Month: June 2004

Lets say your division is part of a large company. Lets say you have a nicely designed website using ASP database. That means that when you click on a link to one of your product categories, what happens? A PDF file opens, of course. Nitwits!

Locknetics – Product Catalog

Check it out: Human Clock

Traffic-Power is evil. Since my recent Scum Alert, I’ve done some more investigating. The best news is that Google is dropping entire sites with TP’s ‘mouseover’ style of keyword-stuffed pages.

Here are some anti-Traffic-Power sites:

• SEOconsultants.com has a pretty good resource site for TP clients, including instructions on how to document what TP did, and fix it.
• You gotta love this site: www.trafficpowersucks.com, which includes scanned copies of the TP telemarketing guide.
• There is a law office investigating the possibility of a class-action lawsuit against TP
• If you want to see all their link farms, try this search in Google. Pick a couple URLs from these, then try to find them in Google–nada.

Here are some worthwhile thoughts from the seminar with speakers John Gennaro(Thomas Industrial) and Aaron Kahlow(BusinesOL.com):

• Be the company that prospects ‘back-button’ to when searching.
• Look for keywords related to how the customer will use your product (plastic pails, not injection molding)
• For local companies, state on web pages “Serving Detroit, Toledo, etc.”
• Pay special attention to your landing pages. When doing PPC, don’t dump to the home page.
• Have a purpose-driven website—engage the visitor with ‘call-to-actions’ like “click to learn more”
• Are users using the back-button? How? When? (This is info server-side data doesn’t show well)
• Focus on conversions

Want more? How about seeing my comments from last year.

but they realize its where they need to market. So along with these babes-in-the-woods, I visited the second annual Thomas Industrial Network internet marketing seminar.

First, note the new name: Thomas Industrial Network. Looks like the terms Register and Regional are going away. They are also debuting a new site, www.thomasnet.com, on July 1st. While they didn’t pitch their services directly, they did explain the goals of this new site. They want it to be a destination site, somewhere engineers can rely on, thus returning time and again.

One may wonder how much Globalspec influenced their design and focus, as the other destination site for engineers. The major differences: Thomasnet allows engineers to remain anonymous, Globalspec provides product detail.

Attendance was perhaps half of last years, in a much smaller room. And the Clarion Hotel in Kalamazoo was dated and poorly kept. There was a portrait of Jesus and one of Mary in the lobby in cheap looking frames that just seemed tacky.

Overall, the content wasn’t much different than last year (same presenters), so maybe people didn’t come because they heard the message last year. I was just happy to be at a presentation where they spoke my language.

At least the presenters did. I was surprised at the very low numbers of hands that went up when asked about “who knows what PageRank is” or “who uses pay-per-click advertising”. I heard one audience member talking to his TIN rep:

In the past we’ve always emphasized making our site look better when updating it. I think now we need to start thinking about adding more content.

Man this is 2004–You are four years late! Unfortunately, he was probably the average attendee. He was asking the rep if they could help, to which he replied yes.

One presenter cornered the audience: “How many are in the process of redesigning your site? What you really mean is that ‘my website sucks and needs to be fixed, but I don’t know what to do’, and that most likely nothing is really changing.”

The fact that I knew more than 90% of the people in the room, made my heart pound with the possibility of a new career helping these folks. But that’s a whole different post.

Sometimes I’m surprised at how few calls I get offering to help with our website or internet marketing. There is big money to be made if you have the right services and the right target clients. Especially when those clients are naive. Thank god that’s not me!

So, today I got a call from a rep at ‘traffic-power.com’. He is actually articulate and intelligent. He walks me thru some search-results reports for a client, then shows me their #1 and #2 listings. I don’t follow along at that point because I actually click on the Google SERP. Bingo! A redirect page pops up.

I finally confront him with this and tell him it is unethical and violates Google’s rules. Most people who play dirty pool would run off to the next sucker. This guy tries to defend the practice. And he tries to change switch subjects. “What would your boss think if his desk was suddenly filled with orders?” Geez. This goes on for a while. I thought he was finally going to bail, but then he pulls one I haven’t heard in a long time…”let me get my boss on the line”.

While waiting for the boss, I look at the source code of the client page the redirect leads to, iteamwork.com and find links to other sites like millionwholesalers-bizland.com that are link-farms. I tell the boss that my ethics won’t allow me to do business with them, and after a brief conversation its over.

