Posted on 17 February 2012.
Have you ever wondered why it is that some online businesses thrive and continue to do so, while others just fail miserably?
It is interesting to observe the differences between successful online businesses and those that, while they have a presence, just are not profitable at all!
Knowing the reason why these businesses are successful should ultimately allow others to… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 15 February 2012.
In case you’ve been living in a mountain cave in Bhutan for the past couple of months, Pinterest is a relatively new social networking site that allows users to create online image collages, then quickly and easily share those collages — called “pinboards” — with other Pinterest users.
It’s fun, easy, and catching on like wildfire right now.
Part of Pinterest’s appeal is that it’s beautiful. Enter the lovely world of Pinterest, and all the troubles of your day-to-day life just seem to slip away in a stream of perfect little black dresses, baby otters, and cherubic children who never seem to get dirty or mouth off to their parents.
Because it’s image-based, the core of Pinterest is overwhelmingly positive. I like to think of Pinterest as Facebook without the whining.
Yes, Pinterest is beautiful. And yes, its users love it. But don’t let all the hearts and flowers fool you. Behind those lovely images, Pinterest is fast becoming a heavy hitting marketing tool for brands and businesses … like yours.
Let’s take a quick look at why this is, and then we’ll get into 56 specific Pinterest tactics you can use to your own marketing advantage.
Once you’ve got a Pinterest account, you can create online collages (“boards”) for different topics you’re interested in, and then add images and videos to your boards by “pinning” them (the equivalent of using glue sticks on old-school vision boards, but faster, slicker, and considerably cooler.)
Pinterest has nearly five million users, and is rapidly growing. Nearly 1.5 million unique users visit Pinterest daily, spending an average of 15 minutes a day on the site.
Think those inspiring vision boards don’t result in referral traffic to websites and blogs? Think again. In January 2012, Pinterest drove greater traffic to websites than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, and Youtube — combined.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how beginner, intermediate, and black-belt Pinterest users are using it to grow their businesses and connect with their customers using these appealing online collages.
Here are 56 powerful ways I’ve come up with to incorporate Pinterest into your content marketing mix …
Pinterest is not only picking up steam in social media circles, it has become a proven source of traffic for blogs and websites, quickly surpassing current favorites like LinkedIn and YouTube.
While lots of folks are flapping their jaws about the impressive statistics of Pinterest, some companies are quietly using this fabulous new tool to pin their way to better customer engagement and a visually interesting, personally appealing brand.
My advice? Take a long, hard look at including Pinterest as part of your 2012 content marketing plan.
And start making your social media strategy more beautiful, one little pin at a time.
How have you been using Pinterest as a marketing tool? Let us know in the comments …
About the Author: Beth Hayden is a blogging coach and Pinterest marketing convert. You can follow her pins at @bethhayden. To learn how to market effectively with Pinterest, download her free report, “5 Stupid Mistakes to Avoid if You Want to Make Money with Pinterest.”
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 08 February 2012.
I’m getting old.
Well, at least in internet years.
It’s getting close to 15 years now that I have been online and had a website of my own. During this time I’ve played with all kinds of different business models. Perhaps just calling them money making techniques rather than fully fledged businesses is more accurate in the majority of… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 06 February 2012.
A few weeks ago Google announced the launch of Search Plus Your World, which deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized.
While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows. While the launch was claimed to be social for personalizing results, the Google+ promotions appeared on queries where they were clearly not the most relevant result even when users are not logged into a Google account.
A couple weeks ago when Google announced Google Search Plus Your World competitors collectively complained about Google over-promoting their own affiliated websites.
Twitter was perhaps the loudest complainer, highlighting how Google basically eats all the above-the-fold real estate with self promotion on this @WWE search.
It is no surprise that folks like Ben Edelman, Scott Cleland & Fair Search chimed in with complaints, as this is just a continuation of Google’s path. But the complaints came from a far wider cast of characters on this move: the mainstream press like CNN, free market evangalists like the Economist, Google worshipers indoctrinated in their culture who wrote a book on Google & even ex-Googlers now call into question Google’s transparently self serving nature:
I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.
Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves, I’d rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion.
The FTC’s Google antitrust probe is to expand to include a review of Google+ integration in the search results.
Facebook & Twitter launched a don’t be evil plugin named Focus On The User, which replaces Google+ promotion with promotion of profiles from Facebook& Twitter.
