Archive for the 'Internet Marketing' category
Monday, April 28th, 2008
For years, I've been on the Site Build It list. SBI is the creation of the rather annoyingly gushy Ken Evoy who never stops his carnival barker cries about his one-stop-site-creation tool.
Ken Evoy Pumping Site Sell
Evoy's been at it since the bad old days when the internet was a mess and Site Built It! did have the advantage of actually getting a website up in some form - easier than coding html from scratch for the neophyte.
Throughout SBI's history, Evoy has shrieked about his process and his proprietary tools. On the surface, a clear process and proprietary tools are a good idea. Probably worth the price of admission (or so I thought at the time). The issue with the proprietary tools (which otherwise might be a good deal) is that you can only use them a little bit. Come and play for one hour per week, see you next week. Not exactly inviting brainstorming or creativity.
In contrast, the indepdendent expensive (many of which are free) tools Evoy condemns let you use them as much as you like once you find them.
Over the years, I've learned not to expect much from Evoy's newsletters (sometimes for six months at a time, they get relegated to the read later bin). Still it's worth sometimes checking in on somebody who's multiyear obsession has been selling ecommerce sites. Another perspective.
In the last couple of years the internet has changed and it's actually quite easy to put a website up. Just buy a hosting account (a single domain account is $3 to $7 Ken, not the $10 to $15 you cite), click the one step install button and you have vanilla Wordpress (or Mambo or Joomla or whatever else catches your fancy). Or pay nothing and sign up at Wordpress.com and have a better than vanilla Wordpress install with lots of attractive themes ready and waiting for you and an active forum.
The ease of putting up a high quality website - almost all of which look better than Site Build It websites and are easier to post to - is naturally a huge threat to the SBI business. Why pay Ken Evoy $300 per year per website for hosting which should cost $50?
Evoy's latest missive starts yet another hysterical title "Why blogging is a massive mistake!" Exclamation mark is his.
Writing a weblog is not a massive mistake. Handled properly, a weblog does wonders for your website traffic and search engine standing. But taking away the hype, this time Evoy does have a worthwhile point about weblog type sites (Wordpress in particular) - i.e. they date like stale newspaper. I can confirm the tendency from my own sites.
By publishing a weblog, you are effectively creating just a daily news source.
What happens if you publish a very good article which has value as a permanent reference? It stands alone in your weblog. People come, read the single article and leave. There may be other interesting content on your weblog for them to read but the visitor can't be bothered to ferrret it out. If your writing or content is extremely compelling, perhaps some visitors will read a certain amount of your content. But then they will leave. Which quite frankly for an online journal is fine. You're not selling anything.
But for a business, this isn't so good. What you want is to create an information resource for people in your business, which will bring them back again and again. An information structure which invites them to find immediately the other relevant areas of interest.
And Evoy quite correctly points out that this is the built-in model for Site Build It:
Blog posts are created and stored in chronological order. A good blogger will produce a post that is useful today, but who will read it in three months? Even when bloggers go to the extra effort of archiving their posts by "keyword categories," the articles are dated and not rewritten into coherent definitive articles. Usefulness plummets with time.
How does a Theme-Based Content Site differ? Instead of a stack of old newspapers, each resembles a good resource book about its theme, composed of useful, original articles ("Web pages") that cover related topics in some depth. Written in each small-business owners's unique voice, and based upon that person's experience in the field, they are useful resources that visitors return to over and over.
Evoy correctly points out that a photography weblog would just be one in a million, posting the nattering about the latest cameras and software:
How would a blog be presented? A stream of disjointed photography tips would be organized by "date of post." And posts on any given topic (ex., "portrait lighting") would be separated by time (weeks or months apart), each covering only a certain aspect of the topic. On the other hand...
Definitely not the right one to pull someone into your website. Evoy contrasts the above weblog site with this siloed sitemap for a static site:
site build it silo site
This time Evoy's absolutely right. Someone looking for information on photography lighting would gradually be led through the whole of your website, would bookmark it and come back as a reference. All of this assumes of course that your content is top-notch (and Ken, let's be frank, there's not too many people capable of creating top-notch content, on or off the SBI rolls). But with a static site structure at least you stand a fighting chance of retaining your visitor and becoming a reference.
