Steve’s Blog

If you’re serious about getting repeat visitors and building your brand, sending out newsletters is a vital tactic. Sometimes its hard to get started with a subscriber base, but there are tactics that work well – surveys are my favorite.

Prospect Magazine carred out a survey to rate the "world’s top 100 public intellectuals". A pretty boring subject, but it caught on with newspapers running campaigns to vote for local heroes in Indonesia, Canada, India, Spain, Bulgaria and Turkey. This story about the results on NPR really got my attention with a quote at the end:

Interviewer: "Do you have many subscribers in Turkey at this point?"

Propsect Staff Member: "We’re hoping to get a lot more. We quite cleverly made it compulsory for people who are voting to enter an email address into the system. Our email newsletter list is now made up of about 95% Turks." 

Continue reading “Surveys Build Mailing Lists”

Some very good news from the Joomla 1.5 world today … Google Website Optimizer now works with Joomla 1.5.

If you haven’t tried it yet, Website Optimizer is a tool for testing different versions of your site to see which one produces a higher conversion rate.

Thanks to Anthony from Joomla Performance and Barrie from Compass Designs for their work on this.

• Original forum post
• Bug tracker item
• Download the patch

Continue reading “Google Website Optimizer and Joomla 1.5”

Mike at Simbunch.com has created a very useful little mambot that forces all external links to open in a new window. (free registration required)

What Does It Do?

The mambot can add these tags to all external links:

• target=”_blank” (open the link in a new window)
• rel=”nofollow” (telling search engines to ignore the link)
• both

Personally I don’t agree with people who want to add nofollow to all their external links. It seems overly paranoid and contrary to how the web works. However, opening other sites in a new window is increasingly a good idea.

Continue reading “Make All Your External Links Open in New Windows”