Panelists:
Lauren Freedman, President, the e-tailing group
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Amy Africa, President, Eight by Eight

• Abandonment metrics - for uncovering why visitors are leaving your site prematurely
• Conversion metrics - for insight into your acquisition funnel
• Retention metrics - for boosting your customer retention
• Search engine metrics - for obtaining the best return on your search marketing investment
• Email marketing metrics - for achieving the highest response rates from your email campaigns

Is your web site successful? Is your online marketing — including your SEO, paid search ads, email campaigns — all working, and how can you find out? The answer lies in metrics. It’s hard to improve upon something you’re not measuring. You could drop $100,000 on a high-end web analytics package. But if you don’t have a staffer dedicated to making sense of all those reports and taking some sort action as a result, it’s wasted money. Better to spend $10,000 on a lesser web analytics solution and $90,000 for a salary to employ someone highly skilled in web analytics. In fact, you’d be surprised the powerful tools you can get for free (and yes, we’ll go over some of the most exciting ones during the teleseminar). However, right now your first investment should be in signing up for this teleseminar.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer — Founder and President, Netconcepts
Avinash Kaushik — Author, Speaker and Analytics Evangelist

Speakers:
Misty Locke, Co-Founder and President, Range Online Media
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, NetConcepts
Pinny Gniwisch, Founder and EVP Marketing, ice.com

Is there a place in Wikipedia for you? Can you protect your interests within Wikipedia in a way that is appropriate and minimizes the risk of a backlash — now and in the future? Want to know the best ways to interact with the service? Want to learn some valuable lessons from a few Wikipedia marketing successes and failures? Then this session is for you!

Moderator:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Speakers:
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates
Don Steele, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

Listen to Stephan Spencer’s interview with Bryan Eisenberg for more about how to boost your site’s conversion rate.

Mickey Alam Khan,
Editor in Chief,
DM News

RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.

Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.

This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.

Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.

You Will Discover:

• Best practices for RSS usage
• The benefits of user generated content
• Why tagging matters for website owners
• How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
• How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions

This presentation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.

I’ve seen designs copied, content copied, even entire sites copied. It’s so easy for infringers to “View Source” and take whatever they like, without regard to copyright.

You can locate copyright infringers pretty easily with Copyscape if they’ve lifted some of your page copy. It’s much more difficult if they’ve limited their sticky fingers to just your design.

So far I’ve discovered by tip-off or by chance that our Netconcepts.com site design has been “pinched” multiple times. Eventually, many months later, the infringers finally stopped using our design, but the evidence of their misbehavior is permanently archived in the Wayback Machine (example 1 and 2).

In fact, the Wayback Machine is quite useful in that it can serve as indisputable proof of who is the source and who is the copy: Whichever site shows the design in use before the other is the source.

The way I see it, you have five options for dealing with an infringer:

1. File a DMCA infringement notification.
2. Contact the infringing company’s CEO.
3. “Out” them on your blog.
4. Have your lawyer send them a nastygram.
5. Do nothing.

If you do nothing, eventually the infringer will redesign (probably stealing another design from somewhere else). That’s not a great option if you’re serious about protecting your intellectual property rights, however.

A phone call to the CEO is inexpensive and it can work. It has worked for us in the past: he asked for two months to redesign, which we’ve granted him. But this isn’t a viable option if you’re dealing with an entity that operates overseas and has masked its domain contact information.

Luckily, the DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, provides a useful hammer to beat on copyright infringers without the need to contact them. That hammer is a DMCA infringement notification. In DMCA legalspeak, this notification is also known as a “Takedown Notice.”

As a content producer, you have the right to enforce your copyright. When your content gets “repurposed” on others’ Web sites without your permission, you would simply file a DMCA Infringement Notification to the infringer’s Web hosting provider to get that infringer’s Web site shut down (like Ian McAnerin did recently).

You can also get the naughty infringer de-listed from the search engines by filing DMCA notices to Google and the other major engines. (I can hear you saying “Excellent!” in a Mr. Burns voice right now).

It is not a daunting procedure. It might take an hour of your time, and it is well worth it. The process is as follows:

1. First, look up the Web host and the domain registrar of the offending site, using lookup tools such as this one from Netcraft and this one from Domain Tools. You can usually ascertain who the Web host is from the Name Servers and/or the Netblock Owner.
2. Next, check the official directory of designated DMCA agents for the host and the registrar. (Hopefully, they’re listed.)
3. Then prepare a letter to send to the designated agent of the Web host. The notice you write should include your contact information, the name of the content that was copied, the Web address of the copied content, a statement that you have a good faith belief that the material is not legal, a statement that under penalty of perjury you are the copyright holder, and your signature. Some Web hosts will allow you to email your notice to them, making it all that more convenient.
4. Also be sure to send a similar notification to the search engines. That will cut off their air supply, in case the site doesn’t get taken down right away. Here are instructions and contact details for each engine: Google, Yahoo and Windows Live Search (formerly MSN Search). Note that Google requires you to mail or fax your letter, whereas Yahoo and Microsoft (Live Search) allow you to email your notification.
5. If the Web host doesn’t take the site down promptly, then submit a DMCA notice to the infringer’s domain registrar. Note: It might be worth sending a notice to the data center that the Web host uses before you try the registrar, as Dan Richard recommends.

