Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Well this has definitely been one wild week. It certainly started off quietly enough and I thought I was going to have a chance to spend some time working on a few of my own projects but that soon changed as one order after another rolled in.

Weather-wise it's been crazy too. Here it's winter time and that's usually quite a pleasant sunny time here yet since Wednesday we've managed to have a one in a hundred year storm that was the equivalent of a Category One or Category Two cyclone and it's hung around for two days. The winds have dropped a little today but the rain is just bucketing down and we've gone from drought to floods. Earlier this week we were on water restrictions and now the flood boats are out rescuing people

The storm even caused Australia to be invaded by a foreign country. An Indonesian naval vessel was on its way down the coast on a goodwill visit when it got caught in the storm and now it's firmly aground on a beach just down the coast.

The crew managed to get off the ship and walked inland where a passing motorist picked them up and gave them a lift into the nearest town in the back of his truck. The police quietly confiscated their weapons (they couldn't leave them on the ship) while the locals fed them meat pies and dried their clothes at the local laundromat. Invasions like that we can all handle.

Mobile Content
This week has seen a major search engine conference happening in California and one of the sessions that really interested me was the one that looked at mobile content. Now there's been some who have been providing adult content for hand held devices for quite a few years now; even we had a couple of domains dedicated to mobile content and at one time I was producing each week's updates for my old paysite in a size that suited mobile users too.

But I found that I was seeing what many others have also experienced. The take up of mobile content in my paysite was minimal and the traffic to our free mobile sites was about the same. Even now that .mobi has been introduced people are still seeing little traffic to sites dedicated to handheld devices.

Sure we might hear a lot of hype about the spread of handheld devices but the fact is that few people are using them to surf the web. They certainly might be checking their email and they might be using them for local search on sites like Google Maps but that seems to be about it.

So is it really worth building sites designed specifically for handheld devices? It seems that the general consensus of opinion at the conference was that it might be wise to wait a little longer to see what standards begin to appear now that the iPhone is with us.

Dirty Words
No they're not the words you're thinking of ...these dirty words are the words that are all but guaranteed to get your emails dumped into the recipient's spam folder if you happen to use them in the subject line. One email marketing firm has actually produced a list of 100 of these words and they're pretty much what you would expect.

Words like free, call now, apply now, as seen, amazing, eliminate debt, double your, discount, dear friend, herbal, home based, lose weight, work from home and a whole bunch more make up the list of dirty words that you should never use in the subject line.

The trouble is that some of those dirty words are words that you really do need to use to influence people who are thinking of purchasing what you're trying to sell. For example free shipping is big encouragement to people who are thinking of making a purchase and a subject line that says something like 'we give you free shipping' is going to encourage a lot of people to open the email ... if they actually get to see it.

However all is not lost because many ISPs are looking beyond the subject line these days before they block an email because it looks like spam. It seems that some are actually looking into the message as well to determine if it is something that the recipient really would want to see.

So if you're into email marketing then it's ok to talk dirty in the subject line - just so long as you back it up with some substance in the body of the message.

And now I'm off to save a whole bunch of things I've been working on because we've already had one brief power-outage while I was writing this. All I can say is thank god for battery back up otherwise I would definitely not be a happy camper.