Internet Marketing for small European Businesses

"Banner Blindness" is a generalisation. Read this if you advertise on the web.

2011-12-15T01:28:00.000-08:00

This is a precis of an article that appeared in the September / October issue of "Applied Cognitive Psychology". Unfortunately a subscription article, the very people who could benefit from reading it are not able to - hence this summary which I hope does justice to the original as much as being of use to people marketing on the web.

"Banner blindness" is the suggestion that people now visually "tune-out" banner advertisements on a website, evidencing little proclivity to click on them and little memory of them after they had browsed a site. However, there is no evidence people haven't actually looked at the ads and made at least a superficial judgment about them - so does that give us somethign to grasp and run with?

Guillaume Hervet, Marketing Professor at Laval University, Canada, and team, attempted to research the issue of Banner Blindness using eye-tracking of web banner advertisements under different display and contextual conditions.

32 participants were presented 8 web pages about digital cameras. A Google-style ad was embedded on the right hand side of the 3rd, 4th, 7th and 8th pages.

Only two ads were displayed: one at a time (pages 3 & 4), and then together on the 7th & 8th pages.

Half the participants were exposed to ads relevant to the digital camera topic; the other half were shown irrelevant ads. (All brands advertised throughout were fictitious.)

82% of all participants looked at one or more of the ads. i.e. of the 128 possible ad views (32 people * 4 ads) the exposure of any given ad was 37%. (So maybe we're not "blind", just partially sighted).

The relevance of the ad to the "Camera" topic made no difference whether the ad was actually looked-at. However, when participants were subsequently exposed to the same ads in varying degrees of "blurry degradation" and compared with a new group of people who had not performed the earlier web browsing (as a control group), then it was only the original participants who were originally exposed to context-relevant ads, who had a greater memory of them.

So relevance didn't seem to affect whether or not people looked at the ads originally, but it did hugely affect their memory of them.

Another interesting result is how participant behaviour changeds over the course of their browsing activity. Where ads appeared in the same location on subsequent pages, participants appear to have learned to ignore that area of the page.

The lessons then?

We're evidently not banner-blind, the suggestion being any given ad has a 37% chance of being looked-at;
Context relevance is important for longer-term recognition of an advertiser;
don't advertise on every page;
don't advertise in the same location on concurrent pages.

(My own query - what was it about an ad (whether relevant or not to the topic) that attracted people to glimpse it in the first place? Were some more visually attractive than others? There is clearly a factor we need to understand about attracting that first "glimpse").
My other comments:
aWeber did a study about graphical versus textual link click-throughs (of course I'm scabbling around to find the article and can't now - so what follows is from memory, I'm afraid!). They ran many tests over a prolonged period of time and found that whilst banners were more attractive click targets initially and that over time, people did indeed start ignoring them, over a prolonged period of testing, the textual links present demonstrated no appreciable drop-off in click-through rate. The proviso, as far as I remember, was that the link was in-context, helpful and relevant. So it would be interesting to see more research on this: just "looking" and "remembering" an ad are still of no use to an adveriser if ultimately PEOPLE DON'T CLICK!

Briquesetclics makes it into Alexa top 1m sites in the world!

2011-11-24T04:45:00.001-08:00

Briquesetclics has made it into the top 1 million websites in the world, according to Web information company Alexa. The site is also ranked within the top 38,000 sites in France.

In parallel and not coincidentally, Google also increased its "PageRank" score of the site.

I am thrilled by this development which I have been watching over the last few months. Yesterday's score of 1,028,000 was the closest yet and today's score of 998,000 just tipped into the 6 figures for the first time.

I always use Alexa scores when evaluating a potential (or current) client's site because:

- Google makes use of the Alexa score within its PageRank calculation, so you cannot ignore Alexa;

- While Google's PageRank score is from 0-10, Alexa's site rank is 1 to infinity - according to the number of sites there are in the world. The Alexa score gives hard evidence about the popularity of the site;

- The Alexa score often helps explain why some sites of lower PageRank beat sites of higher PageRank to the top of the search results - something that would be paradoxical if PageRank were the only score of a site's search-worthiness.

About Alexa
Alexa reflects very much a technical view on the quality of a website, as it is more used by the technical community than by a site's client community.

Alexa is owned by Amazon and provides statistics and information about browsing habits (how long someone stays on a site, where they go to and via what links, how many pages they view etc).

The Alexa scale - much like Google's PageRank - is exponential, meaning the higher ranked a site is (with '1' being the topmost site in the world - currently Google.com) the more traffic it receives exponentially than the next site down etc.

This also means that the lower down the scale you get, the less statistically relevant the information about a given site will be - and therefore the more inaccurate the Alexa score. In fact, the watershed appears to be around the 1,000,000 mark - meaning that Briquesetclics is now within the boundaries of statistical significance in worldwide web stats!

This change together with the PaeRank increase is great news for Briquesetclics and my clients.

Potted summary of recent Facebook changes

2011-10-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

I said I would share a potted summary of the webinar on recent Facebook changes I went to a couple of weeks ago. The webinar was hosted by Facebook Marketing Guru, Mari Smith, who I follow regularly, as I find her material a very good way of keeping up easily with the many F/B changes in train. That said, this last webinar was 90 minutes long, which shows the extent of recent changes!
A full slidedeck of the webinar is available on Slideshare and the salient points are listed below - with the observations on them being my own.

The Subscribe Function
One of the most obvious changes Facebook users will see is the addition of the "Subscribe" function now in Facebook. This function allows anyone to subscribe to your updates without becoming your friend. You have to allow subscriptions - so this function isn't "on" by default, but once you turn this option on, anyone can subscribe to your updates.

There are significant implications of this function that you have to recognise by opting in to it.

1) Your updates become visible to more than just your friends and acquaintances. - Now actually every Wall Page is public by default in Facebook, unless you restrict this down in your privacy settings - but do realise that by allowing subscriptions, you are pro-actively publishing your updates to more than just your circle of acquaintances. Many people will not want people utside this circle to see their updates, in which case this option is not for them. This function is really for anyone who is OK with anyone seeing their updates.

2) The second consequence of allowing subscribers is that your close friends tend to back-off from commenting on your posts (as they will not have opted to have their updates to your posts splashed out to your entire subscriber network) but on the other hand, you will tend to receive more "likes" and "shares" for your content. (Which is an interesting correlation!).

Observation: This function therefore is really more for actual - or self-styled - public figures than private individuals and its marketing implications should also be clear. The average friend-count of Facebook users is only 130 - and with overall new memberships now slowing, greater networking leverage is now to be found in broadening and deepening existing network activity, instead of just adding numbers. More "likes and shares" from famous people means more chance for Facebook to sell and attract product marketing via advertisements - see the developments in the "timeline" below for further corroboration of this.

The Hover Card
The hovercard is like a mouse-over "business card" of a person's key points which you now get when you hover over someone's thumbnail. This is a function very similar to Google+ although Facebook protests this had been in the pipeline long before Google+ was released (which is probably likely).

The Audience Selector
The audience selector is again, a bit like Google Circles, and allows you to specify in an update who you would like the update to go to. (Remember you can still hold private conversations specifically with friends lists. The audience selector relates to open posts. Your choices are "Public" (i.e. anyone); "Friends" (people you have specified as being Friends); "Friends except acquaintances" (note the granularity now that you can specify people who you know, butwho are not close to you, as "acquaintances") and "Custom" (which as it suggests allow you to build a custom audience). There is also an option in your privacy settings to set a default audience for Facebook apps (like Blackberry Mobile) which do not allow this feature in individual posts.

A sub-topic which is also a new change is the addition of Smartlists which allows construction of multiple and overlapping lists of friends, so - as before - you can categorise them in more than one list but you can also specify the gamut of Facebook facilities and privileges to which the list as a whole has access. Friends will receive a notification when they are added to a smart list. You can merge old friends lists into new Smartlists.

