Biznology Blog: March 2007
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March 30, 2007
Does Content Management Ruin Organic Search?
I came across a post from Ben Kemp (SEO Guy) entitled "Content Management Systems Equal Business Suicide!" (Hat tip: Laurel Papworth). Despite the apocalyptic title, Ben does make some good points, but I wonder if he unfairly tars all content management systems (CMSs) with the same brush. (And before I start, I want you to know that my employer sells CMSs.)
Let's examine several of Ben's points one at a time. First, Ben examines the important question of duplication of content: "Search engines loathe duplicate content. In the average CMS, there are numerous common design elements, images, HTML and/or JavaScript code blocks etc, which are portrayed across ALL sites using the same system, and this is not a good thing."
In my experience, Web sites that duplicate common design elements suffer no penalty from search engines, and, while CMSs make it easier to duplicate these elements, doing so is just good Web design. I don't think Ben is advocating that you have different mastheads for every page on your site, but he may be worried that other ancillary elements that might occur in the left and right columns might incur the wrath of search algorithms. In my experience, duplicating such common elements across pages (navigation, ads, and other small pieces of content) has no ill effect.
What does ruin your search rankings is duplicating main body content, such as publishing the same article under several different URLs. And CMSs do make it easier for you to do that, also. Because spammers frequently duplicate entire pages as a shortcut to creating new, real content, the search engines sometimes downgrade the rankings for pages they find duplicated. In addition, providing the same content in multiple places fractures the effect of other sites linking to your content, because some will link to one URL and some the other.
The bottom line on duplicate content is to use a CMS to duplicate design elements, not the main content of the page. If you do that, you won't hurt your search rankings at all and you will gain the benefits of updating each design element in just one place.
Next, Ben attacks shortcomings in CMSs for metadata: "Many CMS systems make it hard to impossible to generate unique page Title, Description & Keyword meta-tags, meaning all pages can look identical in search engine results. Many CMS systems do not permit you to assign keyword-rich image names, or apply unique and specific image ALT tags, and the page file names are usually not directly controllable."
Ben's comments here are right on—some CMSs do not allow you to assign individual metadata to each page, which is death to organic search optimization. Each page needs a unique title, at least, to have a good chance of being found (and page-specific descriptions help, too). Rather than damning all CMSs, however, I think that better advice is to ensure that you choose a CMS that allows page-specific metadata.
Moreover, my experience is that using a CMS system can actually improve your metadata, because you can automate checking of titles (for example) as pages are published. You can update the workflow component of your CMS to automatically check to ensure that the author's title is unique before it is published. If you do so, you'll eliminate duplicate titles. If you don't use a CMS, however, you will find that authors routinely duplicate metadata when they make a copy of an existing page as a template for a new one—they frequently fail to change the metadata to reflect the new content.
Ben also assails CMSs for operating on shared domains, but I think that's a separate issue. Clearly, sharing your IP address with any other business can muddy your search results, but many sites with no CMS do the same. In short, if you can afford dedicated Web hosting with a unique IP address, do it, but don't let that affect your decision on a CMS.
Ben rightly addresses the danger of being held captive by a Web design firm that charges you for every change to your site: "In terms of the proprietary CMS systems, you are also seriously at risk of being captured and held hostage by your web design company, because they now 'own' your site and you cannot easily escape without sacrificing your total investment. In this respect, use of CMS demonstrates a complete lack of business risk analysis. From that point on, you can also be systematically milked like a cash cow for every amendment, change, edit etc that they carry out on your behalf! Believe me, it happens every day… and I’ve seen people charged $90 for a simple edit that took me less than 2 minutes to implement!"
Small businesses, especially, run into that problem all the time, but I don't think it has anything to do with use of a CMS. To avoid this problem, anyone contracting with an agency or design firm should insist on training so they can make simple changes to their site after the initial work is done. That won't completely avoid the lock-in problem, however, because moving to a new agency is complicated by the use of any tool that generates HTML, including CMSs (and including DreamWeaver or other page design programs). If your new agency does not use the program your old one did, it can be expensive to switch. I don't think that the answer is to build all Web sites with a simple HTML editor, however. All information can be exported from one tool to be imported to another—it's painful, but possible.
Ben concludes by questioning whether a CMS is cost-effective for Web sites: "CMS Saves You Money?
Yeah, right!!! The overheads of managing a CMS are usually far in excess of managing a conventional site. Content percentage-wise, most sites actually change very little, and the majority of pages are static and do not change at all. CMS is total overkill for the average business site."
On this one, he has a point, given the way Web sites are done today. Most Web sites are no more than online brochures or product catalogs, and don't change very much. But that is the wrong approach. Instead, you must be tweaking your Web site all the time and measuring the results. You must constantly change your navigation, your design, and your content to optimize sales. You should even be changing your content to improve organic search results. CMS systems do make it easier to make global changes in HTML templates, and they make it easy to tune content.
Just as you can automate the checking of unique titles, you can also set up your content management workflow to analyze the keyword density of your content to ensure that you are using the right keywords and are emphasizing them sufficiently. That can help your authors create better organic search results.
Ben has raised some good points, but I think his points are about the misuse of CMSs, not about CMSs themselves. Most CMSs I have worked with (high-end ones, admittedly), provide enough flexibility to actually improve search marketing, rather than to defeat it.
Posted by mikemoran at 8:44 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 29, 2007
"I can't stand being wrong"
I've been talking a lot lately about a new way to think about marketing—"do it wrong quickly," where you allow yourself the latitude of thinking of everything you do in online marketing as an experiment. You try it, see how customers respond, and then adjust. Well, some folks tell me that they just "can't stand" being wrong—or can't stand admitting they are wrong. How can they overcome their feelings and become more adaptable?
First, if you feel that way, you should know that you’re not alone. No one relishes admitting they screwed up, but some people do seem to have an easier time with it than others. What makes those people different from the rest of us?
It might be merely a question of attitude. Some people approach life as a series of experiments—each one designed to learn a little more so that the next decision is better. Develop your playful side and think about what you’re doing the same way you’d approach a guessing game.
If you break out a crossword puzzle, do you expect yourself to read the clues and fill in every last letter? Of course not. You know that you’ll figure out some of them right away, but many of them require you to take a guess. You try filling in a word for “1 across” and see if the words for “1 down” and “2 down” and “3 down” seem to fit with the word you guessed. Doing the puzzle in pencil lets you erase guesses that did not pan out and try again.
The difference between crossword puzzles and Internet marketing is that crossword puzzles are far easier. A few people can whip out a pen and methodically fill in a crossword puzzle in just a few minutes. In contrast, nobody can solve the Internet marketing puzzle in one try—it is truly a case of trial and error.
