Archive for August, 2009

5 Internet Businesses I Would Start

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
  1. Online PR Consultancy
  2. Twitter/Facebook CPC Exchange
  3. A Hyper-Focused Publication
  4. Become a website failure/improvement expert
  5. Online Marketing Dashboard

1. Online PR Consultancy

As mentioned in my last blog, Always the Tools Never the Content many marketers are going straight for the selection of free tools to try and enhance their web presence. “Lets Tweet, Facebook and YouTube it” is often the starting point of a marketing strategy. Rarely do you hear the cry “Lets think what we are going to say, understand what our customers need and understand the best channel to communicate with them”.

Eventually, disappointed marketers will turn to PR professionals for communication strategy advice. Online PR is a very different animal to traditional PR and requires a completely different set of skills. Knowing the editor of a publication isn’t as important as getting readers to digg or retweet the article, for example. The new marketer is the PR Agency that understands online culture not the Design Agency that understands CMYK and HTML.

print-internet

2. Twitter/Facebook CPC Exchange

We trust recommendations from other consumers over ads. As Google PPC AdWords become increasingly expensive the cost of consumer recommendations stand a chance of becoming a currency. The purchase of retweets, Facebook posts or third party endorsements carry a monetary value to the charity, product or service company needing attention. Realizing this value is a challenge but it could be the new celebrity endorsement.

The successful facilitation of this service is a money-spinner!

3. A Hyper-Focused Publication

My Geneticly Modified Pig Grass

My Geneticly Modified Pig Grass Experiment

Deep and thin is better than shallow and wide. A publication that is hyper focused with a limited readership may seem like a bad business model but imagine you had the readership and trust of 400 top Biologists researching genetically modified grass within their universities and research laboratories in the UK and Ireland. What would a supplier of products to this market pay for their attention? This is a deep and thin slice of wealthy influential people.

What if you had the readership of those getting married in the next two years in your region? The average Bride is in charge of €20,000 and is looking to spend. What would a hotel pay for a really hot opportunity to talk to someone like this?

Newspapers are shallow and wide in terms of readership. They don’t hold the attention of those with a passion for niche subject or pastime. Their advertising model is ineffective. Set up your hyper-focused thin and deep publication, work hard and gain trust and then understand the value of good PR with an ad model together and you have revenues for a lifestyle business that exceeds most normal salaries.

4. Become a website failure/improvement expert

Recently the owner of a great company called IQcontent.ie explained to me that their customer was a walking boot manufacturer. The website was well designed in the sense that it looked pretty and had great photographs of the boot with loads of user recommendations.

The site got lots of traffic but visits that were not converting to sales. With limited market research they found that customers were put off because they couldn’t view the sole of the boot to understand how the grip worked in the wet. When new photos addressed the issue sales soared!

Many business owners can get so absorbed in perfecting their product/service, they often assume that the customer assumes the obvious. Sometimes it just takes a different approach to understanding what makes a website work. Your inquisitive and logical approach can be of massive financial value to your customer. Get a few case study stories and start to tell them to everyone you meet! The work will roll in.

5. Marketing Dashboard

I’ll come clean – this is my latest project. In the days of old marketing we had a good idea of what worked but didn’t have the evidence to properly measure where our marketing spend was actually working.

Today we have data in the form of analytics, open rates, click rates, unsubscribes, followers, retweets, SEO, PPC….etc. We have now inverted the problem of old marketing to the point that we can’t digest all of the statistics coming from all of our marketing channels.

Our latest product reports on each channel by way of a handy widget. More importantly it understands the connection between your email marketing campaign and the increase in traffic to your website and delivers holistic advice and analysis.

This business better take off! It’s a great time to start an internet business.  What’s your idea?

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Posted in Business Startup Ideas | 3 Comments »

Always the Tools never the Content

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

“We use Twitter, Blogging, Facebook and Email Marketing”, said Andrew the Managing Director of an online travel firm. But under scrutiny Andrew didn’t know what to expect from using these tools. He just knew he wanted more orders. His strategy for getting more orders was to shout loudly until someone listened.

