October 20, 2008

The rules of the Web communication: 7 rules of the digital darwinism

At the end of the 1999 and the beginning of the 2000, Evan Schwartz wrote a very interesting and useful book: “Digital darwinism”. The book was written in the time when Internet was on the top of its potential. The main point of the entire book is based on one simple concept, the theory of the evolution, already existing inside firms all over the world. The idea that Schwartz introduces it’s easy, in the nature you must be strong and adapt yourself in front of the changes, if you don’t adapt yourself you will be eaten . The same thing is with Internet. Today, we are all living in a dynamic world which is characterized by Internet and if you are not able to understand the new rules of the game you are out. It is also very important to underline the fact that Internet as our entire society is dynamic, everything is changing so quickly and Ewan Shwartz is helping us to understand this new, dynamic world by giving us some essential rules. Here are the rules:

1.You must create the name that solves problems for your future clients, you must enter in their heads and then create your brand. This is the only way to understand the customer. For creating a steady brand you need 4 things: distinction, significance, reputation and knowledge.

2. You don’t have to influence prices, leave them to follow the law of the request and offer. Remember that consumer know better the market and the offer but the producer knows better the consumer.

3. Create affiliate program and let your affiliate do marketing for you. The affiliate program was introduced in the 1996 by Amazon.com and it had great success. And remember to motivate your affiliates by giving them good percentage because if you don’t give a good percentage probably they will search for another affiliate program.

4. You need to suggest cumulative offers of information and services, because you need to justify the price you are asking. Remember to be original and exclusive and you will create the fidelity for your customers.

5. Sell before and then produce. Only when you have already sold your product it will be made in factory and this is very important because you don’t need warehouse anymore. But remember there is a negative consequence because: we are living in a world where people want exclusive products and if you already have made product and at the end you don’t sell it probably you will not be able to sell it anymore because it’s unique.

6. Give new value to transactions.

7. Integrate everything you can with online commerce and check out that your site is available not only from computers and use “smart card”, they have a microchip and they are easily carried. Remember that online commerce must be integrated with one physical point.

October 9, 2008

Reciprocal vs. non reciprocal link exchange

Link exchange with other webmasters is a good way to increase the number of links to own site. Reciprocal link exchange consists in putting the links on the two sites that trade links. Site A links site B, and site B links site A. The links can be inserted on index or link page. There are lot of webmaster that, for various reasons, don’t want to do reciprocal exchange. One of the most explicated is the fact that from August 2007 Google introduced a new policy which said that excessive number of reciprocal links can be penalized. Please note that on Google policy pages the “excessive number” isn’t quantified, and I’m sure that, lets say 50 reciprocal links are not excessive (reed carefully the page). The other reason, more ancient, is that putting a link on the own page drains the PR of the page (this fact is evident from the formula for PR calculation), and at this point was born non reciprocal linkage. There are two main modes to do non reciprocal linkage.

3 way link
Webmaster 1 has site A, while Webmaster 2 has sites B, and C. In the 3 way link site A links site B, and receives link from site C. In the correct trade, site B should link site C, too, but often this not happened. If I’m Webmaster 1, those with 1 site only (site A, in this case), I normally don’t accept this kind of exchange. You can ask me, why? Because there are many webmaster that grow site C (the site that link me) for this purpose, to give a link, and after a while they didn’t care more about, or brutally cut off the links towards this site, so I don’t receive an adequate PR from this site. In the reciprocal exchange, I’m sure that the site that links me is supported at least by the link from my site.

4 way link
4 way link trade is similar as 3 way, but both webmasters have 2 sites, and they link one site, and receive the link from the other. It’s better way (each of them can be dishonest :) then 3 way link, specially if two sites of the same webmaster are linked between them.

By the way, Google continues to update ToolBar Page Rank very regularly, each 2 months. The last update was about Sept. 27, but I saw results of this update from statistics of my sites already about Sept. 10. As usually happens, some of my sites improved the position, but some others lost rank on Google.