Take a look at this picture & see which words you notice first:

If you were asked to pick out the words ‘absolute luminance’, how long would it take you? Now if you were asked to pick out the words ‘visual perception’, could you pick them out quickly?

This probably seems like a ridiculous exercise - it’s totally obvious, right? But there are so many websites that miss the key point here:

You can choose what your visitors notice & what order they notice it in. You can guide your viewer’s eye around the page.

If ‘Sign Up For Our Free Email Newsletter‘ is the one link that determines the success or failure of your business, make sure you put visual emphasis on it. Don’t just slide it neatly & subtly into the page where it won’t be noticed.

Put your key elements in the right spots, give them the right colour & size. Choose style that fit your site but make sure you are pushing the most important elements to your visitors’ eyes rather than simply assuming your visitors will pull out the key info among the rest of your content.

One day, “cuil” was an ugly typo, the next it was being coughed up as “the new google” all over the web, on 24-hour tv news & in the middle pages of newspapers across the world.

Within 24 hours of launch, 5,696 people had bookmarked cuil at del.icio.us. To put that in context, that’s 5 times as many del.icio.us adds as Barack Obama’s official website has had to date.

So how’d they do it?

The simple answer is: very straightforward PR.

If you ever plan to put out a press release, you should take a look at the cuil launch release on their site. It’s a very standard press release, with some nice hooks tucked in there to appeal to the average journalist.

The hooks cuil tried to push

Here are the hooks cuil tried to push in their launch press release:

1. Biggest search engine: ‘120 billion web pages indexed’, ‘3x more than any other search engine’
2. Different look: ‘magazine-style layout’ (bound to appeal to a magazine journalist, you’d have thought)
3. Different results: ‘unlike any other search engine…’
4. Privacy protection: this point appears 3 or 4 times through the short release

The hooks that stuck in the media

Not all of cuil’s hooks stuck. ‘Privacy’ & ‘Different look’ didn’t even get a mention in some articles, whereas some other elements were totally focused on:

Biggest search engine.
This is always a winner: biggest, fastest, strongest, shortest… extremes & ‘records’ are utterly failsafe themes- especially combined with nice-looking stats. Almost every article mentions “3x bigger than Google”.

Ex-Google employees.

The fact that cuil has at least one ex-Google employee was tucked away in the cuil release, with a single passing mention. Yet every single article managed to pick out this fact. Many made it the headline/core of the piece. Why? Because it has totally universal appeal:

1. We’ve all heard of Google.
2. We all know Yahoo was once toppled by Google & part of us believes it could happen again.
3. The risk that paid off: “Why would anyone leave Google?” we think, “To make something even more successful than Google!” is the answer many of these articles hint at.

Perhaps including this as only a passing mention worked in cuil’s favour: The journalist who picks up the press release thinks “great, I’ve found a gem tucked away here” rather than thinking “yawn, another spoon-fed press release for me to reword”.

Genuine?

Reading many of the day-1 Cuil articles, it’s patently obvious the writers don’t believe Cuil has any chance at beating Google. Yet few writers say this outright; they all act under the pretense that it could ‘kill’ Google.

And that is something to remember when you come to put out a press release: You’re not writing a persuasive document, you’re simply providing the tools to tell a story.

I’ve been doing some work that means I’ve had to buy a few more email lists lately & mail other people’s lists.

An in-house list is always better than a bought one, but, if you need to buy email lists, here are a few more simple tips to save you money & increase your results…

Tip #1: Skip the addresses that won’t work

If you’re buying an email list, ask for these email addresses to be stripped out:

• info@domain.com
• sales@domain.com
• support@domain.com
• admin@domain.com
• webmaster@domain.com

These are the most standard addresses for a domain. ie. the ones every spam program out there will automatically mail.

After years of being spammed, those addresses probably aren’t used any more. Stripping them out before you buy the list means you’ll pay less money & get the same results.

Tip #2: Run a trial - it can save you thousands

Imagine you’re a restauranteur looking for a new house red. Would you buy 20 cases of wine without tasting it? Or would you buy 3 bottles & try them out with a few customers first?

You can do the same with email lists. Instead of buying a broadcast to 3 million addresses for $50,000. Buy a tiny portion of the list to try it out first. If you pay $500 to email a few thousand people and it works out, buy the rest of the list. If it doesn’t work out - losing $500 and learning the list stinks is better than losing $50k for the same lesson.

Tip #3: Be honest with your recipients

What do you do when you receive an email out of the blue, with no explanation how the sender found your details? You delete it right? Or maybe you hit the ’spam’ button.

