How Can I Get More Reviews?

Reviews Matter. A Lot.

Today, many shoppers on the Web start, not with a Google search of the Web, but searching a review site such as Yelp or Angie’s List. They’ll use reviews to decide which businesses to consider, then go directly from the review site to the businesses’ sites. That’s right, you’ve done all this work to get a high position in search engine results, and now they’re not even using the search engine and won’t see your wonderful, effective Web site unless you have good reviews.

In addition to providing a path to your site for prospects who don’t use search engines to find businesses, reviews also help your position in search engine results. Review sites are typically sites of a lot of authority, so a link from a review site to your site will increase the authority of your site, and improve its position in search engine results.

I’ll Write Them Myself

Don’t even think about faking your reviews. First, the people who read reviews are becoming more sophisticated about reading them, and are getting better and better at sniffing out fakes. Even worse, the review sites depend for their success on genuine reviews, so they are investing big time at detecting fake reviews. These are well-financed companies with lots of smart people and lots of resources (think Google, for example), working on issues that are central to the success of their companies. Do you want to bet that you can outsmart them? And, having outsmarted them once, do you want to bet that you’ll continue to outsmart them?

How to Get Reviews

ReviewInc has done some interesting research on when customers are likely to be willing to give feedback to a business. And the most likely time is…when they are asked! 43% of surveyed customers said they are most likely to give feedback when asked. That request can come through email or a text message, or directly from a person. Here are the details:

to Of course, we all want to get positive reviews, so the answer to that question expands a bit. The best way to get good reviews is to ask someone who is happy with your business to give you a review.

The chart mentions incentives. Don’t offer incentives for reviews–most of the review sites consider that incentives for reviews mean that they are not fully voluntary reviews, and can penalize you if they discover that you’re offering an incentive.

The Bottom Line

You need reviews. Actually, you need good reviews. So ask happy customers to give you reviews. Don’t fake them and don’t reward them.

But Wait There’s More

Coming soon is Dave’s Certified Reviews, a new service that will allow you to obtain lots of genuine, good reviews, monitor your reviews and respond to them. It’s been in work for a long, long time, but finally, it’s almost complete.

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Your Site Needs an FAQ. Here’s Why

Why Your Site Needs an FAQ

When we visit a Web site, often we see a page called FAQ. That stands for “Frequently Asked Questions.” You might ask whether your site needs an FAQ page–what good are they, anyway? It turns out that there are important good things that an FAQ can do for your site.

Emphasize Your Strengths

The FAQ page is a good place to give some emphasis to what you think are the particular strengths for your product or service. One way to do this is to simply pose a question such as “what are the greatest strengths of your product?” Another approach is to ask a question about the feature that you want to emphasize, by asking a question such as “why is it important for accounting software to produce year-end summaries?”

Answer the Skeptic

The FAQ page is a chance to pose questions that a skeptical visitor might pose, and answer them. For example, for a Hong Kong custom tailor I once put “a question on the FAQ page “what if my clothes don’t come?” The answer to this question was intended to deal with a visitors worry that perhaps delivery might never take place. It’s hard to deal with a issue like that on another part of the site.

Better Search Engine Results

Search engines love FAQ pages. Search engines love content that has a lot of keywords. Your FAQ page can easily be written so that it is keyword–dense. Search engines also like links within the site. In your FAQ, you can pose questions that cover topics that are in many different parts of the site, and include links to those parts of the site in your answers to the questions that you pose.

Savings on customer support

Your FAQ page can save you money on customer support. Ask your customer support people to write down simple questions that they are asked frequently, and then put those questions and the answers on your FAQ page. Future customers will be able to answer some of their simpler questions right on the FAQ page. At the same time, you’ll have added more keyword – rich content to your site.

Don’t stop with just one or two questions. Keep collecting frequently asked simple questions from your support people, and add one or two a week. Search engines love fresh content, and this is a way to keep continuously adding new content that’s relevant.

Start a dialogue

Put a form on your FAQ page so that a visitor who doesn’t find an answer to their own question can use the form to submit it to you. This will allow you to learn about questions that visitors have, while also making contact with potential customers.

The Bottom Line

If you don’t have an FAQ page, now’s the time to start one. If you do have one already, good for you! Perhaps one or more of these ideas will help you make it even more profitable for you.

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Why You Should Use AdWords

You Should Use AdWords. Here’s Why.

Yes, you’d like to rank high in organic search and get lots of traffic for free. That’s a great objective, and achievable, too. Over time. But there are still some important reasons why you should use the leading pay-per-click service, Google AdWords. Here are some of them.

It Reaches Prospects When They Want to Buy

Someone who is doing a Google search for your product or service is very likely doing so because they are interested in buying. If you can put your name in front of them at the very time they are making that decision of what to buy, and bring them to your site, that’s just perfect timing. Can you get that timing what any other advertising?

That’s why the Yellow Pages used to be so effective. If you bought an ad in the Yellow Pages, prospects saw it when they were looking for a specific product or service because they wanted to buy. Of course, that’s no longer the case–today, your prospects search the Web.

Small Spenders Are Welcome

Happily, there’s no minimum ad spend for AdWords. You don’t have to commit thousands of dollars to your first trial. In fact, you should start small and try a number of different search terms, to find out which ones bring you results, then expand your spend on the search terms that bring you business. Don’t make the mistake of starting with a big spend before know which search terms bring you business.

