Assessment of social media,
search engine optimization, content 
and other inbound marketing trends.

Content Marketing as If You Were Paid by “Likes”

Jan 17th, 2012 by

Facebook's Like thumbs-upLast week, TechCrunch ran a story that only 38% of TiVo users watch live TV. The rest of them watch their favorite shows whenever they want. They pull the content off the box.

With much more people spending their time online, tradition media trends don’t look great. Who likes to be interrupted by TV/radio commercials, direct mail pieces, or cold calls from telemarketers? Hardly anyone. For some fascinating trends in marketing, see my infographic called “Inbound Marketing Ecosystem.”

TiVo alone is not the killer of a live TV — it is the abundance of set-top boxes, apps, or services connecting our TVs to the internet:

  • Roku Box: allows you to watch certain channels / video podcasts, pulled from the internet
  • Netflix: gives you ability to watch a movie / TV shows using your game console, laptop, smart phone, tablet, etc.
  • Hulu: gives an access to TV shows

Podcasts (delivered to your phone) or Pandora (streamed with your phone’s internet connection) are replacing the radio during our commute. Internet and blogs like Huffington Post have replaced many newspapers.

People seem to like that “pull” thing.

According to Nielsen, people in US spend 2.7 times more time on blogs & social media than email. And as “internet generation” grows up, more and more of content will be consumed on a pull-basis. Value for value — we’ll pay for the content we want to support. Directly to the producers — without middle men nor forced packages. For example, a popular podcast “No Agenda” is 100% donation-based. Hosts haven’t became the millionaires, but they do get by.

Leo Laporte, a guy behind TWiT with dozens of different video podcasts, has an option to “tip” him on a website. He gets his yearly salary of $100K from the tips, reinvesting the balance into the business.

There is no reason I should pay for the cable companies’ “packages” of channels I will never watch. I want to go directly to the source!

 

How to lead in the pull-based market?

The answer is pretty simple: produce amazing content. Customers will find you whenever they realize a need for your products/services/content.

Recently, a comedian Louis CK went direct-to-consumers and topped $1 million in sales while charging $5 per download. He did not care about the piracy and files did not contain any restrictions. Granted, Louis CK had a lot of fans to begin with, but producing really good stuff will get you noticed. It won’t make you a $1 million overnight, but in the long run — it might.

 

Think of it as “pay-per-like” model

As I understand, with the cable packages, content producers get paid even if you never watch certain channels. With Netflix or Pandora, royalties are distributed per view/listen.

I think, we all should put our best effort every time — like we are getting paid by number of “Likes”, tweets, shares, inbound links, etc.

Imagine if artists wouldn’t get their royalty if a person listening to the song skips or “thumbs down” it?

Imagine if royalties were distributed after you watch a movie. Let’s say you pay $8 per month for Netflix and watched 8 movies ($1 per movie). At the end of the month, you can give a “bonus” to the movies you liked by taking  some royalties away from the movies you did not enjoy.

Adopt this mindset today!

This model would force production of the best content and Hollywood wouldn’t be able to get away with just a great trailer — movie would have to meet expectations set by it.

If more talented people start following Louis CK, we might see this model in action, but even today, would it hurt to put out the best content in the world?

Posted in Adding Value, Inbound Marketing, Online Marketing, Think Long-Term, User Experience | No Comments »

Experts vs. Fake Experts: Why Perception is not the Reality

Dec 19th, 2011 by

A few months ago, I had to take my wife’s car to a shop. Car was running super loud — the exhaust flex pipe has broke.

I took it to the dealer-recommended garage, where they took care of everything in less than 30 minutes, charging me $100, mostly labor (“part” was a piece of metal). My first thought was “since it took so little, can you charge me less,” but I kept quiet. These guys were real pros and had lots of experience fixing similar problems.

If an amateur mechanic was fixing a car and it took him 2 hours, I would think that a hundred dollar charge is a steal. Perception is not the reality!

Clock

So, who are these experts?

Experts, by definition, are GREAT at what they do. They truly deliver VALUE. They are worth the money and won’t waste your time (costing you more) on unnecessary things. Continue Reading »

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Posted in Adding Value, Think Long-Term | No Comments »

Can your Mobile strategy become an SEO strategy?

Dec 2nd, 2011 by

Lately, I became more interested in mobile web and creating sites for phones. All kind of stats and trends tell us that it is already a huge market and is growing like crazy. Lots of people in the US own a smartphone with full-browser capabilities, but mobile networks are still slow to support larger, desktop versions of sites. Many website owners hurry to develop a “mobile strategy.”

If you’re one of them, I recommend watching “Mobile First” presentation by Luke Wroblewski (55 mins).

The key points are:

  • People come to your site with a particular task in mind.
  • Mobile limitations (small screen size, slow download speeds) allow us to FOCUS on what matters to users (instead of blasting site with pretty graphics, promotions, and banners).
  • Know what your site visitors are there for, design your mobile site to complete those tasks, and then carry over the same structure to a desktop site.