If you expect to conduct thousands of trials with no error, that’s crazy. Instead, you need to play the game. You need to take guesses and see what customers do. They’ll tell you what is working and what should change. If it bothers you to think of yourself as being wrong, than just treat every decision as a guess. By the time you draw a conclusion (many experiments later), you’ll most definitely have it right.
But maybe some of you are still resisting “doing it wrong quickly”—preferring the old, slow consensus way sometimes cynically described as “often in error, but never in doubt.” In contrast, “do it wrong quickly” says that you are always in error and always in doubt—you know you’re wrong. There’s no doubt about that.
Marketing ain't rocket science, but maybe we need a rocket scientist to set us straight. Werner von Braun once remarked that “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” Maybe we can take the same approach to what we marketers do every day. After all, Internet marketing ain’t rocket science.
Even when you understand the “do it wrong quickly” concept in your rational mind, you still might feel more comfortable searching for a best practice. The problem is that when things are changing as fast as they are in interactive marketing, no one knows what the best practices are yet. That unheralded Internet marketing expert Will Rogers summed it up when he said, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.”
If Werner von Braun can admit he doesn’t always know what he’s doing, so can you. Just call it research.
Posted by mikemoran at 12:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 28, 2007
Must Marketers Specialize?
I read an interesting post from Bill McCloskey on the need for specialization. Bill has a point, but I think there's a counterpoint, too, when specialization gets out of control.
Bill makes the case for specialization in a straightforward way: "I submit that the über marketer who is expert in all the various forms of interactive marketing is someone who just doesn't exist, or is very bad at a lot of things. An interactive jack of all trades, master of none, is not the person you want heading up your email marketing efforts."
That sounds good, but I don't agree. First, it presupposes that your marketing campaigns are big enough for all of these specialists. It might be good advice for Procter & Gamble but I don't think it's good advice for Procter Plumbing & Heating. Generalists are the only game in town for most businesses and they do a good job.
But I wonder if it is good advice even for large businesses. As someone who's spent a lot of time inside IBM's marketing apparatus, I always found specialization to be a necessary evil. Yes, you absolutely need specialists for that deep information that gives your business an edge, but the more they retreat into their professional disciplines, the more prone they are to a special brand of myopia that I have christened "Specialist Disease."
Specialist Disease can be cured, but prevention is easier as you might suspect. I understand where Bill is coming from because marketing, like every other discipline, naturally specializes as it matures. But we all must do more to convey that every professional must put the customer and the company before professional allegiances. For every time that fighting the professional battle for a best practice was the right thing to do, I've seen ten times where it wasn't—just because a specialist did not look at the bigger picture and failed to accord respect to other specialties that were more important in that situation.
I've done it, too.
Back in 2001, I remember being appalled at IBM's search marketing failure—I vowed to turn it around. So I, all full of myself as an expert, walked in to tell the IBM Webmasters how they should be doing their jobs. I told them how they needed to change their domain names and host country sites on local servers and all sorts of other wonderful best practices. To their credit, they listened and adopted many of my suggestions, but not those two.
It would have been horribly expensive to revamp domain names and scuttle the multi-country server hosting system. And it would have been bad for customers to deal with millions of redirected pages. So the Webmasters pushed back. I worked them far too hard before I backed down because I "knew" that I was right.
Well, it turned out the Webmasters were right. IBM has increased its search traffiic 25 times since that day, all without doing either of those things I suggested. I am happy that people took my advice in many other areas, but the Webmasters were right to ignore those two gems. We didn't need to do either one.
I learned a valuable lesson about how specialists think and ever since I have tried to have a more general, balanced outlook so that we make decisions faster with less contention. And I don't think that approach has dimmed my expertise any—I think being practical is the right way to deliver the most value with your expertise.
Bill actually seems to favor a contention system between multiple specialists to get the best result: "What you want is someone who is corralling those passionate about search, RSS, email, banners, rich media, mobile marketing, WOMM, social networks, viral into a room and figuring out an integrated strategy that makes sense."
I think that can work, but better than cross-functional teams are cross-functional people. Contention systems are SLOOOW. And what we need these days is more quick decisions and less arguing to achieve the dreaded consensus. Specialist Disease puts a real crimp in your pace. I'd rather do it wrong quickly and then fix it. Instead of letting the specialists argue, let the customer decide.
Posted by mikemoran at 8:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 27, 2007
Statistical Significance is Overrated
I'm a big advocate of measuring the success of your site, but many marketers find the statistics intimidating. Many marketers are more comfortable with the dreaded "anecdotal evidence" than they are with numbers—that's changing, but slowly. I am wondering if the intimidation might be caused by statisticians themselves.
One of the most intimidating parts of the numbers game is statistical significance. Many marketers struggle with this concept, even those normally comfortable with numerical analysis.
To the uninitiated, when a statistician says that a number is not statistically significant, they interpret that as meaning that no conclusions can be drawn from that number. But that’s wrong. Let’s take an example.
If you tested three different e-mail messages to see which one has the highest click rate, the statistician (or your computer statistics program) might tell you that the third version was significantly worse than the first two, but that the difference between the first two was insignificant. What do you do?
You could run another test. You could eliminate the third version and retest the first two. Your numbers person will tell you that you need many more e-mail recipients to achieve statistical significance, because the two e-mails are quite close to each other in effectiveness.
If you want to “do it wrong quickly,” then just send out the one that tested better, regardless of whether it is a statistically significant difference. Why? Because the two e-mails are close enough to each other that sending either one is probably OK. And chances are that the one that tested slightly better really is better, even if you don’t know for sure.
To understand why this is true, you need to understand what “statistical significance” means—it means that you are 95 percent sure that your conclusion is correct. That means that even when you achieve statistical significance, you have a one in 20 chance of being wrong.
A different statistical methodology is gaining traction, called Bayesian probability, which takes a different approach, based on the persuasiveness of the data. Bayesian aficionados argue that when you know where you are starting from, such as the conversion rate for your shopping cart page, you can persuade yourself that a new page design is “working” with a very small number of successes. That small sample size is not statistically significant, but it is probably the right conclusion for your decision.
If you can’t stop yourself from aiming for statistical significance, remember that the bigger the change, the smaller the sample size you need. So try to go after things that raise your conversion rate ten percent rather than one percent. That might sound obvious, but often we need to make a concerted effort to “think big” rather than shooting only for small improvement.
