Category: Uncategorized

Making our company easy to find on the web is of prime importance. While paying for a listing can be of dubious value, a free listing can’t hurt, and may even help your PR (PageRank).

So while reading an industry article on a Test & Measurement World‘s site, I noticed that in addition to offering ‘SpecSearch’ from Globalspec, their menu had Kelly Search listed. I had heard that Kelly Search was an “engineer’s search engine”, so I investigated.

Sure enough, our company was listed, so I signed up to update the information. What surprised me is the number of categories you can get listed in. Afterwards, reading the ‘about us’ info, I learned that Kelly is essentially a UK version of Thomas Register…the internet just caused them to spread their reach. And unfortunately, the number of categories is what makes Kelly Search unuseable. While it has a much better user-interface than TR, a search result with more than a half-a-dozen categories that mean the same thing is not something anyone is going to want to troll thru. Example:

Hardness Test Equipment, Alloys, Brinell Method (11 suppliers)

Hardness Test Equipment, Alloys, Rockwell Method (11 suppliers)

Hardness Test Equipment, Alloys, Rockwell Superficial Method (10 suppliers)

Hardness Test Equipment, Brinell (9 suppliers)

Hardness Test Equipment, Copper, Brinell Method (10 suppliers)

Hardness Test Equipment, Digital, Alloys, Brinell Method (11 suppliers)

They do offer reasonable prices on enhanced listings ($200-450), but I don’t see getting any value out of it.

Over the last couple months I’ve purposefully looked at three different CDs that companies have given out, including one by a sister company. Today someone else asked me about my opinion regarding creating a CD. Seems some salespeople have asked for it, thinking it would be cool to give clients.

If you know me, you know that ‘just because its cool’ doesn’t equal a compelling reason to do it. That ranks right up there with webcasting just because you can.

I think a CD is good for a few things:

• Companies that need to make a presentation to explain their products and its benefits
• Companies that have a lot of technical data that customers/prospects need to use
• Companies that have software to distribute
• Cost savings over distributing/printing catalogs (like the huge Digikey catalog I just tossed)

Most likely, if you have had a compelling reason like the above, you have already made a CD. If you haven’t done one by 2004, you probably don’t need one.

Okay, maybe there is one possible use for me that I’ve overlooked until now. A CD would allow me to distribute copies of manuals and other detailed product specifications that would be too bulky and expensive to email/snail mail. For now, we don’t consider our manual a sales tool, but perhaps a CD would make it a cost-effective one. I would need to make sure the PDF files are ready for wide distribution, which they aren’t. They need to be divided into sections, named properly, create hyperlinks, and more.

While Industrial Quick Search and Thomas Register duke it out with similar formats and goals, others continue to try to horn-in to profit from search engine ranking. Globalspec seems to be getting better at getting high in the listings.

But now comes along Article Insider, launched by Traffic Logic. The actual sites you’ll find in the search engine result pages (SERPs) are market specific, like www.materialstestinginfo.com.

What Article Insider is doing is having experts write articles describing certain products and processes. The experts, from what I can tell, are probably experts in search-engine optimization (SEO). The articles I saw weren’t much better than WebPosition Gold produces. Article Insider may improve these articles with better content as this project develops. But original content ranks well with Google. For being very recently launched, there is a significant amount of content and sites published.

Each site then has two sources of advertising. Google AdSense ads are at the top, probably a smart move. Of course the person landing on this site has probably just seen the same ads on the SERPs.

The second source of ads is loading the site with links with for a specific sponsor. This gives more keyword relevance to the sponsor, as well as benefiting from any click-thrus.

This is what Traffic Logic says in its code of ethics, which also stands to help define their business model:

1. SEARCH ENGINE USERS – by providing useful, relevant content which helps people find what they’re looking for

2. SEARCH ENGINES – by contributing high quality, helpful content for their users

3. ADVERTISERS – By delivering highly targeted leads to their site

And pricing is fixed but based on one of three performance measures:

* Cost-Per-Click (CPC) – Account is debited each time a visitor goes to your site.

* Cost-Per-Lead (CPL) – Account is debited after a form or application is completed.

* Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) – Account is debited after the visitor makes a purchase.

My analysis:

Search engine results: great

Helpful to searchers: low

Value to sponsors: low

I hated Industrial Quick Search for years because they were cutting in on my turf. But they do provide a convenient service to searchers, so I’ve come to accept (and use) them. ArticleInsider is going to have to work harder to get me to accept them. More importantly, they will have to get the search-users to find their sites useful. A two or three paragraph article loaded with sentences as bad as this “The organization takes pride in identifying the needs of their customers. They offer comprehensive service to many industries” isn’t going to engage the user. And the links to sponsor’s sites needs to be convincing, too.

And I don’t think that they have enough room to post articles of significance for surfers…and if they are searching for suppliers, this kind of article isn’t something they are going to want to stop and read.

He caught me doing 228 in a 200 zone!

My cholesterol level is in the borderline-high range. Apparently he never got back to me on my last check-up, because he said it was over 200 then. For someone who has been over 200 more than once, the goal is to get to 160…in three months…or its Lipitor for life. At 37, that doesn’t sound like something I want to do.

So what does a good blogger do? Create a blog about it! Please visit www.lower-my-cholesterol-blog.com to learn how I am taking on this challenge.

One of the fun parts of running a blog is looking at your stats. The small number of hits (page views if you’re picky) allows you to look at each one. Having regular readers use a RSS-reader makes that an even more productive process.

So I know that on a frequent basis someone from Progressive Business Publications reads my blog. Will this someone listen up, please:

I don’t mind that your outbound callers have reached me on a regular basis over the years. I’ve looked at several of your reports, but never kept a subscription. Even today, I agreed to look at “The Marketing Report” just because I don’t remember seeing it.

What I do mind is that you continue to use the same script format. “First let me ask you two questions…” It was dumb and contrived the first time I heard it. It doesn’t engage me. As your telemarketer read her script mindlessly, my mind wandered enough that I didn’t know what the question was. When I picked the answer “other”, I heard the same reply I get no matter what I’ve said over the years “I hear that from a lot of other people.” All my answer did was cue her to go onto the next part of the script. If you are going to try to engage the person you are calling, don’t pretend.

Your statistics may say this is a successful script, but does it really put your potential client at ease and develop interest?

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!