Ok, the write-up worked and I’m trying out @Sendible free for 30 days. Could be fun.

]]> http://metricvoodoo.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/untitled/feed/ 0 metricvoodoo http://metricvoodoo.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/hanging-a-useful-shingle/ http://metricvoodoo.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/hanging-a-useful-shingle/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:52:30 +0000 metricvoodoo http://metricvoodoo.com/?p=403 ]]> Recently, I was hired to do some third party consulting for Intuit with regard to how clients are using their Homestead Web site building tool for establishing their web presence, then provide a critique of the overall process of the “home grown web site” process. It was like stepping into a way-back machine.

Hordes of hobbyists and small business owners have really taken to Intuit’s hosting and site building service. I was able to review sites on all sorts of topics, from lawn care to terminal illness awareness. Some of the results were surprising in their innovation, but equally surprising was the sheer number of sites that looked and felt like they were built in 1999 using a a really old version of Front Page. I won’t call anyone out by linking to their sites, but I can describe some of the mistakes I saw repeatedly.

Why Am I Here? What Do I Do?

I guess my favorite has to be “the site without a purpose.” The list of sites I was asked to review were sites where the owners had requested feedback and suggestions for improvement. I assumed I would be looking at sites that were ready to be shown to the world. Alas, such was not the case… one of the sites I reviewed had two different business names on the main page – I didn’t know which business’ site I was on until I went digging around a little bit. If that’s not confusing to a site visitor, I don’t know what is. One of the first immutable rules of web development and design is that every page has to answer some important questions for the user, like: Why am I here? What do you want me to do?

If a person lands on your site and confusion ensues, they’re not going to stick around. Having a clearly labeled site is a no-brainer, or should be. I can honestly say that I am no fan of MLM marketing pages, but those guys never let there be a doubt as to why you’re on their sites – they beat you over the head with the reason you’re there: Buy now! Order soon! Save $800 in the next five minutes! Click here to make easy money! Fill out this form to receive my secret E-book! Play this video to see how my system works! Sign up for free classes!

You know the routine – we don’t necessarily like the incessant nature of these pages, (of which, this image is a sample) but you have to admit, there’s absolutely no doubt as to why we’re on this page or what the site owner wants us to do: click here, fill out a form, buy now, watch my video…

The vast majority of the sites I reviewed all suffered from some form of “identity crisis,” the most prevalent being the site owner’s complete absence of any idea why they were putting the site there. They couldn’t tell the visitor what to do because the site owner themselves had no idea why the site was built.

Before you hang out your shingle, figure out exactly what your web site is supposed to do first. Brochure-ware sites are no longer useful. “Billboards on the Information Highway” are way outdated – don’t fool yourself into thinking your web site can be of any use to you if you’re just using it as an electronic business card. You don’t need bling. You need a purpose for the site to fulfill that makes it worth the trouble it took (and the money it costs) to keep it around.

WordPress Plugins that I’ve Added to my “Starter Kit”

SEO Automatic Core Tweaks – ok, how can you not love something with a name like that? This ONE plugin takes a lot of nagging little changes that I have to make to every single WordPress install, and does them FOR me!Why is the default permalink structure set to use those stupid ID numbers?  Who knows, but this plugin will change that for you, so you don’t forget and have your site indexed by Google with the wrong link structure. It also deletes the “Hello World” post and it’s annoying comment… When left to their own devices after installation, my clients by and large never remember to do that so I have to do it for them. Then this handly little plugin also adds an XML site map generator, a page order adjuster, and a gadget that lets you handily specify which pages appear in the menu.

Greg’s High Performance SEO – for years, literally, I’ve gotten good enough results with All-in-One SEO and/or Platinum SEO that I haven’t really bothered looking at anything else – the real SEO work is not done in the code – it’s in the writing and networking, so any tool that lets me customize some meta tags on a per page basis was pretty much all I cared about. ‘Til now. As an old SEO pro, I am well aware of using SEO best practices while writing an article, so I know how utilize key phrases in title tags and heading tags. The average person has no clue about this stuff. Greg’s interface, while a little daunting at first, does a very good job of just telling what you can do with all the additional options that the WordPress blogger is not used to seeing. He also offers a different canonical URL solution, that otherwise is not addressed by any SEO all-in-one solution that I’ve seen.

