More and more sites now try to capture visitors’ email addresses on the first page...whether it’s the home page or a landing page.

Why? So that if that visitor doesn’t complete a purchase or registration of some kind during that visit, you can then follow up with an email or send them a newsletter.

It’s an effective tactic and one we tested ourselves as part of our Shopping Cart Recovery brief.

However, there are times when asking for an email address is perceived as an unwelcome barrier by site users.

For instance, more and more online publishers are insisting on some kind of registration before allowing visitors to access the full content on their sites.

What is the downside?

Here is one point of view, published today by Marcia Yudkin in her Marketing Minute newsletter.

With her permission, here is the full text of what she wrote:

In stores, many of us cringe when asked, "May I help you?"

In many mail order ads, you can still see the wording traditionally used to reassure people requesting information: "No salesperson will call."

Online, more than 89 percent in a July 2005 ThomasNet.com survey want anonymity when searching for information on the Internet. In a 2006 Marketing Sherpa survey, 53 percent don't want to share personal information when shopping.

Clearly, most people strongly prefer privacy. When handing over personal data, they expect something valuable in return.

The increasingly popular technique of requesting a name and email address before providing a description of a product violates this expectation.

Proponents of the technique claim that by the numbers, it's profitable. However, missed publicity opportunities don't show up in numbers. I recently found myself intrigued by a product I'd normally want to tell people about, but all the product details were guarded by the need to sign up first.

I left instead.

By hiding products beyond a moat, you may forfeit the enthusiasm of journalists and opinion leaders who could spread your message at no cost.

She is right in saying that a requirement to register or hand over your email address can present a barrier to the people you most want to read your content.

I have experienced this myself when researching topics for this blog. I might come across a link to an interesting article, click through to the site and then find myself having to register before I can read the article.

In most cases, unless the article is on a must-read topic, I don’t bother to register, hit the back button and look for something else. As a result, that publisher loses a link in this blog and some additional, free publicity.

There is another issue here as well. I’m not presenting it as a reason not to capture email addresses, but rather to ensure that we are all aware of the consequences of everything we do online.

When I come across a request for my name and email address on the first page of a site, whether it be the home page or a landing page, a small piece of information about the site’s brand is tucked away in a corner of my mind.

I see the email address requirement and may think any one of more of these things...

“Can I trust these people? I only just arrived at their site for the first time and they are instantly asking me for personal information.”

“Hey, these guys are pushy.”

“No, I won’t give you my email address until I find out whether your site can give me what I’m looking for.”

“Hang on, I can’t find out whether this site can give me what I’m looking for without handing over my email address. I don’t feel comfortable. I’m going to try elsewhere.”

If people experience any of the feelings expressed in these questions, you will receive a small black mark against your brand. Visitors may not remember you for your great site, but instead remember you as the place that made them feel uncomfortable on the first page they saw.

As I mentioned above, this is not a rant against email capture. Our own testing has shown how effective this tactic can be in increasing revenues.

Just keep in mind that even though your revenues are increasing, that’s not the only thing that is happening.

You may also, at the same time, be losing free publicity through journalists and bloggers, and be making a bad impression on some of your visitors.

As you may already know, we have been busy working on a series of certification programs.

The first one, which started in April – and we’ll be running it again, starting in June – is the Foundations of Online Testing course.

During the first course we found that the topic people wanted help with most was determining the validity of test results.

Right now we are working Dr. David Reiley, Professor of Economics for the University of Arizona, to develop a theorem for calculating validity with a small sample size that is based on making a prediction prior to running a test.

We believe this will allow marketers to move more quickly as they test, and to make sound decisions with less information.

In the interim, we have put together a PDF file which takes you through the steps to quickly calculate test validity.

Feel free to download your own copy of Determining if a Data Sample is Statistically Valid.

Here’s another question that came out of our last teleconference call on landing page optimization.

“How important is it to carry over the image you use on the marketing piece over to a landing page. For example if my print flyer has image X used on it, do we need to incorporate that image X on the web landing page that the print piece directs them to.”

Although we haven’t run a specific test on this yet, the qualified answer is Yes.

You’ll see this throughout all marketing campaigns offline. A similar theme and set of images and copy lines will be shared across TV spots, radio, posters, flyers, print, mailings and more.

A common look, feel and message, across all media for any given campaign builds recognition. It means you can “hit” each person multiple times, whether they are reading a magazine, watching TV or driving their car.

