Author: Dave J.

This news from MarketingVox is disheartening for PPC advertisers for myself. Foreign Fraudsters Mobilize Armies of Clickers for PPC.

What the article doesn’t detail is who is paying for the results. Is it the advertisers or competitors or agencies? My AdWords charges jumped considerably at the beginning of the year. And I’ve always wondered how Business.com gets so many click-thrus to my site. My AdWords account allows me to keep control of what countries my ads show for, so I am less likely to suspect such a problem there (although a proxy server in the USA could be as a disguise).

The fact they are posting a news article directly from India says that this hasn’t hit the US news yet. Related: See article below about ‘trust’.

Can you believe it? Like my kids or my marriage, its hard to believe that time has passed that quickly.

Its hard to believe, too, how closely I’ve stuck to the vision expressed in my first post:

My first post. Lets list the current issues on my plate that I want to discuss in the future. Basically, I have several “directory listing services” to pick (or not). …

Throw those on top of Trade advertising, website design/maintenance, and internal issues to make an interesting blog for like-minded people.

Lately I’ve been pondering the fact that the history of things I have written goes ignored. But that’s the nature of the beast. I do average over 30 visitors a day, plus 200 or so via RSS hits. I have enjoyed interacting with readers and fellow bloggers the most. So, please feel free to contact me about anything, or just to say hi.

A thought about commitment:

My wife is a Girl Scout Brownie leader for a year-plus. She pours a lot of energy to support her troop of about 12 girls. For the girls, what they put into it is what they get out of it, and that’s to be expected. And some girls drop out because it doesn’t fit them. However, that’s not my concern.

My wife planned a nature trip for the girls on Saturday, which she had eight girls scheduled to go on. Three called the day of the event to drop out, and three more didn’t show at the rally point. So, besides my daughter, one other scout (and her cousin) went on the trip. My wife was fuming, to say the least.

But what concerns me is the message these girls are getting from their parents–that it’s okay to waffle on your commitments. Are these girls going to grow up thinking that they can just do what they like? What will they be like when they are teens? And how will they perceive the value of trust?

The perceptive reader can see how this story would relate to this blog being two years old. Commitment and trust are a big issues in blogging, marketing and life. I’m not one to quote scripture, but this one struck me last week: Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’.

If you feel that Lesson 1 & 2 were too basic and didn’t apply to you, then this is the post to listen to.

Actually, don’t listen to me, go read what website usability guru Jakob Nielsen has to say about B2B websites.

“It might seem unfair that sites must provide both B2C’s quality of service and simple user interface and B2B’s depth of specialization and complex workflow support. And typically, such sites must do all this with fewer resources than Amazon because the site isn’t seen as closing the order. You don’t click “add to shopping cart” when you want a deepwater cementing system for your North Sea oil platforms.”

The article lists three goals for B2B websites:

• Survive the screening process–make the site usable and content useful.
• Support your advocates–give enough content for visitors to select your product and justify it to others.
• Provide great service–use the power of the web to improve customer satisfaction.

He then suggests some tools to add to your site for your advocates. This was already a goal for me this year, and these are useful suggestions. Just realize there are some people at your client’s companies that are ‘nerds’ for your type of product and they need (and crave) lots of tools and data.

Yesterday I covered the simple things that need to be fixed on B2B websites. One reader provided a list of other no-nos. A lot of these are what Father Flanders preaches at his website and in his book, Web Pages That Suck. Read his blog to see a near-daily fix of bad websites.

• Don’t use Flash intros. Why? Most don’t say anything of substance and just waste the visitors time. ‘We are dedicated to serving our customers’ is not compelling content, and even worse when it is spelled out one letter at a time.
• If you have to tell the visitor how to use the site, chances are something is wrong. Telling them to download special software, or to have their screen set to a certain size, or to use a certain version of a browser is likely to be ignored anyway.
• If you have a more than ten pages in your site, a ‘site map’ is a great idea to help people see if your site is even structured to hold the content they are looking for. I prefer all these types of navigation on a website: buttons, breadcrumbs, site-map, and search. Different users navigate differently.
• Another issue is to address, especially for EU companies, is making sure that the multi-lingual versions of your site are easy to find. I’ve seen very confusing flag icons and other methods used. I’m not sure of a right way to do this, as I haven’t had to deal with more than English.

Most of these have to deal with greater issues and aren’t as easy to fix as the ones I identified yesterday. But they need to be taken care of.

