28 September 2009: Marketing by numbers: For a particular client I am able to farm out a specific Twitter process. It took the person about 3.5 hours through July and August and resulted in 18 visits to the client's website.
The enquiry rate from Twitter for this process and this client and these few enquiries has been 50%, lots higher than the 4% average for that client.
From a sample of enquiries from last month, each enquiry is worth £10 of turnover. So, this Twitter process has brought £90 of turnover.
Of course, Twitter users might be lots more or less keen than average to book. The figures are from a small sample. Turnover is not profit. Everything changes with time. The business is seasonal. And we haven't accounted for repeat business or friendly recommendations from satisfied customers (or damnations from dissatisfied ones).
But it would appear there is a pay rate where outsourcing a good Twitter process might prove profitable.
27 September 2009: Marketing by numbers: I'm running some pay per click ads through Google Adwords. If you're not familiar with that, if you look on the Google search results page, usually the top three results, and the right hand column of results, are paid ads.
Businesses pay each time you click on one of those ads. How much they pay depends on demand for those spots and on a formula that tries to ensure the ad is relevant to the search query.
Remember Google is nothing if it doesn't provide relevant search results. So Google doesn't want people advertising weight loss products when we're searching for a new car, for instance. It manages that by pricing those ads out of profitability.
One of the factors Google takes into account when setting the price we pay for the position we want is the click through rate (CTR) which is the number of clicks the ad received divided by the number of times it was displayed, expressed as a percentage. Ad appearances, displays, are called 'impressions' by Google. So if your ad appears 100 times and 1 person clicks on it, you have a 1% CTR.
Clearly, what you say in your ad affects the CTR. If your ad says "our product's really boring, I don't know why I'm advertising it" no-one will click, whereas if it says "you won't believe how much weight I've lost / how well behaved my dog is / what my house is worth" maybe they will.
So, rule number one in marketing is "everything is a test". Adwords encourages you to create alternative ads to run alongside each other. So we can write two ads and see which one has the best CTR. When we decide that we can ditch the worst ad, and create a new variation based on the better ad. That way, we gradually improve.
Well, I just checked an ad I've been running for a week. I've been slowly improving the ad for a while and all's been well, but this week my new ad got a CTR of 3.27% against last week's winner which only got 0.71%. So last week's ad tweak provided a 4.6 times improvement. Wow.
Testing. You never know what will work, but the rewards are there when you finally stumble upon it.
And .. I've gone through maybe seven different ad variations to get that. For me that underlines yet again that while clearly it's good to make a good first stab at a website and its text, it's not really what you the client and I the consultant decide would be great on your page. It's for the users to decide. All we have to do is give people the choice, and listen.
26 September 2009: I'm burned by Fahrenheit 9/11. Did I learn anything from that? Nope. All it was was a gathering of likeminded people sat going .. "yeah, Bush is a c**t". "You think so?" "Yeah, I think so?" "We all think so."
Well, we knew that from day one.
No-one who didn't think that would be at that film. So .. what was it? It wasn't persuasion. Was it .. making money from a supportive customer base?
And the point of going to see it was what exactly? To feel better? To stroke ourselves that there are others who agree Bush is a c**t and gather evidence that he really is.
The Animals Film changed my life (it dessicated me .. I've never cried so much) and I seem to remember seeing a film called Protest and Survive many times in local churches and community centres but can't find that online .. maybe I have the wrong title. Maybe The Age of Stupid is up there with them.
I like Tony Robbins and I like his thing that says our beliefs are entirely within our conscious control.
I'm a Linux guy. Like most open source advocates, I don't like the smell of Microsoft. But were I to get a job at Microsoft, I'd be surrounded by Microsoft success stories, Microsoft advocates and experts, cool ways to do stuff, and I'd come around to Microsoft. At the same time I wouldn't have the time or inclination to read about Linux success stories, so my head would gradually fill with Microsoft stories and I would turn into a Microsoft advocate myself.