Built-In Tracking

AdWords provides a variety of tracking tools. You can track which terms bring you traffic, how long that traffic stays on your site, and continue on up through webform submissions and phone calls, if you wish. You’ll know whether your AdWords spend is bringing you results.

A Foundation for Your Organic SEO

The tracking that you do for your AdWords campaign will also help you identify the search terms you want to seek organic search positions for. Use your SEO dollars wisely, to go after position in search results for terms that you know bring you business. A small experimental AdWords spend will help you sort out those search terms.

Website Improvement

Once you’re paying for people to come to the site, you’ll take a critical look at the site, considering what they see when they arrive. It’s easy to not consider what happens to free traffic–it’s free, after all–but when you’re paying for every click, you want those bought visitors to have a great experience on your site. Of course, you really want it for all your visitors, even the free ones, but the incentive is stronger once you’re paying for each visitor. Site improvement is more likely to break through the clutter of things to do that all of us have when it involves making good use of money that we’re spending.

The Bottom Line

You should be using AdWords! There’s a corollary to this, though–don’t try this at home. AdWords looks deceptively simple but managing an effective campaign is complex and requires regular attention. You’re better off to spend your time running your business, and leaving this complex task to someone else. Such as me!

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Aristotle on Web Marketing

Aristotle, a long time ago, laid down the principles for a convincing argument. Even today, as we formulate our marketing approach, we can follow his approach. His classical appeals are to Ethos, Pathos and Logos.

Ethos

Ethos is the Greek word for character; the word ethics is derived from ethos.

An appeal to Ethos involves establishing your credibility. The Sanford Web Credibility Project established ten guidelines for Web credibility, that I summarized in an earlier post.

On the Internet, your prospects can research your claims, and it turns out that more than half of them do so. So it’s necessary to be honest just because there’s so much checking going on. But beyond that, building trust is one of the major challenges we face when marketing over the Internet. Remember, we’re offering something at a distance, to people who have never met us, never seen our offices, never talked to our support people, who have no knowledge of our character. We want them to give us their money and trust that we’ll deliver what we promise, or, if worse comes to worse, we’ll live up to the terms of our guarantees. That takes trust!

Be careful of self-evaluation in what you write. Don’t praise your own products or services, don’t say “this is really excellent”. Describe what it does and how fast or whatever, and let the prospect make their own judgment about whether that’s really good or not. It’s OK to describe something in detail, but bad to make your own judgments about it.

You can use the judgments of others, but here, too, be careful. Testimonials and customer reviews are powerful persuaders, but Internet shoppers today are good at detecting fakes, so stick to real testimonials and genuine third-party reviews.

Pathos

Pathos, emotional appeal, and it’s also a part of persuasion. It’s the Greek word for both suffering and experience.

Emotional appeal can be overdone, but we’re all persuaded b emotional appeals. In fact, branding itself is simply an emotional appeal, the feeling that a brand evokes. So emotions lie at the heart of marketing. We’re told that fifty percent of every buying decision is made by emotion.

A favorite charity of mine, that successfully works my emotions with every newsletter they send, is Best Friends Animal Society, a wonderful animal shelter. They use great photos of pets, and the hard-hitting news about how many are killed in shelters every day, to soften the hardest heart. Here’s an example from the home page of their Web site.

Go ahead, click on a link and look at their site. And if you want to make a donation, your money will join years of my own donations there to help the animals. And you can get their great newsletter, that any animal lover will treasure.

These people understand emotion and how to use it in their marketing communications!

One route to emotional appeal is to cite the problems we all have in dealing with support organizations. If you’re offering support that’s really better, than doesn’t run me around for a half hour chasing phone menus and then transfers me to two different people to solve a simple problem, I can relate to that emotionally. In fact, that’s the story of my call yesterday to Verizon just to find out what was my userid so that I could log on to their Web site. But before you represent your company as better than Verizon (as low as that bar may be), be aware that your prospects are doing their research!

Logos

The Greek word logos refers to a universal divine reason that transcends all imperfections in the cosmos and humanity. It’s an eternal, unchanging truth present from the time of creation, and available to every person who seeks it.

In rhetoric, Logos is an appeal to reason. Logical appeals often involve syllogisms, which are composed of two permises and a conclusion.

An example of a syllogism would be “All dogs are furry creatures with four legs. Jada (my dog) is a dog. Therefore, Jada is a furry creature with four legs.” Premise one plus premise two leads to a logical conclusion. Another syllogism is “Engaging Dave to advise me in Web marketing can increase my sales and profits. I would like to increase my sales and profits. Therefore I will engage Dave.”

In order to build your logos-based argument, you’ll need to provide reasons for your audience to believe each of your two premises, before they will accept your jump to the conclusion. You can cite outside studies, testimonials and other evidence to buttress your arguments.

Here’s an appeal to Logos that I believe fails. It’s for hyaluronic acid, whatever that is. These are the claims made for it, backed by no citations of outside evidence at all:

Familiar symbols have been used to give credibility. First, the bottle does look like a typical pill bottle, gaining some credibility. Then there’s a seal that quality is assured–by whom?–GMP. GMP ensures that you are getting real hyaluronic acid. Then we see that it has–good grief!–3 likes on Facebook! Then there’s a statement of the role of hyaluronic acid in the body, with a little asterisk at the end. The astute reader who looks at the bottom of the listing sees what the asterisk is for:

Are you ready to rush out and order your supply of hyaluronic acid tablets? Neither am I. This is not a successful appeal to Logos.

