In my years of internet research, stumbling, browsing and surfing, I’ve never had such a difficult time finding something. See, I’m trying to find out where the surfers on the net hang out, blog, post and share stories. That’s how I get to the root of a thing I’m researching, find out what the people doing the thing are talking about, what motivates them and try and tap into it.
After a few Google web queries on the subject it became clear to me that I wasn’t about to find anything authentic. Most of the top results were based on trip and vacation details, surf camps, surf shops and other services. Well, that’s fair I guess, but it’s not what I wanted. I wanted to hear from people, not companies. Still, I figured that the shops might provide authentic information…
No such luck though. Most of the sites I went to tended to use the same boilerplate copy that you see everywhere. It’s not bad copy, certainly fits with conventional wisdom on web copywriting, but in most cases it lacked authenticity. Could’ve been written by anybody, whether they’d been surfing or not. I’ve dubbed it Robocopy… and again, it’s not bad copy by any stretch. There’s no shortage of web experts who’ll tell you that this method is the most proven to create the opportunity for conversion.
And they could be right, but I don’t see it that way. I think we have to look beyond the conversion to the people we’re having the conversation with.
If you’re interested, this is the formula for writing effective sales copy.
Introduction: Introduce yourself and your company, then spell out a key problem the visitor is experiencing while trying to identify with them on a personal level. You might say something like,
Your widgets are important, they’re what makes your company function day to day! When your widgets break it can cost you thousands of dollars in lost orders or production time, something you simply can’t afford in today’s struggling economic climate. Tom’s Widgets carries thousands of widgets, and provides free overnight delivery of all standard and non-standard widgets around the world!
Elevator Pitch: Quickly explain the unique benefit your organization offers, something like:
Tom’s Widgets provides guaranteed overnight delivery on all widget orders. We pride ourselves on providing excellent customer service and a vast array of widgets of all sizes, makes and models.
Closing Statement: Here’s where we go for the sale, in the business it’s named a “call to action” because it’s supposed to compel visitors to take some sort of action. A closing statement with a CTA might look something like this:
Whether you need one widget to keep production going or thousands of widgets to outfit your factory, Tom’s Widgets is there to keep your productivity lines moving forward. Contact Tom’s Widgets today for an estimate on our high quality widgets.
So, what’s wrong with the above copy? Well, nothing inherently. It gets to the point, tells me what I need to know and solves a big problem. I’ve written copy just like this dozens of times, I think I just want a little bit more… I don’t need Hemmingway, I just need some personalization. I turned then to Google Blog search and, voila! I found some great surf blogs written in an authentic, travelers tone. I guess the difference is that bloggers aren’t necessarily trying to sell anything, they’re trying to tell a story.
Sales copy is written with a specific goal in mind, to drive visitors (much like sheep, or lemmings) to perform a certain act. That act may be something like signing up for a newsletter, filling out an inquiry form, or even making a purchase. No doubt about it either, many of the ‘rules’ based on eye tracking studies, copywriting and user experience studies indicate are totally valid.
I long for the day that businesses break the mold of corporate and sales based communications to take on the more honest and open approaches found prevalently in the blogosphere, and I think to do that – we need to look past the conversion to really see the conversation. So what do I mean by looking past the conversion? Looking past the conversion is about connecting with the actual people visiting your site and starting real conversations with them, talking about actual experiences and telling the story of your business. Maybe it’s idealistic, but it’s something to work towards.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on April 28, 2010 at 1:25 pm, filed under Copywriting, Search Engine Optimization and tagged Copywriting, Marketing. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I like Powerpoint as much as the next guy, it’s a valuable presentation tool, it’s feature rich and a great complement to spoken presentations and keynotes. More than a decade after its debut in 1997 as part of the Microsoft Office suite, Powerpoint has gained a virtual stranglehold on executive meetings and presentations. The use of projectors, support for multimedia and outfits like SlideShare (which, you guessed it, allows you to upload and share powerpoint presentations online) has helped the eponymous presentation program nudge its way into uncountable processes and organizations.