Let’s say you’re running a new email campaign: If you just bought a list from Joe Bloggs Inc, then feel free to start your email with “Joe Bloggs thought you might be interested in our offer”. That way the recipient doesn’t think you’re a total spammer.

Where & How To Get Content Part 1: Do It Yourself

The easiest way to start getting web content together is to create it yourself: Nothing to organise, no need to communicate your vision to someone else. Here are a few of the good & bad bits of creating your own content:

Great: The big pro of DIY content writing is that it’s *exactly* how you want it.

Great: Zero risk. If you write something & it’s not great, you’ve lost nothing and - hopefully - learned something.

Great: No money. Though your time isn’t free, you don’t need to have anything in the bank to create your own content.

Great: Learn & communicate. If you’re looking to learn about something, or to reach out to other people across the world, there’s no better way than by speaking for yourself on the web.

Depending on your situation, the cons of putting together your own web content can often outweigh the pros.

Bad: It doesn’t scale at all. If you can write 1 article per day, then you’re stuck with a 1-article-per-day website.

Bad: DIY content depends on your time. When your other priorities go up, your content slows down.

Bad: It ties you up. Could you move forward faster if your time weren’t tied up writing content? Accountants call this the ‘opportunity cost’: Let’s say you buy $100 of fish on monday, and you sell them for $500 on friday. That’s a 500% profit. But, while you had that $100 tied up in fish stock, you could have made 10 other deals & twice as much money.

Of course - if you’re a bigger business - many of these problems disappear. “Yourself” could be the 600 people your company employs. If you’re an insurance company, get your customer support team to note down all of the questions & answers they get. Publish them straight onto the web & you’ve got a huge asset.

Top navigation, left & right. Breadcrumbs, headers, footers. We usually think of them all as having only one function: Getting your visitors from A to B.

But - on top of that - really good navigation can help a website achieve some big essential tasks.

1. The Obvious Bit: Good Navigation Lets You Find What You’re Looking For

Hopefully this should be obvious: Navigation gets your visitors to where they’re going. If your visitors can’t get where they need to on your site, then your navigation needs looking at.

Side Note: a simple way to improve this element of your navigation is to note down some key tasks your visitors would want to perform (or key tasks you want visitors to perform) & then watch what happens when a few test subjects (even if it’s just friends, family & colleagues) try to do it.

2. Good Navigation Tells You Exactly What A Site’s About

When you visit a site for the first time, there are several clues to the topic of the site & the scope of it. For example, if you look at this site, up at the top it leads with ‘Online Marketing Advice’. That gives you the general subject area.

Perhaps more important than that, down the left, there are a few navigational categories: “Copywriting”, “Search Engine Optimisation”, “Paid Search Marketing”, etc. At a one-second glance, this tells you the range of topics covered on the site.

The same is true on many other sites (and can be true of your site). Here’s a glimpse of Amazon’s old top navigation:

Amazon started selling books. Today they sell thousands of products across a range of categories. If you take a look at the navigation above, you can immediately understand the full range they sell. Even without thinking about it. The same is true of sites you visit for the first time. If your navigation is set up nicely, a quick glance will tell your visitors exactly what your site covers.

3. Good Navigation Gives You A Mental Map

First off - is this important? Does it matter whether your visitors have a mental picture of the structure of your site? Well think back to a time when you’ve been in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Think about the uncertainty in your head - are you going in the right direction? Is it safe here? Is what you’re looking for here? What else is here?

This is an important part of a website: Making visitors feel comfortable & familiar, and helping them to understand where they fit into it.

So how does this work? How can navigation achieve this? To carry on using Amazon as an example, here’s their new primary navigation:

A quick look at this not only tells you what Amazon sell, it also tells you exactly how it’s all organised, and gives you a perfect picture of the size and complexity of their store. Like a tube map:

Imagine you’re standing at a tube station & you know nothing about the tube network. A single look at the map tells you the size of the network, the number of lines, as well as how to get from A to B.
Your navigation can do exactly the same. If a visitor is on one page of your site, very good navigation can condense all of the complexities, the different areas, routes, types of content. Good navigation can put all of this information into a single, easy-to-understand mental picture.

GE is one of the biggest companies in the world: They’re currently 6th in the ‘Fortune 500′. Their annual tax return is the longest in the Unites States. The company is made up of several ‘groups’, each consisting of dozens of smaller companies. GE has a long history, and was founded by Thomas Edison.

Where would you begin to start? Imagine how complicated the homepage would need to be to get all of that across, to appeal to all of the different types of visitors.

