Craig’s Mostly Search Blog

One of the mistakes I see marketers make frequently is they have delusions about how much “passion” visitors should have on their site.

The experience of surfing the Internet is distant, cold, and removed.  The digital, satellite enabled transmission of data does not cater to emotional seduction.

People insult one another on message boards and through email because the reality of personal presence does not exist.   It’s far too easy to flame someone remotely than in person.  And it happens all the time.

Let me ask you a question.

How many websites can you name for which you feel a warm, personal, spiritual relationship with?  How many interactions have you had with websites that have left you breathless?

I know that right now, you are thinking hard.

Websites cannot give us what people can. Marketers too often forget this.  They want code base to connect with people the only way people can.

I can’t think of one website that has inspired me by way of aesthetics.  The most value I have experienced has been through the cold and clean interface of Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Google.

Websites deliver information.  I want that information quickly so I can go back into the world where my sense are more than virtually stimulated.

Just give information.

I get asked this question all the time, “is our bounce rate too high?”

Here is the reality of bounce rates: they don’t matter if you don’t analyze them against another performance indicator.

Here’s an example - the bounce rates on home pages tend to be lower than internal pages.

Why?

Because on a home page, visitors have to click a few things to get closer to the information they want.

So - yea!  You have a lower bounce rate on your homepage.

But your internal pages may have higher bounce rates.

So what.

If visitors found the internal page because that page gave them the information they wanted, you should be looking at time on site (TOS), or, if you have a direct marketing agenda, the response rates to your calls to action.

I’ll follow this post up with WHY bounce rates are even less meaningful than we think.

Musicians are no longer looking to the major labels as the silver-bullet they once were in order to launch careers.

Tonight I am on a panel discussing marketing for musicians, and I thought I’d put some of my ideas on this blog to centralize my thoughts.

1. Put Google Analytics (GA) on your website.  It’s free, and it’s a great way of tracking how many people go to your website, how they got there, which pages engaged them, and a lot more.  Ask your webmaster to install it, and you can log into GA to view a fanastic world of information.
2. Make sure your website looks professional - if it looks bad, you appear lame.
3. Send your music to online distributors.  You can use Community Musician for this.
4. Send your CD to Pandora - they require a unique submission process.
5. Use social networking sites.  I’m not going to go into the details here, but I highly recommend reading The New Influencers by Paul Gillin.  You’ll learn a lot about how to work with bloggers and social networking sites.
6. Send out press releases.  You can do so for as little as $80 on PR Web.  PR Web has tutorials on successful press releases, but I also suggest researching the topic online or buying a book.  You will want to not only use PR Web, but also send releases directly to journalists.  Make sure you understand how to write a good press story (hence the research).
7. Make friends.  Whether these are other bands, journalists, club owners, or engineers - everyone you befriend becomes an asset.
8. Have a newsletter and use a real service.  I suggest Vertical Response.  Again, research email marketing so you leverage the power of email.
9. Hire a stylist.  Image is more important than it should be.
10. Consider raising money through your fan base.  Check out what we did for Spencer Day.  (Go to the homepage and look at the left column for two ways to fund Spencer).
11. Consider writing a song about a topic with high profile.  For example, my band wrote a song about Al Franken. I sent the CD to his radio show, and I saw hundreds of visits per day for weeks after he apparently played it on his radio show.
12. Use Wikipedia.  The bass player in my band has a famous grandfather (Arthur Hailey).  We edited that page to note the fact that Ryan is in a band in San Francisco.  We get traffic every day from that page. The more you associate yourself with topics that are searched for online, the more traffic you can siphen.
13. Use paid search to bid on names of bands that might share a common fan base with you.  If this sounds confusing, research it on Google AdWords.
14. Be honest with yourself.  Some musicians are destined to be obscure because of their esoteric music.  Ask people you trust for their honest opinion about your music so you can set your expectations.  Maybe you need voice lessons.  Make sure you have someone you trust giving you the brutal truth.  At the same time, believe in yourself.
15. Having money helps.  If you choose a low-paying job so that you have more time for music, you have less money to move forward.  A musician I know rented out a high-profile club for $6000 so he could play on a Saturday night.  He spent money on marketing and nearly broke even.  After the event, he realized it cost him about $1000 to play a high profile club in front of hundreds of people.  That might pay off in the long run, if it doesn’t he still doesn’t mind spending $1000 to play gigs other musicians dream of.

That’s all for now - I have more ideas but I just wanted to start off with a quick list of things you can do for your career.

Get to the point quickly. Imagine that you have 45 seconds to tell a CEO what has to happen to survive or succeed.

The CEO is less concerned with the tactics that he or she doesn’t understand (query strings or esoteric KPI’s), but more the goals, the reality of where they are now and what it means, the challenges, required resources, timeline, and whether you are the right person to handle the situation.

Every data point must have analysis. Even stating, “visits increased” doesn’t tell me by how much, or if I should be happy with that amount. Maybe a performance indicator increased by 5%, but we were expecting 12%. Every statement and observation on the executive summary must be given the context of good / bad / on course / off course. For each of these points, you must demonstrate that you understand them, have a plan, and are the right person for the job.

Do not simply place numbers or charts as though their meaning is self-evident. The first thing on an executive’s mind is “so what?”.

Make sure that you include all the major recommendations in the executive summary. I suggest you sweep through your document and create a list of the big ideas, and THEN write the executive summary.

Don’t regurgitate the obvious. Try to get the strategic plan across in 3 or 4 paragraphs.

1. Crystallize your thoughts.

Since the executive summary is the plan or report in miniature, it contains the document’s highlights, its key points. To write an executive summary, focus on the issues that are most important to your business’s success — past and future — and set aside those matters that are tangential.