Seth Godin recently blogged the article “Powerpoint makes us stupid” – these bullets can kill. See, the Powerpoint revolutions has created some casualties, not the least of which are organizations (like the US Army) bogged down with ambiguous and overcomplicated presentations and, possibly worst of all, the common trend to write content using bullet points.
People like bullets (not all people, but more on that shortly). They like bullets because:
- Bullets are an effective way of organizing content.
- Bullets summarize important points for quick and easy understanding.
- Bullets are easy, reading online is hard.
- Content developers can use bullets to explain key points rather than explain them with language.
It didn’t escape me that I used a bulleted list, I did it to make a point. The list above is easy to read and it gets a point across, but it’s cold and impersonal. It conveys information, but my tone of voice is completely lost.
So, like, think of it this way. When I write for this blog, I tend to write – more or less – how I actually speak. If we were talking about bullet points over coffee (because bullets are cool), the conversation would be a lot like the one I’ve started above – though the live version would be decidedly less one-sided. If I were writing for a rack card or brochure I might change my tone to sound more poetic. If I were writing for a corporation I’d use formal language and speech. This is all tone of voice, matching the language of the reader.
Using bullets is the absence of tone. Bulleted lists are to writing what paint-by-numbers are to art, the effect without the inspiration. So why are they still used so frequently? The answer, not surprisingly, lies in the problem of a slightly misogynist web. Stay with me while I ponder…
The internet was and still is a field where men hold most of the key positions (That’s why cracked always makes the front page of Digg). I’m not suggesting that women haven’t contributed as much, quite the contrary, but I’m suggesting that the web wasn’t (and isn’t) built for women. This doesn’t jive with modern marketing ideas, we know that women make most of the household buying decisions – well over 90%, so why don’t websites target that?
There are rules that govern design and communication, most of those rules defined by previous theories. Phrases like “above the fold”, “bullet points” and “call to action” are all things to look for in “effective” web content. Not so plainly, notice how they all have a decidedly military feel to them? It’s all very manly, the web, or at least it was.
Social media is about sharing and connecting, and in this – women rule. They are more likely to share content and connect with other people like themselves, (men are more interested in creating content). Women want to connect, to hear stories and to get long term value, men just want glory and status. Some companies are successfully marketing to women, but most are still failing and it’s because while their design and brand has changed, they’re still writing and building for men.
I have some theories about how some old rules are dying, or should die, and they lead to how to write better content.
The first old rule I want gone is bullets. No more, please? We all have big monitors now, nobody is surfing in 800 x 600 and, unless there’s something we won’t understand unless you explain it in point form, or your audience is exclusively men, we just don’t need them anymore. Women don’t like bullet lists, I don’t like them either.
Then I want to see people craft content to make the most of new resolutions. Turn to the website on your left. Now turn to the website on your right. Both of them were likely designed for 1024 x 768 resolution or less. Did you know that ol’ 1024 x 768 (finally) is the third most used resolution with 1600 widths topping the charts? Well, it is, and it’s a great landscape to craft awesome content.
Once I’ve knocked that small feat out, I want the whole world to start using contractions. This rule of formal language (sans casual commentary) is old and I’m really tired of people writing “did not”, “was not”, “is not”, etc… Remember the old Star Trek: TNG Episodes? Remember Commander Data? Remember the unusual habit he had of NOT using contractions? They did that specifically to make him sound less human. When we don’t use contractions, it sounds as though we’re scolding our visitors through a robotic box. Using them makes us seem more human and helps bridge the gap. Interestingly, I’ve discovered that a main reason for a lack of contractions is that apostrophes break source code. As a marketer though, I’d say that’s the programmers problem.
And last (for now) I want the world to fix their error messages, notifications and confirmation messages to be more human, because I don’t like it when a web page gets angry at me for making a mistake. I know this happens because web pages are made by programmers, and notifications are made to explain exactly what went wrong. I fondly remember arguing with a developer friend who always wanted errors to be structural and informative. I wanted to say things like “Whoops! We don’t recognize that email format, please try again”. He wanted to say “That is not a valid email address”. He never grokked that his would subtly treat people as though they were incompetent where as mine takes the blame onto the company.