Well - Here’s GE’s current homepage:

So how have they managed to keep it so simple, yet remain useful?

Here are five lessons to learn from this

1. Focus On Your Audience

There are millions of things GE could have put on this page. If you look at the top nav, you’ll see almost every element on the pages answers one simple question: “what information would someone come to our site for?”

2. You Don’t Have To Show Everything At Once

The top navigation is clean and simple. Move the mouse over it & you can dig deeper into each section.

All of the images use rollovers. If you’re interested, you’ll move the mouse over the image & immediately find out more.

3. Photos Tell Stories Quickly

Look at the photos on the page.

The apple says ‘environmentally friendly’. The main image (which changes on reload) says ‘diversity, positivity, hope, good health’. The boy with the afro says ‘diversity, the future, funding good causes’. The jet engine says ‘innovation, technology, business’.

This can be used on any homepage.

4. Balance what your visitors want with what you want to tell your visitors

I mentioned that most of the elements on the page answer the question “what would someone be looking for on our site?”. There are a few exceptions to this, and they all answer a different question. You could pose that question like this:

“We know what our visitors are looking for. Aside from that, what do we want to tell them?”

You’ll notice ‘Innovation’ is the first element in the top navigation. Nobody would go to the GE site thinking “I want to know about GE’s innovation”. This is a brand positioning element. They’ve put it up front because they want us to know about their innovation. And it works - I moved the mouse over it & found out more.
The same with the main image - would anyone come to the page looking to find out about ‘Early Health’? Probably not. But GE position it in such a way to try & get the chance to tell us about it.

5. When you write, Make it count

People don’t often ‘read’ company homepages. They ’scan’ them - just like they would scan through a search results page. GE understand this, and have kept their copy to one short paragraph. Here it is:

GE IS IMAGINATION AT WORK From jet engines to power generation, financial services to water processing, and medical imaging to media content, GE people worldwide are dedicated to turning imaginative ideas into leading products and services that help solve some of the world’s toughest problems.

In this one quick paragraph you know:

• GE are worldwide
• They’re problem solvers
• They’re people-focused
• They’re an ‘ideas’ company
• They’re a ‘products’ company
• They’re a ’service’ company
• They cover dozens of markets

So there you have it - 5 simple principles from the world’s largest company, that can be used on any homepage.

Further Reading

• Keeping your home page clean - BoagWorld.com
• Keep your Web Pages simple - Nick Usborne
• “Keep It Simple Stupid” Landing Pages - Roberta Rosenberg @ Copyblogger

If I visit your website from Australia, is it any different from the website I see if I visit from The USA? Or from England?

That’s only half the question really. The real question is: Could your website perform better if it looked different to visitors from different countries?

A few larger sites understand that they can perform better by speaking differently to visitors from individual countries, and a few of the larger ad networks do too. If you hit the Amazon.com homepage from outside the USA, they ask you politely to visit your local site like this:

They’ve been doing that for a couple of years now. Usually, where Amazon leads others will follow, but it’s still incredibly rare that you see simple techniques like that used. The larger ad networks do it (for example, Google AdSense ads are different depending on where you’re viewing from). But this is such a simple technique that even very small sites can benefit.

Here are a few examples of how you could use this to improve your results:

You’re An Affiliate

The Problem: You get thousands of visitors from outside the USA, but your advertisers’ sites only sell products in the USA. Those thousands of visitors are never going to earn you any money.

The Solution: Check your visitors IP addresses. If a visitor is outside the USA, show them AdSense ads instead of your usual Affiliate ads. AdSense uses geolocation, so the ads can earn you money when others may not.

You’re A Service Provider

The Problem: Half your visitors come from the USA, but you only provide services in Australia

The Solution: Partner with a US service provider in the same market, arrange a deal where you’re compensated for passing traffic their way. An easier alternative would be to find a provider in the USA with an up-and-running affiliate program. Check visitors IP addresses and, whenever they’re from the USA, include a large call to action

You’re A News Website

The Problem: You publish an online news site to work alongside your UK magazine. You don’t display any ads on your site. 30% of your visitors are from outside the UK, and will never buy your magazine.

The Solution: Sign up with an international ad publisher. Whenever a visitor lands on the site from an IP address outside the UK, display the ads to them.

The BBC News have toyed with this idea for years. They’re funded by the public in the UK & do not display any advertising. Their problem is, well over half of their traffic is from outside the UK. It was announced recently that they will display ads to visitors from outside the UK shortly

You’re An E-Commerce Site

The Problem: You have websites all over the globe. The problem is, your USA website dominates the search rankings for all of your keywords & your English, German & French websites are losing out on traffic

The Solution: Grab the IP address of your visitors when they enter the site. If they’re outside the USA, inject a large call to action into the first page of their visit; point them straight toward their local site.

