Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the adage counsels. In Dodge City of old it was the gunslingers who terrorized the little guys. On the Internet it’s the not-held-accountable larger ISPs who can do the terrorizing. The Internet, as far as user rights are concerned, essentially has no regulations — and no one is watching out for the little guy. A law like CANSPAM hopes to protect, but lacking serious penalties and enforcement it's just lip service. Companies like SBC/PacBell and AT&T, to name just two Internet abusers, advertise great service and protection but don’t necessarily deliver. Here are two examples:

Your ISP may be censoring it! You guessed it – blocked by those who can (because they can, e.g., SBC/PacBell, AT&T, Verio and MCI). Due to the ever increasing amount of spam (we ourselves filter out over 100,000 pieces per month for our small number of hosting clients), larger ISPs simply block incoming mail. How does a mail server get blacklisted? Well, that's the problem. It seems anyone can report a web site provider as a spammer, for example, yours! All it takes is one anonymous complaint with little evidence and no notification to the accused - affecting all sites hosted by that ISP. The larger ISPs seem to happily accept complainers' words at face value. Why? Because it’s easier and desirable to IP block with an immediate benefit - lighter loads on their servers. To fix the problem for a blacklisted site it can take hours of investigation. But first you need to discover you've been blacklisted! How? Pay attention to anyone who says they cannot mail you, nor receive mail from you.

SBC/PacBell is one of the worst for blocking e-mail servers while ALLOWING high paying SBC/PacBell spammer customers of theirs to exist on their network. You get hurt because other ISPs in turn (perhaps yours), are forced to block e-mail coming from SBC/PacBell. Ask, are you losing business? Are possible clients requesting information from you that you don’t see, or is your response to them being refused transit? If you get Undeliverable Messages with vague answers like “Unable to Deliver” and no explanation as to why, your e-mail is most likely being blocked. Solution: Find a web hosting company that puts their clients first. Call us if you need help with this.

Norton's (and others) security products attempt to hide user information for privacy purposes - a false promise, of course. So, what’s the point of blocking such information? It’s a momentary marketing success that feeds upon people’s fears while delivering little effectiveness. The real effect is to impair web tracking software.

Norton's "anti-business" software may seem comfortable (it is, after all, simplistic) but hurts legitimate businesses who use the "Referring Sites" statistics to measure advertising effectiveness. Norton can deny you (your web site) access to the now non-identifiable information necessary to record where your leads come from, e.g., the domain names of referring sites. This would be the same as banks or retail stores being forbidden to ask how people learned about them. If you're typical, more than 70% of your web tracking log's entries under "Referring Sites" will show up as "No Referrer."  Would you make decisions knowing less than 30% of the facts? The answer is no: Read below to learn how to beat Norton and accurately track your leads.

Here’s an easy way to get around Norton-type interference and easily track which of your advertising placements are sending you leads: make a duplicate of your web site’s home page - a "landing page" and, of course, give it a different file name - one that refers to the specific publication where you are advertising. This specific entry or "landing page" allows you to more accurately measure just who is helping to drive your business. Making a duplicate page takes only seconds, and you can easily create multiple pages to track the effectiveness of all your advertising placements for comparative reporting.  

There are a couple of bonuses in this method. First, you can also trace where users go on your site once they enter that landing page – hopefully all the way to a completed contact form. This is important because you can tell right away what your conversion rate is. If it takes 100 users from a Google ad to get 1 request – that’s a 1% conversion rate. If it takes only 10 users to get 1 request from a highly targeted ad (that's us, folks), that’s a 10% conversion rate — suggesting quality may be better than quantity for your particular tour offerings. By calculating the cost of both ads and dividing the actual requests, not users, you get a true measure of advertising effectiveness. While, for example, Google has massive numbers, the conversion rates are much lower than us, simply because a Google ad provides only a title and two short lines of text — think classified ad. On the other hand, our Web Page Ads duplicate the look of your home page, list your trips, run lots of descriptive copy and link to any articles you’ve written on our web site — think full-color multi-page insert in your favorite magazine. Display ads also have the benefit of building Brand Awareness.

You know that your listing trips with us is free, and that we welcome your travel article submissions. You should also know that these free services generate an incredible percentage of visitors’ requests for more information:

·         35% of all visitors’ information requests are for companies that have published articles in The Cultured Traveler

·         15% of all requests are for companies that we’ve reviewed in The Cultured Traveler

·         15% of all requests are in response to listings for specific trips

This means that an astounding 65% of all requests go to companies that take advantage of the many free opportunities Cultural Travels provide.

Our advertisers know they’ve got a good thing going —  more targeted leads than the free listings. Because advertisers take advantage of the additional services by providing more complete listing information, trips and newsletter articles for travelers to review, the leads they receive are highly pre-qualified:

·         30% of all visitor requests for information are directed at the 2% of companies in our database who currently advertise with us

·         31% of all Cultural Travels visitors view Web Page Ads

·         43% of them go on to view advertisers’ home pages and request information directly