Another reason for simple two-column websites

July 20, 2010 by JD · 1 Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Internet Marketing, Musings, Site Build It 

I spent the night in the hospital following a procedure that is helping me kick this cancer’s butt and did not bring my MacBook Pro with me. I’ve been on Facebook and browsing the web using Safari on my iPod Touch.

I’m able to view most sites (except those that rely on Flash) on my iPod, and I assume that they are viewable on other mobile devices, too.

One thing I really noticed was that sites with three or more columns are significantly harder to read on my iPod than simpler two-column sites.

Most of my sites have been simple two-column sites with the navigation in the left column (and maybe some money-making links) and the main content in the wider right column.

Most of my income is generated by in-context text links in the content column.

A lot of people think those sites are old-fashioned and, as one critic said, “so 20th century.”

It’s true that sites like MurphyGold.com and AYearFromNow.com are plain and look like they are wasting real estate on large monitors. I have been encouraged, repeatedly, to make them wider and add another column.

I don’t intend to do either.

Why?

It’s true that I prefer three columns for my blogs, but that isn’t for your benefit, dear reader. It’s for the search engines and me. By visiting one of my blogs, I can scan the various RSS feeds in the left and right columns and see if I need to visit another site and do something there.

There is some evidence in my site stats that those links bring in more readers through the search engines.

However, my three column sites are not moneymakers. It doesn’t work for me, even though others have reported good results.

When I have tested moving Google Adsense ads from the content column into a third column on the right, income has always dropped dramatically. The same is true for both text- and graphic-links. Both perform better in the content column in a two-column format.

I don’t know if that’s because most people ignore the right-most column or if they have more ad blindness in a column that normally contains mostly ads.

My best sites for generating income have always been rather plain sites that are easy to navigate and have few, if any, distractions. They don’t have the eye candy that lots of people like, but those aren’t the people who click my links and help me pay the bills.

(Thank you to those of you who do!)

For many sites, perhaps the bells and whistles, multiple images and photos, and a plethora of ads do generate more income for them. I assume that some of them have tested the results they get from the changes they make.

For me and the products I recommend, simpler is demonstrably better. I have proof based on research into visitor numbers, bounce rates, conversion rates, and income to back this up.

So, returning to my initial idea, I think the simple sites will do better for me for people who visit my sites using cellphones and other mobile devices, and will continue to perform well for people browsing on their larger computers. I’ll be tracking this as well as I can in the next few months.

Anecdotally, I know that there are sites to which I won’t return when I’m using my iPod, because they are simply too hard to navigate.

Perhaps some of those sites have mobile feeds, but, unless they make it immediately obvious early in their navigation menu, I won’t go digging for it. I’ll just go to a different site that presents comparable information in a way I want to see it.

I’m perfectly willing for people who don’t like my old-fashioned, two-column, plain sites to do the same. Thanks for dropping in. Not for you? Okay, see ya.

I might change my mind if more eye candy ever starts generating more income. (Yes, I’ll probably test it again one of these days.)

For now, however, simpler performs better for me.

I run a business. Performance doesn’t mean more visitors, more comments, or longer conversations. It means more money in my bank account.

I greatly enjoy the social interactions on my blogs, online communities, and Facebook. Making money on those sites is not their primary purpose, but they have to at least break even and pay their own costs, excluding Facebook, which is free.

You may have different purposes, definitions, and priorities for your sites.

Act on your dream!

JD

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How to deal with distractions

January 28, 2010 by JD · 7 Comments
Filed under: Business, Family, Internet Marketing, Musings 

On another of my blogs, I recently wrote about how broadband makes a huge difference in online marketing.

In that post, I concentrated on the benefits of fast Internet access and how it helps to get more work done.

In this post, I’m going to look at the other side of the coin and how broadband Internet access throws up so many shiny red balls that tend to catch my attention and pull me from my work.

To be fair, life is not all about work and there should be a good balance between work and play, business and family, and even being at home and getting out in the world. I know those things.

What brings this all up is that I’ve been spending much of my time with my daughter and her family this month and I’ve encountered some things that have made it more difficult to focus on my work and to ignore the distractions.