The Bottom Line

Employ Ethos, Pathos and Logos to persuade your prospects.

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Say Yes to WordPress. Here’s Why.

WordPress is very popular, now hosting some 20% of all sites world-wide. And it’s free. But, by themselves, those aren’t strong enough reasons to choose WordPress for your site. In this post I review several key considerations that should be important in your choice of a hosting vehicle for your site.

WordPress now hosts more Web sites than any other platform on the Web, some 20% of all sites. Many benefits derive from the huge number of sites using it, which creates an attractive marketplace for people who design and build Web sites, for people who help you use Web sites to promote your business (like me!), for people who develop add-on software for WordPress, called plugins, and even for people who host Web sites. If you choose WordPress, you’ll always be able to find people to help with site design, maintenance or promotion, you’ll be able to buy great extensions for your site at low prices, and you’ll never be stuck when a company goes out of business.

There are six important reasons for you to consider WordPress:

It’s open source
There’s a large, valuable community of support
End users can edit their own content
It’s secure if managed properly
It’s scalable up to quite large
It’s future-proof

Open Source

For several years, I developed a number of sites with a great tool. It provided a lot of features, was easy to use, and was one of the most bug-free software products I’ve used. However, about a year ago, the company went away. When I moved to a new computer, my installation won’t work any more–I need a new install key. The company is gone, so there’s no way to get the key. I’m out of luck with all those sites and now have to redevelop them.

Because the code is open source, even if the company that leads the writing of WordPress goes away, the code is available to everyone, and there are lots of developers to help keep it going. And because it’s open source, you have none of the licensing issues that we all face and despise.

If you need a customization of WordPress, there’s may already be a plugin to meet your needs. And if not, it’s not hard to write a new one, and not expensive to hire someone to write one.

Another advantage of open source is that there’s a huge community of developers who are contributing free and inexpensive software to extend WordPress. Just think of what you want to do and search for a plugin–you’re likely to face a rich array of choices at little to no cost. Anyone who wants to make money from selling a WordPress plugin realizes that the plugin is competing with a price of zero for the platform itself.

Professional Ecosystem

In addition to developers, there is a huge community of people who use WordPress to build sites, and provide other services around WordPress. They compete with many other providers, so the competition drives down the price for site development.

Easy Editing

You don’t want to hire a Webmaster every time you want to add content to a site. You’d rather have your employees who write the content simply edit it on the Web site itself. WordPress provides a simple-to-use WYSIWYG editor that editors can use to write their content right on the site, and insert images and videos as well.

No advanced skills are needed to edit a page on WordPress; anyone who can edit a Word document can edit a page on a WordPress site.

Security

Unfortunately, the Internet is a rough neighborhood these days! We all have security concerns, all the time, with our Web sites. The WordPress core code has been remarkably secure since WordPress’s inception–however, the same large installed base that attracts service providers also attracts people with malevolent intent. So you need to protect yourself.

There have been and continue to be security weaknesses in plugins. It’s important to keep plugins updated to the current version, since fixes are often intended to close security holes. In addition, use strong passwords. It’s sound as well to use two-factor authentication for users.

But there’s good news here, too. The robust plugin market has produced a first-rate security package for WordPress, the security plugin WordFence. It’s so good that it’s included in Dave’s Super Hosting Service. I’ve seen a number of WordPress sites hacked, but have never seen a site protected by the premium version of WordPress.

Scalability

The New York Times, Microsoft and Facebook all run sites based on WordPress. If your site has hosting with appropriate capacity and scalability to the load you’ll experience, and you’re careful to test your complete site for performance, there’s no reason that the biggest companies can’t use WordPress. For small business, good design practices are all that you need to do to obtain the performance you need.

Future-Proof

WordPress has a commitment to backwards compatibility, so new releases of WordPress won’t ever break your site. You avoid the infuriating problem of a new release requiring, suddenly, tons of work.

Again, because of the huge number of WordPress sites, When Google announced that it was suddenly important for our sites to be mobile-friendly, WordPress was there–the standard WordPress themes are already mobile-friendly. When Google wanted sites to implement Advanced Mobile Pages, they developed an AMP plugin for WordPress, so you can have AMP on your site, with just the installation of a single, free plugin.

The large group of active developers as well as the backward compatibility commitment protect your investment in your site.

The Bottom Line

Use WordPress to build your site. Or when you rebuild your site. It’s the right choice for essentially everyone.

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Changes to Google’s algorithm! Should you care?

Search Engine Results Position (SERP) Matters

If your Web site brings an important amount of business to you, or if you want it to, then you’re concerned about where you rank in search engine results. You know that many searchers don’t go beyond page one, and if you’re not even on page two, you’re out of it. What should you do to your site to get and keep high rankings in search engine results?

Changes in Google’s Algorithm!

You’ve probably seen warnings sent out by newsletters and other services warning that Google has changed their ranking algorithm, and your site may drop in ranking because of it. Often these warnings are presented in dire terms–act now or else! What should you do about these warnings? And what should you do to your site to keep your search engine ranking?