On closer inspection the Twitter account was following 1986 people and had 33 followers. Out of the 33 followers, 7 were spam, the rest contra-following from organisations that were sympathetic to the travel company but never likely to purchase anything from them. The travel company insisted on tweeting a new offer every day. They treated their Twitter channel as an advertising channel.

The Facebook fan page has employees and family as readers and again contained a sequence of ads for holidays and short breaks. The email list had nearly 100,000 email addresses but rarely achieved open rates in excess of 3% with purchases often equating to zero.

Andrew wanted to grow his Twitter following, Facebook fan base and rent new email marketing lists believing that his sales funnel would grow. Needless to say that this growth tactic would just annoy more people and not increase orders. The problem wasn’t the size of his audience; it was how Andrew’s company engaged with them.

Having a hammer doesn’t make you a carpenter nor does having a paintbrush make you an artist. The problem in Andrew’s case is not the tool set he uses nor is it the force he is applying. The problem stems from a lack of understanding the art and craft of how to use the tools. From experience I find that most organisations start with the tools before they ever ask the question if anyone is skilled enough to use them. Sometimes the tools fall into naturally skilled individuals’ hands, most times they don’t.

Give me tools...more tools!

Give me tools...more tools!

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We Only Want to Pay for Atoms not for Bits

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Once a product or service becomes digital, its cost inevitably marches toward zero.  This is the premise of the latest book from Chris Anderson called ‘Free: The Future of A Radical Price’.  In this book Anderson argues that once the creation costs of any digital asset are covered, the incremental cost of delivering anything digital is so low it’s not worth measuring.

images

The new internet generation are hard wired not to pay for bits

Anderson examines the human behavior behind why we feel there is value in paying for things made from atoms, for example a newspaper, a music CD, a DVD, training materials, encyclopedia, boxed software etc but yet, the moment it turns from physical atoms to bits and becomes available online, our desire to pay evaporates.  Ask yourself would you pay £0.60 for an online newspaper each day?

The book challenges you to reconsider how you market and price your digital products and services and examines the very successful companies that have embraced giving their digital intellectual property away for free and make their money in other, less conventional ways.  For example the gaming companies that gives away the game, but people can buy tools using real world money to assist them in the game.  Some 10% of people pay and the recurring revenue from this 10% it turns is more profitable than the 3 weeks at the top of the games charts.  The book is packed with similar examples.

To prove his point, Anderson gives away the audio book but asks you to pay if you want the print edition.  The summation is that if you operate in the digital world, you almost inevitably need to find a model that gives the use of your intellectual property away and look at other revenue streams that opens up from having advocates.

Understanding how we perceive value and how we ultimately market and price our products/services is a science.  This Ted Talk video from 2005 is well worth the watch to help understand how to deal with the changing world and how your customers understand value.

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The Paradox of Online Advertising

Monday, August 10th, 2009

Most credible magazines and newspapers have strict protocols to make sure their editorial content is not infected by the influences of its’ advertisers.  This builds trust with the reader, ensures that the content is without prejudice and gives the publication integrity.  Advertising is kept at arms length from the editorial and that is the way it should be.

On the other hand the only truly successful global internet advertising platform is Google’s AdWords and AdSense.  What makes these ads different to newspaper advertising is that it flips the rule that advertising and editorial content should be kept apart.  Instead of making sure the ad doesn’t sit close to the editorial, it places the ad right along side it. In many cases the reader not only trusts the editorial but also considers the ad as additional content and helpful in the quest for more knowledge.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation announced that it is going to start charging for some of its’ online newspaper content come autumn.  The reason being that it can’t make enough money from online advertising to allow the content to remain free for all.  Why has the approach of publishers failed to generate enough online advertising spend while the readers are migrating online?  The problem lies in infinite advertising space the web affords us.

paradoxThe web is different.  We trust software to position ads and don’t feel cheated or believe that editorial integrity has been lost.  This was an unthinkable model 10 years ago, just like Murdoch’s paid-for-content model being proposed now.  The question is what happens to publishing if Murdoch’s plan fails?

