What’s A SysAdmin?

Hi All,

That’s an easy one. Computer systems should be thought of as layers. At the top (of course!!) you have the developers. They write the code/software that is run on the OS (operating system) layer. The SysAdmin, short for system administrator, makes sure that the OS layer can talk with the software layer above and the hardware layer below. The hardware layer, also part of the SysAdmin’s domain, consists of all the guts of a computer (CPU’s, RAM, hard drives, network cards etc.)

A better question to start this entry out should have been “Do I need a SysAdmin”?
In order to answer that question, we need to take in a few factors

1. Competency of your ISP’s System Administration services

Chances are you’ll be able to judge that based on the money you pay. The more expensive ISP’s tend to have standard hardware and a certified staff of SysAdmins. The less expensive, well let’s just say I’ve had an experience with a ‘really cheap’ ISP where I specifically asked the admin (whom I was dealing with) to ‘NOT’ change anything in a configuration file, as I had just spent an hour trying to get it to do what I wanted. He placed me on hold and came back 5 minutes later. “Ok, I fixed the issue and I updated your config file”, he said. Long pause…. “You mean the one I just asked you to ‘NOT’ modify”, I asked. Another long pause…. “Uuhh sorry about that” he replied. My next question. “Did you copy the config file before you changed it?” This is basic System Administration 101. Copy before you change!!! Needless to say, it only took me a half hour the second time around to get my config file working.

2. Size of your system.

If you’re a small house with only one or two boxes running your websites, chances are your doing just fine with the ISP’s sysAdmins. If, however, you have more than two boxes we start to brush the area where you might want to consider a part-time sysAdmin. Or work something out with your ISP were you get a ‘personal’ sysAdmin. As your site grows, you really want to have a person who is intimate with your hardware and any customized configurations. This way, if the you-know-what hits the fan (as it will always do at the worst possible moment) you won’t waste valuable time as the sysAdmin becomes familiar with your system.

3. Desires of your software developers.

If your developer(s) say they need a sysAdmin, get one!! My worst job experiences involved a start up company where I was brought in to help speed up delivery of the software. I kept explaining to the CEO that I had limited experience in maintaining a box and that my sysAdmin skills were at a level below what we needed. (One of the best quotes I heard on this, “sending in an inexperienced system administrator is like giving a ball pin hammer to a three year old and letting him play in the garage next to the Porsche”). Needless to say, we launched a new product that brought down the entire site. It took 4 hours for the sysAdmins at the ISP to get back to us to tell us that the application I had written was hogging too much memory. It took me less than a minute to find the code line and change it. When the CEO brought me in to “talk” about the problem (meaning why/how did I trash the system) All I could say was , ‘this is a situation which would have never happened had we had a “real sysAdmin”‘. He tried to retort and I explained that once I knew what the problem was, it was fixed. I then asked him how I was supposed to have found this problem before we launched. He just stared at me blankly.

HeadGeek

Aaron

How to Rent an Email List

Renting an email list can be a challenge because of potential spam issues and damage to your reputation from the use of a bad list. In the past, only about 10 percent of the email list vendors were reputable. Currently, the situation has improved due to marketer demand for cleaner, more targeted lists.

There are thousands of lists to choose from, in every niche under the sun. B2B list rentals are basically reputable, but B2C rentals are less organized and some lists provide low value. However, if you do your homework and choose wisely, you can find yourself some very successful lists. Below are some tips for finding successful rental lists.

List Rental

A list rental refers to the purchase of a third-party email list for one-time use. The vendor (list owner or broker) sends out emails on your behalf, but you provide the creative and subject line. The mailing goes to a list of people who have opted in to receive email offers from the list owner.

When reviewing lists on the market, examine the list data cards displayed on the vendor sites. You never actually see the list of names. The vendor provides you with the number of recipients on various lists, and you can also request a specific number of recipients. You decide on the date and time the mailing will be sent out. You can have the list run against your suppression “Do-not-email” list. Once you provide the creative and specify timing, the list owner sends out the mailing from its server.

If you are doing this for the first time, research to find the best list brokers in your niche and then request some tests, negotiating for the best trial rates. Analytics and metrics are imperative for success in list rentals.

Finding the Right Lists

Before testing a list or renting one, ask for a list of previous list users so you can investigate the type of businesses (brands) that have been successful with specific lists. That way you can judge whether or not this might also work for your brand. Look for known brands repeatedly using a specific list.

In general, you must send several mailings before you start to get good results. Sometimes smaller, more targeted lists work better than larger ones.

