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February 17, 2003  
 
Feature Article
Become a Web Studio Affiliate Site - Get Paid for Web Studio Sales!
Want to make a few extra bucks? Or maybe quite a few? Then join our new affiliate program, and start participating in our success!
Here's how it works. For every Web Studio sale that results from someone linking to us from your site, we'll pay you 15%! You'll get $9.00 for each retail version of Web Studio and $4.50 for each upgrade. We'll also pay you 15% on sales of other Web Studio store items, including T-shirts.
To get rolling, just send us an email at affiliates@webstudio.com. We'll reply with a link that contains an ID code uniquely identifying you as a Web Studio Affiliate.
Simply paste this new affiliate link anywhere on your site, in as many places as you like. Anyone who clicks on it will be automatically linked to our site and recorded in our visitor database as your lead. If your leads subsequently buy Web Studio products, we'll cut you a check for 15% of the sales!
Payments are made quarterly. In your email, please include your name and mailing address and the names of the domains where you plan to post links.
If you have any questions about our new Web Studio Affiliate program, please contact us at affiliates@webstudio.com.

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Online Marketing
How to Boost Your Search Engine Ranking
If you want more visitors to your site, boosting your site's search engine ranking can really help.
By search engine ranking, we mean your site's position (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) in the list of sites displayed on a search results page.
And it's good to be number one. Or even two through ten. The reality is that sites listed at the top of the page always get far more visits than those listed below.
The reason is simple - most people won't scroll down or click to the next search page if they can avoid it. They usually click the top links first, and often find what they want there.
So, if you're serious about increasing site visits, you have a simple goal: become one of the top ten sites listed on the first search results page. And you want to achieve this ranking for each of the search terms and phrases relevant to your site
This may seem like a daunting task. The good news is that there is a straightforward process - search engine optimization - that will help you win the ranking game.
Search engine optimization, or "SEO", in conducted in three major steps: Keyword Analysis, Website Modification and Search Engine Submission.
In this and future columns, we'll describe each of these three SEO steps and their major components. Where more detail is needed,  we'll provide links to additional resources to help you with the detail work.
We'll also be discussing the details in the Search Engine Optimization forum in the Marketing Your Website category of the Web Studio online forum. Please join us there!
Step 1 - Keyword Analysis
The first step in the SEO process is Keyword Analysis, which should take you three to four hours to complete. You can do the work in small increments as time allows.
During Keyword Analysis, you'll create several lists of keywords from different sources and then distill them for use in your site.
Category Keywords List.  Use at least one major online directory, such as the Open Directory Project, to determine which content categories best fit your site. Within the categories you select, carefully examine both the category titles and the descriptive text of the sites listed in the categories. Make a list of the top ten keywords (both single words and two- or three-word phrases) that seem most relevant to your site. Save these as your Category Keywords list. Also during this process, bookmark any sites which are competitive with or highly similar to your own (used below).
Current Keywords List.  Use an online tool to discover the top ten keywords search engines "see" when they visit your site as it is today. Save these as your Current Keywords list. (These keywords will be helpful when determining how much work is needed during Website Modification.)
Competitive Keywords List.  Use the same online tool to analyze the competitive sites you bookmarked above - and any others you already know of - for their top ten most visible keywords. Combine and save the results as your Competitive Keywords list.
Search Stream Keywords List.  Use Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool to research which keywords people use to search for sites like yours. Enter each of the Category Keywords and Competitive Keywords, one by one, and copy and paste the resulting lists of related search terms and counts (number of searches in the last month for each term) into a word processor or spreadsheet. When you are done, sort the whole list alphabetically to remove duplicates and unrelated terms, and then by count to bring the most-searched-for terms to the top. Save the whole list for future reference, and use the top ten terms in the list as your Search Stream Keywords.
Ideal Keywords List.  Finally, use a word processor or spreadsheet to combine the Category, Competitive and Search Stream keywords. Sort and remove duplicates to produce a master list - your Ideal Keywords. You will use this list to give your site a unique and powerful keyword fingerprint, which in turn will generate high site rankings.
That's it for Keyword Analysis. You now have the ammunition you need to tackle the next SEO step, Website Modification, which we'll cover in next month's column.
In the meantime, please join us in the Search Engine Optimization forum with your questions, comments and suggestions.

- John Gaffney
J. Gaffney Associates, Inc.

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Did You Know...
…that you can download more Web Studio content from our online library?
From the Web Studio site, just click on the Resources tab and select the Content Gallery. Then click on one of the buttons for backgrounds, signs, buttons, photos and animations to see the available collections.
For each collection you want to download, click on the link below the collection thumbnails. You'll see your browser's "file download" dialog. Just save the installer application to your hard disk and run it - your new content will be appear automatically in the Web Studio Gallery.
Note: online content shown as "new" is new for all Web Studio versions. Other content is new for version 1 and 3 users (version 2 users already have this content on CD).

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Tips & Techniques
How to Add "Life" to Otherwise Boring Digital Photos
If you own a digital camera, you probably have quite a collection of shots that just don't have the impact you expected. Some of these may record important events that you want to remember, but shown as-is, the photo quality just disappoints.
Let's look at how you can spice up these photos enough to display them in your online photo gallery!
Start by pasting your photo into Web Studio (or use Picture From File.. or Picture From Scan.. in the Insert menu)...
"Needlepoint" Effect
Click the Special FX gallery tab and open the Pattern gallery folder.

