Would you like to give instructions to your visitors about how to white list your domain name when they sign up for your email list? Get tired of keeping up with the latest instructions? Well fret no longer, just point your visitors to my free whitelist generator, which will produce a custom white list instruction set for your newsletter. And, since I’ll keep it up-to-date, you’ll never have to worry about it again. And no, it’s not covered with ads.

Here’s all you need to do….

• Site or Newsletter Name - Your Newsletter Name, spaces replaced with “%20″… so “Weekly Newsletter” becomes “Weekly%20Newsletter”.
• Your Domain Name - your “.com” name. For example, websiteadvice.com… don’t use the “WWW”
• SendAddress - the address that will appear in the “From” field of newsletters. CHECK IT, this is important.

Here’s how the link is assembled:

http://www.sitecreations.com/whitelist.php
?params&SiteName=SITE-or-NEWSLETTER-NAME
&DomainName=yourdomainname.com
&SendAddress=send@yourdomain.com

Examples of this in use (don’t forget to replace the information in the link)

Click here for instructions about how to make sure you get our newsletter.

White-listing instructions for our newsletter.

Where to Use it:

• On your “thank you for signing up page”
• On your email footer.
• On your website or blog.

Did I skip a spam filter? Bugs? Let me know and I’ll take a look.

Beware of the Ides of March!

Okay, we don’t need to get astrological on this, and after all, it was just a graph that cause the technical problem, but try telling that to the average identity-theft-security-paranoid-id customer who logs on to these major financial sites.Â

(Click thumbnail to zoom JP Morgan’s screen shot)

Rustybrick at SEOroundtable has drawn attention to a very interesting thread which should make those in charge of client webservers prick up their ears. I encounter resistance from some clients when I suggest a hosting change once I see they’re using a cut-rate provider. DNS changes, server switch-overs, and broken 404 pages are all major poison to your Google rank. It’s also sounding like you may not get back where you were in the Google index - as it’s my understanding that Google counts “length in index” as one of its 200 ranking factors.

People wonder sometimes why I run my own servers and have a backup SLA of 4-6 hours. I think his observation speaks directly to the need for this. SEO and server uptime are peas in a pod, folks.

So the next time your host says “your site will be off-line for a few hours while we do maintenence” think about the implications to your rank!

David Meerman Scott recently posted a very well thought out post “How to Pitch the Media” which rang true as I purged at least 10 unsolictied pitches for irrelevant stories from my inbox for Business Lexington this morning. The pitches were ridiculous - general, poorly written, disorganized, and time consuming to read. Honestly, I just organized my in-box and found that my company received 4,450 emails that were not spam (66,138 were) in January. I monitor 1920 RSS feeds (loosely) and 300 or so rigorously. I don’t need your bland, poorly thought out ideas.

• Read the magazine and understand something about why it exists. Uh oh, you say, now you can’t spam the journalists with mass email. Nope, sure can’t. Often the magazine will push out its stories on an RSS feed, giving you the perfect vehicle for keeping up-to-date.
• Tell them why this story or idea is unique. Is it new? Why shouldn’t they just take the pitch and write about the competition? Even though journalism is only about 5% of my work week, I hate receiving pitches that reek of laziness.
• Don’t insult their intelligence.
• Provide URLs for reference in the story that are clickable.
• Make it immediately apparent that you’ve done your homework. Think inverted pyramid.
• Make your note skimmable - make the key points visible in the preview pane. Marketing Sherpa tells us why it’s so important.
• Don’t bother with stories about promotions, name changes, internal reorganizations, sponsorships, donations or other internal matters.

If you plan to pitch bloggers, I recommend checking out this post, which includes some rules which demonstrates that the blogosphere is different than the standard journalistic brigade. And there is also evidence that bloggers’ importance seems to be gaining ground all the time.

Google’s just announced that they are starting testing site-targeted pay-per-click. Currently that is available only as CPM (cost per thousand.) It’s pretty clear that Google stands to make more money from a CPC model using site targeting as advertisers will be able to become extremely precise in their placements.

It will change the way I think about a few of my clients’ campaigns. I’m certain its going to increase costs in some cases as we’ve been running consistantly at $8 CPM on some great placements. The quality score calculations must be pretty complex for this kind of ad, as the site and the landing page are highly variant - unlike the SERPswhich have a predictable presentation. I’m thinking it will be pretty hard to know what these ads are going to cost and even harder to stay consisent.

Websites have many interests represented. I.T., Marketing, Sales, and other departments have opinions and needs for the company website, so the last thing that they need in this case is a search expert coming in from the outside and tweaking pages - saying “just trust me.” For this reason, off-site-testing is an ideal way to accumulate data that can be presented to all invested parties.

With a suite of good A/B testing methods and tools, combined with the power of pay-per-click or CPM traffic, it’s possible to create a compelling list of requests with a high return on effort spent.

Testing on:

• Layout Variations

• Navigation ideas

• Offers & Pricing

• Merchandise Choices

• Cross-Sell & Up-Sell

• Multimedia Enhancements

…can be done without disruption of your internal organization. The nature of these pages means they are low-investment. The development of the ideas may not be as “polished” as the same idea realized on your production website, but sufficient that tests are valid. The key of course is to obtain statistically-significant sample sizes and make good decisions on test sets.

The biggest mistake, according to Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MEC Labs, is to end the tests early, and by having the experiments occurring out of the mainstream of pressure, better testing can be done - perhaps for sufficient duration to obtain a good sample size. In fact - sometimes the internal players (I.T., others) forget about the testing completely - and are pleased to have no extra work to do in support of it. Sometimes it’s a stealth test, where an outside firm is used to test a concept for one department so that they have “ammunition” to take their case to their boss or opposing faction*. By the time the data about changes is gathered, and winning solutions established, there is excitement about integrating change into the main site.

*Stealth-Ops Testing: Offsite testing can be outsourced when an internal department has a case to prove, but don’t really want to “stir the pot” internally. Here, outsourcing the testing itself can be a strong advantage. We are willing to use aliases, use cryptography in communications, and set up lookouts during meetings…… Kidding.