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Tours and Referrer Strings
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on May 26th, 2010)
Another Wednesday and another column ... yep that's about the way it is around here this week.
This week we seem to be dealing with all those fun aspects of running your own business ... clients who are slow to pay their accounts ... "Times are tough" ... tell me about it ... "I didn't get the account" ... then how could you give me an answer to a question that was in the email the account was attached to?
And then there are the clients who can't make up their minds about how they want their website to look. They want an animated gif alongside a block of text ... we tell them it will be a distraction ... but they know best or at least they do until they get distracted by the animated gif and then they want it changed.
They tell us that they will provide all the images of their products but then call and want to know when we're going to go round and take the photos.
Yes it's all fun and games when you're working with people out there in the real world. Sometimes those hassles are challenges that gives me a real buzz when we overcome them ... and other times they're just a pains in the ass that I don't really need right now.
Is the end of the referrer string on the horizon?
The referrer string ... that odd looking URL that not only sends our surfers off to our sponsors to sign up but also identifies us as the one who sent them so that we can get our commission may be in danger of extinction. We already have problems with savvy surfers who somehow think that it's going to be best for them if they cut all our identifiers out of the URL before they hit our sponsors' sites and now things could get a whole lot worse.
In the world of analytics Google is about to offer people who surf the Net the ability to opt out of being tracked for analytics purposes. I've yet to see just how someone will be able to do that but I do understand that it's not a simple task so not many people may exercise the opt-out option but it is there.
Google is also about to give people the ability to perform what Google calls "secure searches". When you do a secure search there will be no referrer information passed so you will completely anonymous ... or so they say.
And then there's all the kafuffle over privacy on Facebook ... while that doesn't immediately impact on us it is going to raise awareness for the need for more privacy online and perhaps sooner rather than later referrer strings are going to be in the spotlight.
Where that will lead if referrer strings are tangled up in the privacy issue is something we should all be watching with a lot of interest.
Boring Tours
Hands up all those who love to land on those websites that consist of nothing more than a never-ending sales letter. You know the ones I mean ... they scroll for ever and if they don't dazzle you with brilliance they bore you to the point where you're willing to sign up just so you can escape to some other website.
Today on Twitter I saw one very savvy web marketer ask one of his contacts to list any differences that he could see between one of those never-ending sales letters and a six-page tour that supposedly shows the benefits of becoming a member of a website.
While I'm yet to see a response to that request I do know one very real difference between long sales letters and long tours and that difference is going to have an impact on the amount of money you might make as an affiliate.
Although long sales letters bore me witless and I invariably hit the back button as soon as I realize that I'm on one of those sites it seems that there are many people who are prepared to stick around, read right to the bottom and then buy the product.
On the other hand, the more web pages that a surfer has to wade through on a sponsor's site the more chance there is that they'll leave without buying a membership and I've even seen some examples of that on mainstream sites too. It seems that the more times a person has to click the ‘Next' button (or whatever it might be called on a tour) the more chance there is that they'll actually click right out of the site and go somewhere else.
So how long are the tours that you're sending your traffic to?
And that's it from me for today. Now I'm off to find a strong cup of coffee and some enthusiasm to jump into today's to-do list.
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