-•- HomeOfficeDigest.com Newsletter - Issue 176 -•-
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THE HOME OFFICE DIGEST NEWSLETTER
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BE YOUR OWN BOSS
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A quarter of 2002 has already passed us by, how is your business
doing? Setting earnings and growth goals aren't just for the big
business owner, goal setting is something every business owner
should do! If you don't know whether you're doing better than you
were at this same time last year, how will you know whether your
business is successful? Keeping track of earnings, advertising
budgets, repeat buyers, and any number of other factors will 
help you to determine whether your business is succeeding or 
whether it's failing. Goal setting and record keeping doesn't 
have to be a tedious, time consuming task. Keeping track of
the business basics should be enough to help you determine what
parts of your business need to be fixed and what parts of your
business are helping you grow. Take a couple minutes each day
to mark down what you made, what you spent, and what you did
and put that information in a safe place. I'm sure that many
of you who thought your business was growing will be shocked
to find that you're simply standing still.


FEATURED ARTICLE
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Keeping Your Pop-Ups - and Your Audience
by Lauri Harpf

In "Why Pop-Ups are Pop-Bad", we looked at the pitfalls 
of pop-up advertising, the most significant of them being 
the way Internet surfers feel about pop-ups. As I mentioned 
in that previous article, when you use pop-ups, you take 
the risk of your visitor count suffering and the reputation 
of your site being damaged. Despite that, many use pop-ups 
on their sites for a variety of reasons and are reluctant 
to cease using an advertising method they feel to be 
effective. 

So, what is there to do? Is the only possibility to either 
make your visitors feel frustrated or drop your pop-ups? 
While your users would probably want to see the pop-ups 
disappear completely, that is not always possible. However, 
by making some slight changes to the way you use pop-ups, 
you can often achieve a result that satisfies both you and 
your visitors. 


Maximum benefit, minimum trouble 
========================= 

There are multiple ways to make your pop-ups more user 
friendly, here are some of my favorites. Try them out 
and see which ones work for you. 

1. Imagine this. You arrive at a site and a pop-up ad 
appears. Being a veteran web-user, you close it quickly 
and continue investigating what the site has to offer. 
When you open the next page, the same pop-up comes up. 
Again, one click from your mouse and it is gone. On to 
the next page and the darn thing pops up yet again! Now 
you're getting annoyed and start looking for the exit. 

OK, you probably didn't have to imagine that. If you've 
been on the web for a while, you're likely to have 
experienced it. Having the pop-up appear once didn't feel 
as bad, but when you had already looked at it and decided 
that you weren't interested in what it advertised, having 
it come up again and again made the site seem very 
unfriendly. 

The moral of the story? Use cookies to identify your 
visitors and limit the amount of times the same pop-up 
is shown to the same user. Although it is claimed that 
on average, a person has to see the same ad several 
times before he'll react to it, enough is enough. 

2. Do not use more than one pop-up on a single page. 
Using multiple pop-ups is unlikely to greatly increase 
the response rate to your advertising, but it will 
ensure that the patience of your visitors wears thin 
a lot faster. A horde of pop-ups appearing at the same 
time may crash some browsers and slow older computers 
down to a crawl. 

3. Consider launching your pop-ups at the moment users 
exit your site rather than when they arrive to it. 
This is likely to make your advertisements seem less 
distracting, because at that point your visitors have 
already finished using your site and found the information 
they were looking for. 

If you choose to use exit pop-ups, remember that they 
offer an excellent opportunity to retain contact with 
a visitor that may otherwise be lost in cyberspace. A 
pop-up to bookmark your site or subscribe to your 
newsletter is likely to work better at this stage, as 
the user has already seen that you run a high-quality 
site. 

4. Just like all other forms of advertising you use, 
your pop-ups should offer content that is relevant 
to the topic of your site. For example, it's a much 
better idea to have a pop-up that sells subscriptions 
to Sports Illustrated on your Boston Bruins fan site 
than a pop-up for an Internet casino. Not only does 
it get a better response rate, but it also makes your 
site to look more professional. 

5. Every time you add pop-up advertisements or adjust 
existing ones, keep a close eye on how your audience 
reacts to the changes. Your visitor count, the time 
an average visitor spends on your site and the number 
of page views per visitor are all important meters 
that will promptly notify you of any possible problems. 

------------------------------------------------------------
Lauri Harpf runs the A Promotion Guide website, where he 
offers free information about search engines, directories 
and other promotion methods. His site can be found at 
http://www.apromotionguide.com/ 
 
 
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