How About You?

If you’re looking for more info on the technical side of this, we spoke about how to find out & use your visitor’s geolocation data in an earlier article about fraud.

Do you treat international visitors differently right now? Are there any opportunities where it could work for you?

The best type of email list is your own: A list made up completely from people who have come to your website said “yes, I like you. sign me up to receive more of this”. However, though that’s always the best type of list, you can get great results from another type: The email list that you buy.

Don’t worry - I’m not advocating going to some back-street broker & hoisting over cash for a list he’s cobbled together by trawling facebook for addresses. There are thousands of reputable companies selling email data. Their lists are usually made up of people who tick those “Yes, I would like to be emailed by carefully selected third parties” boxes.

Buying and emailing this kind of list sounds very simple: Buy the addresses, email them, profit. But in practice there are quite a few pitfalls to avoid. I’ve bought email data myself quite a few times over the years & have learned a lot about the process. I thought I’d share some of the tips with you. I hope these 15 tips save you a bit of pain & save you some money!

How To Buy An Email List: Know What You’re Getting Into

Tip 1. Understand The Numbers:

Lists are almost always sold on a CPM basis - meaning Cost Per Thousand (the ‘M’ in CPM stands for ‘Mille’, which is Latin for ‘Thousand’). Here are a couple of quick examples:

• If you are paying $80 CPM, that’s $80 for every thousand addresses you buy (or 8c for each email address). Let’s say your budget is $800. That’s enough to buy 10,000 email addresses ($800 / $80 (per thousand) = 10).
• If you’re paying £5 CPM, you get 1,000 email addresses for £5. So £50 would buy you 10,000 addresses.

Tip 2. Understand The List Criteria:

List brokers will usually hold a lot of data relating to their lists. Good brokers will allow you to use that data to specify exactly what you want. A little example probably illustrates this best: Let’s say you’re running a campaign to sell high-end mice to Apple Mac owners. The list broker has a list called ‘computer owners’. You want to find out as much information as possible about that list, so that you can slice it down further & find exactly the people you’re looking for. For example, you might say you want a criteria like this:

• Computer Owners
• Who Have been active in the last 3 months (eg. opened an email or clicked on an email that the broker has sent to them)
• Earning $40k+ per year
• Who Own Apple Mac Products

So, if a ‘computer owner’ does not fit that criteria, you’re not wasting money by emailing them. The idea of the above criteria is to give you the best chance of finding a Mac user who is actively reading emails to the list & is likely to have the money to impulse-buy your high-end mouse.

Tip 3. Understand The Mechanics:

There are usually three options for broadcasting:

1. The list broker provides you with the list & you broadcast to them yourself
2. You provide the creative (the content of the email) & the list broker broadcasts to the list for you
3. The broker handles everything - you just give them the money & tell them what you want

Make sure you know what you’re getting before you hand over any money!
Tip 4. Understand The Results:

If you’re buying from someone who is going to broadcast for you, make sure you have a way of measuring the results. This could be an agreement over exactly what data the list provider will give to you (open rates, click through rates, bounce rates, etc) or it could be that you direct people through to your site & use your web analytics tool to measure results from there.

If you can tell your list broker how you’ll judge whether or not the campaign has been successful, they can often help you out/offer suggestions from previous campaigns they’ve worked on.

Tip 5. Understand The License:

Some list providers will sell you lists with different license terms. The main ones you’ll see are ‘email once’ (you’re only allowed to email users once), ‘email twice’, ‘1 year license’, ‘unlimited license’.

Bonus tip: It’s worth realising that - even if you buy on an ‘email once’ basis - if the recipients then sign across to your list, you’re fine to keep emailing them.

Extra Bonus tip: It’s also worth remembering that - if you’re buying an ‘unlimited license’ (to email the list as much as you like) - there are probably other people who have done exactly the same thing with exactly the same list & it may be bombarded. ie. the tighter controls on a list, the more valuable it may be.

Tip 6: Understand The Data Itself (& Make Sure It’s Clean)

It’s incredibly important to find out how the list provider collects the data, how they keep it clean, etc. Firstly, if you buy & email a bad list it can get you into serious trouble legally. Secondly, if you email a dodgy list, it can get you blacklisted by the major ISPs/email providers & can also be unbelievably damaging for your brand.

