Of course we go around the block with them as they try to publish those files directly to their site, or worse yet, they try to use the built in converter in MS Office – YUCK. Once we clean that mess up we have to manually convert them to PDF or Flash (for presentations) then publish them as embedded links.

Now we have new solutions to work with and recommend. About a year ago we stumbled onto a great document converting, hosting, and embedding service and wanted to share it with you.

I want to recommend to you one of the best way to convert, host, and embed documents into your website. As you may know a large part of our expertise is focused on SEO and website promotion. With that in mind we always try to recommend solutions that take the promotion of your website into consideration. That way you can climb the SERPS (search results) as quickly as possible without spending too much money to do it.

With that said I want to recommend a free web2 enhanced document service called Scribd. (scribd.com)
You can sign up for a free account there and use scribd for several critical services to enhance your website and your sites search authority.

Scribd gives you a free way to convert word docs into pdf presentations. In fact it will convert word, pdf, powerpoint, etc into embedded presentations that you can embed right into your website or wordpress blog — the same way you embed videos. Not only does it provide the conversion and embeds, but it also provides you with hosting for the document on their website that provides links back to your website. (This is perhaps the greatest benefit of all because scribd is a very high ranking website, if you have links on it to your site it will help your site gain authority and rank very quickly.)

Hope this tip helps. Drop us a line and let us know where you use it.

Here is a recent exchange with a client regarding questions about site branding, traffic generation and marketing for their information product website. It might be helpful to other site owners who want to improve visitor engagement to their brand. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to contact me with any marketing, branding and promotion questions for your business. (Note: The names and site links are changed to protect the privacy of my client.)

Q: Dwayne – I know you are knowledgable with internet marketing and blog promotion, etc.  We have been experimenting with traffic generation under the theory that it will warm visitors up to our product, but we seem to be getting luke warm reception when submitting posts to reddit.  We did find that a link to our site inserted in a blog comment could generate decent hits, but I was wondering if you knew of any other sites that might give us more ideas. – Thanks! Neal

Hi Neal;
Yes sir, blog commenting works well and gives you decent backlinks. Of course you are selling a niche product so targeting is more important for you than just bulk traffic. Remember since the launch of Caffeine the three legged table rule is 100% in effect so you must satisfy all three value metrics in order to grow and maintain authority and SERPs.

I took the liberty of looking at your site. You are trying to market an information product on Seduction Techniques right? The first thing I recommend you focus on is the site experience and content. We can talk about niche traffic generation later. First develop the product and conversion scenaio…

Here are a couple of suggestions:

Landing impact:
What are you doing on this site? Why do I not know at a glance? When a visitor lands on your site they should know right away where they are and what they might get here. You have less than 5 seconds to accomplish this. The back button is calling…
So how about a visual (metaphor) image – above the fold – to let me know I’m in a place where men go to learn how to approach and attract women?

The blocks of text on the site are crazy long. Break that stuff up. No one wants to read pages of text in long paragraphs. Forget the grammar rules for paragraphs you learned in school and use the copy writing rule instead. No more than 5 lines of text without a full double break space. Break your copy into little info-nuggets – not big intimidating blocks of text. (People quit reading web copy in the 90′s… They want bullets and short clips of text they can follow by scanning).

Conversion scenario:
Where is my gift? Give me something to make me engage the site please. Yes, you have to bribe me or you suck. Where is my free ebook? Where is my video? What about a ’10 ways to attract hot girls’ list? Some kind of swag please. Give me something to engage me. Also note if your free gift and bonuses are valuable enough they can be used as link bait. You then have something to blog and brag about. So consider developing a free gift that everyone who joins your list or Likes you on Facebook or follows you on Twitter gets just because you’re that kind of great humanitarian.

