John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Send in the rifleman: 31 July 2008: Eye yam on video, acting out my fantasy of being the straight man to two outrageous rock Gods. 'Tis my drumning and my occasional "funky" yelp.
Is this persuasive?: 30 July 2008: Is this text persuasive or does it sound rubbish. I know it looks rubbish, ignore how it looks. Just think of the text. Do I lose you at any point? Does it make you want to learn about finance and accounting? It works on me but I might be weird. Let me know.
Marketing systems: 28 July 2008: I'm doing something I absolutely love right now, it gives me such a huge thrill, a genuine electricity of excitement. Yet I reckon I'm probably out on a limb with it. I'll try to explain.; I love systems, first of all. For me, you can't have repeatability unless you have systems and routines. If you don't have repeatability, you can't learn from what went before, and you can't have quality.; I was about to write that that's clearly not true for human skills where, for instance, if you're a roofer you simply learn from your mistakes and your quality comes from experience, but then I thought .. well, if I wanted to be an expert pianist, I'd start with routine: practice for an hour every day, for instance. And then I'd augment that according to experience. So, if I worked out I wasn't progressing fast enough, I'd practice 2 hours a day. If I found issues with, say, left hand fingering, I'd add more routine: practice half an hour just on left hand fingering, or find a tutor to help with that.; So I proposed, maybe 20 years ago now, a marketing system to a client (when I was a PR consultant) which went something like this. I called it 'watering the garden' and 'sowing the seeds'.; The idea was this, and it's (I think) anathema to salesy people who want to drive things and make things happen by force of will.; The system had two main routines. "Watering the garden" basically was about watering the garden to see what came up naturally. So we issued press releases that said "we make " whatever it was .. well, let's apply it to me "I'm a web developer", or "I'm an Internet marketing expert". That would bring enquiries. So let's say I got an enquiry from a jeweller. Well, clearly that tells me there's demand from jewellers for what I provide. If I got the business and ended up with a satisfied customer, that would mean I could satisfy that demand. So now, I'm a web developer with experience in the jewellery industry. So I could write a case study about that. That's "sowing the seeds" .. having found out what grows in my soil / what needs are out there that I can satisfy, I can proceed to get more of that sort of business. And how can I do that? Simply by talking about the business I've done.; So here I am doing something similar. I'm looking at a product that I'm about to sell online. I'm checking, first of all, what relevant keyphrases people have searched on in the past year. One thing I love about that is how the more you look, the more phrases you find, it really opens your mind. Then I'm grouping them into keyword clusters .. phrases around a single (shorter) key phrase. I can see the 'demand' for solutions by the traffic to those clusters.; I can make a judgment, of course, about how relevant each keyphrase is.; But what's really got me excited is that by looking at and analysing and summarising and categorising past sales and enquiries, I can see where we are already selling.; And, by checking Analytics (software that shows detailed information about what people are doing on our website), I can take a keyphrase and see whether it converts to a sale more or less well than average.; Putting all that together, I can calculate a score for each keyword cluster, and then rank search phrases by how important they are to my business: I want high traffic that converts well.; What I plan to do then is to take a keyphrase chosen randomly, but where the probability of being chosen is higher the more important the keyphrase is to me. If we have a top position for that keyphrase, fine, otherwise I'll do stuff to help raise our position.; That idea of being led entirely by the market, of letting the market speak, of creating a system that listens attentively and delivers what people want, of being light of foot and reacting to changes in the real market rather than to stuffy old, lumpen market research, that really gets me excited. That's what's at the core of my approach to Internet marketing.
Rebecca: 26 July 2008: I look back on my blogs about Big Brother with some embarrassment because the issues seem so small in retrospect, but I have to say I'm upset by Rebecca's ousting last night. Upset, not in a tearful sense, but in a "world out of sorts" kind of way.; What I found delightful in Rebecca was her confidence. She was happy being herself and most importantly, happy about her body. Why shouldn't she be? Well, she isn't lithe and blonde, is why.; For me, to see a young woman so seemingly unaffected by our present obsession with looks, filled me with hope.; Now, OK, confidence isn't everything. I'm sure Hitler was confident. So yes, she's not the brightest person around, probably didn't always do the right thing and doesn't have the best set of values either but she found a great foil in "no Rebecca nooooo" Luke and between them they were bright and happy and funny. Without her, Luke's going to look a whole lot more weird. And who gives a flying toss about anyone else in there?; But the nub of it is this. *She* was happy with her body. No-one else was. She endured virtual segregation within the house based on her looks, and the words associated with Bex on forums are not pleasant: slag, nasty disgusting bitch, loud and annoying, vile and nasty, disgusting low-life.; So it doesn't feel like she's been evicted for what she's done, those comments make me feel like she's been evicted for the crime of not being a quiet, beautiful woman. I find that a problem, particularly when she was up against someone like Darnell who has a crime to match every one of Becca's.; I blogged about The Beauty Myth before.