Here are the four most important questions you can ask to make sure you’re buying a ‘clean’ list. Try to get the answers to these on paper/via email if possible:

1. How do you collect the data? (the answer to this should NOT be ‘we trawl the web’!)
2. Are the email addresses all double opted in? (the answer to this should be ‘yes. definitely’)
3. Have they given permission for third parties to email them? (again - the answer must be ‘yes’)
4. How often do you email these clients? (the answer to this should not be ‘I have no idea’)

How To Buy An Email List (Cheaper!): Getting The Most Value

Tip 7. Never take the first price

Some people love negotiating. I am not one of those people, but I would /always/ do it when buying email data. List sellers always build something extra into their prices so that they can discount down. If you are uncomfortable negotiating, blame your ‘boss’. “I’ll have to see what my boss says…”, “If I can get my boss to give me the go-ahead today, can you do it any cheaper?”.

Bonus tip: If you use a list provider to broadcast to 100,000 people & 10% of those emails bounce, you should really get 10% of your money back. Ask about this up-front!

Tip 8. Never take the first package

Even if your list broken won’t lower the price, they will often give you other packages. I’ve had X% ‘extra’ email addresses for the same price, free ‘repeat’ emails to the recipients who don’t open the email the first time around, free deduping (more about that in a minute), free broadcasting, etc. There are 2 things to remember here: Number 1: you’re probably dealing with a salesperson here - as long as they can get the money & please their boss, they’re happy. Work with them! Number 2: You’re dealing with data - an intangible thing - as a result, there’s almost always /something/ they can do to offer you a little more value for money.

Tip 9. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket pt 1: Test the list

Instead of buying a broadcast to 100,000 email addresses straight off, spend 5% of your budget & email 5,000. If the results are good, go back and mail the other 95,000. If the results are bad, move on to another list provider and try again.

Tip 10. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket pt 2: Test your creative

So let’s say you follow the above advice & email 5,000 people to test out the list. You can also use that opportunity to test out your email creative: Send one email to half of the list; a slightly different email to the other. For example, you could use 2 different subject lines. If you get great results from one, then you know to use that variation when you email the other 95,000 recipients.

Tip 11. De-dupe!

Let’s take our example of the 100,000 email addresses again. If 5,000 of those addresses are *already* on your in-house list you’re spending extra money you don’t need to. Good list providers will allow you to ‘deduplicate’ your list against theirs: You send your email addresses to them, they only charge you for email addresses from their list that *aren’t* already in the list you send over. Incredibly reputable companies use a third-party to do this process, but most just do it on trust (you trust that they’re not going to take your email addresses!)

How To Email A List For The First Time: Getting The Best Results

Tip 12. Tell people where you got their address

If you’re using a third-party list, make sure to introduce yourself & tell your subscribers where you got their data. If they suddenly start receiving emails from you with no explanation, they will assume you’re a spammer.

Tip 13. Give Them the chance to opt out

You should always offer the opportunity for your email subscribers to opt out. Often marketers tuck this option away right at the bottom of the email. In my experience, it’s better to put this somewhere more noticeable. If you tuck it away (especially in the first email you send to them) they may well just reach for the ‘This Is Spam’ button, which can get you in trouble with ISPs.

Tip 14. Give Them Something Valuable

If you only follow one piece of advice in this article, make it this one!

When you buy in an email list, the recipient hasn’t given explicit permission to be emailed by you - they’ve given permission to be emailed by “selected third parties”. Emailing people is a tricky process at the best of times - recipients get a lot of email they don’t want. It’s even worse when you’re a “selected third party” & they have zero trust in you. Think of all the emails you receive & delete within 5 seconds of looking at them. If you can’t grab someone’s interest before they hit the delete/spam button, you won’t get great results.

1. Make sure you get a good match between the offer & the list (eg. don’t buy a list of teens & try to sell them a house).
2. Use a great subject line
3. Be obvious. Don’t tuck your offer right at the bottom - make sure it’s visible in the preview pane.
4. Make it personal. Email is traditionally a 1-2-1 medium & the most valuable emails people get (from friends, family) are always direct to them.

Tip 15: You don’t have to go for the sale straight away

Some of the most successful third-party email campaigns I’ve ever run have been about ‘indirectly’ achieving the objective. I’ll give you an example:

I once ran a third-party list campaign where we emailed the recipients once only. We chose a list of broadband users, who’d interacted with the list recently & expressed an interest in computers. The main objective was to sell laptops, but in the email we sent, we didn’t include a ‘buy now’ button, a laptop price, or any ’sales’ offer. There was a single, very simple offer in the email: Sign up to our “Weekly Computer Deals newsletter & get 10% off your next hardware purchase.

