One Step Ahead

Danny Sullivan has been offering his Search Engine Watch Web site for years, and it's widely regarded as the premier source for search engine information.

They have just launched a blog, the Search Engine Watch blog (duh :-). So if you'd like to see the real cutting edge of search engine technology, bookmark this now.

One of my new subscribers is thinking of starting a new business, and asked "How to do it with no money down?"

To be honest, I don't know the answer. Most of what I've done on the Internet does require some cash up-front. However, there are also lots of free services around, but they usually come with a catch - such as them displaying their ads on your Web site.

There's a guy in New Zealand who sells an e-book called No-Cash Startups. I haven't read the e-book, but I'm on his mailing list, and his stuff is good. So it might be worth checking him out.

One of my new subscribers asked me this week:

Why do so many people abandon shopping carts when pricing is not the problem?

Great question! And it is true that Internet users abandon shopping carts at an alarming rate. If this happened in the real world, Coles, Wal-Mart and K-Mart would be out of business.

People abandon shopping carts for a number of reasons - most of them because the Web site owner does something stupid ... like ... forcing them to register, not using a secure server, adding unnecessary steps, not publishing a clear privacy policy, not providing a variety of payment options, not publishing a telephone number, not publishing a full street address, not catering for international customers, making it difficult to determine postage and handling costs, including a whole block of incomprehensible fine print for Terms and Conditions, not publishing a refund policy, and so on and so forth.

How do you fix these problems on your Web site? Ah, glad you asked. Check out my free e-book The Seven Fatal Mistakes That Almost Every Business Owner Makes on Their Web Site.

Many clients ask me about the best way to sell products in the USA - do you require a merchant account, a United States company, etc.?

If you're selling electronic products, such as e-books, downloadable audio and video, or digital photographs, one of the simplest ways to get started is with Clickbank. They take care of the entire e-commerce side of your operation, including secure server, merchant account, order processing, affiliate program, and even handling refunds.

Maybe I'm a slow learner, but I found it tricky to navigate my way around Clickbank. They offer a great service, but are a bit light on their documentation. So if you do decide to use Clickbank, check out the ClickBank Success Forum, a free Web site with tons of information about how to get the most out of Clickbank.

Here's a great example of combining mobile phones, cameras, e-mail and the Web.

I'm travelling to Europe and North America next month, and I've been looking for a simple way to publish photos of my travels, while I'm travelling. I came across Buzznet, a free service that provides exactly this facility. One of the nicest things is that you can e-mail your photos to Buzznet, and the system automatically loads them onto your Web pages. This is ideal for me, because I can take a snap with my camera phone, and then e-mail it directly to the Web.

I love using Google. It's fast, uncluttered and usually brings me relevant results on the first page - or if not, on the first three pages.

There's a lot more to Google than meets the eye, especially when your first impression is the plain home page. The excellent googleguide.com Web site will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Google - and even some things that you probably didn't even know to ask!

Many Australian on-line shopping Web sites are depriving consumers of their basic rights, according to the ACCC. For example, when stating their terms and conditions regarding refunds and warranties, some sites are so strict that they misrepresent consumer rights and protections.

I often get asked for advice about pricing products - especially electronic products that have negligible unit cost. Is it better to price them low so that more people buy them, or to price them high so that you make more money per sale?

One of the most important factors is your market reach. If you have the ability to reach lots of qualified customers, then you can set a lower price and rely on volume to make your profits. However, if you can only reach a small market, then you will get fewer sales, so it might be better to make more money from each sale.

Here's an excellent example...

I'm a cricket fan, and I've been waiting eagerly for the Test series between Australia and India - virtually the world title fight. ABC radio is covering the game live, but you don't get full coverage. Fortunately, Cricinfo is providing live broadcasts over the Internet - for a price. Cricinfo has a huge following world-wide, especially in cricket-mad India, so they can afford to charge a measly US$3 per Test match (or US$8 for the entire series) for this service. It just goes to show what you can achieve when you have such a large list.

Amazon.com has released its A9 search engine, and it's worth a look. Not only does it presents high-quality results like Google (in fact, it uses Google), but it also includes a couple of other cool features. One of the best - and obviously in Amazon.com's own interests - is to search inside books!

A9 is also a lot smarter about remembering your history of searches, but are there privacy issues around that?

It's an election week, and child pornography has been in the news, so it's not surprising that both major parties are having their say on blocking child pornography on the Internet. As usual, there's a lot of rhetoric.

The Liberal/National coalition government started Internet censorship in Australia in 1999, in an effort to block child pornography. But this has been a dismal failure, as the recent nationwide arrests show. The Coalition is now reluctant to commit itself to future legislation in this area, though Prime Minister John Howard said he would consider anything the Australian Federal Police recommends.

The Labor Party is sending mixed messages. On the one hand, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie has vowed to look into mandatory blocking at the ISP level.

But the federal Labor Party isn't so committed. Labor Communications Spokeswoman Kate Lundy declined to comment, except to refer to Labor's policy of committing money to Internet safety education. Now that's a sensible policy!

However, Senator Lundy doesn't have full support of her colleagues, some of whom prefer a technical solution, which - in my opinion, given the current technology available - is doomed to fail.

At the start of the campaign, the Prime Minister John Howard was accused of sending e-mail spam to his electorate. Now he's been accused of telemarketing "spam", and the opposition parties are up in arms about it.

