This helps with Google Mail as well as when a reader has their images turned off. However, Outlook 2007 does not recognize the alt= parameter.
• Use the target=”_blank” attribute for the HTML A tags so that people reading with a webmail service don’t have the requested page appear within their webmail interface.
• While a 1×1 pixel image can be used to force spacing to create a precise email layout, spammers use 1×1 pixel images to determine if their email has been opened.
• Avoid a big image above the fold in the email. This is another classic spammer practice and can increase the likelihood an email will be tagged as spam.

My final test is to view the HTML email with images turned off. Outlook and some other email software set images off by default, to prevent spammers from knowing your email address is active. I set images off in my code by using my editor’s search and replace to delete some part of the src= URLs in my file.

Make sure your email content displays fine without images. For example, if you use a background image to provide a background color with white font color over it, make sure the default background color for that part of the HTML table is dark, not white. Also be sure your alt=, height=, and width= parameters are set for images so they can help readers understand your content without images. Turning off your images will help you catch these issues and ensure the HTML email will display effectively if people see your email with images off.

Once the html email is tweaked so that it displays well or perfectly in the test email accounts, the next step is to go through a checklist. Verify that

• The From address displays properly (as a name, not a bare email address)
• The subject line is correct
• The contact information is correct and visually obvious
• The top of the email has the text, “You received this email because … Unsubscribe instructions are at the bottom of this email.”
• There is text asking readers to add your From address to their email address book
• The top of your emails include a link to the web version of your email.

If it is important to know absolutely everything wrong with the html email code, try a service like Browsercam.com or LitmusApp.com. These services show how your HTML and CSS code will display as email or, in the case of Browsercam, as a web page.

Step 4: Coding for GoogleMail, LotusNotes, and Outlook 2007

Google Mail, LotusNotes, and Outlook 2007 present special coding problems. The good news? If you code to account for their oddities, your html email code is more likely to display well in most if not all email software.

Because Google cannot control how senders will code CSS and HTML, they have to take steps to ensure their application displays properly regardless of the code quality of the html email that is displayed.

As a result, Google Mail acts like an artifact of the mid 1990s when web standards were primitive. It takes some work, but it is possible to crack open a Google Mail page and see just how convoluted their approach is to rendering html email.

For one thing, Google Mail deletes any CSS style reference to a set of styles, no matter where it appears in the email. And fonts displayed in html tables have the odd habit of appearing larger than intended no matter how the html email is coded.

Here are coding techniques that appear to work well in Google Mail and older email software:

• Define the background color in a TD cell with bgcolor=, not the CSS style.
• Use the background= attribute in the TD cell for background images, not the CSS. A corollary is that the background image can be made as tall as needed. If the content of an email template might be short or tall depending on the email content, using an extra-tall background image this way lets the email layout height shrink or expand based on the height of the copy from one email to the next. Note, however, that Outlook 2007 ignores background images. (Campaign Monitor has published a solution to the background problem with Outlook 2007 and 2010, Add a Background Image to your Email in Two Simple Steps.)
• If it works better, use the padding style to control margins within a TD cell. The margin style does not work in these cells. Padding does work.
• If a border around a TD cell is needed, Google Mail displays a border when defined in a DIV but not when defined as a border style in a TD tag.
• If a light colored link against a dark background color is needed, put the font definition in the TD cell (so it applies to P and A tags equally) then add a color= style to the A tag.
• If the P and A fonts appear to be different sizes, wrap the A tag in a P tag.
• Google Mail aggressively uses the right column of their interface which squeezes the html email into the center panel. Be sure the padding style in the content TDs is set at 10 pixels all round so text does not smash against the left and right edges.
• When testing an html email with a Google Mail account, it is likely one or more missing font styles in the TD, H1, H2, P, A, and other tags will be found. Inspect every font carefully to make sure Google Mail displays the fonts correctly.

Besides Google Mail, another hazard programmers face when coding email is less obvious: LotusNotes. Many large corporations continue to support and upgrade their Notes installations. As of 2004, IBM reported that 95 million people used Notes. Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell which companies use Notes. So code html emails as described in this article. The more primitive the code, the more likely it will work well, if not perfectly, with Notes.

That said, it is quite possible that Notes will introduce quirks that beggar belief, for example, converting images to their proprietary format. Or Notes will simply ignore flawless basic html in one email but display other html fine in another email.

Here is what apparently helps Lotus Notes display html email:

• Use a frame table that contains all the internal layout tables, for example, for the header, content, and footer. This keeps the email together in one chunk of html. Pieces of the layout are less likely to wander when displayed in Notes.
• Create a gutter around the frame (wrapper) table by setting the width to a percentage and/or using the cellpadding to at least 5.
• Don’t use a style declaration in the head tags. It is the proper way to code to standards, but Notes (like Google Mail) might delete your styles. Rely, instead, on inline styles within the TABLE, TD, H1, H2, P, A, and other tags.
• Use absolute URLs to images stored on a web server. Notes cannot be prevented from converting images, if it does, but using remote images might help.
• Intra page jumps, using named anchors, rarely work in Notes, if ever. It is best to avoid links that jump down the email to a specific piece of content.
• Avoid colspans in the HTML table layouts. Notes apparently only handles basic table layouts, especially older versions of the software.
• Be sure TD cell widths have accurate widths. Unlike web browsers, which automatically make all cells the widest defined width, Notes sizes each TD cell based on its defined width.
• Centering an email layout usually does not work in Notes. Email layouts will have to be left-aligned.

Using these techniques for Google Mail and Lotus Notes also will ensure your emails display fine in Outlook 2007 with its older HTML rendering engine. Microsoft has published details about what their email software will and won’t display properly (see Resources below for the link). And the Email Standards Project has additional details. They also lobby companies like Microsoft to improve their products.

The bottomline with Outlook 2007, LotusNotes, and Google Mail is that it requires coders to make sure their HTML email code works across most email software. That means simple, standards-compliant code works best in most if not all situations.

Many people who receive email prefer HTML over text for any number of reasons. For programmers, however, the task of coding an HTML email appears both simple and horribly complex. Hopefully this article has described many of the issues and coding strategies that work across email software so that you can code HTML emails effectively.

What is the best idea to take from this article? If there is a choice to be made between a simple coding solution and a more complex solution, simplicity always works better.

Frequently Asked Questions

How to Create HTML Email in Outlook

The basic approach is to create your html email as a separate html file and then create a signature file and use your html email as the signature file. Then you open a new email message and add the new signature file. This prevents Outlook from helpfully converting all your precious html code into text.

To create a signature file in Outlook:

1. Select Tools from the top menus, then Options, then the Mail Format tab in the Options pop-up that will appear.
2. Down on the lower right of the Mail Format tab is a Signatures button. Click that button and a Create Signature pop-up will appear.
3. Click the New button on the Create Signature pop-up and a Create New Signature pop-up appears. Give your new signature a name and select Use this File as a Template and browse to your HTML email.

Then create a new email message, click in the body of your email message, select Insert from the mail dropdown menu and Signature then your new signature file.

People usually ask this question because they want to send html email from their internet account. Don’t. Unless you know every person on your email list, too many bad things can happen if someone tags your email as spam. If you send email through your business domain name, for example, all your email will be tagged as spam. And you will be left to figure out how to get off any blacklists. Even if you know everyone on your list, your internet provider may have a limit to how many messages can be sent and may boot you off their service. It’s far less hassle to pay an email service provider to deliver your email and worry about spam blacklists.

How to Use Background Images in GMail, Lotus Notes, and Other Services

Using images as a background in an html email is problematic. The old way is to carve up your image and divide it among HTML table cells and rows, using the background= setting for the table. You also can put the image in a new html table that encases all the table rows and columns that would display parts of your background image; sometimes this achieves the same effect as cutting an image up but with less code and better results. However, Outlook 2007, Google Mail, Lotus Notes 6, and Live Mail do not display background images easily. Be sure to test your email code with your target email software. Whatever you do, be sure your email design degrades nicely if and when the background image does not display. If you use white text, for example, against a dark image, make the default background color a dark color.

How to Create Anchor Links in an Email

Like image backgrounds, links within an email do not always work. You should test first. Over the years, I have cracked open a few emails with intra-email links and find they use the basic HTML anchor tag to link to a defined name= bookmark. The only oddity I’ve seen is the addition of shape=rect in the anchor name code, as in, <a name=sometag shape=rect> But this was in an email full of images.

How to Add Video to HTML Email

It is difficult but possible to add video to your html emails. Campaign Monitor has a great article, “HTML5 and video in email“, that covers all the steps to make video available within email software clients that can display video while degrading well for email software that cannot display video in an html email. Their article includes test results across many email clients, as well as comments with more insights and results.

“How to Code HTML Email” Slide Presentation

I recently presented this information in a slide presentation, if it is useful:

My presentation also included a one-sheet with resources for coding HTML email newsletters.

Where to Learn More

Besides this article, these online resources should be very helpful:

Email Standards Project

http://www.email-standards.org/
Probably the best start point for understanding exactly how different email software complies with HTML and CSS. They also maintain an acid test they use to compare compliance across email software. And you can participate to help improve standards.

Free HTML Email Templates

http://campaignmonitor.com/resources/templates.aspx
http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/html_email_templates/
Both email delivery services actively test their templates over time with different email software. However, there are subtle differences to note. Campaign Monitor has its STYLE declaration within the HEAD tag while Mail Chimp does not. Be sure to test your final HTML code with whatever services are used by recipients in your email list.

Plain Text Email Design Guidelines

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/plain-text-templates.aspx
This article has a number of simple ways to make text emails easier to scan.

Blocked Email Images

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3413471
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2005/11/email_design_guidelines_for_20.html
From 2004, the ClickZ article shows how major email software compares for blocked images and preview panes. The Campaign Monitor article goes into greater detail with actual examples and ideas how to combat default image off rendering of your emails, as well as designing your email to look okay in preview panes.

Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx
The official Microsoft description of what Outlook 2007 will and will not render for HTML and CSS. Includes a link to a validator that works in Dreamweaver, as well as Microsoft editing tools.

A Guide to CSS Support in Email

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/04/a_guide_to_css_support_in_emai_2.html
Campaign Monitor, an email service provider, has taken Xavier Frenette’s excellent work documenting CSS performance in a few email clients and expanded it to include Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and Windows Live Mail, as well as for the PC they cover Outlook 2003 and Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, and Thunderbird and for the Mac they cover Mac Mail, Entourage, and Eudora.

MailChimp Email HTML Coding/Delivery Guide

http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/email_marketing_guide.phtml
Lots of great information about all aspects of html email, including how spam filters work.

CSS Support in HTML Emails of Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail by Xavier Frenette

http://www.xavierfrenette.com/articles/css-support-inwebmail/
This is excellent research and style by style results that show how these three webmail services display CSS.

Secrets of HTML Email Series

http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=Sections&op=listarticles&secid=16
Some of this information is old but they have a good piece on Lotus Notes.

Lotus Notes Trial Software

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/downloads/
Free downloads of their latest software if thoroughly testing an email with the Notes client software is needed.

HTML Email and Web Page Testing Services

http://www.mailchimp.com MailChimp Inbox Inspector
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/testing/ Browsercam also has updated their service to display your pages at a variety of screen resolutions.
https://browserlab.adobe.com/ Adobe BrowserLab currently is free and available anywhere with a modern browser. It’s easy to use and displays the full range of bad browsers, specifically, IE6 and IE7. But it also shows Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
http://www.browsercam.com
http://www.litmusapp.com
Test compatiblity of your web pages with a variety of web browsers and operating systems. For email, Browsercam simply shows you all the warts in your html code, even though your email might work fine in Notes, Google Mail, and other difficult email software environments. Litmus shows how your email appears in email software.

Best Practices For Bulletproof E-Mail Delivery

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/10/16/best-practices-for-bulletproof-e-mail-delivery/
Excellent overview with some interesting ideas, resources, and details, for example, sending emails on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 2-3 p.m. That mirrors my experience for lists with business email addresses (people come back from lunch and do email before meetings or getting back to work). The best way to ensure delivery, however, is to use email inspection services provided by email delivery vendors: it’s their job to keep up with what works best to deliver emails.

Testing Internet Explorer 6 Web Browser

Microsoft’s Expression Web SuperPreview lets you see how your email (or web pages) look in software that uses the Microsoft web browser engine. Unfortunately, the Preview portion is not free. You have to buy the whole package of Expression Web 3 software. Adobe’s Browserlab site is free and might be a better option to check small changes and validate your html email displays fine.

Standalone Internet Explorer 6 Web Browser

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
This free software lets you run install and run IE6 and IE7 without causing conflicts. With Vista and now Windows 7, this only works at installing IE6 because Windows only lets you have one IE running at a time. Better to use BrowserLab to test against email clients that use the IE6 or IE7 html rendering engine. Also, Microsoft’s Expression Web Super Preview is an easier and better option for the future.

Changes to This Article

This article has been published and maintained since 2004. Here are the most recent changes:

• Updated references to background images to include a Campaign Monitor solution to the background problem with Outlook 2007 and 2010 and GMail, Add a Background Image to your Email in Two Simple Steps. (July 15, 2010)
• Embedded slides from a presentation I gave recently on How to Code HTML Email Newsletters. It included a one-sheet with resources for coding HTML email newsletters. (June 15, 2010)
• Based on a comment, clarified the reason you might see CSS styles above the BODY tag open in some email templates. The email delivery service that provides the templates moves these styles down into inline styles as part of the delivery process. Added link to Best Practices For Bulletproof E-Mail Delivery article in the Learn More section directly above. (May 26, 2010)
• Added link to Microsoft’s Expression Web SuperPreview software that shows how your html email looks in older email software that uses the Microsoft web browser engine. (February 15, 2010)
• Added link to Adobe’s BrowserLab online service that, like BrowserCam, lets you see how your web page (in this case, an html email) displays in older browser technology like IE6 and IE7. This is useful for sending HTML email to older AOL email clients. Also added the FAQ about how to add video to HTML email. (November 13, 2009)
• Added intra-page links to help people who arrive here from search engines. Also added link to MailChimp’s HTML Email Inbox Inspector service. Added FAQs. (January 23, 2009)
• Updated link to MailChimp’s free HTML templates. Their URL changed without any automated redirection. (February 23, 2009)

A more recent version of this article has been posted at SitePoint, which also has links to related articles that might be of interest. The SitePoint article also has a review of Google Checkout.

Selling online can be a great way to expand an existing business or start a new one. Sites like eBay and etsy let you sell within their sites and use their shopping carts. You benefit from their traffic and marketing but they control the look and functionality of their site. The other option is to sell through your own website.

To do so, you need a shopping cart, payment processing, and a process to fulfill orders. This article deals mostly with carts but generally mentions how you might handle payments and other cart-related issues. It is assumed you know how to find and deliver a product to customers.

For this article, I tested six shopping carts using two pages from an ecommerce site one of my clients’ runs. The carts mentioned here are not the only carts available, for example, Yahoo! and Squirrelcart (which has my favorite mascot). And it is possible you will need a custom shopping cart built or a cart customized from software like Magento.

However, the method I use to evaluate these carts can be used to evaluate any shopping cart. Ultimately, it is your online business.

Where to Start?

When a client asks me to help them find a shopping cart, I often start with the feature lists from different cart vendors. It helps my clients focus on what they need. That winnowing process, in turn, helps us focus on whether or not they need a simple cart or a regular cart. If they need a regular cart, using a feature list helps figure out whether they need a basic cart or something more complex.

At the same time my client and I look through the feature list, I work with them to understand exactly what they want to accomplish online. Is the online business their entire business or an extension? Does the shopping cart need to integrate with their accounting system, for example, QuickBooks? What are their products and how complex are their products, for example, will they offer quantity discounts?

There are other important cart features to test. Can customers see their order status online? Can you easily edit all outbound emails used to confirm sales, notify customers when a product is shipped, and so on? If your online business has several employees, can you restrict the reporting to just your client? How hard is it to add options to products?

Another great question is how is credit card data stored in the database? Credit card processing companies have strict rules about storing card data. My advice: avoid storing any important customer data. Let payment processing services handle that risk.

Simple Carts

If you have only a few products to sell, or you want to test the waters, then you have two options for selling online. One option is to use an existing site such as eBay, Half.com, etsy, or similar site. For example, my wife sells all our spare books on Half.com because it makes no sense to bother with anything more complicated.

Your second option, when you have only a few items to sell, is to use the payment processing capabilities of another online service, for example, Paypal or Mal’s Ecommerce. This works especially well if you have a website that already exists. Both these simple carts let you use their site to configure your products then copy and paste button code into your web pages. The code creates a button on your web page that, when clicked, sends the site visitor through their service for payment.
Here’s how it works using a product from one of my clients:

Paypal

http://www.paypal.com

PayPal is an online payment processor, currently owned by eBay, that processes credit cards as well as transactions members make within their private network. Most people know of the private network payments and don’t realize that PayPal also handles payments through major credit cards as well as electronic checks.

To use PayPal as a cart, you’ll need to register with them. This involves setting up a PayPal account then adding a bank account to your account. To validate your bank account, PayPal deposits small amounts into your account, say 11 cents, and you log in and tell them the amount they deposited.

To create a product within your PayPal account, select the Products and Services tab on your main account page, then the Website Payments Standard link on the Products and Services page. This takes you to a Buy Now Buttons page. Select the type of payment button you want then follow the directions to work with their Button Factory. You’ll see a chunk of code at the end of the process that you’ll paste into your website. It is a fairly easy 1-3 web page process to create a button or email link to a product you sell.
PayPal currently charges 1.9-2.9% of transaction cost plus 30 cents USD per transaction. There are no monthly fees and no setup costs. They provide detailed accounting for anything sold using their Buy Now buttons.

Support for PayPal is by help text, email, and phone. They’re a large organization and it can take time to get a proper response. But the response typically is thorough.
In my experience with a non-profit group that uses PayPal buttons to let their members pay for meetings, the only criticism is that the PayPal payment page makes it very hard to use major credit cards. The most obvious part of the payment page is the login box. It’s only when you notice a small image of credit cards and a Continue link that users realize they don’t have to log in to PayPal to pay with a credit card.

I would note one thing about PayPal. While I have heard complaints over many years about their service, so far it has never happened to me. My recommendation with any shopping cart or payment processing service is to ask around. Ask the vendor for references. If they have testimonials on their websites, try to contact the person who gave them a quote.

Mal’s Ecommerce

http://www.mals-e.com

Another shopping cart that lets you create buttons and handle processing remotely is Mal’s Ecommerce. They are a 10 year old company based in Spain. Mal’s offers a lot of functionality in a simple easy to use service. They offer both free and paid premium carts, depending upon what features you need. And they have a bit of software you can download to manage your orders processed through their service.

To use Mal’s you need to set up an account. On their main account page, you’ll see a Cart Setup tab. Click that tab to open a page that provides links to define your products, payment methods, and cart behavior. You can, for example, add a logo on the payment pages your customers will use. Like PayPal, it is fairly easy to figure out how to set up different options.

Mal’s offers a fairly robust set of features for a simple cart. For example, you can set discounts, email notifications, shipping methods and costs, downloadable products, gift vouchers, and other features. They also have a broad range of payment process from different parts of the world.