Now drag the Tile effect onto your image:
Tile Effect Before After
"Canvas Effect"
Now Undo, and drag the Canvas effect onto your image:
Canvas Effect Before After
"Ripple" Effect
Finally, Undo and drag the Ripple effect onto your image:
Ripple Effect Before After
We hope this brief introduction to photo Special FX gets you excited about trying the rest of the gallery!

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You are receiving this newsletter because you are a registered user of Web Studio or because you indicated you are interested in learning about products like Web Studio.

To subscribe or unsubscribe from this newsletter, please visit our subscription management page.

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President's Corner
As promised in last month's newsletter, we're increasing our focus on business specific features for the greater Web Studio family of products and services.
In January, we introduced the first round of business enhancements via our iHostStudio hosting service. Web Studio engineers are now hard at work adding business-related features to the Web Studio program.
This month, we've added a new Affiliate Sales program (see the Feature Story), a new "Marketing Your Website" newsletter column and a companion online forum.
The last two additions deserve special mention. We've invited an online marketing pro, John Gaffney, to both write the column and moderate the forum.
John is a marketing veteran, having served in senior marketing roles at numerous public and private hi-tech companies. His firm, J. Gaffney Associates, specializes in online direct marketing.
In the column and forum, John will share with you proven online marketing techniques that will help drive traffic to your site - starting with "Boost Your Search Engine Ranking" in this issue.
Adding John's expertise to the WebStudio forum is just another example of our philosophy: provide our customers everything they need to succeed with their websites. "Everything" now includes software, support, hosting, technical help, design help, HTML help, expert advice, content - and marketing expertise.
Going forward, you'll see even more business-related products and services, including integrated shopping cart technology, all delivered using the incredibly simple Web Studio approach.
And those of you who don't have business websites, don't worry! We'll continue to add the fun, cool features that Web Studio is known for. After all, our programmers have to have fun, too...

Steve Cochard
President
Back to the Beach Software, LLC

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Site of the Month
Cool Beans Designs

Congratulations to "DJ", February's Site of the Month winner! DJ's site, Cool Beans Designs, is a great example of using Web Studio itself for page design - and to include Macromedia Flash animations. If you want to know how DJ did it, visit the Web Studio Forum and check out the Web Studio Site of the Month Contest section. DJ and our moderators are waiting eagerly to answer your detailed questions.
And for those of you thinking of submitting a site, this is a reminder that we're halfway through February - so click here to submit your site now!

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What's New in Web Studio 3
Instant Picture Thumbnails & Frames
Web Studio 3 has a couple of great new features in the Special F/X gallery: Thumbnails and Picture Frames.
Thumbnails
Thumbnails turns any image into a smaller, captioned image (a "thumbnail"). Clicking on the thumbnail pops up your original image in a new window.
To use the Thumbnails special effect, Rowboats in the Harborjust drag the Thumbnails icon from the Special FX gallery onto any graphic. The Thumbnails Studio window will open, allowing you to select a thumbnail size (75, 150, 225 or 300 pixels) and enter a caption. Click OK when you're done and test your new thumbnail using Preview This Page (F6).
Picture Frames
Picture Frames automatically puts photo-realistic picture frames around any graphic or text object.
To use the Picture Frames special effect, open the Picture Frames folder in the Special FX gallery and drag a picture frame icon onto any graphic or text object. Your graphic is instantly framed! To see more frames, just Undo after you drag each new frame icon onto your image.
Suggestion: try this with your digital camera images. It makes a cool online photo gallery.

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What's New Online
Web Studio Users Gallery
We've created an online gallery of cool Web Studio sites, complete with thumbnails and links to the live sites.
To view them, click on the Resources tab and select the Users Gallery.
You'll find future "Sites of the Month" here as well as other great sites submitted by our users. You can also ask the site developers "how to" questions  in our active online forum. See you there!

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HTML Corner
Adding Emailed Forms to Your Site - Part I
Many of our users have asked for a simple way to add web page forms, the contents of which are emailed when submitted.
This is a simple way to collect data from your site's visitors without having to have your own online database.
There are two ways to add emailed forms to your Web Studio pages: the easy way, if you are using our integrated hosting service (iHost Studio) and the you-need-to-understand-HTML-and-server-scripting way (if you are using another hosting service). We'll discuss the easy way in this issue and the "other" way in next month's issue (Part II).
Adding Emailed Forms with iHost Studio
First, drag an HTML Object from the Cool Stuff gallery onto to your page in Web Studio, and double-click it to open the HTML editor.
Next, go to the E-Mail Form page on the Web Studio site (under Resources > Content Gallery >iHost Studio Cool Stuff).
Now copy the HTML form snippet on the page and paste it into the open HTML Object in Web Studio.
Finally, change the "YOUR E-MAIL HERE" text in the HTML to your desired email address and click "Save".
Your form is ready! You can immediately preview and test it by uploading to your live site or by using "Trial Hosting".
For more on how to  add and change fields and form defaults, see the additional instructions on the E-Mail Form page on our site.

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