For the top tier broad social networks framing the idea of integrating promotion of their networks directly in the search results is a natural & desirable conclusion, but is that just a convenient answer to the wrong question?
At any point Google can promote one of their new verticals in a prominent location in the search results & if they are anywhere near as good as the market leader eventually they can beat them out of nothing more than the combination of superior search placement, monopoly search marketshare, account bundling & user laziness. What’s more, they can make paid products free and/or partner with competitors 2 through x in an attempt to destroy the business model of anyone they couldn’t acquire (talk to Groupon).
Amit Singhal is obviously a brilliant guy, but I thought some of the answers he gave during a recent interview by Danny Sullivan were quite evasive & perhaps a bit inauthentic. In particular, …
The big issue is that if people feel the game is rigged they won’t have much incentive to share on Google+. I largely only share stuff that is irrelevant to tangentially relevant to our business interests & won’t share stuff that is directly relevant, because I don’t want to be forced to compete against an inferior version of my own work when the deck is stacked so the inferior version wins simply because it is hosted on Google.
As we move into the information age a lot of physical stores are shutting down. Borders went bust last year. Sears announced the closure of many stores. And many of the people shopping in the physical stores that remain are using cell phones for price comparisons. Given Google’s mobile OS share this is another area where they can build trust or burn it. A friend today mentioned how their online prices on Google Product search almost always show a lower price near the header than the lowest price available in the list – sometimes by a substantial margin.
In the past we have mentioned that transparency is often a self-serving & hypocritical policy by those atop power systems who want to limit the power of those whom they aim to control.
When Google was caught promoting illegal drug ads there was no individual who took the blame for it. When the Mocality scraping & the Open Street Map vandalism issues happened, all that we were told was that Google “was mortified” and it was “a contractor.” If people who did hit jobs could just place all the blame on “the contractor” then the world would be a pretty crappy place!
Eric Schmidt warned that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” That sage advice came from the same Eric Schmidt that blackballed cNet for positing personal information about him. Around the same time Eric offered the above quote, Google was engaged in secret & illegal backdoor deals with direct competitors to harm their own employees.
What happened to Google recruiters who dared to go against the illegal pact? They were fired on the hour:
“Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?” Schmidt wrote.
Google’s staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer “will be terminated within the hour.”
When Google+ launched they demanded that you use your real name or don’t use the product. They later claimed that you can use a nickname on your account as well, but there is a difference between a nickname and pseudonyms.
What is so outrageous about the claims for this need for real identities is that past studies have shown that pseudonymous comments are best & Bruce Schneier highlighted how we lose our individuality if we are under an ever-watchful eye:
Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
In many markets ads and content are blended in a way that is hard to distingush between them. Whenever Google wants to enter they can demand greater transparency to participate (and then use the standard formatted data from that transparency to create a meta-competitor in the market.)
Increasingly Google is placing more of their search data & their webmaster-related functions behind a registration wall. If you are rich & powerful they will sell you the data. If you are the wrong type of webmaster that aggregate data can be used in *exceptionally* personal ways.
Ahead of Google updating their privacy policy Google has directed a large portion of their ad budget toward ads about how they protect users online.
What better way to ensure user privacy than to allow them to register their accounts under psydonyms? The real name policy on Google+ was part of what made Google want to stop providing referrer data for logged in users who search on Google. This has had a knock on effect where other social sites are framing everything, requiring registration to read more of public user generated content & sending outbound traffic through redirects.
Google’s new privacy policy allows them to blend your user data from one service into refining the experience (and ads) on another:
If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We’ll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for and get you those results faster.
Google & Facebook’s war (against) user privacy is catching media and governmental attention. Microsoft highlighted some of Google’s issues in their “putting people first” ad campaign & the blowback has caused Google not only to publish PR-spin “get the facts” styled blog posts, but to launch yet another ad campaign.
EU regulators have asked Google to pause their privacy policy changes.
Is social media a cleaner signal than links? If search engines put the same weight on social media that they put on links it would get spammed to bits. It won’t be long until a firm like Ad.ly offers sponsored Google+ posts.
Some have suggested that you won’t be able to buy Google+ followers however Google already includes user pictures on AdWords ads (even when they desire not to be & even when they didn’t endorse the product that Google suggests they endorsed). In due time I expect Google will indeed sell followers & other user interactions as ad units (just like Twitter & Facebook do).