Ensure that you rent double opt-in lists (double opt-in requires the list vendor to send a secondary email requiring a response before the name is added to the list. To ensure a list is actually opt-in, you can sign up for the list yourself and see if you get the secondary email activating the subscription.

Average List Costs

Costs vary widely, but targeted consumer lists run from $90 to $160 per thousand names, and the larger, aggregated databases range from $65 to $125 per thousand names.

The B2B, lower-end aggregated small business lists start at $75 per thousand. The higher-end lists targeting controlled circulation publications and targeted at specific groups run as high as $300 per thousand names.

Your Offer

Your offer must be relevant to the subject the list members opted in for or your
message will be deleted and your reputation suffers as well.

Watch for list owners that switch IP addresses. Set up dummy mailboxes to catch junk, and verify the original point of name collection.

Creative That Work

You can’t assume that your top-performing house email creative will test well with a rented list. House emails are normally retention messages, and you need to develop original acquisition creative for your rental list campaigns. It’s tempting to test your best campaign on a rental, but if you do that you may assume that rentals don’t work, whereas it’s the nature of the creative that is not working.

The recipients of rental lists are not in a relationship with you, whereas your house-list customers are. So you need the type of creative that will appeal to brand new customers. Even if you’re a well-known brand, that doesn’t automatically create an email relationship. You must establish the relationship from scratch.

For introductory campaigns, use benefit-driven copy rather than offer-driven copy (which works well with your house list). You need to tell these new recipients who you are. Some might be leery of Internet offers in general so you need to establish credibility. Put an About Us box on your landing page that explains who you are and what you do. Also tell them about your track record. Maybe you have thousands of repeat customers or have been in business since 1990, etc.

Your goal is to establish trust points. If the list owner comes from a high-trust brand, you might say, “As recommended by ZiffDavis” or “Brought to you with permission from ZiffDavis” on your landing page.

List Rental Test Metrics

You can’t know ahead of time about bounces because only the hard bounces are really measurable. For example, 97 percent delivery rates don’t include the number of emails going into filters. Therefore, the only way to accurately assign value to the list is to look at your opens, click-through rates and the percentages of those numbers that are converting to sale in your list rental test.

Remember, there are thousands of email lists on the market, but less than 20 percent are worthwhile, so it’s very important to test. It’s key to use single-source lists.

Ask your list broker how many names on a list should equal 100 clicks. That can help in the test assessment as you can then determine what results meet your criteria.

Even if you run a test for 5,000 names, you can’t always be sure about the trial’s accuracy. That’s because some list owners might deviously send your test campaign to 10,000 in order to raise the response rate and get the buy.

Ask if the list has a recency selection because recency makes a big difference in response rates. Many list owners don’t charge extra for this and only 25 percent of lists offer recency.

Some large list buys can contain names already in your house file. You should be especially wary of paying for those names. Request a sample in order to run a test or have the third-party vendor run a check of your list against theirs. This can help get the price down.

Deliverability and CAN-SPAM Issues

When you use rented lists, you should ask the list owner to run a suppression file. Suppression files remove records from a database that are no longer accurate or current, or names that should be removed due to opt-out requests.

For both CAN-SPAM and branding concerns, you also must ask the list owner to run the database names against your “Do Not Email” file and “Unsubscribe” file.

It’s a good idea to provide two opt-out links with your rented list campaigns: a regular unsubscribe button and a “Do Not Email” option. You must have these mechanisms in place to remove those that do not want to hear from your brand via email.

You must include your physical street address at the bottom of the creative to be in compliance with CAN-SPAM. You also want to request the time/date stamps for all of the rented addresses. This comes in handy if a recipient complains about receiving an email, as you can provide them with a record of when they opted-in. In closing, below are a few specific tips for B2C and B2B list rentals.

B2C Tips

1.    Study all possible demographic segments and values because list owners can try to sell you a lower-valued demo and mark it up. When you overpay, you lose profitability.
2.    Take the time to get at least three to five quotes.
3.    Look for list owners or brokers that don’t email more than twice a week.
4.    You need to know where the addresses originated. Find out where the names were collected, URL-by-URL. Know what topics recipients opted in for.

B2B Tips

1.    Look for highly targeted lists, which are now more available than they were a few years ago.
2.    If you run into a list deal where you have to buy a webinar and a space ad, be aware that arrangements may or may not be in your favor.
3.    Note domain name expirations in the news (publications/vendors/software firms), scraping them from your campaigns.
4.    While selects are still important, don’t forget about source. You can tell a lot about the potential effectiveness of a file by looking at its source.

