John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Dramatic seagull rescue - pictures: 30 April 2009: Firemen saved the life of a trapped seagull today in a dramatic teatime aerial rescue.; The seagull had become trapped underneath chicken wire installed by residents to stop gulls nesting.; Would you put your hand in here? Brave fireman takes charge.; "It's time for the gullbox" says hero fireman.; The ungrateful seagull fights back as it's released to the care of the RSPCA.; It's all in a day's work for our professional fire crew.
Some people make money from blogging: 28 April 2009: Not me. Well, maybe I do in the sense that I get some clients from this and that sometimes people pay me to write in their blogs so yes, I'm in profit with blogging, but that's not what I mean.; Content is valuable. When Google set up Adsense it enabled people to make money from pure content. How so? If I write a page about setting up a successful cheese business, I can sign up to Google Adsense, put their code on my page, and they will read my page and serve relevant ads (eg. from companies selling cheese presses, muslin, and white hats and coats). When someone clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays something, and I get a secret percentage of that for my trouble.; The effect of that? Loads of people writing blogs that recycle secondhand information on the web. Whoop.; Now, it's not really going to make a lot of money if you're not writing about something worth some money. Look at the top right of this blog page, Adsense ads are there, and I've made perhaps a tenner over the whole life of this blog, and I've written good, honest content and I have lots of traffic.; But two things. One, I don't write consistently about anything, I just write about what's on my mind, so it's difficult to think I'll have any actual regular followers besides those who already know me. My traffic strategy is more .. I'll write about what's interesting to me and that will attract interesting people who might want some web work. That's worked for me.; Secondly, I don't hammer the Adsense. It's just there. If I was serious about making money from that, there'd be Adsense after every blog. That might happen, but I've not done it yet. It doesn't feel right.; But, the cruise. Cruises cost thousands of pounds so clicks will be several pounds each.; So. All my cruise blogs are getting re-written and published here: http://ganninoot.blogspot.com/. Blogger is easy to set up, it's owned by Google and it's easy to set up Adsense. The only problem? I've zero traffic. Zero. Not one person so far. But hey, I'm already blogging the cruise, I may as well republish it there. And anyway, it's only a few days old.; But you see how Adsense is working there? I'll let you know how it goes. Maybe it'll pay for the next cruise, maybe it'll pay for a coffee somewhere foreign, who knows?
The Paragon Hotel: 26 April 2009: It looks like this North Bay Scarborough Hotel is my latest client. That's the 'before' you're looking at. It's funny, I often look at websites and go "yeah, that looks alright" and then actually engage my brain and look a little more deeply and the flaws then seem obvious. For instance, it only mentions "hotel" once, right at the bottom in tiny letters. It's hard to see how they might rank for Scarborough Hotel. So, yes, watch this space. Wonder what a paragon is. Oooh look, it's a comic book superhero.
Promenade deck: 23 April 2009: One of the delights of going on a cruise for the first time is the naive discovery of things you'd subsequently take for granted, like the promenade deck. Wonderfully romantic, this encircles the ship on deck 7 (if I recall that right). It's something like a third of a mile around so in the morning people powerwalk it a few times. It's shaded in the heat of the day, and you can just take a seat, order a drink from a passing waiter, watch people play deck quoites and .. what could be nicer?; I just love the style, reminiscent of old ocean liners. And it took me a while to realise those fans in the ceiling are actually the hulls of the lifeboats suspended above.; next - prev
Me and a sales guy had a disagreement: 12 April 2009: He didn't like my site. He was selling into business, which was new for the company, and I'd created a consumer website, so that was understandable. But he just didn't like the way my sites looked. He was pointing me to Flash sites and saying how great they were, and I was arguing that the search engines wouldn't like that as much as my sites so he wouldn't get the traffic.; I think he primarily wanted a website for sales support. Like a presentation, only online. Wrong thinking (people are in a different mindset when browsing online), but still I see where he's coming from.; Now the management should have made a decision, but they allowed him and me to both build a business website. Yes, I know, but that's what happened.; I've just discovered I've got access to the Analytics of both sites. Oh yes. So here goes, looking at the last couple of months. The sites have been up for a while now, and all I've done with my site is create it, I haven't marketed it or even really maintained it.; His got 281 visits and had a 56% bounce rate (56% arrived and left immediately). They looked at 2.15 pages per visit and spent 3 minutes 15 seconds on the site on average. 69 visits were from organic search and all but one were for the company name or website address. I don't know how many enquiries this site generated, but since all the searches are for the company name, that suggests that the site is being used for sales support of existing leads.; Mine got 288 visits and had a 29% bounce rate. They looked at 3.89 pages on average and spent just over 2 minutes on the site. 113 visits were from organic search and almost all for proper keyphrases related to their business. This generated 9 business enquiries in the last couple of months.; I won, I think. Of course I accept that the website I built doesn't do what the sales guy wanted .. sales support. But that's a very blinkered view by the sales guy of what a website can do. I'm getting him an enquiry a week and I haven't really done anything much. An enquiry a day is hardly an unattainable dream. For a business presentation use an appropriate medium. Email prospects (or better still, get them to download from my site) a Powerpoint file or send them a video download for chrissakes.; I've spent my life supporting sales guys, generating sales leads for them to convert, and I should say this is a new one on me, but at least I got to prove that what I do is better than most.; This is ridiculous. What am I even talking about? I'm a web developer and Internet marketer for chrissakes. He'd wipe the floor with me in his area, sales. He should never have been allowed to build his stupid website in the first place, just like he'd never allow me out in the field. This is a management failing. I guess sales guys have a lot of leverage if they're good.
