In my house we subscribe to many different kinds of email newsletters.
My wife gets one from a cosmetic company that all the time says “here’s something to make up for our mistake”
At first I thought that’s a nice way to handle a mistake.
Then they kept coming every couple of days. “Our Bad” or “Sorry for this or that”.
It didn’t take me long to realize that these were lies and I wasn’t even reading the newsletters.
I don’t think this is good marketing and I’m sure I’m not alone. Today I saw this on email insider
Search engines and their algorythms are constantly changing. So the exact rules for being found by the search engines are not known, but here are also some old mainstays that don’t really change.
SEO is Simple – My Rules
Rule 1 – Have good navigation that search engines (and humans) can read and follow
- If they don’t know it’s there how can they see it?
Rule 2 – Have good content and keep adding more.
- The first thing I say is to have something that people actually want to see or use.
Simple rule, but often ignored.
- Then, letting your visitors speak about your content adds new content and more value.
Rule 3 – You need to have other, preferably high ranking sites link to you.
- Same thing. Give people (not search engines) what they want to see so they will want link to you.
Then help them do it. Pay walls are death!
Social network sites, like facebook and Twitter are a really great way to add high ranking links to your site and also attract good conversation. It’s important to remember that they own your conversation when it’s on their site. Conversation on your own site then becomes much more valuable for you, so it’s best to try to direct people there. First to publish many times is seen as the *owner* by Google.
My Rules For Good Conversation
- First and most important is admit when you are wrong.
Try to fix your mistake as best you can and move on.
- Don’t try to censor criticism. Answer it!
- Add value to the conversation.
Keep the self promotion to a minimum.
Let your fans promote you
- There are programs to plug your blog into social networking sites. Publish your own content on your own site first. You are viewed as the owner of the content and it helps encourage conversation on your site.
- Some people ask me about planning a viral campaign, video or email.
The answer is, it’s really hard to do. The best ones usually just happen, but if you don’t put something out there to be shared, it guaranteed won’t ever happen.
- To recap, be yourself and listen well
- read more
Fast Company is a pretty good magazine and I even had a subscription for a year or two. I’ve pretty much done with all of my paper newspaper and magazine subscriptions, but I have been a subscriber to the Fast Company blog for a while now.
Recently they have been pushing ads to their blog posts and you have to wait for the ad to finish before the actual article displays. That made me a bit angry and I haven’t been reading any of their articles for a couple of days now.
Today there was one that I wanted to read and so I went away for the fifteen or twenty seconds for their ad to play. I’m not even sure what the ad was for. I intentionally don’t watch any ads that I forced to watch before the content that I’m looking for plays. Usually I’ll open another browser or email window and do something else for a few seconds or just daydream.
When I came back to their article I saw that the ad was still playing and as I watched the timer I noticed the ad just kept reloading. I realized that to see their article, not only would I have to watch the ad, I would also have to allow their cookies so they knew I watched it.
Well, that did it for me. I deleted the Fast Company blog from my RSS reader (Thunderbird). So rather than having me read their stuff and maybe click on an occasional ad, they got greedy and now Fast Company can’t count my eyeballs on any of their pages. There are other blogs that don’t force me to watch ads and while not being exactly the same content are pretty close, so I read those.
I usually don’t allow cookies so I may not be the typical website visitor, but it seems foolish to me for a magazine’s website to just throw away any group of visitors. I may be just one visitor, however I may also be more typical than they realize. Either way I don’t see how this will be good for Fast Company and I feel a bit sad for the loss.
There’s a new free ebook from Google called Improving Online Conversions for Dummies.
They lean toward adwords, but that’s how they make their money.
If you’re interested in buying or selling ads from your site, it’s explained well.
There is another benefit, too. You can learn how visitors are probably going to behave on your site.
You can use that information to convert them to the action you want. Buy something, sign-up, etc.
Who would know what people are looking for better than Google?
Google Places is a great way to promote your businesses online presence. It works well even if you don’t have a website. Business owners can have a listing on Google’s local database. So when potential customers search for you on Google.com or Google Maps they also see your ad.