The same goes for making a connection between offline awareness and your online ads and landing pages. Use your offline media to build awareness, and then use the same design elements and images to create instant recognition when people come to your web site or receive your e-newsletter.

This isn’t to say that your landing page should be a replica of a poster. It shouldn’t.

The objective of a poster is to create awareness. But the objective of your landing page is to generate an immediate action.

So what you would do is incorporate enough of the poster’s design and message to establish instant recognition, but then develop the headline, copy and images on your web page to drive direct sales.

Each medium has a different purpose, and that purpose needs to be addressed. But the use of a common set of images and design elements does help build a synergy across all the media used.

Finally, as always, be sure to conduct some tests.

You’re trying to achieve a balance between design and function, between a common look across all media, and the performance of your web page. To find the best balance point, you’ll need to test a variety of different versions of your web page.

In response to our teleconference call on landing pages yesterday, we received the following comment:

I am most interested in the dynamics of optimizing for organic search ranking vs conversion. Lots of tension there.

Is there lots of tension there? How so?

One of the keys to successful SEO is to make your page very specific and relevant to a single topic. You will likely be including your best keyword in your page title, headline, a subhead or two, in the body of the text and maybe in a link.

The top search engines will reward you if your page is highly relevant to this one single topic, expressed by your best keyword.

Keep it focused. Exclude peripheral subjects.

The same thinking and discipline should be applied to a landing page.

You want to use the same keyword...but now for the eyes of the reader, not the search engines.

You use the keyword several times in key spots to signal to the reader that the page is highly relevant and focused.

You keep it simple, creating a linear, vertical sales path from the top of the page to the bottom. You exclude any topics or links that are peripheral to the task in hand.

When viewed in this way, there is very little tension. When it comes to high search listings and high conversion rates, both the search engines and your readers are looking for much the same thing.

They want relevance and clarity, without confusing distractions.

In the world of optimization and the search for increased revenues, it is tempting to create our site pages in a way that deliberately “pushes” readers in one single direction.

Our own optimization tests have shown time and again that by keeping visitors focused on a single, linear pathway we can increase conversion rates.

But is that always how our visitors want to experience our sites? Do we focus too much on building and optimizing pages and pathways to serve our immediate financial needs – at the expense of providing an enjoyable experience for our readers, and building long-term loyalty?

This question jumped to my mind while reading an interesting article by Mark Kingdon this morning.

Among other things, he talks about the experiential difference between reading a print copy of The New York Times, and the online version.

He describes reading the print version as being an almost relaxing experience. But reading the same paper online requires a much deeper level of engagement and concentration.

I think there is a lot of truth in that. I believe reading information online does require more concentration. It is not a relaxing experience most of the time.

You have only to compare your body posture and head position in order to intuitively grasp the difference between the two media.

Is there an opportunity here? Should we be working harder at making our sites easier to browse?

While our focus as marketers is usually to direct people forward in the direction we want them to go, we might also do well to recognize that some visitors simply want to surf around our sites, at their own pace, and see what we have to offer them.

As the world of optimization becomes more sophisticated, I suspect we would also do well to put aside some time to make sure our sites are “surfer friendly”.

This is something that could be tested, although it would be a long-term test.

Here’s the question to which I would like an answer:

Which type of customer delivers the most revenues in the long term?

a) The first-time buyer who is corralled down a tight sales path to the “buy now” page...

b) Or the first-time buyer who first surfs around the site in a relaxed manner, then finds a product or service of interest and finally makes his or her own way through to the “buy now” page.

I have no doubt one can maximize short-term revenues by applying the “corralled” version.

But what about in the long term? Which experience leads to the greatest long-term loyalty?

Finally, this isn’t an either/or scenario. It’s a matter of optimizing our sites in both ways, ensuring maximum revenues in both the short term and the long term.

In other words, keep the optimized sales funnels, but also create an architecture that makes it simple and enjoyable for people to wander around and enjoy your site.

Our last clinic was on the topic of Landing Page Optimization. The response was extremely positive and after the close of the clinic we received dozens of emails from attendees who wanted us to critique their landing pages.

As a result, we are putting back our previously scheduled clinic, and will be devoting this clinic to a full hour of critiquing attendee landing pages.

If you would like to participate, please sign up for the clinic immediately and think of a page you would like us to look at during the call.

NOTE: As you can imagine, we will probably receive a lot more pages than we can possibly look at within the timeframe of one clinic.

So please be ready to submit your page during the clinic, but keep in mind that we will have time only to look at a small fraction of all those submitted.