In any case this is a huge insight. Pages instead of posts something I've been playing around with in the static pages section in Foliovision. Our client sites are also largely hierarchical with the weblog performing weblog functions (added value).
What I've been doing is making a static page instead of a post and then publishing a small announcement on the weblog section.
Unfortunately some of the news outlets which republish my content will not link to static pages or to articles which are more than 24 hours old (a pain in the neck, as after publishing a major article I like to come back to it 12 hours later to proof it and add or correct illustrations).
Going forward, I am going to build up the static pages sections very actively. When I first publish a post, it will go into the weblog, but within a few days. There is one small issue which is comments. We enable comments on pages so visitors will still be able to comment on the static page. But often some of the comments come in right away (on the weblog version).
- Do I leave the comments on the weblog post or move them to the static page?
- If I choose to move the comments to the static page, there is no mechanism to do so inside Wordpress. We'd have to build a plugin.
BTW, this sort of question is what you are paying Evoy to solve for you with either no solution (in this case) or his solution. For an inside the box thinker (or someone with very little design sensibility and/or minimal interest in technology), SBI solves a lot of problems. For an existing six-figure business, there are better ways to bring your business online than SBI DIYism. I do agree with Ken that business owners should have better things to do with their time than spend it troubleshooting websites or optimising their sites for Google.
If you're interested in having a closer look at the Site Build It system and way of thinking, Ken Evoy offers a number of free ebooks on writing for the web, selling services and montization. SBI's claim ithat the free ebooks are better than a lot of the pay ebooks out on internet marketing is more or less true. Given the rubbish sold as ebooks that's not necessarily saying a whole lot. The link above bundles several of them into a single zip file for your convenience.
Personally, Ken's writing style drives me up the wall (he's been described as rah-rah), but the bulk of the information is good. I just can't read past his marketing speech. The formatting is bizarre as well. I wish the guy would hire a graphic designer at some point. Why does he write Sidebar and then not make the sidebar a sidebar but whack it right into the middle of the text?
Some other references
By Alec
Internet Marketing, WordPress |
Monday, December 31st, 2007
I was looking up information on Canadian accounting software (or more particularly looking for a Mac OS X offline tool for Freshbooks, the amazing online accounting system with which I run Foliovision.com.
I couldn't find a Mac OS X tool for Freshbooks but I did run across a great website which typifies to me many of the things which a weblog should be:
- Personal
- Illustrative (very nice and simple photos on most posts)
- Simple (no annoying javascripts or frilly designs that get in the way of reading and enjoying)
- Helpful (the articles may not be all that frequent but they are all have some thought or use to someone, this is not posting for posting's sake)
duomo milan from ruk.ca
Here is a sample of Peter Rukavina's writing about the dangers of online social networking - a virtual world where only like will meet like:
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Sunday, December 9th, 2007
There are a few weblogs where the comments are better than the article.
That's the case with Mike Industries. Mike often writes the most lackadaisical posts (a recent one about lobsters) - generating fantastic comments.
Of more substantial interest was his recent thin recommendation of a financial site.
I liked Brett's succinct version of investment information:
I look forward to following The Kirk Report, because I find the markets entertaining. But, like just about every individual investor, I would very likely be better off financially if I limited myself to other forms of entertainment.
If you really want to get the most out of your personal finances, in terms of investment returns and time spent allocating resources, limit your reading to Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letter, William Bernstein’s quarterly Efficient Frontier, and each new edition of Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street and Andrew Tobias’s The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need (not that Malkiel or Tobias change their books all that much from edition to edition, but that’s the point).
This is better advice than you might get spending a week online searching for investment information.
Juan Cole's Middle East weblog, while very good, often has comments that are still more incisive than his own commentary.