A good shave: 18 July 2008: In the distant past I've made judgements about people based on the quality of their shave alone. Basically, if you can't even shave properly, then I can't take anything you try to tell me seriously.; In fact, when I used to go out selling, I had a scoresheet for how I felt I was dressed, knocking points off for creases in my shirt and a tie where the stitching was starting to come apart at the back.; So I was getting pretty narked as my shaver declined and gave me a gradually worse and worse shave.; Having said all that, of course, there is great comedy here because most of the time I look like the chap from Shameless. But hey, you should make an effort if you want someone to buy something.; Anyway. Now I've bought a new shaver, and I'm excitedly just about to try it out. I did just one side, to compare, yesterday and it worked a treat. It was so sharp, in fact, I cut myself with it.; And it pleases me because I was thinking my skin was getting old and moving around under the shaver, thinking "this is why old guys wet shave". That may still be true, but if the new shaver works .. that means it was the shaver and not me getting old. Fabulous.; It's a fairly basic (yet still £60) Philishave, btw. Can't be arsed with having to replace foils.
The first time: 16 July 2008: I'm sick of hearing phrases like this, from some Chemical Brothers bumpf about them playing Olympia: "This will be the first time any band has played this historic venue in ten years". On the news we get "This is the first time this has happened since three years ago".; If it's happened before, it isn't the first time. Please. Try "no-one's played this venue for ten years" .. it's got no less impact.
Accounting terms: 16 July 2008: I've been working on this set of accounting terms definitions. Obviously it looks awful atm, but I've been working on what it does, first .. I blogged about that here. The look of it will come later, but for now I just wanted it to be picked up by the search engines.
Lo Fidelity Allstars: 16 July 2008: The DTs are now friends with Elvis .. no, really .. and in the course of that project to declare who our real friends are, I discovered Southside Lowdown on the Lo Fidelity Allstars mySpace site, a more perfect Johnny tune you probably couldn't find anywhere. It's all through me.
Kooky lady singers: 14 July 2008: There are at least two kooky, pretty young female singers in Scarborough and I struggle with it as a guy because you never know how much of such an artists' fanbase is because of her talent, and how much is just lust. I guess it was ever thus with bands from my youth, Blondie et al. I don't think I ever saw them, and I don't believe I ever lusted after a female singer, not even Kate Bush.; I have evidence to support the idea that much of such an audience is there because they would really like to feel as close as possible to the artist. And maybe that's just the way the world is.; But I don't want to be one of those people. I don't want to stand in that audience and have people think that's why I'm there.; So, even if I thought a delightfully nubile artist was exceptionally talented, I'd struggle to support them publically.; A kooky pretty girl who is actually good will have to work really hard to get through my defences.; Which rather means they've been shafted thrice. Once by the norms that require them to be kooky and pretty to get noticed, twice by the audience who will move on when the next young, pretty fantasy figure floats past, and thrice by the fact that those who might appreciate their talent may also feel as I do and not wish to hang around while it's happening.; Which puts me in mind of Helena Bonham Carter saying that being beautiful is a curse, and Kathy Burke saying "yeah, right".; I think HBC was right.; Oh hang on. Lauren Laverne in the Culture Show might be slightly pleasant to watch (previously in Kenickie). Polly Harvey might too. But no, in both cases it's their character, their skills and their confidence, and in Polly's case, the power and control (and sheer awesome beautiful talent), that's attractive .. nothing base about that.
Tiny Elephants: 14 July 2008: I love the items in the second picture here. They appear to be both ladies and phalluses in one, which is quite clever I reckon. You might like the Small Birds Singing animation too. Pity one can't buy shares in artists, 'cus I'd buy shares in Linda McCarthy (if I had any money, that is).
Drums: 13 July 2008: I was in the pub talking with a friend about the Joy Division and New Order drummer Stephen Morris. He was my main inspiration for being a drummer. What's amazing for me is he introduces no frills, in fact, he strips the beat right down to its essence, creating an often simple beat that suits the song perfectly, usually from beginning to end. That simplicity and the beginning to end universality of the beat represents the universal nature of the emotions the band deal with, and that just works for me. Here's Transmission, OK, not so simple a beat, but certainly playable. That clip is from the film 24 hour party people, I think, very much worth watching.; Then it transpired that I had ten years on anyone else in the group and no-one remembered Cozy Powell. I remember as a kid (12 years old, I guess) watching Dance with the Devil on Top of the Pops and loving it. I was never into heavy rock, I matured late, but this worked for me at the time. Possibly my first visual encounter with drumming.