What’s a sandbox?

Hi All,

I’ve been working in web/internet technologies for over a decade now and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a very sad situation. Most small businesses, who’s sole form of revenue comes from the company’s web page, do not make use of a sandbox.

What is a sandbox? In the toddler sense of the word, its a safe place to go and play. If you fall down, it doesn’t hurt (unless you nail the cement side with your head). In the computer sense, it is almost the same thing, except there are no cement walls. A sandbox in its purest form is an exact duplicate of the production environment. Its purpose is to allow a developer to write new code and debug current code, without the risk of bringing down the productions site. People of the non-geek type are really unaware of how the smallest code defect can, under the best case, prevent the web page from displaying and, under the worst case, send the data to the wrong place. Imagine billing a customer only to find out that the credit card and card info were from a different account. I’ve seen it happen. In most cases, another developer, such as myself, will have to spend hours upon hours trying to restore the data to its appropriate state (after the bug has been located). Unfortunately, in some rare cases, I’ve had to go to the boss and tell him, ‘the data is beyond repair’. Believe me when I tell you, the sandbox is worth the extra expense.

I’m convinced, how do I get a sandbox? Most likely, if your a small house, your hosting your box in a dedicated hosting environment. This makes things easy in that all you have to do is call the isp and tell them you want to setup a sandbox for your system. If they don’t know what a sandbox is, send them to this blog, or better yet, find one that does. If your looking to save money (aren’t we all?) then you can request a box that is less powerful. Ram and CPU changes will not affect the nature of the sandbox. It should have the same OS and modules (php, asp) installed. If you’re a larger house, your probably hosting on a co-located server (A box you own that rents space and a connection at the isp). If this is your situation, you probably have a system administrator (sys admin) who can easily create the sandbox once you explain what you need. If you don’t have a sys admin, see my next blog!!

I have a sandbox, now what? Now you can safely send your geeks into the realm of the development. They can try anything and not worry about it. Once your geeks are satisfied that their code is production worthy, you “push” the code to the production environment.

HeadGeek.

Aaron

Thanks, Jeff!

Finding reliable service providers in big cities is never easy. That said, I live in San Diego.  My family and I were recently looking for a local photograpger in San Diego ( and of course being relatively new to the area, this task could present challenges). As I scanned through the yellow pages ( surprisingly, the on-line yellow pages and directories were very poor!), I found a real big ad for Jeff Kassebaum Photogrpahy in Carlsbad, Ca. it was the biggest and best ad of them all. As an advocate of big ads, I decided to call Mr. Kassebaum and schedule an appointment (s) ( one for executive mug shots and if that worked out, one for family pics).

Well, I’ll make a long story short.  Jeff took the best family pictures in the world.  I know this should be a business blog, but i wanted to personally thank Jeff and let the rest of San Diego know where to go when looking for family or wedding portraits.  Our beach pictures came out fantastic and we can’t wait to have them on display in our house.

Jason

Customer Service Gone Bad

By Cassie

Is the answer to my question that minimum wage is too low to actually employ people with brains or manners, or are we (as parents) breeding children like this?? The question is what happened to good customer service? Why do I encounter sales associates, whether on the phone or in person, that lack social skills, manners, and brains? I know I am not alone when I talk about how frustrating this is to consumers or patrons. I often do not have patience to deal with such individuals. I tend to get snappy, or often just hang up on them. I have even been known to raise my voice. Do they know they are being rude or stupid, or are they too stupid to know this? I remember vividly working at Strouds and Gemco when I was a teenager, and taking pride in helping customers find items or in returning items. Actually making them smile and say thank you, going that extra mile for them because it felt good to be helpful or to achieve a goal. I often had customers tell my manager or assistant manager about how nice I was or helpful I was, and I would come home proud and tell my parents about the customer I helped and how I assisted them in redecorating their bathroom or son’s bedroom.

I actually called a bakery yesterday to order a cake and told the lady on the phone what I wanted, which was a cake. I explained that I wanted a three layer round cake. She contemplated this for a minute and then said “You want them stacked on top of each other?”, “yes” I replied, thinking that is what a layered cake is, then she said “I don’t know how that will look, it might come out crooked and not look right”, I impatient and just plain shocked at what she just said, hung up the phone on her. I had nothing to say to this woman on the phone who worked at a bakery, not a bakery department in a grocery store, but an actual bakery, where they bake. Then again today calling around for quotes on a particular service and just encountering people that just shouldn’t be dealing with the public or answering phones for that matter. What does this mean for us, a world based on customer service? What does this mean for our children? Will there be classes taught in high school or college in “Customer Service”? All of us start out at our first jobs, most of them customer service oriented, and this is where our children will start, but will they behave as badly as the current employees we all encounter? I am teaching my children about saying please and thank you, about taking pride in a project or game well played, and about how to succeed in life. Is this not being taught anymore? Are the parents to blame, or are the companies that hire these employees to blame?? Someone answer my question.

