Kikabink News

Want an example of a successful membership site? How about Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. The hugely popular massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) now has more than 11 million subscribers.

“Subscribers” are defined as individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access.

The 11 million subscriber mark reflects a growth rate of 10 percent in the last 10 months. Impressive, but the growth rate seems to be slowing, given that the game debuted in November 2004 and took only six months to go from 9 million in July 2007 to 10 million subscribers in January 2008.

In other words, it took Blizzard much longer to add this last million subscribers to its user base than in the past (the company announced it reached the 10 million mark in January 2008, up from 9 million in July, 2007).

Nevertheless, World of Warcraft had an impressive 62 percent of the MMORPG market back in April and will be launching a second expansion of the game on November 13, “Wrath of the Lich King.” This may spur further growth or help the game maintain its lead position in the market.

Source: Robin Wauters, “World Of Warcraft Hits 11 Million Subscribers Mark, Shows Signs Of Slowing”, TechCrunch, October 29, 2008

Want an example of a successful membership site? How about Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. The hugely popular massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) now has more than 11 million subscribers.

“Subscribers” are defined as individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access.

The 11 million subscriber mark reflects a growth rate of 10 percent in the last 10 months. Impressive, but the growth rate seems to be slowing, given that the game debuted in November 2004 and took only six months to go from 9 million in July 2007 to 10 million subscribers in January 2008.

In other words, it took Blizzard much longer to add this last million subscribers to its user base than in the past (the company announced it reached the 10 million mark in January 2008, up from 9 million in July, 2007).

Nevertheless, World of Warcraft had an impressive 62 percent of the MMORPG market back in April and will be launching a second expansion of the game on November 13, “Wrath of the Lich King.” This may spur further growth or help the game maintain its lead position in the market.

Source: Robin Wauters, “World Of Warcraft Hits 11 Million Subscribers Mark, Shows Signs Of Slowing”, TechCrunch, October 29, 2008

Email service providers (”ESPs”) are increasingly encouraging - if not forcing - their clients to build “double optin” subscriber lists.

“Double optin” - more accurately known as CONFIRMED OPTIN is where someone signs up to your list and, before you send out any real content, you send them a message asking for confirmation that they really did sign up to your list and want to receive your material.

This process is designed to weed out subscribers who give you a fake email address, someone else’s email address, or who are unsure about, or not all that interested in, your material.

By all accounts, the result is that those who do confirm their subscription are more motivated - and more qualified - leads.

The downside is that you don’t get any “lukewarm” leads - people who may be legitimate prospects, but aren’t sure enough of you or the quality of what you have to offer, to confirm their name and email address. Nor do you get people who, for whatever reason, accidentally ignore your confirmation message (it happens!)

While this is a shame, the fact is, if you use an ESP you may not have any choice but to use a confirmed optin process. I don’t know of any ESPs that make this compulsory yet, but I do know that if you select confirmed optin for a given list with some ESPs (e.g. GetResponse and Aweber) they won’t let you change your mind and switch to single optin later.

You see, ESPs allow numerous clients to send email from the same mail servers. If someone uses one of these mail servers to send unsolicited email (spam) and this causes one or more ISPs to block email from this mail server, EVERYONE - including the legitimate emailers - using this server will have their email blocked.

Understandably, ESPs are no longer putting up with this… which means that YOU may eventually have to switch to confirmed optin.

What’s the immediate impact of this? Get used to lower (legitimate) signups to your list.

While fans of confirmed optin will say that “it’s the quality, not the quantity” of your list that counts, single optin advocates point out that you will end up missing out on a lot of legitimate leads that, for one reason or another, just don’t confirm their sign-up.

Blame it on the spammers.

Nevertheless, if you use a confirmed optin approach, there are things you can do to maximize the number of people who confirm their subscription. I’ll send you some tips on this in a future issue of the newsletter…

Good article by P.J. Fusco on getting backlinks from web directories. Ms Fusco explains that obtaining backlinks from the RIGHT directories is still a legitimate link building practice for the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO).

For one thing, directory submissions typically give you control over the anchor text used to link to your site. For another thing, directories are not only fairly easy to find, but also allow and WANT you to submit your site to them.

Just be sure to focus only on directories that are RELEVANT to your business - whether they are general, topical, niche or local/regional directories. Indeed, Ms Fusco suggests you take your time when evaluating a directory and to look for these signs:

• .edu and .gov backlinks;
• An aged domain;
• Lots of pages indexed by the search engines;
• Good PageRank flow-through to the listing pages; and
• Fewer than 100 links per listing page.

Similarly, she gives some solid tips for what to AVOID in a directory. You want to steer away from directories that:

• Are NOT relevant to your website;
• Are really just thinly veiled link farms;
• Contain links to “bad neighborhoods”;
• Have excessive broken links; and
• Feature numerous pop-up or pop-under ads.

Check out Ms Fusco’s article for more tips, including a list of other things to avoid when evaluating a directory.

Source: P.J. Fusco, “Tactical Link Building: Reliable Directories”, The ClickZ Network, August 27, 2008