The cost for Mal’s? Free. Their service depends on heavy users who pay for the Premium service who in turn funds the free carts. They don’t charge a cost per transaction, no monthly fees for the free cart, and no setup charges.

Support for Mal’s Ecommerce is primarily through an extensive set of documentation that is well written and task-oriented. You can email them but they ask that you use the help text and the forums first as most questions are answered there. But you knew that already since that is best practice for any software.

Regular Shopping Carts

If your online business is a new one or an extension of an existing business, chances are good that a regular shopping cart is required. You do not want to manually manage product quantities, discounts, out of stock, orders, shipping, and all the rest.

In addition to having the option of a regular cart or a more complex cart, you also have the option to install the cart yourself or use a third party service like Monster.com or CoreCommerce.com. Installation on your server gives you ultimate control but you’re also responsible to secure the database, upgrade the software, and all the rest.

Third party services solve those problems but introduce others. For example, a client of mine uses Monster.com but it costs too much, the interface is quirky, and pages load very slowly at times. However, my client does not want the hassle or responsibility of installing and maintaining a shopping cart on their server.

Shopping Carts on Your Server

The two install it yourself shopping carts I am most familiar with are Zen Cart and digiShop. Zen Cart is free and open source while digiShop is from a private software company. They offer similar capabilities but can be quite different in actual use.

Zen Cart

http://www.ZenCart.com

The first install it yourself shopping cart you might look at is Zen Cart, an open source cart that is an offshoot of osCommerce. In my experience, Zen Cart (and osCommerce) benefit from the same strengths, for example, a strong online community and lots of modules to extend the shopping cart functionality. However, they also share the same weaknesses, mostly too much code to wade through to make changes to templates.
Installing Zen Cart is fairly easy. You upload their files using FTP software, set up a database and the database username and password, and then call up their installation page in a web browser. You also will have to set permissions on several folders and files, too.

Once Zen Cart is installed, the administration area makes it fairly easy to create products and categories. The installation process also lets you load the database with sample data so that you can become comfortable with the cart as you load in your own products.

Creating templates is somewhat more complicated. There are a handful of templates that can be changed to reflect your page design. However, editing a template requires carefully maintaining PHP conditionals and other code. It’s fairly easy to break. And, like most carts, there are dozens of templates that control the center content area of the cart. These templates are named in a fairly easy to understand way. Finding a specific template to tweak a design should not be hard.

Support for Zen Cart is through their website, through the forums, wiki, and tutorials. The few times I used the support forum, and when I searched the forums for answers, I got great results.

The price of Zen Cart software is free. However, as with any install it yourself software, you will pay for either your time to set up and configure or time from an expert in HTML, CSS, and PHP.

digiShop

http://digishop.sumeffect.com

The digiShop cart is the best software I have found for less than a thousand dollars (US). While there are other carts in the price range, and more expensive carts, digiShop is fairly easy to use and, therefore, is a good cart to discuss and compare with other carts.
Like Zen Cart, installing digiShop is relatively easy. You upload your files and set up a database with a database username and password. Then you open your browser, call up their installation web page, and follow directions. You even can avoid the hassle of installation by hiring them for $45 (USD) to do the installation for you on your server.

Once installed, digiShop is fairly easy to use. The only negative for me is the large number of top level links, although each link is clearly separate from the others. Creating products is simple: click the Products tab then the Add a Product button. You can easily add variants, a couple types of description, for example, blurb and full description.

digiShop also integrates with a number of payment processors as well as at least one affiliate software program. There’s also the ability to integrate with QuickBooks, StoneEdge, Google Analytics, and eBay. And digiShop also integrates with the company’s other products, for example, chatFuse for live chat and fireBlast to leverage the email addresses collected from your buyers to do email marketing. But those products are priced separately.

Adding your page design to digiShop is fairly easy. There are two sets of header and footer templates, a set used for secure pages and another set for pages delivered without an SSL certificate. You use your page design and drop in small single line bits of PHP code, then upload the four files to the templates folder. If you need to modify the content areas of the carts, their template file names are fairly obvious. digiShop also provides an online widget that will do the conversion from your page design to their templates.

Based on installing software for over 10 years, what I appreciate most about digiShop is that its file structure and code are very clean and easy to understand. This makes maintenance much easier, for example, to find and tweak templates. And while I cannot prove it, my theory is that well-coded clean software indicates the software programmer(s) had a clear goal in mind when they created their product. Messy software, in my experience, usually means the product has been left to grow like a weed.
Support for digiShop, based on two or three years experience on behalf of my clients, is relatively quick and at the right level of detail. They have an online knowledge base which is helpful. But the best support has been through email.

Costs for digiShop vary depending on which version of their software you buy. If you don’t need many features, their simpler version works fine for $299 (USD). The two versions with more features cost $349 (USD) and $799 (USD).

Hosted Third Party Shopping Carts

If you do not want the bother or risk to install and maintain a shopping cart on your web server, the other option is to use a hosted service. Unlike eBay or etsy, with a hosted cart you can use your own page design and URL.

Monster Commerce

http://www.monstercommerce.com

Monster is part of the domain registrar Network Solutions. It appears to be in the midst of migrating to a more cleaned up and modern interface. Whether old or new, however, they provide a broad range of cart functionality, for example, the ability to handle variants and map quantities to each type of variant. If you sell a shirt in three sizes, you can set prices for each size shirt and track quantities as they’re sold.

To set up your page design in Monster, you select the HTML and Layout links on the left side of the old interface, the Design tab on their new interface. There are many design sub options. However, for example, in their older interface, it should be fairly obvious that the HTML for the top of your pages is pasted into the Top of Page HTML Editor page. The Layout options are primarily settings that you define for your cart overall, for example, color schemes.

The Monster cart comes with a variety of buttons used through the checkout process. You can add your own set, however, if you sign up for their Pro package. That involves using their FTP editor to create a folder where all the other buttons reside, then uploading all your versions of their buttons.

Adding products in the Monster cart is done through the Inventory link. The Products sub option makes it fairly easy to add details about each product, including variants, images, and other details. Tracking inventory, price discounts, gift certificates and other product related details are also available within the Inventory options.

There are a lot of online tutorials to help with setting up your cart in Monster. Their telephone and phone support also has been excellent, especially at odd hours on the weekends and holidays when I have called for clients.

Prices for Monster are $49.99 per month (USD) and $99.99 per month (USD). The higher price lets you use your own interface design.

CoreCommerce

http://www.corecommerce.com

If you like the digiShop cart but do not want the bother of hosting a shopping cart, CoreCommerce.com is the online version of digiShop with extra features. It also makes a good alternative to consider with Monster Cart. Because Core Commerce is the digiShop Pro version offered as a hosted service, setting up products and performing other tasks are identical to digiShop.

Adding your site design to Core Commerce is as easy as their standalone digiShop software. You create header and footer pages from your page design, add a few single line bits of code, then FTP them to their server. For the content areas of the cart, you are limited to using CSS to style the checkout form and other bits that appear in the center of a shopping cart. Unlike a standalone cart, you can’t go in and tweak the code for the signup form or other center elements.

With regular shopping carts, it is critical to test how easy or difficult it is to add your website design to cart pages. digiShop software makes it fairly easy to accomplish. Templates typically divide into two groups, one set for layout of the cart web page and then a set of templates for individual elements of the cart pages, for example, the login screen or payment detail form.

Prices for Core Commerce run from $39.95 per month (USD) to $99.95 per month (USD). The higher price adds more bandwidth and server storage space.

Custom Shopping Carts

Beyond regular shopping carts are custom shopping carts. These carts are either created from scratch by a programmer who then sells their cart to their client base or customized based upon an existing cart, for example, Magento.

My default recommendation is to work through feature lists, as well as careful research and analysis of client needs, before you tackle custom shopping carts. Be sure you cannot get the features you need from something that already exists. Be sure a small compromise on your part doesn’t commit you to considerable expense.

If you cannot find what you need off the shelf, you should proceed carefully. For example, get solid references for the programmer or agency that will create your shopping cart. When you talk to references, be sure to ask how the programmer handled changes: did they get snippy and rude or did they dig in and force the client to clearly describe what was needed?

Also, insist the code for your cart is thoroughly documented within the code. That will make it easier for you to take your cart to another programmer or agency. Even if you are thrilled with or married to the programmer, documenting code makes it much easier to maintain your cart in the future.

Finally, with custom carts, it is important that software development happen in a structured way. Your requirements, for example, should be written down and all questions and testing should refer to specific requirements. The programmer should set up a test bed where the cart can be built out and tested without affecting any live production cart. You also should ask to confirm the programmer or agency uses tools to store the code, keep track of any changes to the code, and help maintain code over time.

These are all basic software programming practices but you should still ask. A “no” to any of these questions, or “I don’t need a public test bed” or “We don’t document our code” should be signs to go elsewhere.

Search Optimization and Shopping Carts

Whatever cart you choose, optimizing your online store for search engines is critical. With simple carts like PayPal and Mal’s, of course, you must optimize the pages on your website: they handle only the payment processing. With regular shopping carts, however, you should have, at the least:

• The ability to control the HTML page title as well as the page title that appears within the content on the page.
• The ability to control at least the URL file name for each of your product catalog and detail pages, if not also the file folder path to that file name.
• The ability, of course, to modify meta tags, image title and alt CSS tags, and the words used within your links.

I would argue that the ability to output your shopping site as a site map, to then submit and upload through Google’s Webmaster Tools, also is key for search optimization. And some carts let you export your products as a list for shopping comparison sites.

One approach that I’ve used with some of my clients for search optimization is to publish their product catalog and detail pages as static web pages. This gives them 100% control of what is on every single page. They let their shopping cart manage the orders and payments. Other clients of mine let the shopping cart do everything. Both groups do well so I assume what works is a matter of your personal preference.

Some Final Thoughts on Shopping Carts

Hopefully this article has managed to avoid a flame war about who makes the best shopping cart. It really depends on your needs and preferences. Here are a few quick issues to also consider when you pick a shopping cart:

• If you use an install it yourself shopping cart, check what server control panel is used. One control panel, Plesk, divides the server space into two halves, a secure half with pages that are served through an SSL connection and the other half for pages that are delivered through normal http traffic. If your server has Plesk, be aware that configuring your cart may require a few extra steps.
• Be sure to develop a backup plan for your orders, customer list, templates, and settings.
• Be sure to look up online website monitoring services that will periodically ping your online store and email or text you when your site is down.
• If you can avoid storing credit card data in your cart database, the better your security.
• If you use Mal’s or PayPal, be sure to look into their chargeback policies and costs.

Finally, some hosted carts offer SafeHacker and similar validation that an online store is secure. This clearly is a preference issue. My view is that it is good if it helps your customers feel comfortable enough to buy. These services also can keep you honest by pinpointing any security issues before you find them the hard way.

When a prospect or customer uses Google to find a product or service you offer, ideally you want your web pages to appear in the top 10 search results. There are many excellent articles online that describe different ways to improve the search engine rankings of your web pages.

My goal is not to write yet another how-to article about search engine optimization. Today I want to describe basic steps that businesses can take before they explore more refined optimization strategies. I encounter many clients whose web sites fail to meet even rudimentary search engine optimization. Don’t worry, however. You do not have to be technically inclined to make most of these changes, or to understand everything.

Best case, this article will confirm that your web pages are well formed. Or you’ll find, worst case, ways to improve your web pages.

Your Goal: Usable Search Result Excerpts

Awhile back, I wrote an article called “How To Create an Editorial Process” after realizing a few of my clients needed a detailed, how-to process to ensure new content showed up on their websites on a regular basis. From time to time, Google sends to my website people who use the search phrase, “how to create editorial process.”

Here are the top four search results, as of today, for that search phrase:

While ranking second for this search phrase is wonderful, my goal is to influence the search result excerpt Google provides. I want an excerpt that immediately tells what you will find when you click the link and go to my website. The link label, the first line of the search results, is the first thing people see and scan. My goal is to make that line, that first link, really work hard.

Let’s look at the title of the first search result, the first line, also called a ‘link label’:

Not very helpful is it? I wonder what “Instructions for …” means? If you are looking for examples of editorial processes online, that fragment sounds more useful than the first part of the page title, NCP Cardiovascular Medicine. The page title for this web page might better have been:

Why? Google and other search engines cut off page titles to save space and make it easier for their visitors to skim headlines. If your goal is a useful search result and first line link label, you must organize your page titles so they display critical information first. It also is important to organize the parts of your page title in a way that implies the relationships between the web page and other content on the website.

Let’s look again at the title of this first search result:

I would guess (correctly!) that the website is provided by NCP Cardiovascular Medicine, that they have a section of their site that describes their journal (About the Journal), and that within that section are instructions for people who want to publish content in their journal (Instructions for Authors).

So their page title is well-formed. It describes the relationships between their site and its content. The order of the elements in their page title, however, is not optimized for search engine results.

If you are looking for examples of editorial processes in this set of search results, only my web page shouts something useful in detail. As you will see, that is no accident. It took me awhile to realize that well-formed web pages with titles organized a certain way improved my search results and, oddly enough, helped people skim search results.

Are Your Page Titles Well-Formed?

As noted above, the page titles on your website should be organized to make the most of how they will appear in search results. This is the ideal format to use:

If your page is a child or grandchild page, your page title should follow this format:

Many online articles about search engine optimization would say these titles are too long. I disagree as long as the Site Tagline, in particular, is pithy and keyword rich.

While I do not know the ingredients of the Google search algorithm, I suspect it looks for anything that can help determine the value of a specific web page full of content. A clean, well-formed page title with the site name and helpful site tagline clearly helps achieve that goal.

That said, a journal about cardiovascular science probably needs a good site tagline much less than a business, especially a local business.

The site tagline should be 5-10 words that state your business value proposition, hits your top 3-5 keywords (more below about keywords), and mentions physical locations. A yoga studio, for example, would benefit from a tagline that includes geographic information like town name, city name, or state name:

This sort of page title would better help local people who are athletes (think golfers) in search of classes at a yoga studio in or near Podunk, Illinois. Certainly more so than this page title which is more common:

One arcane note about page titles: the separator you use in between the pieces of your page title. These can be right angle brackets, a vertical line (also called a “pipe” character), a colon, a dash, two dashes, or anything in between. Consistent use of one type of separator is more important than which one you use. Since Google crops page titles, I recommend single space separators with a space on either side.

Finally, well-formed page titles also help visitors who bookmark your web pages. In their list of bookmarked pages, they will see the page title which, if it is descriptive and placed first, will help them find you in the future when they pore through their bookmarks looking for your page.

Are Your Web Pages Well-Formed?

If you’ve used Microsoft Word or similar publishing tool, then you are familiar with headings and styles. Perhaps you don’t realize, however, that these headings are meant not only to break up content. Headings also can describe relationships between content.

Let’s look at this set of headings:

Would you guess that White Corn and Yellow Corn are types of corn? And that corn is a type of vegetable? And that vegetables are a type of food? In this example, careful use of headings helps make these relationships clear.

Web pages can show the same useful relationships. However, looking at the source code of thousands of web pages since 1993, I can tell you first hand that very few web pages make effective use of headings.

Why is this important to search optimization?

In the same way that making your page titles well-formed helps search engines (and people scanning their search results) to make sense of your web page content, a web page that uses headings helps search engines make sense of content within your web page. Headings show the ways one piece of your web page content relates to other content within the page and how the page relates to your site.

A Perfectly-Formed Web Page

If you buy this argument, then how do you make a web page well-formed? Let’s start with an example of a perfectly formed web page then discuss what most people have, imperfectly structured pages that could be made better.

A side note: I was taught never to assume anything is entirely one way or another. While I tout the example below as being ‘perfect,’ in fact someone else might have a better way to organize content using headings. My perfect example simply describes what I’ve learned using headings (and their close siblings, taxonomies) over many years.

Here is how I try to structure every web page I build for myself and for my clients:

Can you see how structuring a web page this way uses headings (H1, H2, H3) to indicate relationships between content? If the website name is always H1, and page titles tagged with H2 headings, the implication is that every web page is part of the site, the way corn is a vegetable and vegetables are food, from the example above.

In the same way, using the H3 heading to mark off content within a web page shows that these headings are subservient to the page title, which uses an H2 heading.

Some readers might wonder how you use a heading 1 for the website title. It is a trick I found online years ago (sorry, I’ve lost the URL but will try to find it). I use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to hide the page title text from all but search engines and web browsers that do not read CSS. The CSS style displays the website logo instead of the website title text.

Here’s the CSS code, if you are interested:

Just some quick comments to explain this code, and then we’ll move on. Note how the SPAN tags, <span>Web Site Title</span>, in the example above is styled to be hidden. And how the H1 heading is styled to display an image, the url(“”) code. The height and width values should at least be the height and width of your logo image. You also can use height, width, margin, and padding to place your website logo anywhere at the top of the web page.

An Imperfectly-Formed Web Page, Improved

Let’s move on to discuss where most people are with the internal structure of their web pages. Hopefully it is clear enough that, while having perfectly-formed pages might be a good thing, using headings in a thoughtful way is more important.

At the least, your page titles should all be tagged with heading 1 or heading 2 tags. Whatever tag you choose, it should be consistent on all your web pages. If you do not follow the ‘perfect’ format above, tagging your website title with heading 1 (H1), then you should use the highest heading possible to tag your page titles.

Then within each of your web pages, be sure to use the next level down heading for all the sub-headings within your page content. If you tag your page titles with heading 1 (H1), then your sub-headings should always be tagged with heading 2 (H2).

You do not want to tag your page titles with heading 3 or 4 (H3 or H4), then tag your sub-headings with heading 2 (H2). Most often I see web page titles tagged with paragraph tags (P) and made bold with the bold tag (B) or strong (STRONG) tag. This approach completely ignores the power headings can offer you in telling search engines how the content of your site is organized.

What About Elements on the Side of Web Pages?

Thoughtful readers might wonder how you tag the newsletter sign up box, navigation links, and other stuff that winds up on the sides, top, and bottom of web pages. Some of these items use headings to announce them while other items do not.

I pondered this problem for awhile, and tried different approaches. My solution is to tag any heading for these items with a heading 2 tag (H2), the same heading tag I use for page titles. Yes, it makes a newsletter sign-up box ‘equal’ to the page title, which is odd.

If you remember my corn example above, tagging top, side, and bottom web page items with a heading 2 tag is like saying fruits and vegetables are food. Search engines see them as being subordinate to the website title which is tagged with a heading 1 (H1).

So, if you simply want to make your imperfectly-formed web pages better structured, and you tagged your page title with heading 1 (H1), then these side, top, and bottom items would be tagged with heading 1. It does not feel like the perfect solution, but it does avoid the problem of indicating an email sign-up box is somehow part of your web page about, to take one odd example, how to make chocolate martinis.

Don’t Forget Your Page Footers

Another ripe area to look at for basic search engine optimization are the bottom portions of your web pages, called footers. Usually the key site links are placed here along with a copyright notice.

