Here’s something to watch out for if you have the Skype browser button. If you use a content management system to edit your website and happen to have phone numbers on the page you are editing, it’s possible that a whole bunch of Skype code will be injected in around each phone number.

It’s not a big deal to strip it out if you’ve only got one or two numbers on a page, but if you have a page full of worldwide agents and each of their phone numbers get the Skype code treatment it’s a real headache to get rid of. So before editing any pages containing phone numbers, switch off the Skype browser button.

Personally it find the idea of an application taking control of web pages and inserting it’s own code before displaying them to be a bit intrusive. Surely web pages should be displayed the way the site owner wants them to be shown.

If you’re just not getting enough visitors from Google, here’s a few other ways to get more people to your site. Most of these methods are part of a good SEO strategy anyway, so you’ll find that by implementing them you will probably do better in Google as a natural progression.

1. Bookmark your most interesting, outrageous or funny content in Stumbleupon. You can get literally thousands of visitors from doing this, however not many will go further than the landing page.

2. Build up a profile on Digg. Make contacts and digg plenty of their articles before dropping in one or two of your own pages and asking your contacts to digg it.

3. As 2 above except do it on Sphinn. Sphinn works mostly for marketing related content so if you’re selling vacuum cleaners you might struggle to get content up there.

4. Blog comments. Unless you are in the most obscure niche there is, you’ll probably be able to find loads of blogs related to your site. Get active in the comments section, give valuable quality feedback on posts and include your web address in the appropriate location, not in the comment itself.

5. Twitter. Setup your account and get active. Make sure you put your web address in your profile and consider making a custom background with your web address on it. Use the search function or a third party app such as Tweetdeck to find people to follow and interact with who might be interested in the content of your site. Get your blog to automatically update your twitter account via Twitterfeed.

6. Contact other sites and swap links with them.

7. Forums – while you can’t go spamming forums with your sales message you can take part as a real member in forums and many of them allow a signature link which is displayed after every post.

8. Pay-per-click. It’s an expensive way to get visitors but it does work. If you want to avoid Google’s Adwords, give Yahoo Search Marketing a whirl.

9. Email signatures/Email Newsletters. Including your web address in every email you send to anyone will get you a few visitors. Running an email newsletter with software like Aweber or ConstantContact will get you lots of return visitors.

10. Give away content. Contact other website owners and offer to do a guest post on their blog or give them a page of content for their site in return for attribution and a link back to your own site.

There are plenty more ways to get visitors from sources other than Google but these are a few to get started with.

Today I received a parcel from an Amazon Marketplace seller. I had been looking forward to receiving it even though it took 10 days (hardly 1st class service as advertised). Upon opening it though I discovered quickly that not only was it late but they had not sent the item I had ordered. It was not only a different model but a completely different manufacturer and altogether different features.

They could have got away with calling it a mistake until I saw the accompanying letter that told me they had run out of stock of the item I had ordered so had taken the liberty of sending the one that arrived instead. They stated that this was a more expensive item with all these features so it must be better and they would absorb the cost difference. They stated this as if they were doing me a favour. Their suggestion was that the product they had supplied was much better than the one I ordered.

The problem with this practice is that they are assuming the customer has just ordered on a whim and that they know better than the customer. It’s cocky and arrogant. In my case, as with all products I buy I researched carefully to find just the product I wanted. I put time and effort into making sure I was selecting the right one. I read over a hundred reviews. I was pretty certain that I wanted the product that I ordered. In double-guessing me they are insulting my ability to choose wisely when buying. They are calling me stupid.

It wouldn’t have taken them more than a few minutes to send me an email to ask if I wanted the alternative. Certainly it would have taken less time than packaging the wrong item and posting it. I would have been able to get my item quickly elsewhere and would have been happy in the end. As it is I’m still waiting for a response from their customer service email address. My time has been wasted. Their time has been wasted. Their money in sending, refunding and processing is wasted, and the packaging materials are wasted. Oh, not to mention the negative feedback that is imminent and the resulting loss in future business to them from potential buyers who check out their seller rating.

For now I have decided not to name the seller here. With a bit of quick talking customer service they might get away with this, but the longer it takes to get a refund the higher the chances that the negative feedback will come with some really negative comments.

I guess the moral here is – don’t assume your customer is stupid, communicate with them and let them choose to be stupid if they so wish.

Update: This was resolved quickly and the seller did have good reason for acting the way they did. In the end though I went to Argos to get my product – something I usually try to avoid.

Over the years I’ve met a lot of clients who have lost contact with their web designers for whatever reason. The designers have never given the client their FTP details so that they can retrieve their own website in order to make alterations or transfer the site to another host.

Often it’s easiest to just use an offline browser or a website downloader. I’ve tried a lot of these and most run for 30 days or so before you need to pay for them. The thing is, I use one maybe twice a year and I wasn’t happy shelling out for that.

Recently though I found HTTrack which does exactly the same as all the other ones I’ve tried but it’s free. I’ve used it for a few sites now and it seems pretty solid.

Just thought I’d share.

If you publish regularly to your website and have built up a backlog of articles, you have a valuable resource waiting to be plundered for links.

When you add a new article to your site you want it to build up some presence quickly. You probably post it to the homepage, maybe mention in on your blog (unless homepage and blog are one and the same) and it probably goes in the sidebar navigation somewhere too.

Indeed in the writing process for the article you’ve probably thought about other articles on your site and linked out to them from the new article. You then publish the article and hope that it gets listed quickly. You might even submit to Digg and Stumbleupon to get some traffic to it.

The next and crucial part is often missed though. It’s time to go through your backlog of articles on your site. They’re already indexed and getting spidered regularly (hopefully). Search through the body content of these articles for any references that could be linked to the new page, and link them up. Indeed, if it’s close enough but doesn’t quite meet your criteria, make up an extra sentence or paragraph to include your preferred keywords for the new page and link them up. Do this in a sympathetic way though, only picking the pages that are most relevant rather than adding keywords to every page of your site.

It’s not a complicated thing to do this and it shouldn’t take long in most cases but it will help with SEO and with getting your new articles the kudos they deserve.

I’ve been wondering a lot recently how Twitter is going to be monetised when it eventually happens. Right now everyone’s really happy using it, and after the airliner in the Hudson being broken 1st on Twitter, people are saying this is Twitter’s tipping point and from now on it will be mainstream like Facebook and Myspace.

There must be a lot of people using Twitter now. 10’s of millions maybe. That must take a lot of resources. At some point soon the people paying for those resources must be thinking about bringing some money back in.

So how might they do it?

The most obvious way is to slap some advertising on there. This could be blanket advertising, it could be contextual advertising based on the content of the page or it could be targeted ads based on users likes and dislikes. While long-time twitterers might be put-off by this, most people are used to seeing ads on any free site. It could be an easy way to start making decent money from the site.

The second way I see Twitter being monetised could be through charging for premium services. Things like being able to have threaded discussions, categorisation of the people you follow and other highly desired features could be placed behind a subscription-only wall. The subscription service might also be a way to view twitter without ads. Free users get peppered with ads, while premium members  can have the relative tranquility of the service they knew before monetisation.

Does anyone else have any ideas on how twitter might be monetised? Please leave a comment.