5 Little Known Tricks To Boost Your Online Experience

By Shahnaz Rauf
Posted Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Every trade has it's secrets... those little known tricks that are often easy to implement but known only to the `initiated few`. Does this ring some familiar bells... the master chef mixing in his secret ingredients. Okay so for those website owners, webmasters and people in the e-business arena, here are 5 `jealously guarded` secrets of the e-wiseman:

1. Most of you may be aware that when writing headlines if you start it with a number say: 7 little known tricks... You can get your entry positioned at the top in directories that use alphabetical listings.

A lot of people know about this and have started using it, now how do you get above the numbers?. Try enclosing your heading within quotation marks : "7 little known tricks...". Yes this works.

2. Often when you are surfing using those hit exchanges, a borderless window pops up - this has no border, menu bars or buttons at all. Sometimes it may even cover your entire screen including task bars leaving you no way to get out of it. It is simple : press `Alt plus F4` on your keyboard and you will be free.

3. How do you protect your email address from those spammers who unleash the power of `spam spiders` – robots that spider your website and capture your email address... One way is to give a `big gap' in your email. Say if your email address is xyz@abcd.com, your html code will look like this:

mailto:xyz@ab
cd.com

It will be split on two lines but it will work perfectly, hence a big gap appears in the online version.

4. There are millions of websites out there, but one thing is consistently missing...your `e-business card`. Do you think you would have survived for any respectable length of time offline without your business card?... or can you make an appreciable impact online without it?

5. If you are working on a shoestring budget , You need at least a ten fold return on each advertising cent invested. Thus you need to know which ezines, newsletters etc you are getting your most responses from.

One way to do this is to use ad tracking services that range from low cost to free – but here your own web address or url does not get exposed and you miss out on the branding that goes along with it;

Another way is to use different auto-responders for each advertising campaign – here some prospects may be scared stiff to respond considering the amount of junk mail we are all being bombarded with.

Yet another way is to install site statistics on your website and for each advertising campaign use a different `campaign number` say if you choose campaign codes ezine1, ezine2, ezine3 etc then your URL's for each ad will be (http://www.snzeport.com?ezine1) or (http://www.snzeport.com?ezine2) and so on (Use your own website address!). Here you simply log in to your site tracking services and check the `visit entry page` – you will know immediately where your maximum responses are coming from. A good site meter for this is (http://www.sitemeter.com)

About the Author
Shahnaz Rauf is The Editor of The Monster Twister– a Newsletter helping ordinary web owners achieve extraordinary heights without losing their shirts. To Subscribe mailto:themonstertwister-subscribe@snzeport.com Or visit her website at (http://www.snzeport.com)