1. Send Permission-less Email Newsletters

All you need to do is obtain email addresses illegally from every website you can find and send your newsletters to them. Let these emails pop up on victim’s mailboxes and send them wondering what they have done to deserve these spams. Put <ADV>  in your subject line and trick them into thinking you’re doing a legal email campaign because users are stupid. They will be happy to read what you have to say and are very likely to buy your product.

2. Don’t Include An Unsubscribe Link

This is a no brainer, if you want users to stay on your mailing list, don’t include an unsubscribe link! Your newsletter’s content is gold, users would love to receive more of them. Why would they click “Report Spam”, bounce or delete your email? Unless they’re not interested in your spam of course! But most users LIKE anonymous newsletters in their busy inboxes so they’re unlikely to mark it as spam.

3. Okay, Include An Unsubscribe Link

But let them surf through 100 pages before they can hit the life saving unsubscribe button. Let them play hide and seek. Let them log in first, even though these users have never signed up before or cannot remember their log in credentials.

Let’s assume they managed to log in to set their newsletters preferences. Disable the “unsubscribe from newsletter” checkboxes so that users cannot uncheck them and unsubscribe! Genius! This is what we learnt from Mocca.com.

4. Don’t Unsubscribe Them Immediately

Fine, after all the thick walls you have put before them, they still manage to unsubscribe. This is the last tactic you can use to continue spamming them dry.

When they hit unsubscribe, tell them that it will take 30 days to take them off the list. The more number of days the better, this is so that you can continue spamming them during these 30 days or more.

See the pattern here? You have time to continue spamming them but have no time to take them off the list. But don’t worry your users aren’t smart enough to notice that this is absurd.

5. Include Everyone’s Email Addresses In The “To: or CC:” Field

Use your desktop email client like Outlook to send newsletters, and put everyone’s email addresses in the “To: or CC:” field so that everyone else who receive the newsletters can see. Perhaps they can save everyone else’s email addresses so that they can spam each other later, the world needs more spam email newsletters, right?

Conclusion

This is what rogue email marketers do all the time. They are usually engaged by companies wanting to sell their products or services and who are clueless about how to reach out to more people.

As a result, these companies resort to buying email databases sold by companies who collect email addresses all over the internet whether or not they have permission to use them legally for any email campaigns.

With these email addresses, they engage email marketers to do email marketing on them even though none of these poor victims subscribed to these newsletters.

As a result, the rate of users marking these unknown newsletters as spam, unsubscribing, and worse still, hating your brand, is sky high because these email campaigns aren’t targeted at all. They did not sign up for these.

These marketers who think “eventually somebody is going to say yes” are oblivious to the consequences of such email campaigns. Overtime, when more people who aren’t interested gets annoyed about these newsletters and your brand, your company’s reputation naturally goes southwards. Instead of buying from you, they get pissed off and you wonder why they don’t buy from you.

There’s no surprise that more people around the world, not just Times Square alone, doesn’t know what a browser is, don’t use the internet as much as we would like to think, are less savvy and would get lost if the site is designed to be more complicated than they would have liked.

It’s a good place to start thinking about these users who are going to use the next website you design. Watch the following video and be surprised:

Found at: UX Magazine

I thought so too but if you really use Twitter like you would using Facebook, you’ll never make the most out of Twitter’s potential.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is about updating what matters to you, what is interesting to you, and how these might be valuable to your followers once you update and share it with them. It’s all about providing value to your followers and in turn receiving them from people you choose to follow. It’s about 1 on 1 conversations with people, even with people you don’t even know, and being very personal about it.

Using Twitter for Search

Most often than not, I use Twitter’s search in substitution to Google to find out more information about things that I’m interested in, as the results you get from Twitter are real time voices of people. Take the Mumbai attacks incident for example, during the event, doing a search on Twitter will get you real time information about the incident, even right from the mouth of people who are at the place of incident, something that Google cannot provide in that sense.

