First Stage Over

I have finished populating this blog with enough content and rant (with the right keywords) to start the Search Engine Optimization Process (SEO). From now on I will go through my drafts a few more times and with more in depth research. For instance, how did I miss out mentioning 37Signals‘ products is beyond me. That company has some brilliant products most of it are free to use with a limited subscription. This would not have happened had I put in more effort into my post.

Confession over. Time to kick ass!

Google Analytics Bootcamp

If you happen to be at Vermont from June 17-20 (Fat chance I will be there). Do yourself a favour and register yourself for the Online Marketing Boot Camp. It might turn out to be one of the wisest investment for your career or business. Soon we will live in a world with minimal marketing and advertising waste because of the advances of marketing measurement.

Don’t be a tool! Use one!

Today, I had to venture out into the open wide spaces outside of my office to take a taxi to a little known road. I never liked taking taxi due to its outrageously high prices around the city area. Sure doctors and lawyers charges more, but more on that later.

The first taxi driver. No luck, where the hell was that place? The second taxi had no idea on how to find that place too. Don’t they have street directories.

I was on the verge of pure undiluted anger. I flagged another taxi not expecting much. He asked me for my final destination then nodded. Maybe he been there before. That was an unexpected piece of luck.

He then keyed in a few buttons on the taxi touch screen monitor which I wrongly assumed was just an expensive piece of communication device between call centre and the taxis. Up pops the map, and the roads in the map is search able very much like most other good online maps are. I asked him about it. Was it difficult? Troublesome? How come many taxi drivers don’t use it?

“Where got lar?” He replied in stereotypical Singlish, “Very easy, just press press the address and got map liao!” He was not afraid to try the tools at hand. Like they say, you will never know till you do it.

There you have it, I got to my place, I paid the taxi charge and he got his business all because he knew how to use the tools allocated to him. It was a high price yes, but he certainly deserved it.

Websites and businesses should follow such examples. Here are some recommended suggestions.

1. The internet – Find out what others are saying about you. Do a search, Type “XXX Company sucks” or links:XXX Company in Google Search. Get one of those free programs to search for backlinks. If there are any negative feedback, work on them and post a reply or press statement assuring the audience that you are doing darn hard to address their fears. If the positive are good, make those users evangelists. Give then more discounts, ask them to e-mail a brochure to recommend to others. Send them Thank you and Christmas cards. Make sure they don’t just stay happy, convince them to convert others. Because a delighted customer is a much advertisement than the best poster.

2. Live Chat – Many internet users are suspicious of E-mails because of the publicity relating to spam and viruses. Furthermore, they don’t have high expectations of a reply appearing in their in-box so soon. For the time you take to open your mail, key in a reply, run a spell check and edit it a few times to make sure you sound like the Queen of England, your potential customer would have already surfed your competitor sites (in Search Engines, its so easy!) which might convince him to purchases quicker than you can type “Dear Sir….” Get live chat, make sure its well implemented and someone will actually be there to capture all the sales leads. A second too late with the reply is no reply when the searcher decides to plant his flag somewhere else.

3. Why are many internet website with strong elements of brick and motor store components without maps or directions to their shop? It doesn’t have to be a professionally looking map (although that might boost the image of the website). A map of straight lines and square shapes will suffice.

4. Google Analytics – Ok, this is not some tool which one can pick it up and use it immediately like a screwdriver. You do need a fair bit of technical skills (HTML and web analytics) to set it up. Get someone else to do it for you, if not, you can pay me a tidy sum to do it for you. Setting up is a pain. The joy is in the results. For websites with lots of visitors a day, say 100,000, I recommend something better but cost quite a bit.

5. Spell Checker – I am starting to state the obvious here, yet many important documents and presentations are riddled with spelling errors which can be easily picked up by Microsoft Office spellchecker. If you cannot buy Microsoft Office, download a free but decent alternative.

6. The most important tool for a website is the creative mindset. Write a strong and compelling messages all over your website in a clear and concise manner. Don’t leave your customers baffled with all those colours and pictures. Type something.