I advise my clients to view these areas as second opportunities to achieve several useful goals. One, you can link deep into your website. Visitors may not use these links but search engines might find them valuable, especially if your link labels are keyword-rich. Two, the bottom of the page is a great opportunity to state your business value proposition, especially if you can fit in keywords. This statement should not be more than a sentence and not more than 20 words.

Third, and perhaps most important to your visitors, the footer is a great place to put your contact information. This includes, but is not limited to, street address, phone number(s), fax number(s), key email addresses, and a link to directions (from Google Maps or MapQuest). My experience is that some large number of visitors use the front page of a company website when they need to call, email, write, or drive. And they quickly scroll to the bottom of the front page in their search. Why make them click for that information, or hunt for the right link label that leads to your contact page?

As an aside, if you do put email addresses in your footer, or anywhere on your website, I highly recommend that you use The Enkoder to encrypt them. It is an easy to use, free online service. If you do not know, spammers often harvest email addresses from web pages the same way Google and other search engines visit web pages to catalog them. I’ve used Enkoder for years with terrific results, so far.

One caveat about encrypting email addresses: do not bother to encrypt an email address that has been harvested. If your email address has been unencrypted on your website for more than a day or a week, chances are it has been stolen. Better to create new email addresses, encrypt them using a service like Enkoder, then put the encrypted addresses in the footer of your web pages and elsewhere on your site.

Which encryption method is better? I’ve studied different schemes and Enkoder works well because it encrypts in a way that is not easy to hack. Many solutions simply substitute one character for another. Or they put spaces between pieces of an address, for example, ‘joe at mycompany.com.’ These are very easy to crack.

How to Optimize Keywords, Content, and Link Labels

As I noted at the top of this article, my focus here is to highlight search engine optimization issues that are basic, lightly covered online, and reflect common mistakes. You can find a ton of useful information that shows how to improve your search engine rankings, for example, with good keywords.

The only point I’ll make here about keywords is that they are really a bridge between your offline, real world marketing and your online marketing. That should be no surprise, but it often is. Keywords really map to the words prospects and customers have in their head at their moment of need. Without the internet, you learn these words and use them in your marketing. All search engines do is provide a way to translate those words into links to websites, hopefully yours.

So when my clients develop keywords, I usually urge caution. It is better to have 3-5 core keywords that are sprinkled through your page titles, page content, headings, and link labels than it is to have 15 or 20 or 30 magic keywords. A large set of keywords is an irresistable temptation to get caught up in tweaking and perfecting keywords. Too many keywords diffuse their power on your site as you drive yourself nuts going in circles.

My advice is to create two sets of keywords, a core set that maps to words your prospects and customers use to describe their needs and what you offer and a second larger set that elaborates and refines your core set of keywords.

As for how to develop keywords, I’ve linked to a few good resources below and will add more over time.

Changes to this Article

February 6, 2006: First version posted.
August 24, 2009: Updated the link to the email address encoder.

Resources

New Year’s resolutions are cliched. Many people make them. Few people remember them months later.

However, clear resolutions can be a powerful way to boost your business. And January, after the hectic chaos of the holidays, is the perfect month to develop simple measurable goals you can remember and keep throughout the new year.

Goals are problematic. Some people love constraints; they eagerly make, refine, and achieve their goals. Other people, like myself, grudgingly acknowledge the value of structure but resist too much control. Still other people insist the best decisions are made by responding to their business life as it happens. They argue goals are a “nice to have” but not relevant in the chaos of their business life. Goals ruin their spontaneity, their fun.

This article describes a simple approach I use to keep on top of my goals while letting me forget that I’m on a tether. Perhaps my process will help you this year as you make resolutions.

First, There Are Good Goals

Most people are skittish about goals. They’re seen as burdens, a necessary evil.

To get myself over a deep prejudice towards goals, I ignore the fact that goals limit my actions. Instead, I divide goals into types. I embrace the types of goals that help me and religiously avoid the ones that drive me nuts. Task goals, broken out by client and project, help me remember what to do every day. Basic goals, as you’ll see, help me enjoy my work. Simple life and business goals help steer me over months and years.

Besides dividing goals by type, I also limit how often I check my progress. In November and December every year, I take a little time to look back at my goals for the year and create goals for the new year. Otherwise, I look at my goals on a monthly basis and think about them only as they become relevant on any day or week.

For example, one of my goals last year was to get control of my schedule. Days when my workload buried me with more deadlines than hours, I made time to figure out if I had met my “workload is killing me” goal (if true, the crushing workload could not be helped) or if I needed to find a better way to control my schedule. Despite real struggles, I had a lot more time off last year (you know, weekends), and a lot less stress, because I had set such a simple goal. I could remember it.

On a monthly basis, I looked to see if I had a list of tasks broken out by client and projects, my primary solution to meet my goal to control my schedule. Some months I did not because I gave up on the software that I’d bought at the start of this year. It injected more control than I wanted in my life. July through October I reverted to my beloved tall yellow Post-It Notes.

In October, however, I hit on the idea of using a basic Excel spreadsheet to manage my tasks, using a categorization scheme from the software I had bought earlier. That works beautifully. It works better than Post-It Notes, which is saying something.

Don’t be afraid of goals. Don’t believe that you must check them daily. Don’t believe you need more than 1-3 goals to make them work.

Let’s start with basic goals, the ones I use to make sure that my overall work and personal life are in balance.

Start With Basic Goals

These are the easiest goals to explain, make, and keep. There are three basic goals I have year in, year out:

• Have Fun — It is hard to enjoy life if you’re stressed, angry, and generally upset
• Learn New Things — This is a sure way to have fun and keep from being bored by work or people
• Help Others — Besides the karmic value (what goes around comes around), this is a great way to have fun and keep engaged

I keep these goals by asking myself simple questions from time to time, usually in the early morning when I rehearse my schedule for the day. Depending on the challenges ahead that day, I ask myself one of these questions: “How can I have fun today?” or “What can I learn?” or “Who could I help?”

For example, a day spent in phone meetings is probably the perfect day for me to make time to have fun. That might mean half an hour to call a friend, or eat at a special place for lunch, or just flop in the hammock outside our home office. Days without specific deadlines are good days to ask, “What can I learn today?” Especially if I’ll need to know something next week or next month on another project.

If I didn’t have these basic goals, I’d be a workaholic. Every problem would be a crisis that demanded my full attention. I know that life too well. I hate it.

Task Goals

Honestly, these are the most problematic type of goal for me. I can stomach them only when I’m part of a large project that involves many people who must pull together. On these projects, there is no better way to document all that must be done.

While I can obsess for hours over the details of building a Gantt chart, trying to make the tasks clear and relevant while figuring how best to relate one task to others, I resist the deep level of control project schedules involve.

My advice is to use Gantt charts, highly detailed project schedules, only when they provide real value. When you do use one, scan all the tasks so you can see how your work fits in, then extract your tasks into a list you can use to focus your work.

If appropriate, for example, on software development projects, be sure to use project plan templates that have worked in the past. That will help you and others “memorize” over time the kind of tasks required, easing the negative impacts of these schedules.

Then again, if you love to be in a harness, you are lucky. For people like myself who are profoundly fearful of wasting time, make the most of project schedules but also find ways to pull out your contribution. This approach helps minimize the terror I feel when I see a project plan with dozens of tightly integrated line items.

Business Goals

In my experience, a good business goal is simple. For example, increase revenues by increasing a type of client. Or increase revenues by increasing customer satisfaction and improving your referral process from these newly happy customers.

While a simple business goal can have many different tasks associated with it, the simplicity of the goal itself helps keep it top of mind even in the most chaotic work environment.

How do you find simple business goals? Look at your business.

Run through your head your impression of your business in the past year. What sort of problems happened over and over? Maybe you had one problem that made you stop and think, a problem that suggested a new future direction for your business.

Another way to find simple business goals is to ask yourself if you had fun with your business in the past year. If not, for what reasons? How do you define fun? Is it learning? Is it helping others? Is it complex challenges? This line of thought can lead you to what gets you excited about your business, what gets you up in the morning. It may be that you’ve lost enthusiasm and your goals, as a result, should focus on getting back your excitement for what you do.

Here’s another way to pull out simple business goals. Think of the different aspects of your business. Successful entrepreneurs engage their business on three levels: the entrepreneur with an eye out for future opportunities, the technician who meets and exceeds the customer’s needs, and the manager who looks back at past effort with an eye to optimization and reductions in costs and time.

Now evaluate your work in the past year. How did you do with these three levels? Were you, like most entrepreneurs, too focussed on your technician role? One clue is a strong hatred for doing the books, by the way. I have that phobia. I would much rather write the perfect copy for a client, or build the perfect website. (See the E-Myth book link below if you want to learn more about these ideas.)

Once you have come up with a short list of possible goals, really areas where you can improve your business, then you should evaluate them in some depth.

A note about terminology. There is a lot of confusion about the definition of goals, tasks, and strategies. To me, a business goal could actually be a task repeated over and over while still remaining a goal, for example, writing daily tasks on a Post-It note. But technically that is a task, not a goal, as you will see. This article is about the New Year’s resolution kind of goal, the markers you write down and measure yourself against.

Whether your markers are technically a goal, strategy, or tactic matters only as a way to evaluate possible goals, to dig into what you want to accomplish.

The easiest way for me to evaluate possible simple business goals is to evaluate them in terms of goals, strategies, and tactics:

• Goals — The simplest broad expression of a desire, for example, to live a happier life
• Strategies — More specific expression of ways to achieve a goal, for example, the strategies “control your schedule” or “look better” could achieve the goal of living a happier life
• Tactics — Think of these as practical tasks that achieve strategies which, in turn, achieve a goal

For example, buying a new wardrobe is a tactic to implement the strategy of looking better which, in turn, might help achieve the goal of living a happier life. Using yellow Post-It Notes is a fool’s tactic to implement the strategy of controlling your schedule which helps achieve the goal of living a happier life.

With possible goals in front of me each year, I ask myself if each one is technically a goal, strategy, or tactic. The question often pulls out a hidden resolution I had not noticed. It’s also possible sorting your goals this way will uncover an underlying connection that you really want to focus on.

For example, you may have a few resolutions that really are tactics to achieve a strategy and goal you had not articulated. That will get you closer to a resolution that will be memorable and effective.

If you find that you have a bunch of goals that turn out to be tactics, but no strategy goals, ask yourself what your tactics will achieve? How will executing the tactics change your life or business? What difference will they make? The answers should help you uncover one or more strategies and goals that underpin your tactics.

Life Goals

The difference between a business goal and a life goal is rather obvious to me. I don’t expect my work life to save my soul, or justify my existence, no matter how thrilling it is for me to work with clients, build a business, and make something out of nothing.

A life goal, however, taps into what is special about each of us and helps draw those qualities out in constructive ways. Life goals make our ambitions a little more real.

If you are a frustrated creative like me, someone who secretly wants to be an artist or a motorcyle racer, or something other than your current life, you probably have life goals that you’ve ignored for years. For everyone else, a life goal is often a deferred dream, perhaps to spend more time with your kids. Or maybe you’ve always wanted to teach.

Whatever the source of your life goal, it reflects your perceptions about what makes you special. If you can complete the questions, “I’m alive because …” and “My life matters because …” and “If I had never been born, then … would not happen,” you have at least one view of yourself that is or can become a life goal.

Another way to tease out life goals is to ask yourself what you would want to do if you had enough money to live the way you want to live. Would your life be more calm, or more active? Would you take more risks and, if so, what risks?

These personal goals, I find, divide themselves neatly into experience goals and life goals.

For example, I would love to fly a float plane. That’s an experience I’d love to have many times. But would I be eager to live in the Alaskan wilderness for forty years as a guide flying a float plane on and off lakes? Probably not. So being a bush pilot, for me, is an experience goal.

Once you identify one or more of your personal goals, the next step is to become very specific about steps you can take to achieve them.

With a life goal written down on paper, jot down all the things you’ll need to make that goal real. For example, if you want to teach third grade, you’ll need a teacher certification, you’ll need to find a school where you want to teach, you’ll need to make financial adjustments (possibly) to your current life, and so on.

With that raw material, answer these questions:

• In a perfect world, I would love to be a …
• When you achieve this goal, what is one concrete manifestation of your achievement (e.g. being published, completing a year of teaching)?
• In five years, where would you like to be with respect to your goal and the concrete manifestation of that goal?
• What action can you take this year to achieve your goal?
• What action can you take this month to achieve your goal? This week? Today?
• Who is a role model that embodies the life you want to lead?

These questions are from an excellent book, The Artists Way, geared towards blocked creatives like me. However, it is a twelve week program that takes some time to complete. Their process changed my life, turned it upside down, by helping me to see that I should fit my work life into my creative life, not the other way round.

However you do it, be sure to spend time thinking about what you want to accomplish with your life, not just your business.

Smart readers will see where I’m heading. This exercise, as with the business goal exercises, will generate a lot of specific goals as well as tasks to achieve those goals. The more you can suspend your disbelief, put aside the worries that consume your business today, the more data you will generate and the better your goals will be.

With lots of raw data for goals and tasks, the next step is to organize your information in a way that does not overwhelm your life.

Tracking Goals Without Going Nuts

How you track your goals depends upon your personality.

If you hate organization, the best method is to narrow your goals down to two or three key goals, write them down on a piece of paper, then stick them on a wall near your desk where you can see them. That’s the easiest approach.

If you are like me, and you don’t mind a small amount of organization, in my case because I forget things easily, the best method is to put your goals into an Excel spreadsheet. Why not a Word file? Excel lets you sort your goals based on due dates, priority, and other criteria.

If you like lots of organization, the best method to track your goals is to use a Franklin Planner, at least their software if not their whole system which includes a binder, special pages, and so on. That approach does not work for me, I’ll be honest. Managing my goals with a dedicated piece of software turned out to be too much like nagging to me.

If you use an Excel spreadsheet, you are welcome to start by adapting the spreadsheet that I’ve developed (see below for a link to download it). Like the Franklin Planner software that I tried (and failed to adopt), I rate the priority of my tasks with a nine-part scale: A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, and C3.

The easiest way to explain how to use these nine ratings is to use the A ratings for tasks due in the next week or two. The A1 items should be few in number and due today or tomorrow. You want as few A1s as possible. Why? For me, it’s depressing to have 20 top priority tasks on my list.

The B ratings are for projects due in a month where it is useful to break out the tasks now. I find that some of these B tasks can be done early simply because they’re on my list.

I also find that B tasks are great sources for the “Learn New Things” basic goal mentioned above. Usually B goals involve projects I know will happen in a few weeks or months and often they require preparation, including learning new things or trying solutions before the actual project hits.

The C ratings I rarely or never use. For me they represent underlying goals, really my business or life goals, that I track on another sheet in my Excel spreadsheet.

With my tasks rated, and due dates typed in, I then use the Data > Sort feature in Excel to sort by Rating then Due Date then Project/Client. This simple feature reduces a lot of my stress spent figuring out the proper order, making sure I’ve got all my A1 rated tasks at the top of my sheet. It frees me to simply type in tasks with no concern for their final order.

I then print out my spreadsheet of active tasks every few days and hand write updates to the printouts as I work along and complete tasks. I print out my goal spreadsheet every month, and take a moment to assess how I’m doing in achieving those goals.

How Many Goals are Too Many Goals?

The simple answer is 1-3 goals each for your business goals and your life goals, for a total of 2-6 goals. Anything more winds up frustrating me and dilutes my efforts.

The first step is to prioritize your goals and identify the 1-3 business goals and life goals you want to accomplish this year.

Next, document your work tasks and keep them separate from your business and life goals. I do this by keeping tasks and goals on two different sheets within my Excel spreadsheet. Business and life goals generate tasks to achieve them, certainly, but they are different from tasks.

With your goals in a place separate from your tasks, it becomes easier to revisit them monthly or quarterly to ensure that you are still on goal.

My experience is that I’ll forget a goal, or two, only to rediscover them a month later. The rediscovery provides distance and insight into what I really want to accomplish. That, in turn, leads to ideas about how to achieve my “lost” goal. If I had written the goal down in a notebook, or a Post-It Note, I would have lost the goal.

Hopefully doing some or most of what is suggested in this article will generate useful ideas for goals and tasks. Once you have simple goals in hand, the key to success, of course, is to organize this material in a way that does not overwhelm you.

Additional Resources

My Excel Spreadsheet for tracking goals
Franklin Plan Plus software
The Artist’s Way (book)
E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It (book)

Please note that I’ve written a companion article to this one, How To Code HTML Email Newsletters, that describes the subtleties of coding html email to work beautifully across almost all email reading software.

This summer past my wife and I drove our kids cross country as part of a move from Connecticut to Arizona. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, my wife dragged me into a sculpture gallery off the main plaza.

After I agreed with my wife the sculpture she had picked out would look fine in our new home, I turned to the store owner and asked whether or not she used the internet to support her business. She responded exactly the way I’ve heard before from other business owners: she had a website, barely, and did nothing with email.

This is backwards. While websites are useful, and a 1-5 page site is easy enough to set up, it is email that offers the greatest opportunity to convert buyer interest into sales over time. Some large number of people who walk into a store may be interested but not be ready to buy. Email is a relatively cheap way to keep in touch with these folks, as well as provide information that lets them buy when they’re ready.

More to the point for local businesses, research studies show people not only open email from local businesses at a higher rate, they also buy at higher rates as a result of receiving these emails. People clearly respond to the connection they have to a business they’ve walked into and dealt with personally.

This article describes a low-cost way for any business, including the gallery in Santa Fe, to create a basic email newsletter capability rather quickly. It’s not hard. It just takes a little diligence over time.

What Are Your Measurable Goals?

The first step is to take a break from your business, family, and other cares. Take time to think about what you want to accomplish with email marketing. One measurable goal I’ve already mentioned: generate future sales from customers as well as people who walked into your shop but never bought.

Another measurable goal might be referrals from existing customers to potential new business. Or a website that supports itself with advertising might want to drive people to click on an email link and visit your website pages.

Bottomline, your goals should be clear, measurable, and written down on a piece of paper that you can find easily.

Collect Email Addresses

Once you have your goals documented, the next step is to collect email addresses. This has at least two aspects to consider: the way you collect the addresses and how you collect addresses. The easiest way to collect email addresses is to use a simple wire-bound notebook that you put near the cash register. A neater way to do it, however, is to print up simple postcards that includes these elements:

• A title that clearly describes what the postcard does and the subscriber benefits (e.g. “Sign Up for Our Emails…Learn About New Products”)
• Lines for the person’s first name, last name, email address
  Possibly 2-4 checkboxes for the person to indicate what topics they’d want to hear about in an email
• One line for additional information (e.g. topics not included in your checkboxes, notes from yourself or your staff about the person’s
  interests/needs)
• Copy in bold that states what you will do with their email address (e.g. “We will not sell or trade your email address. It will only be used to tell you about our latest products. We value your privacy.”)
• Copy that thanks the person for signing up

How you collect email addresses is more important than the mechanical way you gather the address. Because email can be a powerful way to connect with your prospects and customers, every email address should be collected as part of a conversation. You and your staff should offer the signup card (or notebook, if you go that route) in the context of talking with that person about what they need.