I agree with Luke’s approach 100%. It makes you focus, makes your website super-fast, and helps your visitors accomplish their tasks.

Now, what’s mobile strategy has to do with the SEO?

If you follow SEO news, you’ve heard about  Google’s Panda updates which algorithmically give higher rankings to “quality sites.” “Quality” is a vague term and many site owners are wondering what it means to Google.

In my opinion, any site or page which accomplished user’s task or solves her problem is a quality site. Search engines are likely to agree with this — lower bounce rates & users are not coming back to click on another listing / refine their search.

From this point of view:

  • Does design matter? Your site needs to look professional, but overall — not really.
  • Do fancy jQuery transitions help users get their task accomplished? Nope.
  • Do custom fonts justify decrease in site’s load speed? Absolutely not. If you use Arial instead of Futura, I will still buy from you as long as you have what I need.
  • Do big banners help your users find what they need? They might, but is there a better approach? You bet.

All the things above should never make a cut for the mobile site. They shouldn’t even make a cut for a full-sized site, but asking “Would it be good for mobile site?” might give you a good indicator on importance of the elements.

Furthermore, do things above matter for search engines? Nope. They are actually ignored by search engines.

So by focusing your time & efforts on creating a site which best serves your users and accomplishes their tasks as part of your mobile strategy is a great SEO strategy as well.

Things which help complete visitor’s task are important.

If you have an e-commerce store, what will be good for a mobile site?

Site element / feature Mobile site SEO
Fast load time crucial small signal for search engines
Easy navigation crucial good structure helps crawl the site
All text is plain text (not in an image) helps with a load time keywords on a page
jQuery transitions slows down the site ignored by search engines
Good product info Helps make a purchasing decision more keywords on a page

What’s good for mobile is good for SEO. What’s bad for mobile doesn’t help SEO. Focus on the user and rankings will follow (along with the happy users).

 

You have certain goals for your website, whether it is to sell products or generate leads. You need to focus. With monitors going up in sizes every year you have a lot of real estate on a homepage, but how much of stuff really matters? I’ve seen homepage banners actually detracting from site’s value — after doing A/B test, results showed that clicking on a banner distracted visitors and made them LESS likely to convert.

Look at your website from prospect’s point of view. 

Is is helpful? Contains necessary information? Finally, for each element ask: “Would I have this on a mobile site?”

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Posted in Adding Value, Mobile Site, SEO, User Experience | No Comments »

Rel=Prev, Rel=Next, and View All – Great pagination Solution, New from Google

Sep 18th, 2011 by

Last Thursday at SMX East in New York, Google’s Maile Ohye has announced a couple of interesting things Google will emphasize & support from now on.

First – emphasis on “View All” pages.

No changes required for your site, as long as your ‘View All’ link/page is crawlable or all pages have a rel=canonical pointed to the view all version.

Maile mentioned that they found out that users prefer to get full content rather than clicking “next” multiple times, AS LONG AS it doesn’t add too much latency. Perfect use – text-based content like news article, which won’t add extra seconds to download it. However if you own an e-commerce store, showing 200 items at the same page will get very slow because of the pictures… Read on.

Exciting second announcement: Google now supports markup for the “series content” (paginated): rel=”prev” and rel=”next” – both need to be specified in the <head> section of the page. Official announcement is located on Webmaster blog.

There were a lot of questions regarding the use and whether it will work better for paginated content (e.g., an article broken down in pages), archives (e.g., New York Times topic page about Obama) which only has links to the articles, or for the user-facing, paginated sitemap. Maile made it clear that Rel=Prev or Next has been designed to address all of the above.  Continue Reading »

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Posted in E-Commerce, SEO | No Comments »

B2Bs: Too much focus on immediate sale?

Jul 22nd, 2011 by

Abandoned Shopping Cart

Photo by Joelk75

When you shop for yourself, does it take long to buy something? Usually, not.

When you shop together with a spouse, how long does it take you now? (Let’s say you want to get a great gift.) You may be a great shopper, but it would still take longer than shopping for yourself and making decision on your own.

Having a particular problem in mind (a gift), deadline, responsibility which comes with your selection, and another decision-maker increases your time-to-purchase and begins to look a lot like business’.

Businesses can’t afford making an impulse purchase or not considering alternatives, which altogether makes B2B conversion funnel longer. Whether you cater to mom n’ pop shop, bakery, or a nonprofit, they all need to pitch few alternatives to co-workers and confirm they decision with somebody else. Buyer wants to make a good decision and end up “looking good” in front of others (will you look good when your gift is opened?).

 

Businesses catering to other businesses want an immediate sale.

Far too many PPC and SEO efforts in B2B industry focus on an immediate sale. Whether you shop for business cards, new copier, or promotional products — the majority of companies will land you on a page and call your attention to that “buy now” button. Yes, small fraction does end up buying right there, but over 90% are simply in a research phase. What do you do about them?