Further, celebrities sell Tweets to advertisers. When they are hot their rates go up:
When Ad.ly introduced self-destructing Charlie Sheen to Twitter, he was paid about $ 50,000 per tweet. It was worth it. Sheen’s tweet for Internships.com generated 95,333 clicks in the first hour and 450,000 clicks in 48 hours, created a worldwide trending topic out of #tigerbloodintern, attracted 82,148 internship applications from 181 countries, and added 1 million additional visits to Internships.com.
Search engines might consider these to be clean signals if those same search engines were not busy buying the manipulation of said “relevancy” signals.
Attention is purchased to create demand. It isn’t comfortable to put it this way, but we are trained to obey authority & to like what others like:
The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which equates with four degrees of separation to thousands of people, Mr. Fischer said. Metrics like that led him to believe that if Facebook could figure out a way to capitalize on “social endorsements,” it would be like creating a word-of-mouth campaign that could reach millions of people simultaneously. Since the campaigns would come from a friend, they would theoretically be taken more seriously than, say, a TV commercial, he said.
On an individual basis reviews and ratings get faked everywhere. Even stodgy old slow-moving institutions like colleges game their ranking systems.
There recently was a question raised about how Google’s rating systems skewed high on the underlying data. Surely Overstock (the same Overstock Google penalized earlier this year) wouldn’t promote Google’s trusted stores aggressively on their own site if it made their business appear worse than it actually is, thus a positive bias must be baked in to the system.
Entire categories of demand are created by those tied in with power cost shifting to create bubbles. The federal reserve helped spark a real estate bubble with low interest rates. FBI warnings of mortgage fraud were ignored. Consumers were constantly fed propaganda about “real estate only goes up.” Then when that bubble popped, the US government bailed out those who caused it & burned trillions of Dollars propping up home prices. The government even bailed out a company that is now shorting the housing market (when that company was about to get bailed out the secretary of treasury leaked that material non-public information to some of his criminal investor buddies).
Does all the above sound circular, conflicting, corrupt & confusing? It should, because that is how power works & comes off as seeming semi-legitimate when acting in illigitimate ways. The perception of reality is warped to create profitable opportunties that are monetized on the way up and the way down.
Millions of kids take drugs that address the symptoms of being a child full of energy, imagination & entusiasm. In some cases they may need them, but in most cases they probably don’t. The solution with the highest economic return gets the largest ad budget, even if it only treats symptoms.
When the +1 button & Google+ launched, Google highlighted how they would use the + button usage as a “relevancy” signal. Google recently started inserting + pages directly into the search results for brands & right from the very start they were using it as a scraper website that would outrank the original content source.
Google used the buy in from their promised relevancy signal to create a badge-based incentivized system which acts as a glorified PageRank funnel to further juice the rankings of these new pages on a domain name that already had a PageRank 10.
I recently read a blog post about how anyone could do the above & the opportunity is open to everyone. But the truth is, I can’t state that something will become a relevancy signal that manipulates the search results in order to get buy in. Or, if I did something which actually had the same net effect, Google would likely chop my legs off for promoting a link scheme.
Recently the topic of Google+ as a scraper site came up yet again via Read Write Web & on Hacker News a Googler stated that it was “childish” to place any of the blame on Google!!!!!!
Google determines how much information is shown near each listing & can create “relevancy” signals in ways that things tied to Google get over-represented (look at the +1 count here). When they do that & it destroys other business models *of course* Google deserves 100% of the blame.
Remember the whole justification for Panda was that thin content was a poor user experience?
In spite of sites like eHow getting hit, Google is still pre-paying them to upload content to Youtube.
Now that the (non-Google hosted) thin content has been disappeared (and the % of downstream traffic from Google to Youtube has more then doubled in the past year) it is time for Google to take another slice of the search traffic stream with Search Plus Your World:
The Google vs Facebook locked down walled garden contest will retard innovation. As the corporate internet silos grow larger the independent web withers. Them going after each other may leave room for Twitter, but it doesn’t leave lots of room is left for others, as the economics of publishing have to work or the publishers die.
Start ups that were on a successful trajectory were killed by Panda:
The startup had been on a roll up until last February when Google altered its ranking algorithm with the release of “Panda.” The changes decimated TeachStreet’s traffic, and the company never quite recovered.
