Author: Dave J.

For those of you still watching Thomas Register/Net, they have been able to get top listings for a lot of industrial terms, including my keywords. But are people using the site? Well, in the last week, we’ve received two bonifide ‘hot’ leads from their site. The prospects used TN’s ability to send out an RFQ to multiple vendors.

One of my favorite finds last year was a post at Origins of Brands Blog that told how being the number-two in a market means positioning different from the leader. This article I found at the Max Blumberg’s Positioning Game Blog is an example of HP doing just that, and looking for higher profitability as a result.



HP: How being second can be more profitable

Recent evidence, however, suggests that market share is not necesarily good for profits. In general you are better off meeting many needs in a smaller market than meeting only a few needs in a larger market.

I complained a couple months ago about Business.com hammering me with click-fraud. I called them to complain (to deaf ears), but clicks did drop dramatically, so I decided to let things ride.

When I was looking at my site stats for December, I was ready to hit the roof. Business.com was the top referring domain, even over Google! One product page in particular jumped dramatically in traffic. Seething, I hit my account on their website to find me billed for only about 6% of those click-thrus.

It is good to see them filtering the click-fraud, but the activity is throwing off my tracking. The heavy traffic shows they have a big problem to deal with. But, busy guy that I am, I will let my account continue to be active.

As we’ve been using Goldmine CRM for a month, I’ve been able to observe how different people interface with the software, and technology in general. Here’s a summation:

• Power-user: One who wants to make the most of the tool they’ve been given and are willing to explore its capabilities. Symptom: “I think I screwed something up.” Thankfully, I’m not the only one.
• Power-ignorant: Those who use the software, but aren’t aware how the software is there to benefit them and make their lives earlier. Symptom: “I didn’t know you could do that.”
• Power-less: Those who simply don’t understand what to do. Most likely these are field salespeople somehow. Symptom: “Can you show me that again?”
• Power-trip: One who understands the software and its capability but takes short-cuts or does it the old way. Symptom: “I’ll figure that out later.”

I had a new customer order a couple of our units just before New Years. The equipment needed an option installed, and because of the holiday and subsequent year-end inventory, we couldn’t ship it last week as he desired. I had been trying to keep him informed but getting the equipment out was out of my hands. Friday our shipping manager sent the customer an email telling him his units would ship on Tuesday. We received emails in response after 5pm on Friday asking for expedited delivery.

Monday morning at 9am, unannounced, his lab manager showed up in our lobby asking for his equipment! He had rented a pick-up and drove up from Maryland to Michigan over the weekend. He inferred from the email that the equipment was ready, and we were just waiting for a regular pick-up on Tuesday, when in fact we still had to prep for shipment. The shipping manager and I were both talking to him, and we knew that we couldn’t commit to getting the equipment ready. We also both knew that it wouldn’t be smart to get the person who could commit in front of him (and there were no other authority figures available for him or us to appeal to).

He said he would just wait for his equipment. So, we asked him to have a seat in a conference room while we investigated our options. “While your waiting, can I get you a cup of coffee or something?” I asked. “No, I just want my equipment,” he replied, thin-lipped. Is this guy going to sit in this room all day, I wondered.

Once I was able to tell him the equipment would be ready later, I was able to break the ice. We sent him off in search of loading straps while he waited. After lunch, we had his equipment on his pick-up truck. By the time he pulled away, he was all smiles and very thankful for all our help.

My Google AdWords used to occationally earn the coveted “up north” position (above, not on the right) on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) but recently have been pushed down to an average of #5. But I don’t think I’ve updated my CPC (Cost Per Click) in three years.

So, how do you get to the top listing? This post by a Google representative explains it very clearly:

Search Engine Watch Forums — Top position? Impossible?

Here are two basic facts worth knowing:

• Rank number = Max CPC x CTR. Thus Max CPC and CTR have equal weight
• Ads go to the top when they have met an additional performance standard, which focuses on the relevance of the ads to our users…This is measured by CTR.

There is additional discussion from people in the forum about this information but no one discussed how to boost CTR (Click Thru Rate). And the only way I can think of doing so is to improve your ad. Once again, I haven’t touched my AdWord ad in years. I think the only way to do this is by adding gimmicky copy. Right now, I have a couple promotions starting that I could list in my ad which would boost CTR. And afterall, isn’t click-thrus why we are using AdWords?

Off-topic. Just wanted to share that my old National Guard unit, the 3/126th Infantry is shipping out of Michigan to Fort Dix to get ready for duty in Iraq.