Why was this so successful?

• Because we’d only purchased one email to the recipients. It’s tough to sell a laptop off the back of a single email, so it made more sense to try & get them to switch across to our email list so that we could then email them again (& again)
• The barrier was very low - all they had to do was sign up to another email newsletter about computers (& we already know they’re interested in computers)
• The offer was good - do next to nothing, ’save’ money
• The recipients who did sign up & get the 10% off code felt compelled to use it (otherwise they’d be ‘wasting’ money)
• By the time we’d sent the first ‘Weekly Computer Deals’ email to them (full of laptops), they’d already had 2 emails from us (the initial email & the ‘thank you’ email containing the discount), & we’d already given them something, & therefore their trust in us was far higher
• Because we were trying to sell an expensive item, the percentage discount worked well (”I’ll buy a $1000 laptop & save $100 instead of buying a $10 mouse & saving $1″)

The strategies we’ll talk about are:

1. The Central Controller
2. The Group Effort
3. The Multi-Way Conversation
4. Of The People, By The People (For the People!)

Warning - this will be a long post! Don’t worry though - I’ll make it as scannable as possible & fill it with pictures to illustrate.

Strategy 1: The Central Controller

Here we can see the company (’ACME Inc’) has a UK website. In the example, a guy called Sid puts all of the content onto the site, which he gathers from various places within the company. From there, the site is read by Search Engines, Shareholders, Clients & other ACME divisions.

In other words - Sid is the central hub for the website. Sid could be a single person, or a department within a company: The point is, all content is controlled centrally. Usually this means the whole site will speak in one of three ways: Third-person-anonymous; The voice of the central author (it could be Sid, in the example above); A contrived character.

A Few Good Things About This Approach:

• Tight control over what makes it onto the site
• Central point of accountability (if there are errors on the site, it’s Sid’s fault; if the content is great, it’s because of Sid)
• ‘Holistic Integrity’ (everything on the site agrees with everything else, because Sid has a good picture of the whole puzzle. If you were to pitch this in a presentation you might say “Everything’s on-brand”)
• No policing costs (nobody has to go round checking anything on the site, because Sid does that while he’s adding the content)

A Few Bad Things About This Approach:

• Everything depends on the person/team in the middle - all of your eggs are in their basket. If he’s great, you’re great. If he’s not so great, neither are you. If he takes the week off work, your site stands still.
• Things get lost in translation (if Sid doesn’t understand it, how can he communicate it effectively? If Sid doesn’t think it’s important, he can bury it or push it to the back of the queue)
• The bottleneck. If every department in the company wants to get something onto the site all at once, they’ll have to wait.
• Jumping ship. If Sid ever leaves, the entire knowledge & direction of the site leaves with him.

Who Uses This Approach?

• Seth Godin’s blog more-or-less follows this: no guest posters; no comments - all of the content (other than trackback notes) is straight from Seth.
• Innocent Drinks follow this. The site is narrated by a nice contrived character which sits nicely with their brand. All of the content is spoken by this one central narrator.

Strategy 2: The Group Effort

So this diagram looks a little more messy, but what’s going on? Well - Sid has set up the website so that the other departments in the company can speak direct via the website. Gary in Sales can put his content straight on there, the CEO can put his content straight on there too; each of them speaks directly to all of their Clients, Shareholders & every other site visitor (including search engines). You’ll notice the arrows only go one way. This means (for example) the Shareholders can’t post direct to the website themselves.
This generally works in one of a few ways: Individuals in the group/organisation might be given tools to publish directly. Perhaps they’re given little one-way blogs to communicate, or their put in charge of a new section for their category. Another popular version of this is when a central website is split into smaller sub-websites, each with their own ‘editorial team’.

A Few Pros Of This Approach:

• Easy way to get extra ‘expert’ content onto the site
• Nothing gets lost in translation - if the CEO wants to put out a message, he just goes ahead & puts it out
• Everybody buys into the site
• Greater granularity. If one person wants to go into real depth in their section, they don’t have to rely on someone else having time available to publish it all
• The Human Element. This one really deserves a discussion of its own: The positive aspects of putting some humanity into a website just can’t be overstated. People love hearing from real humans. Allowing people to broadcast direct via the web is almost usually better than utting a bland facade between the people inside a company & the people outside.