His party defends it on the grounds that they have been using telemarketing techniques since 1996, and the only difference now is that it's a pre-recorded message rather than a live telemarketer. And heck, if it's good enough for companies to do it, why should politicians be banned from doing it?

The real issue, of course, is that most people hate telemarketers, but neither major party is willing to do anything about it. Oh, there is the occasional media release on a slow news day, but don't hold your breath for any real action!

At the start of the campaign, the Prime Minister John Howard was accused of sending e-mail spam to his electorate. Now he's been accused of telemarketing "spam", and the opposition parties are up in arms about it.

His party defends it on the grounds that they have been using telemarketing techniques since 1996, and the only difference now is that it's a pre-recorded message rather than a live telemarketer. And heck, if it's good enough for companies to do it, why should politicians be banned from doing it?

The real issue, of course, is that most people hate telemarketers, but neither major party is willing to do anything about it. Oh, there is the occasional media release on a slow news day, but don't hold your breath for any real action!

The Australian Government has promised to review the laws concerning "spyware" (a term used to describe software that installs itself on a computer without the user's full knowledge, and then transmits information back to the spyware author). IT Minister Helen Coonan has committed to reviewing these laws as part of a broader review of electronic security, with the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA).

So far all we've got is a general notice of intent. It will be interesting to see whether this translates into genuine action, leading eventually to strong international laws banning spyware. I doubt it, though. If anything does happen, we're likely to end up with watered-down or ineffectual laws, as happened with the Anti-Spam law last year.

In the meantime, DCITA has released an on-line guide to e-security for small business, which is a good start. You can also protect yourself further with The Common Sense Guide to PC Security.

Large companies who have ignored search engine marketing might be in for a rude shock when they first turn their efforts in this direction. They might discover that the best search engine positions have already been snapped up by smaller businesses that are promoting their products (legally, as registered affiliates of the large company). In her new book, Search Engine Advertising Catherine Seda talks about this problem, where companies can suffer a signficant loss in profits because smarter, more nimble affiliates were savvy enough to recognise the value of Internet marketing before the lumbering giants turned in that direction.

This just goes to show the power of Internet marketing for even small businesses. While large companies with multi-million-dollar advertising budgets are throwing their money at expensive ad agencies, the smaller players are quietly - but profitably - turning to the Internet for their advertising.

On a similar note, while conducting a Google advertising campaign for a client, I discovered recently that I could get top placement in Google for the keywords "election", "australian election" and even "John Howard" for just 9 cents a click. It was so easy, because the big media organisations just haven't bothered advertising, so it was a cinch to grab top spot for bottom dollar.

Australians are highly likely to be targeted by "phishing" scammers, who pose as banks, other financial institutions and other reputable organisations in an attempt to trick Internet users into revealing confidential information. According to a report from Internet security experts Symantec, Australia's well-developed banking sector makes it an attractive target for scammers.

Many Internet users are now getting used to these sort of scams, and can recognise them at a glance. However, scammers are getting more sophisticated, and constant vigilance is required to keep them at bay.

The Labor Party, vying for election as Australia's government next month, has proposed a new law to stop hard-core pornography from reaching children. The new plan would require Internet Service Providers to install mandatory filtering programs that would force adults to verify their identity before viewing X-rated Web sites.

Sigh ... It's election time, so I guess we should expect pollies to be promising everything under the sun.

The fact is that Australia already has laws to protect children from adult material. Unfortunately, the law has proven to be a dismal failure. Why would we expect the new law to be any different? It won't be. It's just another stupid promise to try to garner a few votes come the election.

The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, has been accused of being a spammer, after it was revealed that he hired his son's company to send unsolicited e-mail to constituents in the Prime Minister's electorate.

Political parties are exempt from the new anti-spam laws in Australia. However, the opposition parties have accused Mr Howard of breaching the spirit of the law.

Yes, the Prime Minister is a spammer. Not by the strict definition of the law, but certainly in the eyes of most Internet users.

But I can't understand why his opponents are criticising him for it (Well, actually I can understand it: It's a few weeks away from an election!). The law clearly states that political parties are exempt. So, sooner or later, a politician would take advantage of it.

This is not "cynically exploiting a loophole" or "a clear case of double standards", as the Labor Party's technology spokesperson Senator Kate Lundy says. The exemption is written into the law, and Mr Howard is entitled to use it.

BUT ... and this is a big but ... It should never have been written into the law in the first place! Politicians should not be allowed to send spam. There's simply no reasonable argument in favour of exempting political parties (nor charities and schools, for that matter) from the anti-spam provisions.

So rather than these politicians claiming to be shocked by one of their own taking advantage of something written in the law that they themselves wrote, we would all be better served by them removing that exemption. But you won't hear many pollies taking that approach. Why? After all, it would stop them from spamming in the future!

I reported recently that Australia has recently hit the million user mark with broadband access. However, that still puts us two years behind other developed countries, according to consulting company AT Kearney.

Part of this is due to technical reasons (Australia's infrastructure doesn't support the very high-speed access that other countries enjoy), and part of it is political (for example, Australian law requires "Universal Service Obligation" for its telecommunications network, which means in effect that if everybody can't have it, then nobody can). The Australian government is also doing less than many of its OECD counterparts in providing governmnet support for broadband access.

What does this mean for your Web site? Simple: Don't rely on your users having broadband access. You still have to design your site so that the 90% of other users can access it effectively.