The Timeline (Formerly your Profile)
The huge change (everybody will be converted over from end of October) will be to what formerly was your "Profile", which now becomes your "timeline". Facebook is aiming to become the centre of your online identity, as as such, the timeline is a HUGE fill-the-blanks personal diary of your life, with everything from places you've lived to whether you have ever broken bones or not! Seriously, some wags have already called this the "Time SINK!". So the question is - given the breadth of possible information and the obvious marketing leverage it gives Facebook (especially in light of its suscription features above), will everyone actually either bother to fill out all this information, and will some others equally positively not want to? Where there are so many concerns about the privacy issues in Social Media, it may well be the Timeline only appeals to certain audiences and not everyone, globally. My own view is peoples' use of it will become incremental, as they choose to populate certain aspects of the timeline over time.

Other privacy settings
There are other privacy settings changes, such as specifying what happens now when people tag you in one of their own updates and privacy settings around the actions of specific applications relative to your circle of friends and acquaintances.

Content
The character count on an individual update has now been raised to 5000 characters as it appears Facebook is pursuing another goal of becoming a serious publishing platform as well as wishing to keep peoples' web experience Facebook centred. The existing limit was more likely to encourage people to link off to a 3rd party web page, rather than keep ewverything within Facebook. This, it seems, is another reaction - or similarity - with Google+.

What is going?
FBML - Facebook's Mark-up language (useful for coding bespoke Fan Pages) will be a thing of the past by mid 2012, only iFrames will work; The Review and Discussions tabs on Fan Pages will be going 31st of October.

So, a huge amount of change - a lot of it in reaction to other social platform development with which Facebook has to keep abreast, as well as a lot of it underlining Facebook's intention to become "the" experience people have on the web, as opposed to "part" of peoples' experience. The above is of course only a superficial summary. Consider carefully whether you want to let people subscribe to your updates and howmuch you want to give away about yourself on the forthcoming timeline.

Google's qualitative guidelines for ranking well in search

2011-07-21T03:49:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of empirical information about how to rank well in Google search results such as:
- Correct use of meta tags; use of keywords in the website text; ratio of content (words) to code on the page; number of back links to the site etc etc. This is the usual "bill of goods" you get from most SEOs (including myself).

So it was really interesting to see Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search, recently publish the following list of "qualitative" search ranking factors. Google took this step in response to criticism about its recent "Panda" algorithm update which was designed to reduce the success of websites that simply "game" the ranking factors to get on top of search results, regardless of the actual quality of their content. (So called "Content Farms", palgiaristic and just low quality sites). I think most of us would say "Good riddance" to the over-predominance of these sites in search results (perhaps they could now do something about the proliferation of worthless agency directories and just promote the higher quality sites referenced within them!)

But because a number of legitimate sites also came a cropper in the search results when the Panda upgrade was released in February - Google made it very clear what it deems "good content" - as even legitimate sites have a duty to keep their information up to date and demonstrate continuous thought-leadership and uniqueness. This list of qualitative factors also implies a much more semantic, lexically intelligent and socially validated set of ranking criteria from Google that SEOs should now recognise are a big departure from their traditional "bill of goods" - and frankly also puts the onus back on the client to have compelling proposition in the first place, rather than rely on the SEO to tweak and nudge the technical content.

So here is the list (slightly edited for sense or purposes of observation):

•    Would you trust the information presented on this page?

•    Is this information written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or does it appear more shallow in nature (e.g. absense of examples, over-reliance on other peoples opinions etc.)

•    Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant information on the same or similar topics with slightly different word variations?

•    Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?

•    Does this page have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

•    Are the topics on the site driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site look like it is just generating content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

•    Does the page provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?

•    Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

•    How much quality control appears to have been performed on the content?

•    Does an article describe both sides of a story?

•    Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?

•    Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don't appear to hold all the relevant information in one place?

•    Is the page edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?

•    If this was a health related query, would you trust information from this site?

•    Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?

•    Does this site provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?

•    Does a page contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious?

•    Is this the sort of page you'd want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? (There's a big clue!)

•    Does the page have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?

•    Would you expect to see this page in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?

•    Is the content short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?

•    Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

•    Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Amit Singhal went on to say that low-quality content on some parts of a website could also impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus an exercise of removing low quality pages, of merging or improving the content of "shallow" pages into more useful pages, or of moving low quality pages to a different domain could also help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

The above list provides a great insight into some of the departures Google has made from its traditional ranking factors. Without making this post too long, here are some of my observations:

a) Social accreditation (by referrals from Social networking sites) and "shares" between people using facilities such as Wibiya or "Add this", Facebook "likes" etc are now becoming mainstream within the ranking crieteria.

b) Whilst of late, language quality scoring (such as the "Flesch readability scale") has been known to have crept in to ranking factors, this would seem to indicate its rise in predominance and sophistication.

c) The amount of cross-referencing of an individual site's content with known authoritative sources such as encyclopedias, educational establishments and such like can now be presumed.

d) Cross referencing of a site's content against existing other text within Google's database (to check for plagiraism) can now be assumed to have been hardened. (I have written many times: copied content is BAD).

e) Sites that have an imbalance of advertisements to content may be assumed to be disadvantaged.

f) The importance of domain-wide content is becoming clearer - and not just the importance of individual pages on a site.

g) Does the site possess the correct regulatory disclaimers and adherence to regulatory requirements? (This is my interpretation of "would you be happy giving your credit card information to this site"?) See a previous article I wrote about website legal minima in one of my old newsletters (you will have to click the "Read more" link in the attached to see the whole article). The point being that small businesses are notoriously bad (or ignorant) of their legal obligations to their web content as much as customers are insufficiently savvy in spotting dodgy sites. We know Google looks for disclaimer information on sites supporting financial transactions and my presumption is it has widened and hardened this scope.

h) The requirement to promote yourself, your business and your website outside of the website itself (in order to bolster reputation) remains at the core of Google's reputational scoring of a site.

I'll stop there - but I hope you will agree - really interesting!

What could topple Facebook and how?

2011-06-14T12:23:00.000-07:00

There have been many “best things” since sliced bread. A Beatles Album from the early 1960’s triumphantly stated on the back cover “This album is recorded in stereophonic sound. It can never become obsolete!” (Actually all the voices sang down one ear and all the instruments played down the other - weird to listen to - perhaps they were right - it would be great for Karaoke).

But what about Facebook? We’ve joined the network – we’ve now even seen the film. Is there anything now stopping us wearing the T-shirt? One in every eight minutes spent online is spent on Facebook. Godman Sachs tells us it is worth $55 billion plus, and when Mark Zuckerberg says that Social Networking should not just be part of our web experience, but the experience itself, is he wrong? Facebook now allows you to host entire websites from within your Fan Pages (see an example) implying you need never leave the social network to browse the sites you want to. And with social reputation deciding “Good” versus “Bad” websites, these networks are potentially far more powerful a marketing force than Google’s search ranking algorithm – so subject to automated exploitation of whatever the next key “ranking factor” happens to be. The prospect of Social Networking as the experience of the web is a compelling one.

But will it be Facebook? Not if we predict for Social Networking the constant ebb and flow of Centralising Vs Decentralising forces that have so shaped computing power over its 5 decades of life. If we do so, we can see that the “Face”, is in need of considerable plastic surgery if it is to continue to "fit".

The first wave of computer evolution saw mainframes (centralised, monolithic processors of the 1970s) begin to share processing capability with "dumb terminals" (where processing power remained central, but input and output of data could be performed remotely by the 1980s). This decentralisation continued with the rise of powerful PCs, culminating in the fully “cooperative” processing of the mid 1990s between rich (“FAT”) applications on PCs communicating in real-time with mainframe backends (Client Server).

With the advent of the Internet and almost simultaneous availability of virtual technologies (such as Citrix) in the late 1990s, the second wave of centralised processing began to crest, as functional capability slowly leached away from the PC back into the “cloud” of the internet and central server farms and PCs once again became increasingly “THIN”. Indeed the most extreme expression of this can be seen nowadays with the rise of mobile and tablet computing which truly represent modern “dumb terminals” reacting principally to centrally stored and processed data, content and function.

The Centralised model applies to the first generation of Social Networks, of which Facebook represents the pinnacle. These networks are centralised to the extent you log into them, give them all your details and friends, and you can then only access their networking facilities in the way that they make available to you. Each network consequently has a unique “behaviour” and way of interacting, but you follow it. This therefore also defines the sort of messages we send and the sort of people we interact with on each network.

The drawback is that consequently, people have different social networks for different purposes. You use LinkedIn for professional interactions; Facebook for more social – “water cooler” type chat; Twitter for headlines. In this sense Social networks currently treat us - as well as our networks - as multiple different people. And this is what will kill the first generation of Social Networks.