Hint: Recently video has been shown to be the absolute most effect free gift. Easy and instant! Videos also help engage the visitor. For example a video giving away the ‘ultimate secret’ of seduction to people who connect with your site could promise to share a really cool secret – but then give them three in the video. Don’t be stingy! Over-deliver. Then use the closing section of the video to upsell into your real product. And of course the whole operation gets uploaded to Youtube, Vimeo, Daily Motion etc…

Speaking of social reach… Where are your social signals? No feeds? No social site badges? Where are your FB and Twitter signals? Don’t have time for Twitter and Facebook? Oh no problem – then your site is a relic — like a dusty old mausoleum statue… isn’t it quaint? Better get that fan page up and running and push your blog content to it and to your twitter stream using plugins (free and easy). You can’t possibly expect busy people to actually visit your site every day hoping you have provided a new nugget of info for them – you have to reach out and give them an dead simple way to see your content. Hint: Social media.

Aesthetics:
I understand you’re going after the whole spartan blog look here but if you are trying to promote a product or service you must hype the benefits. Pictures of the sexy women your clientele could possibly attract would be a good start. You need some compelling images to tease the visitor into engaging the site and returning. Does not have to be pornographic or anything – just a couple provocative images here and there would go a long way.

Your choice of design colors is fine for what you’re doing. White is a trust color so the white background is fine. You will need to figure out a third color to complete the design at some point. Use this free site to play with brand color ideas and when you find something you like make note of the colors so you can try to integrate them into your site. http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Nuts and bolts:
- You are not using permalinks (search engine friendly URL rewrites) in your blog settings. This is a must to help elevate your site to bots so they can pick up your content.

- Use Pages instead of Posts for persistent content. Don’t put page content in a post. Make it a static page. You can then write a post about it and link it so you take advantage of the ping services, but critical persistent information should be main menu content.

– Your header image is does not link to your home page. Did you realize your visitors must use their back button to return to your index page if they drill down to article page? This frustrates surfers and they often double-click the back button because you made then use it. Don’t depend on the web browser for site navigation.

- Your site does not allow comments. Why would you prevent your visitors from engaging you? Comments are the easiest way to generate conversion activity on your website. You need conversion activity on your site to satisfy the third leg of the three legged table = ACTIVITY. Without visitor engagement and activity your site can have all the backlinks and content in the world and still be totally irrelevant.

Hint: Let people leave comments – but moderate the comments of course using your blog settings and once you start to choke on the comment spam flip your site settings so that visitors must by registered and logged in to comment. This create more activity and conversions.

This is just a quick set of suggestions Neal. We can certainly go deeper into any of these topics at your convenience. Feel free to ask questions about any of the issues. Once you have the site ready for prime time we can talk about the secrets of magnetic traffic seduction.

At your servers…
Dwayne

Posted via email from Dwayne Coots

Revisions to this 81-page FTC guideline document — innocently tagged ‘Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising’ — were aimed squarely at web bloggers. The changes define thinly sliced examples of how web endorsements can be defined and how each can stray into the territory of advertisements. It also heralds stern punishment for offenders who write product or service reviews and saddles the blog author with stiff penalties should they fail to divulge that their review is a paid or barter endorsement, or if they make any claims about a product that does not prove true. According to the document available in PDF form here: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf these new regulations will be enforceable starting December 1st, 2009

Sadly, this attack on free speech also endangers countless bloggers who depend on income earned by product reviews.

So what? It’s about time somebody took control and closed down these bloggers clogging up the web with their reviews and cheesy info sites full of affiliate links and questionable testimonials!”

That seems to be the mainstream response, however, those who closely follow the ongoing battle between corporate media and the independent bloggers will see more sinister intent here. Bloggers have made a huge dent in corporate media consumption and advertising revenue. In the early days of the web, corporate media satisfied itself first by stiff arming web publishers as unimportant and amateur — basically not worth following. Then as more consumers flocked to the Internet for information rather than just amusement, the mainstream press turned up the heat with an endless cycle of scare pieces about the dangers of the web and how harmful it could be to surf.

