New & Noteworthy in Internet Marketing

Some comment-worthy stuff in the inbox & reader this morning:

• Cuil is the new Google challenger: the original search engine commentator, Danny Sullivan assesses the strength of the challenge in detail. Lots of buzz about this but no time to assess it today. The three column approach to displaying results is interesting, as is the use of images in results. Three column shoulds should help sites and searchers with more chance to win clicks. I’ll revisit this when the buzz dies down.
• Sound advice on writing with keywords from Karon Thackston of Marketing Words Copywriting Blog. Describing what you are not is a particularly good technique to remember — although I’ve often found people object to even the smell use of the word “cheap” adds to their copy. For me, the best guide is whether your copy sounds clunky as you read it aloud. If it does, you are overdoing the keyword repetition.
• I challenge you to read, social media expert, Chris Brogran’s 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice without being better informed about social media considerations. For me, the first one is always who is going to do the socialising and how much time do they have. No point even starting if you can’t sustain a target momentum*.

I kinda like Cuil’s three column results page but many are saying the results that fill the columns don’t match hyped relevance levels.
* Hmmm… not sure I am sustaining my target momentum with this blog. Very much a case of “do as I say not as I do.”

Need Graphic Design? 99designs Works for Designers & SMBs

99designs.com offers SMEs/SMBs* and designers a very worthwhile opportunity. It takes the “put client with a need and expert provider together” business model of sites like Guru.com and Elance.com to a new level.

The Web is above all a communications medium bringing people together. Any number of sites seek to put freelancers and service providers, wherever they might be, together with potential clients, wherever they might be. Great for both parties:

• freelancers cut time looking for prospects down by getting access to people with a defined need for their services — doubly great, no more direct mail and advertising to prospects who may or may not actually need their services.
• SMEs/SMBs* get access to any number of providers via one ad and can then choose from proposals submitted with reference to freelancers’ profiles on the site.

99designs.com is a Sitepoint project spun off into a separate business. It allows you to post design jobs/contests with a declared price/prize and invite entries from the design community they have built up.

The new twist comes in people submitting finished designs, rather than proposals. No need to vet providers and chose one or two.

Designers who think your prize is worth the effort submit a design for rating and feedback.

The approach might not work so well for other types of work — small copy jobs, yes, lengthy projects, no, for instance. And you could find yourself inundated with amateur designs. You can check profiles for designers’ credentials but you probably need to know a little about design and be pretty sure what you want.

Having said that, running a logo design contest through 99designs has allowed me to see a large number of designers’ take on my brief and refine what I need as the entries have come in. The effort involved in achieving the same effect via a Yellow pages/Web search>contact>vet>decide>give brief, more-conventional, process are pretty daunting. And I can’t see an easier way to work with a number of designers simultaneously.

The folks at Sitepoint have done some smart stuff over the years — their site is a great resource. 99designs.com is another smart and useful application of the Web’s ability to bring people together and circumvent traditional channels. Definitely worth checking out if you need some graphic design or a small Web design project done.

*”Small & Medium Enterprises” as per UK commonwealth usage / “Small & Medium sized Businesses” as per US usage

Web Marketing Insight Catchup

Some days my daily search for Web marketing insight is frustrating other days, well, the insight is in full flood.

First thing:
Turn my laptop on return; to the kitchen [sigh] to get the coffee I meant to bring down to the office; log in and wait for my beleaguered pc to sort out itself ["commmmon!"]; and settle in to read email and RSS feeds because that’s one of the things I offer clients: the latest Internet marketing tactics.

(Know the story of Sisyphus doomed to spend eternity 1. pushing a rock up a hill 2. losing it near the top and 3. repeating 1. and 3.? Well. I relate. But in a good way. The fact that one is never on top of the Internet marketing knowledge hill could be frustrating. Except, constant learning makes life interesting for me.)

Hour later:
Either:

• Hmmmm. Not sure I’ve actually learned much — another five internet marketing information product  pitches, advice I first read in 2001 recycled or repackaged, two more social media sites to consider, etc. That is: a lot of information but no insight.

“Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink” Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner

Or:

• Lots of fresh insight to note (fresh water to drink from the sea of indigestible salt water that is the daily flow of Web marketing advice) and not enough time to take it in and share it with others.

Fresh or Worthwhile Web Marketing Insight:

• A reminder from Gerry McGovern that your target audience is more and more fickle every day based on a number of things Gerry has come across on his web travels
• (via Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide) a very droll take on the right way to hire an SEO firm from Ian Dury of Conversation Marketing

(Note, especially: the first point about SEOs that can’t write. The technical stuff matters. But the words deliver the traffic and the ROI. I would say that, of course.)

• “Five Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience” from, Clickz columnist, Heidi Cohen actually offers more than five. Her general theme, understanding and catering to chosen customers’ needs in products, service and company style is one I heartily endorse.

