Members of the old WikiStudent will remember that the second-hand Unisa bookshop had pictures of textbooks from loot.co.za, similar to the ones in the right-hand panel of this blog.
These are actually adverts, though you would hardly say so! (Don’t you hate those flashy banner ads you see all over the Web? They just scream ‘advert’ at you, unlike these).
What I like about these Loot book pics is that they are actually helpful. Someone wanting to buy a textbook from another student can see what the cover looks like, and the price they would pay for a new copy at Loot. I love these ads so much that I think I would use them even if I wasn’t making a profit out of them!
To be open, I’ll tell you how it works.
Customers of Loot can put up adverts on their website, in the form of book/dvd/cd/games covers, or generic ones like this:
If someone clicks on one of your links or images and registers at Loot within 30 days of the click, as soon as they make their first purchase, you get an R8 voucher 
I know, R8 doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t real cash, but for someone like me, these R8s add up and help a lot, considering how much I spend at Loot! At any point in time I have stuff on order. (At the moment, it’s four books and one DVD). I like using Loot because they’re very reasonable, and their office is in Sun Valley (so I drive there to pick up my orders in person, instead of having them delivered through the post). I know the staff and like the company, and think they’re very worthy of support.
The term “pretty URLs” refers to URLs that are short, human-friendly, and descriptive of the page they reference.
Page URLs in MediaWiki are “pretty” enough, but I want to improve on the default structure.
For example, the link to the page for CMP310-A by default would look like this:
WikiStudent.ws/Unisa/index.php?title=Unisa_Module:CMP310A
I want to shorten it to:
WikiStudent.ws/Unisa/Module:CMP310A
Can you see how friendly this is? If someone emails you the link you know exactly what the page is about before you even click on it. Contrast this with a link on Unisa’s home page which is labelled “Prospective students”. The link is:
unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=16832
How unreadable is that!
Ok, I know a lot of websites still have URLs like this, especially websites that have been around for a long time. It’s because that was the old way of doing things (giving pages ID numbers instead of descriptive text). The new thing is to use these so-called pretty URLs, and this can be achieved by creating re-write rules in your .htaccess file.
I’ll admit, I’ve never done URL re-writing before, and haven’t yet had a chance to look into it. If anyone knows how to transform my first link given above into the second one, please share the re-write rule with me!!
PS. Filing this post under “Marketing” because having keywords in your URLs is good search engine marketing too
One thing I haven’t yet factored into my schedule is email marketing. Oops… But that’s OK, it can wait till after the site’s gone live. Here’s a brilliant email marketing kit I bought recently, to help me with mass mailers, newsletter design, viral marketing, etc:
I’m glad I own this (rather huge) file with CD, as it answered almost all my questions on email marketing.
The new WikiStudent, like the old site, will have newsletters you can subscribe to, and I’ve reached the point where my mailing list (or future mailing list, I should rather say) will be so large, that I have to do things properly. E.g. If I send out zillions of emails all at once there is a good chance that I’ll be seen as a spammer, even though the recipients chose to be on the list. This email marketing kit has a whole chapter on spam, and gives anti-spam laws by country even. It also has email design guidelines, tips for optimising delivery, tracking and reporting, developing an effective email strategy… Vital stuff to know!
After writing about the privacy policy earlier today, and Google’s recommendation for AdSense users, I was wondering, not for the first time, whether or not to continue displaying Google ads. (These are those “sponsored link” ads like the ones in the sidebar of this blog).
I must admit, I don’t like them. They’re ugly and will always look like adverts, even though you can customise the colours to blend them in with your site and even though they’re supposed to be relevant to the content of the page and therefore useful to your visitors.
Here’s what I do like about them:
Getting a cheque in the post from Google is really really nice, and it’s always for a large amount (they wait for your earnings to build up). So if I have these ads on the new WikiStudent it will be for this reason alone.
What I’ll probably do is try them out and make a decision after a few months. The thing is, I want this to be a professional-looking website, and ads like these definitely don’t contribute towards professionalism!
There are a few MediaWiki extensions for GoogleAds, which let you insert your AdSense code in the skin (rather than in pages, where visitors could modify it - bad idea!). Since this isn’t at all important to the functionality of the site, I’ll leave this till last. Just felt like mentioning it now, after getting that Google privacy policy alert.