All current Social Networks are closed, centralised systems. You can’t even share the services of other networks that do integrate with your preferred network (e.g. Twitter posting to LinkedIn) without signing the terms and conditions of that other service and having a fully-signed-up network of people over on the other side. And the services then don’t really "interact" even under this level of integration.

What will topple Facebook?

The challenge is for a service provider to define a social networking architecture that treats YOU as the individual (one profile, one set of interests, bio, pictures, one defined network of acquaintances, etc) and allows you to co-opt the services of any network in the way you prefer. Anyone accessing you via any of their preferred networks, gets a consistent a view of your profile and network across whichever channel they access you from (obviously within any constraints you choose to set up). This would be a distributed and “open” Social Network architecture: where YOU hold the your data and friendships in one place and the networks link you up in the way you wish.

How?

The closest commercial model to this vision actually sits with Google. Admittedly requiring you to sign up to their Ts & Cs, every Google function beyond that point is free, modular and totally open to the rest of the world via published application interfaces. YouTube, and Blogger (both Google applications) sit at positions 3 & 4 respectively behind Google (1) and Facebook (2) as the worlds top-most visited websites.

Facebook is not even a contender for some of the facilities in which Google is in the top position on the web (e.g. Facebook is not a player in Video or eMail – not to mention Search – which is very poor on Facebook).

What Google currently lacks on the other hand is that gravitational pull that will allow people to Socialise across all the Google utilities - which even now really behave as stand-alone apps. There is also not yet the architecture that allows anyone to link-in their (approved) applets into that framework.

But if you look at Microsoft’s current acquisition of Skype (see my views on this) you will understand that Microsoft see their greatest opportunity in emulating what Google is doing, not in what Facebook is.

The challenge to Facebook is to its centralised model and monolithic nature. The distributed model above is a vision, but nobody is there yet.

Exciting vistas from new client - welcome

2011-03-15T13:59:00.000-07:00

Very pleased to welcome Robert and his very interesting portfolio of business opportunities. Very pleased too that within 3 business days from a standing start I had earned him his first two sales in France!

Robert found me whilst searching for exactly my target sales phrase and was looking for exactly the marketing proposition I offer.

He reiterated how apalled he was with agency prices and the lack of transparency of what you get for the money you pay. This is why he preferred going down the subject matter expert route.

A 100% match. I am delighted.

Real-life lesson: Adhering to W3C standards is important

2011-02-05T03:10:00.000-08:00

If I inherit another designer's website (this occurs frequently at the small business end and I've said enough about that elsewhere) I usually advise the client that time needs to be spent bringing the code up to W3C (or Worldwide web consortium) standards. This is always quite a hard sell as the benefits are not always apparent to the client. We know Search Engines will favour a standards-based site over a non-standard site; all other factors being equal - but that's reasonably low in the ranking factors - and we know that over time non-standard sites fail to display properly and need to be addressed at "some point". But it's a hard sell when times are hard and each "buck" has to go to the biggest "bang".

Well, I was performing some changes today for a client whose site I originally inherited but have not worked on for about 4 months. Being a large site however, and client cash having to go where it is needed most - I had not validated every single page in times past. No trouble: everything displayed fine and pages were turning up in search results.

Lesson learned. Just reviewing the site before doing my amends today I noticed some of the deeper pages had lost their formatting on the side menu. This was only visible in Internet Explorer - a browser I have long-since abandoned in favour of Firefox - but it still needed addressing.

And I cast about the CSS first - nothing. I compared other similar CSS in other sites. Nothing. I checked the code between pages that were working and the pages that weren't. Nothing obvious.

So I ran a standards check.
I use CSE HTML Validator (no, this isn't an affiliate link) and ran it across the HTML. "Ping!" "Ping!" "Ping!". Out came the discrepancies one by one. It was part of the original code I had inherited, generated out of an obscure CMS tool (and I've said enough about those vis a vis small business) that was doing it -
tags with no SPACE between the br and the / and mis-location of the IE=EmulateIE7 compatibility tag. Fixed those - problem disappeared.

But it reinforced to me why it matters - when you may be forced to doubt your own rhetoric in front of clients. Standards are important.

January newsletter from Briquesetclics

2011-01-10T11:33:00.000-08:00

In this first post of the New Year I want to highlight some of Google's latest news regardless of Facebook being the major headline grabber over the winter. F/B still remains an appropriate marketing platform for only some types of enterprise, whereas Google's usage is universal.

I also want to highlight a specific client project I have been working on which represents some "firsts" for Briquesetclics (coincidentally in tune with Google's next moves!).

I am also altering my own approach to market with two clear years of Briquesetclics operations and 26 clients later (plus a number of near-misses) the path ahead for me is becoming clearer and I wanted to touch on that too.

What Google is thinking about

Matt Cutts (Google's unofficial spokesman) sketched out Google's direction at the last Pubcon conference in Las Vegas in November last year.

(Realising everything Google does is additive, not cannibalistic this does not mean abandoning previous SEO good practice but it does show where Google is looking next.) Cutts highlights the following big 5 areas of focus: Read More

International Casting

I want to highlight this UK model agency site I am working on at the moment as it builds coincidentally well on Google's "next steps" above, so the timing is great.

"Is your website working for you?" is always the key question at stake when new clients talk to me, although how I resolve their marketing issues is always different according to their target market. However, you may be interested to read my views on "CMS" packages compiled from a number of client experiences I have seen and dealt with as we did meet this again here and I feel clients ought to understand the issues.

However for me the solution to International Casting's web marketing needs revolved very clearly around leverage of Social Media and Mobile and you can read more of what I have done for them here....; There are also some early indications of who is searching for this site which also plays into the "local search" that Google says it is turning its attention to this year. Read more here...

Where next Briquesetclics?

The last two years have seen some very clear distinctions emerge for me which now prompt my next steps:

a) While I started and will continue to work for startups and micro enterprises, the core of my clientele is larger, established companies. I have also had some very near misses in recent months engaging with some very well established companies with exciting marketing requirements. It is time to "up my game" and make a better case for my expertise - part of this pitch is my social media and web marketing "brain" which is now open to the world.

b) All my clientele has turned out to be English speaking although the need for French translation doesn't go away. A very interesting portion of client queries turns out to be companies external to France who are in search of French and European markets but who need that link between English and French in order to communicate and operate. This tells me that my french proposition and translation capabilities are relevant but that I need to alter my French pitch less towards native French companies than to overseas companies seeking to expand in France.

c) I have become convinced I need to make it clear I am an independent consultant who can bring an expertise and objectivity to clients that agencies cannot (agencies being referred to by more than one client as "black holes": reinforcing rather than dispelling John Wannamaker's observation "I know that half of my advertising money is wasted … I just don’t know which half!"). I had previously seen it necessary to use the "Royal We" to convery size, but client feedback suggests to me I stay vocally "single". Interestingly, it has been the larger companies seeking to expand in France who have actually stated a preference for dealing with knowledgeable individuals rather than than agencies.

Content Management Systems (CMS): Small Business Beware!

2010-12-04T09:10:00.000-08:00

I don't have a problem with CMS. But finding myself ripping out an inappropriate CMS implementation for my umpteenth client to replace it with a marketable, search-compliant, unique and fit-for-purpose web design does make me think I have an issue with small business designer's whose only solution is "CMS: now what was the question?".

The two critical tests for CMS are:

1) Will the site have large volumes of frequently changing content? If the answer is YES (large volumes and frequently changing), then a CMS may be appropriate depending on how your designer answers test '2' below. If the answer to "1" is "no" then don't go near a CMS - or join the ranks of disgruntled businesses finding themselves shelling out large cost for even minor structural changes. If you have only minor content amends to make, or just want to add the occasional news item, there are more nimble solutions you can implement than going down the CMS route. Small business should think of CMS as a sledgehammer to crack a nut and should force designers to argue otherwise.

2) Test 2 is a two-hander but both questions have to be asked at once: does your designer understand about search engine compliance AND does the CMS allow edit access to the code? If the answer to either question is "no", again, don't go near a CMS (nor to that designer). There are 3.2 billion web pages out there and adding content without being searchable is NOT going to get you found. CMS promises about "SEO Compliance" should be taken with a pinch of salt, as their facilities only barely skim the surface. A small business site MUST be search-engine compliant and that means having a designer who knows their stuff, and a CMS that allows them direct access to make the underlying HTML compliant.