Two Email Trails: Careful Where You Send ‘em

I received two email promotions yesterday. Both were good enough to win a click. But one had no chance of converting into a sale. The sender didn’t do enough to help me spend my money. After I clicked I saw no prominent signage to the trail I was interested in following.

I’m time poor. I get a lot of email. And I’m online promotion shy.

I’m pretty normal then for thirty-something professionals with a little cash* to spend who’re online daily for work/communication/play purposes. For me the email/RSS thing is maybe more acute — you try staying on top of developments in ever-evolving world of Internet marketing…

Anyway.

An Email Promotion Good Enough to Win My Click

Both emails where compelling enough for me to lift a weary finger and click through to the site:

• Amazon — targeted as ever — was offering discounts on social media marketing books because (see above re. “ever-evolving world of internet marketing”) I’ve bought the odd online business book now and again.
• Fishpond, New Zealand’s biggest bookstore (think: Amazon circa 1998), was offering $10 credit if I bought any of the items in a Wishlist I haven’t looked at for months. Not a bad idea. I’ve expressed interest in these books maybe a little shove is all I need.

Not sure I would have clicked on either email if I hadn’t been a. cursed to pursue the pot at the end of the internet marketing knowledge rainbow and b. interested in how Fispond is chasing sales because I am cursed… “You get the picture.” But that’s beside the point.

Turning Click into Conversion With A Well Marked Trail

The point? The point is that Amazon delivered on my expectations but Fishpond didn’t:

• Amazon offered a landing page bulging with social media books. (Out of date from the moment the writer and editor agreed they were ready to be published but that, too, is beside the point.) Some I already own, so the targeting was there but the personalisation was a little lacking. If one of the titles had related to a particular challenge I, or one of my clients, was facing I might have even tried to remember my Amazon password.
• Fishpond offered their homepage as the landing page. They were asking me to sign in, remind myself what I had in my wishlist, etc. Well. Immediate access to my Wishlist is probably too much to ask — some serious technical challenges. The homepage has a lot of popular books. The “Sign In” link is prominent on the homepage.  Not bad. But not good enough. I needed something more closely related to the reason I clicked.

Fishpond Lost Me When I Lost the Trail of My Wishlist

The Fishpond email had me thinking “Wishlist”. The trail I was following was marked “Wishlist”. The homepage with its “Wishlist” text link amounted to a trail with insufficient signage. In the few seconds I — like any Web user — allowed the page to hold my attention there wasn’t enough of a trail to follow.

What could Fishpond have done?

Ideally, they would have created a landing page for the promotion mentioning the offer I had responded to and prompting me to signin to my wishlist. They’re not Amazon; their resources are limited. The ideal isn’t always possible in an SME/SMB like Fishpond. I know. I’ve been there.

Sending me to their wishlist page would have helped.  But some changes to that page would have meant the trail I was following was prominent.

1. Heading, “My Wishlist Contains”, becomes “Your Wishlist: Keep Track of Stuff You Want”
2. Copy, “No products are in your Wishlist” becomes “Login or register to view or store stuff you’d like for later” with relevant fields. Indeed, two succinct options would be good. (Note: I am assuming this is the permanent page a landing page would vary in not needing to cater to new visitors by offering calls to action related to registering.)
3. Additional content to be added if at all possible: (not quite a specific landing page) mention of the 24 hour promotion to be added to the page if you can be sure that it will be removed as soon as the promotion is history.
4. Other content, (”Want to know what other shoppers wishing are for? View the top 10 most desired wish list items here.”) would be replaced with the actual list to create another way of grabbing my attention. This new “trail” is a detour but a prompt to “Add to Your Wishlist” could get people back on track.

Bottomline:
If you are running an email promotion send people to a page on your site that references that promotion or, at least, is directly related to it. A promotion-specific landing page can be tough to arrange. But you need to offer signposts on the trail that leads to your goal action. Don’t make people work any harder than is absolutely necessary to get to the relevant parts of your site.

*“A little cash” and seeming smaller all the time with current interest rates and what the commentators call “economic uncertantity”. All the more reason to make it as easy as you can for me and all the other mortgage slaves out there to spend money at your site.

Search Engine Submission Non-service

Search engine submission is a service you can do without.

I’ve always wondered about SEO companies touting submission to search engines as part of their services. Um. There’s no need to submit to search engines. They are in the business of finding and indexing sites. All that is needed is a link from another site.

Picture a boardroom, back room or cafe near you. A group of people is intent on a piece of paper the loudest of the group is writing on. “Anything else we can offer? This list could really do with another bullet.” “Ahh… How about submission? That will give us seven services.”