7Banners’ Lab

Forgive me for being a copycat. I cannot think of any other suitable words other than “Lab”. ‘Testing Ground’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Occasionally I will test the latest software and tools just out of sheer curiosity. Sometimes Google or Yahoo come out with a kick ass feature which seems like it could take over the world or just fizzle out.

Leave it to me to test those and then tell you if it might profit you. Sacrifice isn’t noble, it is dumb. The wise just profits on those who had sacrificed themselves.

Links

Link, link and link generously but relevantly. Link for Google, like for your audience and link for convenience.

But never have more than one link in the same paragraph or line.

Analytics: The misconception

Statistics without analysis are just numbers without much value to it. There are many companies who benchmark success and profitability (or the lack of it) to key performance indexes such as click through rates, bounce rates, return to investment (ROI), etc and take the figures generated without much analysis overall picture.

Someone said to me, “I had a bad experience with search engine marketing because I had lot of clicks but no one was actually buying. The CTR looked good but no sales!”

That doesn’t make sense to me Jose, along with flying sauces and George Bush’s speeches. Its like blaming Saddam for 911.

Surely it might be because his contact information is submerged under an ocean of technocolour Flash graphics and not linked to a mailto:

There could also be other reasons for not the clicks not converting
1. The adcopy might be enticing but misleading. Is might be the Search Engine Marketing equivalent of an advertisement screaming, “Free Sex” but the advertiser is selling fortune cookies. Clever but no dice.
2. Crappy Products
3. Are you a victim of click fraud? Check the frequency of clicks.

This doesn’t just apply for CTR, but also impressions and conversion. Someone once got orgasmic talking about his impression rates. Turned out that he had invested over the odds for contextual ads (those ads you see in blogs and other publishers’ network) without knowing how many of his clicks are fluff and how many are conversions.

Or you get conversions but paid over the odds for keywords thus wiping our any positive ROI. The possibilities for statistics cherry picking and its subsequent cognitive dissonance to  confirm a personal or corporate biasness are endless.

Take some time to look not just at the statistics but also how the campaigns are running and the pattern of buyers along with a concrete understanding of the website and other marketing campaigns. Maybe you might not have known if someone in your company had actually put up a terrific advertisement in a newspaper and print readers with limited memory span might actually search for the company when they realized their dogs ate the newspapers.

Never call those people for financing

cite=”http://s57.photobucket.com/albums/g202/acrosstheland/?action=view&current=crap.jpg”>It distresses me to see a site with a landing page like this existing in the blogsphere with the motto, “Good Financing is to facilitate development, not to prolong the life of a dying business.

Well one thing I guess they won’t be doing is to prolong the life of their business because when I called, the phone was not in use.

What do I see?
1. Lame photos
2. I cannot never imagine a simple page to be confusing. For example the “contact us” is on the landing page. What do we contact you for?
3. Only one piece of news and it is 2007.
4. I am not going elsewhere or explore further because I feel like throwing up.

The fact the firm was listed in the Yellow Pages and the existing of this piece of junk they call their website means they survived long enough to have some kind of plan. They might have better luck in other form of medium, but it is unlikely their website made any positive impact on their business.

The Seven Banners

Being first in the search engine won’t save a terrible website just like being in front of the shopping centre won’t entice anyone to stop by a rubbish dump in order to take a whiff.

1. Marketing message matters, work on your selling point and show it clearly
2. Site navigation matters, make your product easy to find
3. Ease of conversion matters, whether it is finding information, subscribing to e-mail or buying a product
4. Your products and their prices matter as well
5. Do you have the proper security to conduct e-commerce?
6. A fast website with very little downtime
7. Being in front (through Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing) actually helps if you have the first 6 factors.

There may be other factors depending on websites and businesses but these make the 7Banners

Phone On Hold

This time its Rap!

My head is going to explode…

On Hold Music Selection

When on hold over the phone, never play heavy metal music.

1. I am past that stage, I don’t like Metallica now
2. My ears!
3. It distracts me and make me forget what I am going to say to the other party.
4. I prefer pop. Ok, then again, its some people don’t. Its safer to just play Bach