TweetBlender – this is an excellent little gadget for web sites about subjects… ok, that sounds dumb. Let me explain. TweetBlender isn’t about posting your own tweets back into your blog like all those other tools. It’s about providing a snapshot of twitter activity on your blog. You can have TweetBlender monitor RSS Twitter feeds from people, hash tags, or even just keywords. What you get is a blend of comments on the topic. If you tell it to monitor #musicmonday, your widget will encapsulate the latest X number of comments from anyone under that topic, not just you, or people you follow. So if your site is about the subject of music, you might want to install TweetBlender and have it monitor that hash tag!

Theme My Login – This might be considered a vanity plugin but it really is useful to two kinds of WordPress managers – people like me who have 16 WordPress sites all going at once and sometimes forget which one I’m trying to get to, and people who install WordPress for business clients. It’s a very simple theme that requires no special work – just install it, and it applies the currently active theme to the login page.

WP Theme – Speaking of themes, as someone who installs WordPress for other people who have no idea what they’re in for, this is a really handy way of offering someone a preview of dozens of themes and letting them decide what they like without risking them activating a theme you’re not ready for. You install the plugin, then navigate to the management page under Settings in the menu and you are presented with a page that includes links to all the themes you have currently installed on the server. You can copy and paste this link into email or into a spreadsheet or other document and send the list of LINKS to your client. They can then click on each one to see a sample layout of their site in that theme, without having the ability to activate it before you’re ready for that.

Be sure to check out the main blogs at MetricVoodoo.com and LollipopSocial.com for more about how I use WordPress as the basis for Pervasive SEO and Online Reputation Building.

Taking a page from my own reams of advice on the subject, I’ve finally set up a blog on WordPress.com. This is not to say that I haven’t already polluted the world with blogs aplenty – I just have never taken the time to set one up here.

There, now I feel like I’ve accomplished something today!

There are some basic features that most failed affiliate marketers share. There are more than three, but a few issues seem to show up over and over again – and I’m not even a person who voluntarily works with affiliate marketers and I see this… so they merit some individual attention.

Affiliate Marketing Fail #1 – Lack of Research

This is an odd conundrum. Folks who are jumping on the affiliate bandwagons are often using shortcuts to get into business for themselves… I don’t mean to insult anyone but that act in itself is just a tad bit lazy. So expecting new affiliate marketers who are all hyped up on the latest “Amway” presentation to slow down for five minutes and actually do some real research is probably futile. But the sad fact is that if you don’t stop and think out your plan of action, you will royally screw yourself.

I have two real life incidents to illustrate how folks who get all caught up in the hype (emotion) of the next great thing have wasted time and money because they failed to engage the brain (logic) and actually plan their moves. In another article I wrote about a gentlman who planned to take the world by storm by selling lessons on how to use Google. You see, he had paid some ridiculous amount of money to take a class himself on how to use Google – you know, how to use all the advanced operands and so forth. He took notes and downloaded recordings and basically copied the entire course and decided to sell it himself, as well as have affiliates sell his course for him. He spent several thousand dollars having a company re-do all the instructional work as new Flash presentations. He then hired the same company to build him a new Flash-based web site. He could afford this because he only had to spend 4 cents per click to bid on “google” in Adwords – Google’s keyword estimator said so. He was going to make a killing because his advertising, and that of his affiliates, would be so cheap.

Not once had this guy ever bothered to actually type in “google” into Google’s search field and see what came up. You can imagine my reaction to this “killer PPC strategy.” It was pretty much, “Dude, you really think Google is about to let anyone advertise on their brand for 4 cents a click? Wake up.” At one point he actually bid up to $10 a click and his ads still never ran.

Now I’m not talking about some heavy duty, all-night research here – this is basic. Type in a search term and see who you compete against. It’s not hard. If you see NO ONE advertising in the paid ad space, there’s a reason. There is no such thing as the magic keyword that no one ever thought to bid on…

But what if there are advertisers?

My second example is an actual affiliate, who decided that he could make a fortune using PPC to push ads to his affiliate site, which is how it’s supposed to work, right? He bought a domain name, paid someone to build a site, and was in the process of collecting bid proposals for PPC work when I ran across his RFP… to build an Adwords campaign for electronic cigarettes.

Ok, yes, there are people advertising these things because they spring up faster than Google can squash them. But the plain fact is that it is against Adwords policy to advertise any cigarette product, electronic or not. They state it quite plainly in their editorial guidelines. The same thing happened with a site that sold organic herbs who decided to carry and advertise absinthe… great idea. Too bad it’s against policy. Google disables the ads and if you keep re-enabling them, Google will ban your account, plain and simple. If you want to set up another account and try again, good luck – have some spare credit cards all with separate billing addresses and knock yourself out.