If your answer answer to both the above tests is "no", then stop there. Get a good designer who understands SEO and marketing and have them write you a bespoke site. You will save money long term and stand a chance of getting found.

If your answer to the above tests is "yes" I would urge you just to check the following additional tests.

From a technical standpoint, CMS is a content meat-machine critically dependent you having a search-compliant , stable template. And just like a bad designer can make a hash of your website whether they are using a CMS or hand-writing it, its the sausage-machine aspect of CMS that prompts one final check.

The more down market you go in your choice of CMS or designer, the more likely you are for rot to increase exponentially through your site. Expect long turn-around times for even small changes and great expense.

Avoid little-known CMS like the plague (although I have seen problems even with badly written Joomla sites - although that's more the fault of the designer). They create non-standard code filled with bloat (i.e. code you don't need) and compound error upon error with little indication to you that they are doing so. (I have seen sites with duplicate sets of meta tags - all of them wrong - triplicate sets of identical Javascript, quite apart from illegal or just bad code, yards of commented-out code (i.e. bloat) with the content section beginning somewhere on line 500... This then gets trotted out on every single page in the site which from day 1 is neither searchable, nor performant, buggy and expensive to maintain.

If you were taking your car for a service, you wouldn't trust a mechanic approaching your car with a hammer before he had even determined what needed doing. So why do this with your website?

Website Content Syndication - allowing others to copy whilst keeping control

2010-09-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

Copying peoples' web content is a thorny issue quite apart from its illegality. If content is copyright and you copy it then that is theft. It is also problematic in terms of the "dilution of the gene pool" as far as unique, accurate, searchable content is concerned. I have written elsewhere about copying peoples' content on the web. Once content is copied it is no longer unique and no longer controllable. Everbody loses when content is copied.

The search engines themselves now implement canonical recognition of original source so that in theory the original author of a creditable - and therefore probably much copied - piece of work still gets "first dibs" on search results.

But there are genuine reasons why people need to copy content and others who equally need their content to be copied - I'm thinking in a case close to my heart, the need for product manufacturers and sub-distributors to be able to share technical and product specs.

And while in such instances issues of copyright are not in question, there is still the thorny issue of "dilution of the content" as far as having a recognizable master source - as well as ensuring information remains up todate (which can have legal issues of its own). Once content is copied, it is out of control and no longer reliable.

In these instances copying is still prolific, but it is not the correct answer.

"Linking" to the original source is not a great answer either as in many cases a sub-distributor wants to keep a customer on their own site and may not want them wandering off to other sites to find other suppliers and better deals.

In this case "Content Syndication" is absolutely the correct way to go. This is the process where the original information publisher posts their copy-able content in a format where other people CAN take it and use it. The great thing here is that the publisher retains control of the information (if they change it, then these changes reflect in the copied versions as well), the copier doesn't have to disclose the publisher and doesn't lose the hard-won punter who has landed on their site.

Content syndication may take a number of different formats including iFrame, RSS Feeds and Java/PHP.

For Green Energy (eu) we have implemented a Java / PHP solution for our sub-distirbutors. This allows content "scraping" by a Javascript from a PHP file on the host site. You would never tell the content was copied. See examples:

Original
http://www.evaporative-cooling-systems.com/products/index.php

Syndicated copy:
http://www.ecotech-online.co.uk/evaporative-cooling/products.html

Pros:
This means "EcoTech" can take on new content from Green Energy as fast as Green Energy chooses to add it. (It took a day to add 12 pages of new content plus the navigation).
This information will forever stay up to date.
(For Green Energy) - The content from an SEO point of view remains uniquely Green Energy's.
Green Energy has the benefit of additional traffic to their site - meaning additional chances for sales. Because they sub-distribute geographically, this also means their sub distributors will get a slice of the action because they have linked correctly to the mother ship.

Cons:
EcoTech does not get an SEO benefit from the content because it is "scraped" by javascript from the original. However, their pages which host this content should still have their own unique meta tags, descriptions and even additional content. There is nothing preventing them implementing their own unique content in addition to the syndicated content.
The sub distributor has to work a little harder at marketing the content.

Counterfactual:
Lets put this the other way: if the content was copied and therefore duplicated, then both Green Energy and Ecotech no longer have unique content. Nor is it controlled. Cannonically Green Energy "should" still appear higher in the search results but the content is no longer unique. As a Google searcher I am presented with Lots of identical results for "Redwell Infrared Heating" and the words look exactly the same. (This incidentally is how I originally found the problem existed). Confused which clone to choose, I opt for a site with unique content.

Internet & Social media marketing case study: Nearlyheaven.com

2010-06-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

Sue Virr is an established local entrepreneur in the Limousin offering Flying Lessons, as well as being a breeder of pedigree Hungarian Vizsla dogs and running two holiday cottages. Following the departure of her previous designer, she got in touch with me, Richard Martin, to ask if I could pick up the reins and "Help promote the flying".

The first thing that immediately struck me in reviewing Sue's existing site was that all three business propositions were competing with each other on the same website. This was confusing both visually and in terms of SEO. If I were a prospective pilot landing on her home page, all I would see was information about Holiday cottages, with a small link off to the right of the screen to take me to the "Flying" part of the site. Equally, searching "cold" for "Learn to Fly in France" (for example) did not turn up her site in the first 10 pages of SERPS, and searches using more refined geographical and flying terms (which I knew MUST lead me to her site) landed me variously on pages about Puppies and cottages and not about aircraft. However, a backlink check on the site showed that nearly all the valuable in-links that were contributing to her PR3 rank came mostly from flying sites.

There were no analytics on site to show how people were otherwise behaving with it, although the Alexa data showed that keyword use and site page behaviour was fairly hit and miss. Anecdotally, though, Nearlyheaven had a successful blog, which I had to be cautious to preserve.

I consequently recommended we should split the proposition into three separate sites, retaining "Nearlyheaven.com" as the main flying site and creating two new ones for the Dogs and Holiday Cottages.

The existing Typepad platform was not suitable for continued hosting of the proposition. There are many reasons for this, fundamental to which was:

As I was splitting the proposition into three and wanted to apply full SEO and marketing techniques to the site, I wanted full control over the code. Typepad didn't give me this. Not being able to see even how to add or delete a link from a static page after hours of searching through unfriendly navigation nailed it for me with Typepad.
"Nearlyheaven.com" - being mainly a dynamic blog site with some static pages was just a redirect to a Typepad URL. However, I wanted to turn this on its head, maximising the SEO of the static content, and bring-in the dynamic content of the blog as "additional content" once someone had signed-up to what the site had to offer. The analytics - once we had put them on - entirely justified this impression. They proved that the static pages were page-for-page far more browsed than the blog pages - althoug it is true that because of the number of blog pages, in total the blog received more viewings. (There were indeed two different audiences in play here. Web surfers who wanted to find out about flying - and Sue's bloggers who went for the blog. Websurfers outnumbered the bloggers 10:1 so you know where my head was at!). This was a website first, a blog second;

Blogger is free. Typepad is expensive (and I was about to create three sites from one);
I like the family of Google applications and whilst I know a bad blog on Blogger won't rank higher than a great blog on Typepad, I do believe there is a marketing synergy in using the Google facilities and hoping to be found on Google search! I also wanted to make use of YouTube, Feedburner, possibly Mapinfo over time. Blogger ties in directly to my Google profile, etc etc etc.

So I created the three sites:
http://www.nearlyheaven.com/
http://www.pedigree-hungarian-vizslas.com/
http://www.holiday-cottages-to-rent-in-france.com/

all three had associated blogs. The way we incorporated the blogs with the static content were:
a) access direct via iframe - so people didn't have to go to blogger;
b) newsfeeds using the feedburner feed directly to a "news" section on each static page.
This way I felt we could much better provide for the "biggest" market (which were the random web browsers wanting to know about flying) whilst showing them the site was an active one with a dynamic community behind it. Whilst equally not taking away from a considerably enhanced blog which we set up on blogger for Sue's existing "gang".

