SIMB Articles

The smartphone market is an incredibly fast moving space to watch at the moment. Not only is there a growing shift in consumer spending from purchasing feature phones to Internet savvy smart phones, there are also no monopolistic players that have an iron grip on the market. Competition is fierce and at this time there are at least 6 major smartphone operating systems fighting for market share: Windows Mobile, Symbian, OSX, Blackberry, Android and WebOS.

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Despite Google’s ‘do no evil’ company motto, I think their business model is at least slightly evil. You see, this is a company that makes money by people clicking on links. No, let me rephrase that, this is a company that makes money by software reading (or “pulling”) the content behind links. “What’s so evil about that?” I hear you ask. Well, let me list a few little problems.

Reason 1 : There is no correlation between Google getting paid and advertisers finding new customers.

As far as Google’s concerned, as long as that special link has been “clicked on”, they get paid regardless of whether the clicker was actually interested in that product or service. I’ve recently spoken to a web developer that was involved in projects where websites where created to deliberately trick people into clicking on links. Sponsored Google links were integrated into sites in such a way that they looked like normal navigational menu items. Nasty stuff. I’ve also been to web sites where businesses are deliberately exposed to adsense links of their competitors. Guess what they’re going to do - that’s right, they’re going to click on those links to check out their competitors. In this case the advertisers are paying Google to send their competitors to them - just splendid! To reiterate, there are too many circumstances where clicks are not from real prospects, and this problem will only grow as more and more hackers exploit the system against advertisers.

Reason 2: There is no guarantee that what Google calls a “click” is even the result of a human clicking on a link.

I could write a little program that automatically does a Google search, finds an adsense link and then “reads” it. So long as I send the right information so my program looks like a browser, and I emulate human behaviour (by slowing my program down), I’m certain I could fool Google into thinking my software was a person, and thus end up costing an advertiser money. Certainly, if I tried to do this more than a couple of times then Google would detect suspicious activity and not count any more false “clicks”. However, if my program was a distributed “botnet”, trojan or worm, that did this from hundreds of thousands of different computers from different IP addresses, each clicking on different links slowly over time so as not to arouse to much suspicion, well, the result would be click fraud on a massive scale. Advertisers lose big time, Google still wins.

Reason 3: Google has an inherent conflict of interest when it comes to natural search placement for businesses.

In short, they cannot allow most businesses to be found easily by natural search, because if they did, not as many businesses would pay them for sponsored advertising, and then Google’s shareholders would be unhappy.

Obviously creating such a system where every business receives exposure would not be easy, but there are things Google could do to make the situation better, but they wont. Consider for example if Google implemented a “business” search option, where businesses or the same type/category would come up randomly in search results. If you searched for say “Melbourne Electrician” twice, different Melbourne electricians would come up each time and therefore there would be a reasonable chance that all businesses of this type would receive at least some exposure via natural search.

As it stands at the moment, Google says “go ahead and go nuts with keyword optimisation and nonsensical unnatural in-link creating campaigns, because in the end we have just 10 slots on page 1 and we don’t care who fills them. Everyone else will have to pay us for sponsored search”.

Ask yourself this question: Why should a website that is for an electrician need more than 4 pages, and why should such a website need 500 in-links just to get exposure? It shouldn’t. And there is absolutely no correlation between a business that is aggressively optimising and that business actually delivering a great product with great service.

Google is presenting just two choices: Play the frustrating and silly game of creating ridiculous content and links, or pay them big money for “clicks” that they don’t even know are from interested prospects, or even real people.

There’s got to be a better way for businesses to market themselves online that is fairer.

It’s not rocket science.  Follow these steps:

1. Go to: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. Enter in any phrase you like, say for example “steam cleaner melbourne”.
3. Google will then come back with a whole list of related phrases to the one you entered, like “carpet cleaner”, “hard floor steam cleaners”, etc.
4. Importantly, for each phrase, Google will show you how popular it is (i.e, how many people are searching for your services using each keyword).

Why is this important?

If you want people to find your website, your website must match against keywords people are actually using to find your products or services.

You can create a strategy as to which phrases you should target (hint: try and find keywords that people are searching for but your competitors are not exploiting).

You can structure your website links and write your page titles, headings and page contents to match your keyword strategy, and thereby improve your Google search rankings.

If you care where you website ranks in Google search, then you care about Page Rank!

• Page rank was invented by Larry Page, co-founder of Google.
• Page rank says that the more websites there are that link to your website, the more important your website must be
• If an “important” website links to your website, the “weight” (significance) of that link is much greater.

