Archive for April, 2011
Savvy or Sucker Marketing
For the past few months, I’ve been offering a few business-related blog posts for business owners. For those of you who have taken the step to put out your online “open for business” shingle by starting a website or web blog, you might have noticed an increase in emails asking if a company can help you increase traffic by monitoring your site, using SEO (search engine optimization), helping you select keywords that rank high on Google for your business niche, or adding you to a larger network of business owners boasting a large percentage of hits for your local. If you don’t know what these marketers are talking about, you owe it to yourself to figure out whether you can detect savvy or sucker marketing?
Know the difference between savvy and sucker marketing?
What is the difference between savvy marketing and sucker marketing? Savvy marketing helps you reach beyond cold contacts and close friend networks into the rich communities that may be already primed for your business.
To understand savvy marketing, you should experiment with what you can learn yourself. For example:
1. Conducting Google keyword searches for your niche. It’s free. What do you have to lose?
2. Experiment with what happens when you change meta tags, content, ads, and watch your website analytics over a period of time.
3. Note what content your audience responds to. Pay careful attention to how your contacts found you.
4. Paid advertisements are not created equal. Find out the ones that give you the best ROI. Keep track of which ads did well and where they were placed.
5. Create a quarterly or monthly newsletter, thanking your customers, and showing them what actions or methods of participation would help them belong to your network and/or community.
When you’ve done some of these things for yourself, you’ll be more savvy about when and who to hand this to should you choose to hire someone to maintain your website/webblog to increase your business contacts.
You will also be able to detect when you’ve been contacted by what I’m calling “sucker marketing”:
1. The caller tells you he or she works for Google. I find this practice unethical (and possibly illegal). For each person who has called me and said she worked for Google, they have had to “clarify” that she didn’t actually work for Google at all. However, she was reading from a script. This sucker marketing tactic is hoping you don’t know enough about online business and SEO and is banking on popularity of Google to get your attention.
2. The bot message in your inbox guarantees that it can increase traffic to your website if you’ll pay a fee, join their program, or hand over your website maintenance over to their marketer. Even if the company could increase your website’s traffic, there is no guarantee they will increase relevant traffic to your site. A marketing company’s guarantee must be based on whether they can bring you niche-rich traffic (a.k.a. relevant hits).
Want to do an inexpensive experiment on this? Take out an ad on Facebook, put a limit on the amount you’d be willing to pay in weekly time period, and do not put limits on demographics related to the ad. On a different week, add in al the demographics that apply to your niche, and change your ad to be keyword specific. Your traffic hits should go down, but the number of relevant contacts should increase.
If you are going to hire a company to do your marketing and web maintenance, make sure they understand your business niche.
3. The marketer tells you he knows the most effective keywords for your business, and you don’t know what those are.. This one honestly makes me laugh. You can find out more about keyword searches by doing a little research of your own. A great book I have mentioned before is Vanessa Fox’s, “Marketing in the Age of Google“, and she devotes much description and examples to how you can determine your business niche’s SEO-driven keywords to help your business rank high.
If you can at least do this part yourself to get a fundamental understanding, you are now poised to ask a few questions of your inquirers. The following conversation occurred last year, but is a summary of approximately five similar phone calls:
Marketer: Hi, I’m calling from Google. I saw on your website, www dot widgets dot com, that you aren’t ranking as high as you ought to for your business. I can help you discover keywords that you might not know about so that you can increase your website traffic.
Me: (acting dumb) Oh, wow! You work for Google? That must be exciting. You help businesses increase their website traffic, eh? What kinds of keywords are we talking about?
Marketer: Actually, I don’t work directly for Google. I work for XYZ company, but we work in conjunction with Google’s way of searching so that people can find your business. With keywords, let’s see…. with widget sales, you should be using keywords, A, B, and C.
Me: (still acting dumb) You mean, if I used keywords A, B, and C specifically on my website, that would help my business do better?
Marketer: Yes, those are the three main keywords for your business. We can…
Me: (interrupting) Well, thanks for letting me know those three keywords! That was great help. Bye! (hangs up phone).
In the above scenario, the marketer erroneously addresses me as the owner of the business, and not necessarily the same person monitoring my businesses website. The minute I detected the marketer’s “sucker” fallacies, I ended the conversation in a way that would likely guarantee I wouldn’t be addressed the same way. I also did not know the company that was named; this was a cold contact with no introduction via email or understanding of my specific business or its history.
In the ensuing months, you may be contacted by more marketers who now know you know something of your business. If you are ready to hire someone to help expand your marketing plan, select someone savvy who isn’t taking advantage of your lack of knowledge about how SEO works, what kind of content should go on your site, and what type of advertising you want to engage in for which kind of platforms. They should have experience with branding your type of business, and if they don’t but ask to use you as a way to gain experience, ask for a trial period and regular check ins.
3. You receive an email telling you to get in on the exciting world of mobile marketing. I put this in a similar category ask deep linking. Before you agree to do this, you have to look at your business practices, goals, and your present contacts. Did you ask them for permission to be contacted on their mobile phones outside of emails? You can lose good customers without taking time and care to consider what some mobile marketing methods may do to your business.
If your business is very new or very small, know that there is a lot of free information available to help you get started with marketing and branding your company, project, or idea (patented or not). You don’t have to pay beaucoup bucks up front unless you know a reputable person with a plan to build your market responsibly.
Remember, just because you put a website up does not mean you will get business overnight. You have to learn how to “work it”. Marketing can be very helpful, but know what is savvy and what is sucker-ish.