For example, if you see someone can’t find what they need, offer the email signup card as a way for you to let them know when what they need arrives. (And be sure to note on their signup card exactly what they needed but could not find.) Or your customer may be at the cash register and you can offer your email signup card as a way to learn when other items of interest to them will arrive.

I also stress that email addresses should be collected only through face to face or phone contact because of spam. You should never buy a list of email addresses. The best list is one collected through human contact, even if it is a much smaller list.

Once you have email addresses in hand, I recommend that you send a welcome email that reminds them they have subscribed to your emails, the reasons they signed up (for example, if you have notes on their signup card, be sure to write something personal that elaborates on your notes), and a link to unsubscribe from your emails. The unsubscribe link will help “train” your reader that they have nothing to fear about getting emails from you. This is covered in more detail in the “Write and Send Email” section below.

One final note about email signup. A person’s email address is valuable. Therefore, you should seriously consider offering something valuable and/or fun in return. If you are a grocery store, for example, you might have a little sign that says, “Free Cookie if you Sign Up for Our Emails.” Or you could work with a nearby store to offer something of small value that provides free publicity for that retailer. Something small but valuable also helps reinforce to the subscriber that you recognize the value of their email address. It helps build trust.

Set Up Your Email Marketing Process

A successful email marketing capability relies on both a strong signup process, as described above, and a clearly defined process to generate emails that are relevant to your subscribers. You will fail if you simply sit down once a month to write a quick email then send it.

Instead, as part of defining a few measurable goals, you also should consider how and when you plan to send email. I recommend that you start with email offers that include special codes or products that help you connect a sale with a specific email. I also recommend that you use text emails initially and don’t bother with html unless you want to take the extra time.

Why text? For one thing, it is the quickest way to get started sending email. Most business owners I’ve worked with are time-starved. If that describes you, chances are your email marketing efforts will founder because you lack the time. Sending simple text email offers on a regular basis will generate equal and possibly better results than a more elaborate html email.

The one downside to text email is that you cannot track how many people opened your email. However, if you are getting started with email marketing, including an email only offer lets you track how many people expressed an interest based upon your email as well as sales from that email.

Another part of setting up your email marketing process involves setting up email accounts at different services. Look at your list of email addresses from prospects and customers. If some of them are at Yahoo! or Hotmail, you probably should set up email accounts at those services. Then send your emails to those addresses to test your email before you send it to your list. You probably cannot set up test email accounts at every source in your email address list, but you should for the top three to five.

So your email process should include a list of email offers you plan to send over the next 3-6 months, when you plan to write the offers, what additional information you’ll need for each email you send, if appropriate, and smiliar information. Basically write down all the little details you can think of that you’ll need. That way, when you sit down to send email, you can dig out this information and be more efficient.

Find an Email Service Provider

Perhaps the easiest step in creating an email marketing capability for your business is finding someone to send your emails. There are a number of good email service providers who offer a range of services beyond sending email, for example, tracking clicks within your emails, providing html email templates, and articles about email marketing. Even better, moving from one email service provider to another is fairly straightforward. You’re not locked in.

Here are the basic capabilities that I would recommend you look for in an email service provider. They should offer the ability to:

• Cut and paste your email into a web page form and create from scratch using their publishing tools
• Track open rates, click throughs, and email forwarded to friends
• Use professional email templates that have simple designs that are provided
• Customize all the housekeeping emails used to subscribe and unsubscribe
• Export and import email addresses from .CSV files, as well as manually type in email addresses
• Send test emails
• Evaluate the spamminess of your emails

While there are many low-cost email service providers, the ones I recommend you look at are MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Intellicontact, EzineDirector, CoolerEmail, ConstantContact. As a side note, I do not make money recommending these services. I’ve simply used them enough to believe they might work for your needs, too.

Why not send email yourself, from your own computer? There are a number of good reasons not to do so. For one thing, letting someone else send your email means they handle the unsubscriptions (and subscriptions, if you also use your website to sign people up). They also track open rates and clickthroughs, if you send html email. They also handle any spam complaints. And it’s possible that your internet provider will shut off your service and label you a spammer if you send an email with some unspecified number of recipients.

But mostly I recommend smaller businesses use email service provider because it is a small price to pay for peace of mind. I personally do not want to worry about handling unsubscribes, or being labelled a spammer, and assume you don’t either.

Write and Send Email

If you’re like me, writing can be scary. So let’s start with the easiest part of writing email: the From line and the Subject line.

The From line is what you see in your email software. To start, I would recommend that you use your first name with your business name in parenthesis, Jane Doe (Wilton Flower Shop). This allows your From line to be personal and remind the reader where they know you from. However, every rule is made to be broken. Perhaps you want your from line to include only your business name. That’s perfectly fine.

The only hard and fast rule is to be consistent. Why? Using the same From line helps people scan their email looking for email to delete. If they recognize your email, they’re less likely to delete it thinking it’s someone they do not know. People also might sort their email and it helps your readers if all your email shows up together; if you use multiple From lines, your emails could wind up in different groupings.

Writing your Subject line is fairly straightforward. Most email software truncates the email subject line after 5-8 words. So having all your email subject lines begin with “Read this great email from the Wilton Flower Shop” won’t work. It is better to put your business name in the From line and to use the subject line to entice readers to open your email. So you might write “Yellow roses, Potted ferns, …” instead. Beyond being relevant and interesting with your Subject line writing, and making them different from email to email, you also should avoid spam words such as “Free.”

Having loosened up by writing your From and Subject lines, let’s get to writing emails.

There are two types of emails that you will need to write. Housekeeping emails are emails that subscribers will get when the unsubscribe, change their email address, and so on. These emails are often ignored, or treated lightly, but they are a critical part of your email marketing program. Highly personal housekeeping email messages that state the benefits of your emails will do more to build goodwill and retain customer interest than barely written emails.

For example, for the email sent when someone unsubscribes, you could send a message that says, “You are unsubscribed.” Or you could send a message like this one I actually received from Bright Kids:

This unsubscribe message is a terrific example of the potential boring housekeeping emails possess. Not only does the email come from a human being, with her contact information, but I also get my confirmation, instructions on how to subscribe (in case I want to later, or made a mistake by unsubscribing), and a reminder of what makes this person and their email newsletter special (she writes great stuff about parenting kids). Unlike the simple “You’ve been unsubscribed” message, I’ve been given positive and well-rounded human contact.

Once you have writen your housekeeping emails, the next step is to focus on your offer emails. My experience is that most people are terrified about writing, myself included. My solution is to keep my writing simple and to the point. So here is my advice for writing emails.

Write as if they were in front of you. Think about what they are wearing, the color and cut of their hair, their facial expression, what made you first notice them when they walked into your store, their name, and so on. With this person vividly in front of you, what would you say to them? What do they need today? For what reasons? How can your business help?

Writing your email is your chance to connect as if they had walked into your store again. Don’t forget their time is valuable. You could tell them all about your sick dog as part of meeting their needs. Certainly the human touch does help people bond. However, it is more effective to respond to their needs by describing how your business can meet their needs.

Once you have a simple message that is based on their needs, then add personality. Notice with the unsubscribe email I quoted above, from Bright Kids, how she has added not only a smiley face but also starts one key sentence with a verb: “Feel free to re-join us…” These are simple ways to add personality and humanity to your offer emails. It helps to be direct. It helps even more to be human.

I recommend that your offer emails focus on one main offer and possibly 2-3 additional offers. The extra offers can help you attract interest from readers who are interested in your business but not your main offer. Adding extra offers also adds interest to your email. The main offer should be a paragraph, possibly two, with 3-5 sentences per paragraph. The additional offers, if any, should be only a sentence or two. If it works, be sure to include urgency in one or more of your offers. “Stop by today to …” always works better than “Hey come in any time to …”

I also recommend that your offer emails include something that can be tracked to that email. For example, a restaurant might send an email mid-afternoon that includes a message, “Hungry? Don’t want to cook? Our chef just found some succulent mushrooms from Oregon. They’re brown, firm, and taste nutty. Come in tonight, mention this email, and she’ll cook it up exactly the way you want.” Remember, you don’t have to offer a discount in order to track a response from an email. It helps but there are many ways to generate interest and track responses.

The most important thing to include in your email offers is a call to action. In addition to encouraging subscribers to mention your email, you also need to encourage them to call, come in, and maybe even email you with follow-up questions. Your email is two-way communication. You want to encourage people to contact you when they receive your email. And don’t forget that adding a little personality also can help people pick up the phone. You don’t have to be all business all of the time.

Measure Success (or Failure)

Remember the measurable goals you created at the start of your email marketing efforts? The ones you wrote down? Every few months, be sure to dig them out. Also be sure to write down how many email responses, phone calls, and on site mentions you get as the result of each email you send. You might want to track how many sales, as well, and their dollar value.

If you are not getting the results you wanted, or you want to improve, there are a number of elements to tweak and consider:

• Are your emails relevant? Do they include information that ties back to any notes you jotted down when you collected email addresses? Going back to your subscription cards can generate ideas about what to write in your email offers.
• Are your emails personal? Or too personal? It is tough to strike a balance between making your email copy personal enough to foster a human connection and too much personality that drives people away. Show your email copy to people you trust. Ask for subscriber feedback. And when you write your copy, write your words and sentences as if a specific reader sat in front of you.
• Are your subject lines relevant and interesting? While experts say 5-8 words is ideal, I recommend that you simply make sure your first 5-8 words are relevant and capture attention. But using 10 words or more is not a sin if it conveys useful information.

In addition, if you have more than fifty subscribers, try dividing your list in two equal lists of email addresses then sending two versions of your email offer. The versions should differ only in 1 possibly 2 ways. For example, you might send two versions of your email offer where the only difference is the subject line. Or the emails might have the same subject line but different calls to action. While splitting your email list this way is not completely scientific, it can yield useful information over time.

My experience is that there is little difference between twenty email marketing campaigns that generate dozens of data points that can be measured and compared and two email marketing campaigns that generate phone calls and store visits. In either case, success hinges on setting up your email marketing in a way that lets you know when you’ve made a sale. It certainly is useful to know twenty subscribers opened an email but never called. But a sale is the gold standard, especially if you are starting out with email marketing.

Where to Learn More

Email marketing is a vast topic. There are lots of ideas about how to do email marketing and how to make your email marketing more effective. Here are resources that I visit and subscribe to that you might find useful:

If your business offers unique products, and you have a website, you may have wondered how to prevent competitors from copying your images to their computer. What made the web so popular so fast, the ability for average people to view the source code of any web page, including downloading images, can cause problems for some businesses.

Locking down your images is not 100% possible. But you can take a number of steps to limit how your site visitors can do with images.

These should be your immediate first steps to take:

1. Add a bit of javascript code to each of your web pages that prevents a visitor from using the right button on their mouse to copy an image;
2. Add a blank web page to every folder on your website that contains images.

If you Google the phrase “disable right mouse click code,” over 60,000 pages will show up. The problem is which solution is best. Especially if you’re more business-oriented than technical.

The best code I’ve encountered that works with most web browsers is from the site Dynamic Drive. This solution works best because it disables the right mouse button only for images. People like myself who use the right mouse button to navigate back and forth between web pages can still do anywhere on the page that does not contain an image.

One caveat about the Dynamic Drive code is that you have to paste it into every page. Linking to a .js file works only with Microsoft Explorer web browsers. To work in Firefox web browsers, you have to include the code anywhere on each of the web pages whose images you want to protect.

The second immediate step to take is to create then drop a blank web page into every folder of your website that contains images. The easiest way is to create a text file, name it index.html, then copy it to every folder you want to protect.

What does this blank web page do? It prevents people from viewing your web page source code, finding the folder where you store the images that appear on your page, then browsing directly to that folder. When they browse directly to any image folder, your blank index.html folder will display only a blank page. Without this blank file, visitors would see a list of images in that folder and the ability to click through to any sub folders.

Beyond these two immediate steps, you also should use a “robots” file to keep search engines from browsing your website folders that contain images.

The robots files is a simple text file named robots.txt and it should contain these lines at a minimum:

As with the blank index.html file, simply open a basic text editor like Notepad, create a new file, save it as robots.txt, type in these lines (replacing ImageFolderToProtect with your folder names, of course). Then upload your robots.txt file to the root folder where your website home page resides. (Want to learn more about robot files? Check out the Robots.txt File Tutorial.)

Another simple step you can take to protect your website images is to use meta tags in your web pages. These tags instruct search engines to not catalog your images. The tags to use are:

One thing to note about the robots.txt file and use of meta tags is that they work only with legitimate search engines like Google. Rogue search engines might ignore the directives in your robots file. However, following these steps will protect your website images better than not taking any steps.

The last simple step to take to protect your images is perhaps the simplest: add a copyright notice to all your pages and include a web page that states the terms of use for all your content and images.

Beyond these simple steps, you also can look into watermarks for your images. Software like Photoshop can add invisible watermarks to your images to help identify them should you ever want to pursue legal action. In Photoshop, you can embed watermarks by using the Filter > Digimarc > Embed Watermark. You also can visit the DigiMarc website to learn more about watermarks. However, you would have to find a violation of use of your watermarked image then have the money to prosecute legal action.

Protecting your website images is not guaranteed. You can’t hide the code that displays your web pages. You can’t prevent rogue search engines from cataloging your images. And you can’t prevent people from selecting File > Save As > Complete Web Page from their web browser. However, the steps I’ve outlined can lock down your images enough to make visitors work to take your images. Most importantly, these steps help make your case in the event you do pursue legal action.

Run your business without customer feedback and you might as well burn your money. How do you dig out customer ideas that make a huge difference to all your customers? Lately online surveys appear to be an inexpensive way for businesses to easily gain customer feedback. To learn more about online surveys, I asked Vivek Bhaskaran, founding member of online survey service QuestionPro.com, to talk about the pitfalls and opportunities that online surveys offer businesses. Vivek is a brainy guy who knows the science behind surveys. I thought it would be useful to quiz him about the practical side of surveys.

Question: (Tim) Are online surveys a waste for small local businesses? Are they just too complex and expensive? Or is the face to face contact in a store or sales call better or more accurate than an online survey? What are the strengths and limitations of online surveys for these businesses?

Answer: (Vivek) Most decisions that small business owners make, from marketing to sales, are primarily driven by “gut feel” — being a cash flow operated business myself, I know this. However, as your business grows you need to have a more analytical approach to making decisions that support and validate your “gut feel” – one such analytical approach can be surveys.

Now the question of how do you do it – essentially there are four choices – in-person interviews, mail, phone and online. There are pros and cons to each of these modes.

In-Person Interviews
Pros: In-depth and a high degree of confidence on the data
Cons: Time consuming, expensive and can be dismissed as anecdotal

Mail Surveys
Pros: Can reach anyone and everyone – no barrier
Cons: Expensive, data collection errors, lag time

Phone Surveys
Pros: High degree of confidence on the data collected, reach almost anyone
Cons: Expensive, cannot self-administer, need to hire an agency

Web/Online Surveys
Pros: Cheap, can self-administer, very low probability of data errors
Cons: Not all your customers might have an email address/be on the internet, customers may be wary of divulging information online.

In-Person interviews always are better, but the big draw-back is the trap you might fall into if you don’t do them regularly. It is expensive to regularly conduct interviews and not conducting enough interviews might give you false positives.

Validating your research is almost as important as designing and conducting it. We’ve seen many instances where after the research is conducted – if the results do not match up with the “gut-feel” of upper management – it has been dismissed as anecdotal and a “one-time” phenomenon. To avoid such traps, we strongly recommend that data-collection be done on an “ongoing and regular” basis. This will help you compare and contrast how perceptions change depending upon how you market your product or service. The other issue here is sample size. To be confident with your research you have to interview enough people to weed out the “fringe” elements.

The most important reason I think small businesses should look into online surveys is the ability to self-administer them. You don’t need to hire a marketing agency to do it. There are tools and templates available your make life easy!

Q: What are the steps involved in setting up an online survey? What can you do early on to guarantee success with an online survey? What should people look out for?

A: Software companies have realized that there is a huge market for self-administered online surveys. Accordingly there is massive competition and this is great for everyone. It makes software companies come up with really innovative and cheap solutions and allows consumers to harness this as a tool easily.

Setting up an online survey is easy. The first issue is choosing a provider. I would recommend that you choose an option that does not require a software download. This makes things much easier and simpler. You don’t have to deal with the hassle of setting up the software and servers. There are quite a few companies that offer online hosted survey applications that only require a connection to the internet. They handle the hosting, data-collection and the analysis software. See below for a list of providers.

The next step would be to look at the integrated analysis tools that the provider gives you. I think it is really important that the analysis tools be part of the software solution. This makes life easier and you don’t have to buy special analysis software.

The third thing to look out for is the ease of developing and authoring the survey. The tool should have a point-and-click interface to create a survey and publish it. No programming or HTML skills should be required.

Most vendors offer free trial periods. Use this to create a little survey and send it out to friends and family. Spend a little time familiarizing yourself with the survey tool. This will be a huge benefit to you when you actually surveying your customers.

The biggest problem is that most people think online applications as another website – its not. It is software delivered over the web browsers. Hence take your time to familiarize yourself with an online application, just as you would spend time going through all the menus of Excel!

The other thing I think users should look out for is robust functionality. You don’t want to get locked into a vendor and then find out that you cannot do “branching” or certain question types are not supported. This will hurt you in the long run.

Q: How do you pick people to help you with an online survey? What skills are needed? How do you evaluate these skills?

A: Designing an online survey is no different than designing a paper survey or preparing what questions you need to ask your customers in an interview session. If you are unsure of how to do this, there are many market research companies out there that can help you. They’ll usually sit with you to figure out what your needs are and what your objectives are and then help you design the survey and publish it.

Most of these small market research companies use other online survey software vendors to publish and host the surveys.

Here are a couple of things you that can help you decide:

Has the market research provider done prior business in your industry?
Do they have a pre-defined process and plan that they follow?
What exactly are the deliverables? Are they clear and spelled out?
Choosing a market research agency for a project is just like choosing a professional services firm – for example choosing your lawyer. Make sure you have good references and they are up to the job.

Q: What are the different online survey options available? For example, DIY (e.g., phpESP), QuestionPro, Greenfield Online. How do these options differ? How do you tell which option is most appropriate?

A: Essentially in this marketplace there are three different categories: -

Server Based Installation
In this option, you can buy server software and install it in your servers that you run or host somewhere. Note, however, that if you access the internet via a dial-up, this option is not really viable if you run your own server.

Pros: You have total control of the data. You can write custom software that can access the data and do customized CRM integration.
Cons: Very expensive, need technical knowledge about servers and must have a dedicated 24×7 connection to the internet with enough bandwidth. Infrequent product upgrades.
Examples: Perseus Survey Solutions XP, Object Planet, Survey Analytics
Typical Users: Large Corporate Institutions that already have dedicated IT support and staff to manage a data-center.

Online Hosted Self-Service
In this option, you essentially buy the service for hosting and deploying your survey. Almost all vendors that offer this also offer tools for easily authoring (creating) your survey as well as analysis tools. They usually also offer an option to download the raw-data from the servers in the form of Excel Spreadsheets.