So our beliefs come from our experiences (they aren't actually 'us'). So, Fahrenheit 9/11 just bolstered those experiences for the majority of those attending. In that sense, it actually did damage by making those beliefs more absolute, more black and white. Very Bush.
I've always been able to see (perhaps) all sides to an argument. I understand, for example, that the people in the companies who are helping to destroy the planet are in the most part acting out of goodness. They want their company to be successful, to feed and educate their families, and to provide whatever products or services their company provides to their customers in the best way they can. Most of the time they are progressive, switched on, and just that .. doing the best they can with what they have.
And now we have an American president who is making headway internationally by bridge building, understanding, negotiating, giving and taking, trust, diplomacy and generally being nice.
In today's Guardian there's an interview with Jo Brand. About 4/5 of the way down that interview she talks about her favourite gig ever.
It was in a working men's club in Bradford where the audience initially hated her. She "did a bit of guerrilla comedy", "funny bits, and then when they were laughing I whipped in a few home truths". She ended with a standing ovation.
That's the battle that needs to be fought. Opening up people's minds to the richness of life and opinion and experience, not bolstering opinions that are already set.
That's even more important now we can control our own media. We no longer sit and watch 'the news'. We get the news we want .. the information we already agree with. Increasingly we bolster our own views by choosing our environment to suit ourselves. That's why Borat was genius (it got serious points through while appealing to people who liked American Pie). And it's why I make an effort to read about what I don't know, and check out media with other viewpoints: ever actually watched AlJazeera or read The Times of India? You can even read something like Al Quds (the most popular newspaper in Palestine) in English care of Google Translate and if you do you realise, it's not all wailing and not washing in Palestine .. they are almost like normal people. Isn't that amazing? Yes, of course, I'm a Guardian reader. So box me in. I'm not saying I read The Times of India avidly. I'm just saying it's nice to get a rounded view sometimes.
Moore is making me not watch The Age of Stupid (Join Moby, Radiohead's Thom Yorke, Gillian Anderson, Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Heather Graham ...) because I fear it'll be more of the same and I so thoroughly don't want to be like Bush I don't want to have unyielding views about anything. I want to be open. Flexible. Interested in other people's views. And anyway, Moby and Radiohead?
24 September 2009: For me, the Top Gear car that's stayed with me the longest was the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti. Don't forget how amazing Clarkson is, no-one has come close to doing what he does. And in this particular Top Gear he fell in love with the idea of driving a Ferrari tourer around Europe. And I did too.
Look. If you lot can play fantasy war games and Farmville bullshit, then I can have one part of my head reserved for my own dreams, and in there, I'm driving a Scaglietti around Europe without worrying about legroom, fuel bills, or who's feeding the cats .. alright?
Who the hell is Carole Nash? Check her out on Google and Google images. Sure looks the part. Wonder if she was a competitive rider at some point.
Now tell me you don't want bike insurance from Carole Nash. And you don't even own a bike, right? I'm even considering buying a bike just so I can buy insurance from her.
Seriously, that's a master class right there, perhaps the strongest I've ever seen.
Let's start with the idea of the persuader being trustworthy and likeable. Who the hell wants to buy insurance from a tidy guy in a suit when, especially if you're a biker, you can buy from a hot biking chick who looks like she's at the centre of all things bike (and she's a chick) and probably holds the world land speed record for hot chicks. Honestly, I'm going to call now and pretend I've got a bike just so I can be part of it.
Dodgy ground maybe. Persuasive? You know the answer to that.
The crux is the thinking behind all this. This wasn't thrown together. Everything you see is honed to appeal to her market.
Now tell me you only want to spend £200 a month on marketing.
22 September 2009: The Paragon Hotel (Scarborough) just had its best August ever thanks, I'm pretty sure, to my Internet marketing activities.