The call is on Wednesday May 24th at 4:00PM EST. It will last for one hour, and there is no charge for participating.

If you would like to take part in the call, please subscribe here and we’ll then email you the call-in information early next week.

There’s a wonderful post and image over at the Church of the Customer blog.

It points out that the Hilton Hotel online reservations service is not available between 2:00AM and 6:00AM. It seems their computer systems need a little shut-eye every night. And yes, there is something extra to chuckle about there -- as the site is for a hotel chain.

But before we laugh too loudly, how do we do with our own customer service? How well do we do after, say, 9:00PM in the evening?

It is a question worth asking because there is a lot of buying going on between 9:00PM and midnight.

The kids have been put to bed, the dishes are in the washer, and people are turning to their keyboards to buy flights, vacations, pants, books, movies and a thousand other items and services.

While the world of B2B may slow down considerably after the end of the work day, that is not the case with B2C.

And when you are buying online and have a question, there is nothing worse than a customer service instant chat option that tells you nobody is available, or a phone system that simply ask you to leave a message.

So why don’t we all extend our customer service hours? It usually comes down to money.

But maybe it shouldn’t. In one of our one research briefs on customer service we demonstrated how customer service calls can actually make you money. In other words, your customer service center can become a profit center.

It would be much better to start generating revenues with those inbound calls, rather than leave prospects and customers with the impression that you are asleep on the job.

When testing, the validity of the data is a function of the how much a difference there is between your results, and the sample size.

Simply put, if you have a larger variance between two results, then you will need a smaller sample size to achieve a strong degree of confidence.

For example, if we run a landing page optimization test and receive the following results:

To determine the statistical significance of a data set, we need to look at both the sample size and the difference in our results. In this particular example, the difference is great however the sample size for Landing Page A Leads is relatively small, so there is a high amount of room for error caused from sampling.

There are obviously very complex algorithms for calculating the statistical relevance of a given data sample.

Learn more in our upcoming certification course.

What are eco-ads? They spring from marketing strategies, often within large corporations, which address the need to present companies as being friendly towards the environment.

Companies recognize that many of their customers are concerned about the environment, and want to be seen as making positive moves in the right direction.

A number of examples of these eco-ads are featured in a recent article in The New York Times.

What is the cautionary element here?

In a nutshell, if you say it, you need to do it. In other words, you can’t just write an ad about how you are taking steps to protect the environment, you have to actually take those steps.

This issue of transparency is addressed in a lot more detail in Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s essay on Transparent Marketing.

If you don’t walk the talk, someone will catch you. This is exactly what happened when Starbucks publicly promised that anyone walking into any Starbucks coffee shop would be served Fair Trade Coffee on request.

The announcement was made to please supporters of the Fair Trade Coffee movement. Unfortunately, not all the store managers were told about this. So when people asked for their Fair Trade Coffee, in many cases none was available.

And before you could say, “Darn that Internet”, the Starbucks Challenge had been created by a couple of bloggers, and hundreds of people around the world walked into Starbucks shops and deliberately asked for Fair Trade Coffee. They then posted their experiences online for everyone to read.

The moral of the story is that promises relating to the environment generate a lot of passions and expectations.

Few people will argue against the benefits of large companies supporting environmental issues. And eco-ads are part of that.

But you need to follow the path of Transparent Marketing. And you have to keep your promises.

Here are some interesting figures from a story on InternetRetailer.com

Visitors returning to a web site are eight times more likely to make an online purchase than new visitors, according to new data from WebSideStory Inc. During the first three months of 2006, repeat visitors to business-to-consumer e-commerce sites had a conversion rate of 12.61%. That compares with a 1.55% conversion rate for new visitors.

This begs a couple of questions.

Here’s one of them:

When you consider those figures, and think about someone coming back eight times before completing a purchase, what went wrong the first seven times? How did we manage to fail them seven times in a row?

Granted, some people come to our sites simply to browse, without any immediate intention to buy. Others will be comparison shopping and find a better deal elsewhere.

But even so...why does it take eight visits before someone buys?

And here’s the next question:

If it does take multiple visits before someone is ready to buy, can you do to get those first-time visitors to come back seven more times?

- Do you try to collect at least their email addresses on that first visit?

- Do you email newsletters or special offers from time to time?

- Do you try to recover visitors who started to make a purchase during one of their first few visits, but didn't complete the process?

- Do you provide 1-800 numbers for people who would like to buy, but are being held back by one or more unanswered questions?