Pros: No technical knowledge required. Create surveys using a point and click interface and view analysis online and real-time. Upgrades to software can be performed without affecting you.
Cons: Data is stored with the service provider. If the service provider goes out of business you might loose your data.
Examples: QuestionPro.com, Vanguard Vista, Quask
Typical Users: Small and Medium size businesses. Market Research companies. Marketing Depts. Of some large businesses also prefer this option to the self-hosted model because of the high ROI.

Managed Full-Service
With this option you engage a market research company to take care of the data collection and analysis. Almost all market research firms are familiar with online surveys. Some have their own internal tools that they use and others use software vendors for their online surveys.

Pros: You don’t have to do a thing!
Cons: Expensive
Examples: Herbert Research, Catalina Marketing
Typical Users: Medium and Large Businesses.

Q: Are template questions a good thing or bad thing? How can you tell? Don’t they make people lazy when they set up a survey?

A: At QuestionPro we regularly poll all our users, and about 60% of our users have used Survey Templates as a starting point to customize and create their own survey. Templates give valuable food for thought when you are designing a survey. I don’t know about the “lazy” part, but I can tell for sure that it’s saved many of our users an enormous amount of time.

Our Survey Template Library is one of the reasons many users choose us. We are constantly probing the market for better designs and incorporate them into our template library. We offer these templates as part of the license. In fact we don’t even charge you for the templates. They are free. We do not think people should pay an arm and a leg for information and best practices.

I think that you should use templates to get ideas about how you can structure your survey and see all the different possibilities. Then you look at what you really need to do and choose the closest one and start of modifying the template to suite your needs.

Q: What are the different types of questions possible in an online survey? Which are most common? How do you pick the ones to use? What are their relative strengths and weaknesses?

A: Essentially there 4 broad categories:

1. Dichotomous/MultiChomous – Ask the respondent to choose beween a few options. Respondent may be able to choose one or more options.
2. Ratings – As respondent to rate different items. Typically this is in the form of a Matrix.
3. Constant Sum/Rank Order – Ask users to distribute 100 points over a couple of items, or ask them to rank in the order of preference, their choice.
4. Open Ended – Ask for comments, email address, physical address etc.

The general trade-off is really balancing you analysis requirements with easy of use for the respondent. For example, for a demographic question you can ask respondents to Choose their age:

a. You can ask them to input their date of birth or age
b. You can ask them to choose 1 out of say 7 age ranges.

Choosing option (a) gives you more flexibility in terms of your analysis. You can do granular analysis, but increases the frustration on the respondents part.
Option (b) on the other hand is easy for the respondent, but limits your ability for analysis.

What you decide is a balance that is acceptable for your analytical needs and at the same time does not put too much cognitive stress on the respondent.

Q: How might your new site ResearchAccess.net help people understand and use online surveys? Where did the idea come from? What are your goals for the site?

A: We’ve launched ResearchAccess.NET with the hope that it becomes a place for people to ask questions and share opinion on Online Surveys and research. We received a lot of queries and found that there was not a good “resource” site that just had information for people to look at. We believe that online surveys are a form of bi-directional communication with your users. If you are not able to quantify in a meaningful way what your customers really want, you won’t be able to deliver.

We hope that the site becomes a portal and encourages people to do online surveys and in general provides a platform for users to learn more about different technologies that are our there and share and learn for each other’s experiences.

Q: Finally, what’s the best way to analyze online survey results? Do you have to be a statistician to benefit from online surveys? How rigorous do you have to be?

A: The most basic form of analysis is the frequency analysis. Essentially you look at how many people chose each option. This, in itself can reveal a lot of things. And no – you don’t have to be a statistician to understand this.

The next step would be to perform “Crosstabs” – Crosstabs measure the co-relation between two questions. For example :-

Q1 – What is your age?
Q2 – How satisfied are you with our product?

What Crosstabs give you is the ability to look into the relationship between Q1 and Q2. Is the age-group 18-30 more satisfied with your products?

The third analysis I usually do is grouping analysis. In this you define target groups – For example -
Group 1 — “males AND age 18-35”
Group 2 — “females AND age 45-60”

You can then measure differences in responses to all the other questions to your survey for each of the groups.

Even non-analytical people can benefit from this because all this can be done using a point and click interface.

At QuestionPro we’ve led the industry in technology and are pushing the limits everyday. QuestionPro has the most comprehensive analytical toolset and configuration options in the industry. You can create simple one page questions to complex logic rule-based surveys with looping and branching – all using your browser.

In terms of integration, QuestionPro is the only provider that has built-in integration to post surveys to other online applications like blogs (blogger api) and salesforce.com (sforce api.)

I believe that the software marketplace will be shaped by “niche” vendors providing software that collaborate with each other. Essentially I think that the web will be the medium for users to pick and choose best-of-breed software. Companies like Microsoft, IBM and Sun have made great strides with the advent of “Web-Services” – this has enabled small players like QuestionPro offer great value add services to other companies like SalesForce.com. In November 2003, SalesForce.com launched the Sforce initiative. We at QuestionPro have always believed in integrating with other products and services instead of being an island. We took this opportunity to use the sforce api to integrate with SalesForce.com – to provide users with the ability to send surveys out to their contact database (hosted at Salesforce) and then record the responses as they come in and pump that back into the salesforce database.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

QuestionPro.com
ResearchAccess.NET
Steps in Preparing an Online Questionnaire – How to Effectively Conduct an Online Survey (article by Vivek Bhaskaran)

Updates to this article are noted at the bottom of this page.

You are a business person. You know customers, products, competitors, pricing, and how to make them make money. You do not have time to learn software programming. It takes years to learn, for one thing. But you do need to hire someone who can build a software application. Where do you start? How do you evaluate a skill set that appears to be very different from your business skills?

First, you do not have to know how to code software to get good results from a programmer. Picking the right person does not have to be a case of throwing a dart against the wall. Good results happen when you define your project goals clearly, you evaluate a programmer effectively, and you make sure the programmer follows basic programming guidelines.

A good software application does more than run with few errors. Most importantly, good software is built in a way that makes it easy for other programmers to maintain over time. An average business person can make sure both criteria are met.

What Is Your Project About?

The first step in hiring a programmer is to ask yourself, “What do I want to accomplish?” You might think the answer is, “Track leads from my website.” The best answer, however, goes far deeper. What do you want from your application, now and in the future? Focus on what kinds of detail you will need to make business decisions. It might be important to organize your data by postal code, for example, but not by street address. Or it might be important to organize your prospects one way and customers another way. Or you might need to access and use data from a source outside your company.

These subtleties become very important when your programmer builds your application. Software development is a mature industry and there are many examples of almost every kind of application. Which to choose, and whether to build your own, will depend on subtleties like how to describe your customers and what data tells you that your business process is working or failing.

Buy or Build?

The question of whether to buy software or build from scratch is not easy to resolve. Building software introduces significant risk that something will go wrong and will always leave you 3-12 months behind the functionality of comparable products. Buying software, however, often turns you into Goldilocks with too little or too much functionality when all you want is just enough functionality.

If your needs are small, buying software is probably the best way to go. In all other cases, the best way to proceed is to work with your programmer to clearly define your needs now and in the future then evaluate what software is available. You may discover having functionality that is behind 3-12 months is no big deal and that there is no software available that provides important functionality you need.

However, do not assume that building from scratch is best in all cases. Think carefully before you choose to buy or build. Your time and money are scarce resources. And beware of programmers who always build because the process of building software from scratch is so challenging and exciting.

How To Evaluate Programmers?

Evaluating and hiring programmers is more complex than reading resumes with an eye to long assignments, brand name employers, top schools, and certifications. These details are important. However, it is far more important for you to evaluate based upon a number of less obvious details that will impact the success (or failure) of your project.

There are at least three types of software programming skills you will encounter when you interview programmers. You will find programmers often specialize in one with modest, little, or no expertise in the others. Here are basic descriptions of these skills:

• Application programmers concern themselves primarily with the actual software code and how to make the code flexible today and tomorrow.
• Systems architects focus on the high level goals of the application which often includes hardware, interactions with other systems, and other worries. They also try to build systems that are flexible over time.
• Database designers worry about how data is organized within the data tables in one or more databases. Their goal is to ensure that data is returned as quickly as possible and is easy to maintain.

Which skill should you hire? If your application is fairly simple, an application programmer with database design skills probably will do. If your application will use or process large amounts of data, then a database designer is in order. You probably will want to hire someone with systems architecture skills for medium to large scale applications.

Besides understanding how programming skills differ, you should do due diligence. Ask the programmer for references, not only the clients who will sing their praises but clients who have had business problems similar to your situation. When you talk to references, be sure to ask about the scope of the project completed, how the programmer handled problems, whether or not the programmer is detail oriented, and how open the programmer was to questions from business people. For example, did they bark answers? Or did they take time to carefully explain key concepts so that everyone involved could make good decisions?

You also should ask references how much preparation work the programmer did before they started coding. This can include creating documents that list requirements, functionality, and test scenarios. But it might, and perhaps should, include notes from meeting the users of the application the programmer built. The last thing you want is a programmer who makes up requirements as they go. Or a programmer who builds based only on what a client says in a meeting. Documents allow all participants to confirm or deny critical details.

Another area to explore with programmers is their personal fit with you. If you are a high strung personality, make sure the programmer can handle that fact. If you are a quiet soul, make sure the programmer has the ability to pursue you to get the information and details they need to create great software. You also want to make sure the programmer is honest and upfront about the inevitable mistakes and setbacks that happen in software development. While references can help you decide about these issues, you must evaluate a programmer for yourself.

Finally, be sure that the programmer you choose feels comfortable with documentation. Research shows that there are many fewer errors and much less cost involved when software development is carefully defined, designed, planned, and implemented. One key factor to hidden costs are requirements changes in the middle of a project. Programmers are more likely to produce reliable code if they spend time up front to work with you and the users of your application to write up detailed requirements and functionality descriptions. That said, too much of a good thing can delay projects endlessly. Be sure to have enough detail but not so much that you choke your process.

Documentation also should include prioritization of requirements. You need to meld a list of requirements you want with the technology impact of those requirements. A skilled programmer will be able to tell you which requirements require more time to develop than others. You should structure your software project so that you can deliver functionality every 60-90 days with the simplest functionality first and more complex functionality in later phases.

The ability of your programmer to be comfortable with documentation helps in another critical way. The software should not only do what you want today. It should do what you need tomorrow. If the programmer is careful and thorough in collecting requirements, they will build a system that works now and in the future. Also be sure to ask your programmer to include in their price documentation of the application they have built, for example, at least a list of functions used with their inputs/outputs and what files the functions reside in. (Don’t worry, functions are described below.)

Basic Programming Guidelines To Follow

While a business person does not have to know software programming to get good results from programmers, it helps if you know a few software basics. This will allow you to evaluate the overall quality of your programmer and make sure that the application they build will be easier to maintain over time.

Don’t freak, however. These software basics are relatively easy to learn. They also will help you understand what you are asking of the programmer.

Good programmers build applications that include a file that contains all the configuration variables and common functionality used throughout the system. Why is this important? Imagine that your software sends email to your twenty sales offices. What happens when you add a new office? Or change the address at five of your offices? A central configuration file allows your programmer to update a single file. It does not take much effort to use configuration files and will save you lots of effort later.

Another hallmark of good software programming is the use of variables. Think of variables as place holder names. Instead of referring to a database table by its actual name, for example, you refer to it with a variable. This allows your programmer to change the database table name once, by redefining the variable (usually in the configuration file) rather than in the dozen or more places in the code where that database table is referenced.

The use of functions also makes maintenance of your application easier. Functions are self-contained bits of code that work like little engines. You might have an email function, for example, that is used by all parts of your application that send email. Another function might insert data into your databases. As with variables and configuration files, functions allow you to maintain one set of code that is used throughout the application. Changes to the email function, for example, can be made once instead of every place in your code that send email.

Database “normalization” is another important skill. The goal of normalization is to ensure that data (for example, a customer address) resides in as few places as possible within the database. Why? There is less complexity and less risk of failure if data changes can be made in one location instead of many.

Imagine this scenario. Your biggest supplier has one address today but adds two more locations next year. Then their company is bought and their name changes. This could cause a huge maintenance nightmare.

In a normalized database, vendor names would be in a table separate from addresses. Let’s say the database table is called tblVendorNames. In this table, you might have two columns, VendorID and VendorName. Another table, let’s call it tblVendorAddresses, contains at least two columns of data, VendorID and VendorAddress. This arrangement allows you to add (or delete) as many addresses as you want without impacting the vendor name. It also means that when you change the vendor name, in the tblVendorNames table, the change will apply to all the address records. Why? Because they reference the unique id used to identify your vendor, the VendorID value.

Now imagine if you did not do normalization. Let’s say you put the vendor name next to every instance of an address. When your vendor changes their company name, you have to update multiple locations in the database, not the one location in my example. As noted above, the primary goal of programming is efficiency and simplicity. That drives down the error rate and makes code easier to maintain.

Finally, good programmers use consistent syntax when they code applications. This enables them, and programmers who might maintain their code in the future, to read and understand their code long after they have forgotten what they did. Syntax includes comments that explain what functions do and grouping variables. For example, you might have five different types of status and it is important the status variables are grouped together in the configuration file rather than spread around the file. Syntax also includes indenting code so that it is easy to see how pieces of code relate to each other. And it is important your programmer label variables consistently. For example, integers (numbers to lay people) might be prefaced by “i” (as in iVariable) so that the programmer knows the variable is an integer and will respond certain ways. Or database tables might be prefaced with “tbl” (as in tblTableName).

That wasn’t hard, at least not until integers were mentioned. In addition to checking references and other criteria, be sure your programmer works in ways that make it easy to maintain their code. Good programmers will not mind your questions. In fact, often they will take the time to educate you about other equally important issues. If you interview a programmer and they dismiss or ignore your questions about how they code, be sure to thank them for their time before you let them go.

Which language to use?

The last issue to discuss about hiring a software programmer is what programming language to use and, in some cases, what database.

Choice of language and database hinges mostly on what software applications you currently use. If you have alot of Microsoft software, seriously consider having your programmer work with Microsoft languages and databases. The less technology complexity you have throughout your business, the better off you will be over time. It is a needless nightmare to maintain applications written in two or more different programming languages.

Another factor to consider is availability of programmers with a particular language skill. Some languages are less common than others and maintaining code in that language could cost more because there are fewer programmers with that skill. Languages such as Perl, PHP, and Classic ASP have very large numbers of programmers. Languages such as .Net, Java (JSP), and Cold Fusion appear (to me, at least) to be slightly less common. In the database realm, Microsoft SQL and MySQL are very commonly used databases. Other databases also have strong communities.

The quality of the programmer in front of you, however, always trumps what programming language you choose. Any of these languages or databases are common enough to be supported well for the indefinite future.

Therefore, be absolutely sure you know what you want them to build for you. Then follow the criteria above as you evaluate programmers. Chances are high that the combination of questions, references, resume, and personal interview will make it clear that one programmer is better suited to your needs than another. Best of all, you did not have to learn programming to evaluate them.

Changes To This Article

August 10, 2004: Added Resources section with a link to Great Hacker != Great Hire article. Cleaned up the paragraph on normalization.

Resources

Great Hacker != Great Hire
If you don’t know, != is programming shorthand for “not equal.” This is an excellent article that describes the fussy programmer type perfectly, the kind that will bark at you if you ask a dumb question, the kind you probably don’t want to hire if you’re a small business.

Earlier this year, and again this week, I had to configure a client’s email once they moved to a new web hosting vendor. In both cases, they had old webhosting contracts that cost too much, around $30 USD a month when $10 or $20 a month provides much more bandwidth, disk space, and other features. In both cases, I had to cobble together information to get the email configuration done. This article is a summary of what I found works.

While this topic can be highly technical, I only want to describe the minimum an average non-technical person needs to know to configure their website and email settings. It is not rocket science. Nor is hair ripping failure pre-ordained.

The first point to make is that many businesses use an in-house email server to collect email from the internet and route it to everyone within their company. This requires a dedicated internet address for their email server. If they do not host their website, and many do not, this requires their web server to be configured to route website traffic to one internet address (their domain name) and email to another internet address (their in-house email server). Put another way, while it is possible to use a web server to collect and store email that you can view with a web browser, most businesses never use this option. So you have to configure email to go from the web server to the in-house email server.

Configuration is handled through a DNS (Domain Name System) zone file. If you do not know, when you type a domain name (e.g., www.bedrock.com) into a web browser, or you send an email, software on the internet translates your request into an internet address using DNS, a distributed Internet directory service. Domain names exist strictly to help make the internet more human readable. However, internet technology uses four part “dotted IP” or “decimal IP” addresses, for example, 1.1.1.1 to uniquely identify devices connected to the internet.

The DNS zone file itself is simply a list of configuration settings in a specified order and format. When someone requests a translation of a domain name into an internet address, the DNS zone file is searched to retrieve the correct address. Translations are either forward (from a domain name to an internet address) or reverse (from an internet address to a domain name).

The core of the DNS file is a record type with their own settings. Here are the key record types most non-technical people will encounter when they configure their website and email addresses:

SOA. The start of authority is the first record type in any DNS zone file. It provides settings for the domain name of the primary DNS server for the zone, the contact email address, a unique serial number for the zone file, and intervals for refresh, retry, expire, and time to live (TTL).

NS. The name server record type identifies each DNS server within a zone. Most websites have two DNS servers for redundancy backup. While the primary DNS server is listed in the SOA record type, all DNS servers must have individual NS record types. If you are a website reseller and have your own name servers, each of your name servers should have one NS record within the zone file.

MX. The mail exchange record type identifies the mail server(s) for your domain. You can have multiple MX record types to ensure redundancy. Settings for this record type include preference (with the lowest number having highest preference) so that any request to identify your mail server will work through your list of mail servers in the order you specify. The MX record must point to a domain name that follows the mail.yourdomain.com format.

A. Each MX record type also needs to have a corresponding address record type. This record type assigns the mail to a specific internet address.

The TTL (time to live, how quaint) determines how often other parts of the DNS registry check your zone file for updates. A high setting means fewer visits and less bandwidth but also means your changes will take longer to propagate through the DNS system.

To change my client’s mail configurations, I only had to add an MX record type and an A address record type that included the internet address for their in-house email server. I also added one NS record type for each of my name servers. This was much easier than it sounds (see below). To do more than mail configuration with your zone file, you might work with these zone file record types:

CNAME. Because computers attached to the internet often perform more than one role, the cname record type allows you to create aliases for a single resource. One typical use is to create an A record type for the yourdomain.com requests that points to an internet address and one cname record for www.yourdomain.com requests that points to yourdomain.com. Cname record types should point to address records (which point to internet addresses) and not other cname records. This avoids infinite reference loops.

TXT. This record type is used for human readable comments (like, “Hey somebody actually reads my zone file.”)

PTR. This record type maps an internet address to a domain name for reverse translation requests.

You can edit DNS zone files several ways. I’ll describe how to use Web Host Manager, a web application used to manage Linux web servers. WHM often is included with CPanel, another web application used to give website owners control over their web servers. There are other DNS zone file editing tools for Microsoft, Unix, and other web servers. While tools may differ, record types do not change because they’re controlled by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards.