Vertical Search Rising

Patricia Hurst’s post on Search Engine Land showing that B2B marketers are shifting to search marketing is something we have been aware of at TopTenWholesale. What we’d like to add is that some of the best opportunities in search for B2Bs are on vertical search engines.

B2Bs Catching Up With B2Cs

It’s been apparent for some time that B2B marketers have been slow to adopt search marketing when compared to B2C sites. Hurst reviews various research studies illustrating this point, including last year’s Forrester survey, which shows B2Bs invest more heavily in trade shows, public relations and print advertising, while search marketing getting far less attention. Then there’s the Marketing Sherpa research comparing B2B to B2C Internet marketing budgets, also showing that B2C marketers allocate more to search marketing than B2B counterparts.

As Hursh noted, B2B marketers are warming up to search in 2007, with respondents in the Forrester study indicating they planned to increase search budgets this year. These findings coincide with SEMPO data collected for its annual report last year, showing that marketers will be shifting dollars from traditional to online marketing and search.

Reasons for the shift are obvious, as decision makers read the writing on the wall that says search drives commerce, online and offline. Consumers and business buyers research online before they shop – that’s a given. Therefore, search has become the mainstay in modern marketing budgets, and B2B marketers are catching on fast.

General Search Engines Losing Luster

B2B marketers know that general search engines like Google are losing their luster. Outsell reported a search failure rate of 31.9 percent for business users last year. Convera confirmed this finding and went further to say that general search options do not meet the needs of today’s business and professional users. This results in time inefficiencies and unmet needs as critical information can’t be found quickly on the web.

The Convera study identified a significant trend: Vertical search engines are being developed by trade publications to serve as search destination for their industries. These verticals can be organized by topic or by industry, and are a significant trend that will continue to accelerate.

Virtues of Going Vertical

One of the best things you can do as a B2B marketer is to promote your site in the verticals. Your target market is there, highly qualified and segmented. First, ensure that your site is well primed for organic listings. Then capitalize on sponsored listings and look for the lift in clicks and conversions.

There are many other promotional opportunities you can take advantage of in the verticals that simply don’t exist in general search engines. Vertical search engines are run by highly specialized professionals within a specific niche, so they can advise you on the type of marketing that works best. General search engines, on the other hand, don’t focus on advising unique business segments on their advertising needs. Because the verticals are smaller, they work harder to please customers and provide custom solutions.

Advertising on Verticals Is Cost Effective

Verticals are particularly cost-effective for small businesses, giving them a level playing field compared to what they face on general search engines. Here, where they can afford to buy their key terms, the audience is rarefied but highly qualified.

Actually, verticals are cost-effective for any business. The keyword buys are lower, and advertisers can expect higher click-throughs and conversions, resulting in a better marketing ROI.

Advertising Opportunities on Verticals

You can get pay-per-click advertising, banner ads and other promotional marketing services on vertical search engines. You get better brand recognition on verticals because a niche audience is going to recognize your brand a lot faster than they would on general search engines. The exposure may be lower but your brand recognition will be higher.

When it comes to banner ads, many times you can request and receive custom positioning. That’s because verticals will go out of their way to please customers. Verticals provide highly relevant content for their users with targeted banners, so it’s a win-win for customers and advertisers.

Some verticals will provide a link directly to a customer’s site or requested URL. This gives you an SEO benefit because the link from an authority site will give you higher organic rankings.

Another benefit is that some verticals have blogs on which you can comment. This can result in User Generated Media that you can use. Look for opportunities to comment on topics relevant to your niche.

Did you know that some verticals have email lists, and these databases include people interested in your niche? These opt-in email lists are more relevant than mass-market offerings. Users opt in to receive emails on topics of interest. Advertisers place ads in the email newsletters. Relevant ads to a receptive audience make good sense.

Last, but not least, B2B marketers enjoy an advantage on verticals because their ads are exposed to a highly motivated, targeted audience. Click-throughs can be fewer — this saves you money. Conversions can be higher — this makes you money. No two ways about it: B2B advertising on vertical search engines is a win-win.