- Do you respond to all customer and prospect inquiries quickly and courteously?

I think there are two things to be learned from these figures.

1. We need to review, test and analyze every pathway on our sites to identify where we are losing people’s confidence and why.

2. We need to do a much better job of making first-time visitors a lot more comfortable and confident about buying from our sites....right from the start. And make efforts to collect at least their email address as soon as possible.

Here are some research briefs that contain some relevant and useful data relating to these questions:

Shopping Cart Recovery

Optimizing Subscription Pathways

Profit from Inbound Customer Service

The Compounding Effect of Micro–Gains

Here’s another question that came in a few days ago. Someone wanted to know what the best practice is for changing the color or appearance of a text link after it has been clicked.

Our Director Optimization, Jimmy Ellis, wrote up this answer:

We do not have any specific test results I can send over for “proof” but everything we have seen points to keeping it as simple and “standard” as possible. Anyone who has clicked on a link on the internet, even after their first time on a website, knows that a blue link with an underline means “a link.” The same holds true for visited links and other elements of web pages. Simple 90+% of the times means better and more effective. For “visited” links, the most intuitive color is the standard “purple.” We typically recommend using the standard colors or close variations as a rule of thumb. Once again, there is no LAW, but time and time again it produces results.

I think that “underlines” for links no matter what the color are ESSENTIAL unless you are purposely trying to de-emphasize a link. If you want people to click, underline it.

This thinking is basically opposite of almost any fortune 500 or “major” company that needed a website to represent their brick and mortar business and wanted something “professional” like Accenture for example (http://www.accenture.com/). Put your “grandma” or your “mother” on this page and she would not know what to do.

The only thing it has going for itself is that it’s “simple” and you are not “overloaded’ with info. I’m looking at it now and I’m like… what do I do here??? Companies like “Amazon” that test extensively, know better. Just look at their site. (Pure text headlines, blue links, muted visited links, etc)

We like standard blue or:

#0000CC is a little darker

#000099 is a littler darker than that

Both clearly look like “links”

For visited you can use the same color (standard blue), standard purple or something like:

#666633

#551A8B

The one main benefit of using a different “slightly muted” color for visited links (like standard purple) is to help customers see where they have “already been” before. If you have a LOT of links, it’s helpful. If you only have a few links then it’s pretty much negligible.

If your color scheme does not work with the standard colors then you want to make sure you use underlines and choose an alternate but still visually effective color for visited links.

This is another question raised during our teleconference call on Wednesday.

We were looking at before and after versions of an offer page we had optimized. On both versions the “buy now” button appeared only at the end of the sales message, which was about two screens down from the top.

A participant on the call asked whether we might have achieved a higher conversion rate if the call to action button had been shown on the first screen.

There is something of a myth out there regarding what should appear on the first screen, or “above the fold”.

In other words, many web designers believe that you will get a higher conversion rate if your call to action button is above the fold, on the first screen.

Do not assume this to be a fact.

Our own research and testing indicates that this assumption is not true at all.

Also, take a look at some of the long, long sales pages online. Some of the most successful and best converting of these long-copy offer pages are maybe ten or twenty screens long...and the best of them do not include a “buy now” button until very low down on the page.

Why do they do that?

Because they know that while they might get more clicks with the button higher up on the page, they won’t get better conversions.

The ten screens of copy are specifically written to build a growing commitment to buy. Benefit after benefit is presented and repeated, with a view to deepening the commitment of the reader not only to click the “buy now” button, but also to complete the purchase process.

We are not suggesting that every sales or offer page needs to be that long.

In some cases you need just one screen with which to communicate all the benefits of a product or service, and all the reasons to buy.

But sometimes it takes two screens to do that. And sometimes three or four.

The final answer to the question is that the call to action button should appear at the end of your sales text. And your sales text should be exactly as long as it takes to communicate your complete sales message.

In other words, a page should be as long as it needs to be in order to fulfill its purpose, and not a word longer. Then add the “buy now” button.

This question was raised during our teleconference call on landing pages yesterday.

It’s a good question.

There are times when simply saying “Add to Cart” on the button works just fine. But this is the case only with very simple and familiar purchase types.

For instance, if you are on Amazon, have found a book, read the details and reviews, and seen the cover...their button which says, “Add to Cart” will do the job.

Why? Because what you are buying is so familiar and so self-evident. You see the book, you want to buy it, and you “add to cart”.

But what if you have a landing page or offer page selling something a little more complicated and unfamiliar, like a free trial subscription to a new online publication or service?