The Web Host Manager interface is perhaps the simplest way for a non-technical person to edit their DNS zone file without destroying too much. WHM does generate error messages before writing an updated file. The arcane structure of a zone file is laid out nicely as a form that you can manipulate then save. To get to the zone file edit screen with WHM, find the “Edit DNS Zone” link near the bottom of the left navigation bar. Then select the domain name whose file you want to edit. The edit screen will appear as shown in this screen capture:

see this image full sized (120kb, 1024×768)

I have highlighted in pale yellow the fields that you would need to change/add to configure the address for a website and mail server.

In looking at this screen capture, note that all input data for record types must end with a period, for example, mail.yourdomain.com. and not mail.yourdomain.com, so that the DNS does not append data to that bit of information.

The minimum you need to configure a mail server is an MX record that points to mail.yourdomain.com and an A record that points to the internet (dotted IP) address for your in-house mail server. The other key record types (SOA, NS) should be pre-populated in the Web Host Manager form. Finally, on the SOA record, you should change the contact email address. Note that the contact email address uses periods instead of the @ symbol: fred.bedrock.com. instead of fred@bedrock.com (note the last period after .com. in the first example).

To check that your DNS zone file is configured properly, you can use a service like DNSReport. This free service checks your current zone file and reports back on a variety of issues with Pass, Warn, and Fail status for each issue. It tests your mail connection and lets you know if your MX and A record(s) are configured properly. If they’re not, you’ll get a red Fail status which means you need to go back to the Web Host Manager interface to fix the problem.

If you do not have access to Web Host Manager or similar tool, ask your webhosting vendor if they have a tool you can use. Otherwise, they have access to your DNS zone file and changes must be made through them. A domain registration service like Enom, however, does allow you to maintain part of your DNS zone file separate from your webhosting service (although you may need to work with your webhosting vendor to ensure the Enom and your webhosting zone files work together).

See? That didn’t hurt. For designers and programmers who provide internet capabilities to businesses, advanced technical support is not required to change a DNS zone file to point to their clients’ in-house email servers. In most cases, it is a minor configuration chore that you can handle or work with your webhosting vendor to configure.

Resources Mentioned in this Article

DNS Report http://www.dnsreport.com
Web Host Manager Website http://www.cpanel.net/
Enom Domain Registration http://www.enom.com

DNS Resources Directory http://www.dns.net/dnsrd/
Simple DNS Plus Help http://www.jhsoft.com/help/showtoc.asp?d=/help/rec_other.htm

This website was recently relaunched in part to make all 600 plus pages searchable by the Google search engine. If you do not know, Google will not crawl and index pages that have id= in their URL, for example, www.bozotheclown.com/ index.asp?id=rednose&action=bonk would never be indexed. The original software I used to maintain this website generated URLs with id= and so Google only crawled the first five or ten pages of this website.

Even worse, regardless of what technology used on this website, content is added so frequently that Google sends people to the home page of this site even though the content disappeared from that page long ago. This article describes the different solutions I’ve found work to manage traffic from Google and other search engines.

Let’s start with what I call “one hit wonders,” the visits that show up in your website activity files as 1 page viewed for 0 seconds with no follow on pages viewed. It’s as if the visitor arrived then clicked away screaming. You might take this behavior to be a personal insult.

First, these brief visits are not bad. In my case, many of them are regular site visitors who keep up with the site using my RSS feed. They see something of interest, click a link to a page on my site, then quickly click a link on that page that leads them to the content they want. Those one hit wonders I count a huge success. It’s also true that you cannot guess what a site visitor wants when they click on your link in the list of search results. In the case of this website, I suspect it is the name of the site (ReachCustomersOnline.com) that intrigues many people. They see what the site is about then quickly go back to what they really needed to do, an activity that had little to do with this site.

There are, however, some number of visitors who will arrive at your website in search of something you can provide but the visitor never sees how your site can help them. How can you help the one page visitors who could benefit from your site?

For this website, I find that using SiteMeter.com helps immensely. I can view site visits in near real time by referral and quickly see not only how many one hit wonders are visits are from search engines and how many through my RSS feed (their referrals show up as “Unknown” and I get an email, more on that later). The search engine referrals list at SiteMeter includes a pre-populated link that leads me to the search engine used, the query used, and the results displayed to my visitors.

I focus on the search engine referrals at Sitemeter, click each link to see the search results page that caused my visitor to click to my site, find my listing in the search results, then check to see if the search results point to my home page or to a page buried within my site. The latter is ideal because those are archived pages and the visitor will always find content at that location.

With the old version of this website, most of the search engine results pointed to the home page. So with my new website, I coded in PHP a redirect script that grabbed the search terms used to find my site and fed the terms into my search engine page. Instead of being dumped at the home page and left to fend for themselves, they were dropped off at my search results page already populated with results that matched the query they used with the search engine that brought them to the site. I wrote the search redirect script to handle live search requests that appeared on my SiteMeter pages.

Like me, you might think this is a brilliant solution. Not to mention very helpful, even thoughtful. You would be wrong, of course.

I discovered to my horror that Google quickly ran through the 600 plus pages on my website and the indexed results showed up within an hour. When I clicked on the referral links at SiteMeter, I found that Google and other search engines now pointed to archived pages, not the home page. Instead of helping people, my search redirect script kept them from the content they wanted. I panicked. I had to scramble to do something.

Then the solution hit me: the problem was the small number of search results that led visitors to my home page. So I tweaked my search redirect script and made it work only on the home page. When someone arrives at the home page from a search engine, they now see big text with a link that offers to let them search my site using the terms they used to arrive at my site. They don’t have to remember their search terms. They don’t have to find and type into my search box.

In addition to the search redirect script, I also track usage of my RSS feed. If you do not know, RSS is simply a way to output headlines and some amount of descriptive text that an RSS reader (more software!) can retrieve and read. By using RSS, visitors can scan content from many sites without having to sort through email newsletters (and endless spam) and visiting websites.

I find that adapting the code that generates my RSS feed so that the link includes the title of the article allows me to track what articles interest these visitors most and, by extension, how many of them visit the site through my RSS feed. This approach also strikes a nice balance between useful data and data that might invade their privacy (although, to be honest, it is near impossible to attach a name and location to an IP address, the only location information available in your website activity files.)

The script below is the one I use to email myself whenever someone clicks a link in the RSS feed; you’ll need to figure out how to modify the code that generates your RSS feed to add the string ?t=title to each of your links (where title is dynamically generated). I found that task to be easy with pMachine and MoveableType. I simply found the variable used to print the title in the RSS feed and added ?t= plus the variable after the variable used to generate the link. The script then searches for t= anytime someone requests a page from the website and, when t= is found, it sends me an email with the title, date, time, and URL.

Bottomline, not all one page zero second visits to your site are a disaster. You can (and should) do things to help the visitors who want content from you and cannot find it. My experience is that tracking usage of my RSS feed (so that I can determine how much of that traffic contributes to my one page visits) and placing a search engine redirect link on my home page is the most I can do. It is more than nothing but less than the impossible task of mind reading what visitors want from my website.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

These scripts are currently written in PHP. I’ve not had time to re-code them in ASP or Perl so that these scripts are useful to everyone, not just the PHP crowd. If you want to recode in ASP and/or Perl, I’m happy to post your code here with your name and a link.

Search Redirect Scripts (for home page and full script)

RSS Tracking Script (emails when a link is clicked)

http://www.sitemeter.com

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This website was recently relaunched in part to make all 600 plus pages searchable by the Google search engine. If you do not know, Google will not crawl and index pages that have id= in their URL, for example, www.bozotheclown.com/ index.asp?id=rednose&action=bonk would never be indexed. The original software I used to maintain this website generated URLs with id= and so Google only crawled the first five or ten pages of this website.

Even worse, regardless of what technology used on this website, content is added so frequently that Google sends people to the home page of this site even though the content disappeared from that page long ago. This article describes the different solutions I’ve found work to manage traffic from Google and other search engines.

Let’s start with what I call “one hit wonders,” the visits that show up in your website activity files as 1 page viewed for 0 seconds with no follow on pages viewed. It’s as if the visitor arrived then clicked away screaming. You might take this behavior to be a personal insult.

First, these brief visits are not bad. In my case, many of them are regular site visitors who keep up with the site using my RSS feed. They see something of interest, click a link to a page on my site, then quickly click a link on that page that leads them to the content they want. Those one hit wonders I count a huge success. It’s also true that you cannot guess what a site visitor wants when they click on your link in the list of search results. In the case of this website, I suspect it is the name of the site (ReachCustomersOnline.com) that intrigues many people. They see what the site is about then quickly go back to what they really needed to do, an activity that had little to do with this site.

There are, however, some number of visitors who will arrive at your website in search of something you can provide but the visitor never sees how your site can help them. How can you help the one page visitors who could benefit from your site?

For this website, I find that using SiteMeter.com helps immensely. I can view site visits in near real time by referral and quickly see not only how many one hit wonders are visits are from search engines and how many through my RSS feed (their referrals show up as “Unknown” and I get an email, more on that later). The search engine referrals list at SiteMeter includes a pre-populated link that leads me to the search engine used, the query used, and the results displayed to my visitors.

I focus on the search engine referrals at Sitemeter, click each link to see the search results page that caused my visitor to click to my site, find my listing in the search results, then check to see if the search results point to my home page or to a page buried within my site. The latter is ideal because those are archived pages and the visitor will always find content at that location.

With the old version of this website, most of the search engine results pointed to the home page. So with my new website, I coded in PHP a redirect script that grabbed the search terms used to find my site and fed the terms into my search engine page. Instead of being dumped at the home page and left to fend for themselves, they were dropped off at my search results page already populated with results that matched the query they used with the search engine that brought them to the site. I wrote the search redirect script to handle live search requests that appeared on my SiteMeter pages.

Like me, you might think this is a brilliant solution. Not to mention very helpful, even thoughtful. You would be wrong, of course.

I discovered to my horror that Google quickly ran through the 600 plus pages on my website and the indexed results showed up within an hour. When I clicked on the referral links at SiteMeter, I found that Google and other search engines now pointed to archived pages, not the home page. Instead of helping people, my search redirect script kept them from the content they wanted. I panicked. I had to scramble to do something.

Then the solution hit me: the problem was the small number of search results that led visitors to my home page. So I tweaked my search redirect script and made it work only on the home page. When someone arrives at the home page from a search engine, they now see big text with a link that offers to let them search my site using the terms they used to arrive at my site. They don’t have to remember their search terms. They don’t have to find and type into my search box.

In addition to the search redirect script, I also track usage of my RSS feed. If you do not know, RSS is simply a way to output headlines and some amount of descriptive text that an RSS reader (more software!) can retrieve and read. By using RSS, visitors can scan content from many sites without having to sort through email newsletters (and endless spam) and visiting websites.

I find that adapting the code that generates my RSS feed so that the link includes the title of the article allows me to track what articles interest these visitors most and, by extension, how many of them visit the site through my RSS feed. This approach also strikes a nice balance between useful data and data that might invade their privacy (although, to be honest, it is near impossible to attach a name and location to an IP address, the only location information available in your website activity files.)

The script below is the one I use to email myself whenever someone clicks a link in the RSS feed; you’ll need to figure out how to modify the code that generates your RSS feed to add the string ?t=title to each of your links (where title is dynamically generated). I found that task to be easy with pMachine and MoveableType. I simply found the variable used to print the title in the RSS feed and added ?t= plus the variable after the variable used to generate the link. The script then searches for t= anytime someone requests a page from the website and, when t= is found, it sends me an email with the title, date, time, and URL.

Bottomline, not all one page zero second visits to your site are a disaster. You can (and should) do things to help the visitors who want content from you and cannot find it. My experience is that tracking usage of my RSS feed (so that I can determine how much of that traffic contributes to my one page visits) and placing a search engine redirect link on my home page is the most I can do. It is more than nothing but less than the impossible task of mind reading what visitors want from my website.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

These scripts are currently written in PHP. I’ve not had time to re-code them in ASP or Perl so that these scripts are useful to everyone, not just the PHP crowd. If you want to recode in ASP and/or Perl, I’m happy to post your code here with your name and a link.

Search Redirect Scripts (for home page and full script)

RSS Tracking Script (emails when a link is clicked)

http://www.sitemeter.com

]]> http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/10/20/15.49.10/feed/ 0 http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/08/15/10.55.22/ http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/08/15/10.55.22/#comments Fri, 15 Aug 2003 15:55:22 +0000 Tim Slavin http://reachcustomersonline.com/dev/?p=531 Tweet

“Dirt bag soap” surely is an odd phrase. So is “My dog Mundi.” What do they both have in common? They showed up in my website log files recently. At least six visitors have used “dirt bag soap” to find this site. It turns out that a Google search on both terms results in this site being listed high in the results page. This column describes how that happens, what no-cost and low-cost tools exist to extract this data, and what it means.

The mystery of dirt bag soap can’t be solved through Google: the results link and the cached page link don’t show the entry on my weblog that Google found. On July 28, 2003 I blogged a story from the New York Times about how people use the internet to barter to start their businesses. I had seen the article in print, in the Fashion section no less. Dirt Bag Soap is one of the companies featured in the article. The owner traded his soap for soapmaking equipment, a logo design for his business, and other business necessities, dramatically reducing his costs and increasing his chances for success.

I found both search terms through a routine check of awstats, the free website activity tool provided by my webhosting vendor. Before we dive into tools, however, let’s talk quickly about where awstats got these phrases.

Every web server (and ftp server and mail server and …) generates a log of its activity so that it can be managed over time. You can use the log to determine how much data has been transferred over a period of time and other useful data. With websites, log files have a business purpose in addition to the technical purpose of finding out what happened. The log files can be used to determine how many people have visited, what pages they have seen, and other data.

Here is a line from a recent log file from this website:

168.226.183.249 – - [13/Aug/2003:11:31:38 -0400] “GET /images/rco_logo.gif HTTP/1.1″ 200 2481 “http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/how-to/articles/article.php?id=174_0_25_0″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

Gibberish certainly, but here is what this data means:

• 168.226.183.249 is the IP address of the visitor to this website. Some IP addresses are specific to one computer while other addresses are shared. So a repeat of this IP address in the log files could be one computer one person or many people many computers. DNSStuff.com says this IP address means the visitor used an internet connection from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• [13/Aug/2003:11:31:38 -0400] is the date and time of their visit.
• “GET /images/rco_logo.gif HTTP/1.1″ is the specific file requested. In this case, the server has recorded just one of the graphics and other files needed to display one page in the visitor’s web browser. By the way, to really educate and confuse you, GET is one of two ways to retrieve information from a web server. POST is the other method.
• 200 is the response back from the server as a result of the request. 200 means okay. 404 would mean the file requested was not found.
• 2481 is the file size (in kilobytes) of the item requested and sent.
• “http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/how-to/articles/article.php?id=174_0_25_0″ is the page the visitor requested. This line of the log file, therefore, records sending one element of this page.
• “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)” tells what browser (IE 6.0) and operating system (Windows NT 5.1) the visitor used to make the page request.

See, that didn’t hurt. While this information is esoteric, it can be valuable. Knowing what browsers visitors use can tell designers and programmers what sort of code to use to display images and content in a visitor’s web browser. And calculating the start and end time for a specific IP address can determine how long the visitor spent on the website (and which pages they visited and in what order).

There are two formats for website log files, common and extended. The extended format has to be configured but it is the only way to get useful data from a webserver. The common format yields a bare minimum of data that does not include referrer (where the visitor came from) or information about browsers and operating systems. Yet the extended format cannot tell you screen resolution (how wide and high the visitor’s computer screen is), geographic location, and other important data.

To get that data, you need scripting code embedded in your web page that captures and records that information. I should state here that none of the data collected by scripts or website log files is inherently identifiable to a unique individual or address. Nor does the scripting delete files or compromise the visitor’s computer. Worst case, scripting code would place a text file (called a “cookie”) on a visitor’s computer with a flag or number that tells the web server the visitor has been to the site before. (Of course, unscrupulous people could present you with a form which if you filled it out with your personal information could be tied to the cookie text file to identify you. That’s why people are and should be suspicious about filling out forms online.)

But I digress. My point is that there are two distinct classes of tools used to analyze website traffic. One set of tools works solely with web server log files that (mostly) use the extended log file format to analyze visitor activity data. Another set of tools use log files (in some cases) plus scripting, unique web addresses (URLs), cookies, and other techniques to present an even more complete picture of website activity.

The website log file-only tools include free tools like Analog, Webalizer, and awstats. The second set of tools includes WebTrends, LiveStats, Urchin, and NetTracker as well as hosted solutions such as SiteMeter, EcommStats, ClickTracks, and Conversion Ruler.

So which tool works best for a small or medium sized business on a budget? It depends upon the effectiveness of your current website. If you have little or no idea who visits your website, you should start with a combination of tools such as awstats, SiteMeter, and EcommStats. If you have a good handle on your site visitors but want to know more, then you should consider more sophisticated tools such as WebTrends, LiveStats, Urchin, or NetTracker plus services such as ClickTracks, ClickLab, Conversion Ruler, and IndexTools.

If you have no idea who visits your website, your website activity reporting should be designed to provide information about number of visitors, how they arrive at your site, what search terms they use to find you (and which search engines). No-cost and low-cost services like SiteMeter and EcommStats can provide a rich set of data to get started. SiteMeter is more stream of conciousness, showing you each visitor and letting you drill down to see details. EcommStats is more structured with the ability to see a list of frequently visited pages, search terms, referrers, and other useful data based on user defined date ranges. Neither displays unique visitors. However, if your goal is to get a basic understanding about how your website is used, that may not be a problem.

Both SiteMeter and EcommStats use javascript or html code to collect data. You place their code in each web page you want to track (easier to do than it sounds). This approach eliminates any site activity from search engine robots and, therefore, is more valuable. If you do not know, search engines like Google send out software on the internet that crawls websites, calling up page after page to scan and categorize content to display when people use that search engine. Using scripting to record website activity means you do not have to guess how much your visitor numbers and other data has been inflated by search engines.

For businesses with little insight into their current website activity, a combination of tools works best. Analog, Webalizer, or awstats are common to most hosting environments and they can tell you how much bandwidth you’re using, what search engines visit, and other data. However, use of services like EcommStats and SiteMeter will show you how human visitors work with your website, where they come from, what search engines and search terms they use, and other important data.

If your business has a good handle on this basic information over the past three to six months, then the next step up is to use more complex tools and services. You might, for example, wonder what makes visitors ignore an important link and click instead on a link of less importance to you. Or you might wonder exactly how many people click through to a sale page.

Because these questions can range widely, the tools to use vary widely. If you want to track your Google AdWords campaigns and which links people click on your website, for example, ClickTracks is worth investigation because their solution uses custom URLs to track activity so that you can see your website interface with clickthrough percentages next to each link. ClickTracks also includes the ability to incorporate your Google AdWords campaigns so that you can measure performance of text ads you buy for specific search keywords. However, the hosted version of ClickTracks costs $50-90/month USD with a three month minimum. So a small business on a budget might use ClickTracks once or twice a year for three months. For example, before you redesign your website it might help to know exactly what links visitors click on in your current design.