Twitter for Marketeers

Twitter is also one of the most effective social network tools for marketeers to reach out to people who are interested about their products. Take Dell for example, who recently adopted Twitter for it’s marketing effort to spread the news about their latest promotion in real time and as a result earned $1million in revenue just by using Twitter itself. At last count Dell have 39,429 followers in their Twitter network. 39,429 people have followed Dell voluntarily to receive real time deals. Which means Dell can always reach out to 39,429 people in seconds whenever they want to spread the news about a deal.

Twitter for Bloggers

Twitter is great for content providers like bloggers for example. Everyone who blogs knows that it is very difficult to keep pumping out great content/post on their blogs for their community more than once a day, but by using Twitter, you can give out valuable information via short burst of tweets to your community who follows you on Twitter. Other than that, if you have a large community of followers, you can let them know via a tweet that you’ve updated your blog with a new post. When users find your post valuable and useful, they might tweet it to their network of followers and you will get increased traffic as a result.

Twitter Misuse

But hold your horses if you are thinking about using it purely as a marketing tool, and using it to solely to sell your product and not providing value or interacting with others. Because you’ll lose followers in the long run. Remember, Twitter is as much about giving as it is about taking.

Cost of Twitter

*Update
Twitter will remain free for use for everyone including individuals, celebrities and companies.

Here’s the latest post from Twitter’s blog regarding this.
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Twitter has been free just like Facebook or any other social networks. It is still free, but recently there has been talks about Twitter getting down to business, charging commercial users soon, but how they define “commercial users” is still not clear at this point.

To find out more about using Twitter, checkout this great slideshow “How Twitter Changed my Life” (top of page), by business and entrepreneurship student MinXuan Lee.

You can get more tips and tricks about using Twitter at Twitip, a very useful blog about Twitter by Darren Rowse, a very successful blogger who started Problogger.net and Digital Photography School.

*Follow us on Twitter if you will (@hex_sg or @benhomie, @greenlaundry), we’re using Twitter for leisure if you’re wondering.

Flash, yesterday

Several years ago when Flash first made it’s debut, almost everyone who uses Flash are excited about creating the next flashy website, injecting the “wow factors” into every site they built by creating splash pages, lengthy flash intros, cheesy sounds, ambient or groovy background music with no “on/off” buttons, packing in lots of effects that either takes away too much of the users’ attention or having the user to wait too long for the website to load. Not mentioning weird interfaces and hard to use navigation systems which developers deemed “cool”. Though, I’m not denying the fact that I am guilty of some of the above mentioned in the early days.

Flash is Great But Prone to Being Abused

The great thing about Flash is that it is so versatile and flexible that you can build almost anything with it, websites, microsites, rich internet applications, games, mobile applications, desktop applications (AIR) etc, but the flip side of the coin is that Flash has been used irresponsibly by so many to make websites “as cool as possible” that it have earned some bad reputation over the years.

Loading Time

Take for example, when we speak to our clients about building their websites, they all share the same concern – loading time. Because that is the most apparent. Users don’t like to wait too long to interact with a site to start with as users have extremely short attention span today. Users these days have a queue of so many other sites to visit, news to read, blogs to follow, they have less reasons to wait another second. If you’re not convinced, ask yourself if you like to wait in a queue.

Among this common concern, bad utilization of Flash is more than meets the eye.

User Experience

In short, the user interface, the consistency of effects, the smoothness of transitions, navigation systems etc are some of the factors that contribute to the user experience. A layman can’t spell it out in details why they hate it, they just hate it. This makes user experience more of an “art” than a “science”. It’s the responsibility of the Flash developer to make sure they “don’t hate it”, by using Flash responsibly. Flash is resource hungry by nature, so don’t make it worse.

Keeping Flash Alive

Its the onus of Flash developers today to ensure the longevity of Flash. No more Flash intros without skip buttons. No more flashy and slow moving animations before the user can finally see the content. No more sounds without “on/off” buttons. No more launching a flash site in a pop up window from a splash page. No more launching the user’s browser into fullscreen mode without their consent. No more “experimental” or hard to use navigation systems that makes it hard for the user to learn, nobody likes to learn how to navigate a site anyways, when they use a door knob, turn on/off the lights, turn on/off the tap, they don’t have to learn in order to interact with it, so why do they have to on a website?