“We lost a lot of our traffic, and overnight we started talking to partners for biz dev, not for acquisition,” he said. However, many of the potential partners wanted to know about an outright acquisition.
About.com was also smoked by Google:
The biggest worry, though, is that the decline of About.com itself may be irreversible. Fewer people are clicking on About ads placed by Google and the site’s own display ads have dropped in value.
The company has attributed this decline in value to Google’s decision last year to downgrade About pages in its search results. With more than 80% of traffic coming from search, the Google denigration was indeed a blow but About’s problems may be rooted in something deeper.
Keep in mind that the reason these websites were hit was that they were claimed to be thin & thus a poor user experience. When the NYT bought About.com one of the top competing bidders was Google!
Now that the “thin content” has been demoted in the search results Google can integrate deep content silos from Google+, like this one:
That is an 8-word Google+ post about how short another blog post is. I like Todd & do like to read his writings, but here Google is clearly favoring the same sort of content they would have torched if it was done on an independent webmaster’s website.
How Google has raters view other websites that redirect traffic is based upon those sites having a substantial value add. Clearly in the above example there was nothing added to the interaction beyond sharing a bookmark with a punchy tagline.
If Google wants to use the + notation to pull up that other referenced page then perhaps that can make sense, but to list an 8-word Google+ page in the search results nearly a year after the Panda algorithm is outrageous. This sort of casual mention integration in the search results occurs on expensive keywords as well. Not only do they list your own Google+ posts…
…but they also list them from anyone you follow…
In addition to information pollution, the other big issue here is time. Google wants to make forms more standardized to make filling them out faster & they give regular sermons on the importance of fast search results. Yet when I do a navigational search, Google delivers two AdWords ads, a huge Google+ promotion, and then the navigational search result barely above the fold.*
*Since I thought the above was obnoxious, I renamed our Google+ company page to S_E_O Book to help Google fix their relevancy problems.
Can anyone explain how Google’s speed bias is aligned with putting plus junk right at the top, even on brand searches? Yahoo! has been pretty aggressive with putting shopping ads in the search results, but their implementation is still a better user experience than what Google did above.
And Bing offers an even cleaner experience than that.
Due to how Google integrates Google+ in such a parasitic way I see no incentive for participating on their network except when I have something that is outside of my domain of expertise, something that I am not targeting commercially, something that is thin, or something irrelevant to say! That incentive structure combined with Google’s photo meme feature will ensure that content marketers will help plenty of people see Star Wars stuff ranking for mortgage loan search queries.
When you own search/navigation you own language. that position can easily be extended into any other direction/market in a way a social graph can not:
“The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English,” McNealy said. “All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business.”
Further, Google can chose at any point to respond to or ignore market regulations in accordance with whatever makes them the most money. They can also fund 3rd parties doing the same (like undermining copyright) to force others to strike an official deal with Google to be “open.”
A lot of businesses live on small profit margins, so Google’s ability to insert itself & fund criminal 3rd parties aligned with Google’s internal longterm interests is a big big big deal. Companies will learn that you either work with Google on Google’s terms or you die.
When a public relations issue brews they can quickly change their approach and again position themselves as the white knight.
Yahoo! put out a research paper highlighting activity bias, stating that the efficacy of online advertising is often over-stated because people who see ads about a topic were already more closely tied in with that particular network & that particular topic before they even saw the ad. As an example, any person who sees an AdWords ad for hemorrhoid treatment was already searching for hemorrhoid-related topics before they saw your ad (thus they were in the subset of individuals that might have came across your site in some way if you were in the search ad ecosystem or not).
This sort of activity bias-driven selection bias (homophily) exists on social networks online & offline.
Google did research on incrementality of ads & they came to the opposite conclusion as Yahoo! did. Google suggested you should buy, buy, buy, even on your own branded keywords. They suggested that testing was expensive (no mention that the only reason it is expensive is because Google chooses not to make such tools easily accessible to advertisers) & that the clicks were so cheap on branded keywords that you should buy, buy, buy. Many advertisers who mix brand & non-brand keywords together don’t realize that they are using the “returns” from bidding on their own brand to subsidize over-paying for other keywords.
Google Analytics is the leading & most widely used web analytics program. They can share whatever metrics help them sell more ads (defaulting to crediting the last click for conversions, even if it was on a navigational search to your site) & pull back on features that are not aligned with their business interests (SEO referral data anyone?)