Other more complex tools worth investigation are non-hosted options like WebTrends, Urchin, LiveStats, and NetTracker. These tools use log files (configured in extended log file format) as well as cookies to track activity. Hosted options include ClickTracks, ClickLab, Conversion Ruler, HitsLink, Index Tools, among others.

The best way to investigate these tools is to first write down the questions you have about how visitors use your website. Then visit the vendor sites, sign up to try software at sites that look promising, and engage their sales people as you try out the service. Be brash and ask to talk with customers and not just the ones that like the product.

You also should search several websites to see what results other people have had with specific tools. For example, a search for “LiveStats” at Webmasterworld.com shows that, among other things, the latest version 6.0 does not display complete search terms, an important deficiency. Other sites to check are SitePoint and the newsgroups at Google. And you should search ClickZ, MarketingProfs, MarketingSherpa, and other marketing sites to see what they have to say about specific tools or services.

When you go through this process and become familiar with activity on your website, you will discover a mystery (or dirty secret, depending upon your point of view): statistics lie. Every analytics tool uses different methods to extract and calculate data. The result is small or large variances between information reported by one tool and another. The best way to protect yourself is to ask vendors how they calculate key metrics such as unique visitors and other metrics you need to answer your questions about visitor activity.

The bottom line for website activity reporting is that you need a foundation to start then tools to help you understand customer behavior in more depth. How your prospects and customers behave in the real world in your store or office might be different than how they behave on your website. Good analysis over time hinges on what tools your visitors use, what tasks they need or want to accomplish, what sort of people they are in terms of personal history and motivations and ambitions, and not least the context of the day and time they show up at your website.

So now you know all about “dirt bag soap” and “my dog mundi” and how they showed up at this website. The real conundrum for me is the search phrase, “my dog mundi.” I searched the top twenty links at Google in an effort to discover what the visitor had in mind that day. Maybe they were checking to see if they could use that name for a book title? One could imagine all sorts of scenarios. It does highlight the best part of website analytics, and perhaps life in general, exploring mysteries leads to insights and more mysteries to explore.

Disclaimer: While certainly no animals were harmed in writing this article, I should mention that I receive no money from any vendor mentioned here. You can trust the information here represents only my research and experience.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

Analog: http://www.analog.cx/
AWStats: http://awstats.sourceforge.net
ClickLab: http://www.clicklab.com
ClickTracks: http://www.clicktracks.com/hosted/
Conversion Ruler: http://www.conversionruler.com
EcommStats: http://www.ecommstats.com
HitsLink: http://www.hitslink.com
IndexTools: http://www.indextools.com
LiveStats: http://www.deepmetrix.com/log_analyzer/corporate/
NetTracker: http://www.sane.com/products/NetTracker/
SiteMeter: http://www.sitemeter.com/
Urchin: http://www.urchin.com/
Webalizer: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/
WebStat: http://www.webstat.com
WebTrendsLive: http://www.webtrendslive.com

ClickZ: http://www.clickz.com
Google Newsgroups: http://groups.google.com
MarketingProfs: http://www.marketingprofs.com
MarketingSherpa: http://www.marketingsherpa.com
SitePoint Forums: http://www.sitepointforums.com
Webmasterworld: http://www.webmasterworld.com

W3C Extended Log File Format: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-logfile.html
Log File Formats Explained: http://www.bacuslabs.com/WsvlCLF.html
HTTP Response Codes: http://www.bacuslabs.com/WsvlHtResp.html

Dirt Bag Soap website: http://www.dirtbagsoap.com
Dirt Bag Soap weblog entry: http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/weblog/entries.php?id=P504_0_1_0_C

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“Dirt bag soap” surely is an odd phrase. So is “My dog Mundi.” What do they both have in common? They showed up in my website log files recently. At least six visitors have used “dirt bag soap” to find this site. It turns out that a Google search on both terms results in this site being listed high in the results page. This column describes how that happens, what no-cost and low-cost tools exist to extract this data, and what it means.

The mystery of dirt bag soap can’t be solved through Google: the results link and the cached page link don’t show the entry on my weblog that Google found. On July 28, 2003 I blogged a story from the New York Times about how people use the internet to barter to start their businesses. I had seen the article in print, in the Fashion section no less. Dirt Bag Soap is one of the companies featured in the article. The owner traded his soap for soapmaking equipment, a logo design for his business, and other business necessities, dramatically reducing his costs and increasing his chances for success.

I found both search terms through a routine check of awstats, the free website activity tool provided by my webhosting vendor. Before we dive into tools, however, let’s talk quickly about where awstats got these phrases.

Every web server (and ftp server and mail server and …) generates a log of its activity so that it can be managed over time. You can use the log to determine how much data has been transferred over a period of time and other useful data. With websites, log files have a business purpose in addition to the technical purpose of finding out what happened. The log files can be used to determine how many people have visited, what pages they have seen, and other data.

Here is a line from a recent log file from this website:

168.226.183.249 – - [13/Aug/2003:11:31:38 -0400] “GET /images/rco_logo.gif HTTP/1.1″ 200 2481 “http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/how-to/articles/article.php?id=174_0_25_0″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

Gibberish certainly, but here is what this data means:

• 168.226.183.249 is the IP address of the visitor to this website. Some IP addresses are specific to one computer while other addresses are shared. So a repeat of this IP address in the log files could be one computer one person or many people many computers. DNSStuff.com says this IP address means the visitor used an internet connection from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• [13/Aug/2003:11:31:38 -0400] is the date and time of their visit.
• “GET /images/rco_logo.gif HTTP/1.1″ is the specific file requested. In this case, the server has recorded just one of the graphics and other files needed to display one page in the visitor’s web browser. By the way, to really educate and confuse you, GET is one of two ways to retrieve information from a web server. POST is the other method.
• 200 is the response back from the server as a result of the request. 200 means okay. 404 would mean the file requested was not found.
• 2481 is the file size (in kilobytes) of the item requested and sent.
• “http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/how-to/articles/article.php?id=174_0_25_0″ is the page the visitor requested. This line of the log file, therefore, records sending one element of this page.
• “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)” tells what browser (IE 6.0) and operating system (Windows NT 5.1) the visitor used to make the page request.

See, that didn’t hurt. While this information is esoteric, it can be valuable. Knowing what browsers visitors use can tell designers and programmers what sort of code to use to display images and content in a visitor’s web browser. And calculating the start and end time for a specific IP address can determine how long the visitor spent on the website (and which pages they visited and in what order).

There are two formats for website log files, common and extended. The extended format has to be configured but it is the only way to get useful data from a webserver. The common format yields a bare minimum of data that does not include referrer (where the visitor came from) or information about browsers and operating systems. Yet the extended format cannot tell you screen resolution (how wide and high the visitor’s computer screen is), geographic location, and other important data.

To get that data, you need scripting code embedded in your web page that captures and records that information. I should state here that none of the data collected by scripts or website log files is inherently identifiable to a unique individual or address. Nor does the scripting delete files or compromise the visitor’s computer. Worst case, scripting code would place a text file (called a “cookie”) on a visitor’s computer with a flag or number that tells the web server the visitor has been to the site before. (Of course, unscrupulous people could present you with a form which if you filled it out with your personal information could be tied to the cookie text file to identify you. That’s why people are and should be suspicious about filling out forms online.)

But I digress. My point is that there are two distinct classes of tools used to analyze website traffic. One set of tools works solely with web server log files that (mostly) use the extended log file format to analyze visitor activity data. Another set of tools use log files (in some cases) plus scripting, unique web addresses (URLs), cookies, and other techniques to present an even more complete picture of website activity.

The website log file-only tools include free tools like Analog, Webalizer, and awstats. The second set of tools includes WebTrends, LiveStats, Urchin, and NetTracker as well as hosted solutions such as SiteMeter, EcommStats, ClickTracks, and Conversion Ruler.

So which tool works best for a small or medium sized business on a budget? It depends upon the effectiveness of your current website. If you have little or no idea who visits your website, you should start with a combination of tools such as awstats, SiteMeter, and EcommStats. If you have a good handle on your site visitors but want to know more, then you should consider more sophisticated tools such as WebTrends, LiveStats, Urchin, or NetTracker plus services such as ClickTracks, ClickLab, Conversion Ruler, and IndexTools.

If you have no idea who visits your website, your website activity reporting should be designed to provide information about number of visitors, how they arrive at your site, what search terms they use to find you (and which search engines). No-cost and low-cost services like SiteMeter and EcommStats can provide a rich set of data to get started. SiteMeter is more stream of conciousness, showing you each visitor and letting you drill down to see details. EcommStats is more structured with the ability to see a list of frequently visited pages, search terms, referrers, and other useful data based on user defined date ranges. Neither displays unique visitors. However, if your goal is to get a basic understanding about how your website is used, that may not be a problem.

Both SiteMeter and EcommStats use javascript or html code to collect data. You place their code in each web page you want to track (easier to do than it sounds). This approach eliminates any site activity from search engine robots and, therefore, is more valuable. If you do not know, search engines like Google send out software on the internet that crawls websites, calling up page after page to scan and categorize content to display when people use that search engine. Using scripting to record website activity means you do not have to guess how much your visitor numbers and other data has been inflated by search engines.

For businesses with little insight into their current website activity, a combination of tools works best. Analog, Webalizer, or awstats are common to most hosting environments and they can tell you how much bandwidth you’re using, what search engines visit, and other data. However, use of services like EcommStats and SiteMeter will show you how human visitors work with your website, where they come from, what search engines and search terms they use, and other important data.

If your business has a good handle on this basic information over the past three to six months, then the next step up is to use more complex tools and services. You might, for example, wonder what makes visitors ignore an important link and click instead on a link of less importance to you. Or you might wonder exactly how many people click through to a sale page.

Because these questions can range widely, the tools to use vary widely. If you want to track your Google AdWords campaigns and which links people click on your website, for example, ClickTracks is worth investigation because their solution uses custom URLs to track activity so that you can see your website interface with clickthrough percentages next to each link. ClickTracks also includes the ability to incorporate your Google AdWords campaigns so that you can measure performance of text ads you buy for specific search keywords. However, the hosted version of ClickTracks costs $50-90/month USD with a three month minimum. So a small business on a budget might use ClickTracks once or twice a year for three months. For example, before you redesign your website it might help to know exactly what links visitors click on in your current design.

Other more complex tools worth investigation are non-hosted options like WebTrends, Urchin, LiveStats, and NetTracker. These tools use log files (configured in extended log file format) as well as cookies to track activity. Hosted options include ClickTracks, ClickLab, Conversion Ruler, HitsLink, Index Tools, among others.

The best way to investigate these tools is to first write down the questions you have about how visitors use your website. Then visit the vendor sites, sign up to try software at sites that look promising, and engage their sales people as you try out the service. Be brash and ask to talk with customers and not just the ones that like the product.

You also should search several websites to see what results other people have had with specific tools. For example, a search for “LiveStats” at Webmasterworld.com shows that, among other things, the latest version 6.0 does not display complete search terms, an important deficiency. Other sites to check are SitePoint and the newsgroups at Google. And you should search ClickZ, MarketingProfs, MarketingSherpa, and other marketing sites to see what they have to say about specific tools or services.

When you go through this process and become familiar with activity on your website, you will discover a mystery (or dirty secret, depending upon your point of view): statistics lie. Every analytics tool uses different methods to extract and calculate data. The result is small or large variances between information reported by one tool and another. The best way to protect yourself is to ask vendors how they calculate key metrics such as unique visitors and other metrics you need to answer your questions about visitor activity.

The bottom line for website activity reporting is that you need a foundation to start then tools to help you understand customer behavior in more depth. How your prospects and customers behave in the real world in your store or office might be different than how they behave on your website. Good analysis over time hinges on what tools your visitors use, what tasks they need or want to accomplish, what sort of people they are in terms of personal history and motivations and ambitions, and not least the context of the day and time they show up at your website.

So now you know all about “dirt bag soap” and “my dog mundi” and how they showed up at this website. The real conundrum for me is the search phrase, “my dog mundi.” I searched the top twenty links at Google in an effort to discover what the visitor had in mind that day. Maybe they were checking to see if they could use that name for a book title? One could imagine all sorts of scenarios. It does highlight the best part of website analytics, and perhaps life in general, exploring mysteries leads to insights and more mysteries to explore.

Disclaimer: While certainly no animals were harmed in writing this article, I should mention that I receive no money from any vendor mentioned here. You can trust the information here represents only my research and experience.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

Analog: http://www.analog.cx/
AWStats: http://awstats.sourceforge.net
ClickLab: http://www.clicklab.com
ClickTracks: http://www.clicktracks.com/hosted/
Conversion Ruler: http://www.conversionruler.com
EcommStats: http://www.ecommstats.com
HitsLink: http://www.hitslink.com
IndexTools: http://www.indextools.com
LiveStats: http://www.deepmetrix.com/log_analyzer/corporate/
NetTracker: http://www.sane.com/products/NetTracker/
SiteMeter: http://www.sitemeter.com/
Urchin: http://www.urchin.com/
Webalizer: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/
WebStat: http://www.webstat.com
WebTrendsLive: http://www.webtrendslive.com

ClickZ: http://www.clickz.com
Google Newsgroups: http://groups.google.com
MarketingProfs: http://www.marketingprofs.com
MarketingSherpa: http://www.marketingsherpa.com
SitePoint Forums: http://www.sitepointforums.com
Webmasterworld: http://www.webmasterworld.com

W3C Extended Log File Format: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-logfile.html
Log File Formats Explained: http://www.bacuslabs.com/WsvlCLF.html
HTTP Response Codes: http://www.bacuslabs.com/WsvlHtResp.html

Dirt Bag Soap website: http://www.dirtbagsoap.com
Dirt Bag Soap weblog entry: http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/weblog/entries.php?id=P504_0_1_0_C

]]> http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/08/15/10.55.22/feed/ 0 http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/08/01/00.49.08/ http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/08/01/00.49.08/#comments Fri, 01 Aug 2003 05:49:08 +0000 Tim Slavin http://reachcustomersonline.com/dev/?p=489 Tweet

With millions of websites on the internet, you might think that there are almost as many ways to design and layout content on a website. In fact, so far there are no more than four styles of web pages and a dozen or so ways to lay them out. This column explores some common design elements of web pages to help when you have to ask for a website design or create one.

Each style of web page layout has been dictated by the current state of web technology. Less freedom with technology resulted in less freedom to design with more design freedom possible as time has gone on. All web designs have relied on what magazine and book layouts usually use: a grid. It is only recently, however, with the advent of cascading style sheets (aka CSS) that web designs have been able to break out of the grid structure the way magazines and other print media can.

So what’s a grid? A website is like any other form of communication. A grid is simply an organization of content bits on a page into visually structured areas the eye can group together. Think columns and rows of content. The designer has to arrange these content bits to lead your eyes to the most important content on the page. Segregating links and blurbs and photos is one way a designer leads your eyes and helps you scan a page. The designer also has to figure out how to help site visitors navigate through layers of content.

Today the most common web page grid layout has four blocks, or sets of columns and rows: a top block row (usually the title, some color, maybe navigation), a left hand block column that goes down the page (usually links to content), a center block column (usually where the content goes), and a bottom block row (usually the footer information, copyright, maybe some links). On some websites, you also might have a right block that includes ads, links, blurbs, and photos. The home page for the San Francisco Chronicle offers a great example of a basic grid layout:

However, the first web page designs did not start out with even this level of sophistication. The first web pages simply ran text and headlines down a page. If you were lucky, the page author included links to content within the page at the top of their web page, in the middle if their page was really long, and at the bottom of their web page. Otherwise you had to scroll, scroll, scroll as you scanned for the information you needed. This first style of web page layouts could be called runoff. Content is literally poured from the top of the page downwards. Useit.com, a website about usability, is an excellent example of how to use the runoff layout:

Graphic designers naturally hated the runoff style because they could not communicate effectively if their only option was to pour content. Around 1995, a few frustrated designers figured out that HTML technology could be used to create tables that created a grid that could be used to group content into areas on a web page. Designers could use HTML to lead the site visitor’s eyes to the most important content on a page. The web became much easier to navigate.

Use of HTML table code led to two new layout styles. One style was based on CD-ROM layouts. Rather than pour content down a page, content was kept out of view so that the site visitor could see it only when requested. The first page of a CD-ROM layout website has groups of links, key images, and possibly introductory content. CD-ROM sites typically use the first page to create an impression on the visitor and offer up key links. Here are two websites that use a CD-ROM layout, Cartoon Networks and Blue Ribbon Flies:

Another layout style that uses HTML tables is based on classic magazine and newspaper layouts which use grids heavily. Most websites today use this publication style because it works well with a wide range of content. In contrast, CD-ROM layouts often require site visitors to click more often to get content because the content is buried at least one level below the main web page. The San Francisco Chronicle home page above is a great example of the publication layout style. Another less obvious example of a publication layout is the Macromedia home page (because it also looks like a CD-ROM layout):

The main problem with the CD-ROM and publication styles is their reliance on HTML technology which does not handle the visual presentation of content well. Designers have to engage in very arcane workarounds to get HTML to position content correctly on the page. Then there are issues related to how different browsers support the HTML standards. One web browser might add space under a line of text or an image while another browser does not.

The fourth and last layout style to know about also is based on print media layouts such as magazines, posters, and books. However, unlike the CD-ROM and publication layouts, this new style allows designers to break out of the grid when needed. This new style uses cascading stylesheets (CSS), a mostly new technology, to store directions for where to place content. So a web page of content laid out in a grid style today could have its CSS stylesheet swapped tomorrow so that the content is laid out more freeform. To see how this works, visit the cssZenGarden website. Here are three examples of CSS layouts that present identical content in three different ways after swapping the stylesheet and adding images:

These examples from cssZenGarden show how CSS technology can be used to create layouts that are basic grids, book-style layout, and more freeform layouts. The tone of a website can change dramatically with one stylesheet file in the time it takes to upload the file and new images to the web server.

While web pages cannot completely escape the grid, CSS technology can organize content more easily to maximize web communication to site visitors. Instead of learning and fighting HTML code that might appear differently in different web browsers. designers can learn one technology (for now!) that allows the ability to communicate visually in a number of ways, with and (mostly) without grids.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com
Cartoon Networks http://www.cartoonnetworks.com
Blue Ribbon Flies http://www.blueribbonflies.com
cssZenGardenshttp://www.csszengardens.com
These websites offer free website layout templates that use grids:
Book of Styles http://www.bookofstyles.org/ (see Themed Layouts box on left)

Leave A Comment
©2010 ReachCustomersOnline.com. All Rights Reserved.

]]> Tweet

With millions of websites on the internet, you might think that there are almost as many ways to design and layout content on a website. In fact, so far there are no more than four styles of web pages and a dozen or so ways to lay them out. This column explores some common design elements of web pages to help when you have to ask for a website design or create one.

Each style of web page layout has been dictated by the current state of web technology. Less freedom with technology resulted in less freedom to design with more design freedom possible as time has gone on. All web designs have relied on what magazine and book layouts usually use: a grid. It is only recently, however, with the advent of cascading style sheets (aka CSS) that web designs have been able to break out of the grid structure the way magazines and other print media can.