The test I always run with web copy, or copy of any kind, is to read it out loud as things look very different on paper than they do when you say them. Once you’ve tried to read a bulleted list aloud, you’ll probably never use one again. Once you start writing naturally, not based on old methods, you’ll find your copy suddenly more appealing to people.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on April 27, 2010 at 5:36 pm, filed under Copywriting, Marketing and tagged Copywriting, Marketing, Reference. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I was trying to get access to the last Canadian Internet Use Survey today. Statistics Canada provides a CD-Rom for the low, low price of $2400. Ouch. I went to AskAway next, it’s a great resource of volunteer librarians from BC that are available 13 hours a day to help you find helpful reference information.
No dice, it’s not in the libraries (probably cost prohibitive). UBC has a copy apparently, but you have to be able to log in to their archives to get it. (Any UBC students out there wanna make $50?)
It’s tough to find Canadian consumer data, after digging deep though I was able to find a report from Neilsen (the ratings and ranking company, you know the ones) that places Canada in the top 10 rated countries for overall consumer confidence.
What’s consumer confidence? It’s how good or bad you feel as consumers about the state of the economy and your personal finances. It’s measured, in part, by the things we worry about – like global warming and the economy. It’s also measured by tracking where our money goes, and our thoughts on the future of the economy.
So, what are we worried about? In a nutshell – our health, global warming and increasing bills. We’re worried about other things too, but those three are all well above the global average. We’re not as worried about the economy either, a stat that’s confirmed when you look at where our money is going.
When we look at the data, we can learn that while Canadians are lower than the global average in luxury spending, we are not quite as debt focused as the average American.
A corresponding study in the Neilsen report indicates that an overwhelming number of Canadians believe the recession will be over in a year.
Our language has turned from ‘recession’ to talks of ‘recovery’, which shows that the average Canadian feels confident with their financial status, job futures and the state of the economy as a whole. Source: Neilsen Ratings: Canada breaks into the top 10
In the internet world, what does it all mean? Possibly that internet properties will make efforts to target Canadians (and their wallets) more aggressively, and new Canadian startups are more likely to be profitable in the near future.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on April 9, 2010 at 4:25 pm, filed under Marketing and tagged Marketing, Reference. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I just watched The Big Lebowski again. It’s not for everyone; it did terribly in the box office back in 1998. Now, it has a massive following worldwide. There are festivals, message boards, even a recognized religion with an official website for followers of dudeism.
The Dude talks of takin’ it easy, man. What will come will come, and when it comes – you just take it and move on. It’s a philosophy that has served me exceptionally well during my years in marketing. There’s a lot of literature out there talking about what works in marketing, where it works, what doesn’t work, what works to what degree. There are hundreds of discussions debating the validity of one method over another.
Debating the validity of one method over another is, well, kind of pointless and not dude-like at all. Everything works. If it didn’t work, it probably wouldn’t exist. There are varying levels of effectiveness, though I don’t think one can debate what that is without trying it. It’s a marketer’s responsibility to learn and experiment with whichever disciplines they want to specialize in, because when you can prove your answers to the questions of viability it’s easy to get work.
If you don’t know the answer to a marketing question, it’s ok. Have a seat, take a sip of your white russian and think about your options in terms of time, money and risk.
If you have the time, you can do the thing yourself.
If you can’t do the thing yourself, you’ll need to scrap the idea or pay someone else.
If you find a cheap and fast solution, it will be accompanied by a massive risk.
There’s nothing wrong with risk, or spending time or money. If black-hat SEO didn’t work (cloaking and scraping for example) people wouldn’t keep doing it. Sure, it’s insidious, but it works. It works most effectively when seasoned hatters sit at the helm of the spam-train. It works least effectively when you have to search for “how to do black hat SEO”. It will probably destroy your brand and your reputation, but it definitely works to generate revenue. White hat SEO takes a long, long time but there’s virtually no risk and the payout always happens, eventually.