Using the blog feed, we were then able to feed off directly to the Nearlyheaven Facebook page which I also created, so we could keep people up to date automatically via that route as well.

We have also lined-up a neat set of PPC campaigns.

Site traffic has not stopped growing since implementing these major changes (phew!). We're getting about 2,600 visitors a month now about a 25% traffic increase on legacy, and we KNOW that traffic is now a lot more targeted than before. The main site also turns up nicely on Page 1 SERRPS for our target phrases.

The picture never stands still though, and we keep adding to the proposition. I may write a subsequent post on progress.

Spreading the net wider - Briquesetclics June newsletter

2010-06-08T11:22:00.000-07:00

Briquesetclics June Newsletter
I encourage my clients not just to rely on their websites as a means of building their businesses. Sure, the website has to be "findable" and there is a whole art in doing this. But the website on its own is not a very proactive marketing tool. People have to be "looking" for it or referred to it by friends, colleagues, other advertisements and this is all a bit passive.

The Social Web (Web 2.0 as it is also called) provides a ready means of putting your marketing message out there much more proactively and obtaining far many more referrals than you could get just by having a website. But for many, the breadth of tools available (email, social networks, blogs etc) and establishing a cohesive strategy to use them (without giving up one's entire life to the web!) is baffling.

As I mentioned last month, I am compiling a Social networking "Brain" containing all the web and social web tools that really work. I have already added to it considerably and will continue to do so. Check it here and check back. The subject is large and constantly evolving.

But I've also put together a simple process flow below that really works and which takes just ONE STEP to update all those platforms listed (presuming certain capabilities are put in place on the website itself). I have just implemented this flow for two of my clients using tools I also mention in my "Brain". Contact me for more details.

Bing Vs Google

2010-01-07T05:13:00.000-08:00

At the risk of writing the gajillion-and-first post on "Bing Vs Google", I thought I'd nonetheless pen down my own impression of these two engines, just based on my own findings.

Without question the search results I get for some of my websites are very different between the two engines - to the favour of Bing, I have to say! However - and maybe tellingly - the results between Bing and say Yahoo, Altavista and Ask are not that far apart.

All the websites under my care are new startups. And whilst I am able to write and optimise the content of each of these sites whilst staying within the rules - i.e. not getting spammy - it seems to be "this" activity that gets my sites - e.g. infrared-heating-redwell.co.uk to page 1 line 1 of Bing, whilst leaving it nowhere to be seen on Google.

Also, all the sites under my care, as new startups, have very little web history behind them and we're only just beginning to break ground into link building estate, so our history with Google and consequently our reputational score, will be low.

As if to prove the point, one new client of mine is a well established, 'old' site which is very-well linked into for a number of historical reasons but poorly optimised, covering about 3 or 4 major and very diverse topics. However, look up any phrase for any of those topics and "blammo!" page 1 on Google and often-times nowhere to be seen on Bing.

The trouble is that this client's site, offering such diverse services and not very well optimised is confusing - if not offputting - to customers. So despite their good SERPS results on Google, quite often you'll be searching for one thing and land on a page about something else.

Can I presume therefore an over-preponderance of "age and in-links" to Google's ranking and maybe a bias the other way (towards highly optimised "niche" sites) on the other engines?

I don't have enough evidence to suggest that is "the definitive" answer and nor do I think it will be a long-term one. Clearly over time I believe a balance of the four forces (niche; content; history; inlinks) will be in everyones best interest to obtain great results. Perhaps at the moment the greatest value in Bing is to "nudge" the people like my new client into looking at their propositions and content and seeking to bring both up to date!

A triumph for web over real-world

2009-10-09T07:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a great example of the virtual world (the internet) beating present-day real-world "Europe" with all its structural rigidities, mis-allocation of goods and services (currencies, politics and psychologies etc etc) that still define this continent.

Have a look at Sterlingshopping.co.uk. Many will know how far the pound has slid against the Euro (it's less than parity at the moment). And groceries anyway in France are expensive. So for any Brits living in France and transferring pounds to euros - groceries are even more expensive.

Well, Sterling shopping allows you to buy online at Tescos, Asda, (you name it) in the UK and will then deliver to France for £15!!! They arrange a fixed number of drop-off locations and set times.

Needless to say they are inundated. You can more than redeem the price of the delivery off the same goods bought direct in France so long as you buy in bulk.

This is how things are going to be whilst real-world Europe still possesses such currency, psychological, cultural and structural rigidities. The virtual market is pulling the rug from under the real-world's feet!

Google analytics interface - fantastic

2009-08-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

OK, so your site is all designed and optimised. All that traffic is coming screaming to your (virtual) front door now. Well done!

Except, they stay for 10 seconds and leave the site.

But there's really no excuse not to use Google analytics, and they're absolutely free.

And I have to confess they've saved my bacon and that of my clients

You see: search optimisation is a relatively straightforward activity: follow certain rules, apply them to your site and you can expect traffic to come to your site. (OK, its a bit more involved and ongoing, but you can see huge results from relatively simple initial steps).

But you need traffic analytics to actually determine how people are interacting with your site. This is not SEO, but rather Internet Marketing, but it does improve your overall reputational score and therefore your rankings. Things that have really benefitted me hugely:

a) Merging or deleting files with low click-through. This improves your overall "time on site" statistics and page/search relevance. (I kid you not, I merged 9 files for a client which had about 6 clickthroughs a month each,into 3 files relevant to a specific subject, EACH of which obtained over 59 clicks in the remaining 2 weeks of the month.)

b) Tuning page contents and navigation. If your page is exhibiting high "bounce rate" and low "time on page", then you need to tune your contents and navigation. High bounce rate says people are leaving the site without doing anything else on site. "Time on page" is exactly what it suggests: the length of time people are staying on a particular page. Ideally you want a low bounce rate (<40% is good) and a representative time on page (I can't give you an ideal figure: but perhaps time yourself reading through your page contents and if people are generally exiting well before that, then your content is not appealing).

c) Determining where people are exiting your site. Google stats show you (% Exit) where people are leaving your site. Of course everybody leaves your site at some point. Ideally you want them to leave having taken an action - if you have any sort of action confirmation page (e.g. A thank-you message for contacting you), this is the best one to have the highest % exit from. Any pages prior to that are worse news, depending on your content and desired action.

I'll post a separate article on "how" to tune your content - things to look for.

How success kills companies

2009-05-25T06:32:00.000-07:00

I originally wrote the fuller article (see link) in 2001 for the Institute of Management Consultancy. Unfortunately due to a reorganisation at the time they did not publish and I did not follow-up. In retrospect I should have.

Expectations of business longevity should be set low. Of the 100 largest UK firms in 1917, only 28 still existed by 1987 and only 18 of those were still top 100. In 1935, an S&P top 500 firm had a life expectancy of 90 years. By 1975 this had dropped to 30 years and by 2001 was 15 years.

Survivors do not perform. The market index (Dow, FTSE etc) consistently leads survivor performance and is not defined by it. Survivors systematically underperform both the market as a whole as well as their industries within it by up to 300 points. Indeed, were one to base the S&P on long-lived companies, the index would have depreciated 20% year on year from 1962.

New companies outperform incumbents and decay over time, suggesting that effective market competition is based on innovation (product competitiveness), not efficient operations (price competitiveness).

Why is the above the case?
Most CEOs spend most of their time pursuing operational efficiency of their company (a management task) as opposed to new markets (a leadership task).

Consequently incumbents fail to change at the pace and scale of the market. They tend to innovate around a continuum of their core products. Higher market value accrues to companies that introduce brand-new products (i.e. disruptively innovate).

Consequently incumbent companies enter "cultural locking" of their market position and product into the corporate psyche and build. Disruptive innovation heralds dilution of present earnings, organisational disruption and cannibalisation of existing fixed capital.

What should companies do?
They should act more like the markets. Create, operate and then "trade-out" their business units.

Create at the pace of the markets and destroy at the pace of the markets.

Buy companies at the early end of the growth curve or on the periphery of the established market at the same pace of investment as the capital markets.

Seek the business units they should sell-off - that is, those at the top of the market - to use those dollars better for new businesses at the bottom of the market. This also allows them to discount the top-end performer to the buying company who can use the saved capital to rejuvenate and re-tool the "incumbent" unit.