I also had a call from the Scarborough Hospitality Association and I asked .. because I can't work it out .. whether Scarborough's B&Bs are having a great time because everyone's having holidays in the UK and Scarborough's regeneration efforts make it a great place to be, or whether the recession is hitting others who would normally come here in equal measure. Are we up, generally, or down? He said this is the year it all went online. B&Bs that aren't savvy online marketers have seen their business decline. Those who have embraced the Internet have found bookings to be up.
That ties in, too, with how things have felt generally. B&Bs no longer seem to have their August booked up from about February. In July they are staring at a near-empty August diary. But it fills. People have been booking perhaps even the day before.
21 September 2009: Coldplay are boring, middle class white kids making bland, meaningless music for white kids who have new cars. Coldplay enables those people to fool themselves into thinking they enjoy good music and have awesome experiences of live music so they can feel cool easily.
At least .. that's what I've absorbed from the ether. I think that's the image Coldplay has. I've no idea, I honestly haven't gone near them.
But then in its own death throes, the South Bank Show gave us an hour of Coldplay last night and the guys turned out to be beguilingly nice, self deprocating, aware of the improbability of them reaching their dizzying height. They were together, close. I liked them. I liked them a lot. I want to be one of them. I'd like to know them.
I still think the music's bland. However, the programme showed them working with Eno, and him telling them they were OK but could be better, so perhaps the next album is worth a minute of my attention.
So .. a couple of things. Firstly: what a PR job! By showing the reality of the band and softly showcasing their achievements, I enjoyed it all and I'm now warm to them. Wow. That was a good job well done.
But actually I'm inspired. Coldplay are just a smidgeon over ten years old. Ten years ago, they were just some friends at uni.
21 September 2009: Marketing by numbers: Grrrr, I'm kicking myself. For Metcalfe Insurance who offer, for example off licence insurance I've just completed a re-style. It's more or less the same content, but with much better design. You might get an idea of what it did look like from the Wayback Machine.
I was hoping to be able to evaluate the effect of re-styling a website without making any other changes but actually we made significant other changes too. The company now offers direct on-line quotes as well as traditional insurance brokerage. That makes the before and after incomparable.
The client wanted to restyle the front page like the supplier of those direct facilities. I think that came from deference. I might be wrong, but perhaps the thought was .. 'this company knows what they are doing (more than us), we'll copy them'.
That supplier had a front page with lots of buttons, one for each offering. So I went to a designer to design the buttons and the designer did what I guess is probably a great way for them to get new business .. he said, more or less, "well, I thought the whole page could do with an update so what do you think to this:" and provided a revamped design.
That was how we got into doing a restyle. It was just a sweet shop thing.
So there was never a budget, and it's hard to say .. well, you know, we ought to think this through and even though you already have the design, it will be several thousand pounds for me to think on your behalf. I mean, that really is a tough thing to sell.
And honestly, I was with the designer, yeah, great, let's do it and see what happens. That's the great thing with the web (as opposed to say, writing a book), you can always change things.
Once the dust settled, the figures revealed themselves. The bounce rate (the percentage of people who arrived on the site and left immediately) had risen dramatically. We would now require almost twice as many visitors as before to maintain the same level of business.
Wow. So what had gone wrong?
Looking through the figures in Analytics, the problem seemed to come from the home page and it transpired that most people were arriving on that page and wanting pages that didn't have buttons.
See, the buttons were meant to denote the on-line, 'live' quote and buy facility. So for, for instance, taxi insurance there's no button because Metcalfe only offers it through its normal brokerage services .. ie. mainly by phone. No button, so it's only available on the home page through the menu.
That might be OK if people (that'll be people who already have a relationship with Metcalfe) weren't searching for 'Metcalfe' in Google and then wanting to navigate to what they want. I was rather hoping, for instance, taxi drivers would type 'taxi insurance' into Google and find the taxi insurance page directly. But that's not most of the traffic.
By copying the online quote supplier's website, what the client requested, I'd seriously messed this up.
Basically, a website home page ought to channel the popular needs of its visitors onto pages where they can get what they need. "Taxi insurance sir? Over here", basically.