Better yet, don’t get hung up on statistical significance at all. It’s better to make ten decisions in a row with 70 percent confidence than just one that you are 95 percent sure of. By making frequent changes, the ones that turned out to be wrong will be found out soon enough.
If you’re still thinking that you need statistics to prove that your results aren’t random, just remember the words of comedian Dick Cavett: “Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don’t happen.”
Posted by mikemoran at 9:12 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 26, 2007
The Pitfalls of Pay-Per-Action Advertising
I love it when I get a comment that is better than the original post. Last week, I chimed in with some thoughts on Google's experiment with pay-per-action (PPA) advertising, and I got a hugely detailed comment this weekend on that post, so go re-read that entry to see it. (I'll wait.) When you come back, I'd like to talk about it more.
In my original post, I mentioned that I expected return fraud to be far less of a problem than click fraud has been, but ClickHawk from TrafficSentry believes return fraud will be zero. He (I don't actually know if it is a "he" or a "she") may well know more about that than me. He writes, "'Return Fraud' is a non-issue. Not only does the time/return ratio not make sense for would-be perpetrators, but all existing PPA programs already have built-in measures to debit affiliate accounts upon returns. In fact, this very feature opens up a completely new type of fraud; Advertiser Fraud (merchant fraud against publishers) can occur when unscrupulous advertisers falsify return records in order to receive advertising refunds."
My speculation centers mainly around what kind of relationship Google wants with its advertisers. Return fraud is near zero for affiliate marketers because the product is being returned to the merchant—the one who pays the affiliate. With Google's program, the return would be made to the affiliate/advertiser, so I am not sure how Google could verify that it happened.
As ClickHawk points out, if Google merely takes the advertiser's word for the returns, then it is exposed to a different danger, a fraud perpetrated on Google by the advertiser claiming fictitious returns. To me, that is the most interesting part of how Google structures its program, and I have not seen anything written on this yet. Perhaps my commenter or others know of how other PPA programs work, but I have not found any public information.
ClickHawk goes on to make an even more interesting point about whether the supply of PPA ad space will be available: "PPA is a boon for the advertiser. Not only does it wipe out the possibility of fraud, but it also completely removes his risk, as he is only paying for sales. Now, the publisher is taking all of the risk, and has no idea what, if any, revenue he will receive for the advertising. If the only risk was proving that his audience was a good enough match to produce good response to the ad, the publisher would be more likely to accept the terms (this is, in effect, CPC). However, the publisher is also taking the gamble that the advertiser has both a marketable product AND an effective marketing plan, all the way through the conversion process to the close of the sale. All of this is outside of the publisher's control, so that's quite a big gamble. If their is little market for the advertiser's product, or if the advertisers price is not competitive, or the advertiser's web site is unprofessional in appearance, or any number of other reasons that lead to loss of the sale, the publisher gets nothing."
To me, this is something we'll just have to see play out. We have very little information on the nuts and bolts of Google's program yet, but Google might handle the performance problem (and thus the supply problem) by applying the same kind of arithmetic to PPA ads that PPC ads get.
Although Google is now dabbling with quality factors in its PPC ranking algorithm, the original bid and click rate approach essentially ranks ads at the top that pay Google more. The original Goto.com ranking method merely assigned the top bidder the top spot, so the risk was that bidders used ads that did not get clicked enough, but had very high bids—Goto had to "suspend" ads with low click rates to ameliorate this danger. Google eliminated that problem completely by adding click rate to the formula.
I see no reason why Google can't do the same with PPA. The feedback loop is more complex, but Google Analytics allows conversions (actions) to be tracked and Google will know how much each ad returns to its coffers. Google could rank PPA ads alongside PPC ads based on which is returning the most money. Doing so would ensure that PPA ads must perform to the level of PPC ads (from the standpoint of Google's return) and would allocate supply in the exact ratio that performance dictated.
We'll need to get more information about how the program works before we know what approach Google is taking—they are smart folks, so they have probably come up with something better than me. Google has an opportunity to integrate PPA into its successful PPC approach, and it would be big news if it did.
Posted by mikemoran at 9:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 23, 2007
Social Advertising
Google's foray into Pay-Per-Action advertising got a lot of play this week, including from me. But late last week, I noticed a smaller player with an even more interesting twist on Web advertising. It made me start to wonder about all the different models and where they are going.
When Web advertising first started, you mostly saw fixed placement where you negotiate for a banner ad in a particular place on a specific page, paying for a time period (such as one month) just like a billboard. Fixed placement is not the way a rookie marketer should break in—you need to know what you are doing before you negotiate a long-term, hard-to-change commitment. But that was the only game in town.
Then rotating banner ads and keyword-based advertising emerged, starting with the per-impression model, where you pay for each time the ad is shown, just like a magazine. Usually referred to as CPM (cost per thousand—“M” is the Roman numeral for one thousand), you pay each time your ad is displayed on the screen, whether its clicked or not.
Then the world changed with the per-click model. Although pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture and swallowed up by Yahoo!), it's often called CPC (cost per click) or PPC (pay-per-click). It just means that each time someone clicks on your advertisement, you're charged a fee. The original PPC systems ranked each ad by its pay-click bid, but Google introduced the idea that click rates and other factors should also influence the rankings, which now all major PPC providers have emulated.
Shopping search engines, Snap.com and a few other pioneers quietly introduced per-action pricing, but now that Google announced its beta program this week, the industry is paying attention. Often called CPA (cost per action) or PPA (pay-per-action) you pay only when the customer takes “action”—typically a purchase of your product. This is no different from the way affiliates get paid, but we never really thought of affiliate marketing as advertising—it seemed different. Well, maybe it isn't.
But here's something that is different. Squidoo has announced a twist on the venerable old fixed placement advertising. Pay Squidoo for a month to put an offer out there—so far this is merely time-honored fixed placement—with a twist. SquidOffers allows surfers to vote for the best offers, which then rank higher. (Is this social advertising?)
Seth Godin explains how he expects SquidOffers to be used, and I wonder if this is the same kind of tweak on fixed placement that Google's click rate insight was on per-click advertising. I doubt it will turn out to be as important a tweak, but it is an interesting way to bring social interaction into advertising.
The more people do with social media, the more it seems can be done. The defining difference of the Web has always been the links. Web 2.0 is now causing the content to change based on participation. The content connections are no longer more important than the people connections.
I've always been a huge proponent of measuring the success of your site, and for adapting to what customers do, and for calculating the value of your customers. Given an ever increasing array of advertising choices, it's getting to the point where you can't really operate unless you do these things. A few years ago I thought the Internet allowed you to optimize your business based on metrics—now I think it forces you to.