So what’s a grid? A website is like any other form of communication. A grid is simply an organization of content bits on a page into visually structured areas the eye can group together. Think columns and rows of content. The designer has to arrange these content bits to lead your eyes to the most important content on the page. Segregating links and blurbs and photos is one way a designer leads your eyes and helps you scan a page. The designer also has to figure out how to help site visitors navigate through layers of content.

Today the most common web page grid layout has four blocks, or sets of columns and rows: a top block row (usually the title, some color, maybe navigation), a left hand block column that goes down the page (usually links to content), a center block column (usually where the content goes), and a bottom block row (usually the footer information, copyright, maybe some links). On some websites, you also might have a right block that includes ads, links, blurbs, and photos. The home page for the San Francisco Chronicle offers a great example of a basic grid layout:

However, the first web page designs did not start out with even this level of sophistication. The first web pages simply ran text and headlines down a page. If you were lucky, the page author included links to content within the page at the top of their web page, in the middle if their page was really long, and at the bottom of their web page. Otherwise you had to scroll, scroll, scroll as you scanned for the information you needed. This first style of web page layouts could be called runoff. Content is literally poured from the top of the page downwards. Useit.com, a website about usability, is an excellent example of how to use the runoff layout:

Graphic designers naturally hated the runoff style because they could not communicate effectively if their only option was to pour content. Around 1995, a few frustrated designers figured out that HTML technology could be used to create tables that created a grid that could be used to group content into areas on a web page. Designers could use HTML to lead the site visitor’s eyes to the most important content on a page. The web became much easier to navigate.

Use of HTML table code led to two new layout styles. One style was based on CD-ROM layouts. Rather than pour content down a page, content was kept out of view so that the site visitor could see it only when requested. The first page of a CD-ROM layout website has groups of links, key images, and possibly introductory content. CD-ROM sites typically use the first page to create an impression on the visitor and offer up key links. Here are two websites that use a CD-ROM layout, Cartoon Networks and Blue Ribbon Flies:

Another layout style that uses HTML tables is based on classic magazine and newspaper layouts which use grids heavily. Most websites today use this publication style because it works well with a wide range of content. In contrast, CD-ROM layouts often require site visitors to click more often to get content because the content is buried at least one level below the main web page. The San Francisco Chronicle home page above is a great example of the publication layout style. Another less obvious example of a publication layout is the Macromedia home page (because it also looks like a CD-ROM layout):

The main problem with the CD-ROM and publication styles is their reliance on HTML technology which does not handle the visual presentation of content well. Designers have to engage in very arcane workarounds to get HTML to position content correctly on the page. Then there are issues related to how different browsers support the HTML standards. One web browser might add space under a line of text or an image while another browser does not.

The fourth and last layout style to know about also is based on print media layouts such as magazines, posters, and books. However, unlike the CD-ROM and publication layouts, this new style allows designers to break out of the grid when needed. This new style uses cascading stylesheets (CSS), a mostly new technology, to store directions for where to place content. So a web page of content laid out in a grid style today could have its CSS stylesheet swapped tomorrow so that the content is laid out more freeform. To see how this works, visit the cssZenGarden website. Here are three examples of CSS layouts that present identical content in three different ways after swapping the stylesheet and adding images:

These examples from cssZenGarden show how CSS technology can be used to create layouts that are basic grids, book-style layout, and more freeform layouts. The tone of a website can change dramatically with one stylesheet file in the time it takes to upload the file and new images to the web server.

While web pages cannot completely escape the grid, CSS technology can organize content more easily to maximize web communication to site visitors. Instead of learning and fighting HTML code that might appear differently in different web browsers. designers can learn one technology (for now!) that allows the ability to communicate visually in a number of ways, with and (mostly) without grids.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com
Cartoon Networks http://www.cartoonnetworks.com
Blue Ribbon Flies http://www.blueribbonflies.com
cssZenGardenshttp://www.csszengardens.com
These websites offer free website layout templates that use grids:
Book of Styles http://www.bookofstyles.org/ (see Themed Layouts box on left)

]]> http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/08/01/00.49.08/feed/ 0 http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/07/14/23.46.28/ http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/07/14/23.46.28/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2003 04:46:28 +0000 Tim Slavin http://reachcustomersonline.com/dev/?p=441 Tweet

Last time, I wrote about a website and email strategy that would allow almost any business, especially small businesses like florists, heating oil companies, law firms, and hardware stores, use the internet for a modest $500 start up price. My first column explained how to build a one page website. This column describes how to use email newsletters to find and support customers.

While there are reasons to have a multi-page website, many businesses on a budget would be better off if they spent on a one page website and saved their money for regular email contact. The creation and maintenance of a multi-page website costs more and returns less immediate measurable value than email sent to customers who have provided their email addresses in the context of a sale or a vist to an office or store.

There are two ways to use email for business, either as one-off coupons and announcements or as newsletters sent out on a regular basis. For businesses starting out with the internet, one-off emails are probably the best place to start. They require little preparation and you can send them at will instead of being tied to a regular publishing schedule. This column will focus on one-off emails.

Creating email capability for your business requires three steps: writing your emails, finding a provider to deliver your emails, and collecting legitimate email addresses. I’ll discuss each step in some detail.

The first step is to create a process to collect email addresses in person from your customers and prospects. If you have a store or office, the simplest way is to create a small form that captures their full name, email address, and 2-4 areas of interest with a line to express an interest outside of your pre-defined choices. The areas of interest should be products and services your customers value. The form should state a clear benefit (e.g., Sign up to receive x, y, and z!) and state that you will never sell, trade, or rent their email address. You might create this form in Microsoft Word with four forms per page, print a hundred copies, then cut up the pages to make four hundred forms.

Once you have a small form to hand to customers and prospects, train yourself and your staff to incorporate a request for an email address in the context of a sale. For example, if a person likes your shop but cannot find what they want, offer the email address form as a way to let them know when you have what they want in stock. You also can leave a small stack of forms by the cash registers and by the front door. There are other ways, through trial and error, that you can collect email addresses in helpful, unobtrusive ways.

Remember, the best way to get and use a customer or prospect email address is in the context of a stated customer need that you can meet today or in the future. The worst way is to steal their address, either nefariously or through purchase of an email address list. That’s why people hate spam: it’s not based on permission, it’s impersonal, and the offers are not relevant. Do what you can to emphasize permission, be personal, and be relevant. When each customer or prospect fills out your email address form, for example, you might send them a short personal email to thank them and perhaps offer a benefit.

Finding a vendor to deliver your email addresses is your second step. The fastest way to get started is with a vendor called Ezine Director. The first 999 emails a month you send through their service is free (although the number may change over time based on any free offers from their competitors). Beyond the first thousand emails their prices are competitive. Other providers to look at include ListChannel and Cooler Email.

Certainly there is a significant research to be done to find a good email delivery service. However, a service like Ezine Director (or any service under $30/month) is a good place to start sending one-off emails. If the service provider lets you export your email address list (as Ezine Director, List Channel, and others do), there is little to stop you from moving from one service to another. That’s why email delivery services focus on reporting tools and other services to keep their customers.

The key factors to consider with email delivery services are reporting and an active program to place their customers on email white lists and off email spam blacklists. On the reporting side, look for bounce reporting (not just numbers but also the reasons for the bounce, for example, email box full or no such address), open rates (only works if you send html email), and clickthroughs. Basically, you want to know what interests recipients of your emails (not necessarily who looked at what but what people looked at) to help refine what you send in your email offers.

Of course, you can write your emails so that you will know when your reader has responded. Just include an offer code or a requirement that the person mention your email. It is far better to hear ten people buy from you mentioning your email than seeing a hundred people read your email and wondering how many of them actually bought.

As with picking an email delivery service, writing an email can be extremely complex. I will focus on the basics here.

When you configure your email delivery service, you will need to configure the From address, the To address (when a reader clicks Reply, who does their email go to?), and Subject lines for each email you send. These three elements are key to your success with email. The From and To should be the same with every email. The From address, in particular, should be descriptive (Jane’s Exotic Flowers not Jane) and even provide a tone and/or benefit. Your readers will use your From address and Subject line to determine whether or not to open your emails. These details are worthy of obsession.

You will also need to write messages for readers who subscribe and unsubscribe to your emails. These messages typically are one paragraph in length. They describe what your emails offer, how you use their email addresses, and who to contact in the real world if they have questions or problems. Phone numbers and an address are very helpful. So is a personal tone. You also should mention that you will not sell, trade, or rent their email address.

For each email you send out, be sure to limit your email to one topic. Do not offer seven different things and hope that one of them will stick with your readers. Instead, if you are a florist, send an email about fresh cut flowers (your single topic) with 3-5 examples of what you currently offer. Be sure your topic is mentioned in the first three words of your email subject line, too, as well as the benefit that you’re offering (e.g., low price, broad variety, new styles).

Each email you send should be no more than three paragraphs with 1-3 sentences in each paragraph. You should follow the AIDA principle (use attention, interest, desire, and action in your copy) and include a direct call to action (e.g., Call us today and mention this email to receive x). The key is to convey quickly what you offer in your email and tell your reader how to take advantage of your offer. Certainly you can provide jazzy, attention-getting words but they’re probably wasted. Most people have short attention spans. Only offer enough detail to help them make a decision to act on your offer.

Bottomline, write your emails as if you’re visiting a stranger’s home and they have opened the door wearing a bath robe: be polite yet friendly, thank them for their time, state your business clearly and quickly, and tell them how you can help them. Don’t waste their time.

If your list of email addresses exceeds fifty, over time you might experiment with different combinations of words, phrases, and offers in your email subject lines and messages. To do this, divide your list of email addresses into equal parts, at least two groups with at least twenty-five addresses. Then email different versions of your offer to each subset of your email list. While not every business has to test this way, it can be helpful if you want to understand what words and offers resonate with your readers or you simply don’t know what approach works best.

The last step to consider is putting an email signup box on your one page website. Ezine Director and other email delivery services provide the html code that you can provide to your graphic designer to include on your website. At the least, you should have a process to collect email addresses from customers and prospects who visit your store or office. Those addresses should be more valuable than addresses collected from a website.

In conclusion, a one page website and active email campaigns are not the only way to use the internet to find, keep, and support customers. But it is a cost-effective way for businesses to get started with internet tools. This strategy makes it easy to control costs while also experimenting to find what works for your customers. You can prove the internet has value before you spend additional money on a multi-page website or a design for html email.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

http://www.ezinedirector.com
http://www.listchannel.com
http://www.cooleremail.com

100 Tips, Tricks and Insider Secrets for Successful Permission Email: http://media.whatcounts.com/insider_secrets.pdf
The Jennings Report: http://www.jenningsreport.com
WordBiz Article Archive: http://www.wordbiz.com/archive/index.html
http://www.emailsherpa.com

Leave A Comment
©2010 ReachCustomersOnline.com. All Rights Reserved.

]]> Tweet

Last time, I wrote about a website and email strategy that would allow almost any business, especially small businesses like florists, heating oil companies, law firms, and hardware stores, use the internet for a modest $500 start up price. My first column explained how to build a one page website. This column describes how to use email newsletters to find and support customers.

While there are reasons to have a multi-page website, many businesses on a budget would be better off if they spent on a one page website and saved their money for regular email contact. The creation and maintenance of a multi-page website costs more and returns less immediate measurable value than email sent to customers who have provided their email addresses in the context of a sale or a vist to an office or store.

There are two ways to use email for business, either as one-off coupons and announcements or as newsletters sent out on a regular basis. For businesses starting out with the internet, one-off emails are probably the best place to start. They require little preparation and you can send them at will instead of being tied to a regular publishing schedule. This column will focus on one-off emails.

Creating email capability for your business requires three steps: writing your emails, finding a provider to deliver your emails, and collecting legitimate email addresses. I’ll discuss each step in some detail.

The first step is to create a process to collect email addresses in person from your customers and prospects. If you have a store or office, the simplest way is to create a small form that captures their full name, email address, and 2-4 areas of interest with a line to express an interest outside of your pre-defined choices. The areas of interest should be products and services your customers value. The form should state a clear benefit (e.g., Sign up to receive x, y, and z!) and state that you will never sell, trade, or rent their email address. You might create this form in Microsoft Word with four forms per page, print a hundred copies, then cut up the pages to make four hundred forms.

Once you have a small form to hand to customers and prospects, train yourself and your staff to incorporate a request for an email address in the context of a sale. For example, if a person likes your shop but cannot find what they want, offer the email address form as a way to let them know when you have what they want in stock. You also can leave a small stack of forms by the cash registers and by the front door. There are other ways, through trial and error, that you can collect email addresses in helpful, unobtrusive ways.

Remember, the best way to get and use a customer or prospect email address is in the context of a stated customer need that you can meet today or in the future. The worst way is to steal their address, either nefariously or through purchase of an email address list. That’s why people hate spam: it’s not based on permission, it’s impersonal, and the offers are not relevant. Do what you can to emphasize permission, be personal, and be relevant. When each customer or prospect fills out your email address form, for example, you might send them a short personal email to thank them and perhaps offer a benefit.

Finding a vendor to deliver your email addresses is your second step. The fastest way to get started is with a vendor called Ezine Director. The first 999 emails a month you send through their service is free (although the number may change over time based on any free offers from their competitors). Beyond the first thousand emails their prices are competitive. Other providers to look at include ListChannel and Cooler Email.

Certainly there is a significant research to be done to find a good email delivery service. However, a service like Ezine Director (or any service under $30/month) is a good place to start sending one-off emails. If the service provider lets you export your email address list (as Ezine Director, List Channel, and others do), there is little to stop you from moving from one service to another. That’s why email delivery services focus on reporting tools and other services to keep their customers.

The key factors to consider with email delivery services are reporting and an active program to place their customers on email white lists and off email spam blacklists. On the reporting side, look for bounce reporting (not just numbers but also the reasons for the bounce, for example, email box full or no such address), open rates (only works if you send html email), and clickthroughs. Basically, you want to know what interests recipients of your emails (not necessarily who looked at what but what people looked at) to help refine what you send in your email offers.

Of course, you can write your emails so that you will know when your reader has responded. Just include an offer code or a requirement that the person mention your email. It is far better to hear ten people buy from you mentioning your email than seeing a hundred people read your email and wondering how many of them actually bought.

As with picking an email delivery service, writing an email can be extremely complex. I will focus on the basics here.

When you configure your email delivery service, you will need to configure the From address, the To address (when a reader clicks Reply, who does their email go to?), and Subject lines for each email you send. These three elements are key to your success with email. The From and To should be the same with every email. The From address, in particular, should be descriptive (Jane’s Exotic Flowers not Jane) and even provide a tone and/or benefit. Your readers will use your From address and Subject line to determine whether or not to open your emails. These details are worthy of obsession.

You will also need to write messages for readers who subscribe and unsubscribe to your emails. These messages typically are one paragraph in length. They describe what your emails offer, how you use their email addresses, and who to contact in the real world if they have questions or problems. Phone numbers and an address are very helpful. So is a personal tone. You also should mention that you will not sell, trade, or rent their email address.

For each email you send out, be sure to limit your email to one topic. Do not offer seven different things and hope that one of them will stick with your readers. Instead, if you are a florist, send an email about fresh cut flowers (your single topic) with 3-5 examples of what you currently offer. Be sure your topic is mentioned in the first three words of your email subject line, too, as well as the benefit that you’re offering (e.g., low price, broad variety, new styles).

Each email you send should be no more than three paragraphs with 1-3 sentences in each paragraph. You should follow the AIDA principle (use attention, interest, desire, and action in your copy) and include a direct call to action (e.g., Call us today and mention this email to receive x). The key is to convey quickly what you offer in your email and tell your reader how to take advantage of your offer. Certainly you can provide jazzy, attention-getting words but they’re probably wasted. Most people have short attention spans. Only offer enough detail to help them make a decision to act on your offer.

Bottomline, write your emails as if you’re visiting a stranger’s home and they have opened the door wearing a bath robe: be polite yet friendly, thank them for their time, state your business clearly and quickly, and tell them how you can help them. Don’t waste their time.

If your list of email addresses exceeds fifty, over time you might experiment with different combinations of words, phrases, and offers in your email subject lines and messages. To do this, divide your list of email addresses into equal parts, at least two groups with at least twenty-five addresses. Then email different versions of your offer to each subset of your email list. While not every business has to test this way, it can be helpful if you want to understand what words and offers resonate with your readers or you simply don’t know what approach works best.

The last step to consider is putting an email signup box on your one page website. Ezine Director and other email delivery services provide the html code that you can provide to your graphic designer to include on your website. At the least, you should have a process to collect email addresses from customers and prospects who visit your store or office. Those addresses should be more valuable than addresses collected from a website.

In conclusion, a one page website and active email campaigns are not the only way to use the internet to find, keep, and support customers. But it is a cost-effective way for businesses to get started with internet tools. This strategy makes it easy to control costs while also experimenting to find what works for your customers. You can prove the internet has value before you spend additional money on a multi-page website or a design for html email.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

http://www.ezinedirector.com
http://www.listchannel.com
http://www.cooleremail.com

100 Tips, Tricks and Insider Secrets for Successful Permission Email: http://media.whatcounts.com/insider_secrets.pdf
The Jennings Report: http://www.jenningsreport.com
WordBiz Article Archive: http://www.wordbiz.com/archive/index.html
http://www.emailsherpa.com

]]> http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/07/14/23.46.28/feed/ 0 http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/07/01/12.00.28/ http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2003/07/01/12.00.28/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2003 17:00:28 +0000 Tim Slavin http://reachcustomersonline.com/dev/?p=435 Tweet

Three years after the internet boom, many businesses have not ventured past the brochure website phase. Even fewer use email to reach their customers and prospects. The question these companies face is whether to spend more on their websites. Many of them paid high rates for their static online real estate. Even more companies never went online because of the high cost of a static site.

What are these priced-out businesses to do about the internet? Are they shut out? How should they sort the flood of offers for low cost websites and webhosting? A basic multi-page website still costs around $1,000 USD to do right. That does not include ecommerce. In other words, it is still too easy to waste thousands of dollars on a website.

Companies that are cost-concious can still use internet technology to reach customers. The trick is to balance the cost and potentials of different tools, specifically, websites and email. An October 2002 study by DoubleClick found fifty nine percent bought something offline after their received an email from a merchant they knew. This suggests that email is a more effective tool than websites for many businesses.

Therefore, a one page website with the right content could be enough for any business whose customers and prospects visit their stores or offices, for example, florists, law firms, dry cleaners, restaurants, and hardware stores. The website becomes a business card with contact information, directions, a small set of product offers, and a signup box for email newsletters. In the store or office, the business can use sign up sheets for their email newsletter.

The sign up process also becomes a way to connect with customers who can’t find what they want that day in your store. Without the possibility to sign up for email contact, these potential customers are usually lost. The same dynamic applies for websites that do not have an email signup box.

With email addresses gained from face to face contact with prospects and customers, in the context of a sale, a business can devote their scarce time and money to send coupons and product offers to their list of email addresses. The response should be higher and more consistent over time than relying solely on a multi-page website.

A single page