The simple answer would be to add other prominent links for the main areas that aren't currently covered. But I think there's a less obvious problem which is pervading the site now, and I haven't quite tackled it but I wonder if it's too professional looking (many successful insurance websites look amateur). The navigation might be it. Not sure. But certainly on that home page, even for someone wanting insurance for which there's a button, they still have to read all the buttons to find theirs. It's not good. Even the crossfade ads aren't right. By the time you've decided you want to click it it's whisked away from you (probably fixed by the time you read this).
So I've put in a proposal to make popular links more prominent on the home page. I'll let you know about what solution I chose if/when it's approved. But the moral of this story is: do the job right. For me, it's a great lesson learned. See, I look around at local web developers and designers offering clients what they want and I think I must come across really awkward when I keep saying "yes, but (that's a really crap idea Mr client because .. so) why don't we do this". But basically, that's my worth. That's my expertise. The one time I essentially went with what a client wanted .. I somehow allowed the initial "oh, I redesigned your website, why not just do it" to take me in .. it messes up. Back to awkward Johnny: "great idea, but have you considered .. ". It's what you're paying me for.
19 September 2009: Everyone's talking about dubstep. Here's a great explanation of dubstep. With the help of Wikipedia I can keep up with the kids. Skankin, bo? Nasty.
Having said that, my attempt to inspire a dubstep version of Keith Harris and Orville's "I wish I could fly" seems to have fallen on stony ground. It worked for Prodigy and "Charlie Says".
14 September 2009: Most of the songs the Big Brother contestants all knew, loved and sang along to I'd never heard before. Not sure I'd really even heard of the artists. I work in silence. I don't own an mp3 player. I'm out of touch with music.
Of course, I enjoy it though. I play in two bands and adolesced to punk and where I used to wonder whether life could exist without music, now I hear teenagers say the same and I think .. gawd, I couldn't live life 'with' music .. quiet is nice. How can you think straight if music's on?
Which takes me up a side alley about this year's Acoustic Gathering which seemed to attract a younger crowd. Lots of chatting while the bands were on from people who will happily text, flick tv channels, eat, drink cheap tinnies and chat at the same time. Those are tomorrows skills as we take on board wearable computers and total connectivity. I clearly am becoming a dinosaur (do I get to choose which one?). In a recent few days off we planned (didn't manage it, tho) to get out the record player and play some old records. Like gran did with her 78s.
While I'm being an old fogie I might as well dole out some advice to young people. As 'acoustic' followed 'rave', so what everyone is talking about now will soon be out of fashion and its opposite will be back in. As a teenager today, I would hone my concentration skills. Everyone will have the ability to hold three conversations at once. But you'll be the one who can sit down for an hour, concentrate on a task, and reach a higher level without taking a call, sending a text or checking your Facebook. You would be independent of external stimuli, how cool is that? That skill will be rare indeed and you'll be in demand.
I am connected to Eliza Carthy by two things. Firstly, she's a friend of a friend. I've never met her. But barring once seeing someone from Crossroads at a HiFi exhibition in London, and seeing David Bowie's knob in a film, that's one of my big claims to fame.
Secondly, she's local. In these parts we feel a little blessed by having the Carthy-Gods around.
I was put off Eliza Carthy by this photograph (which I have 100% stolen) which would seem to want us to think of her as someone we are about to have sex with. It's the open mouth. It didn't need to be open.
Anyway, that kinda puts me off. I don't want to be dragged to the record shop (if such a thing exists any more) by my gonads, I'd rather my ears.
It's more, if I'm honest, that I don't want anyone else to think that's how I made my choice. Unfashionable it might be, but I work hard at this. I had formative years in Leeds University where every woman was a feminist and I read Spare Rib because I did, and do still, want the world they fought for.
Anyway, that's all wrong. She headlined the Acoustic Gathering last night. She's sexy all right, but through intelligence, writing and playing skill, capability and feistiness. I don't think I'd last five minutes in her company. Think ribald drinking games, lightning wit and solid earth. So .. record company .. get that across in the photos. There has to be a match between the marketing and the reality otherwise you get a disjoint, cognitive dissonance, post purchase blues.