Posted by mikemoran at 12:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 22, 2007
Which Companies "Do It Wrong Quickly"?
The basic idea behind “do it wrong quickly” is that if customers are not responding to your marketing, do something different. That kind of flexibility requires a special kind of corporate culture, however. Some companies already have the kind of risk-taking, experimental culture where the "do it wrong quickly" approach will flourish, but others have work to do. Listen to several companies that have made the transition.
There’s no universal name for the kind of culture that adjusts its marketing based on what customers say and do. Some call it a “feedback” culture, others a “responsive” or “open” culture. Several marketers referred to a “metrics-driven” culture. Whatever the name, successful marketers know it when they see it.
Some of these marketers were starting from scratch. Listen to Curt Sasaki, Vice President of Sun Microsystems’ Web site: “Sun was not at all a metrics-driven culture when I arrived. When I took over, the Web was an information resource. I began to ask folks, ‘What are our customers doing?’ And they didn’t have the answers. I noticed that the first thing people did at our Web site was to leave. [Now] every single week, we measure everything. We look at the funnels of promotions to clickthroughs to sales.” Sun’s culture of “openness” is a clear contributor to the marketing transformation they’ve made—people must listen to be persuaded.
Some companies have always had a “numbers” culture, but needed to learn to apply it to online marketing. Joel Reimer, Director of Interactive Marketing at ScottsMiracle-Gro, explained, “Scotts is a very data-driven. Consumer research drives everything we do. But we’ve always struggled with justifying this internally because we have had a hard time isolating the impact because we don’t sell direct. With online, we’re trying to foster a relationship approach.”
Michael Petillo, e-business Leader at manufacturer W.L. Gore describes their transition. “Gore is very much a metrics-driven company—it’s an engineering company. We’re educating marketing in the power of Web metrics. We’ve seen an amazing revolution—there’s so much passion.”
Devashish Saxena, Texas Instruments’ Manager of Worldwide Internet Marketing, tells a similar story. “We have a culture where numbers talk. I’ve always found that if I can back up my story with the right data, people who were dead set against it are willing to change. It’s not just the culture of the company, but the openness of the leadership team. We’ve been able to educate them on Web metrics. One approach is to tie back to customers: ‘Hey look, here is what customers are telling us.’ Anytime you can bring that customer perspective and customer insight, that’s very helpful.”
CompUSA’s Al Hurlebaus noted that “Numbers play an important part of convincing anyone around here. We look at bottom-line gross margin and profit.” Still, when he proposed adding customer reviews to the Web site to raise conversion rates, “I don’t think one executive thought there’d be any change.” So they experimented—trying it on one product segment to see if conversion rates increased. (They did, markedly.) In a company without a feedback culture, Al’s bosses might have said “no” instead of “give it a try.”
Successful online marketers almost universally agree that the way to persuade companies to experiment is to emphasize listening to customer feedback. Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik summed it up. “Most people don’t care what I think—my opinion, my analysis—they think I don’t understand their biz problem, which may be true. They will be doubtful of my analysis as long as they think it is mine. But when I manage to clearly articulate the customer voice shining through, that is when they seem to accept the data.”
The thread that runs through each of these stories is the need for a change and the need for someone to persuade people to make that change. In your company, will that someone be you?
Posted by mikemoran at 5:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 21, 2007
Google Testing Pay-Per-Action AdWords
It's been rumored for a while, but it's finally being tested, as Google has announced a beta program to test pay-per-action (PPA) AdWords bidding. The Snap search engine has done PPA for years, but obviously it is big news when Google does it. I first speculated on this two years ago when Google acquired the Urchin analytics firm (now Google Analytics), but it's finally here. What does it mean to search marketers?
First, if you're concerned about click fraud, this would be a way to eliminate it. As I wrote long ago, there's no ability to create click fraud if you have to buy the item. Since then, folks have reminded me that another kind of fraud might exist, depending on how Google implements their system—crooks could click on your ad, buy your item, and then return it. Google might not refund its per-action fee. I've seen some references to this being called Click-Order-Return (COR) fraud, but we have too many TLAs (three-letter acronyms) as it is, so I prefer to call this "return fraud."
Andy Beal believes that this announcement is a harbinger of Google becoming an affiliate network, just like Commision Junction. Kevin Newcomb at Search Engine Watch agrees, but Google has denied this. It's interesting, though, because by positioning itself as an affiliate network, it would make sense for Google to have a closer relationship with affiliates than it does with advertisers, allowing return fraud to be more easily policed. You could refund the per-action fee and then be in a position of having to police your affiliates so they don't fraudulently claim an item was returned when it wasn't. (It's a complicated world out there, huh?)
But if we can believe Google's denials (Andy does not), then Google would be having a much more hands-off relationship with its advertisers (rather than treating them as affiliates) just as it does today. That would make Google less likely to refund money for return fraud, I think, but we may have to wait and see what they do.
Now understand, return fraud is a lot bigger pain to pull off than click fraud—someone has to receive the package and send it back and ensure the money was refunded, so you'd figure that it would occur less than click fraud does. My take is that, for search marketers that really want a "pay for performance" advertising model, PPA could be a godsend. No longer would you need to carefully calculate how much you should bid for traffic—now you can just provide a cut of your transaction profit (or a cut of your LIfetime Value if you are savvy) and you can be sure (in the absence of return fraud) that you are making a good business decision.
Regardless, this is an important step in the industry because advertising models should be about customer choice. You should be able to pay per impression or per click or per action—your choice. Google is trying to make it happen, which is a good thing, regardless of how it turns out.
Posted by mikemoran at 10:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 20, 2007
Organic Search Marketing Needs Words
I got an e-mail today from someone who wants to take a small business to the next level by focusing on search marketing. And I had an ah-ha moment. There's some organic search marketing advice that I have just been taking for granted to such a degree that I may not have said it. You really need words. Lotsa words.
You know, Bill Hunt and I wrote a 600-page book on search marketing and I am not sure we emphasized this point enough. This was all brought to mind when someone at High Country Furniture asked me for advice on their organic search marketing. 
I took a quick look at the site, and was struck by how few words there are on the pages. It's a nicely-designed site, but it is mostly pictures of furniture. This makes sense, really, because who would buy a piece of furniture without seeing it? But selling on the Web is different than selling in a store, because there's no salesperson. There's no one to tell the story.
Like most businesses, High Country certainly has a story to tell. With just a quick look at their site, I can tell that they have more than one location, so they seem to be a successful small business. They sell on the Web and ship all over the US. So they aren't your typical brick-and-mortar furniture store. It makes sense for them to be interested in organic search so that they expand their business on the Web.