In the diagram to the left, imagine each circle is a website and each arrow from one circle to another is a link from one website to another.

Which website has the most links pointing at it?

B (the red circle) has the most links pointing at it, and it has the highest Page Rank.

Note however that C also has a very high Page Rank, and yet it only has one link pointing to it.  Why?  Because B is linking to it, and B has a huge page rank, so the “power” of B’s page rank is transferred to C.

Tips:

• Get as many links to your website as possible.
• Ask business partners to link to your website.
• List your website on business directories like HotFrog.com.au
• Write an article on Squidoo and link back to your own website. There are plenty of other websites where you can publish articles too.
• If you’re a member of professional associations or clubs, you might be able to get a link to your website from the association’s website.
• Engage a journalist to write an article about your business that might get published on a newspaper website.
• Find out who is linking to your competitors and try and links back from them too.

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Matt Cutts,  Google’s most famous search engineer confirmed today that, in terms of web site rankings, the meta keywords tag is dead.

The reason for this is pretty obvious: people can stuff keywords in their website’s keywords tag that has absolutely no relevance to the visible page contents in order to deceive the search engines.  This practice used to go on until Google stamped on it some time ago.

Matt went to to list the following aspects of a web page as being important for good rankings:

• Make sure your search term(s) are on the page.
• Fill in your title and description tags with your search term too.
• Get other sites to link back to you.
• Create a blog and post often.
• Register for Google’s free tools.
• If you’re a business with a physical shop front, make sure you fill in Google’s business registration form google.com/local/add

There’s nothing new there, but I guess if anyone had any doubts about the relevancy (or lack thereof) of the keywords tag then this is definitive proof.

If you’re interested, here’s the original article.

Note: In this article I am reacting to the book by Mark Stevens called “Your Marketing Sucks“

1. The importance of a value proposition

Before marketing your business, you MUST figure out what it is about your business that makes you genuinely different from your competitors. This is called a value proposition. Your value proposition should not be the usual clichés about how hard you work, or how much expertise you have, as these are assumed. What you need is something that gives you a competitive advantage.

Some examples of good value propositions are:

• Low cost leader (Cheap as chips)
• Best of bread in terms of quality (BMW)
• The most technologically advanced (Nike)
• The most convenient (7/11)
• The easiest (Apple – it just works)
• The fastest (Snap printing, Ferrari).

Your value proposition is something that must be communicated in every single marketing communication (email, snail mail, online), over and over and over.

2. Your customer must fall in love with your product or service.

Customers will buy your product or service not because they think it is “satisfactory” or “good enough”, they buy when they think it’s awesome, that it’s going to change their world and they can’t do without it. In short, they must LOVE your product. So, when you get in front of a potential client it’s your job as a salesperson to make this happen. Just how this is done is the trick, and obviously what you’re selling and the context will differ dramatically, but some important aspects for my industry will be:

• Creating an emotional connection.
• Building trust and credibility.
• Convincing them that they need (not want) what you’re offering.
• Convincing them that you are the only person that can deliver it as <value proposition> cheaply/quickly/high quality as they need it.

Not so different from a standard relationship is it?

3. The 1-2-3 punch.

So you’ve developed your value proposition and you’re ready to start marketing. Before you do, be aware of the following: Do not expect your prospects to do the work. They should not have to pick up the phone, or write a letter to take up your product. You should be calling them.

The most successful marketing strategy is often to use the 1-2-3 punch, that is, a synergistic combination of email, direct mail and calling.

• Send a targeted email with a punchy subject that is relevant to the prospects industry. Having a non-targeted subject will ensure that your email ends up as junk.
• Follow up the email with a phone call. If the call goes through to voice mail, that’s OK, leave a short message that reinforces the main points of the email.
• Have something arrive in the snail mail letter box a few days later.

If certain prospects have not contacted you within a week, call again. With sales, persistence is the key.

4. You cannot create a sales person, and not all sales people are sales people.

Mark says that a sales person is born to be a sales person: they are relentless, and they close deals. People that are not born sales people, even with the best of intentions, cannot end up becoming effective sales people. To make matters worse, most people who say they are sales people are not. They are just trying to be. Perhaps they are “giving it a go” because they had no other options, or perhaps they just think they’re naturally sociable and therefore a good fit. Wrong. Good sales people are rare, and it is your job as a business owner to find them, and fire those that are not working.