This goes back to Scott McNealy’s quote: “The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English. All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business.”
Analysts didn’t understand why Google CPC rates were down 8% last quarter while overall search clicks were up 34%. The biggest single reason was likely more clicks on adlinks on branded AdWords ads. While a brand buying its own keyword typically pays far less per click than what some of the biggest keywords go for, the branded keywords typically have an exceptionally high CTR. Those additional clicks dragged down Google’s average CPC, but the extra revenue they offered was a big par of the reason why Google was about to grow at 25% even though their display network only grew at 15%.
That slow growth of display is in spite of Youtube now serving over 4 billion video streams per day & Google adding display ads to log out pages.
Online views are not the same as TV views. A comScore study found that 31% of display ads are never seen. In spite of that, US online advertising will reach nearly $ 40 billion this year.
Google wants to insert itself as a needed cost of business in the same way credit card companies have.
On Google Maps they put an ad inside your location box.
Even if most people don’t participate on Google+, Google can still force advertiser buy in through over-promotion of the network in the search results. On your branded keywords they may drive your organic listing below the fold & put Google+ front & center.
Facebook earnings are still growing much faster than Google’s & Facebook encourages advertisers to advertise their Facebook pages, so even when you pay for the click Facebook still keeps the user. Facebook is adding apps to the timeline & is trying to win VEVO music video hosting from YouTube.
While Google is primarily known as a search company, it is getting harder to get off of Google though any channel other than a toll booth. Google keeps driving the organic search results downward, while Google verticals fill up many of the organic results that remain. Many companies already buy Google ads on their own YouTube content. Some buy ads on Google to drive them to their Youtube videos & then buy ads on their own Youtube video to promote their websites. Soon Google will try to push you to buy them on your Google+ page as well. Google is becoming a walled garden:
Google wants to control more elements of your social world now. They don’t just want to be a search engine.
Is that so bad? Maybe not. It’s certainly no different from how other companies, from AOL, to Microsoft, to Apple, to Disney, to Facebook, have viewed the world — as ideally a walled garden, an all-consuming platform that most people use for pretty much every form of entertainment and social interaction.
A lot of people thought that Google was somehow different. They were, of course, wrong.
…
To move forward either as the old Google or Google+, Google needs to be capable of making fair deals with the partner ecosystem. It needs to curb its instinct to kill competing media companies that were actually producing great content that Google helped you find.
I suspect there will be plenty of bloodshed before Google figures that one out.
“This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.” – Larry Page
Google no longer believes in the concept of the open web. Blame it on Larry Page becoming the CEO, blame it on him talking to Steve Jobs & Steve telling him to make fewer and tighter products, blame it on Google funding eHow, or blame it on basically anything. But if you go back far enough, much of the stuff that is going on now was clearly envisioned a decade ago:
I was lucky enough to chat with Larry one-to- one about his expectations for Google back in 2002. He laid out far-reaching views that had nothing to do with short-term revenue goals, but raised questions about how Google would anticipate the day sensors and memory became so cheap that individuals would record every moment of their lives. He wondered how Google could become like a better version of the RIAA – not just a mediator of digital music licensing – but a marketplace for fair distribution of all forms of digitized content. I left that meeting with a sense that Larry was thinking far more deeply about the future than I was, and I was convinced he would play a large role in shaping it. I would rather jump on board that bullet train than ride a local that never missed a revenue stop but never.” – Douglas Edwards
What happens when the Google+ version of your content outranks the version on your own site? And what happens when your branded channel and/or your fans become a vertical ad silo Google sells to your competitors?
I tested submitting a couple posts to Google+ with a Wordtracker top keywords list & valuable keywords (on a cpc*traffic) basis in posts about top keywords. Those posts rank #2 or #3 in Google for many people that follows me. No harm to me since those posts were irrelevant to this site, but if they were about my theme & topic I just would have out-competed myself. When Google outranks you (even with a copy of your content) they get to taste the data again and sell off the attention another time. You only get a slice of that monetization, even when it is your work that is being monetized. Maybe it is great for stuff that is somewhat less relevant and/or keywords that are so competitive that you otherwise wouldn’t score for them, but we have to be really careful we don’t out-compete ourselves. Though if Googke keeps this up they won’t be the only ones monetizing it. Give it a few months and celebrities will be selling sponsored Google+ posts based on some metric created by multiplying search volume, CPC & how many followers they have.