Your business name, location, hours of operation and phone number displays on Google Maps. Potential customers searching for something else may find your business, too. You can also provide additional features like photos, videos and coupons so your business can really stand out on the map. You can great stats as well and best of all it’s completely free.
Sometimes I do my best thinking while out for my daily walks, sometimes it’s just silly stuff. Today there’s an old expression running through my head. I used to hear it quite a bit in my past lives, but I don’t much anymore, “People buy from people”.
It’s probably because so much shopping is automated these days that people don’t expect a personal relationship when they’re buying things, I know I don’t. It always surprises me when I feel a personal experience from a business I interact with online.
I think one of the best things you can offer your website visitors is a clear idea of who you are and what you can do for them. I’m a one man shop so it’s easy to be the face of me. The face of a company can also be many people, provided they’re all consistently delivering the same message. More important is listening to their customers and sharing what they are hearing with the rest of the group. Everyone needs to be on the same page so it’s important to meet regularly to discuss what they are hearing and what would be the best way to help the customer.
In my business everyone’s thirteen year old niece or nephew can build them a website. I would like to think that I’m better than most of them, but I will admit there are probably some that are better than me. So it’s my job to let my customers get to know me and give them confidence that I will offer them a better value.
A cup of coffee together is my preferred method, but it could be a phone conversation, email or text. Not every business can take their customers out for coffee and danish. Your visitors really just want to know they have been heard, that you are concerned about what they want. Any solution you offer them, as long as it tries to address their needs lets them know you’ve listened and is almost always better than offering them nothing at all.
Make sure you give your visitors an easy way to talk to you and really listen to what they say. That’s the best way to let your customers know that you’re a good value for them.
It seems that whenever I speak to people about websites they are always more concerned with traffic and how to get more visitors than anything else. It doesn’t seem to matter that if their site looks bad or is not very user friendly, any traffic that they do get will probably leave right away.
I suppose it’s my job to make sure that my sites look good and work well, but there’s still that tricky part of turning your visitors into fans of your site and customers of your business.
I was reading an article on my local newspaper’s site this morning about a Pittsburgh company that seems to be doing just that. ModCloth is a clothing company that’s promoting their business in a very non-traditional way. They’re still spending on promotion, when I Googled their name I did see they are paying for clicks, but the newspaper article pointed out they’re doing much more. They’re actively listening to their customers, asking them what they want and for the most part giving them what they ask for.
They’re allowing their visitors to vote on items they want to see in stock, help name and describe products and suggest styling tips. They have ModStylists to guide customers and give advice from how to accessorize to what to wear to an event. It’s a really good lesson for anyone promoting almost anything.
Matt Cutts who is one of the faces of Google recently gave a great interview to The WordPress Podcast with lots of good tips on how to properly promote your site.
This is about an hour long, but well worth a listen. The beginning is a bit tech-ish, but hang in there it gets good.
I like to aimlessly wonder around the web. They used to call it Web Surfing. I’ll follow any number of things that strike my fancy. The other day I was on LinkedIn, looking at the other peoples blogs.
I stopped at a couple and read a post or two. I even registered and commented on one. I like to comment on the posts that I like. Comments are good for your blog.
Then I came on one that just stopped me in my tracks.
This blog had a fairly recent last post where they apologized for not posting much and they promised to do better. I would just write more and forget the apology, but not a big deal. Let’s hope they do.
The rest of the post went on and on about how they didn’t like to write, it was too hard to have perfect grammar, the sun was in their eyes. OK the sun excuse wasn’t there, but I probably won’t return to this site.
Here’s the deal with blogs, if you don’t want to write, don’t have one. A stale blog is worse than none at all.
If you want to have one, just write something, then write more. The wining may have been worse than nothing, but maybe not. Anyway, write what you like, about what you like and don’t worry at all about perfect grammar.
Nothing is better to promote your site. If you are lucky enough to have good comments, even better. Listen to your commenters and reply to good ones.
We all need good sales leads. I write many posts about networking, but there’s always much more.
This is a really good post on MediaPost’s Performance Insider blog I like