The threw all kinds of malarky at me:

• “They aren’t redirect pages, they’re mouse-over pages”
• “We are going to start our own search engine (and be #4)”
• “We work with hotels.com etc. and they don’t have a problem with our ethics”
• “We limit our clients to three from one industry, otherwise we couldn’t promise top ten rankings, that’s our ethics”
• “We normally charge about $5,000 to get top rankings for 20 keywords”
• We are Google’s top competition, that’s why they don’t like what we do
• And I could go on…they certainly did

Here how they do it, in a nutshell (from their site):

A search engine entrance (SEE) page is a one page version of content taken from your site that is housed at a new Web site address. To create a SEE page site we register a new domain based on your keywords and upload the SEE page, the Traffic-Power.com code, and over 100 unique Advertising Pages. If someone finds the SEE page directly or through an Advertising Page they will be automatically sent to your original site once they click on any link on the SEE page.

Back on March 29th I met with a potential vendor. Like many first meetings, it was called by the salesperson to understand our company and its needs, as well as explain his company’s services. Unfortunately, there was no active project to discuss. He and his manager left, promising to ‘digest’ what they learned and come back with some suggestions or proposals.

By now, obviously, I’m not going to get that response.

Why bring this up now? This vendor had put me on a monthly postcard campaign prior to our meeting. And it still continues, acting as a reminder that their company failed to follow though. And the postcard still has my name spelled wrong!

What’s your follow-up like?

I’m trapped. Talking about Seth Godin or his books seems to mean the bar is raised and I have to talk in an outlandish tone so others will buy the book, or tell others. Its got to be an IdeaVirus, or Purple Cow, or Free Prize.

But thats not what I want to do. That’s not me. That’s not what this blog is about. But I do want to talk about Free Prize Inside because I think it is important, especially to smaller B2B businesses. Why important? We are often trapped in innovation-less marketplaces, but our organizations are loosely structured, making Free Prizes easier to roll out. Lets take a closer look:

• A Free Prize is nothing but an innovatation that makes selecting your product rewarding to the customer. The prize may be hidden or obvious. But it is Remarkable–which means that it isn’t just a gimmick and that it is worth remarking about.
• The way to find a Free Prize is by Edgecraft. Edgecraft is taking existing or potential competitive advantage and pushing it to the edges. A very cool idea but…
• It is Difficult. Difficult means more than hard work, it means stepping out of the box and being able to look in (and looking and looking). This is where using Jackie Huba’s idea of “What Would Seth Do” as a mantra could be helpful. It means having your radar on for sensing the edges that customers like so that you can exploit the edges.
• Most inspirational to me is the idea of the Champion. The champion is the person (hopefully you) who can take the Free Prize and make it happen. Seth says it is better to have a Free Prize that is within your power to be a Champion for. Passion is not enough. You have to also work at creating a reputation that allows others to let you be a Champion. Really, it is a lesson in being a leader. People don’t follow people they don’t trust, no matter how great the idea.

So there is the secret to the whole book. But if you really want to be a disciple, buy the bible (I mean book). use it learn W.W.S.D.

This cover article in Sales & Marketing Management discusses the need for a strategy for email communications. Mostly, it warns against salespeople ‘hiding’ behind email, instead of engaging the client. It suggests that “more important communications…and communications with new clients are almost always more effective in person”.

In this sidebar, called Don’t Hit Send, the advice about what messages not to email is pretty common-sense, too, but this one attracted my attention. Why? Its probably the easiest trap to fall into:

When a client e-mails you a question, more often than not your first reaction is to hit “Reply.” But your response probably doesn’t answer the question he didn’t ask yet. “When a customer asks a question, there’s frequently a question behind the question,” Turmel says. If you call your client instead of e-mailing him back, you can respond to his real concern, be proactive, and prevent a barrage of e-mails that can tie up your time.

In the last few weeks, I’ve received three different requests-for-quote from people using AOL email accounts.

Like asking the guy driving a Hummer about his mileage, it feels a little rude to ask questions about why they don’t have an email account with a real domain name. But it also makes you suspicious–I’m not selling Emerilware, after all. Are they a spy, or just a dealer/agent wasting my time?

Trust but verify–I do the following:

• Ask a couple more qualifying questions
• Write down the number on my caller-id
• Try to get other info, such as phone and address
• Search their phone number and email address on Google

In the end, its just scary to think that these people can’t spend 50 bucks and a little time to make themselves look more professional. AOL could probably make some money offering such a service directly. (But AOL would rather foist 50,000 ad impressions on you to make that same 50 bucks.)

UPDATE: I just got a significant order from one of the people with an AOL email account!!!