For years Google built their reputation as being the search engine that offered the cleanest & fastest search results. They were known for monetizing less aggressively than the competition. But over the past couple years Google has dialed up their ads to where they now send a greater ratio of ad traffic than organic search traffic. One Google engineer recently described the ability to rank highly in Google without buying their ads as being a bug that was getting fixed!
Google’s big risk in their coupling of aggressive monetization, aggressive self-promotion & changing how users feel about user privacy is that they can create the perception that users should go elsewhere for for an honest or trustworthy search. This not only builds momentum for smaller search services like DuckDuckGo & Blekko, but has also won praise for Bing from Gizmodo, Dave Winer & The Next Web.
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 27 January 2012.
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 12 January 2012.
If you haven’t read part one, you can do so here – My Most Challenging Year Part 1: When Family Tragedy Strikes
At the start of 2011 I set up this blog to run as automatically as possible.
A stay at home mum friend, Steph, from my city Brisbane came on board as editor and head of… Read the rest of this entry »
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
Join our Facebook activists in the ‘Jedi Council’: is.gd On the 3rd of January, Volkswagen asked on Facebook for advice for 2012 (is.gd More than a thousand people commented asking VW why they are lobbying against environmental laws and why their boss Martin Winterkorn refuses to meet Greenpeace. More about the Greenpeace VW campaign: vwdarkside.com VW’s refusal to talk to Greenpeace www.greenpeace.org.uk
Video Rating: 3 / 5
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 22 December 2011.
A business built on flimsy foundations will soon crumble.
How do you know if that is your business?
Here are some clues. If your business is built on tactics and not strategies, the newest “push button” software, a “loophole” to exploit Google or Facebook or any dodgy marketing tactic that misleads people, AKA, a shiny object.
… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 21 December 2011.
One of the most useful skills in business is to be able to look at what someone else is doing in an unrelated topic, and bring it to your own online marketing.
You’ll find fresh angles, new approaches, and compelling ways to deliver your message.
If you run a yoga studio, you can often learn more from an auto body shop or a roofing company than from your fellow yogis.
If you’re in technology, take a look at what artists are doing. If you’re a musician, borrow from accountants.
Allowing yourself to cross-pollinate will make your ideas stronger. And it gets you out of the tired “same old” marketing all of your competitors are doing.
If I were a betting woman, I’d put folding money that none of our readers is competing in the very weird niche I’m going to talk about today.
Chris Christensen owns a business that manufactures and sells high-end beauty products … for dogs.
Not just any dogs, mind you. Christensen pretty well owns the market for high-end beauty products used to style the winners (and the also-rans) for dog shows. He was featured recently in a fascinating article in Inc. magazine, and the lessons from his business practically jumped off the page at me.
So here they are: five lessons from the dog beauty product industry that you can steal today and start applying to your own marketing, no matter what product or service you offer.
Christensen started out as a rep in the more traditional beauty product business — the one for human beings.
There are billions of dollars to be had in that business — but there are also thousands of competitors.
Through a chance encounter (keep a sharp eye out for these), Christensen realized that he could take his considerable expertise and connections in the beauty business and translate them to this underserved market.
How you can apply it: If your market is too crowded, look for a profitable intersection. Know what you can do incredibly well, then look around for what types of customers might benefit from that in an unexpected way.
Which leads us directly to #2.
If Christensen had jumped into beauty products for reptiles, he probably wouldn’t have seen the success he has.
Not every niche market is a profitable one.
Instead, he sells to the people who compete in dog shows. And show dog breeders are motivated by three factors that often point to excellent, high-profit markets.
First, winning dog shows boosts the status of the winners. (The human ones, not the canines. I don’t think the dogs care all that much who wins the ribbons, they have their own concerns.)
Status is a superb motivator if you’re trying to sell a product or service. Boost the status of your customers and your business will probably thrive.
Second, winning dog shows boosts customers’ financial well-being. If you’re a dog breeder, winning shows is good for business.
Help your customers make more money and your business will probably thrive.
And finally, dog people are crazy about their dogs. People who buy the cheapest generic shampoo for themselves will spend top dollar on special shampoo for their “babies.”
Cater to the intense desire some humans have to pamper pooches and your business will probably thrive.