To get to this point, many of the articles have to be very good to build up a readership capable of creating collective intelligence.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Monday, November 5th, 2007
Switch to Phrase and Exact Match and Bring Down Your Cost Per Click and Cost Per Sale
Yesterday, I got an email from my acquaintance Andrew Goodman over at PageZero (author of the excellent 
Winning Results with Google AdWords) discussing issues with broad match in Google PPC management.
In August one of my clients had a horrible surprise (well we both did) where PPC costs skyrocketed - almost tripling for one week, with only about a 25% improvement in leads.
I got on it right away and called Google. The Google AdWords representative told me that thanks to our great quality score we'd qualified for "expanded broad match". Although Google says that they are against get rich quick schemes and fake sweepstakes in AdWords, this move is straight out of that shady playbook.
Sure, we'd "qualified". Qualified to pay three times as much for just a fraction more business.
"So how do we turn it off?" I asked.
"You can't," she answered.
So what did I do? My clients had been making money on this campaign and they wanted to go back to doing so. So I eliminated all broad match phrases from all our campaigns. That left some holes in the campaigns so I added some additional phrase matches to compensate, i.e.
broad match:
French DVD films
became phrase match:
"French DVD films"
"DVD French films"
"films French DVD"
"DVD films French"
"French films DVD"
As you can see it takes six phrase matches to cover a single three word broad match. With longer phrases, there are clearly phrases which are more likely than others so it's not all that intimidating.
A bit of a pain in the neck, but eminently doable (Splutweb's keyword permutation tool is free and speeds the process).
The result was worth it. Our advertising costs dropped in half (about one quarter or one fifth of what Google was serving us with expanded broad match).
With expanded broad match our CTR went way down. So not only were we getting lots more lousy clicks, we were now paying far more per click. When that CTR went down, advertising costs soared.
How about the sales? Well, they are down about 20% from what we had pre-expanded broad match. They are down about a third from what we had with expanded broad match.
Here's what those numbers might look like with and without expanded broad match.
| Match Type |
Cost |
Sales |
CPS (cost per sale) |
| original Broad Match |
$4600 |
480 |
$9.58 |
| with Expanded Broad Match |
$8400 |
600 |
$14.00 |
| Phrase/Exact Match only |
$3500 |
680 |
$5.47 |
So in the end, Google did us a favour by penalising us for one week with expanded broad match. They weaned us off of broad match altogether.
If you want to make money with AdWords, just don't use broad match.
The two interesting forms are phrase match which is created by putting quotation marks around your phrase "french DVD films" or exact match which is created by putting square brackets on your term [french DVD films].
Anything other kind of match and you are taking money out of your children's education fund and subsidising Google's purchase of YouTube.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Friday, October 5th, 2007
Aquisio Aquisio PPC management solution is touted by my friends over at SEOMoz as a recommended vendor. Unfortunately there is no pricing listed.
I had to spend twenty five minutes hunting around their website, waiting for business hours to come up in North America and running around their voice mail system before I could get a live quote. One of my pet peeves is websites which promote their product but won't post their prices.
To save you the trouble, the starting price is $1000/month for a 5 account package. Each client is allowed $1000-$3000 month spend. After that you are looking at a $250 bump per client who goes over $3000.
Not expensive in comparison to some of the other high end competitors, but out of budget for my projects.
There's space here for some invention - a consolidated administrative panel for Google AdWords, Yahoo PPC and MSN with client reports would be most welcome. Aquisio does not include MSN for the moment, although they promise it within a month of today.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
In a mastermind group to which I belong someone asked whether it would be a good idea to use Paypal as a merchant service for e-commerce.
The gentleman wanted to sell touchscreen monitors at $1000 to $2000.
One thing I will say for Paypal, using their system for merchant payments is extremely easy. You just set up your buttons and your links and you can be taking donations in minutes.
For physical goods, Paypal is extremely buyer friendly, i.e. it would be difficult to prevent a customer from abusing a return policy. On the other hand for digital goods, Paypal is extremely seller (i.e. con artist) friendly. I recently made the mistake of purchasing some expensive marketing materials from a dubious seller. In the end, the product was never delivered.