Then amazingly, once the corporate powers had positioned themselves on the web, they proceeded to (attempt to) extend their authority into the new media. Now any news outlet who wishes to survive must maintain sites with interactive Web 2 aspects and social media components. Now they seemed to suddenly embrace the web and everything about it. Every news page and program had the corporations web branding and URL. The web is ours! Bwah ha ha!

The migration of major media onto the web is now complete. Sadly they seem to have brought all their bad baggage along with them. Corporatist slant, raging hyperbola, and elitist globalism still clog their message. So nothing has changed for the better, but at least they can compete in the free market right?

Wrong. Instead of a heads up competition, mainstream media does little else but complain about bloggers and independent news outlets because they are not accountable. More learned media experts point this fact out but also acknowledge the counter point: that bloggers and independent news sources represent the very last resource for information that has not passed through a corporate filter. Professional bloggers make up the huge diversity of information and opinion we now have available to augment or challenge globalist groupthink news outlets.

So no, it is not a heads up competition. Now comes the price. Apparently, the talking heads at big news cannot convince their consumers that unregulated bloggers should be struck from the web by the mere wieght of negative spokesmanship. So the FTC has been called in to begin its little campaign of regulation. It will not escape the informed reader that the FTC is made up of 5 presidentially appointed commissioners, who come to their 7 year post directly from, (you guessed it): corporate law firms. More pointedly still, is how former FTC commissioners are reshuffled back into the corporate law miasma.

Okay so does this mean the end of free speech on the web?

No, but it is another brick in the wall.

##

I set up this little site for the Indy Falcons group. (volunteer). www.indyfalcons.com
If you go there, you will see I have embedded the webcams which are sponsored by the Indianapolis Star.
My question is this: if people come to this page and watch the webcams, does that score a hit on the Star site? I know one of the reasons they support the webcams is the number of hits they get during the season. If embedding the cam removes those hits, I need to take it out and find something else to put there….
Thanks
Susan

——-

Hi Susan;
Happy new year! That’s a good question and a worthy cause.

I looked at the page and checked your code to see what’s what and you are using an iframe to embed these cams onto your page. Since the iframe is just pulling their page into your page it will register as a hit from the visitor computer — your website will not be cited in their logs unless you have some other clickover kind of content.

So to their system it does register a visitor hit so it justifies their supporting the cams. But don’t forget to add some content onto your page also so it can be regarded as important enough to be indexed. If your home page is nothing but an iframe embed from another site it does not qualify as valuable content to search bots. This makes it hard for the site to gain popularity and get ranked so more people can find it organically.

Hope this helps.
Dwayne

This morning I came across a cool review at fellow Examiner Eric Hammer’s site. It was about a company called Zenni Optical and the details made me click over to their site.

Zenni really has their act together. They offer a huge line of high quality eyeglasses at a discount prices. Their website is easy to navigate, but the show stopper is the selection and price.

One the second page of frames I found a near perfect match for my $250 frames for only $29.00 – I almost cried. So just to go apples to apples I checked the Titanium Alloy category — the reason my frames were so expensive, at least that’s what the salesperson said – and found a flexible titanium set like mine for a whopping $39.00 (they’re model #3742 if you’re curious).

You can compare your frame styles (they have a super selection of sharp looking frames) and you’ll have your glasses delivered in about two weeks. Shipping costs are minimal and if you buy several pair you’ll save even more.

First understand that heder.php is just one type of site trojan. There are many flavors of this type of site exploit and they have some things in common, so it might be worth a blog post to cover them.

These kinds of exploits compromise your hosting account. Then they install malicious code into your html pages. They also add some entries to your htaccess file to redirect incoming traffic to the payload. Usually the payload is a version of the same exploit so the code can spread to the next victim.

So now we know how you get it… Basically, this exploit is usually dropped onto your machine when you visit an infected website. It will overwrite a Microsoft ActiveX file on your machine — which is how it hides from your antivirus. (Yes as usual it’s a Micro$oft exploit).