So by landing on the dog show market, Christensen won a trifecta … a market driven by three ultra-powerful motivators.
How you can apply it: You don’t have to have that many factors to find your own delightfully profitable niche.
But you do want at least one powerful motivator in your market … whether it’s status, sex, love, wealth, or a passionate hobby that makes people temporarily suspend any tightwad tendencies.
Golf, weight loss, professional education, dating, and dogs are juicy markets where there’s a lot of profit to be made.
Frugality, recycling, house cleaning, the Occupy movement, and naked mole rats tend to be a lot less profitable — even though there are people who are quite passionate about those topics.
Christensen wasn’t just some guy selling shampoo — he really knew the beauty business. He knew the products, and he knew the chemists who manufactured products.
Anyone probably could have achieved some success by pouring cheap drugstore shampoos and hairsprays into bottles and saying those products were specialized for dogs. (See Lesson #4.)
But Christensen knew that to create a lasting business, he’d have to get obsessive about creating quality products — products that got his customers the results they craved.
Products that made those dogs look fantastic.
Now over 70, Christensen still goes to dog shows all over the country to watch and listen. He’s grown his line of products by observing what his customers need, then creating it for them.
The growth of his product line, incidentally, is one of the many reasons his business hasn’t even blinked at the recession. Once he had found a great market, he kept going back to them again and again to see how he could deliver additional value.
How you can apply it: Start with a strong product that delivers the results your customers crave. Perfect that product, until it’s so magnificent that you’re creating legions of raving fans.
Then, if you’re satisfied you have a strong, solid market of buyers, start watching and listening.
What else do they need? What other problems can you solve for them? Are there sub-niches within your niche that need an even more specialized product?
Dog shows don’t allow the breeders to use hair spray to style the dogs.
So Christensen doesn’t sell hair spray. He sells “texturizing bodifier.”
Are the ingredients in texturizing bodifier nearly identical to those in regular old hair spray? I have no idea. Maybe. But the label matters, so he labels his product in ways that work for his customers.
How you can apply it: Too many businesses get stuck trying to sell customers what they need instead of what they want.
If you’re a copywriter and your customers think branding is a luxury that’s just for huge businesses, don’t try to sell them something called branding, even if that’s what will help. Come up with a label that works for your customers, even if it’s not how you would refer to it. Whenever you can, use the language they use.
Label your products and services in a way that makes it easier for your customers to buy.
Christensen recently unveiled a new product — ultra-high end handmade Damascus steel shears.
There’s a lot more competition for shears than there is for “texturizing bodifier.” But Christensen knew that he had created so much good will with customers that they would be interested in seeing what he came up with.
He used his obsession for quality to develop a $ 500 pair of shears, tweaking the design until they were perfect.
And they sold. But much more importantly, sales of his $ 200 shears immediately jumped — because now those were “mid-range” shears, rather than the most expensive shears he offered.
How you can apply it: There’s some segment of your customer base — maybe it’s 2% of your buyers, maybe it’s 15 or even 20% — who want the “platinum” version of what you offer.
Create something that fulfills that craving. Add real value — with more valuable materials, with increased access to you or your staff — any way you can think of, as long as it matters to your customers.
Don’t look for how you can control costs on this one — look for how you can create an incredible result for your customers.
Then put that product where customers will see it. Even if you never sold one of your “platinum” products (although you almost certainly will), the fact that it exists will improve the perception of the rest of your line.
Try hard to make your platinum product something you really love to deliver. Make it a celebration, for both you and your customer.
Ever find a great marketing idea in an industry totally outside your own?
Let us know about it in the comments.
About the Author: Sonia Simone is co-founder and CMO of Copyblogger Media. Follow her on twitter for more thoughts on weird businesses.
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 16 December 2011.
The morning I decided to write about this subject, I saw a post on one of the popular discussion forums.
It was from someone who had invested quite a bit of time and effort into building his online business, was nearing the point where it could start being profitable, but was running short of energy and inspiration to keep… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 05 December 2011.
Yes, as an inbound marketer, your blog content has to be amazing. However, even the best content can be hampered by bad design. As a business becoming a blogging machine, it is easy to focus 100% on content and ignore valuable design elements of your blog that can act as powerful boosters of traffic and leads of your business.