You’ve probably also seen ads and received emails from companies who claim that they can get your site onto page one, guaranteed. Or who offer some product that will put your site onto page one. Just send the money, and you’ll be there.

Google is a Business

Why does Google keep changing how they rank sites in their results? What are their goals in making all these changes? Do they simply want to inflict pain on small businesses who are trying to promote their offerings?

To understand what Google is doing, consider Google as a business. They want to provide effective search service, so that the service will be widely used by people who will see the ads that Google gets paid to display. So Google has a strong interest in providing search results that are relevant to queries that are entered, that take the visitor to a quality site that offers authoritative information on the topics the searcher is looking for.

When I started in Web marketing in 1998, SEO was about how to trick search engines. Measures that were popular then would get you thrown out of the indexes in a minute today. As search engines have become more sophisticated, they are better able to determine what a page is about, and to make more measures of quality. Today, trying to fool search engines is a bad strategy–even if you succeed in fooling them for now, as they get more and more sophisticated, when your deception is discovered your SERPs will suffer.

A Strategy for Search Engine Results

The strategy of fooling search engines treats the search engines as opponents to be manipulated and deceived. That strategy pits you against these organizations, requiring constant vigilance toward the next step taken in the battle by your opponent. You have to watch carefully for every change in search engine algorithms!

What are your odds in this competition? Suppose you’re a small business, working hard to succeed while providing your product or service, with the limited resources that you have. You’re focused on your customers and their needs, and your own product or service. You have limited attention to give to search engines. And limited funds to hire experts. On the other side of the competition is huge organizations like Google, who hire the brightest Stanford graduates to put all of their considerable talent and lots of other Google resources into the job that’s critical for their company–providing truly relevant search results. The odds are not in your favor!

On the other hand, instead of trying to compete with an organization that has practically unlimited resources of talent and money, why not make Google your business partner instead? Instead of trying to fight this behemoth, put them on your side and leverage all that they offer. Do this by providing high quality content on your site and providing the best possible visitor experience. Then, as search engines get better and better at measuring the real visitor experience, your SERPs will just improve. And you won’t worry about every little change in Google algorithms.

Do I Need an SEO Specialist?

If you decide to put Google on your side, do you still need an expert in search engines to help you? Putting this another way, having given you this advice, should I just close up shop?

Happily for me, there is still room for experts, although their proper role has changed. The experts should advise you on how to provide a high-quality visitor experience so that it’s recognized by the search engines and given the credit that it deserves. The search engines aren’t people who give opinions–they’re using software to estimate the quality of visitor experience. Because of the number of pages they have to scan, that software has to be fairly simple. So there’s still a role for the person who understands how search engines do this, who knows what they value most, who can direct your efforts into the most productive areas.

In addition, there are a variety of technical cues that search engines use to estimate the quality of visitor experience, and your expert consultant can make sure that you’ve provided all these cues, so that you won’t provide a great visitor experience but have the search engines not recognize–and reward you–for what you’ve done.

The Bottom Line

Put Google on your side by putting your visitors first–provide a high quality visitor experience.

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Important Newsletter Don’ts

Your Newsletter–What Not to Do

Newsletters are easy–just write a note and send it out! But, like everything else, if you want your newsletter to be effective, there’s more to it than that. Here is a quick summary of what to do with the newsletter, followed by what not to do.

What We’re Trying To Do

The newsletter is intended to nurture prospects into being customers. When someone just encounters your business or your site, and learns about you, they may not yet be ready to do business. But by reading your newsletter, they learn more about you and your business, and get comfortable with the idea of doing business. There’s an old marketing rule that we need seven credible exposures of our brand before a prospect will seriously consider doing business. So get that first exposure with the site, and the next six with the newsletter. So we’re trying to build credibility and comfort through this communication.

Change the Outline Each Time

You’re trying to make prospects comfortable with you, so keep the same general outline for each newsletter. If you provide a recipe as the second item in one newsletter, then provide a recipe as the second item in every edition. Your readers will get to know the organization of your newsletter and they’ll be able to go right to what they like. And if they like one, then they’ll like the next one, because it’ll have similar organization.

Constantly Offer Discounts

The newsletter is not a place to offer discounts! Why not? Because it goes to all (or nearly all) of your prospects and customers, and discounts in the newsletter tell them that you’re willing to sell for less than asking price. It undermines their confidence in your pricing, encouraging them to believe that they can get what they want from you for less than you usually charge. So stay away from discounts as a major feature of your newsletter.

You can occasionally offer a price deal in the newsletter, but specialize it to some particular circumstance and then be ready to do it again if that circumstance arises again! For example, if you offer a discount on the third anniversary of being in business, then plan to do it every year. And also avoid the temptation to find lots and lots of similar excuses!

Poor Quality Content

Your prospects judge your newsletter by the usefulness of the content. So be sure that you provide information that’s useful to them in some way. If you’re an attorney, how to handle some situation that could have legal consequences. If you’re a physician, health advice is an obvious choice. If you’re a Web marketer, a newsletter on how to write newsletters.

Sell Too Much

A rule I’ve seen for newsletters is 75% non-selling content and 25% selling content is a rule that’s often given. I’d modify that by advising no more than 25% selling. If the purpose of your newsletter is to attract long-term clients, not just, say, selling merchandise, then you might even have almost no selling content, and simply seek to convince your readers that you’re an authority in your discipline so that when they need help they’ll come to you.