With Paypal's system, there was no recourse. You fill in the complaint procedure (you have 45 days maximum) and then when you are done, they close the case.
Digital goods are not subject to Paypal guarantees.
But for physical goods, they are always on the side of the buyer (i.e. someone can order something and claim that it didn't arrive and all the burden of proof is on you). On expensive items like yours, I would be wary.
If Paypal for some reason decides they don't like your account activity, they freeze your account (no more incoming money, no access to the money on file).
That said, I have put $25,000 through Paypal with little incident (mainly international money transfer for services). That seller probably does close to $1m/year through PayPal and is still using PayPal for about half of their business.
Still with physical goods, you might think long and hard about putting all your eggs in this basket. I suggested the original poster take a look at Google checkout.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Monday, August 27th, 2007
Which help desk to Use to automatically build a knowledge base up over time as you answer customers incoming requests?
This is another question I've answered lately privately.
A lot of smart people are using Kayako for help desks. One of my hosting providers started to use Kayako about a year ago and Kayako made my help requests (all too frequent so I'm not recommending them here) there a whole lot easier.
Kayako have a free month long trial and after that you can pay monthly ($40 for the full package) for a hosted version or buy outright at $500 (you probably have to pay for upgrades after awhile so I'm not sure the cost of ownership is any less).
Details of Kayako pricing.
Another help desk I've looked at which is much less expensive is Will Barden's Three Pillars Help Desk. There is a version at $47 and $77. If you join Will Barden's email lists he sometimes even makes a special offer of Pro for Basic cost to his list.
What's great about Three Pillars is that it is a one time fee with source code and hosted on your own servers. So if you have inhouse programmers, you can customise Three Pillars Help Desk as you go.
What we are using right now for support at Foliovision is Basecamp - as we are already deep in there and our clients all know how to use it - and have experimented with the help desk in Freshbooks which we are using for accounting. Basecamp is not public facing (you need to be a registered use to log in) nor does it allow redistribution of tickets to team members which is why we are still looking at other solutions.
If you are using WordPress on your main site, there is a very simple solution (as we build bigger and bigger sites, simple solutions have more and more appeal), it's WordPress plugin called Ask Me. Ask Me lets you get questions and answers up on your site in a hurry (latest Ask Me news). A larger Ask Me database would benefit from a simple category system. There is nothing to prevent Sara (the creator of Ask Me) or your programmer from adding that feature.
My advice - pick any one system get to know it well and use it to the maximum. We and our clients get huge value out of WordPress as we know WordPress so well. There are better tools for many of the things we do with WordPress. But the time we would lose getting to know each of them would be far more costly than the time we spend writing plugins and adapting WordPress to our purposes.
By Alec
Internet Marketing, WordPress |
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
Every time I've used eBay, I've hated it.
- Last minute bid sniping (been on both the giving and taking ends:
frankly, there's no point in bidding until the last two minutes
talk about interrupting one's day)
- Fraudulent sellers given nearly free rein (i.e. Apple computer, Canon cameras)
- No real buyer protection policies
- Horrible mediation procedures
- High fees
There's not much to like about eBay.
It turns out I'm not the only one not to like eBay. Finally, the tide is turning against eBay - and much of their trade is moving to Amazon.
I am not surprised to hear about Amazon. I work with retailers who used to be 100% eBay.
A year ago, when someone sold on eBay and Amazon, they did about 70% eBay vs. Amazon in volume. About 6 months ago, it was 50/50. Today, they are selling more on Amazon - at much higher prices and margins.
eBay's bad reputation is turning it into a lemon market, if you remember from an economics class.
This evidence is anecdotal but supports my experience. In difference to eBay, my experiences with the Amazon marketplace have been very positive. When I've found a fraudulent seller, they've been policed out very quickly (overnight).