Judgment: 9 April 2009: For the first time since I started working for myself in about 1989, I took someone to court. Yesterday was the hearing.; This was a long standing client. AFAICS we liked each other. He spent £700 a month on programming and I maintained his ecommerce website. It wasn't designed for maintainability, and I was gradually shifting the code to three tier architecture. The database design wasn't good but he never wanted to bite the bullet and redesign it.; Then he spent a lot of money moving premises and I think his business faltered and he started to look at what he was spending with me, asked around, and decided he could get it done more cheaply. We talked, and I dropped my hourly rate a little for him. In truth, I was moving away from programming and towards Internet marketing but for some reason I never managed to persuade him that was the best use of my time and he was proposing to use someone else for the 'front end' and the SEO and marketing. That guy was Microsoft trained so would be using ASP and so on. I tried to resign when I heard that (because I use open source and PHP .. totally different things and not great bedfellows) but he said he wanted the quality of my work on maintaining the database and maintenance screens.; We discussed the approximate price of having a simple upload of his product database to Google Shopping which I said was around £500. The client then started asking for more functionality and other jobs to be done. It turned out his database didn't store a photograph for each product (necessary for the upload), so that and the maintenance screens needed to be changed. He didn't want all of his products to be uploaded automatically, but wanted to be able to choose. We wanted not just to upload to Google Shopping but to other price comparison sites too. The upload was to be automatic. Because photographs were going to have to be uploaded for each product, he was going to ask his staff to do that, so I felt the need to create a helpfile for their reference (photograph sizes and so on), and of course there was the management and discussion of all those changes along with the other things he wanted.; He ended up with four bills, £22.50, £737.12, £700, and £120 and was still asking for more work after the second invoice. This was, afaics, our 'normal' relationship.; I delivered software to do the Google upload, we uploaded products and it worked and I think I did that within the £500. The change in specification and the other requested work accounts for the difference in the bill.; Incidentally, I was always willing to split the difference and get paid half. If the client thinks there's a problem, then there's a problem. Between us we cocked this up, and if we could have agreed to that either before this whole process or in mediation (which we attempted but his best offer was £350 including costs).; The judge found that my original price was an estimate, and that in law that is free to change according to circumstances. Good practice would have me let the client know a revised estimate when it became clear we were moving away from the original, and I didn't do that. But because of the established relationship and way of working, and because of the ongoing billing, and because I'd raised price issues in emails several times, and I was able to show that actually I was trying to reign in the clients' requests to keep costs down, he judged that after the second invoice which took us over the original estimate and when the software was clearly not yet finished, it was clear to all parties then that the costs were higher than originally estimated.; He also noted that I had never received any sort of complaint about my work until the client filed his counterclaim (which was struck out because he didn't pay the fee). What wasn't brought up was all the broken promises of payment. The "I'm coming into town and I'll drop a cheque off" that never materialised. The "I've written you a cheque", which when I turned up to collect turned into "my house was burgled and they took the chequebook". This client was hard to manage. If he'd been clear, we could have sorted it.; Anyway, the judge found in my favour and I won the case.; I don't feel victorious. I don't feel that "that's shown him". I just feel sad. If I ramped up what I feel, I'd be heading towards crying more than anything else. Here was a good relationship where I'd failed to persuade the client of the worth of the work I was doing despite it being a long term relationship. His business has had rough times, and the website we worked on has fallen into disrepair. However he has (I think, well, he certainly used to talk about what properties he'd bought) a lot more money than I have, so he can afford to pay me.; I don't mind people going for cheaper suppliers if that's what they want. I'm not racing anyone to the bottom. I do a great job. Actually I want my prices to go up. I'd just rather they decided to do that before engaging me. What this client did was the worst case: engaged me, took my time so I couldn't work for anyone else, then didn't pay.; So I can't feel any happiness about it. I wish my former client well. Like I said, I've not done it in twenty years and hopefully I won't have to do it again. But the money will be shinier in my bank account.; When I work it out, I'll blog the costs of this. I spent hours preparing documents for this case, so I probably haven't won anything anyway.