In these cases, and in the case of selling many kinds of products too, the text on the “buy” button should become the “tail of the headline”.

What do we mean by the tail of the headline?

Let’s say you write a great headline that clearly communicates your value proposition and includes a strong promise that appeals to your visitors.

The text on your buy or sign up button needs to repeat the core benefit from the headline.

So if your headline is offering a 15-day free trial of a valuable publication, your buy button might say something like, “Start Your FREE TRIAL Now...”

Or if you have collected their credit card information, and a core value in your offer is that it is risk free, you might try, “Start Your RISK-FREE Trial Today...”

Or. “Download Your First Issue Now...”

The exact wording will depend on the core value you express in your headline.

And as you can see, each of the examples above also includes a sense of urgency and immediacy. Does it make a difference? Fifty years of testing in the direct mail industry has provided an unequivocal answer: Yes.

All of these lines are longer than “Add to Cart”. And your designer may kick and scream a little.

But if nothing else, run some tests. Test some buttons on which you add the “tail of the headline”.

When you do that, you are maintaining the sales flow of your page from the first word to the last.

And those last few words, on the button itself, are critical to converting all those “I’m not quite sure” readers.

By repeating the core message, you increase conversion of the fence-sitters.

In a previous post I mentioned that we would be featuring the use of the Hacker Safe seal as part of our Landing Page teleconference call today.

During our final edit we decided instead to run a separate call on credibility indicators.

As a result, the Hacker Safe case study and data will not be used today, but will feature in our next call on Wednesday, May 24th at 4:00PM EST.

If you would like to enroll in advance for the Credibility Indicator call, please send a blank email to editor@marketingexperiments.com with the subject line, Credibility Indicators.

According to an article on CNET today, the current boom in online ad spending is well protected from the kind of bust we saw back in 2001.

The author argues that the presence and commitment of mainstream advertisers like Ford and Procter & Gamble give the online ad business a much stronger and more resilient foundation.

That may be true.

But while CPM advertising is protected to some degree, PPC advertising may not be.

Pay Per Click has become a significant source of revenue for online publishers, and for Google, Yahoo! and now MSN. Not to mention numerous minor players.

However, these large search companies need to address two important problems.

The first, as we all know by now, is the issue of click fraud. We have published research on the topic of click fraud and this clearly remains a problem.

The second problem, which we have addressed in this blog before, in the issue of trash-content sites.

There are hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions of pages online which have been created specifically to fool the search engines and make money from PPC advertising.

Not only do these pages undermine the credibility of search results, but they also reduce people’s trust in contextual advertising itself.

On most of these trash-content pages there is no real “context”. The pages have no original or valuable content at all. And when you have no content, contextual advertising simply becomes regular advertising.

Two things need to happen.

First, the search engines need to find a way to recognize trash-content pages, and list them on page fifty instead of page one of any given set of search results, however well optimized they may be.

Second, they need to say no when these publishers apply for an account in the first place.

What probably happens is that trash-content publishers create one content-rich site, through which they apply for their account. Once they have the account, they then use the same account across all their trash sites.

Without better policing of where PPC ads are shown, more and more people will jump on the trash-content bandwagon.

And if that happens, unchecked, we’ll see a growing loss of public trust in all search results.

Recently we received an email from one of our subscribers who is looking for ways to encourage his own subscribers to whitelist his company’s emails and newsletters.

He touches on an important topic. Email delivery is a ticklish issue and many email clients, filter services and anti-spam services are becoming increasingly aggressive.

In some cases it is all too easy for a subscriber to accidentally “blacklist” a sender’s email address and never see anything from them again.

Here is the question we were sent:

“...we are always concerned about being identified as Spam and losing viable email addresses to pitch new products and programs.

I am working on a "How to Whitelist Us" page set. I want to keep it "short and sweet" and give information for the most widely-used inboxes.

I've seen sites that try to include text and screenshots for every possible program, plus anti-spam software as well. It was difficult to sift through. (I'm sure the webmasters are also finding it impossible to keep up with current versions of everything from AOL to Spameater!)

I suspect that we have large numbers of people using AOL, MSN-Hotmail, Yahoo, Netscape or Gmail for web-based email, and MS Outlook/Express or Mozilla for email clients. Is there a report that identifies the most widely-used email systems?”

And here is our answer:

One of the simplest ways to show your subscribers how to whitelist your emails and newsletters is through a free service from CleanMyMailBox.