So what kinds of stories can you tell about furniture? Well you can start by answering some basic questions:
- Why should I buy from you?
- What's different about what you sell?
- Why should I buy furniture online at all?
But High Country could offer much more than that. That information is the normal high-level abstract stuff that you need to close sales but doesn't really attract any searchers. What advice should I give Highland to attract searchers? Here is what I would tell them. 
You need to tell the story of each piece of furniture, not just show a picture from a catalog. The first thing you might want to do is to improve the catalog by placing each product on a separate page with lots of words and facts to explain what the picture does not tell. What colors does it come in? What's it made out of? What are the dimensions? You need this stuff to sell it, but some of these words also become search words. Some people are looking for a mahogany coffee table. and Google won't know it's mahogany from a picture. 
But there's an even bigger opportunity for information than just doing your catalog right. Why not give design advice? Instead of having one page that says we give design advice, you should explain how to think about a room and how to know things go together. (I assume some of the chairs go with some of the tables even though they are on separate pages.) Tell a story of what someone was looking for and how they found it from you. This kind of content is customer oriented—think about the problem the customer is trying to solve and how you helped them solve it. Tell as many of these stories as you can think of—they'll all use different words and capture different searchers with different problems.
If you really think through what your customers are struggling with, you can meet them at their point of need. Most people are intimidated in the area of home decoration—if you can sell to those people you have a captive market. And the Web is exactly the place where intimidated people hang out because no one sees how clueless they are. If you're willing to help people over the phone with this kind of advice, you might attract a whole new clientele.
You don't have to do everything all at once. Start small. Pick some area of information that you think you can explain and do it. You'll figure out how to subtly show off the furniture and design services as you explain it. (Perhaps talk about a particular customer and the design advice you provided and show examples of the furniture bought from you.)
Find your best story tellers. Get your best writer to interview the salespeople at your company who know the best stories and write them down. Interview happy customers. When you do, think about using words that ordinary people would use to describe the problem and the solution and use those words in the titles. If possible, hire a writer even if it's part time. Maybe find a freelance writer (a reporter from the local paper?) that you pay to write a dozen customer stories. Go out to their homes and take pictures of how nice the furniture is now and how happy they are. Real people with real stories.
It may be that you can't easily change the design of your site. If that's the case, then maybe you could start telling stories in a blog. You can use Blogger or Typepad for free. Eventually the search engines (and your customers) will find those words and start showing up.
Now there's lots of other great search advice in our book and in other places about how to pick the right keywords and optimize your content and get links (and on and on). I even offer advice for all the free search marketing tactics you can try when you are on a shoestring budget.
But it all starts with words. You must start by having some text that tells a story. If you do, you'll at least have some keywords even if they aren't the perfect ones. You'll at least have some content to optimize. And you'll find that these problem-oriented, customer-oriented stories will really capture the interest of people who might link to your site.
It's great to hear from people because it reminds me that for all the complicated advice, sometimes the simple stuff needs to be said out loud. So here it is: If you want to succeed at organic search, you need some words.
Posted by mikemoran at 12:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 19, 2007
Search Marketing for Those You Know and Those You Don't
Avinash Kaushik has a thought-provoking post on how to optimize your search marketing budget. He is right on in his assertion that most search marketing programs are far too heavily skewed to popular brand keywords—the words people who already know you use.
Avinash contends that if you analyze the return on your investment, you'll find that the lesser-used terms (the "tail" keywords in Chris Anderson-speak
Most search marketers can drive more sales with the same budget they expend now by focusing on the less-popular terms. Avinash outlines a radical proposal to split the purposes of organic and paid search marketing—to use organic search campaigns for the popular terms and the paid search budget for the long tail.
I think there are some exceptions to Avinash's advice because sometimes highly-specific phrases sometimes convert highly and have been discovered by several businesses. (Think about very specific local search terms such as "Kalamazoo plumber"—it may not be that heavily searched, but if several of that city's plumbers have found that the term converts, it might end up being more expensive than the average tail term.)
But despite exceptions in pathological cases, I believe that Avinash's advice is worth exploring for any business. Too often, businesses buy terms without analyzing whether changing their mix could raise their return on investment. But I think if search marketers analyze their results by the numbers that they might not end up with as radical a strategy as Avinash suggests.
Paid search can be analyzed for return on investment using profits or lifetime value, as I have suggested in the past. But you also need to account for the synergy between organic and paid search. I frankly admit that I don't know how to do that mathematically, but many have reported that traffic is far higher when a company controls a high ranking in both organic and paid search for the same term. Outrider's Chris Copeland has reported research that shows a 92% click rate in such situations and has theorized that it is based on people developing a trust in anything found by both types of search. Regardless of the reason, I think we need to account for this synergy when we plan our campaigns.
In addition, I think that organic search marketing has far more value for the tail terms than Avinash gives it credit for. Most companies, in my experience, focus almost exclusively on product-oriented, catalog-type content that brings in the popular terms. They fail to offer the problem-oriented content that attracts people that don't know what they want to buy yet.
For example, many potential customers are searching for "credit card fraud" that do not know they need a "data mining" system. If you focus your content only on explaining your solution to the problem, you may be surprised how little you use the term "credit card fraud"—you won't use it in the title, for example.
If instead, you focus on writing several stories about the problem of credit card fraud—what it costs, what its causes are, how you can detect it, what kinds of solutions there are, etc.—then you'll attract all those problem solvers out there who don't yet know they need data mining software. And you can subtly explain that to them and maybe sell something.
So, I generally agree with Avinash's points in that he challenges search marketers to examine more carefully the behaviors they've fallen into. You can't focus most of your paid search budget on popular terms and expect to have the best return on investment possible. Trying Avinash's advice is a good way to kickstart your thinking with something new.
But my suspicion is that most businesses will find that they still want to use paid search for some popular terms because of that click rate synergy that Chris Copeland studied. And I also suspect that marketers that carefully craft low-cost organic content aimed at early sales cycle customers will find that organic search works very well for the long tail.
These are mere quibbles with an excellent post by Avinash, however. If his thought-provoking ideas cause you to take a fresh look at your search marketing program, then it has done its job. I think that if you try his ideas and keep experimenting, you're likely to end up with a somewhat less radical approach than he suggests. But Avinash would be the first one to agree that you always end up optimizing based on real numbers.