Have a listen but I have to say .. 'live' is better. The band is exceptional. Think 'Elbow', maybe. I loved what the drummer played but I can't seem to find it on the CD .. different drummer? The freedom of playing 'live'?
So, from a dinosaur feminist who doesn't listen to music .. may I recommend you catch her on tour? The tour dates are here and it's just started.
13 September 2009: Marketing by numbers: If you are marketing, you should always be testing. That was the mantra when I was doing direct marketing twenty years ago and it's still true today. So every website, even every web page, should have two or more versions, one where you're running your normal page, and another where you've changed a headline or photograph or the copy or whatever to see if it helps.
The way it works is the visitor always sees one version of the page, but the version they see is determined randomly when they first arrive. OK, they may see the different page on their home computer to the one at work, but it's good enough.
Once the 'experiment' proves one page is better, you keep that one and try another test. In that way, you're always gaining.
Except, that's not how my latest test went. Remember the psychological profile work I did on taxi drivers? My g/f (who is a work psychologist) did a fabulous psychological profile on taxi drivers based on some questionnaires I sent out and some other data (trade publications and so on), and based on that I wrote new page copy designed to appeal to them.
140 visitors went to the two pages. 6 converted off the original page, and .. wait for it .. 0 converted off my spanking new psychological taxi copy.
So what went wrong?
It certainly wasn't the psychological profile. That was breathtaking.
It was my interpretation of it. In my excitement, I wrote it too quickly. I didn't really, really, take the profile on board. I didn't think enough about it. Didn't really, really put myself in their shoes.
What's exciting about those figures is the power of copy. Remember, the other power of copy is to draw visitors through the search engines by containing keywords people are searching on. Ignoring that hugely important thing for a moment, here we have an awesome demonstration of the power of copy. Two pages. Equal in every way except for the text. One converted at 8%, the other at 0%. Isn't that something? Does that mean if I actually got the psychological text right I might be able to get it to 16%?
And .. just think about those numbers. 8% versus zero. Zero! I've never had results as absolute as that. Copy, then, is probably the most important thing on the page.
So .. without testing .. who knows what state the other (many) pages on this website are in. Let's say they are at the 4% level. That means, through testing, I could improve all of them to at least the 8% level (via a few 0% waypoints, admittedly). And what about beyond 8%? Why not? If 8% is just what it was, unoptimised, untested, where's the ceiling? What enormous potential! I could carve a career out of just that.
My rage is building. Because the discussion between client and web developer is always about how the page looks. And web developers who have a portfolio of nice looking websites get more business and yes, they may even have happier clients because our main sense is our eyesight and the thing the client can judge is how it looks.
My contention is always .. you've a limited budget. Spend that on what matters. I'm also testing some different graphic designs atm and afaics the implementations I've put in place make almost no difference, yet they take hours to implement. Copy is just copy, you can make changes instantly.
I'm almost at the point of saying "screw how it looks". I'm sure there are great graphic designers who can make a really big difference, and maybe the fact that clients can get stuck in and say "move that over there and make this bit more purple" turns any design into a committee decision. Maybe that's what's wrong. I mean, the big design and brand people just turn up and say "here's your new logo". Lesser designers turn up with a choice for the client to pick from (oh yes .. how to make friends and influence people, JA style). But honestly I would rather launch a page of black text on a white background saying something useful than have something pretty that said nothing much of any use.
John Allsopp Web Design - "screw what it looks like". It's kinda catchy don't you think?
The other thing about it is .. writing is hard to sell. Anyone can write. Yet .. just look how important it is. It really needs to be done right by someone who knows what they are doing.
It's perfectly possible that the reason I know what I know about Internet marketing is I've made more mistakes at it than most. I certainly get the strong impression that there are 99 ways of doing this stuff wrong for every 1 that's right. Hopefully I can spot more than your average bear of those 99 ways of doing it wrong before we reach implementation. It's a tough job though, if you're brought in to make a nice lovely website and all you keep saying is 'no'.