Andrew Cheetham: 12 July 2008: Andrew's got a new website with lots of his old work available for us to see. He's on about page five or so for Scarborough artist so maybe that'll help (update: 16/07/08 he's now on about page four). That's my photograph of him, btw. Oh .. it's not my website .. I think a friend of his did it, looks like he used Drupal, an open source Content Management System .. all hail open source, again. It's nice work .. but the whole Internet marketing side of things is missing, although it needs to be pretty subtly done to suit a genuine artist. Hopefully I'm going to get to sit with a proper big London art gallery dude at some point (I'm working on it) to try to work out over coffee how the two worlds might collide gracefully .. it really does fascinate me.
Hotels: 11 July 2008: The contrast between two B&Bs I've been speaking to is marked. One is down in the dumps. They have a good website but haven't done any Internet marketing. They are empty for August, unusual even for them. They say they are suffering because of the credit crunch, no-one wants to drive to Scarborough because of the price of petrol.; The other did Internet marketing with me and is (unusually) booked solid until the end of the season both for their hotel and their self catering apartments. They are still getting enquiries for rooms at the rate of four or five a day which they are having to turn away.
Twitter: 8 July 2008: Twitter. Microblogging. Blogging in small units, one or two sentences. Telling everyone 'what you're doing'; Blogging, in case you're still not with me .. oh hang on, you're reading my blog. OK.; Twitter's a waste of time, surely.; Except. Barack Obama's doing it. And his Tweets contain links. And he has 46,340 people watching what he's up to.; You can update Twitter from Facebook. And you can update your Facebook status with your Twitter feed.; I Twittered a little. Just a little. And I've got 26 people following me.; Now here's the wham. I just Twittered that I'm excited because I'm installing Movable Type, business scale blogging software, for a client.; The next thing I know, 6 Apart, the company that built Movable Type, is following my Twitter account (with an invitation to follow theirs). Sweet Jesus, I think there's something going on here. Get yerself a Twitter account and see what happens.
Page Rank: 7 July 2008: Q: "A few months ago I moved part of my website to another location (in the same website). I put up redirects to the new location. In the old location, my pages had PageRank 4 but there's still no PageRank for the pages in the new location. What's wrong?"; A: PageRank is why Google is different. Back when search engines were new and there were few web pages, all that mattered were the keywords and phrases on the website itself. As the web grew, two students had the idea of taking into account the number of links to a website as an indicator of how important that website is. Moreover, a link that contains words, for instance the one below for Gwen Stefani Misery Face, probably describes well what the site it points to contains, so those words should be brought into the calculation too. Those students went on to form Google, and those two insights are what set Google apart. Search for Gwen Stefani Misery Face in a few days time and see if it's worked.; If you extrapolate the link idea a little more, it makes sense that a link from, say, Apple's home page should be more important than one from your grandma's blog. It's more important because more people link to Apple's homepage than they do your grandma's blog. So some links are more important than others in determining your own website's importance.; The importance of a page according to Google is given as a PageRank between 0 and 10, with just a few top sites having a PageRank of 10. The PageRank of a page is calculated from the PageRank of the websites that link to it.; You can see the PageRank of each of the pages of your website (each page is different) by downloading the Google Toolbar. Once you've installed that, I think you might have to switch on the display of PageRank, but thereafter it gives you the PageRank of every page you visit.; So, the question is, how come the PageRank hasn't transferred to the new page location. The first answer is, because the links are pointing to the old locations. But the questioner states that he's dealt with that by using redirects .. implemented properly they transfer the PageRank.; The answer is that the publically viewable PageRank in the Google Toolbar is updated just a few times a year. What we see is actually a much delayed and simplified download of what Google is really using. So, basically, and based on traffic reports I have access to for those pages, I think the PageRank has transferred, but Google just hasn't updated the PageRank readout yet.; What to do? Nothing. Just wait until the next Google PageRank update. If the PageRank hasn't transferred by then, take a look at the redirects and make sure they were done correctly.; Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves sales and marketing people, who always want things doing quickly. The game changes often as Google changes how it ranks sites and people discover new ways to get a great ranking. The web is full of SEO debris .. advice that's months or years out of date. I think the trick to efficiency in SEO work is to know what works, and not to get sidelined, because once you're in the mire of everyone else's detritus, it's tough to climb out. My strategy is to watch for the new, assess it, test it, test everything ongoing, and only do what works. Therein lies efficiency.