I was a truck driver and later worked with ammo supply. It’s been almost eight years since I dropped out of the NG, and I’m sure the unit has changed a lot since. Should I feel glad that I quit or like I cheated them? Either way, my spirit is with them and so are my prayers.

I was talking with someone today about the shrinking size of trade publications. This time the subject was Laboratory Equipment, which was 24 pages and 26 advertisers (5 full page).

So it was interesting to find an editorial in the new Circuits Assembly (pdf) acknowledging the shrinking magazine. What Mike Buetow lamented is that as ad-pages shrink, so does editorial content, only further diminishing his magazine’s relevance. But this is a guy with a plan…

First, he makes a rather bold step in saying…”wouldn’t (readers) be best served if we packaged each issue as if they paid for it?”

Then he creates an action plan to cram more content into his magazine by providing abbreviated content that continues online. This actually gives him the freedom to publish longer articles and provide more data. This creates room to address more of his nine key technology areas each month. He echos what I’ve said is the continuing job of trade publications: “Our role is to act as a filter, screening the noise from what’s truly crucial.”

Our parent company recently started releasing PDFs of product catalogs, which has been something I’ve asked for repeatedly. The problem is that they were generated from the original print jobs, so every graphic element is rendered individually. The result is a 6M document (for eight pages) that slowly paints each element every time you scroll. On top of that, there are foreign fonts used that aren’t embedded. Ugh!

So, how to fix? I just opened the PDF file, then reprinted it using Acrobat Distiller (not PDFWriter). I have the properties for Distiller set to “eBook”. The resulting file is about 700K!

Now I’m able to create templates in Goldmine to send PDFs of our pretty brochures. Cool!

I thought I had a slow year blogging, but in reviewing my posts I was surprised by the quality of what I found. Check these out (newest posts first):

• Great case-study in B2B marketing gives my take on an article from MarketingSherpa
• Juicy info on B2B web searchers summarizes another MarketingSherpa article
• CRM project moving ahead outlines basic steps taken to get our CRM project started
• Business.com–home of click fraud? Is a expose using my personal experience.
• Three free prizes are examples of WWSD (What Would Seth Do)
• SEO as a branding tool tells a truth for B2B websites that should be heeded.
• We try harder…being #2 is a link to one of my most inspiring reads this year…

A #2 brand should never try to emulate the leader

• Dilbert is right about marketing links to an article in an engineering mag creating white papers from your engineers.
• Website Critique takes a B2B company to task for their ‘new’ website.
• Edgecraft with Alton Brown is an analysis of what makes a Free Prize.
  

But now that I understand more about him (thanks Wired), I am raising him to hero-status. That isn’t a casual statement to make. He saw the edge, and made it happen.

• Scum alert! is my first post regarding the very evil Traffic Power SEO company. Its generated a number of emails from victims to me.
• Is email sabotaging your sales efforts? asks the question–when should you reply by phone to an email from a prospect?
• Old news and red herrings provides some analysis by yours-truly regarding the impact of Google on trade publications. All of my posts should be this good.

Trade pubs need to provide new information (including product info) that readers want to learn about. Engineers are not going to search the net to see if Agilent has a new impedance analyzer, but they’ll be thankful if it is presented to them. Google can’t do this–that’s the red herring.

• Building useful site navigation points to an article that focuses on navigation designed to generate more conversions–such a simple idea, but runs contrary to your sense of organization.
• From the master Guru Jakob Nielsen takes B2B websites to task. Great advice on creating ‘advocate tools’ to help during the purchase process.
• Back to the basics Things not to do on your sites (about half the examples have been fixed)
• Who’s your best salesperson? is a little story about how I bought a new washing machine at Best Buy. If you think this is about them not being on commission, you are wrong. This is an ‘ah-ha’ moment, so worth reading.
• Marketing: It’s a puzzle is a great post not because of my prose, but because of the great article I found. It tells it like it is.
• Another marketing nitwit tells of a email newsletter sponsor whose landing page is a Word document!
• Can CRM survive the handoff has to be one of my longer, more rambling posts. I dare you to read it.
• Getting control of the calendar is a quick introduction to the power of the ical file format. (Nowadays I have Goldmine which speaks ical!)
• From Mailbox to Trashcan is just a link to an article about getting your direct mail read.
• Is anybody out there? (like me?) When yours truly gets his head blown-up (literally) in the local paper in an article about blogging.
• Top ten posts of 2003 in case you liked this list!