Posted by mikemoran at 10:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 16, 2007
The “Opt In” Straddle
What do you do when a new customer makes a purchase? Do you automatically check that box and make the customer remove the checkmark? You know the box I mean—the one that "opts in" to future marketing e-mails. Some marketers say they’d rather be known for respecting their customers’ privacy, so they don’t check that box. Aggressive marketers check the box and try to hide it at the bottom of the screen in small print so that the busy shopper doesn’t notice it and uncheck it. What do you do?
It's a difficult choice.
Those good-hearted privacy-respecting marketers are loved by their customers, but there are a lot fewer of them,
because their customers rarely check the box themselves. Those marketers have very short mailing lists.
Those aggressive marketers that automatically check the box get large mailing lists, but also many unhappy customers who have no idea why they are getting this e-mail—they unsubscribe. And they may not have a warm feeling for the company that sent them what they consider to be spam.
Live Nation, a leading Broadway show and concert event company, takes a middle ground, by automatically checking the box, but sending a gentle introductory e-mail to start. That “welcome” e-mail stresses the value of receiving future e-mails and provides an easy way to opt out. Guess what? Linda Villwock, Live Nation’s head of Internet marketing, reports they get very few opt outs. Why?
First, the welcome e-mail is sent quickly after the purchase, when customers still remember why you’re allowed to contact them. More importantly, that e-mail explains the benefits of being on Live Nation’s mailing list. Why does this work better than explaining everything up front?
Perhaps this success is explained by the moment of purchase not being the best time to ask the “opt in” question. People are focused on what they are trying to do—purchase. So it’s easy to sneak something by them. But it’s wrong, because that will backfire. What Live Nation does is to sneak that first opt-in by them, but then openly explain what they did and ask if it was OK—at a later time when the customer can really make a good decision on that separate question that has nothing to do with the original purchase.
Your welcome e-mail is the single most-opened piece of e-mail you’ll ever send—75 percent of recipients open it. However, according to research firm Marketing Sherpa, Live Nation is part of just 48 percent of companies that even send a welcome e-mail for an “opt in.” Even fewer, only 10 percent, go further by sending a special offer in that welcome e-mail, according to Brian Eisenberg.
If your company pays attention to that welcome e-mail, you’ll form more relationships with your customers, just the way Live Nation has.
Posted by mikemoran at 4:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 15, 2007
The Marketing Tactic That Gets Five Stars
Quick: Which online marketing technique, according to Foresee Results, is used by 72 percent of the top Internet retailers and is the most influential factor in purchase for 39% of all buyers? The answer is customer ratings and reviews. So why aren’t you using them on your site?
For most online marketers, it’s all about fear—fear of negative reviews. David Seifert, Director of Direct Marketing Operations for outdoors retailer Bass Pro Shops, sums it up: “As a retailer, you never want to say anything bad about something you sell.” But the fear is overblown—“Only seven to eight percent are negative reviews,” according to David.
The negative reviews are a small price to pay for some impressive results. Customers want to see negative reviews—it makes all of other reviews more credible. The Senior Director of e-Commerce for CompUSA, Al Hurlebaus, notes that after the US technology retailer added product reviews to its site, “Every single [product] category improved its conversion rate.”
Customer reviews and ratings are moving beyond products into services. US telephone company AT&T has launched reviews on YELLOWPAGES.COM, allowing consumers to rate any business, from a local plumber to a global retailer.
You might be growing convinced that offering reviews is a good idea for product retailers and service directories. After all, if one listing gets bad reviews maybe they’ll by something else from you. But it takes real guts for a product manufacturer to post reviews—negative ratings might send customers to your biggest competitor. I've highlighted Sun Microsystem's use of product reviews in the past in the hope that more manufacturers will take the plunge.
Product ratings and reviews are proven to lead to higher conversions, but they also provide an invaluable listening post for customer feedback. David says Bass Pro monitors the top-rated and lowest-rated items and “we fix things not designed correctly.” “It gives [CompUSA] information about what’s important to them,” says Al.
But do reviews change customer perceptions? According to Curt Sasaki, Vice President of .SUN Web, “If you read and respond to what people say, people think, ‘Hey, Sun actually listened.’” In an era with so little trust in marketing, that may be the biggest benefit of all.
Posted by mikemoran at 11:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 14, 2007
What's the Real Goal of Search Marketing?
Great post by Melissa Burdon at grokdotcom on the real goal of search marketing—conversions. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know how much I agree.
Melissa makes exactly the right points. Your goal is to sell stuff, not to get high search rankings. Obviously, if you can get more traffic with same conversion rate, then great. But the relationship between rankings, traffic, conversion rate, and conversions is fluid.
You might get lower rankings for more popular keywords and get more traffic with the same conversion rate and therefore more conversions. Which would be good. Hmmm...lower rankings are good? Yes, they can be.
Or you might get lower rankings for less popular keywords and get lower traffic but have a higher conversion rate (because that keyword is a perfect match for your target market) and get higher conversions. Which would be good. Hmmmm...lower rankings and lower traffic are good? Yes, they can be.
As my Little League coach used to tell me, "Keep your eye on the ball." (I still couldn't hit the ball, but oh well.) Your focus should be on conversions, not conversion rate or traffic or rankings. Even better, your focus should be on Lifetime Value.
If you're looking for a search marketing book that helps you keep your eye on the ball, then check out ours. We make sure that you focus on sales first (which means converting your customers) and search stuff second. Anytime you think search first you end up doing the wrong thing—either spamming the search engines or annoying your customers or both.
Posted by mikemoran at 3:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 13, 2007
Does Your Content Demand to be Passed On?
No matter what you sell, the cheapest way to get your message out there is to get your customers to do it for you. But how do you create content that practically compels readers to pass it on? What makes someone decide to take the step of introducing your content to someone who trusts them?
Seth Godin, in his excellent book Unleashing the IdeaVirus
But why? What motivates sneezers to “e-mail a friend” your Web page? Reputation. They like to be seen as “in the know” or “on the cutting edge” or (add your own “trendiness” cliché here). Sending good ideas to others is the main way they enlarge and strengthen their social connections, whom they call in when they need help. If you can tap into the kinds of ideas that spreaders want to spread, they’ll do the work for you.
First it helps if you can identify your sneezers. Do you have any special “insider” status you can offer that provides early peeks into your strategies and ideas? Many customers might be interested, but sneezers certainly will be.
Affiliate links are the simplest example of insider status—let your customers refer other customers and get paid to do so. When Bass Pro Shops introduced customer reviews, it randomly awarded $100 gift cards to reviewers to get the contributions started.
Six Apart, a leading blog software company, has introduced a blogging service called Vox for private blogs—the authors control which people are allowed to read them. Marketers can easily take advantage of this kind of private channel to hold trusted conversations with influential customers.