Think about it this way: Would you buy an expensive sports car and drive around with four flat tires? You’d still be able to go fast, but not nearly as fast as you could be. A clear, lead-focused blog design will help turbo-charge the results of your inbound marketing content.
So what does a great business blog look like? The design itself could be one of an infinite number of choices. However great business blog designs share common traits of success.
1. A Call-to-Action in Every Blog Post – In a post about blog design, it would be simple for us to start out with some “fluffy” design advice. But that wouldn’t help your company’s bottom line, would it? Even if you stopped reading this post after this tip, you’d still leave with its most important takeaway. You MUST put a call-to-action in each of your blog posts. Yes, you should test the design and placement of your calls-to-action, but first and foremost, you need use them in your posts. This is one of the most powerful levers for transforming your blog into a well-designed lead generation machine.
2. Post Previews – Marketers must think like publishers. It’s easy to think of your blog as just a blog. Instead, you should think of it as a digital publication. Your blog is just like a trade magazine for your industry. One trait of magazines that people love is the table of contents that provide a preview for all of the articles in that issue. Instead of displaying your entire, most recent blog article on your blog’s homepage, display only an excerpt and an image from several of your most recent posts instead. This will allow visitors to scan some of your blog’s content and give them a choice of what to read first.
3. Clear Subscription Call-to-Action – Every visitor to your blog isn’t going to convert into a lead instantly. Some visitors will need to learn about your business over time. A way to help expedite this process is to get more visitors to subscribe to your blog via email or RSS. To do this, you need to have a clear call-to-action that encourages people to subscribe via either method.
4. Clear Connection to the Core Business Website – Your blog isn’t an island. Instead, it is one part of a successful website. You blog design must make it clear and simple for a blog reader to get to key parts of your core website. It is great if you have awesome content, but it needs to be connected to your products or services to help move relevant visitors further along in the buying cycle. Have a clear blog navigation that connects to your website, and consider using some sidebar real estate to direct visitors to key website pages.
5. Limit Social Media Sharing Buttons – Too much of a good thing can be bad. Yes, you want people to share your blog posts, and having social sharing buttons on your blog is important. However, giving people too many sharing options is distracting. It actually causes users to become overwhelmed and subsequently take no action. Instead, limit the sharing buttons on your blog to only those networks that send traffic and leads to your business. If you don’t get any traffic from StumbleUpon, then why clutter your blog with its button?
6. Allow Simple Sorting of Content – Depending on how prolific of a writer you are and how long your business has been blogging, your blog design needs to make it easier for visitors to find older and relevant content. As a marketer, you have several design elements to help achieve this, including blog search, tagging, recommendation widgets, etc. As with social media sharing buttons, you don’t need to use all of these. Organize some user testing sessions to understand what people unfamiliar with your blog find to be the best methods for discovering past content.
7. Prominent Post Image Display – A great blog is visual. You shouldn’t knock readers over with block and blocks of text as soon as they arrive. Look at your blog design. How are you using images to draw in readers? There are many ways to showcase images from posts in the design of your blog. It can be as simple as an image next to an intro paragraph on your blog’s homepage or something far more customized. The important thing to remember is to not make assumptions on what your readers want. Again, conduct user tests to collect feedback and determine the best option for your audience instead.
8. Prominent Headline Formatting – In your blog design, make sure that your headline is formatted correctly. This means it needs to be the star of the show when it comes to the text on a page. Make sure it is significantly larger in font size than the body or subhead text on the page. This may seem like a small detail, but making your headers pop makes a huge difference!
9. Fast Page Load Times – Online readers are impatient. When they are looking for information, they want it NOW. If your blog post takes too long to load, then your visitor will bounce and go elsewhere. In order to prevent this issue, you need to test your blog’s load time. This free tool from Pindom will tell you how long it takes for your blog to load. Ideally, the load time for your blog would be under 2 seconds.
10. Clean Sidebar – A blog’s sidebar can easily become the junkyard of the page. It’s all too easy to keep cluttering a sidebar until it has a seemingly endless list of useless widgets. Look at the sidebar of your blog. Look at each widget or design aspect of that sidebar. Does it really serve a purpose? Is that individual element encouraging the behavior that you want your readers to take? If the answer to either of these questions is no, then delete it from your sidebar. It’s about time: De-clutter that blog sidebar and get users to take the actions you want.
What other blog design best practices would you add to this list?
Connect with HubSpot:
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