Tennis: 7 July 2008: There was some fabulous tennis in the Nike World Gwen Stefani Misery Face competition yesterday. An impressive win from the man who founded Fatah, how does he find the time? Oh, no hang on, maybe this is the chap. How cute is this written just before.; Spain must be cock a hoop after converting to the Euro 2008 and no longer using potatoes as currency.; Seriously though. Doesn't Nadal have a big bottom? While we're admiring bodies though, can't escape Venus Williams'. Beauty comes from function every time.; I was possibly as impressed by the BBC camerawork in the closing credits. The close-up, slow motion shots of balls bouncing and feet pounding, it must have been a seriously expensive camera .. the issues being, I think, letting in enough light, taking a zillion frames per second and having enough electronics to process and save it all.
Book covers: 5 July 2008: I should understand what makes a good book cover, and use that to design great home pages.
BSD Solutions: 4 July 2008: BSD Solutions just called saying they are not listed in Google and can I help? Yes. So let's see how quickly. If I publish this link now (at 18:30), let's see how long it takes for a search for this search to find their website bsdsolutions.co.uk. Here's the link that makes it happen: BSD Solutions Ltd provides commercial Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs). There y'go.; Update: I checked it the next morning (08:47) and the site was listed. The *this* link above didn't used to bring up bsdsolutions.co.uk , and now it does. So Google read and processed this blog in at most 12 hours.; Update: (07/07/08 14:16) Nope, that was just the URL, a search on BSD Solutions still isn't showing the site .. keep checking.; Update: (11/07/08 10:17) I got out of the habit of checking, but I just checked now and a search for bsd solutions brings the site up on page three, while bsd solutions ltd brings it up on page two. bsd solutions harrogate of course brings it up on page one. So that took maybe a week to get the page processed and indexed.; Interestingly (but completely unconnectedly), BSD is the flavour of UNIX that's underneath the Apple operating system OS X. Linux is open source Unix.
OSC: 1 July 2008: Wow, the damnedest thing just happened. A client called me to say his OS Commerce installation now contained exclusively product categories from a new OS Commerce installation I'd been working on the night before.; Now .. this is impossible. Yes, OK, probably the two sites might well be on the same server. But they address completely different database accounts and exist in completely different accounts on the web server.; The two databases weren't compromised, they held the correct info. The config files the same.; To get the client's site back working again, all I did was remove three products from the new site. This is impossible.; I haven't cross contaminated the files because I haven't worked on the first client's site for a year or more, so to investigate I had to get his username and password out of the filing cabinet. I really don't think I pushed across any of his files to the new site because .. I didn't, there's no evidence that I did, I installed a completely new setup and these are wildly different versions of the software, so if I'd mixed them up we'd be getting errors.; So. Questions are in at the host (who's never seen anything like this) and at OSC. I'll keep you posted.; Update: Between me, the website host, and the OS Commerce forum, we solved it in just over an hour. Is this a bad example of open source or a good one? I'd say a good one. Open source is tested by users all day every day, so this will be a rare instance. I'll feed my experience back to the developers who will incorporate a fix and the update will be out quickly. And I got support from a fellow user .. that's open source for you, there's a community of like-minded people willing to help.; From that panic and that low point to a phone call, someone found me by searching the net, wants an Internet marketer long term for his new business, and brilliantly, had been searching for a few days and came to me because I seem to be someone he can trust.; That's something that's always worked for me. I'm genuine, it's in every pore of me. When I used to work in the PR industry I used to meet new prospects and they'd just hand over their business. People trust me with their credit card details .. they just give them to me unasked, the CVV, everything "oh you do it" (I never store them, btw). The PR and the Internet marketing industries are the same thing .. unregulated industries full of bullshitters. In that, I stand out as a genuine guy.; So my site and its mixture of technical stuff with pictures of my cat breaks the rules deliberately. I, personally, am the asset here, so how do I deliver that over the Internet? This blog was my solution back when Internet video wasn't practical.; So, from a low to a high in about five minutes. You'd think, just sat here in my office tippety tapping away, my job isn't exciting wouldn't you? I think I need a herbal tea.
Hair loss solution: 1 July 2008: In searching for competitors for the site I'm working on for the keyphrase hair loss solution (see, I'm allowed to do that here in my own blog :-) ), I came across this. Now, I don't usually go with the humour angle (and he does actually nick one of 'our' ads at one point .. bet he hasn't got permission for that), but this is exceptionally well done. That site is top for the keyphrase "hair loss solution" .. just look at all the keyword work going on there. I bet he's not rich on it .. it's still an hourly rate kinda business (it's OK to follow through the links AFAICS to see what the solution is), but .. you know .. it plugs into something deep. I want to know what I would look like bald. I want this as a birthday gift :-) Mind-you, if you do go for it, he's canny, I'm not saying you won't get onto a sucker list, so maybe use a valid but separate email address.