Not Often Enough

In the days when newsletters went out in the mail, they were expensive to print and even more expensive to mail. But those days are gone. Today, our prospects subscribe to and pay for email service that delivers our newsletters to them. If they want to print them, they pay for the printing! And it’s easier to open and look at a newsletter–or not to look at it.

Take advantage of the ease and convenience of automation, and realize that your readers are accustomed to getting most newsletters on a weekly or even daily basis. If you send weekly instead of monthly, your readers will be reminded of you more often, and they’ll be more likely to do business with you or recommend you to someone who needs your product or service.

Forgetting about Headings

Many readers will scan the headings in a newsletter before they decide to actually read it. So provide those headings! In addition, busy readers may read some sections and not others–make it easy for these readers to make this choice, or else they’ll not read your newsletter at all.

Forgetting about Branding

Be sure that your newsletter looks like your Web site and carries your logo. If prospects see inconsistent graphics from you, they’ll not remember you as well, and your communications wit them will seem disjointed. One way to achieve consistency between your site and newsletters is to send blog posts from your site as your newsletters–as I do.

Don’t Send a Welcome Newsletter

In any social interaction, saying hello is important. Similarly, a new subscriber deserves to get a special welcome edition of your newsletter. Most newsletter software can send this for you; all you have to do is write it and give instructions to the software one time. The open rate of the intro newsletter is much higher than the open rates of subsequent newsletters–this is a great opportunity to communicate. It’s also a good time to offer a discount–make it a new subscriber discount, and the subscriber will know not to expect it again. Offer a discount on the next meal, an ebook on how to deal with a personal injury situation, an ebook on the insurance coverage a small business should have, for example.

The Bottom Line

Keep in mind that the purpose of your newsletter is to nurture prospects, not sell them. Take the long term approach, and you’ll see the results.

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Create Evergreen Content for Your Site

Evergeen Content

Content that’s “evergreen” has continued value over time. For example, it’s not an announcement that an important deadline is looming and you better take action; rather, it’s general advice on how to do something. Evergreen content can deliver visitors over a long period, and it helps in search engine rankings because visitors who click on it will tend to stay on the page for a while, and over a long period of time. It’s just the sort of content that you’d want to put on page one of search results if you were Google!

As a practical matter, evergreen content doesn’t have to be replaced as quickly on your site, so it also reduces the workload for busy people who work in small businesses. But that’s not an excuse to put content on your site, decide that it’s evergreen, and then leave the site alone–Google, not to mention your visitors, want fresh content. Supply your site with a continuing flow of new content.

The Ingredients

For evergreen content to have impact on your search position, and be most effective, here’s what it needs to have:

Continued value–As in the example above, write copy that will have value over time, that isn’t tied to some specific event. Luck plays a role here. It’s possible to recommend some specific SEO technique that ceases to be useful the next week. However, if you try to provide good advice to your readers, that’s not tied to specific events, in general that will have some staying power.
Hold the user–provide enough information so that the reader spends some time on the page. Google measures how long until the reader goes on to the next page, and long times help your search results position.
Write for SEO–Use important keywords early in the text, in the middle of the text, and at the end of the text. Also put important terms in the heading and in internal links to the page.
Sell the content in the heading–Have a descriptive heading that draws the reader in
address a need–Address a real need that your audience has, so that they’ll be interested in the content.

The Bottom Line

Write durable, quality content for your site. And keep adding to it on a regular basis. Over time, you can develop an authoritative site that will rank well in search results.

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Structuring a Multi-Language Web Site

Multi-Language Sites

Suppose you’re a physician in practice in a major city. You want to serve both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking patients. So, naturally, you have two Web sites built, one for English and one for Spanish. Or do you? What’s the right way to structure your Web presence if you want to present a multi-lingual face to the people you serve?

Note that here we’re talking only about the problem of multiple languages in a single location. If you’re a multinational organization, and want to serve people in different countries who speak different languages, then you will most likely want to have distinct Web sites, each tailored to its own country, not just by language but by content and by incoming and outgoing links.

The Alternatives

There are three alternatives to consider:

Two distinct sites, one for each language, with the same or very similar structure, each with its own domain name. So your URLs will look like example-en.com and example-es.com.
A single domain name, with different subdomain names. You’ll have two sites, but the same domain name will work for both. Your URLs will have the form en.example.com and es.example.com.
A single domain name and a single site, with separate subfolders for each language. Your URLs will have the form example.com/en/ and example.com/es/

Two Sites, Two Domain Names

For search engine position, this is the poorest approach. First, Google awards more authority to sites with more content–and this divides your content between two sites. In addition, your incoming links will be split between the two sites. Finally, from a visitor experience perspective, could this give a visitor the impression that you are less than completely open about how you serve people who use different languages, since the same business is using two different domain names? For all these reasons, this is not an attractive alternative.

One Domain Name, Two Subdomains

When you have two subdomains you have two different sites. Each subdomain will be indexed separately by Google, so you still have the SEO disadvantages of the first approach. You will have two separate sites to maintain and promote, so there’s extra work compared with a single site.