Plugging Away When No One’s Watching
I inherited an outlook from my own “Tiger Mom” about an education. While I hear of parents attending their kid’s graduation ceremonies from the third grade, I am aware that the only graduations that were of any consequence in my parent’s home were those of college and post-college institutions. In the meantime, we were expected to excel, and I mean EXCEL: perfect grades, achievement in math and sciences, piano recitals with flawless performances, and just all-around excellence. I can’t remember a time that I “let go” or “let up”. And while my parents weren’t there every moment to watch me like a hawk, I sometimes wonder where the motivators were that kept my nose in a book, other than my own love for knowledge and mastery of a subject. When there is no reward, what keeps you plugging away when no one’s watching?
Do you practice when no one's watching?
One could argue I was properly motivated by fear (i.e. fear of disappointing my parents, fear of punishment for failing, fear of being the stupid kid in class), but I think my achievement ethic goes deeper than those surface fears. I get a profound sense of pleasure with fluency and mastery of a subject. Mastery does not mean there is nothing left to learn, but represents a freedom and fluidity with a subject that leads to playfulness and joy within the subject or medium. For example, there is a difference when you play a short tune on the piano, note by note, in painful tedium and awareness of placing the correct finger on the correct key in the correct timing and rhythm with the correct amount of force, and effortlessly accompanying yourself on that same piano while holding a conversation with someone, seemingly unaware that your fingers appear to have little brains attached to them as they dance upon the keyboard.
Not everything you do for your artistic pursuits or your artful business is going to gain you applause, branding power, or even any notice from anyone. Much of what you’ll do will be the quiet, sometimes tedious, and occasionally lonely work of preparation, knowing your subject better than others, and figuring out ways to share it with others when it’s ready. Having a successful artful business means you will have to be fairly good at all three! What will you do to work all three angles at once? Here are some tips from other successful entrepreneurs:
* Make a plan, and schedule your hours. If you work for yourself, you have to be that much more diligent to guard your time.
* Make sure you get enough practice time in your most creative and productive hours. If your best hours are early in the morning before you jump on your computer, leave your iDevices off, and go to your practice first, even if that means you still have morning breath. If it’s nighttime that floats your boat, make sure your creative time happens in a space where you can make noise, spread out, and apply yourself quickly with the least amount of effort to get yourself into a creative head space.
Don’t forget to book time that includes processing, paperwork, and follow up. I will often journal using Evernote to keep track of ideas, and I’ll send a copy of that note to any one else involved with that particular project. That builds in accountability to my work, and guarantees I won’t forget where I left off.
* Do it with others. Join a like-minded community of people who know your interests and support your creative endeavors. If you knit, join a weekly knitting group. Like to play music? Find other live music lovers to attend shows, and stick around afterwards to swap info about music production woes and developments.
* Seek a business community that supports your shout outs. They can teach you about elevator speeches, short pitches, business plans, legal issues, and other related activities. An example: Biznik.com has a free profile and premium profile offerings that let you connect with others about your business.
In my example, I was concerned that coming onto a business-related scene as a performance artists would be a put off. By joining a business community and learning from others, they have helped me shape my presentation to the business community professionally. Now I’m known as a go-to person if you need a professional dancer who understands Social Media and social causes. They helped me bridge the gap of understanding, so that a dancer like myself has a place.
Here’s a video I came across that reminded me of the process (i.e. lots of set up, lots of work, waiting, agony, and then… bingo!):
<iframe title=”YouTube video player” width=”400″ height=”3oo” src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/RODr0Fg8pNc” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
While you might not be hearing the roar of applause for your efforts, these actions can help you stay on track for deadlines, projects, presentations, and pitches for your artful ideas to take flight. What helps you stay on track to do what you love and get it “out there?” Please share your ideas.
Buy Domain Names On The Cheap
I am friends with a few people who sit around and develop domain names for fun. Arianna O’Dell is one of them. My friend in GeraldineLily on Twitter is another. Others seem to collect domains like some people collect refrigerator magnets and spoons. The problem with generating domain names is that most companies make you purchase web hosting with that name, and that can get expensive. It’s REALLY expensive if you come up with a lot of names of which you may sell or use later. What do you do if you want to buy a bunch of domain names on the cheap?
While GoDaddy.com was one of those companies that would occasionally sell domain names for anywhere between $1.99 and $7.99 a year, you might have heard how the company is being boycotted by angry users because CEO Bob Parson recently aired a film clip of him shooting an elephant and standing over its carcass. Animal rights activists have called for a boycott against GoDaddy domains, and PETA shutdown its GoDaddy site. Many people have gone on the web, looking for a replacement host for their domains. While my general position is to not allow a CEO’s personal life to affect my business decisions, I too am shocked regarding Parson’s choice, and I like have looked at other sites for domain registration options.
That site might just be Media Temple, and they are perfectly poised to take your domain name on. Since November 2010, they have been running a special that appears to be a indefinite. New and old users can purchase domain names for $5 each without purchasing web hosting. Users can shop and choose which hosting platforms they like. That means, if you wanted to host your domain really cheap, you could conceivably host your new domain on free platforms like Posterous and Tumblr, or create a WordPress site and find a cheap host. Swap DNS settings, and you could be hosting your newest domain name from MT in no time.
A colleague of mine has been bugging me to solidify my own plans for “world domination” [right!] by purchasing another domain as a type of umbrella for all things Imei. As of last night, I am the proud owner of GotiMei.com.
What about your world domination plans? Got some fun, serious, or semi-lucrative ideas on the burner? Check out Media Temple for your domain purchases. At $5 a year to start, you can’t go wrong, and perhaps you can help others send a message to Mr. Parsons about who is the real dead elephant here: the elephant, or GoDaddy.com.
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