Go to their Whitelisting Instructor Generator page, input a little information about the newsletter name, “from” email address etc, and the page will generate an HTML guide for you to add to your site.

The final page not only provides whitelisting instructions for Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo!, but also for some of the filtering services like SpamAssassin, McAfee Spamkiller and MailWasher.

It’s easy to do. And free is good.

First, a thank you to the editors of 60SecondIdeas.com.

They selected the Marketing Experiments Blog as one of their Top 10 Small Business Blogs for the first quarter of 2006.

The recognition is much appreciated.

Which brings us to the topic of awards and other credibility indicators.

On many sites you will see award graphics, Hacker Safe seals, VeriSign logos and the like.

Does it make a difference? Do prospective customers feel more secure knowing that the their personal information has this extra layer of protection?

In a word, yes.

Credibility indicators are an important way to overcome the fears some buyers feel online.

We are working on preparing a complete research brief on this topic. In the meantime, we do have some data on this we’ll be sharing in Wednesday’s teleconference call.

Let me give you a snippet of data in advance of the call.

PETCO.com tested various positions for the Hacker Safe seal they have on their home page. Just by changing the location of the seal within the design of the page they were able to increase conversion of visitors to sales by over 8%.

To get the full story on this, and to get the data on other landing page tests, sign up for our free teleconference call on Wednesday May 10th at 4:00PM EST. Simply follow the sign-up instructions here.

As you may already know, every couple of weeks we hold a 60 minute teleconference call during which we share some of our most recent research results.

Our next call is on the topic of optimizing landing pages.

We have quite a bit of new data on this, including a short case history in which we’ll show you how we increased conversion rates on a research partner’s offer page by over 40%.

The call is on Wednesday May 10th at 4:00PM EST

There is no fee for attending.

If you would like to attend, simply sign up at the Marketing Experiments site and we’ll send you the call-in details.

In yesterday's issue of USA Today there is an article about the “risks” marketers take when they try to emulate MySpace.com and open up their sites to include comments and feedback from their visitors.

Here is an excerpt from that article:

“Building such interactive relationships with consumers requires the marketer to give up some control, and that has risks. Marketers must monitor sites closely lest they find their brands associated with lewd images or profanity. It is even trickier, however, to try to limit what people say about a brand.”

One cannot help but wonder where the writer of this article has been hiding for the last ten years.

Marketers lost control of their brands even before the arrival of the Internet. Remember email bulletin boards?

And today, shopping comparison sites, blogs and a thousand other sites all give the public the opportunity to have their say about companies and their products and services.

Every word impacts the brands being written about.

Control? Talk to United Airlines about control. The “anti-United” site Untied.com went online in April 1997 and is still going strong.

The battle for control over what is said about brands was engaged and lost a long time ago.

The risk marketers face online today is not about loss of control. Too late for that.

The risk lies in running a business without transparency...you’ll be caught.

And in marketing a business that doesn’t meet the needs or wants of the public...you will be compared and ignored.

We have addressed both of these points in the past: in an article on transparent marketing, and in our recent brief on value propositions.

In a previous post we had talked about trash content sites and how they publish cheap or syndicated content simply to attract search engine traffic and make money from PPC ads.

In that post we anticipated that Google, Yahoo! and others would eventually find ways to identify these sites and drop them way down in the search listings.

But perhaps we spoke too soon, and have seen just the beginning of the trash content site explosion.

In addition to trash content sites, there are also “lucky domain name” sites.

FlashGames.com is an example of these.

Its only "content" is a list of links to other game sites. But because the domain name is one that inexperienced web users type directly into the address bar of their browsers -- in the hope that there is a site with that name -- it earns revenue of more than $150,000 a year selling online ads.

The practice of finding domain names that people will type directly into the address bars of browsers is already a huge business. And it’s about to get bigger.

Richard Rosenblatt, former chairman of MySpace.com, has raised $120 million from investors to build a new company, Demand Media Inc. Its purpose? To invest in these lucky domain name sites.

And according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, he is going to go one step further. He is going to add “cheap content” to these sites, along with the ads.

So there you have it. We are about to be faced with a $120 million investment in cheap content.

The number of trash content sites will continue to grow, not decline.

And as these lucky domain name sites already generate about 5% to 10% of search-engine revenues, perhaps Google, Yahoo! and the others will be tempted not to penalize them too heavily.

As for the rest of us. We’ll have to do the only thing that can beat these sites in the long term – create great content that our visitors will want to talk about and come back to.