One Domain Name, Separate Subfolders

This is the most attractive approach from an SEO perspective, because all of the credit for incoming links in any language will all accrue to the single site, as will all authority for the content you put on the site. And all the of the new content in any language will benefit the overall site for all languages. You can provide flags on each page that link to the content in that language–in this case, for example, a U.S. flag and a Spanish flag. A visitor can easily toggle back and forth between the two languages, so that an English speaker can find content for a Spanish speaker and then just click to show the Spanish-language version to the Spanish speaker. With this approach, the bilingual nature of the site is featured rather than hidden.

The Bottom Line

For a site that serves multiple languages but for a business that operates in a single location, use a single domain with subfolders for each language.

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When Should You Update Your Site? Why It Matters

Many small businesses have what could be called a “build it and forget it” approach to the Web. They work hard when the site is built, then let it sit undisturbed, hoping that it will draw traffic. This is not a sound approach! To discover why, read on.

Google and Currency

Google dominates search, so our first attention goes to what Google does about this issue. Google’s goal is to deliver search results that are relevant to a user’s query. They’ve decided that one important aspect of relevance is currency. Their users don’t just want just information, they want current information. First-time visitors to your site want information that’s current, and repeat visitors want to find something new.

Google’s response to this assessment of their customers’ desires is to include currency as an important ranking factor. When you create a new site, currency will be in your favor, but over time this will degrade as you don’t add new content. You can no longer just set up a site and have the traffic roll in; you need to keep supplying it with current content.

This is not unreasonable on Google’s part. When you get the newspaper on Monday morning, do you want to see last week’s news? Sure, you might see some stories that go back in time, but what grabs your interest is the latest news. Similarly, Google is particularly interested in giving its searchers the latest information. How does Google do this? By moving sites with more current information–that have received new content recently–higher in search ratings.

I Don’t Have Time to Write for The Site

In a small business, everyone is doing lots of things. You’re busy. You can’t take time to write articles for the site! But do you take several people to go to a trade show? And spend all the money to get a booth in a trade show? What if, for much lower cost, you could get more leads from your Web site, just from an hour of writing once a week?

Making effective use of your Web site is the best marketing expenditure that you can make, because it’s working to connect with people who have expressed an interest in what you offer by searching for it! These are all prospects, you’re not just printing paper and spreading it around, hoping that someone who is interested will see it.

You need to take the time to write for the site. If it means doing less of something else, that’s fine. Find some marketing activity whose productivity is doubtful, and write for the site instead.

What To Write

A good starting point if you aren’t writing much for your site is a blog. Find short articles that you can write that provide useful advice to your target customers. In these short articles, indirectly convey your selling message, whether it’s product quality, customer support, great service, or whatever your key selling message is.

A blog is a good place for these articles. They can also be used as newsletter fodder as well. This is an example of just such a blog/newsletter article. It’ll go on the site in Web Marketing 101, which is my blog, and it’ll also be sent out as a newsletter.

The Bottom Line

Get writing!

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Common Small Business Web Mistakes

Today, small businesses understand that they need a Web site. However, often their goals extend only to “having” a Web site, so they don’t ever realize the considerable revenue benefits that a Web site can bring. Using a Web site as the hub of your marketing strategy is the best advertising investment that you can make. Here’s why.

Interruption Advertising

Traditional advertising can be called “interruption advertising.” For example someone is reading a newspaper, and you pay to put an ad near an article that’s being read, in hopes of attracting the reader’s attention, interrupting what she actually wants to do. On radio and television, it’s the same thing–but there, you actually interrupt the program in hopes that the viewer or listener will pay attention to your interruption.

If you purchase a mailer such as a postcard or an add in a mailer for several companies, you’re paying to buy a lot of paper–thousands of pieces of paper–and lots of ink, to print your ad on the paper. And lots to distribute this printed material, again in hopes that someone who happens to be interested happens to see your ad at the right moment.

All of this is expensive per person who is reached, which you well know if you’ve priced even a small ad in a newspaper. You’re buying a lot of paper and a lot of ink and a lot of delivery in hopes of reaching someone who’s interested.

Inbound Advertising

Promotion on the Web, particularly through search engines, is fundamentally different from interruption advertising. Someone who is looking for your product or service does a Web search as part of their seeking someone to meet their needs. What we seek to do with search marketing is to make that connection between the person who wants what you offer and your offering on your Web site.

For example, if you’re using pay-per-click advertising, your ads will appear on the right side of a Google search result. The people who see those ads will be searchers who’ve entered a term that you’ve (carefully!) chosen, that indicates an interest in what you provide. If they click on your ad, then they’ve shown their interest twice–once in the search, and then again, after reading your ad, and clicking. You pay only when they click on your ad and reach your site. So your payment is to present your site to someone who is actively looking for what you’re offering.

The work you do to rank well in search engines is also “inbound advertising”–you’re trying to appear on page one or page two of Google search results for the products or services that you offer. This, too, is worth time and effort, and investment, because you’re seeking to present your case to people who are actively looking for what you offer.

Often small businesses don’t want to write a regular newsletter. It’s work!…and everyone is busy. But a newsletter signup on your site is a way for someone to say “Please remind me that you’re around.” They’ve been to your site and for some reason this isn’t the time to buy. But they’d like to be reminded! So don’t throw away that visit–that you’ve worked and paid to get. Instead, use it to start building a relationship through your newsletter.

The Bottom Line

Don’t just “have” your Web site. Make it work for you; it’s the most effective, least costly form of promotion available to you.