In both those cases, a complete lack of familiarity with PPC guidelines cost these folks more money than they ever made, simply because they didn’t take the time to research the market, or ask an expert before jumping into their venture with both feet.

If your businesses success is predicated on PPC success, you owe it to yourself to either dig down and get the facts or hire a consultant for an hour and get their opinion of your plan… and you must have a plan.

But there’s an even more important part to paid online advertising that is overlooked by practicallyeveryone but the most sophisticated advertisers… ROI. Sure, everyone san say it. Everyone knows what it stands for. Everyone knows it’s a benchmark for paid ad performance. But almost no one knows what goes into the mathematics of making sure you actually earn a Return On your Investment in that paid click.

It’s surprising to me how much news there’s been in the online ad world lately about “post click” optimization. It’s as though it never occurred to anyone that the transaction doesn’t end on the landing page. If you aren’t tracking user behavior, watching the paths your visitors take through your site after the click, you’re missing a huge chunk of the story here. You might beat everyone else’s price on widgets by $200 but if your cart gets the hiccups in the middle of a transaction and frustrated users leave, you won’t see any return on that investment in the click.

And even then, assuming you make the sale, are you tracking ads, clicks and conversions in enough detail to be able to match up the cost of the click with the sale totals? How will you know if you’re actually making any profit on your sales if you aren’t able to relate the individual sale back to the search term that started the process?

When PPC analysts start talking to business owners about advanced analytics to enable bidding to economics, their eyes glaze over.  I don’t really blame them – I don’t know too many business owners who like Algebra. But if you really want to optimize your campaigns, you need to be able to prove that keyword A has a cost of $n per click but has produced $r dollars in sales of item B – then you need to know the margin on item B so you can see if there’s any profit there after deducting the cost of $n from the earnings.  If not, then your keyword is not profitable and you’re bidding to high for the markup – you either need to bid lower, raise the price on the item, or figure out how to target items with higher profit margins to begin with…  if you can’t find the relationship between sales and clicks, you’re up a creek without the right paddle.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman of the Rimm-Kaufman group has a most excellent 3-minute explanation of using economic factors to control bidding.

What it all boils down to is this: if you are not using the proper tracking techniques that allow you to match up the keyword with the items purchased at checkout, you will never know the answer to “what’s my ROI?”

On another site, I commented about all the uproar over the BK-Spongebob commercial, which seemed to me the latest in a string of missed crowdsourcing opportunities for Burger King. Another famous backlash commercial was the Motrin commercial that ticked off a certain micro-segment of the “mom” market and resulted in Johnson & Johnson yanking the commercial completely (after paying for production and air time) and posting an apology on the Motrin web site, all because a relative “handful” of internet-connected, socially-active moms felt insulted and started talking about boycotts. 

Why don’t these ads get tested in front of the right groups? I heard one TV marketer observe that “pre-releasing” television commercials lessened the “impact of the message.” What? Aren’t you the same people who tell us that you have to see an ad seven million times before we remember what it’s advertising? How can additional free exposure be a bad thing for a video ad?

Marketers, you have, in the internet, the perfect, completely FREE, perpetual focus group, if you’d just learn how to use it. If you’re a big-dollar marketing firm and you don’t include this sort of testing in your video ad production process, you might want to take another look – you no longer have an excuse to be ignorant of the immediate feedback potential of free video streaming sites as viable test beds. Don’t ignore the potential to let the audience tell you exactly what they most want to see from your next commercial.

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One new type of fraud discovered this quarter was perpetrated by malicious scripts that execute when a visitor views a web page disguised as relevant content or search results. The script initiates “Zero-iframe” or off-screen clicks that route the visitor session through an alias referrer website, and on to unsuspecting advertisers who pay for the phantom click. All this occurs transparently to the offending site’s visitor; they never see the ad or visit the advertiser, and their computer is not infected with any type of malware or botnet.

The other really interesting item, to me, was the statement that the greatest percentage of click fraud originating outside the good ole US, came from Canada, the UK, and Germany. My SEO background in malware attacks had me thinking Asia would dominate as the source of click fraud, but apparently, that’s not necessarily the case with paid ad fraud.

The good news across the board though, is that the PPC platforms themselves are accounting for the drop in click fraud, as they’ve become more sophisticated in preventing it. The bad news, of course, is that click fraudsters are moving to other types of ad networks, which are still more susceptible to these sorts of attacks. Darn.