Splash pages

Think about it, do you really need a splash page? The whole purpose of splash pages was to inform users of the required screen size and it requires flash player to view the site, but you know what, who cares? Technology has been evolving faster than you can imagine, huge monitors are common these days, 1024×768 is the new 800×600 and 99% of internet users have Flash player installed. Lastly, please refrain from telling the user they need Flash Player 10 to view the site when it only takes Flash Player 8. And by the way, nobody likes to follow rules when using the internet, so please do your users a favor. Accommodate the user than have the user accommodate you.

Content Architecture

It is crucial to have a website planned out extensively in it’s skeleton form before anything else. Bad planning of a site leads to bad user experience, that is when users move their mouse to the top right corner of the screen and click the close button immediately.

As mentioned earlier, Flash is very flexible in terms of where you want to position elements of your site like buttons for example, but that doesn’t mean you can put them anywhere.

Flash Today

It has been several years since we have expressed our enthusiasm by releasing countless great or annoying flashy Flash sites, pleasing or pissing off countless others. It is time for us developers to grow up and to think more in the user’s point of view than our own.

Users these days are more content hungry than ever, leading to the rise of blogs that generates valuable content to meet user’s demands and at the same time monetizing their effort. This means more users are interacting with standards compliant websites more often than ever, giving them even lesser reason to learn how to navigate around a badly designed Flash site.

Being a good Flash designer or developer is more than just knowing how to script bells and whistles, it is how well the end user can interact with it that is the most important.

As web usage has been increasing throughout the years, even if you don’t own a personal website, you most probably own a blog. Having a website without being able to track the number of visits and where they’re coming from is almost like putting your site to waste.

Here’s a quick one explaining the basic terms of web statistics so you can better appreciate the use of it. Keep in mind that the terms used by various web statistic services might differ a little from each other. Some might refer to “Unique visitors” as “New visitors” or “Referrers” as “Traffic sources” etc. But they share similar meanings.

Web Statistics & their terms

Unique Visits
Your web counter logs your users IP addresses. When a user visits your site, your web counter will log him/her as 1 unique visit. Even if the user returns to your homepage, or refreshes your site 10 times for example, your web counter still logs it as 1 unique visit. Unique visitor logs are much more accurate in recent times with broadband access, as your IP address won’t change too frequently unless you’re still sing 56k dial-ups where your IP address changes each time you connect to the internet.

Page Views
This is the number of times your website has been accessed at any page the web statistics code has been pasted into. This number does not take into account the user’s IP address. If the user accesses your website 10 times, the number of page views logged is 10. If the user accesses your your site’s homepage once, viewing 10 pages, the number of page views logged is 11.

Most advertisers are interested in this figure as this is a basic measure of the number of impressions their advertisements will get if they advertise on your site.

Returning Visits
This measures your “visitor’s loyalty”. The more popular your site is, the higher the number. One of the most important factor when measuring a blog, as this shows how interested your user is that makes them check your site again for new content.

Referrers
My favourite part of web statistics is referrers, or your traffic sources. Who is linking you? Who loves you? Where does your visitor come from? Referrers shows you the links so that you can check out the site and see what they’re saying about your site.

As a part of the crucial factors of SEO (search engine optimization), being linked up at as many other sites ranks your site higher in search engines. This is also a measure of the “link worthiness” of your website.

Search Keyword
This is an analysis of how users discover your site, which keyword they use and which search engine. Perfect for your SEO efforts, as you’ll know which keyword is the most popular. You’ll also get an idea of how successful your SEO efforts are, for example if you’re selling wine and when a user search for “wine” on google, your site appears at the number one position, this shows that your SEO efforts is applaudable. Congrats. You don’t have to pay for search engine advertising anymore. When this happens prepare to hire more employees to handle your surge in business leads.