Ian McAnerin posted some handy DMCA notification letter templates to make this process even easier: for the Web host, for Google, for Yahoo, and for Live Search.

I would be remiss to not mention that the DMCA takedown procedure is a double-edged sword. Like any other tool, a DMCA notice can be used for good or evil. Specifically, someone could use DMCA unfairly against you! It happens. Competitors do use the DMCA to silence competitors.

Therefore, you, as a Web site owner, need to protect yourself from unwarranted (or at least unwelcome) prosecution. If the potential exists for you to inadvertently host infringing material on your website—for example, if you are hosting online forums, group blogs, blog comments, or other types of content that can be submitted from others besides yourself—then here are some actions you can take to help protect yourself:

1. It’s helpful if you can qualify as a service provider that can be covered under the Safe Harbor provision. For example, you may qualify if you offer a search engine or a bulletin board system.
2. If so, notify your customers of your policies regarding copyright infringement and the consequences of repeated infringing activity. One way is to make it part of your Terms of Use.
3. Also, publish a page on your Web site with DMCA filing instructions and state that, if and when you get a DMCA notification, you will act on it. Here’s an example of such a DMCA Notification Instructions page.
4. And most important, check the directory of designated agents,; if your company isn’t listed there, complete and file this form (pdf) to the Copyright Office for inclusion in the directory.
   If you’re interested in the gory details of the DMCA, you can read this on Wikipedia.

Disclaimer: None of this is legal advice.

Problem:

TRUSTcite is a self-funded start-up that came to Netconcepts without having an online presence at all. They needed more than just a web developer. They needed guidance with their online strategy and with how they could differentiate themselves in the market. Their processes weren’t defined. Their functionality wasn’t defined. Their key differentiators weren’t all defined. And how they would market themselves online wasn’t defined either. They were looking or a partner to rise to the occasion: not just spend their money by building them a website, but to really think through what would make their business successful.

Netconcepts were mindful that the funding for the website was coming out of the founder’s savings, so we stretched every dollar.

It couldn’t just be a good website that worked. It had to be an exceptional website. We believe that by incorporating some of the latest Web 2.0 technologies into the site in such a way that was a showcase for Web 2.0 ‘done right’, we could gain additional visibility for them.

Solution:

The solution that Netconcepts came up with was a sophisticated yet intuitive Web 2.0 application and website leveraging the power of XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP and MySQL. Some of the core concepts of this Web 2.0 website included leveraging the social networking aspects of the site, making it easy to build a network of referral sources and recommenders and make it easy for visitors to find and compare service providers based on referrals and recommendations from business people and past clients. Ranked search results are based on peer reviews and user feedback. Another founding principal of the site is the KISS principle: keep unimportant information/content hidden but still accessible. Search is the most important feature so it was important to keep that prominent and simple with smart top navigation separation and simple home page search.

Users have almost full control of what they can put in their profile: images, bold titles, lists, contact details and so on, ranging from simple and well structured with image, or simple with no images.

Web standards are mandatory, making the web better for everyone. Accessibility is not just for the blind. Web standards and best practice make for easily indexed pages. Semantic markup is a search engine’s favorite thing!

Starting with a basic working version of the site that works without JavaScript, we built on to that base from there, employing JavaScript to add to the user experience. For example, “progressive enhancement” was used to allow the site to display on less visually rich platforms such as cell phones and PDAs. On the home page, JavaScript was used to — in a search engine friendly way — make the full category list initially hidden but available with one click without reloading the page.

Results:

It is still early days, but several thousand pages of the site have been indexed in Google, and good media coverage has been obtained for the site in the New Zealand Herald. With no advertising to the general public and limited advertising within the B2B media, visitor numbers have grown four-fold, comparing May to October. What is more important, a growing number of visitors are returning to the site and are directing their clients to the site also.

Hannah Samuel, founder of TRUSTcite says:

“I approached Netconcepts regarding the development of TRUSTcite as I knew they were experts in the field of search engine optimisation (SEO) and had extensive experience in website development. However, what was more important to me initially was their e-commerce consultancy service which proved to be vital to the success of developing and launching TRUSTcite. Much like a pattern-maker, Netconcepts took my sometimes abstract, 2-dimensional ideas, and developed the patterns out of which the ‘fabric’ of TRUSTcite was created. It was amazing to see the concept become reality following ongoing discussion and recommendation.

As a new venture, it was vitally important that clear outcomes and costs were identified and monitored. This is something I found Netconcepts to be excellent at and I can’t recommend highly enough how well managed the whole project was. I certainly look forward to a continuing relationship with Netconcepts as they are truly excellent designers, developers, project managers, e-commerce advisors and all round neat people!”