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10 Tips and Reasons Why Online PR is Vital to Your Web Strategy

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

When we talk about PR we rarely contemplate the complexity of the profession.  Often PR is about taking a position on an issue, creating claim in a crisis or creating the personality for a brand.  Most importantly PR is about spreading your story.

PR companies often complain that their role is misunderstood as clients think it is about getting column inches but yet at the end of the quarter they present their clients with press clippings as the measurement of their success fueling the misconception.  In a period of tumbling readership of print publications isn’t it time that we looked at online PR and understood why it often trumps the importance of the traditional column inch?

The 10 Tips and Reasons:

1.    Wider audience: Many traditional print publications have a reach limited by geographic boundaries.   Their online readership is frequently much greater than their printed circulation therefore an online press release can reach a wider global audience than the printed version. Settling for the fact that your printed story will appear on a website is not sufficient.  It rarely translates well to online where readers consume information and behave differently.  Your online PR needs to be written for an online audience.

2.    Easier to gain prominence: The digital editor of a publication is looking for more than a story and photo.  They want multiple photos or video or even competitions or dialogue that encourages interactivity.  The digital editor has different needs and is hungry for interactive content.  Feed that hunger and be rewarded with more prominent coverage.

3.    The story continues: Combine your online PR with online advertising and insist on links back to specifically designed pages on your website where the conversation continues and the attention generated by the article rewards both the reader and you.

fish-and-chips

Yesterdays offline PR

4.    Archived Content: Today’s column inches are tomorrows chip wrappers (did chip shops really wrap their produce in newspapers?). The point is that your online PR with the peer reviewed publication or popular notice boards or blog will be archived and reproduced as a result within search engines.  Future searches will reveal your past online PR efforts, especially those that had some level of engagement.

5.    Create Google Juice! That’s the term used to describe the power of an googlejuiceinbound link from a peer-reviewed publication. Google (and others) looks at the quality of the publication; a peer-reviewed publication often holds lots of juice, and gives your site Google juice by linking to it helping your search engine performance for that topic.  Get enough links from well-respected publications and you will top Google ahead of competitors with random low scoring inbound links.

6.    Totally traceable ROI: Links clicks, videos watched, contacts made…real tangible outcomes are measured from online PR.  The guesswork on your Return On Investment calculations is made simple.

7.    Niche Marketing: Weddings Online gets 4.5 million page impressions per month, that’s as much as most national newspapers and has over 1000 brides signing up in the same period.  Each bride spends around 4 hours per week on the site.  If you want to reach the wedding market in Ireland, this is the way.

Sugahfix 28,000 21 to 45 year olds interested in fashion in Ireland actively receiving fashion tips per week, while nitechblog.com has 500 top CTO’s in Ireland as frequent readers.

These online publications have massive reach within their niche, something generalist print magazines don’t have. Add in the interactivity they produce with forums and blogs and these publications are the new powerhouse for reaching and talking to your perspective clients.

Get your online PR strategy right and find a low cost, high impact route to your audience.  Combine it with online advertising spend and BINGO!

8.    Old talents – new platform: Don’t be distracted by the technology focused PR agent that doesn’t have the talent to tell your story well.  Poor stories travel equally as bad online as they do offline.  Select your PR agency based upon PR credentials not their technology know how.  Companies like Ion, DCP, Weber Shandwick and CMPR for example, have both virtues.

9.    Multimedia will increase chances of success: If your PR happens to contain video it stands a substantially higher chance of improving engagement, can quickly overcome trust issues and the investment in video can be reused in email marketing and many other online points of contact.  The digital editor is more likely to run with the content also as long as it enhances the story and doesn’t look like an ad!

10.    Combine and conquer: Any marketing strategy requires multiple channels of activity. If your marketing strategy includes above-the-line elements as well as below-the-line, the combined effect of the activities will be greater than the sum of their parts.

Your customer is increasingly taking their guidance from online research therefore it is imperative than your attention if focused on creating influence in this area.  Make online PR a central part of your overall marketing strategy, not a footnote.

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