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Writing and Publishing, Part 38:
Becoming your own publisher:
Marketing:
Creating a web site:
Problems, Ethics, and Decency:
First, I want to deal with a common misconception about the web.
You may think that putting up a website will automatically get
you visitors. It just ain't so. Here is the hard fact. There are
22 million dot coms out there and that number grows daily. This
means, if you want people to find your website, you are going
to have to tell them about it. You are going to have to find some
way of attracting people. I will get into this a bit more later.
For now, it's something to keep in mind.
Now to ethics. Since I put up the Wesoomi website, I have learned a great deal about web ethics. Sometimes I almost conclude that there are none. It seems as though the development of a new communication channel has brought out all that is ugly, disgusting, and degenerate (UDD) about the human species. Here are some of the things I feel belong in the UDD category.
First, spam. Once I developed a web presence, I wanted to make it easy for my visitors and others to communicate with me. To do that, I set up several E-mail addresses for different personalities and different aspects of Wesoomi. It did work. It got my addresses on a large number of E-mail lists. It got me a lot of communication, a lot of writer queries, a lot of criticism, and a continuous deluge of that garbage called spam. I deal with all of it in various ways.
One of my frequent spam inputs is about E-mail lists. I have been offered a large number of lists of E-mail addresses and special software to spew my advertising out over the web. I have been offered at least 100 ways of clogging someone else's E-mail box. I have managed to ignore all of them. This gets back to my basic premise of customer relations. Don't do anything which will alienate the customer. I simply think about how I feel about spam and the people who spew it out. Just for the sake of a few chance sales, I don't want other people to think that way about me.
I have not found any fool proof defense against spam. My E-mail client, "Poco" has what are called filters. These are little pieces of macro-code which examine incoming mail and route it. They take the form of "if-then" statements. A typical filter might have a statement to the effect, "If ‘the body of the message' contains ‘To be removed' then ‘move this message' to ‘Trash.'"
These filters are not fool proof for two reasons. First, most spammers know about them and compose their garbage accordingly. In addition, legitimate mail can innocently contain some of these key filter phases. This mean that you still have to check at least the headers of the messages before deleting them. The headers will usually contain giveaways. The dead give away is "undisclosed recipients" in the to box.
Once you have identified spam, the best defense is to just delete it. If you reply with a request to delete, they probably won't. Instead, they will put your name on an active victim list. That will get you more spam. I have learned to never respond to spam in any way. If you do, it will only get you more spam.
As far as I am concerned, spam is any marketing E-mail or, so called, newsletter which I did not specifically request. All of them, when they dump this crap on you, will claim that you somehow opted in by something you have done. It's always a shabby lie. I have never requested spam, but I get it every day. I get hundreds of E-mail newsletters every month and every one of them claims that I have subscribed to them. I have never subscribed to an E-mail newsletter in my life.
Enough on spam. It's a fact of life. another UDD is a contemptible practice called web referrals. Think about this. How would you like it if you found out your doctor had sent you to a specialist because he got a kickback from that specialist. That's how web referrals work. When you see banner ad links urging you to visit another site, watch out. The site with that link is being paid to send you to the other site. I have been offered deals like this. I could put banner ads on my site and lure you to another site. I would be paid a fixed amount for each visitor I betrayed in that way. So far, I have refused every offer. It's about ethics.
Here is another UDD which stunned me with its stupidity. One time, I was offered a link to my site from a site which was in the business of linking their visitors to the sites of publishers. They seemed to be supplying a routing service. It was not secretive. It seemed legitimate and the price was reasonable. I paid them a fee for a three month trial and they set up a link to my site, so they said.
When I checked out the link, I found that, instead of a link to my site, they kept the visitor at their site and presented my site as a small window in their page. They made it look like Wesoomi Publishing was just a page on their site. Of course, that made me angry. They had the small price of the three month trial. That's all they ever got from me.
I could do the same thing that they did. You may notice that I have some web links pages as part of my site. These are for my visitor's convenience. When I set them up, I could have made them frames at my site instead of links to other sites. How would you feel about me if I had done that? Would you visit me again? Would you use my links?
Next time, I will get into website design and layout.
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