So what does it do?

In the background it scans for usernames and passwords. If it finds them it steals then and uploads them to the hackers. If it finds FTP credentials it uses those to upload itself to your websites and inject some code into your home page and write some backdoor ssh access files into your server space.  This is how it spreads – once it is on your website, anyone who lands on it gets the new code and the process starts attacking their machine.

I have anti-virus software so I’m safe right?

Nyet! Most Antivirus software cannot find it because it is more like spyware. Also it hits your machine via php and javascript code and those are functions your web browser uses all the time — so a firewall is useless to prevent this. Since it hacks an activex helper it hides really well from scanners.

Okay so why do people do this crap? Why me? What do they get out of it?

The hackers make money by retrieving your other credentials (usernames and passwords to banking sites, credit cards etc…) as well as personal info (your SSN, address, phone numbers, etc) and then it uploads them to a public board in encrypted form that only the original programmers have the decrypt key to. So all your data is uploaded to a public forum and the hackers pull these files daily and decrypt them. Then they:

• Sell your email address to spammers
• Sell your personal info to identity thieves
• Sell your credit card details to fraudsters
• Share your exploited ftp details with partners who now have write-privilege to install other payloads to your website…
• Then they post teaser code to boards to help other hackers develop better code.

As a webmaster you should always keep a close eye on your security — particularly ftp credentials. FileZilla is one popular ftp client that is taking a big hit because it stores your credentials in unencrypted format. So if you manage 10 websites for clients and use FileZilla for FTP – you could be at real risk. FilaZilla is an excellent Windows FTP client, but please do not store your passwords in it. (Uncheck the “Save Password” box in the FTP profiles and keep a separate encrypted list of site credentials.)

Hope this helps…

For several years DermaTechRx was the brand for Q-Based products. Now they have expanded into their All Stop line of products are making the best use of the newly designed DermaTechrx website to help people learn from their research and experience in skin related problems, topical pain relief, and human parasites.

You’ll find eGuides covering details and symptoms — complete with visual aides, videos, and charts to help you get the most of your visit. The developers also mention they are adding interactive flash presentations to help parents and educators in the classroom.

We’re excited by this new site and applaud Q-Based for giving back to the public.

Dwayne

Dwayne – You seem kind of like a guru on the online shopping stuff. My husband and I want to try and make some extra money by doing something online. We both have jobs but we figure we can spend about 3 hours on each weeknight and one weekend day to make a go of selling something on the net. We have a few hundred (maybe $500) to put into it. Can you suggest anything? We see the wholesale and dropship ads all over. Does that work?.

Answer:

Howdy Kelly;

Okay that is a great dream and a nice nest egg to start with. First you’re not going to replace your day job any time soon with a $500 investment, but with a little elbow grease and several weekends you can parlay that into something that will pay a car note and maybe create some mad money to boot.

First while I urge you to look into wholesale and dropship options, don’t just leap into anything just because of a sales pitch. Remember that landing page sales copy can be very persuasive and is designed to separate you from your money before you have time to carefully consider. So look into these options then come back and ask for any further advice once you find one you like.

Also consider novelty. Suppliers for novelty items like sexy panties and gag gifts are also an option.

Wholesale or Dropship products:

These are fun. There are aggregators like Doba and Simplix who you pay a fee to and they give you access to many ‘so-called’ wholesale products. Be careful because they are usually closer to 25% off retail so not really wholesale.You can also look into getting individual products and specializing once you find a good wholesale source. For example you can look are and select say, wholesale sunglasses to get started. Setting up a specialty stand at a flea market or the corner of a busy parking lot can make you more in a weekend than a year of eBaying the junk at Doba.

Remember that a lot of other folks are out there trying to make a few extra bucks on the web. If you take a moment to think and talk about differential marketing (how you can be different from everyone else) it can pay off tons.

We want to hear how it goes so please write back.

Thanks again;

Dwayne