My opinion: I’m not sure about this one. I’ve heard both arguments, that you can, and cannot, make a sales people, and, I’m inclined to believe that some people at least can become a sales person if they undergo a shift in “state of mind” and learn to overcome fear (perhaps with the help of a psychology of hypnotist). But I’m no expert.

That’s all for today.

Having just finished my I.T. Masters degree I decided that I should continue learning on a weekly basis. Learning keeps me energised and focused.

After 8 years of full time programming, I’m pretty confident in my ability to code to a high standard and engineer solid databases, and Libby can design beautiful graphics and layout elegant web pages, but neither of us have any training in marketing. Marketing, let’s face it, is important.

So I went to Borders today and picked up a book by Mark Stevens called “Your Marketing Sucks“. The title was instantly appealing (because well, my marketing could be improved somewhat), and Mark’s writing style was clear and entertaining. As I read the book I’m going to blog my learnings here (under the Marketing tag), so if you’re interested that’s where you’ll find it.

The first chapter was short and simple, and basically laid out some pretty obvious but nontheless important things a business should do:

• Know what you’re selling.
• Know why your business is different from your competitors.
• Don’t engage in marketing just for the sake of it.
• Don’t use marketing techniques that cost your more than you get back from it.

Written by Andrew Chapman of SIMB.

The goal of this article is to help our readers to write their website content in search engine friendly way.

1. Choosing the right keyword combinations.

When potential customers are trying to find your business online, they will choose combinations of words that they associate with your services. For example, if I was wanting to purchase a Canon digital camera, I might search for “canon camera buy Melbourne”. Knowing what word combinations your customers are entering into search engines is of critical importance. If the content of your website doesn’t contain at least some of the popular word combinations, your customers wont find you.

In addition to knowing what search phrases are being used, it’s also important to evaluate how flooded the market is for your product or service. If you offer a popular product, there will be a lot of competition from established businesses. This is called “contention”. If your business is in a highly contended area, a good starting strategy is to choosing more focused search phrases. Consider the difference between the phrases “buy canon camera” and “buy canon camera melbourne”. The latter phrase is much more focused (due to the word “Melbourne”), which means there will be less competition for that search phrase and so achieving a good ranking is more realistic.

Finally, you should choose only one or two search phrases to focus on. Having too many search phrases in a document will dilute the important phrases, which will harm search results.

You might be wondering how you can find out what keywords people are using for search. It’s actually not that hard, as there are tools available to help you research the best possible keywords, including Google’s free keyword tool and Word Tracker.

2. Using the word combinations to good affect.

Once you’ve chosen a couple of good search phrases to target, they need to appear in your web site page. There are a few factors here to consider:

a) The key words and phrases should appear in your web page title and heading. Headings on web pages are like the front page headings on newspapers; they are considered to be of vital importance.

b) The search phrases should also appear in the first paragraph of your text. As a rule, the higher up in the document the search phrases appear, the more important they are considered to be.

c) For a document to be considered valuable, it should be of respectable length. A document containing 40 words is not going to rate as highly as a document containing 800 words.

d) Your search phrases should appear several times in the document (don’t go over board though). Generally speaking, your search phrases should comprise at least 1.5% of the total word count, and can go as high as 5% before search engines will start thinking they are being “spammed”. As a rule of thumb, if your web page doesn’t look or read like a normal document then chances are Google wont like it and you’ll be punished instead of getting ahead!

3. Get as many QUALITY inbound links to your website as you can.

Ever heard of the term PageRank before? PageRank is the heart of Google’s ranking system. The idea is that if lots of other websites in the same or related domain as your product or service are linking to you, then there’s a good chance that your website is important. In other words, your website will be scored according to how many relevant links are pointing to your website, and as a part of your on-going marketing campaign, you should get as many links as possible. These can be from:

• Other websites in your market area that aren’t competing directly with you, but are still related to you. As an example, consider a wedding dress provider linking to a wedding cake maker. They’re not competing, but there is synergy between these businesses. Often getting a link exchange in place is as simple as making a phone call or sending an email.
• Article and blog websites. If you can write and you have the time, write as much as you can about anything related to your business, and then post those articles on websites that host articles, such EzineArticles, GoArticles and iSnare. When your articles are published, these websites will link back to your website above or below the article.
• Websites that are business directories. These websites place businesses into categories, and then provide descriptions and links to websites. Some popular directories include: HotFrog, OzeBiz and AussieNow.
  

Links from related businesses or articles are the best ones to aim for. They’re more favourably regarded by the search engines, and they’re also more likely to bring you business. Links from directories are not given much importance by Google, simply because they’re so easy to get.

That’s all for now. Happy writing!