White label sites: white lies?

2009-05-07T02:02:00.000-07:00

One of the more recent trends with successful, proven web technologies is to re-publish them to other would-be entrepreneurs as "White-label" sites that they can buy, brand (under their own label) and then run as a business themselves. Sounds great.

The trouble is - like the California Gold Rush - its not the diggers who make the money, it's the people who sell the spades. If you buy a whitelabel web engine (be it online dating, car hire price comparison, car insurance comparison, whatever) just think "how competitive is the market and how far down the food chain is my startup going to be?".

Seriously. These are highly successful products that have already dominated their market. The Pay-Per-Click advertising cost for the "obvious" phrases that sell is going to be high (however well you optimise). The conversion-rate of people clicking-to-buying from you is going to be low because there is a lot of choice in the market (and a lot of people with competing white-label products).

And remember, with a lot of these engines, you only earn a commission, by way of being an "introducer" to the engine. You don't earn the full value of what you sell.

So, say you earn $20 per successful sale at a conversion rate of 1 sale to 60 visits (yes, that bad and worse). This means your PPC ads are going to have to be $0.25 or less to have a chance of making you money (in this case you'll get $5 from a $20 commission).

What PPC ads for phrases that sell in a competitive market are going to be that cheap? For Car hire, these phrases cost $20 a click! You could have spent $1,200 on advertising to make $5!

You can go for "long tail" phrases (rarer: cheaper) but equally remember that you will get less click-through - Say 5 clicks a day - unless you open up the ads on the "Content Network".

You'll then get your click throughs, but they will be poor quality ones and your conversion rate will plummet (say 1 in 200).

I'm not saying "don't go fo it". I am saying "Do your maths before you part with your cash".

Do SEMs make better web designers?

2009-04-17T03:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a little word equation for you.

If a well marketed website requires great search engine optimisation (SEO) to be found, great Internet Marketing techniques and design to bring potential customers to take your required action (i.e. buy from you), and then great Web analytics to see what has occurred...

...then it is true that a website designer who is not qualified in SEM is about as useful as a chocolate fire-guard. Whereas a Search Engine Marketer (SEM) who is perhaps not a brilliant designer is OK (but improvement needed, obviously) and a good designer qualified in SEM is fantastic!

The point is, if your website is not searchable it lacks a huge part of its armoury (some of my client websites get 40-50% total traffic via search). If the website is then insufficiently "sticky" to attract visitors and get them to take action it lacks 99.5% of its entire business purpose; and if you have no idea what is working and what is not you can do nothing about it.

So I think the above equation balances.
Designer not qualified in SEM = Chocolate Fireguard.

I am finding a sea change going on in my business. Some of my work is ab-initio creation of a website. But a lot of my work is what I'd call "second-generation" site design - i.e. a rewrite of an existing design to get a business properly marketed on the web and "working" for the client. This pre-supposes the client has an existing website which, however pretty, is doing a whole lot of nothing for them at the moment.

Now Briquesetclics.fr provides Internet Marketing, SEO and Design for small European businesses in South-west France: that is: the Limousin, Aquitaine and Poitou-Charentes. Small businesses either write their sites themselves or go to small business website designers. All it presently takes to become a web designer presently is to say you are one. I believe the writing is on the wall. In the current climate, clients have to get their websites working for them. If their designer is not accredited in some for of internet marketing, they will soon be out of business.

When dinosaurs ruled the earth

2009-04-12T01:13:00.000-07:00

I had to put up this post, because what happened gave me a real giggle.

Part of an SEO's "off-site" Search Engine optimisation tasks is to submit a website to respectable directories to try to obtain links back your own site to try and gain referral to your site and therefore business (in the real world) and reputation (on Google).

Now, there are millions of directories out there and you can grow old and grey pursuing these links. Best to choose wisely. Don't linger on time-wasters: move on.

So naturally enough, I presumed a directory promoting IT professionals in the Limousin ("Pole excellence eDesign" - it sounds the business) to be a sensible choice (act local before going global, right?). So although I live just outside the border of the Limousin, I applied. (You know, turn right outside your drive you get to the Limousin, turn left, you stay in the Charente).

Ha! I received an email from the administrator telling me (sic) "You can't apply to this directory. You work in the Charente. Go away".

But I am an SEM expert and web designer. I work IN the Charente, but I work ON the web. I can work anywhere for anyone and the only border I have to respect is tax (and as far as I know, Charente and Limousin are both in France).

Well, I didn't reply to the lady: there are millions of directories and noone can stop me turning right out of my drive to get work (in the real world or virtual). But was this a directory promoting "competition in the Limousin"? In a time where Europe is trying desperately to promote cross-border trade (see http://ec.europa.eu/youreurope/business/index_en.htm) the parochial and protective behaviour displayed by Pole Excellence eDesign belongs to an age millennia past.

Author's footnote: Readers will be shocked and saddened to learn that "Pole Excellence eDesign" was recently taken over by "Elopsys" due to a lack of business. Even if you don't like this post, I thought you'd enjoy the pictures of endangered species.

Electonic Information - A blur of large numbers or the precision of just one?

2009-03-24T07:59:00.000-07:00

There are 63 billion web pages out there. SPAM filters are now so aggressive even bona-fide emails don't get through. The Blogosphere is creaking under the weight of measured observation and insight (ya!). There are hundreds of "mainstream" social networking tools - and on just one - LinkedIn - a consultant in London has now reported a network of 9,300 "friends". (Must make Sunday lunch interesting).

The stats are so overwhelming and just the array of choice is so big, the odds are seemingly stacked against the small guy's websites, emails, blogs to the point they may feel they are never going to make headway. Never going to get seen, read, acted-upon, whatever, unless they either find that needle in the haystack... or cheat.

First off, let's not deal with cheating. Cheating is about playing the numbers game and Google will sniff you out. Large numbers (Spam mails, spammed keywords in websites or blogs, spam search impressions generate a lot of noise. You'll be found and blacklisted. DON'T CHEAT!.

And you DON'T have to find a needle in a haystack, either.

Just go on the basis that the best social networking tool is still word of mouth and that an effective website and marketing can only enhance, not create, an effective business behind it. In this way you are forced to focus on the basics Google wants you to and you will be found amidst the numbers soup. i.e. HAVE SOMETHING DECENT TO SELL AND HAVE PEOPLE REFER YOU. T'was ever thus.

A word is worth a thousand pictures

2009-03-03T04:11:00.000-08:00

Long live the king! No, no, not a flesh and blood monarch, but the "King" of internet traffic: CONTENT. And not static, never-changing, content, but vibrant, intertesting, dynamic content that sends the Google spider-bots scurrying around websites like a re-make of "Arachnaphobia".

It is a mistake of most small business websites I see in the South West of France, around the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Dordogne, that they try to copy big company websites by using lots of flash graphics and being spartan with words. But big companies already (by definition) have brand presence and reputation and a customer base that guarantees them a certain amount of internet traffic. They can afford to be more flash.

And in similar vein, small companies then ape the big by using such generic industry phrases about their offering that those words really don't work for them at all (either for human visitors or the Google-bots, both of which sets of visitors leave the site no wiser than when they visited!).

Again, big companies and small companies necessarily must differ in their use of words on the web. Big companies typically target large customer bases with commodity-type products, requiring "one-size-fits-all" marketing words too (whose advertising they can also afford to pay for). Small companies really don't generally cater for a mass market with commodity products (and generally can't afford the $20 per click costs that go with them). Their language by definition should be far better targetted (and this always ends-up cheaper for advertising too).

On the internet, content is king. And if you really can't naturally work enough relevant text into your website pages - or it really does look end up looking like an old school text book - then this is what blogs and Article pages can help-out with. All these pages can be linked to your website to increase your verbal "real estate" on the web over time without cluttering up the visual presentation of your message.

For small businesses the mindset should not (a priori) be about pretty graphics (whether or not relevant to your content). Of course you need a good-looking website, but the prevailling mindset should be marketing first, and good looks and funky technology second. So few small business designers seem to understand this. A Word really is worth a thousand pictures.

Welcome to the era of "Nano careers"!

2009-02-13T03:19:00.000-08:00

Tough times call for a change of mindset and expose weakenesses in the old one. You get this "duh!" moment when you cotton on.