I talk here a lot about the details of using the web to build your B2B business, which for many businesses must be highly-advanced stuff, based on what I’ve seen recently. So, lets take a moment to go back to the basics of your website to make sure doing things right there:

• Make sure your site is accessible if someone doesn’t type in ‘www’ before your URL. Double check that you aren’t showing a message like “under construction”, which certainly can’t help your business. Call your host and get it fixed!
• If your going to put dated material on your website, make sure you delete it or update it. Don’t offer a 2001 Directory on the homepage of your website if you are trying to sell a 2004 edition in your outbound telemarketing.
• Blinking and spinning images are out, too, by the way (see above link for another example). Animated GIF files are easy to fix…almost any graphic editor can animate, or unanimate an image file.
• If you want to post email addresses on your website, don’t leave them unprotected where the spam-bots can harvest them. A simple Javascript code that you can copy here can protect those email addresses.
• Make sure all your web pages have Titles. Father Flanders recently highlighted that there are two million “new page 1” web pages out there. (See the spambot example above for an ‘untitled document’.) The Title of your webpage is the most important thing that the search engines look at, as well as the surfers using the engine.
• And if you are going to post an email address, use your domain’s email account, not your AOL account.
• Lastly, get rid of the gastly wallpaper on the background of your web pages. All you need to do is replace the background image with a blank/white image. This look went out six years ago.

Master the technology or hire someone who can. These kind of errors should have been taken care of years ago!

At the beginning of the month, I posted an article on how to install phpicalendar on your website.

In going back to tinker with it, I learned that you can modify the header and footer of the calendar pages universally (easily). Just look in the ‘includes’ folder and edit the header.inc.php and footer.inc.php files to add your HTML. Doing so screwed up my calendar, but I think it is a problem with style sheets. Like I said I was tinkering. But this is still way-cool.

In my business, local search isn’t important. But for a lot of B2B companies it can be, either as a local distributor or service company. The recent roll-out of local search (Google, Yahoo) is a good way to find people ready to spend money.

I just made my first purchase of a local service via Google Local Search. It was so much easier than a phone book, too. The only dissappointing thing is that the listing Google brings you to doesn’t necessarily have the vendors website listed, but thats most likely because these local companies don’t have one.

So this looks like a new reason for local B2B companies to get on the band-wagon and get their own websites. For a local landscaper, I previously advised that they shouldn’t expect to get leads from the web, especially since general results are crowded with directory services. Now the local search cuts those out.

Here are some tips to make your site local search friendly from the MarketPosition Newsletter April 2004: “Therefore, it’s important that you design your Web pages with local searches in mind even if you also sell globally.How do you do this? It’s easy. Simply add local keywords such as

address, city, state, province, or postal code to all of your keyword-rich Web pages”

We’ve often toyed with doing product photography in-house, and digital cameras make is so tempting. But its surprising how much more quality you can get from a pro. Of course our equipment can be large and loaded with stainless steel, which makes getting the lighting right hard. So, I’ve limited use of our own photography to special shots for our website, usually close-ups to highlight special features.

Mike Boyink was shooting some small parts for one of his clients and documented his set-up. Seeing that the parts were metal, I’m sure he spent a good deal of time getting the reflections to look right.

Product Photography on the Cheap

I thought all B2B marketing was more-or-less the same. This article from MarketingVox helped me clarify why I find selling ‘services’ was so hard–because I am a ‘products’ marketer: Differences in B2B vs B2C Sales Strategy: “Whereas a product site will sell the product directly, a B2B service site must establish trust and credibility to encourage contact by the potential client.”

That sounds really hard to do! Especially on a website.

About two months ago, our local paper ran a feature article on ‘geocaching’. My wife was quite intrigued by the idea. I had planned to buy her the geek-tool required to do this for her birthday, but she beat me to it. So we went geocaching for the first time together, along with our sons (daughter was out with a friend), last Sunday afternoon.

What is geocaching? Its an activity using a GPS navigator to find hidden ‘caches’. The caches are smaller boxes (ammo-cans seem well suited for this) hidden by other people. After the boxes are hidden, the coordinates are posted to the web for others to use. The most popular site for this seems to be geocaching.com.

The caches are hidden in public places, especially in parks. My wife feels a little self-concious about being seen wondering in the woods aimlessly. The inherit inaccuracy of the GPS tool left us wondering around a 20 foot patch of ground several times. And some of the hiding places are crafty.

To me, it brings back memories of doing ‘compass courses’ when I was in the National Guard. The GPS makes it easier, but the game of geocaching is much more fun.