Search keyword numbers also contributes to your unique visitors numbers.

Browsers / Operating System / Screen Resolutions / Flash Versions / Java Support
As you can tell these are very straightforward, the stats tells you which browsers, OS, resolutions, flash player versions, are the most popular these days, and also if their computers have java support.

If you look at screen resolutions for example you’ll realize that 800×600 resolutions does not appear at the first few most used screen resolutions anymore, who needs tiny screens when they can have large screens at a cheap price today (2008). The most popular screen resolution now is 1024×768, which is also a basis of the websites we create today.

Countries
Shows you which countries your website has been viewed from and which countries loves your site more. If you’re doing a global business, only having hits locally means you have to re-think about your marketing efforts.

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There are more kinds of other statistics that different web statistics services measure, some even measure which links on your website has been clicked, or if you own a blog, what search terms they use to search within your blog.

Free and Great Web Statistic Services

We recommend Statcounter, it’s free and gives you comprehensive statistics about your website, most importantly they don’t force you to append their logo on your site to have your site tracked, as compared to other free statistic services. Even sows you a Google Map of where your visitors comes from. The only catch is they make revenue through advertisements, so be prepared to see ads on your stats account.

One other service you can consider is Google Analytics, free, no ads and also is an invisible counter. Wide variety of information you can see about your side, even works with Google Adwords. If you use Adwords, Google Analytics is perfect as you’ll be able track your conversion rates (how your ad dollars converts to revenue). The only thing about Google Analytics is that it might be too overwhelming for first time users.

Both sites gives you the basics of web statistics including other bells and whistles. It’s up to your personal or business preference, try them to see which one works better for you, or you can even use both on one website.

Hope you have a better understanding about web statistics after this post.

Real Simple Syndication, or RSS for short, is a part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

RSS has been around for quite some time and my bet is you see them 90% of the time when reading blogs especially. I am very surprised at how a handful of people are still not acquainted with it. As time spent online has been increasing at an alarming rate, we keep track of a number of blogs or websites almost daily to keep ourselves up to date with stuff that we like. These number of sites increase throughout the years and chances are you’ll find that visiting these websites to look for updates turns into a chore and a pain. This is where RSS comes in to rescue all you information hungry people.

What is RSS you ask?

There are many definitions and explanations you can find on the web of course. But in a nutshell, RSS helps you keep track of your favourite websites or blogs (read: in large quantity) for new updates easily and quickly, almost at a glance as with some good RSS Readers either online or offline.

How to use RSS?

1) Copy the RSS link

Take this blog for example as one of your favourite sites to read frequently ;P. You want to keep updated with this blog, so literally you “subscribe to the RSS” but clicking on the available link which is on the right hand side of this blog for this instance. If you don’t know where the link is, look for the RSS Icon that mimics the one at the top. Most sites that wants you to subscribe to their blog uses this official icon for easy identification.

RSS button on the address bar (the blue button)

You can even get easy access to the RSS link by clicking on the RSS button on your address bar (almost all browsers detects if an RSS feed is available and in turn provide a button in the address bar for your convenience):

Now copy the RSS link from your address bar.

2) Use a RSS Reader

An example RSS Reader from netvibes.com

You’ll need a RSS Reader, You can find a review of all my favourite RSS Readers which you might like to use for starters below. Basically, paste the RSS link into the RSS Reader. Your RSS Reader will show roughly 5 – 10 latest “news feeds” of the site. This will be updated automatically by the RSS Reader when a new post is updated on the site.

The latest post will be marked unread if you haven’t click on it yet. This is how you keep track of new updates to your favourite sites!

3) Repeat

Repeat 1 and 2 for all your favourite websites, you must have tons of them I suppose! The above image is taken from netvibes.com, one of my all time favourite online RSS Reader as it enables me to keep track of numerous blogs at a glance. Now you can too!