The beautiful thing about this is .. if I hadn't tested it, I wouldn't have known how wrong it was. So .. how much of your website is wrong without you knowing? If you're not testing .. how can you know?
The numbers are your clients and prospects talking to you. There's not much that's more important than that. Much as I might (do) come across as cocky sometimes (always) here, there's only one God. It doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what you think. Seriously. It only matters how your clients interact with your website, and you get to peek at that through the numbers. The numbers settle all arguments and answer all questions, uncomfortable though that may be sometimes. The numbers are God.
The alternative, test version of this blog is a lovely one about kittens, obviously.
9 September 2009: One birthday or Christmas someone bought me a travel alarm clock. It folds neatly into a small pillbox shape 50mm diameter and 23mm deep. It weighs 180g (about 7oz). I have a travel alarm clock that weighs 180g. Where am I going with that? I think it's made of lead.
One day my travel alarm clock rolled off the desk and landed on my E-Ten m700 PDA screen, rendering it permanently white and leaving a lovely dent in the bodywork.
I quite like not having a mobile phone.
Good thing because E-Ten were irrideemably useless. No response whatsoever to emails.
And because I'd bought something unusual, the repair companies didn't want to know either.
Nor would the home insurance cover it. Besides the excess, apparently your premium rises if you make more than one small claim. That would be my first, but the point is, it's not worth it.
And then I discovered the E-Ten users' group. The people there helped. They helped a lot.
I ended up with an offer of repair and the means to repair it myself.
So the first lesson of the day is exactly that. On the Internet, people can help each other outside the control of companies. You knew that, I know, but .. it's worth meditating on to get the full impact.
No-one in the UK would sell me a replacement screen, but I was able to buy a replacement E-Ten m700 screen in French from a French company. Partly that was because I could push French language messages through Google Translate, but mostly it's a usability thing. The site was usable enough that I could use it even though I didn't understand the language .. cool, non? (/ c'est easy peasy) And they didn't kick off about postage overseas and I got the product in a few days. Isn't that something? Usability is lesson number 2.
You know, I even feel better towards Russia now. Not everyone in Russia is trying to send me 3,000 watts of spam in the periods between hunting bears. Some people take the trouble to upload detailed instructions like that. I am their friend. Lesson 3 is .. I now feel good towards http://www.pdacenter.ru/
I had a few false starts. Mobiles apparently commonly use a Torx screwhead so I had to buy some Torx screwdrivers but before you order those, make sure you have a Philips #0 screwdriver too, not all the screws are Torx.
But. Seriously pleasant shock. I took it apart, replaced the screen, and (2 hours later) it damn jiggly works!
I had to recalibrate the screen, I didn't expect that .. there's a utility for that in the software under something like Settings->display.
But wow. I'm proper chuffed with myself.
Just one other thing. My big message for now and for all is "how have you contributed to the Internet today?" So of course I contributed back to the forum what I'd learned, so those who follow in my footsteps have an easier day. Here's the full story.
And don't buy anything from E-Ten. Screw them. Preferably with a torx driver.
8 September 2009: Firefox just had an error and so gave me a page headed "Well, this is embarrassing", going on to explain the issue "Firefox is having trouble recovering your windows and tabs." "Well, this is embarrassing" made me laugh out loud, what a lovely way to report an error :-)
2 September 2009: Sarah Rayner has a new website. It's not one of mine, it's been created by a friend (hopefully still).
It's built almost entirely using Flash. That's a bad thing. The devil makes shiny things to distract us from what we should be doing.
When the Google robot visits this site, it will see nothing barring the metatags: the page title: "Sarah Rayner - The Creative Pumpkin", the description and the keywords which it ignores.
Not only that, when you work out the navigation (unusual navigation is bad, imagine cars having different controls) and click to see a new page, what you're seeing is another part of the Flash presentation, not another webpage. So Google sees this website as simply one blank page.