1. Television – the great time waster.

For years, I could only see 3.5 channels on TV – NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS. I say 3.5 channels because I could only receive PBS part of the time.

When TV switched from analog to digital, I could see exactly 0 (yep, zero) channels. No TV!

For many people that would have been a disaster, but for me it helped to make more time to focus on my work.

Now, I don’t know how many channels are available here. There are channels I’ve never seen before and some of them catch my interest in ways I never would have imagined.

I was watching a show about rebuilding Stonehenge on the National Geographic channel. It was a fascinating story of how some folks built replicas of the Stonehenge monolithic rocks using foam and rebuilt what they think is a good replica of the original Stonehenge. I found that fascinating. *Poof* there goes an hour of my life. Was it educational? I think so. Did it help me get closer to reaching my goals? Not at all.

My daughter introduced me to a show called Cake Boss about some folks in New Jersey that have a bakery and specialize in some rather awesome cakes. Never in a million years would I have thought I’d find that interesting, but I did. The next thing I knew, I’d watched three episodes and another hour and a half had evaporated. Entertaining? Yes. Closer to achieving my dream? No.

I could go on and on. I bet I’ve wasted 30 or 40 hours this month, just watching TV. I’ve been watching old reruns of NCIS, Becker, Cheers, and lots of other old favorites. Why? I’m not really sure.

2. Internet video – both useful and an incredible time waster.

I have really mixed feelings about this one.

Now that I have access to broadband, I’ve discovered that I both like and loathe online videos, and I haven’t been good at separating the two.

I recently learned about Hulu.com and while I enjoy some of what it has to offer, it has cost me quite a few hours of productive work time.

For instance, I have watched six or seven episodes from season one of The A-Team and enjoyed all of them. Entertaining? You betcha. Helps me get closer to reaching my goals? Quite the opposite.

I have been a big fan of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis for several years. Since I didn’t have cable TV, the only way I could watch them was to rent them on Netflix.

While playing around on Hulu.com, I discovered that Amanda Tapping, who had been one of the co-stars in both Stargate series had a show of her own called Sanctuary. Three episodes were available on Hulu and I watched all of them. I liked the show so much that I added all of the episodes from season one of the series to my Netflix queue and eventually they’ll show up in my mailbox.

With broadband, I don’t have access to just three DVDs at a time, I can watch shows online from NetFlix and that’s a huge temptation.

Until this month, I had much less temptation to watch movies and TV episodes because I had made it a habit to do all my work first and would reward myself with a little TV (by watching DVDs from Netflix) while eating dinner.

Now, however, there is a huge number of shows and movies I’d love to watch and I don’t even have to wait the two days it normally takes to mail a DVD back and get the next one in my queue.

So, I’ve had to think about ways to deal with these distractions.

I realize that watching old reruns at random is a waste of my time and energy. I don’t think I’m going to have a difficult time tuning them out.

On the other hand, I’ve also discovered the lure of YouTube.

I will never get hooked on the mindless entertainment that is available on YouTube. I have no doubt about that.

However, I’ve discovered that YouTube has some interesting and useful content that I will watch and some of it may even be helpful in my business.

For example, I’m a huge fan of Napoleon Hill and his books Think and Grow Rich and Law of Success. But, until last week, I’d never seen a video of him. Quite by accident, I stumbled across a video of Mr. Hill talking about his initial meeting with Andrew Carnegie and how that launched his career devising and publicizing his personal success courses and philosophy.

Since I have some pages on my sites about Napoleon Hill, I added this video to a couple of them. For example, you can see that video on this page: Napoleon Hill – Think and Grow Rich – Law of Success.

I think that video actually adds something to the information about Mr. Hill.

So, while I’ll never waste any time watching videos of squirrels surfing or idiots doing stupid things, I do find value in some of the videos available on YouTube and I’ll be making use of some of them in the future.

One of the things I plan to do is create short videos of some of the business owners on Murphy Gold where they can talk about why they enjoy owning and operating the businesses they do. I think that will provide good information that some of their customers and prospects will enjoy learning.

I still have to learn how to create and edit these videos, but that’s going to be pretty easy since one of my granddaughters has a photography business and can take good videos with one of her cameras.

I have video editing software on my computer that I’ve never used, so it will be interesting to learn if this will be another distraction or a way to help promote my business and my client’s businesses.