A Few Cons Of This Approach

• People leave. If your content is built around your people, you have to figure out what to do when they leave.
• People may be unreliable. Again, if your content is built around people, you have to make sure they continue to produce it (reward it), or put a system in place so that it doesn’t have a negative effect if/when they don’t.
• No central knowledge/management/point of accountability.
• Potential for conflicting messages from different authors.
• This is sort of a halfway house: The facade of a conversation with the site’s audience, without actually any mechanism for the audience to speak back.

Who Uses This Approach?

• Most media organisations use an approach along these lines - it’s very similar to the setup of a conventional magazine/newspaper. The BBC News, for example, posts dozens of items a day, some by anonymous staff, some by named writers.
• Many corporate blogs also follow this route: They allow internal staff to publish direct to the web, but disable comments so that all content is from their staff only. The Google Health Ads Blog is a good example of this.

Strategy 3: The Multi-Way Conversation

Here you’ll see the arrows go both ways. Content comes from inside ACME corp, but content also comes from the site audience. This could be in the form of comments, a threaded forum, user-populated blogs.

What’s Great About This Approach?

• User-involvement/user-buy-in. Those both sound horrible, don’t they? Letting your ‘readers’ become ‘participants’ can be great for you & great for your site. Turning your site into a community, or allowing it to engage with an existing community, not only increases traffic, retention, & stickiness, it can turn an otherwise boring site into something that people want to visit & talk about. In other words - it can bring new people to your site, can keep them coming back, and can vastly improve their feelings toward your brand.
• Free (’keyword-rich’) content. Let’s say you have a team of 3 in-house, and an audience of 3000 readers. ‘Flipping the funnel’ and allowing your readers to do some of your shouting for you vastly increases the amount of content you can produce.
• Instant feedback. When you do something your audience/readers/buyers don’t like - it’s better to know about it than to hide under a rock. Giving them the mechanism to just say straight out “I don’t like that” can cut a lot of time and badly-placed effort.
• A two-way conversation. The clichéd saying ‘2+2=5′ is all about building on other peoples ideas. Building on the ideas of yourself, your staff, and your readers.
• A genuine relationship. Big brands often speak about ‘customer relationship management’. Too often, it’s only the brand that believes this relationship exists. Conversing with readers/customers offers the possibility of a genuine relationship between them and the brand.

What’s Not So Great About This Approach?

Many people worry about opening up access to their audience (large organisations especially). A few of the key worries are:

• ‘Off-brand messages’ (readers posting comments that don’t relate to what the company is trying to do, or how it wants to be perceived)
• Copyright violation/defamation/other legal issues. If outsiders can post on your website, there’s always the potential (no matter how slim) that someone can break the law using your site.
• For example, Shoemoney was once subpoenaed over comments posted by one of his blog readers.
• Aaron Wall was famously sued as a result of comments over on SEOBook.com (the case was eventually dismissed & Aaron came out of it really well).
• Policing costs. “we asked them for content. now how do we make sure it’s the content we want?!”

Who Uses This Approach?

• Many larger blogs use this approach, for example Copyblogger now uses several content creators (bloggers), and each article allows comments from readers - no matter who they are.
• SEOMoz is another good example here: Content is often created by the SEOMoz staff (again, anyone can comment by signing up to the site for free). Additionally, users can post their own content, which all other users can then comment on (& rate).
• Most other blogs use a cut-down version of this: A single central author posts original content, the larger audience is able to post comments only. For example, the fantastic ChrisG.com and Skelliewag both follow this format.

Strategy 4: Of The People, By The People

In this example, you’ll notice the company is greyed out. Why is that? That’s because the staff of the company don’t post or create any content themselves. They set up the mechanisms for users to post content, and then all content comes from the users (totally powered by the ubiquitous ‘UGC’/'User-Generated Content’).

What’s good about this?

• Minimal/zero cost content. Though it may be worth rewarding the audience for content, this is hugely less costly than creating content in-house.
• Huge scaleability - held back only by the chosen niche, the quality of the idea, the usability of the site, and the ability of the servers to cope
• Huge permission assets - a large audience, all of which have been recruited by friends/family, offers a huge permission asset.

What’s bad about this?

• Legalities. The Youtube legal issues highlight what can happen.
• Wandering direction. If you have a firm direction for the site, it’s tough to keep a firm hold of that when all content is driven by your users.
• Totally at the mercy of the audience. If the audience moves on, there’s little you can do about it. Friendster, Orkut (and arguably Yahoo!) are famous cases of this.

Who uses this approach?