RSS Readers

There are numerous RSS Readers both as a web application and desktop application. It’s a matter of choice which one you prefer. A web based RSS Reader will enable you to get access to your news wherever you are be it an internet cafe or at the airport. A desktop RSS Reader will open up faster without waiting for a website to load. I have tried a number of them and here’s filtering out all my favourites:

Netvibes (Web Based)

Netvibes is much like iGoogle where you can add your favourite widgets to the website eg. weather, facebook friends updates, RSS feeds. Netvibes lets you create multiple pages of widgets. You can create a page solely dedicated to RSS feeds itself.

What makes this my favourite is not only the ability to view large quantity of news at one glance as mentioned before, clicking on a feed brings you to a second page where the website will load on a seperate frame on the right, within the reader itself. Which means you don’t have to open new windows just to read the full article which I always find it a pain. To view other articles from the same author just use the navigation on the left. This makes your day to day reading much faster.

Times, by Acrylic Apps (Desktop Based, $30 CAD to own, Mac based)

As keeping up to date with your favourite sites become a day to day affair, it is almost like reading a newspaper daily. Times lays out all your RSS feeds into a newspaper like format. This familiar format makes reading easy and fun. Times also lets you create different categories/pages of your feeds so that you can navigate between each category like how you would on a newspaper.

The perks of this reader is that it downloads your articles at the background clicking on a feed peels the page open and reveals the FULL article. Talking about speeding up your reading

You can also save clips of your favourite articles, or articles you plan to read later into a tray, literally. This appears at the bottom of the reader and saving articles onto the tray is like drag and drop affair. Very intuitive. This function also features stacks much like Mac OSX Leopard. You can keep these newspaper clippings for as long as you want them to. Dragging an article away from the tray deletes that article. The whole concept of this is just like traditional “newspaper cutting”.

RSS Reader on the iPhone

There are quite a number of them. Here’s 2 of my favourites.

Newsstand, by OMZ Software, USD$4.99 to own

Newsstand is an easy to use iPhone RSS Reader that lets you read articles in 2 formats – Portrait and Landscape. (iTunes link)

The portrait mode is pretty straightforward, just click on articles you would like to read. You can read the full article of any feed right inside this application without having to launch Safari, very important! Unread articles are marked with a blue dot, exactly like iPhone’s Mail. This app also lets you flag articles for later reading.

The landscape mode (tilt your iPhone) is the part that makes things interesting. It turns all your articles into Cover Flow. Scroll left and right with your fingers to navigate between sites. Double tap on any of them and the “newspaper” graphic will jump to the front and flip open to review all the latest feeds. Clicking on the feeds on the left loads the texts immediately on the right. Click “X” to close and continue navigating.

Newsgator – Free

Newsgator (iTunes link) is just like Newsstand, without the landscape / coverflow mode. But unlike Newsstand, all your RSS Feeds are stored on Newsgator’s server. Just log in with your Newsgator’s login name and password to access all your feeds. This means that you don’t have to manually type in the feed URL into the iPhone which is a pain if you have large amount of feeds you need to add. By storing your RSS feeds in the cloud, this means you can also read RSS on Newsgator’s website. Both platforms will be synced with the same RSS Feeds. Reading the full article within the app is also possible.

Well that’s all for the RSS coverage! I hope you enjoy this article and gain some insight on how powerful RSS is as a form of time saver for all your blog reading needs.

I have joined Melly and hopped onto the Mac bandwagon, please pardon me if some of these applications doesn’t work on PC. Here goes:

1) MobileMe, by Apple

MobileMe is Mac & PC friendly! If you have several computers at home, eg. 1 desktop computer, 1 laptop to work on the go, 1 iPhone or iPod Touch, you definitely need your data to be synced across all devices, and nothing does it best like MobileMe. MobileMe not only syncs but pushes data from your calendar, contacts, emails, bookmarks and more to all your devices.

If you like push technology and if you’re running a small business run by 2 person for example, it’s not practical to pay a hefty price monthly for Microsoft Exchange or Blackberry in my opinion. MobileMe only costs US$99/year for Single User and US$149/year for Family Pack to enable you to have push email, calendar and contacts to your iPhone and your other machines.