This is where Dudeism is helpful. There is a path of least resistance, and there is a path of utter improbability. The path of utter improbability contains great treasure and great rewards but is a hard and dangerous journey. The path of least resistance is cool, meandering, easy and breezy but the pay is terrible.
What about you? Would you rather take massive risks for a possible quick payout? Would you rather pay for perfection? Or take the time and do it yourself? Whichever you choose, the Dude abides.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on February 12, 2010 at 3:09 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Marketing, SEO, Tips. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Above: Verdana, Below: Georgia - which speaks to you?
Type speaks. The typefaces you use on your website will change how users perceive and interpret information. The last few years have shown some major advances in the ways we are able to use different fonts on our websites. You can use the @font face syntax in your CSS files to load a font from a remote server (A List Apart has a great article), and companies like FontSquirrel go so far as to provide @font face kits, styles just need to be copied and pasted.
You can also try Cufón; Cufón consists of two individual parts – a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript. It’s meant to act as a simple alternative to sIFR, which is known to be complicated to use and configure.
But we’re not quite there. Fonts are very heavily licensed, and though there are free fonts available for use – chances are that you’ll end up using one of the 8 core web fonts rather than trying to find a free font that’s easily readable. Those core fonts are all owned and licensed by the Microsoft Foundry, which is why you’ll find them in your version of MS office. They are made of up of three serif fonts (fonts with ‘feet’) and five sans-serif (no feet).
Serif fonts: Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier
Serif fonts are often claimed to be more easily readable. In my mind they project a certain inherent seriousness and trustworthiness, like the voice of a newscaster. That’s not to say they do for everyone, there’s no empirical evidence that serifs are easier to read than sans-serif and in fact, sans-serif fonts weren’t widely adopted until the 20th century. Serif fonts are most closely associated with news and information; I like Times New Roman for headlines and Georgia for text in this case.
Sans-serif fonts: Arial, Trebuchet MS, Comic Sans, Impact, Verdana.
Forget Comic Sans or Impact for general text, neither are easily readable at small resolutions though I find Impact works well for headlines. For text, you’ll be choosing between Verdana and Arial most likely as Trebuchet MS can look nice, but can be tricky when users don’t have that font installed. Given the choice, I would choose Verdana. Created in 1996 for Microsoft, it’s one of the most commonly used and readable fonts out there – like the Helvetica of the web.
Don’t forget the spacing.
Whichever you choose, make sure you pay close attention to the spacing: that’s line spacing, letter spacing and word spacing. Too close together and the words become hard to read. Too far apart and you may have “rivers” running through your text.
For now, our choices are still limited.
While the foundries and the browser companies hash out issues of licensing more fonts for standard use on webpages, choices to users without a lot of CSS experience are still limited. Just try to remember that it’s not about what you like, the goal of type is to make a thing easy and enjoyable to read. Until next time!
Author: Sean Enns, posted on January 29, 2010 at 12:29 pm, filed under Fonts and tagged Copywriting, Marketing, Tips, Web Design. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
The first of Watzlawick’s five axioms of communication is “One cannot not communicate”. Because every behaviour is a kind of communication, people who are aware of each other are constantly communicating. Any perceivable behaviour, including the absence of action, has the potential to be interpreted by other people as having some meaning.
On the web, you are your website. Your website (you) communicates with visitors, who in turn try and communicate with it (you again). As in real life, sometimes there are breakdowns in communication, and the message doesn’t come across clearly. Here are some things to watch for…
Too much wewe talk. Not talk of small or diminutive things, or anything inappropriate – it’s talk about you. Your company. What you have done. Why you’re great. Why I, if I was smart, would buy from you.
This type of copy is a killer. People respond more effectively to copy that talks about them, talks to them, solves their problem. Copy that lacks a strong customer focus will lose visitors quickly. If you mention your customers (you, your, yours) at least 2 times more than you mention yourself (we, I, company name), you’ll be doing well. Don’t hurt yourself by checking manually though, use the We We Calculator from Future Now. I scored 65% customer focused (alright, enough about me). I challenge all of you to do better!
Too much jargon and meaningless corporate-speak.