Do you allow your best customers to help you shape your strategy? If you do, they are far more likely to talk about it, because they helped create it. Do you provide wikis or other community features that help them talk to each other? Help sneezers meet other sneezers so that your message flows faster between networks.
And, as we discussed earlier, make it easy. Put the buttons on your site that helps spreaders to introduce your content to others, such as “Digg this” and “print this page.” Make sure your e-mail forwards easily without getting scrambled by e-mail software. These simple ideas are the essence of “do it wrong quickly.”
But most of all, value the relationship you have with your sneezer. Let them know how important they are. Make them feel special. And never (never!) compromise their relationship with their social network. If you decide that it would be a great idea to send an offer to every e-mail address that you got from sneezers who e-mailed a friend, then expect the sneezers to start spreading someone else's ideavirus.
Posted by mikemoran at 9:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 12, 2007
Why is Changing Your Marketing So Challenging?
I've written in the past about the need to Do It Wrong Quickly—to stop the slow consensus approach to all marketing decision making and start experimenting. But many people have told me that, although this idea makes sense to them, they just can't bring themselves to do it. Some changes just seem harder than others, don’t they? One reason people struggle with change is they don't distinguish between adaptive change and technical change.
Let’s look at an example that has nothing to do with marketing. Suppose you’ve decided that you want to get up an hour earlier each day. Perhaps you want to pray in the morning, or do some exercise, or start writing that book. Logically, if you go to bed an hour earlier each day, and add this activity first thing in the morning, you should be able to pull it off, right?
But no matter what you do, you just can’t seem to get to bed an hour earlier. You just can’t get up an hour earlier. It feels like a big change.
It is a big change. It requires you to alter longstanding habits. You might have to forgo watching your favorite show to go to bed earlier. You might have to give up the time you spend talking to your spouse each night. You might not see these implications as the root of your problem, however. Instead, you might tell yourself, “I just can’t get up an hour earlier” or “My body clock just won’t adjust to this schedule.”
For you, getting up an hour earlier might be an adaptive change—one that requires you to change your beliefs about yourself or change other habits that you consider to be part of who you are.
Let’s consider another example. Come spring in many countries, the clocks are adjusted to Daylight Savings Time—where I live, we did it yesterday. The entire country sets their clocks an hour ahead—that means that everyone is essentially going to bed an hour earlier and getting up an hour earlier. And no one has any trouble with it. Exactly the same behavior change. What’s going on here?
Adjusting to Daylight Savings Time is a technical change, rather than an adaptive one—a technical change alters something external only and requires no personal adaptation. Because everyone is changing their schedule at the same time that you are, no huge adjustment of your life priorities is triggered.
This example demonstrates that a good deal of the pain involved in change goes on inside your own mind. Clearly, your body clock is adjustable enough to change your bedtime by an hour—you do it every year—but if you tell yourself that you can’t adjust, you’ll undoubtedly prove yourself correct.
Changing the way you approach Internet marketing is no different. For some people, experimentation is a freeing, natural way to behave—they love this change. But for many of us, it's scary. We don't want to be wrong. We don't want to be criticized. We just feel more comfortable doing it the old way.
For people that feel uncomfortable "doing it wrong quickly," understanding that this is an adaptive change makes it easier. Understanding that this one won't come naturally, that it will take some internal mental work, is the first step to making the shift. For more information on adaptive and technical changes, read Leadership on the Line
Posted by mikemoran at 9:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 9, 2007
Is Your Marketing Copy Fact-Based?
We've talked before about the Three Rs of Internet Marketing—to be real, relevant, and responsive. One way to be both real and relevant is with fact-based marketing. I spoke with someone who has consciously lowered the volume on his hype machine.
Floyd Marinescu, creator of successful software community sites infoq.com and theserverside.com, disputes the traditional marketing dictum to “sell the benefits, not the features.” Floyd says that he finds his software developer customers respond to the exact opposite approach—selling the features, not the benefits.
Floyd says that programmers perceive traditional marketing copy as spam: “When you sell the benefits, everyone’s product sounds the same.” He used copy that solicits registrants for a technical conference as an example:
- Increase your skill
- Network with others
- Learn what you need for your job
Floyd’s point is that any conference can claim these benefits. He’d regularly rewrite this kind of copy to emphasis specific features—the speakers, the subjects, the precise technical information the customers were looking for: “No benefits. Just facts. Just features.” The marketers told Floyd that his copy was boring, but he says “the feature-oriented ones did better—20% better clickthrough rates.”
If you’re looking for a way to turn around your conversion rates, give fact-based marketing copy a try. Not only will the tone seem more real to your customers, but you'll also be using more relevant words, which helps searchers find it in the first place.
Posted by mikemoran at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 8, 2007
Why Don't Searchers Click on My Site Search Results?
We've talked about why searchers click on your site search results, but what about when they don't? Because sometimes they won't. If you know why searchers fail to click on your search results, it can help you improve your Web site search.
Here's a news flash. One of the biggest reasons that searchers don’t click is they get no results at all. Some studies show that more than 20 percent of Web site searches do not yield any results. What’s more, searchers tend to enter second and third queries using many of the same words that were in the first query, which can yield even more “not founds.”
But searchers also fail to click bad results. (What would you expect them to do?) If they don’t click on irrelevant results, what do they do?
- Look at the next page of results. Relatively few searchers look deeper into the results, but a searcher intensively looking for information is more likely to do so.
- Search again. Perhaps this sounds like exactly what you want them to do, but the outcome is typically bleak. Studies show that the second search (and subsequent searches) usually fail at even higher rates than the average.
- Abandon your site. OK, this isn’t a good outcome, either.
We try to talk ourselves into the idea that site search that's mediocre (or worse) doesn't cost us. After all, we know where it is, so our customers will find it if they will poke around just a little longer, right? Except they mostly don't.
If your search engine is not producing the results your customers need, maybe it's time to try something new. If you're looking for a free search engine for your Web site, one that is easy to try, provides highly relevant results, and that has a configurable user interface you can change to your heart's content, try the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition.
Posted by mikemoran at 10:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 7, 2007
Blog Influence Is Growing
Not every company believes they should be writing blogs, but that doesn’t mean they don’t find blogs important. Just listen to Steve Swasey, Director of Corporate Communications for Internet video renter Netflix: “We don’t have a Netflix blog by design—our philosophy is to let our customers speak.”