I think we all became used to the idea in business of "making it big" (granted we did at least accept the rarity - but it was still our goal). That is, of having these "Branson" episodes where an idea (whatever it is) suddenly seems to become big overnight and the Dragon's Den is on the end of the phone desperate to get you on board. ( Or was that just me dreaming...;-) )

I grant most of us probably thought that however unlikely we all were in our own business ventures of "making it big", this was still very much the target, and mindset, wasn't it? Of making it big ...or going back to the 9-5?

But in a credit-absent environment, where the likelihood of being funded enough to make anything 'big' is smaller than it ever was, and a 9-5 job is the new "Big" deal, let me introduce you to the "Nano Career", or the idea of "making it small". The point about the nano career is you just have to make lots of "very smalls!"

If you could create a business opportunity which would make you £100 over the course of a year, this would not be very interesting to a "making it big" mindset.

Supposing you could ensure that creating this opportunity cost you no more than £10 over the year, about an hour of your time and could pretty much be left to itself after that. This is then a "nano career"!

I have attached an example "Nano Career" into the header of this blog! (Click on the title.) It builds on the themes in my last two posts "Maintain deepen & niche" and "Is Pay Per Click a bottom-less pit?"

The nano career is obtained by having something to sell that people will want to buy, obviously - but by setting up the Pay-per-click advertising campaign to have such a rarefied set of search criteria that you spend no more than 10p on a click and cap the campaign costs at say £5 a month. What are the results?

On the one hand) You will likely get less than 100 clicks on this campaign during the year;

On the other) The people searching for those "rare" criteria have now driven right up to your front door and are therefore very likely 'buyers';

You ensure the sales commission for the product is sufficient to justify a single sale from just one of those 100 people (i.e. you will earn more than the £10 you spent).

Plus you can add your specific links into emails, blogs, etc etc etc to increase your chances of being clicked on.

Do this several times a day for every day of the rest of your career.

Welcome to the age of the "Nano" career.

Pay Per Click - needn't be a bottomless pit

2009-02-01T01:50:00.000-08:00

"Pay Per Click" is the form of internet advertising in which a company opts to pay for an advertisement, which is then presented via the Search Engine Search results or via peoples' own websites. If someone happens to 'click' on the advertisement, a charge is incurred by the advertiser and the 'clicker' is carried through to the website of the advertiser (hopefully to then purchase something).

Pay Per Click (or PPC) is therefore also known as sponsored search. i.e. it is a funded "push" by the advertiser to get noticed, as opposed to an organic (free) "pull" by the search engines to display company information in the search results. Google offers this service via "Adwords"; other service providers are Yahoo; Miva; 7 search; Epilot; Looksmart, MSN and others.

Advantages of PPC? Advantage 1. It can promote a website to public view far faster and much wider than reliance on 'organic' search engine optimisation. Equally, the effectiveness of the advertising campaign - unlike in the physical world - is traceable to the 'click' - so there is a whole load of information an advertiser can glean very very quickly about the effectiveness of their campaign. (I have also used PPC as 'market research' for keywords to be used in my organic search engine optimisation - because you can see very quickly which phrases are being displayed and clicked-on and which are not. Even though I don't then continue with the actual PPC campaign itself.)

Advantage 2? There is a lot less mystique around "how to rank in the search results" around PPC than there is around organic Search optimisation. And whilst undoubtedly you can still fail utterly and spend hugely with a poorly optimised PPC campaign, the advantages in '1' above still generally obtain. If you pay, you will be displayed.

Disadvantages of PPC? Really stem from its advantages! On the surface it seems any altruism displayed by search engines in providing 'free' SEO utilities for organic search results go out of the window when it comes to PPC. Indeed if you click and drag your cursor over a Google search results page, it highlights the PPC results first, the organic search results second, demonstrating how Google itself prioritises its website construction and popularity rankings within its own pages! So - yes - with PPC, you, er, pay for it. The more competition there is in a particular market, yes, the more you pay to make your ad competitive (i.e. display higher up the rankings). No kidding, Search Optimisation keywords themselves (as an example close to my heart) in big urban areas can cost as much as $30 a click!!!! You can see how PPC can indeed be a bottomless pit. This has led to a conspiracy theory amongst SEOs that Search Engine companies keep their rules about organic search optimisation deliberately obscure and ever-changing, exactly BECAUSE they want you to take out expensive PPC campaigns.

Which leads me to the point of this post, and why I have titled it as I have. (Is PPC a bottom-less pit?) Because actually "for the little guy", the PPC market superficially is, exactly that. (A yawning chasm into which they throw lots of money, without ever seeing where it goes or what comes out of it). PPC is therefore (on the surface) a reasonably 'unfair' and exclusive preserve of big companies and deep pockets. This runs contrary to proclamations by search engine companies of how they level the playing field and champion the little guys.

This is where, of course, I provide a synthesis of exactly how "little guys" can do well, piercing through the mumbo jumbo, conspiracy theories etc, right? Right! For a clue, look back to my post titled "maintain, deepen and niche".

You see, PPC (as indeed SEO itself) can be viewed as a bottomless pit for large companies selling "one-ize fits all" commodity products. Their organic SEO also has to optimise the words everybody else uses on 11 million other pages across the web. Because if you are going to pursue commodity products, you have to sell to a commodity market. So at this level, I think actually the search engines are pretty ALTRUISTIC in their sneaky hidden algorithms and expensive PPC bid mechanisms. They work absolutely against the big companies playing to a wide field. (The rules and tools keep you guessing and keep you paying).

But little companies should not be trying to compete on this playing field. If small companies (I provide Search Engine Optimisation Services for small European Businesses in the Limousin, Poitou Charentes and Aquitaine regions of South West France) pursue "Maintain, Deepen, and Niche" strategies, my experience is:

a) I can land them on Google Page 1 using "deepend and niche" type terms just through organic search results and I have a pretty good results record behind that (otherwise bold) statement;

b) Their use of PPC has to be very targeted and specific.

Both PPC and SEO are mass market disciplines supported by mass-market tools.
Small companies generally fail to make headway with either because (if they do SEO at all) they equally bring a mass market mentality to their activities: they try to rank on Google using really generic terms; and equally conduct PPC campaigns (if at all) with the same mindset.

So I think there is neither an SEO conspiracy going-on against the little guy, nor do I think PPC is a bottomless pit. It is just that in most cases, the literature and body-of-knowledge has been created for the big companies tossing huge sums after very generic search terms. And small companies themselves lack the knowledge and skills-base to conduct adequate marketing (which at the end of the day is what underlies good SEO).

Briquesetclics exists exactly to offer Search Optimisation services to small European businesses in Southwest France: specifically the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine.

Are "Online Brochure" sites for the birds?

2009-01-26T03:13:00.000-08:00

First of all, what do I mean by "Online Brochure sites"?

I mean sites - especially small business websites - that are simply an electronic rendition of a paper-based brochure. You and I have seen them a thousand times - we may even run one or two of them ourselves (my hand is definitely 'up'). The greatest concession to "Customer Interaction" may be a small "Contact us" form but there is certainly no cash-generating capability in the web site itself. Its whole being exists to drive people off-site and spend money on a physical interaction of some sort. That is a LOT to ask a small website to do. To bring in any potential business (cash) these websites are totally reliant on a) being found; b) being interesting and c) the prospective customer going "off-channel" (for example switching to the telephone) to complete their transaction.

"Are they for the birds?" I mean - "Are they therefore just about completely (just about) useless?" (No insult meant to our avian friends. I didn't make the phrase up).

These brochure sites are perhaps the mainstay of micro and small businesses on the web, and of the designers and developers who serve that market. So is this not an absurd question? (I mean surely, Richard, so many Lemmings can't be wrong?)

Now - I do not dispute AT ALL, that there is a convenience and a small cost saving in having an electronic brochure to point a potential client to and be able to amend (website designer willing) pretty much on the hoof. This is as opposed to being locked into a static print version of something that might go out of date reasonably often, and the expense (and time delay) of posting it around the globe.

But there, the utility value of these sites stops, in 990/1000 cases.