You will also get a full suite of web applications allowing you to manage your emails, calendars, contacts, photos and files. The web app really looks and works like a desktop application which is really an awesome experience.

2) Money, by Jumsoft

Money lets you keep track of your earnings and expenses, invoices and bills. What I really like about this native application is that it really just gives me what I need without being bloated with extra features that I don’t need. Very easy to use, once installed it gets you up and running in no time.

This application lets me see my overall finance situation, income, my invoices (invoiced, uninvoiced, overdue), and expenses all at a glance. If you find creating invoices day to day a chore, you can also create invoices within this application, but unfortunately you can’t customize the look of your invoices like you want them to although you can select from a few pre-designed templates.

But that’s besides the point, the ultimate purpose using this application is such that I can make financial decisions very quickly, keeping track of invoices sent to clients and filing income taxes at the end of the year. There is also a sync feature to backup and revert your data to MobileMe, so that you can see exactly the same data on different computers.

Money costs US$39 to own the program.

3) Things, by Cultured Code

In order to reduce stress, you need all your tasks, big or small, immediate or future, to be recorded instead of having them hanging around your head. Things lets you do just that. It comes with a desktop and iPhone app available at the iTunes store. You can sync both apps with both platforms wirelessly. This to-do list application lets you create tasks which you can file under “Today” (tasks you need to complete today), “Scheduled (tasks you need to complete in the future)”, “Someday (tasks you might want to consider completing) and “Next (all the task you need to complete after Today’s task, including scheduled tasks). You can even create folders under “Projects” where you can list individual tasks under each of your projects, be it your clients projects, personal projects, or even shopping lists!

You have to try using it to get the flow going, it really does makes me more productive and stress relieved especially when I have a tad too many things to handle at once. Never underestimate the act of ticking off your tasks as “done” each time you complete them, it does makes me feel more accomplished of all the things I have at hand.

Things is now available as a free beta download for your desktop, it’s still undergoing development and once it’s done you’ll have to download the full program at a US$49. You can get US$10 discount if you sign up for their newsletter now. The iPhone app is available at the iTunes store at US$9.99.

4) Evernote

This free notes taking application, Evernote, stores all your notes in the “cloud” which means you can access your notes via a web interface, free desktop application or the iPhone available for free download via iTunes. Evernote is Mac & PC compatible. You can take regular text notes which you can format the text freely using the interface on any platform, take photo notes using either your iSight/Webcam/iPhone Camera, or voice notes using your iPhone’s built in microphone. Evernote also works on Windows Mobile devices.

Notes created or edited will be synced throughout all your devices which is a very important aspect. You can also create multiple so called “Notebooks” to sort your notes into different categories.

Evernote gives you 40MB of monthly upload allowance. You can pay US$5/Month or US$45/Year to go Premium and get 500MB of monthly upload allowance.

Here’s a useful tip where most of us missed out, you can actually set your searching preference via this small link on the right of the search box:

Apart from many preferences you can set like language, explicit content filtering and number of results returned, the most useful one I would assume for most people is the “Open search results in a new browser window”.

Now you don’t have to use a keyboard key combination with the mouse to launch a new window from the search results. Small feature but extremely helpful.

Here’s one that I developed for the movie 30 Days of Night (click on banner to replay) for Qais Consulting (I know, banner looks pixellated but this is what I call – compromise – for file size restriction), I would like to share with you my experience while developing this innocent looking banner which only weighs 29.7kb.

7 Points Checklist:

Here are 7 points to note when optimising your web banner. With this checklist, hopefully you won’t have to tear your hair out like I did. The final point I’m going to talk about using fonts which to me, is the most critical area of optimisation:

One more tip about developing your byte critical flash banner:

If you’re not sure which asset in your flash file is causing the increase in filesize, go to “Settings” at the “Properties” panel in Flash, click on the “Flash” tab and check the “Generate size report” checkbox. This will generate a text file listing all the assets that are used in your flash banner including their individual file size in Bytes, from there it’ll be easy to see who is the culprit at a glance.