So, perhaps I needed to get caught up in some of these distractions this month in able to sort out the useful from the shiny red balls that just lead me off track.

I can see how someone who doesn’t have a plan or goals to achieve could be dragged into hours and hours of wasted time.

It’s easy to do. Just veg out in front of the tube and let it feed nonsense into your receptors.

On the other hand, when I find something that matches the goals I have set for myself, I’m discovering a whole new world of information that can really be useful.

The hard part is to separate the two and not let myself be distracted by things that will never lead me one step closer to achieving my goals.

What about you?

How do you deal with distractions? Do you have plans and goals you want to achieve? Do they help you stay focused?

All the best,

JD

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Mitch Mitchell is asking good questions on his blog

July 30, 2009 by JD · 1 Comment
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Internet Marketing 

My friend, Mitch Mitchell, has been posting some excellent questions on his I’m Just Sharing blog over the last couple of days.

Now, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t regularly write good posts, it just indicates that I’ve been thinking a lot about the questions he’s been asking recently, and still haven’t come up with complete answers for some deceptively deep questions.

It started with his Truth In Marketing? post.

He followed that up with Who Is Your Blog For? and Who Are The Affiliate Programs On Your Blog For?

I commend him for addressing these issues and asking these questions.

Do you have anything to add to the discussions on his blog?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Working like crazy behind the scenes

July 13, 2009 by JD · 8 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Dilbeck Marketing, Internet Marketing, Murphy NC 28906, Murphy North Carolina, Products at Amazon, Site Build It 

If you look at the home page of this blog or read the RSS feed, it looks like I’ve been a lazy boy for the last month or so.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

I’ve been working behind the scenes to fix a major problem, update a large site, and bring a new site online.

My goal of bringing the new site online by July 1 was delayed about a week, but I’m making progress with it, again.

Dumped by Amazon

In the last week of June 2009, I received a notice from Amazon.com that they were terminating my affiliation with their associates program.

To say that I was surprised would be a huge understatement.

To top it off, it had nothing to do with me. I was dumped because I live in North Carolina and Amazon.com dumped all their associates in the entire state in one fell swoop.

This was done in anticipation of changes in the NC tax laws that had not been passed nor gone into effect!

I’ve been a proud associate of Amazon.com for about 13 years, but, after this, I’ll never recommend them to anyone and I won’t buy from them. I’m done with Amazon.com.

Rebuilding a large site

As a result of being dumped by Amazon.com, I have started to remove all links to their site. This is going to take me months to accomplish. I have links to their products on just about every page of most of my sites, and some of them have over 1,000 pages.

It’s a second-level priority, right behind building a new site, because I don’t want to send them any customers with no possibility of receiving a commission for my work.

I’ve removed links from most of my blogs, but modifying my static sites will take much longer.

Over the last couple of weeks, I completely rebuilt JohnDilbeck.com. This is one of my oldest and largest sites. In the process, I deleted several hundred pages that were out of date or no longer relevant.

Rebuilding the site was something that I’ve planned to do for a while, but being dumped by Amazon.com was the catalyst that motivated me to take action as quickly as I could.

My affiliate marketing business has taken a hit

After the world economic downturn last September, my marketing business has been hit hard by a big reduction in income.

This was not entirely unexpected, but the suddenness came as a surprise.

Since December, I’ve been making new plans to shift a part of my marketing efforts from affiliate marketing to helping locally-owned small businesses in Murphy, NC attract new customers and enticing existing customers to come back, again.

Murphy Gold is live

To do this, I worked for six months to plan how to accomplish these goals and started planning a new site.

Although there is still construction debris all around and parts of it still need a fresh coat of paint, Murphy Gold is now live.

I still have a lot to do on that site, but I’ve been working at it diligently. I’ve researched over 2,000 keyword phrase combinations and have been doing the initial traffic building work.

I’m not ready for a grand opening announcement, but I’m hoping that one will be forthcoming in a couple of weeks.

Back to my cave…

In the meantime, I’m going back to my cave in the mountains of western North Carolina and I’ll be working all hours of the day and night to get everything on my to-do list done as soon as possible.