Yes, we all get it. Your company is poised on the edge of several strong vertical markets, and ready to leverage new media and web 2.0 technologies to blow away existing old world dynamics and surge forward with new synergies and exciting, action driven initiatives.
Except nobody (except for looney tunes executives who don’t know what they actually want) really talks that way, and nobody likes being talked to that way. You would be better off to say “We like all the new technology out there and are looking forward to incorporating platforms like Twitter and Facebook and using audio and video on the web to allow us to communicate with our visitors better.”
Fight the Bull is an extension for MS Office (works in Open Office as well) that analyzes your content for heavy jargon and meaningless speech.
Too many typefaces. There can be only one.
I’ve been reading about type lately, two good books – one is called “Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn How Type Works”. The other is called “Designing with Type”. I like fonts and typefaces, both are important to communication as some typefaces convey trust while other can convey doubt. Without getting into it too deeply (because I will later), conventional wisdom tells us that we should use no more than three typefaces at a time. One typeface for the main headline; one for the copy; one for sub headings.
The colours, ooooooh the colours.
Your main font should be one colour, something close to black or dark gray. Your background should be slightly off white. Line spacing and letter spacing should make your copy easy to read. If you must use colours in your fonts, or on your website, use them sparingly. It’s not a circus tent, after all, it’s your business and unless your business supplies flashing coloured lights and tie dyed clothing, you should probably keep it toned down.
If you can’t write, hire someone who can.
Some people are great writers. Some people write by smashing their fingers on the keyboard in rapid succession. At least, that’s what it seems like when I read some of the copy out there. I’m always amazed by the care and attention people pay to the graphic properties of a website and to what lengths they’ll go to get something ‘perfect’ and how little they seem to care about their copy. Don’t spend $4000 on a website and follow it up with amateur hour copy. A great writer will work with you to craft your site’s copy, perfect a tone of voice and attitude and, most importantly, make sure grammar and spelling are consistent and correct.
Coming soon = Leaving now
If you have a page that says “coming soon, please check back later for updates”, that tells me one of a couple of things. First, that you wanted this great website and maybe underestimated the time an effort it takes to write copy. If the “coming soon” persists, I’m going to assume that you no longer care about your website. If that’s the case, why should I or anybody else care?
These leaps in logic may be fallacious, but perception is everything. If you can’t finish them, hire someone to. If you can’t do that, unpublish them. If you don’t want to do that, believing that the “content helps for search engine rankings”, I’ll be blunt and say, all you’re doing is showing people what looks like a strip mall with half the stores empty. Empty pages, optimized or not, aren’t going to help you.
Anything else?
Plenty, stay tuned during communication week at Harbour City SEO for more communication tips and tools. Ciao for now!
Author: Sean Enns, posted on January 25, 2010 at 4:17 pm, filed under Copywriting, Marketing and tagged Copywriting, Marketing, Reference, Tips, Web Design. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
In the last post, I mentioned the importance of qualifying your search engine marketing firm in various disciplines. You wouldn’t take your car to a brake specialist to get the oil changed, and you shouldn’t go with a marketing firm that doesn’t specialize in link building or SEO.
To round up, today I want to talk about some qualifiers for SEO and Social Media marketing. You should be asking questions of your SEO company, in effect interviewing them to get an idea of their qualifications before you commit to a contract.
If they specialize in SEO
SEO is made up of two distinct areas, on and off-page optimization. On page optimization involves things like keyword research, competitive research, copywriting and content development and structure as well as an understanding of the technical requirements to set up and work with a variety of website types and content management systems.
Off-page optimization involves link building through various methods, like directory submission, link exchanges and content development and syndication.
More often, a firm will specialize in one or the other. I, for instance, specialize in the on-page optimization strategies, though I am familiar with many of the techniques for building links.
When you hire a company to do your optimization, there are questions you can ask to find out exactly how qualified they are before handing over your dollars.
Q: Can you tell me about your background in marketing and SEO?
A: look for at least 5 years of experience in marketing. For young companies with less experience, you can sometimes get a better price on SEO campaigns if they have the qualifications.
Q: What methods do you use for keyword research?
