Amcho Computer Services
Newsletter - August 2000

 

Contents: What's New Product Pricing Free Internet Access (UK) UK VAT Search Engines Talk to your web site visitors Emails Received: Instructions For Life Helpline: What is a Banner Exchange?

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What's New Check out our new domain name search engine at http://www.amcho.co.uk/domaincheck.htm Give it your required domain and it will search all the .uk .com .org .net .cc .to .ws top level domains and tell you if your desired name has been taken or if it available to be registered. You should find that this script is faster than most other similar scripts. As well as only requiring one input before displaying all the results, the queries are processed by the different servers at the same time, and the results are displayed as they come in. ~~~~~~~~~ There are a few new tools on our webmaster tools page at http://www.amcho.com/tools.htm Give our keyword analyser a page address and it will show you what words are on your page and which ones do not appear in your page meta tags. ~~~~~~~~~~ I noticed a number of hits from search engines from people looking for html to text conversion (the three words appeared on the same page but were unrelated). You can now convert any web page to text; just enter the page address you want to convert at http://www.amcho.com/html-text.htm Product Pricing. A long time ago barter was the way that people exchanged goods and services. People would swap, say, a sack full of grain for a churn of milk. This was fine if both parties to the transaction had whatever the other wanted. Using money was a way of getting over this problem: I would swap my goods for money then use the money to purchase whatever I wanted. With industrialisation it was more convenient to produce millions of identical products and sell them all at the same price. There were exceptions to this static pricing model: Auctions where the 'right' price for a product was determined by competitive bidding, and Stock Markets where the price is adjusted on a day by day basis depending on relative supply and demand. This dynamic pricing process has now been automated and is being used to sell products on the net: 'Make Your Price Sell' will help you set the right price for your product; The right price can literally triple your net profits. It can make the difference between success and failure. If you don't have a product yet or are considering one, a feasibility study can save you a year of time and expense... Click Here to see dynamic pricing in action: click on the order now button you can then buy at the market price or put in a bid below the market or just watch the price go up and down as supply and demand are matched in real time. When I tested the link above the price was $22.22 Free Internet Access (UK) If you are in the UK you can now have unmetered internet access, this means that for a small monthly payment you can be on line as long as you like without it costing anything extra. That's the theory - if like me you have tried to sign up you will know that it is not easy to get it all set up. I tried signing up with callnet800 and freeserve but nothing happened. I finally managed to sign up via lineone and quip. Quip provide discount phone calls and also the free 0808 number for surfing while lineone provide the internet servers. Unfortunately within weeks of signing up lineone/quip announced that the service has been closed to new subscribers and that the service will be discontinued from the end of September 2000. This means that I am again on the lookout for an unmetered internet service provider in the UK. It looks like my page at http://www.amcho.co.uk/ukwebaccess.htm will be updated a few more times in the next few weeks! UK VAT. Or why anybody.co.uk is more expensive and less profitable than anybody.com. If you are VAT registered in the UK, your prices are probably higher than anyone who is not. Lets say you buy and sell CDs. If your cost per CD is say $12.00 and you sell for $15.00 this gives you a $3.00 'profit'. Of that $3.00 the VAT man takes $2.23 leaving you $0.77 So any business based in the US is a lot more profitable than an equivalent vat registered business in the UK while doing exactly the same amount of work! Talk to your web site visitors You can now talk to your web site visitors. There are a number of products that will allow you to do this: Click to Talk You can put a 'Click to Talk' button on your webpage, whenever one of your website visitors clicks on the button they are asked to enter their details (email name and phone number) the system then automatically sets up a phone connection: your phone rings - you answer, your customers phone rings - they answer then you talk to each other. This lets you talk to your customer just at the point that he has decided to buy from you.