Netflix has over six million members, some of them bloggers, and the company pays close attention to what they write. Mike Kaltschnee, the blogger behind the Hacking Netflix, has the company’s attention, according to Steve. “We have people dedicated to reading Hacking Netflix every day. We treat him with equal importance to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times because he knows more about Netflix than anyone else.”
Mike agrees that he gets treated as a full-fledged member of the media—he was one of just five reporters to get a sneak preview of the Netflix WatchNow download service, along with the New York Times, Forbes magazine, and the Reuters and Associated Press news services. Like many reporters, Mike has a direct line to Steve for story corrections: “Once, Steve responded from Taiwan with his Blackberry.”
Steve summed up the Netflix blog philosophy: “Rather than creating our own blogs, we harness the energy of someone who’s independent.” The “let others blog about us” approach is risky, because you don’t tell your own story, but for Netflix, the risk is low—research firm ForeSee Results has named Netflix the #1 site for customer satisfaction several times running.
Maybe delighting your customers is the only real key to getting positive publicity in the blogosphere.
Posted by mikemoran at 5:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 6, 2007
Why Does Paid Search Work So Well?
Sometimes I get so tied up in being an expert that I miss the basics. It happened to me not long ago when I was explaining some deep search marketing concepts to a savvy marketing audience. From the questions I was getting, it was clear to me that my listeners were overlooking a basic reason that paid search ads work—people want to see them.
As someone steeped in search technology for 20 years, it's obvious to me that people searching for something are interested in the answer—so obvious that I sometimes fail to mention it. But it's not so obvious to marketers, because the whole domain of advertising has grown up around interrupting people doing something else. To the dyed-in-the-wool advertising person, it's almost a foreign concept to think about people actually desiring to look at your advertising message. That's what's different about search.
But instead of comparing paid search to traditional advertising, such as TV and print, where so may things are different, let's make a simpler comparison. We'll examine the differences between banner ads and paid search ads.
Banner ads are shown on Web site pages the same way print ads are shown in magazines—bought based on the subject matter of the content and the demographics of the readership. So, Canon might want to buy a banner ad for its digital cameras on Digital Photography Review's site, because of the subject matter. And Gillette might want to buy a banner for its razor and razor blades on ESPN, because of its predominantly male audience.
Here's what we know about the effectiveness of banner ads. Their recall rate is quite low (about 20%) and their clickthrough is also low (usually well under 1%). So what do we know about paid search? We know that their recall rate is about 60% and their clickthrough rate is almost always over 1%, sometimes as much as 10%.
To a veteran advertiser, this seems amazing. I mean, just look at those sexy banners with big type and pictures next to those sedate little text-only search ads. Why do customers click on these boring-looking paid search ads while ignoring the glitzier banners?
Because the search ads are relevant to what they are looking for. Search engines sell the ads based on the words the searcher enters, so ads for “life insurance” are displayed when the searcher is interested in that topic (unlike banners that are shown at random). In other words, the mere act of searching has eliminated most of the audience who doesn't care about the subject.
I know that this point is basic, but I've seen so many people stumble over it recently that I can't help but point it out. Searchers are a self-selecting audience. Marketers have a chance to get their message in front of someone who is ready to hear it. And they can reach them at the exact moment they are ready to listen. No wonder search ads work so much better than banners.
Posted by mikemoran at 8:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 5, 2007
Is Search Marketing Too Much Work for Publishers?
Tom Foremski let loose with a long list of complaints about what a pain it is for publishers to make their content palatable for search engines. His basic point is that people think of Google and other search engines as being magical in their ability to find the right information, but in fact people have to do a lot of work to make search engines work. Does he have a point?
Nope.
The truth is that content publishers do less work to be found in search than to be found any other way. Yes, Bill Hunt and I wrote a whole book of search marketing tips for those that want to do the work. And if you want to do the work, you'll get an edge. But all of that work is optional. If you don't do any of the work, some content publishers (and blogs are a great example) will get about the same traffic. If you use the right words in your titles and your copy, that's the most basic thing to do. Most bloggers do this stuff automatically.
But let's compare the work involved with search to the work involved in getting your content found in other ways.
So how long has it taken for Tom to build up a big list of RSS subscribers? He had to learn to use his blogging software and make sure his feeds were working and set up categories and moderate comments, and do lots of other stuff. And how many people would have found Tom's blog without search?
Or maybe people directly typed in Tom's URL. How did he get that message out there? How much time and money would it take to get his URL plastered in places his readers would see. I bet he has never taken out a single ad that shows his URL. And how many PR stories has he worked to get written to get his URL out there? Maybe none, because it is a lot of work.
How about links? How much work is it to get other people to link to your site? You'll get lots of links from writing good content (just as you get lots of search traffic the same way), but link campaigns are a lot of frustrating work. Most people don't bother. How many of Tom's links happened because linkers found Tom through search?
I think Tom's error is that he is holding search to a higher standard than everything else. In truth, getting attention for your content takes work—lots of work. But using the Tom Sawyer dictum, Tom Foremski enjoys the work of blogging, of writing good content, and speaking his mind, so he doesn't see it as work. But he doesn't like the other stuff—that seems like real work to him.
My advice to Tom is to stop doing the work. If you don't want to do it, then don't. I bet you won't notice much difference. But to say that search is broken because it is too much work is silly. Search actually works quite well without publishers doing any work at all, which is unlike a lot of the other ways of getting attention.
Posted by mikemoran at 8:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 1, 2007
Is Your Marketing a Conversation?
I've spoken before about how the Internet turns marketing into a conversation. Lots of people have. But it's not a new idea. In fact, I was lucky enough to work with one of the people that figured it out first, although I frankly didn't grasp the significance of what he was saying at the time.
Back in the mid-90s, I worked with Chris Locke, later one of the authors of the seminal book, The Cluetrain Manifesto
Later, Chris and his co-authors made “Markets are conversations” the first point of their 95-point manifesto. So why are we still talking about it now? Because it is finally happening.
The Cluetrain folks were visionaries. Back then, this conversational markets phenomenon affected only a few industries. Today, average people are participating in communities in many markets. Soon, rating a product or commenting on a blog will be as common as e-mail. And many more methods of customer participation will arise too.
Chris was absolutely right, of course. He warned you this was coming years ago. Luckily, you still have a chance to do something about it before the vision is totally realized.
Posted by mikemoran at 10:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Valuing Your Customers
What are your customers worth? Sure you may be able to put a monetary value on transactions, but do you know the value of each new customer relationship? If you do, then you can decide just how much to spend to acquire each new customer. See how to calculate the value of your customers in March's Biznology newsletter, cleverly named Valuing Your Customers.
Posted by mikemoran at 9:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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