A: They shouldn’t just be targeting the most popular terms, but those that provide the most value and relevant traffic. Look for an understanding of how keyword research works and how they’ll target the best opportunities. Most firms won’t tell you everything, as they want to protect their trade secrets, but they should be able to tell you enough so you feel confident to buy from them.
Q: Do you offer full disclosure of all your methods?
A: Transparency is a huge deal in SEO, as the wrong strategy could get your site penalized. If they don’t offer 100% disclosure, go with someone else.
Q: What types of link building are you proficient in?
A: Ask for specifics, if it’s directory submission, link exchanges, content development or syndication. They should be able to provide specific examples for each form of successful link building. From most to least valuable (in my opinion) are: 1) Content development, 2) syndication, 3) directory submission 4) link exchanging.
Q: Can you give me some examples of websites you’ve optimized?
A: This is easy, they should be able to provide examples of work they’ve done AND be able to provide results for their own website. Researching their website and the company will give you great insight into their business practices. Ask for references too. Make sure you Google their company, check out their links and check with companies they’ve worked with.
Q: What sort of guarantees do you provide?
A: This is a tricky question. No SEO firm worth their salt will guarantee specific results unless you pay through the nose for it. Every SEO firm worth their salt should guarantee an improvement in results and rankings for targeted terms.
If they specialize in Social Media
Social media requires a lot of ingenuity, great timing and the ability to develop enticing and engaging content. If you can’t do it yourself, you may be able to farm it out to a third party who will work on your behalf. That sort of marketing would be too costly for most businesses to outsource based on the time commitment alone. If you must outsource here, or if you plan on hiring someone for an in-house position, here are some questions you should ask before committing to a contract.
Q: What sort of results have you generated for other companies using social media?
A: For a small business, brand awareness is less important than actual traffic and new business. Building social profiles and embracing web platforms are wasted efforts if they don’t generate the desired action. I would want case studies of businesses they’ve worked with in social media campaigns.
Q: Which social media channels do you leverage for your clients?
A: They should be able to answer with the main ones. YouTube, Flickr, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc…
Q: Are you a power user in any of these networks?
A: The social media networks are ruled by the power users, those who have spent hundreds of hours developing loyal followers. Many power users are able to have a content item pushed to the forefront by tapping into their social networks, these are the people you want on your side when you have something ready to go viral.
Q: What benefits do I get from using your company to run my social media campaigns vs. running it myself?
A: There may be distinct advantages to using another company ranging from experience in creating successful viral campaigns to overall know how. I would want an answer that spoke specifically to the benefits of using their company over doing it myself. Time saved is NOT a good reason.
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There will be other questions you can ask, and I’ll post them in future updates as they come to mind. To round up, you just can’t ask enough questions of your marketing company before committing to a contract. If they don’t have the answers to your questions or aren’t willing to provide them, you should probably look somewhere else.
If you’ve just had some work done and want to know what the results are, drop me a line and I’ll check your existing SEO strategy and send you a brief report on my discovery.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on January 18, 2010 at 4:00 pm, filed under Link Building, Search Engine Optimization and tagged Marketing, SEO, Tips. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
A taxonomy is , in an oversimplified manner, a hierarchical organization and categorization of a subject. The categories of this blog, for example, represent a basic taxonomy. DMOZ, or the Open Directory Project represents a more complex taxonomy.
Categorization is important so we can understand how a thing fits in with other things around it. The more we understand the relationships between things, the more we understand the thing as a whole, right? Ok, enough rambling. I bring this up because I often see SEO specialists calling themselves marketers, designers call themselves SEO specialists and a whole lot of other muddled definitions. There’s no certification required in most of these disciplines, and sometimes none available.
But there are distinctions between disciplines. People that perform well in some areas may not have any experience in others. A branding specialist may not have any experience with public relations, programmers may not be able to slice a PSD.
Before you hand over a cent to a service provider, ask them these questions to make sure they’re spending their time, and your money, wisely.
If they specialize in internet marketing.