Live Helper Download the free software and set up your own help desk on your website. Put a LiveHelper button on any page on your website, when your visitor clicks you can talk to him in real time using audio or a 'chat window' I have found the audio quality is not perfect and personally prefer the chat window.
Hear Me This is similar to Live Helper above, but this allows all your visitors to talk to each other and you can join the conversation if you wish. Unlike live helper above you do not control what goes on! I have also set up hearme to work on my advert pages have a look at http://www.amcho.com/ads/

Search Engines An interesting tip from the MarketPosition newsletter (to subscribe e-mail: subscribe@webposition.com) Apparently yahoo will not include commercial sites in their directory if the address of the business is not included on the Web Site. This is yet another reason for adding full contact details to every page on your web site. You need your contact details on your site not only to build trust and credibility but also to get into yahoo! The newsletter contains a lot of useful info that you can use to get a good position in the search engines it is written by FirstPlace Software, Inc. who produce a program that reports your search positions on the major search engines and helps improve those positions. Click here to download a free trial of WebPosition. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Another good tool that I am considering signing up for is Word Tracker. You give it a list of keywords that you are targeting. It then helps you generate some more similar keywords, and then checks the number of websites that altavista returns when someone does a search on your keywords. Very good for finding a niche that you can fill: If you have two target keywords each being used by searchers the same number of times and one returns a million web pages while the other returns none, it is clear which keyword you should target!   Emails Received: The following found it's way into my mail box. Thought it would be worth reproducing here: INSTRUCTIONS FOR LIFE   1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.   2. When you lose,don't lose the lesson.   3. Follow the three R's: Respect for self Respect for others Responsibility for all your actions   4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.   5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.   6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.   7. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.   8. Spend some time alone every day.   9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values. 10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer. 11. Live a good, honorable life.       Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time. 12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life. 13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up the past. 14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality. 15. Be gentle with the earth. 16. Once a year, go to somewhere you've never been before. 17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which love exceeds your needs. 18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it. 19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon. Thanks to eltoro@ims-ltd.net Helpline - Questions and Answers Q: What is a Banner Exchange? Banner Exchanges allow you to promote your website using banners, you can buy banner exposures, or using a banner exchange you put a bit of html code on your pages that displays banners for the exchange, in return your banner is displayed on other peoples web sites. I enrolled in a number of banner exchanges but found that click thru rates were not very good. I have now moved all the banners off my main pages, after deciding that having other peoples animated flashing banners luring my visitors away was not a good idea. The best way to promote a site is to have good content, and meta tags, and title tags, that target the search terms that your visitors are Lilly to use. Once you have good content get reciprocal links from other web sites. Quite a few engines now rank a page according to the number of (external?) pages that link to it. Helpline - Webmaster Tips Do a search on your html files for "%20" . I found a number of my links did not work when I put this newsletter on the web. This was because there was one of these blank characters at the end of my links. If you drag and drop a URL into dreamweaver it is easy to include a space at the end and not notice it. Helpline - Feedback Please send comments and interesting questions to mailto:helpline@amcho.com Your question and reply may be reproduced in a future newsletter The names of the innocent and the guilty will be disguised.   © 2000 Amcho Computer Services Ltd. All rights reserved. Feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you want to. but please check with us before reproducing the content, normally all we will ask is a link to our website. All feedback is welcome: mailinglist-feedback@amcho.com To unsubscribe please send an email to unsubscribe@amcho.com To subscribe please send a blank email to mailto:subscribe-mailinglist@amcho.com Mike Choroszewski Amcho Computer Services Ltd Little Honeycombe, Tamar Way, Gunnislake, Cornwall, Pl18 9DH. UK phone: 08707 41 40 50 UK National Rate fax: 0870 124 6863 UK National Rate www.amcho.com/newsletters/ www.amcho.com/newsletters/2000-08.htm August 2000 www.amcho.com/newsletters/2000-07.htm July 2000 www.amcho.com/newsletters/2000-06.htm June 2000 www.amcho.com/newsletters/2000-05.htm May 2000 www.amcho.com/newsletters/2000-04.htm April 2000 www.amcho.com/newsletters/2000-03.htm March 2000 www.amcho.com/newsletters/2000-02.htm February 2000 www.amcho.com/newsletters/2000-01.htm January 2000 www.amcho.com/newsletters/1999-12.htm December 1999 www.amcho.com/newsletters/1999-11.htm November 1999 www.amcho.com/newsletters/1999-10.htm October 1999 www.amcho.com/newsletters/1999-09.htm September 1999

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