The paradox is that in order to arrive at these sites, the potential client must either know - or have been referred to - the business owner in question ("oh, I must look up so-and-so's site"), or they must have found the site via 3rd party advertising either on paper or a directory site - which is likely to have been paid-for at considerable expense. The two problems with this model are:

1) The site in itself is not a marketing tool in its own right - i.e. by existing on Google Page 1 million, it does not have a hope of ever being found and therefore of being a "Beacon" to all prospective customers saying "I'm a really good site and you'll find what you are looking for here". At least with paid-for advertising, for all that it is expensive, at least the "effective" marketing mechanism you are purchasing acts as surrogate for your own "absense" of marketing mechanism and it brings you sales leads so you are happy.

But whether or not it is pound for pound as efficient as having a searchable website of your own is arguable. Paid-for advertising by anyone else's mechanism is either geographically constrained (like a physical newspaper) or targeted only at the audience THEY have to attract to meet their own marketing needs. This is not the same as being able to market effectively to anyone, anywhere according to your own criteria. Which brings me to point 2.

2) When landed upon, the small business website is very unlikley to be a commercial propostion in its own right with a means of generating its own cash. Its "business justification" relies totally on the sale that is going to be made in the physical world. If small businesses understood how easy it is to place revenue streams on their own sites - irrespective of a sale in the physical world - then it might make them think twice about the value of getting their own marketability right. If the website itself is at all commercial, success via your own marketing is arguably far far cheaper than 3rd party advertising. (Something the big sites and advertisers definitely DONT want you to know). It is by no means free; but it is cheaper and it is all within your control.

So brochure web sites are not completely useless, but they are perhaps only 10% as useful as they could be. Note I do not slam the content of the sites themselves for this issue - a poor proposition or badly worded copy is as terminal for a business in the physical world as it is on the internet. So I am not talking about "design" or the actual business itself so much here. I am talking about the "improper use of the vehicle".

What I find a pity is that the small business owner probably does not KNOW (and the small business designer either does not know or does not let on that they don't understand) that the above is the case. And both business owner and designer conveniently overlook the fact that in order to make the site of any commercial use, additional further expense of time or effort (most likely both) HAS to be incurred to drive people to the site itself, via listings via agencies or physical media (like newspapers) or via email.

To that end, I have set up free "Masterclasses" on my website now, to help people learn the basics about starting an online business. My bias is Southwest France, around the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine, as that is where I work.

I will add to these Masterclasses as I go: but see http://www.briquesetclics.fr/en/Internet-Marketing/Articles/ and
http://www.briquesetclics.fr/en/Web-Site-Design/Articles/
as examples of everything I have said in this post.

If small businesses understood that they could have "searchability" BUILT-IN during their web design, and that this should absolutely be an intrinsic part of the overall design cost, and if the understanding from the get-go is that keeping the website competitive would also require a certain ongoing contract that is cheaper than long-term advertising costs, then not only would much more traffic potentially arrive at the site: but the costs of the ongoing maintenance would be very competitive versus the ongoing costs of advertising on paper or via an agency. Food for thought, uh?

Let me be absolutely clear it is completely possible for a small, adequately differentiated business to appear on Google Page 1 search terms without using 'obvious' terms like the company name or URL. I presently have three companies under my wing that appear exactly like this. (One company lands on Page 1 line 1 for even reasonably generic search terms). This is not cuckoo land. (No picture of a cuckoo, sorry).

The pity is that small business website owners (and the designers that serve them) do not understand that if they do nothing about search - then "nothing" is exactly what they will get - nor do they understand the essentially "free" nature of search by building it in from the start and the cost-efficiency of this mechanism even under an ongoing maintenance contract.

Making a website commercial in itself is both a marketing and design question and again, for 90% of small businesses, one that is not addressed at the start. Small business brochure sites typically have no means of generating cash in and of themselves (this is easy to do and again, "Free food" if built in from the start). They also lack sufficient "Action Orientation" to get the customer over that "Motivational Hump" that they will confront when you invite them to pursue their purchase with you over the phone, by email or by letter, instead of via the medium they are already on (the web) and as part of the "flow" they are already in. These are business and design questions that need to be addresses from the start and again, tend to be overlooked if the business owner is unfamiliar with what the web offers...and, er, so is the designer.

I'll get off my soap box now! Are Small Brochure web sites for the birds?
Having "been there" myself and now finding myself on the other side of that coin (ew! how many metaphors do I want to mix up?) I believe 90% of brochure sites ARE for the birds. But 100% of them also NEED NOT BE if the business owner and website designer know what they are doing on this very different and exciting medium from the word 'Go'.

"Maintain, deepen and niche"

2009-01-19T00:33:00.000-08:00

European small businesses do not have a hope of competing in the mass market with big players. This is almost wholly due to supply-side constraints: they cannot afford the marketing and generate the brand presence; they cannot commoditise their products enough to compete on cost; they do not possess the capacity to fulfill mass demand or service mass after-sales.

I said this is a supply-side constraint. Because this is the playing field that big players play on. But is it currently also their undoing. I say "currently". Actually, arguably, the seeds of the current recession go back at least to 1997 when it became evident that mass production, across almost every market, was over-supplying the market with un-differentiated goods. Think about it: Banking, electronic goods, even holidays: walk down the high street even in 1997 and every single offering in every single shop was exactly the same (or as near as no difference) to any other. The only possible distinction came down to price. Every major player could supply the demand of the entire market on its own. The only means of competing was through continued operational cut-backs and adoption of technology and operational efficiency. There was absolutely no - or nearly no - competition between actual products any more. This is why we saw the flurry of mergers in the late 1990s and why things nearly came undone in the dot-com burst in 2002. The economy required further concentration of mass producers (i.e. merger) to concentrate productive capacity in fewer players. It is what is also desperately needed now - although politically unacceptable because of the jobs implications. (Which made less of a noise, of course during the good times!).

The flip side is that companies darn well need to start focussing on demand - and this is where small businesses are at no disadvantage. Let the big players focus on concentration and further operational efficiency. Small players need to be moving like billio to grab customers and that's why I title this post "Maintain, deepen and niche". Have you seen that dreadful Thompson holiday advert currently doing the rounds? Where it looks like they'll put you in a studio: bring in the sand, fabricate a pretty view; "massage-away" any black clouds and turn on UV lamps to give you a fake tan? I mean, this expresses the "mass-commoditisation-ultimate-eccentricity" that big companies now face. There is no distinction any more.

For European small businesses to stay competitive: "Maintain, deepen and niche":

- Maintain - seems clear enough - but you need to be working like stink to keep your existing customers. Do this and do this step first.

"Maintain" DOES NOT mean "keep doing exactly what you do". It means going all out to improve what you already give existing customers. If you can't improve your product, at least give it a facelift. What about a total makeover of the tired website that is sitting gathering dust in cyberspace (and never brought you much traffic in the first place). If you can't actually upgrade your product, delight existing customers and improve your chances of hooking new ones by taking positive and cheap steps to "Maintain" your existing pipeline. If you have a shop: paint it.

"Deepen" means "ADD" stuff to what you offer. That means offering more to existing customers than you already give them (i.e. "deepen" their relationship with you) or add "more" to your proposition to attract new customers. Do "more" to attract new customers. Have you considered optimising that now re-vamped website to become more competitive in search terms. European business! Are you actually selling in more than one language? (Small aside: but doing this saved our holiday business' bacon in the last 18 months. And it seems so obvious.). Deepen your market.

!"Niche" means work out what it is you do that everyone else doesn't and sell to that. Look: small businesses can't afford the marketing budget that big ones can, but there are loads of free tools on the web you can use (or Briquesetclics.fr can help you use). Simple example: do a search on Google for what you think you offer: Say "Gites". Oh dear: 11 million pages return this. :-(
So try "Gites in France". Better. Only 4 million pages return this. But apply "Niche" to your thinking and you realise that there are fishing lakes within 5 Km of your "Gite". Only 418,000 pages return "Fishing in France". Mmm interesting. So now search for "Fishing in France accommodation" and you're down to 300,000 and actually starting to get competitive. With a 10 page website offering a good mix of "niche" phrases like this and properly optimised - you're actually very likely to possess search terms that will get you onto Google page 1 if not page 2.

Briquesetclics.fr enshrines "Maintain, deepen and Niche" in its Internet offerings to European small businesses. You can compete in this tough time, but you must not compete on the same playing field as the big players. Their pitch is presently water-logged