Internet marketing includes disciplines such as PPC management, affiliate program management, banner campaigns and paid link building. It could include social media and content development and syndication, but I tend to look at those as separate disciplines. If you’re looking for any of these services, there are a lot of questions you could ask to see if they can handle your needs.
Pay Per Click Q&A
Q: What sort of volume do you handle on a monthly basis?
Anything over $2000.00 would be a good answer
Q: How many clients are you handling currently?
Don’t want too many here, if they say “20″ – then it seems like they’re not committing a lot of time to you.
Q: Have you ever worked in this industry before?
“Yes” would be good here. If they haven’t, ask what similar industries they’ve worked in.
Q: Are you a certified AdWords professional?
This is a certification process for managing AdWords. You have to take a test and score well. You also have to spend a certain amount over time.
Q: What sort of results can I expect as far as increased clickthroughs and lower costs?
I can’t say this enough, ask for specific targets to be defined here.
Affiliate Marketing Q&A
Q: Can you tell me about the work you’ve done for other companies? How have you improved their sales?
Look for an overall, sustained increase in sales. Ask for referrals
Q: How long have you been in business?
5 years + in the affiliate business is a good benchmark.
Q: How many affiliates do you have in your recruiting pool?
You want thousands, if possible. Ask about some of the top affiliates in your industry.
Q: Which affiliate networks are you familiar with?
Shareasale and Commission Junction are the two top affiliates.
Banners and Paid Links Q&A
Q: Which banner networks are you familiar with?
Buysellads is popular. Google AdSense and Doubleclick offer impression based advertising as well.
Q: Does your company provide creatives and tracking?
Will you have to get your own designs done? Will they create tracking links for you?
Q: What advantages are there to using banners and impressions?
Banners are great for branding, text links and paid links are great for SEO and traffic.
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In the next article, we’ll talk about SEO and Social Media. Make sure you don’t miss any of our posts in this series by subscribing to our RSS feed.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on January 8, 2010 at 4:38 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Marketing, SEO, Tips. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
It’s surprising to me how many websites are still being built without a thought to future online marketing efforts. What I find especially surprising are the number of web development frameworks and tools that were built without a single thought of search engine optimization.
When I develop a website these days, whether it’s for personal or professional use, one of the first questions I ask is “Is this site going to be difficult to optimize? What are the barriers to achieving my goals?”
I’ve compiled a list of content management systems and frameworks that I’ve worked with, ranging from the simplest to the most difficult to optimize. If something is impossible, or nearly impossible to optimize – even if the price is right, I usually won’t consider it for a project unless nothing else will achieve the laid out directives.
Ranking of content management systems by ease of optimization.
9. Homestead
Homestead is a complete solution for website owners. The monthly fee includes items like web hosting and a small website. The pros are a short list. Manage everything in one place, easy to learn and use. The cons, well, for one – there’s no source control. You can’t have access to the code, even if you want to. Custom titles are a no go. Custom design is equally no go. You usually have a fixed number of content items (5 pages for $x) and very little power to alter the existing structure. Plus, you can’t move to another host without losing everything. There are others like it, such as Vistaprint. In general, these sites are not much bang for your buck and are often more expensive than a ‘free’ CMS like WordPress or Joomla.
8. Flash built sites
Forget it. Having a flash site is choosing the opposite of easy search engine optimization. The rasterized text can’t be read. The pages aren’t pages. You may as well have a blank page up there, unless SEO isn’t a consideration.
7. Anything in .asp or a windows environment
Many corporate, big box type sites are developed using .asp. Don’t go anywhere near this unless you’re an .asp programmer. SEO for these types of sites is a nightmare at the best of times.
6. Joomla
While I’m fairly proficient with Joomla SEO, it’s taken me a long time to get there. Joomla has struggled with providing users the configuration necessary to optimize a site properly. There are third party plugins available, but they’re a bit daunting to say the least. Things can go horribly awry if you don’t know what you’re doing, I’ve even been approached by other SEO agencies who aren’t comfortable working with the extensions.
5. Any e-commerce system.
E-commerce systems, like Magento, Virtuemart, OScommerce, Volution and others have strange rules. You often need to download an extension to optimize them well, and even then they’re not self explanatory.