• Many of the biggest sites in the world use this format. You could say that Google’s search engine runs using this format (though their spiders trawl for the content, rather than users posting it directly).
• Forum websites are usually centred around this.
• Threadless (a T-shirt company) puts a very nice spin on this: Not only is their site content produced using this format, each of the t-shirts they produce is designed & voted for by their users.
• Directories are often built around this idea too. Seth Godin’s Squidoo is a great use of this concept: Expert content, largely driven by users, pulls in piles of traffic. Site costs are covered by AdWords, and there’s a gigantic chunk left over for charity (and for the experts themselves if they wish).
• MySpace (oh yeah - other than Tom), Youtube, and - to an extent - TripAdvisor have all followed this format to fantastic success
• Facebook took this a step further: Not only do users post content, developers can also create applications for the site, allowing users to interact in different ways.

So there you have it: the four basic ‘content communication strategies’.

Which are you currently using? Could you combine elements of others to improve your site?

Looking at that, they’ve obviously spent time on the creative. It looks ok. It’s very timely. There’s a strong call to action. But it really annoyed me…

It annoyed me because - for me - there are some serious flaws in their email strategy.

I had a look back through my inbox & noticed I’d had eleven emails from hmv.com over a thirteen day period. That shouldn’t be so unusual: I often voluntarily sign up for ‘1 a day’ emails, but this was not one of them. Aside from that - this is just not the kind of email I would want every day (’final sale’, ‘only 13.99′, ‘offers, offers & more offers’ emails).

The only reason I haven’t unsubscribed from their emails is that they ask me for a login & password to unsubscribe. I probably had a password once, but I have no idea where & I can’t guess it. So, until I figure out how to unsubscribe, their hand-crafted, beautifully designed emails are achieving an objective they never intended: Annoying me.

What Are HMV Doing Wrong?

To be honest, the reason I picked hmv is not because they are outstandingly bad: It’s because the individual emails are actually quite good. They’re just spoiled by some really, really common strategy problems. Here are the ‘quick fix’ problems:

1. The frequency is just too high for that type of email

If you’ve got an email that does add value to your recipients, then every day might be fine. If you’re just churning out ’special offer’ emails day after day, it’s too often. Admittedly they throw in the occasional ‘Online Poll’ or ‘Win a DVD’

2. They send to multiple lists at the same time

It looks like I’m signed up to 2 lists - ‘hmv offers’ & ‘hmv music’. They send to both of these lists at the same time, meaning (as they’ve got me on both lists) I often get 2 emails from them on the same day.

3. It’s a real pain to unsubscribe

It’s easier to just hit the ’spam’ or ‘delete’ button than it is to unsubscribe. It’s easier just to keep receiving emails I don’t want than to get off their list. In the long-term, this just damages their brand & puts their delivery at risk.

4. I hate horror movies

I know most people love horror movies, but I just don’t like them! And that’s just one example: HMV consistently send me special offer emails on things I just don’t like.

How Could They Improve Their Emails?

Here are a few ‘quick fixes’ & one overall strategy fix:

1. Fix the frequency

They could solve problems 1 & 2 (frequency & multiple emails in the same day) very easily. Presumably they think their target audience is seriously interested in what they’re flogging cheap. If that’s the case, why not send out an email that’s double the length (combine their ‘hmv offers’ & ‘hmv music’ emails when a subscriber is signed up to both)? One long email with twice as many deals is MORE valuable & LESS annoying than 2 very similar emails on the same day. The added factor is: 2 emails on the same day screaming “cheap offers” just seems desperate & cheapens the entire brand, whereas one per week saying “the week’s best deals” would be fine.

2. Ask the audience

Instead of an online poll asking “what’s your favourite horror film?” why not put one out asking “what do you think of our emails?”.

3. Make it easy for us to unsubscribe

If you’re talking to someone at a party & you can see you’re really boring them, move on. Don’t pin them in the corner & talk their ear off for the rest of the night. The same applies to your emails: There’s just no reason to make it difficult for someone to unsubscribe.

4. Add some value to our lives

This is more difficult than the other fixes, but it’s the one that could pay big dividends:

If I sign up for a music/dvd newsletter, I’m obviously interested in music & film, not just interested in BUYING music & films. There’s a huge opportunity for HMV to find out more about me & to deliver me information that I genuinely want. Imagine if they told me when my favourite artist was putting something new out? Or if they interviewed my favourite artists/directors/actors & sent that to me? Imagine if they recommended something that I might actually like, & gave me a link to an mp3 snippet so I could see what I thought? If they did all of that I’d love their emails, I’d probably spend my money with them, and I’d be talking about them in a positive way & forwarding their emails on to other people.