One of these days, I’ll be able to write on this blog more frequently than I’ve been doing over the last several months.

Act on your dream!

JD

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New arts and crafts guide and marketplace

May 20, 2009 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Arts and Crafts, Internet Marketing 

The following paragraph is excerpted from the press release on PRWeb:
Announcing the Launch of the Most Comprehensive Online Guide and Marketplace for American Arts and Crafts

The new venture, AmericaCreates.com,
AmericaCreates.com, offers electronic storefronts for independent artists while also inviting consumers to explore the artist experience and learn about upcoming creative events and associations in their communities. In addition to selling excellent quality American artwork and fine crafts, America Creates includes easy-to-search databases making it possible for visitors to simply find local exhibitions, classes, artist cooperatives, art schools, guilds and gallery openings, and learn more about specific art techniques.

Later in the press-release, it says, “U.S.-based artists and fine craftspeople – along with guilds, co-ops, art schools, community art centers, museums and galleries- are invited to join the community at no charge.”

Sharon Sinclair, one of the founders, says, “We understand the difficulty many artists experience in marketing their own merchandise. The energy it takes to do this well often leaves little time for their craft. Many have little budget or time to create a Web presence, yet consumers are in search of one-of-a-kind objects with a personal story. America Creates was designed to bring people together and help creativity flourish.”

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Post flyers to your Facebook profile from Vflyer

March 12, 2009 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Advertising, Dilbeck Marketing, Internet Marketing, Murphy NC 28906, Web Services 

Do you know about Vflyer.com?

I’ve been watching this site as it has developed over the last couple of years and opened a free account in 2007, but never did much with it. I created a test flyer, but never published it.

I think Vflyer.com is ideally suited for people who sell products and who want to create flyers with text and photos using templates that are pretty well designed.

For example, if I were a real estate salesman or sold cars, I’d be using this service on a regular basis.

Since I sell services, I haven’t found it to be all that useful for me, but I keep in touch with what they’re doing so I can pass it along to my consulting clients.

Today, however, when I was catching up on reading the blogs to which I subscribe, I ran across a very interesting post on the Vflyer blog:

New Feature! Post Links to Your Flyers to Your Facebook Profile.

That caught my attention!

I’m always looking for ways to leverage my advertising on social networking sites.

Since I hadn’t visited my Vflyer site in awhile, I went there and saw how pathetic it really was. Now that I was aware of it, I couldn’t leave it like that, so I spent a half-hour or so updating the information and creating a new flyer for my local marketing consulting.

Just as their blog indicated, it was extremely easy to post a link to my new flyer on my Facebook profile.

Not only that, Vflyer automatically posted the flyer to my Google Base account and could have posted to other sites, but, since this was mainly for testing, I chose not to do that.

Another nice thing about Vflyer is that it is easy to create a PDF of your flyer that you can print, email, or otherwise distribute, even if you know practically nothing about PDFs.

There are a few things I don’t like about the flyer I created.

At the top of the flyer, where I’m describing my service, it does not put a blank line between paragraphs, or even indent new paragraphs, and I think that is just bad form.

Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with the layout and the ease of creation of the flyer.

I could have done it myself using Pages or a word processor, but it would have taken much longer and probably would not have looked as nice.

The other thing I am not happy with is the wording in the attributes section of the flyer. I know that it should talk to my clients and should not be about me, so there are some things I will be changing before I start distributing it seriously.

Still, it’s not bad for a free service and about a half-hour of work.

If you’re my friend on Facebook, you can see the link to the flyer.

I know I don’t use enough photos on my blogs and other publications, and this flyer is no different. If I had more talent in that area, I’m sure I could have found a good photo, but I didn’t.

However, if you’re renting property, selling homes, selling cars, or running a service business that is more appropriate for photos, Vflyer makes it easy to add them.

As a free user, you obviously don’t have all the features that paid members enjoy, but it still does a very good job. Paid accounts start at less than $15 per month and I believe their service would easily be worth that amount if I sold high-end products, especially if I lived in a larger town that had a local Craigslist or Kijiji site.

All in all, this was an unexpected, yet very interesting diversion from what I had planned for my morning.

I already know of a couple of clients I’ll be advising to start using the services provided by Vflyer.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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