Continue Reading »

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Posted in Adding Value, E-Commerce, Online Marketing, Think Long-Term | No Comments »

Single best way to prevent your customers promoting you

Jul 18th, 2011 by

Over the past few weeks, my wife and I got to travel to my home country Latvia and had our second wedding (this time in Romania.)  It was our first trip after getting married — so we tried to show each other the best, including lots of museums, castles, and palaces.

While visiting your typical tourist places, one thing kept striking me — if you want to take pictures, you need to pay. Varying from two dollars (Rundales Pils in Latvia) to as high as ten (Romanian Palace of The Parliament), you got to purchase that sticker!

Instead of allowing visitors to take photos & show to their friends, share on Flickr, do free advertising and cause others to say “Wow, where is this?,” museums are so shortsighted and prefer short-term earnings.

 

While you aren’t likely in business of attracting tourists, what other roadblocks do YOU setup to prevent your customers promoting you?

  • Did you set up a Foursquare account so people can easily check-in?
  • Do you have a free Wifi at your place of business?
  • Do you have social icons placed throughout your website?
Sinaia, Romania

Sinaia, Romania

Posted in Online Marketing, Think Long-Term | No Comments »

(For a limited time only!) Make SPEED your competitive advantage.

May 19th, 2011 by

There should be absolutely NO reason for a stock product to ship in more than 12 hours. I want it FAST. Ideally, I’d love to have it tomorrow.

Make SPEED your competitive advantage! (While you can.)

 

Yesterday

In the past, some companies would invest in process automation. This company would reduce their costs and make itself more competitive. Over the time, others would implement similar automation and this would level the playing field for all. In fact, automation+efficient processes would become a requirement to enter the industry.

Point: be first to gain first-mover advantage; be last to catch up with competition.

Today

Companies like Zappos or services like Amazon Prime make speed their competitive advantage. Order shoes today, you’ll try them on tomorrow. Order any household item, you’ll use it in 2 days. What a difference from placing a catalog order a decade ago! Continue Reading »

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Posted in Differentiation, User Experience | No Comments »

5 Things You DON’T Hear About A/B Testing

Feb 10th, 2011 by

I love to run AB tests. They are great for measuring impact, good in preventing bad decisions, and good for the continuous improvement. Whether it’s a big, high-impact project, or a simple change, doing an test is always a good idea: in theory. I’d like to point out 5 things which you’ll need to consider before committing to an AB/N test or multi-variable test (MVT), whether you’re a small business owner or working for a large company.

AB Testing

1. Getting a Buy-In From Others

Getting buy-in might seem like an easy task, given that testing will allow you to make data-driven decisions. However, changing the company and introducing this “culture of testing” might be harder than it seems. Continue Reading »

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Posted in A/B Testing, E-Commerce, Online Marketing, Think Long-Term | No Comments »

Spreading Seth Godin’s Ideas

Jan 14th, 2011 by

Seth Godin’s blog posts get lots of attention. Yesterday I sat thru his webinar on getting & spreading ideas. Seth had lots of recommendations on what’s working, why are people spreading ideas, and how to make it easy to encourage that.

Yes, I’d like to spread Seth’s ideas & according to the list he presented, I’m spreading it because:

  • Seth is expert in business/entrepreneurship
  • Posts are timeless
  • He’s generous & shares expertise (even though webinar isn’t free, his blog is)
  • He writes short posts
  • He doesn’t post off-topic
  • He doesn’t interrupt posts with links
  • He doesn’t promote himself or his books
  • Makes me look good & smart
  • I appreciate him generously blogging (for free) and want to give back by spreading his ideas
  • I’d miss his posts if they disappeared from my feed

What about your company’s blog? Why customers follow it & would they notice if you stopped posting?

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Enabling Rich Snippets for E-Commerce: What do you need to do

Nov 7th, 2010 by

Last week, Google Webmaster Central blog announced rich snippets for shopping sites. Pretty exciting news for e-commerce community! (for now, available in US only.)

But first things first. What are search snippets  & what makes them “rich”?

Rich snippets for shopping sites

Snippet (or search snippet) is information from your webpage that Google (or other search engine) thinks is relevant to user’s query. It could be your meta description, but if it isn’t relevant to a search query, Google will substitute it with more valuable information.

Rich snippet is additional information about web page, which has been explicitly provided thru special mark-up on the page. Currently supported information for rich snippets are: reviews, people, events, products, recipes, and businesses. Mark-up is done in HTML code of the site, and few formats are available: microdata, microformats, RDFa and GoodRelations (for e-commerce).

Enhancing your search snippets for product details pages.

There are clear advantages to do this NOW, before your competition. Not only it instantly draws attention to your listing, it also adds value to potential buyers by giving them star rating, pricing, and stock availability. I couldn’t find how much of an impact it might have on the click-through rate, but research has been done in the past about user-generated customer reviews (from Social Commerce Stats by Bazaarvoice):

Highly-rated product will increase likelihood of purchasing for 55% of consumers. (eConsultancy, July 2010)

Products with syndicated reviews convert 26% higher. (Bazaarvoice Case Study, 2009)

Continue Reading »

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Posted in E-Commerce, SEO, User Experience | No Comments »

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