Be particularly wary of anyone offering to submit your site to hundreds/thousands of search engines for $x. Not so much a service as a scam in those cases. There aren’t that many reputable search engines. Indeed, your ROI on that particular marketing expense might be negative if you end up associated with unsavoury corners of the web.

Why am I thinking about search engine submission?

Signed up with webmaster central today and found myself appalled to find this site — very much a work in progress and not safe for public consumption yet — well indexed by Google. It seems Yahoo! Search has about the half my unfinished pages indexed and MSN Live two pages.

Time to get serious about filling in the sizable gaps in my content!

Flash For Search Engines

It is one of the maxims of search engine optimisation: if you’ve put it in Flash it might look good but you’ve pretty much hidden it from search engines.

But maybe the maxim doesn’t apply any more.

Google, Yahoo! and Adobe have got together to figure out a way to offer the big name search engines access to content in Flash file formats (SWF). According to Ecommerce Times:

“The two search companies will use an optimized version of Adobe’s Flash Player technology to improve their engines’ abilities to index the Flash file format (SWF) and scan information contained within the files.

This, according to Adobe, will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content powered by Adobe Flash Player and which would otherwise remain outside the scope of traditional Web searches.”

There are already some things you can do to get content in Flash indexed. Things like, most basically, “noscript” content and ensuring that SWF file meta data is keyword rich. This, though, is an interesting development.

A kinda “duh” development, though. S’pose Adobe weren’t too concerned that Flash movies couldn’t be found via the way people find things online, search engines. That didn’t stop Flash being popular with advertising creatives, gamers, etc. or widely used. But taking 12 years to take some steps to cater to search engines…

Indeed, its not clear who approached who. Maybe the impetus came for the search engines’ endless quest to deliver good results. That definitely the feeling I’m getting from what Google has said on its Webmaster Central Blog and Googleblog:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

Bottomline: I wouldn’t be rushing to redo your navigation in your site in Flash. It will be a long time before “no flash please if you’re looking to get traffic via search engines” drops out of SEO-client conversation. Best bet is still href text links — modify it all you like via css but offer the simple links.

After thought: Will be interesting to see what impact this has. The heavily designed sort of sites that make use of flash aren’t generally put together in a keyword savvy way either. (Think of big brand sites put together by big ad agencies — Adidas isn’t to worried about using running shoes a lot in website content, for instance.)

The question is whether the text content in Flash files will actually help search engines understand what the content is about.

NZ Search & Social Media Stats

For the last eight years my work focus has been the US online market. Whether I was living in Melbourne, Auckland or Wanaka, the work ended up in an email inbox somewhere in the US.

Now, establishing my own consulting business and working with local clients, my work focus has shifted to spend more time studying local web usage. It’s interesting to be spending a little more time looking at my local web neighbourhood. The Web may be global but its usage varies across time zones and country borders.

Google Dominates NZ Search with  89% Market Share

And there’s definitely a “900 pound gorilla” in the New Zealand search space: combining Google.co.nz and .com shares gives  the non-resident gorilla 89.19% of NZ searches, with MSN’s Live beating Yahoo!  for the search scraps with 4.30% versus 2.23% (source: Hitwise, Search Volume 24 Weeks ending May 31, 2008).

Google can’t boast that kind of dominance in the US where its share is more like 58%.

NZ Social Network Picture is A little Different To US Picture

My latest Hitwise newsletter offers insight into New Zealanders’ use of social networks.  Seems Facebook and Bebo are almost equally popular with 39.87% & 39.15% of social network use and Myspace (still dominant in the US) lagging behind with 7.81%.

Big movers in the US market — photo sharing site, Flickr (101% growth from May ‘07 - May ‘08 to rank 3rd behind MySpace and Yahoo in unique visitors), people search network Reunion.com (77% growth for 5th spot), social bookmarking site Digg.com (90% growth for 11th) and business social networking site LinkedIn (138% growth for 20th) — don’t feature in NZ stats.

My impression [should really take a look] is that Bebo is definitely for a younger demographic — witnessed it causing sibling friction between an 11 year old boy and his 8 year old sister with one laptop to share recently, for instance.

So it seems like Facebook is the place to look if you’re a NZ business thinking about doing something about “this social media thing everyone is talking about.”

Product Page Optimisation: What’s Important?

<aside>Hmmm… Struggling to get to the work I need to do today because I couldn’t quite resist one of my ecommerce feeds… And one page led to another. Good stuff, though:</aside>

The importance of product pages can be underestimated. Often in the SEO context much more attention is paid to home, category and sub-category pages.

But product page optimisation* is crucial to both long tail search traffic and — something that is definitely neglected in the SEO context — sales or conversion.

The e-tailing group and ARS eCommerce took a look at the importance of various product page elements, in an August, 2007 study and produced a set of results that any etailer should be aware of: