Category: Uncategorized

As part of some recent ‘changes’ here at work, I’ve been asked to manage some opportunities with potential clients. That means following up on quotes that I’ve sent on behalf of our now-missing field salesperson.

I’m a busy guy, so I thought it would be easiest and least intrusive to follow up via email. I spent about 45 minutes sending the same basic email, but with a personalized message relating to their quote. Results: about a 30% response rate one week later. I’m a little disappointed, as I thought my emails raised good questions that would be easy for the contact to reply to.

Next month I’ll try the same thing, but use the phone. Kind of a test to see which is more effective…and find out if Email is sabotaging my sales efforts.

BTW: B2blog is taking a week off for some R&R. Yippee!

I continue to blog about Traffic-Power (alert, fight) because I believe that smaller b2b marketers like myself were more likely to fall victim to their sales pitch. Based on my recent experience at an internet seminar, b2b marketers still don’t understand the web. Now that TP-type search-engine-optimization (SEO) is banned by Google, hopefully some of these folks learn how to do it right.

My comments to TP victims:

One issue is Google’s indirect complicity, which the TP-victims that contacted me have highlighted. Yes, Google let this go on too long. I’ve watched a competitor of mine for years hog the top spots because they’ve got a spammy website, while being dropped by Google twice, for just a month each time.

At the same time, you can’t expect Google to tell you personally that your site is doing something illegal and will be banned soon. When people from Michigan go to Indiana to buy fireworks, who tells them what they are doing is wrong? The cashier? the Michigan government? the state troopers at the border? Most likely it will be the local cops, and only after you’ve pissed off the neighbors by making too much noise. And telling the cop that you ‘didn’t know’ the fireworks were illegal isn’t going to help, either. Same goes for this situation.

And as a current victim of a competitor ‘spamming the index’, I’m not totally sympathetic. I’ve known the rules and played by them, and will continue to do so. Granted, the salespeople at TP don’t understand the rules or that they are violating them–they think if it works, it must be legal. Anyway, I hope you are looking at the current down-turn in business as part of the cost for inflated sales you’ve had while your TP pages worked.

Yes, SEO is part black-magic. Either learn it, or hire someone who knows it, especially if your livelihood depends on it. Marketing on the web is vastly more complex than getting top rankings, too. Now is the time get ahead of everyone else. If you can spend $1-5,000 with traffic-power, what can you do with your site to increase conversions??

For a more contrarian view on SEO, here is a great post from Seth Godin:

If you want to grow your business, you need a reliable and scalable and dependable way to spend time and money and have it turn into traffic and revenue. In the real world, companies do that with real estate and with advertising. Online, it’s about adwords and site design.

What part of that title didn’t you understand?

Edgecraft is a Seth Godin term for taking competitive advantages and pushing them to their limits. Understanding the whole Free Prize mantra from Seth is essential to this post, so go read my recent summary if you need to.

Alton Brown is the host of Food Network’s “Good Eats”. If I could actually link you to an episode or two, I would, as it would help you understand this post as well. If it helps, Alton describes himself as a ‘groovy home-ec teacher’.

So let me define Alton in terms of Free Prize:

Free Prize: Good Eats, literally. Making learning fun has always been a great Free Prize (think Bill Nye). Getting enough information to get off the couch and actually cook makes it truly interactive and special.

Long-term Prize: Learning enough (and actually cooking) to be a kitchen ‘hack’.

Edgecraft: Making his shows focus on the WHYS of cooking. Why a souffle will collapse when you open the oven, for example. Making the show emphasize only one topic/recipe is important, too. Alton’s often-tossed “but that’s another show” is testament to this focus.

Champion: The interesting thing I recently learned is that Alton went to cooking school expressly to create Good Eats. He saw the edge, and knew he had the skills to create a show, he just didn’t have the food knowledge. His original intention wasn’t even to be the star.

Having the champion as the star is what makes the show so addictive–obviously I’ve become a big fan. 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.

Part of my respect is his obvious willingness to push the limits and experiment with what resources he has available. Attaching a battery-powered drill to a pepper grinder is hilarious, but also smart when you need a lot of fresh pepper. More subtle is doing a split screen so you can see him talk and watch him mix a bowl of ingredients.

Making the connection between Seth Godin’s Free Prize mantra and a living example is quite inspiring. It will affect what I do in my life, and not just my kitchen. Perhaps for me, that IS the free prize!

Links:

The Thermochemical Joy of Cooking at Wired

Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Alton Brown at Brian’s Belly

Rants & Raves, Alton’s poorly posted blog

My first Good Eats experience (I actually cooked it): Fish & Chips

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?