ClickZ: Forefield Case Study: When Traffic Is the Goal

Traffic to the FMA Advisor site means subscribers are accessing valuable content. If they don't visit, they won't see that content and aren't taking full advantage of the service. If they aren't getting the most out of FMA Advisor, they're less likely to renew their subscription. That would result in lower company revenues.

In the past, Forefield posted alerts on the site's home page. You can see the problem -- without a reminder or alert sent directly to users, they're less likely to log on. A typical Forefield subscriber visited twice monthly. By then, an alert could be out of date.

So Forefield turned to e-mail [alerts using email vendor Boldfish].

Forefield has seen an overall increase of 88.7 percent in FMA Advisor use since it began e-mail alerts.

Product usage (e.g., individuals who log onto the site and check out the FMA Advisor) has increased dramatically immediately following e-mail alerts -- typically 200-250 percent.

Forefield's two largest customers have renewed their contracts, and both have increased in value. Each company has more employees using FMA Advisor, so each pays more.

For the record, Robert Loch and I also contribute to The End of Free, a web site dedicated to paid content models.

[MarketingFix]

"Would you rather get paid a one-time fee from an editor to write an article for a magazine or would you rather write something that earns you money and keeps earning you money?" asks Jennie. "You know the answer: You'd rather write something that keeps earning YOU money."Jennie's latest ebook, "Write Industry Reports: Work at Home and Start Earning $5,000 in Royalties per Month" reveals her quietly-whispered secrets to earn residual income from your writing and research skills. [PRWEB Jan 16, 2003] [PR Web]

"Google Word Index" showed signs of changes in the Google™ Database today. Yesterday we had already made huge gains in getting the words "google village" and "googlology" and "googlosophy" into the Google database. As part of my marketing strategy for the site, I have chosen to carve out a set of words in the Google Database where this site and its sister site Google Village can dominate [more on this strategy in the article today 'Page Rank . . . Forget Page Rank'].

Today, I got the shock of my life; I checked the Google Word Index we have on our site, and there it was staring me in the face. We had lost all of our entries in Google™ Database:

See the word 'Googlology'? Only four entries? And none of them mine! Yesterday, January 20, 2003 there were 65 of them and now there was none! Also 'Google Village' the whole 133 references to Google Village missing! And there were only 3 and none of them mine! Yesterday we had started getting some really good traffic from these words! And now they were gone.

Constantly for the next hour I checked. Within an hour see what happened:

Google Village was back and Googlology had more entries than yesterday!! Look also how the word "Google" had changed too from 17.5 million to 18.7 million. Ah! and when I checked on the fresh material that I had entered over the last few days, there it was in Google™ Database.

It would seem that when fresh weblog pages are entered into the Google Database, that the previous stuff that was entered as fresh pages is deleted from the database. Then the new stuff is added. I just happened to be sitting on the Google Word Index when those changes occurred today.

That refreshing is also done over a rolling period of time. See in the second hour update (the second diagram above) that 'Googlosophy' is '0'? Well another hour after that you will see 'Googlosophy' back again with its 37 occurrences.

It is now 21 days since we started Google Village and Googlology Info sites. What we are learning about getting listed and getting traffic through Google™ is amazing!

[Elwyn Jenkins: googlology]

[Scripting News]

[Scripting News]

Search Engine Blog: The State Of Search Engine Marketing, 2003. Google rules the roost

A nice discussion of the issues facing SEM in 2003. This year should certainly be interesting, with the Google, Overture, Yahoo, MSN, and AlltheWeb all likely to be involved in some serious wheeling dealing.

Two trends that many interviewees acknowledged, besides the potential and popularity of this marketing channel, were that search engine optimization is in the process of "growing up", moving beyond pure placement and firmly into the realm of marketing. ROI, conversions, reporting and tracking are becoming increasingly important. The old-school technical exercise of attaining high rankings is perhaps becoming increasingly marginalized. If rankings do not translate into sales, then what good are they? It's no longer enough just to be seen, web sites must put search engine traffic to work.

[MarketingFix]

Media Post: Pop-up vs. Pop-under: Researchers See No Difference

A good discussion of the pop scene, highlighting research that suggests that pop-ups and pop-unders are considering with equal disdain by users. Some disagree with this prognosis, most notably iVillage that made a big thing about dropping pop-up, but then continued to serve pop-unders.

Personally I think that it is fair to lump them together given that they both hijack the user experience by opening a browser. To suggest, as Peter Naylor, VP, general manager of sales at iVillage does, that the “difference is up vs. down, white vs. black” is simply laughable, something that I'm certain that his audience will point out to him in due course.

[MarketingFix]

Hot on the heels of Matt Mower (who is baking support for the Internet Topic Exchange into LiveTopics), Georg Bauer has updated his PyDS blogging tool to allow liveTopics-like post categorisation and Topic Exchange pinging.

 

It works really well. To enable it, you click a link on your desktop website home page and are presented with a list of available topics (everything from here). You check a few boxes and click 'Save', and from then on a set of checkboxes marked 'Topics' will appear under the 'Categories' line when you want to make a new post. Check a box and make a post, and it will automatically be syndicated up to the Topic Exchange. Great!

Hey - this is brilliant. Michael Fagan is organising the topics on the Topic Exchange, in a completely unintended but incredibly sensible use of the Wiki pages that are associated with every topic.

[Seb's Open Research]

Two BusinessWeek articles (via gooGuide): Google's Gaggle of Problems. 'sources say Yahoo has grown tired of Google.com's popularity and may soon cut its tie to the company. "The portals have started to get fed up. Over the last three years, Google has stolen 40% of the search market directly at the expense of AOL, MSN, and Yahoo," says Jason Kellerman, CEO of search-technology company LookSmart, which has a deal with MSN.' 'measurements by Web traffic tracker Nielsen NetRatings, AOL [which uses Google's results and ads] and Google.com together get six times the search traffic of Yahoo, the closest competitor.' Will Froogle Be a Google for Shoppers? "As a Google fanatic -- my wife claims I sometimes murmur Google in my sleep -- I was too excited to wait for the final release [of Froogle]. Alas, after some unscientific research and lots of experimenting with the beta version, I have to report that Froogle definitely isn't the best way to find bargains on the Net."... [Google Weblog]

With increasing numbers of legitimate e-mail marketers swept up in the war on spam, the industry leaders form a coalition to protect their interests. [internetnews.com: Internet Advertising Report]

J:L This sounds a lot like RECA (Responsible Electronic Communications Alliance) formed in Sept. 2000. <Google's cached page>

Fifteen of the nation's top email service bureaus today announced creation of the Responsible Electronic Communication Alliance (RECA) to promote professional standards for online communication and marketing. The coalition also announced progress on the adoption of industry-wide messaging and e-commerce benchmarks designed to respect consumer privacy and the needs of Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Founding members of RECA (www.ResponsibleEmail.org) include:

24/7 Media (Nasdaq: TFSM)
Message Media
Acxiom Corporation (Nasdaq: ACXM)
American List Council
Bigfoot Interactive
ClickAction™ Inc (Nasdaq: CLAC)
Digital Impact (Nasdaq: DIGI)
DoubleClick (Nasdaq: DCLK)
e-Dialog
EmailChannel, Inc. >> I was founder and CEO
FloNetwork, Inc.
Netcentives Inc. (Nasdaq: NCNT)
Phase2Media
Responsys
yesmail.com, a cmgi company (Nasdaq: CMGI)