2. Set priorities.

The most important thing at any given moment in life is subsistence. We’ve all heard the cliché, “moving deck chairs on the titanic.”

Priorities can be thought of in this order:

1. Subsistence (or necessity): Where are we? Are we in danger of dying? How alive are we? Are we healthy or sick? Do we have enough food and water? Are our resources threatened?

2. Defense: Is anything or anyone threatening us? If so, who and what can we do about it?

3. Conquest: How can we expand beyond our current status quo? Where can we go? What is out there for us? What is the opportunity size? Are we in a position to succeed? How long will it take?

Powerpoint

· Bulleted lists are best

· Read each sentence twice asking, “Which words are not needed?” Also ask, “do I need to think to understand the take-away?”

· Phrases are meant to be read easily, not to grow into prose

· Make sure it is easy to scan the slide and understand the points

Word

• Paragraphs are preferable, however a list within the executive summary can be used to highlight the most important take-aways

I was watching that wonderful show Mad Men this wkend about an ad agency in the 50’s.

Lucky Strike was a client.  A report came out in Readers Digest that introduced people to the idea that maybe smoking was harmful.

The Creative Director (CD) was taking a lot of heat from the client over how he would respond to the news.

The CD didn’t want to respond to the article, and so the meeting got very heated and the owners of Lucky Strike stood up, angrily, and began to leave the room.

In a last act of salvation, the Creative Director said, “tell me, what is the first step in making your cigarettes?”

The owner said, “we take the tobacco and we toast it.”

The CD wrote on the wall, “Lucky Strike, It’s Toasted”.

The owner said, “so what, all the other companies toast their tobacco as well.”

The CD said, “yea, but they don’t tell you that, so they don’t.  When the conversation with your consumers is going somewhere bad, change the topic and say something irrelevant that sounds good.”

It’s Toasted.  Account retained.

The topic of paid links to support an SEO campaign is as much a philosophical one for SEO’s as it is tactical.

This post is not intended to explore the philosophical side.  Instead, I’m going to address the question of: how good is Google at detecting paid links?

I just completed another experiment on the topic.

Here is what I did:

I built a page optimized for a localized service.  I got the page ranking #32 for my benchmark keywords.  I waited one month to be sure that the SERP had stabilized.

Then I spent $100 to pay an Indian contractor to acquire triangular links.  The links appear on pages that have at least 50+ completely irrelevant themes (the sites were also largely irrelevant to the service I optimized). The $100 spend acquired 20 links that have nearly identical link text.

Within 3 weeks, the page shot up to a #2 spot on Google.

I think this improvement was clearly a result of the rather spammy looking backlinks.

A counter point to the apparent success might be: “but Google’s filters haven’t yet profiled those links - and in time, the links will be identified as purchased and the SERPs will decrease again.

Maybe so.

But for $100, this service can easily afford to keep buying links and staying ahead of the filters.  The ROI on that buy is far greater than the cost per click for paid placement.

We all buy stuff online.

One thing everyone should consider doing is becoming an affiliate of Amazon.com.

Why?

You get a piece of the referral purchase back. You can buy almost anything on Amazon, and you can also price compare, so you get the lowest price, and a piece of the revenue.

Steps:

1. Sign up as an affiliate
2. Put up a web page with the link code they give you. If you are not sure how to do this, you can simply have a word document on your computer that has a link to Amazon with your affiliate ID.
3. Everytime you make a purchase, make sure you enter Amazon by clicking your affiliate page.

Example:
Over the holidays, I spent nearly a grand on gifts (lots of relatives). I got about $75 back AND got the lowest prices around.

Over the course of the year, I bought everything from USB cables to a juicer on Amazon and I get checks back.

The recent Google PageRank update, from the observations of myself and my SEO team, seems to have significantly lowered overall PageRank.

Google has to do this from time to time. Based on Larry Page’s original algorithm, PR has to be lowered from time to time (as it increases over time).

I’ve followed a number of sites, including Adobe (PR 10 - which nows has a number of internal pages at PR 9 for the first time in a long time) and I am seeing a calculated deflation.

One could argue Google is doing this either to correct the PR inflation or to inflict some pain on the link broker business.

I think Google is doing this to correct the inflation, but I could be wrong. Regardless, I do believe we saw a large drop in average PR.

I’ve played around recently with link-bait ideas on my personal blog, and what I’ve discovered is that if you piss people off, they will link to you more than some of the other tactics I’ve tried.

I also tried flattery (Study Determines Bloggers Are Better in Bed), which resulted in a handful of comments by other bloggers but no links.

I’ve also published experiment results, which do get a bit of buzz as well.

But if you anger a passionate group of people about their core values, voila - links!

Of course, this is not the best way to go about building a brand.

Even if you are a retailer, I strongly believe in adding more content to your site.

All the time.

From an SEO perspective, there is the concept of “fresh content” (the belief that search engines prefer new content). There is also the PageRank consideration - as more web pages are added to a site, a properly linked site increases its overall PageRank.

And then there is the real reason (for me): going after the long tail.

If you have 2000 articles on a topic and you strategically target long tail terms, you are likely to see a lot of traffic from that content. (I’m not going go discuss, in this post, converting that content).

But how do you get so much content? After all, you are doing the copy writing, or your writer is swamped.

I’ve been using Forum Booster for some projects (not big brand projects). You can have articles written for $10, and they’re fairly good (tier 2). If you have a topic with a long tail, it’s worth spending $1000 to get 100 articles. More than likely, you’ll see a positive ROI before long.