4. Sites using Dreamweaver templates
Dreamweaver allows you to use a template to set global styles for s website. The problem is that once your template is set, you’re often locked into it and cutting out parts of the code to make it easier to optimize is a challenge.
3. Custom built PHP sites
Sites built in PHP can be as easy to optimize ans anything, if the developer thought about SEO when they built it. The problem is that they usually don’t, so the elements required to do proper SEO are not available. If you know PHP, or know someone who does, you can easily make the necessary changes. You are required to have a working knowledge of the elements you would find in the <head> section of your web page to make this happen. This is generally my preferred way of doing things.
2. Custom built HTML sites
If a site uses only HTML, it’s easy to optimize. The hardest part of doing this is gaining the working knowledge of HTML and FTP programs, so you can effectively download and manipulate your website.
1. WordPress, blogging platforms
WordPress is by far the easiest SEO I have ever done. WP sites get indexed quickly, the extensions for enabling optimization are free and easy to use, and optimization itself is all done via a simple extension to your blog’s posting interface. When I launch a new site, I always start with WordPress to build traction and develop another site in the background.
Sometimes you need a specific solution to achieve your goals, so you have to find the right balance. If you don’t speak HTML, or if a blog doesn’t have the features you need, you may have to use a CMS like Joomla. If you need to sell product, then your shopping cart is more important than initial ease of SEO. But you should always ask the question of your developer or agency, or yourself if you build it on your own. There are few things more painful than building a site with lofty goals of search engine success to only discover later that you’ll be ice skating uphill to get there.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on January 4, 2010 at 2:45 pm, filed under Marketing and tagged Blog, Marketing, Web Design. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Small business and individuals are often faced, at least offline, with the daunting task of competing with big box stores. More often than not, the small mom and pop shop gets squeezed out by a larger, competing business that offers similar (and often inferior, but not always) product at a much lower price.
It’s a bone of contention, especially for this small town guy who has seen Vancouver Island change from a series of small towns with quaint shops to a sprawl of big box stores and shopping centers.
One place the big box stores can’t compete, or at least don’t compete, is local search. As a small entrepreneur serving a very focused region, you can easily out optimize the larger, even medium sized competitors. To learn how to fold the big box stores, read my article on seven strategies to optimize for local search. The why is a bigger question, one that I’ll answer below.
Simply put, a business reaches a point in it’s growth plan where it either has to seek business outside of a particular operating region to facilitate the growth plan or it must stop growing and be satisfied with the business it has. If you choose to grow, you have to target other markets with your SEO campaign. Nanaimo becomes Vancouver Island, Vancouver Island becomes BC, etc…
By strengthening your efforts and campaigns to target multiple regions, efforts aimed at smaller regions are diluted.
Let’s say your business previously had all of it’s business come from Nanaimo. Recently, you’ve expanded into the Comox Valley but haven’t targeted that region with any marketing. Your site shows up well for Nanaimo related searches, but nil for the Comox Valley.
You could just add the words “Comox” and “Courtenay” to your titles, and it could work, but each word you add takes value from those you already have. You also need relevant links from the new operating region and relevant content to give you some market penetration.
The more regions you add, the more time you have to spend marketing them and the more competition you have. This scales to the global level, where you’ll need a staff of marketers, seo specialists and web gurus working on your SEO full time.
I don’t have to spend as much time, for example, as a global blog like SEOmoz. They’re a great company, with awesome articles. They have an office and an editorial staff, they have tens of thousands of visitors and probably more links then I’ll ever have to my website. They’ll not show up for SEO Nanaimo though, because it’s not worth the traffic to go through the effort. Most big businesses, and even mid sized businesses with multiple operating regions are faced with the same. To support growth, it’s just not feasible to target a single market.
And that’s where your advantage as a small, local entrepreneur comes into play. By spending an hour or two a week on SEO you can watch your site soar above those of your competitors without the costly expense of an in house SEO team or outsourced marketing.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on June 7, 2009 at 4:24 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Marketing, Search, SEO. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.