Google needs content, mainly in the form of text. Flash has hidden the content from Google. That's a real pity since it seems Rayner is a copywriter.
It's sad too because, except for the page sliding effect which isn't worth the downside, there's nothing there that couldn't have been done by bog-standard website means.
So. How to market this site on the Internet given there's nothing we can do about the on-site content? I'm speculating, I don't know Rayner at all, so it all depends what she wants to do. For all but a social media strategy, this website will hold her back in terms of getting a position in the Google search results. So I would be tempted to use it as a brief and rebuild it properly, but she's probably already spent her money for the website and it might even cost more to rebuild it properly so that would be hard to swallow.
So we've basically got two strategies left: build inbound links (because they will contain text Google can use to classify the page), and social media .. build a fanbase on Twitter / Facebook et al. (update: I forgot: PPC too of course)
With inbound links, basically the value that needs to be implemented is "how can I contribute to the Internet today?" We would need to work out in what way Rayner would be confident contributing .. would she have an hour a day to write a blog? A couple of hours a week to write an article? Would she be willing to get involved in forums? Are her paintings for sale, should we post them in online galleries (are they, actually, relevant at all or is it really a hobby)? We need to create a content machine, and I'd guess she's unlikely to want to outsource any of the creation of that because text is her business. But she might want to outsource the publishing and publicising of what she creates so she concentrates on creation, then gives it effectively to her online publisher who does all the crazy Internet stuff that turns it into traffic and kudos and interest and enquiries. That is the main hope of raising her position on the search results with this website.
With Web 2.0 and social media, it's about thinking through all the ways people can and might want to connect with her, from RSS feeds to YouTube channels, from Facebook to Twitter via LinkedIn, and from Podcasts to newsletters and creating material for her and her 'fans' or followers through the channels that work for her.
All of it is about giving and contributing in order to get back kudos, social standing and reverence. So when it comes to it, people will turn to her for help. Here the website isn't dragging us back, so at least we'd be battling on equal terms.
That should be implementable with a few hundred pounds a month ongoing to create and implement the strategy, assuming Rayner creates the core content.
But the truth is, that all sounds like hard work and if she's a freelance copywriter she doesn't need a huge amount of work to keep going. These strategies are forced upon us by the initial website because without the ability to test and evolve the website we can't do the central, core website thing which is to be there on the first page of Google when someone types in that they want what we sell.
So I'm back to the website. I'd rebuild it properly and go from there.
1 September 2009: Marketing by numbers: God I love this. OK, if you delve into Internet marketing it won't be long before you are advised to write articles and syndicate them around t'Internet. That's fine. But writing articles takes time and it's a pain if you have to go through a clearance cycle. The temptation is to lower the quality in order to issue the quantity.
The reason article writing is good, though, is because it creates permanent, relevant links to your site and because the reader will hopefully be in the right frame of mind when they arrive.
Inbound links are not good just for traffic, they help raise you in the search engine results.
However, the article syndication sites have been mobbed by Internet marketers, the quality dropped, so Google downgraded those sites.
And, a link is a link whether it's from outside in to your site, or from within your site.
So one of the advantages of using me over most Internet marketers is that I can do the technical stuff too.
I've just added the ability for visitors to view the artwork on Whitby Artnet by art type: ceramics, paintings, etc. That's a nice bit of functionality for the user. There's more to come.
It fits nicely with my growing view that a sales style is 'out' while a functional, service style is 'in'.
But, most importantly, it creates four new pages on the site. You can link to them like this: Whitby paintings and art. So the site may well now rank for, for instance, 'ceramics from Whitby' because there's now a page of ceramic art from Whitby.
Each work shown on one of those pages contains multiple links back to the artists. The more artists enter their work, the more links they'll get.
So what I've done, in about an hour and a half, is probably the equivalent in effectiveness of writing and syndicating an article but we're not beholden to any of the article websites. On a bigger site, this would be a much bigger deal, and I think utility wins.