Do I not like this?: 6 April 2009: Hmm, do I like the way this site is designed or not? I like good photography, and the site is attractive, and I like .. in principle, the idea of having a big photograph and then text underneath when you scroll down for the search engines to read.; But there's a real lack of a call to action here. I guess if you need a lawyer you need a lawyer so you'll call, but I'd certainly prefer to ask the reader to do something .. get in touch, for instance.; Interesting though. And very nice that it's in two languages.
Internet marketing rule #1: 6 April 2009: I used to struggle with Pay Per Click advertising, but no longer. It's not, actually, as simple as you think to make a profit with it.; It looks simple. The idea is that you choose one or more key phrases that are relevant to your business, decide how much you're willing to pay if someone who searched on those phrases clicks on your ad, write your ad (just a title and two lines of text), and it's bombs away. Since it takes a short while for the ads to get started, you may as well book that Ferrari test drive you always wanted.; The problem is, it's a bid auction. So at the very top level of understanding it makes sense that the market is setting the highest price for a click that companies can still make money on. Clever Google. So if you're going to make money at pay per click, you'll have to be better than average at converting those clickthroughs into sales, otherwise ultimately you'll fail.; There's something else too. Google's quality score. Google wants its users to have a great experience, so wants to discourage irrelevant sites from advertising. So if your ad says "lawncare" while the page people click through to (the landing page) is actually a dieting programme, then Google will ramp up the price you pay per click. It's more subtle than that, taking into account a good handful of factors including the words in your ad, but basically taking user actions as a 'vote' for the ad and the landing page. So you'd better be good and honest.; The price you bid helps to determine the position of your ad. Basically you have to outbid everyone, and have a great quality score, to get the top position. Since you're paying more per click there, it's often the case that lower positions are more profitable. There's some psychology here too .. perhaps if you're an impulse buy being at the top makes sense. If you're a great alternative, maybe being the fourth thing people consider will work best for you.; Some approach Google Ads like they might a normal advertising campaign. Set a budget, buy the ads. Don't bother too much about assessing payback. Because with normal ads the biggest benefit is in awareness and that's really difficult to put a value on. So, don't bother. Those bidders tend to go for the main keyphrases, so to bid high on those tends to be unprofitable.; So the game involves setting up Adwords and Analytics so you can definitely measure where your profit is coming from, then adjust all these factors to optimise your income. There are countries and regions, time-of-day and language. There are image ads. You can set up alternative ads to see which converts better. There's appearing in Google search only, and there's appearing on other websites too (the content network).; With each keyphrase you bid on, you get to choose whether you want to appear on that phrase only, on that phrase with extra words on either side, or for that phrase and others like it (automatic lawn = grass = turf). You choose. Whatever works.; And as your campaign rolls you'll find people are clicking through on variations of your phrases that you really didn't anticipate and that aren't relevant. They might want "free lawn tips", for instance, and you pay maybe £1 for them to click through to you. So there's a stoplist to maintain, and you'd put 'free' into that.; As you develop what works and remove what doesn't, you can move into other areas. Adwords isn't the only pay per click system by any means. Noticed ads in your YouTube videos yet? Facebook ads allow you to target by demographics too.; All of which underlines the most important piece of knowledge I can give you about Internet marketing in whatever form it takes, pay per click or search engine optimisation (SEO) or social networking / Web 2.0 stuff. It's about everything. Making your business really work online involves improving everything. So with Pay Per Click it's choosing great keyphrases, having a great bidding strategy, writing great ad copy, having a great landing page (and all that that entails: great pics, great copy, a great offer, great video), see what I'm getting at?; When I hear what people have done to create hugely successful businesses online, they say "we did everything". There's no one technique or magic button to press. It's everything. It's additive. Improve this by 10% and that by 40% and those by 30% and before you know it you're making 5x the profit you used to. Which is why you need an expert Internet marketer on your team. Someone who knows the extent of that 'everything'. Someone who knows what's possible.; I'm having some difficulty putting this across (ha ha, apply it to your own business, drongo), both to people who think they know what they are doing "I can do SEO", and to those who haven't a clue. It's like Narnia. Unless you're in it, you can't possibly see how big this is. I'm still discovering huge parts of this Internet marketing forest that blow me away, that I didn't even know were there. OK, that's becoming more rare now so I am getting a real sense of being seriously expert nowadays, but still. Remember, my whole career's been in marketing in one way or another .. and I'm still being blown away?; It's a whole lot to explain. So I'm starting to explore the possibility of working for a percentage of sales. Basically, you already spend a load of money on marketing one way or another. My proposition would be to lower your cost of marketing by going online instead.; If you employ an architect, you don't expect to hear about structural stresses and environmental legislation. You just want a nice building that works. So I need to simplify what I offer. Charging by the hour is OK, but I have to justify what I spend my time on, and I get into these long and detailed conversations. Charging a percentage of sales frees me to do what I know is best. Everything.; So if you fancy being a guinea pig to help me figure out how that might work, get in touch.