I'm glad to see good businesses on the web are at last reaping the rewards for the safer and more pleasant environment they provide.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
At popular news site Digg users vote stories up and down. Stories either rise to the front page or top of category pages or are buried.
Some of my SEO colleagues are bemoaning their lack of success in getting their annoying marketing materials to the front page of Digg.
They justify their indignation with a chorus of "the others are doing it, the others are doing it".
In the words of Andy Hagans:
Nearly every story that makes it to upcoming/most - whether it makes it to the homepage, or gets buried -has a 'gaming' group that votes together. Like I said even top users without site affiliations will plug stories to friend, and nevermind the 'fanboys' that vote together.
It's rather amusing if it weren't so sad. These SEMs support their position with convenient libertarianism:, accusing Google or Digg or hypocrisy for trying to keep them out:
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
It's official - Google will be kicking the AdSense spammers off the network.
What AdSense spam is are those sites which you arrive on via either organic search or PPC results (usually the former) and you find nothing but RSS feeds or chopped up articles on a very basic template. The sites rarely have any contact information. To be blunt, they are of no value at all except to their owner who brings in traffic at one price and sells it off at another price.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
The web is undergoing another major shift right now.
The first shift was from direct navigation and directories to search.
SEO was all the rage and we are Foliovision were and are very good at it.
The next stage now is Online Communities or The Social Web.
Manifestations of online communities:
- social websites like MySpace and LiveJournal (perhaps the more exotic AdultFriendFinder could be included in this group)
- forums (countless, for every industry there are usually a few big ones: one of the originals was slashdot)
- social bookmarking sites (delicious and digg spring to mind)
- specialty topic sites like WikiPedia or Squidoo
What's bad about this is that all the black hat search guys are coming up with ways to pollute these communities. At one webmaster forum there are hundreds of paid forum posters available to go out and sign up accounts and start spewing out whatever you want in mainly broken English for literally pennies per post. These guys are harder to catch than the black hat forum and comment bots so the human version must be considered worse.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing, Business |
Friday, April 13th, 2007
I've finally found some simple javascript for affiliate or other links you want to partially cloak. It works well in IE 6 and hides the destination altogether in Firefox. It does not work in Safari. I'd like to know if it would work in IE 7 but as 60% of all visitors to my client websites are still running IE 6, that's already a good start.
Why would you want something like this on your website?
- If you are selling anything via an affiliate link people don't like the strange syntax and will often avoid clicking on the link, even though clicking on your affiliate link does them absolutely no harm. In general, having control over one's display URL. It will also help you with the search engines. They judge a website by the content of its outbound links.
- So this way you can link to the top level address of any given domain, rather than to a convuluted affiliate link, making Google happy.
I'd like to show you the code but alas Xstandard is acting up again and won't seem to respect the code tag.
Without Xstandard, I'm back with the basic example:
<a href="http://www.affiliate-link.com/" target="_top" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.company-name.com';return true;" onmouseout="window.status=' ';return true;">Shop at Company Name!</a>
By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO |
Friday, April 6th, 2007
A very interesting discussion on Aaron Wall's SEOBook about whether Google is contributing to web spam. The best part is in the comments (sorry Aaron!) where two readers to the numbers on AdWords for relatively high priced PPC words.
Basically they just don't add up.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO, Business |
Thursday, April 5th, 2007
I am having to learn copywriting (quite a bit of the poetry I wrote in my twenties was published so I have hope of managing copy too).
I wish I had more clients who could write copy as well. What any website needs is more great copy. As opposed to machine generated or offshore article spam (most of the article spam comes from the Philipines and India; why? both countries have large populations of fluent if not particularly literate English speakers for higher for pennies on the dollar).
In any case, one of the keys to great copy is the headline.
How does one make a good headline even better
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
Great guidance on how to anonymise your surfing via proxies:
Hiding Your IP Address, Anonymous Internet Surfing HOWTO.
The danger is that unless you do it just right you risk more than you gain. Specifically that the proxy holder can grab all your unencrypted passwords (email, site logins).
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO |