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Welcome New Newsletter Subscribers

Importance of the Welcome Email

It’s easy to overlook that welcome email that you send to new subscribers to your newsletter, but that’s a big mistake. Why? Because, as an Experian white paper shows, welcome emails have an open rate that’s much higher than typical newsletter open rates.

This chart, from the Experian white paper, shows an open rate for welcomes at nearly 58%, compared with about 15% for typical newsletters.

Note also that the click rate is also much higher, nearly seven times as high.

So the welcome email is a great time to reach prospects and customers with your message.

When Should You Send It

Your newsletter software may offer you a choice between sending the welcome right away or in a batch at some later time.

The right time is right away! The same Experian white paper shows the open and click rates for immediate welcomes is much higher than for later, batch welcomes–as you’d expect–when someone has just subscribed, you’re on their mind.

If your newsletter software won’t send a message to new subscribers, this advantage is important enough that you should replace it. An excellent and very popular WordPress newsletter plugin–the one I use–is MailPoet. The free version lets you send an immediate welcome.

The First Message

Start by thanking the new subscriber for joining the list. Then deliver your first message–your vision and mission, told in your own voice. What are you up to? What do you deliver, and to which people?

This is your opportunity to tell this customer or prospect that you stand for and deliver things that are important and worthwhile, to reinforce the message that was already delivered about you, that drew this subscriber to you in the first place.

Remember the old saying that you never get a second chance to make a first impression! This is your opportunity to deliver the basic message about your whole business and what you stand for.

Now Offer a Surprise

All of us love to be surprised! This is your chance to delight your new subscriber with a surprise. What sorts of things can you use to do this? The advantage of the welcome newsletter is that you’re not setting a pattern here–this is the first one, so you can offer a welcome gesture that you may not repeat.

Because this is a special occasion, the usual caution about offering discounts in the newsletter–that they can undermine your price structure and create you a body of customers who won’t buy at regular price–doesn’t apply. You can offer a discount coupon. You can even offer a more dramatic special–if you’re a restaurant, offer a “bring a friend” coupon with two meals for the price of one! Be careful to call it a one-time welcome offer so that it’s clear this will not be a regular event.

You can also offer other surprises, such as free shipping, all sorts of goodies as premiums, or even an ebook. Whatever suits your particular business.

The Standard Outline

If you’re a regular reader of these notes, you’re aware that I recommend that you establish a standard outline for your newsletters, and follow it with each one. This allows the subscriber to know what to expect–there will be a recipe, perhaps, perhaps an interesting client story, perhaps a description of a new product feature. This way, if your subscriber likes one newsletter, she knows that subsequent newsletters will be of interest too.

For the welcome newsletter, forget the standard outline! This newsletter has a very special job to do that’s different from other newsletters, so you don’t need to follow your regular pattern.

The Bottom Line

Establish a special welcome to new subscribers of your newsletter. And in this welcome, offer them something really special.

Of course you have a newsletter! If not, go directly to jail and do not pass Go. Instead, read other articles here about your newsletter and get started. It’s the best way to build your business on the Web.

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Bargain Web Hosting: Really a Bargain?

We’ve all seen ads for inexpensive Web hosting. It’s even advertised during the Super Bowl! You can get your site hosted for $1 a month. Or even 99 cents a month! What can be easier? Should you use these cheap services? This issue digs into the issues of cheap hosting providers, based on actual experience.

We see cheap hosting services advertised on the Super Bowl. This tells us that lots of people are buying them, and also that they must be quite profitable for the vendors, since they can afford the huge cost of Super Bowl commercials.

We’re talking here about the difference between hosting that might cost, say $6 a month, compared to first-class hosting that you can get for about $20 a month. So the cost difference isn’t great. Does it matter? Is it OK to go cheap on this?

Why So Cheap?

Why is it that companies can charge so little for Web hosting? It’s easy to pay $30 a month for hosting service. How then can some companies sell it for $1? Or $3? Or $6? The answer, as usual, is that the service isn’t the same as the $30 product. I’ve seen three primary areas where the vendors cut costs:

• resource limitations are placed on these sites, particularly cpu time they can use and RAM that they can use to service requests;

• multiple sites may share an IP address; and

• customer support may be limited.

Resource Limitations

On one occasion I moved a site from a moderately-priced hosting service at a big company to my own hosting service, that’s more expensive but doesn’t put stringent limits on CPU and RAM resources, and the same site, with no changes, loaded twice as fast on a better hosting service.

We all know that speed to load is a factor that Google considers in assigning page rank in search results. Why? Because they’d like to point their customers–searchers–to pages that provide good experience by loading fast. So although loading speed is influenced by many factors, particularly site design,

If your site is hosted on a quality service, not only Google but your visitors will have a better experience when they visit your site.

In a more recent experience, a client was paying $16 a month for hosting service from one of the big companies. When I ran a WordFence security scan of his site to find malicious software, the memory limitations imposed by the hosting service kept the scan from completing. As it turns out, there was malware that was not being detected by the prematurely terminated scans; when the site was moved to a quality hosting service, the malware scan ran to completion, detecting and correcting the problems that went unfixed previously.

Shared IP Address

The very cheapest hosting services will have your site sharing an IP address with another site. Google tells us that a shared IP address will not, by itself, hurt your position in their search results. However, if your site shares an IP address with another site that gets infected with malware, then that IP address may be classified as one containing malware and suffer in search engine rankings. Similarly, if the other site sharing your IP address either deliberately or through malware sends out spam, your IP address may be identified as a source of spam, so that your emails aren’t accepted by many email servers.

A shared IP address saves money, but it’s a bad idea.

Limited Service

The big companies have various ways to limit service. One of them doesn’t provide telephone service at all–you send them an email. If they’re really interested they’ll call you back. Later. But at the moment you’re panicked or having problems–and you site is not delivering your message properly–you may not be able to get help.

You also may find that there is telephone support, but you have to wait a looooong time to reach them! How much is your time worth while you’re on hold? The most annoying part of this is that you’re likely to hear that “Your call is very important to us…” while you know that it’s not so important that they bothered to hire enough people to keep up with the call volume.

Perhaps the most annoying way to chisel on support is to have multi-tier support. You explain the problem first to someone who has limited knowledge, runs you through a script of actions for you to take, to screen out a couple of simple problems. Then you are transferred to someone else who perhaps can actually help you. Here, too, you’re paying for the cheap hosting service by wasting your own time.

The service that you want is a real person who can solve problems for you, available 24 hours a day.

The Bottom Line

Expect to spend $20 a month for site hosting. Use pingdom.com to measure your site’s home page load time. Run WordFence’s security scan on your site, and if it doesn’t complete, upgrade your hosting service or move to another service.

One way to get great hosting service is to use Dave’s Super Hosting Service; there are also other competent hosting providers.

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Google’s New Requirement–You MUST Be “Mobile-Friendly”

Google and Mobile-Friendly

Google has announced that, starting April 17, they will include whether a site is “mobile-friendly” as a criteria for position in search results. This means that starting on that date, if they don’t think your site is mobile-friendly, expect your position in search rankings to change. Significantly.

Why are they doing this? To meet the demands of their own customers, searchers. An increasing number of searches are performed from cellphones, and Google wants to deliver search results that these customers can use easily. In that sense, this change is in your interest as well–your customers, increasingly, use cellphones to search, so you need to have a site that’s easy for them to use from a cellphone.

What is Mobile-Friendly?

Happily, Google doesn’t leave any doubt what they mean by mobile-friendly. They’ve provided us a test tool that we can use, for free, to see whether a site is mobile-friendly. Just give the link a click, insert your URL, and Google will tell you–yes or no–and even show you a picture of what your site looks like on a cell phone.

Here’s a sample of the sort of result you can expect, for a test of this site:

How Can I Make My Site Mobile-Friendly?

You don’t want to be out in the cold on April 17, although you can expect Google to phase in the penalty over time–which is to say, if you can’t make it by the 17th, you can avoid the worst of the damage by acting as quickly as you can.

If you’ve used WordPress for your site, you’re in better shape. If you site uses one of the popular themes, most of them are already mobile-friendly, so when you used the Google’s mobile-friendly tool you received the happy news that your site is already mobile-friendly. If you have a WordPress site that doesn’t use a mobile-friendly theme, you could add mobile-friendly code to your theme, potentially at some cost and taking some time, or you could have your site changed to use a mobile-friendly theme. The latter approach is likely to be the best approach for most small businesses.

If you’re using one of the older site generators such as Joomla, you’re not out of luck. Check with the developers of your tools. Joomla, in particular, has some plugins that can help you achieve responsive design with a Joomla site. There’s a free ebook about getting a Joomla site to be responsive.

If you have a static HTML site, or an HTML site with a lot of code, you’ll need to add code to the site to sense the type of device that’s being used to view it, and adapt the display to the size of the device. That’s a significant amount of work, and of course you’ll need to be ready to change that code as the devices used evolve over time. But if you have your own Web programming staff, this may be a practical approach for you. You might also decide that perhaps it’s time to get away from the HTML approach and join the WordPress bandwagon. I took that step a while ago with my own site, so I’ll be relaxed on April 17.

The Bottom Line

Become mobile-friendly. Now. Or lose much of your Google search traffic.

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Walmart Buys Google

Walmart Is Buying Google

In a press release today, Walmart announced that they are acquiring the assets of Google. The announcement says “We are purchasing Google in order to protect the reputation of Walmart. Google operations will remain as they are, with the exception of a few small changes.”

Minor Changes in Search

What are those changes? The announcement continues “We have been concerned for some time about the negative publicity about Walmart’s wages and working conditions, and how this negative information is spread through the Internet, particularly by Google searches. Our Board decided that decisive action is needed to defend our reputation. As soon as the acquisition closes, negative information about Walmart will no longer appear in Google search results. Our Board decided that this approach to dealing with the reputation issue was more economical than giving a raise and providing health insurance and reasonable working conditions to our 2.2 million employees.”

Food Service in Google Offices

The announcement stated that free meals in Google cafeterias will continue as a fringe benefit for full-time Google employees; part-time employees will need to pay for meals. Because of corporate commitments, catering for all food in Google operations will be provided by McDonalds, starting immediately after the acquisition. The significant savings that will result from this change are expected to improve Google’s bottom line.

Full and Part Time

Walmart has traditionally relied on part-time workers to provide up to 40% of its labor in stores. Because part-timers do not get benefits, this reduces labor costs. Post-acquisition, Google will be given a mandatory goal to have 40% part-time employees within six months. This will be achieved either by converting present full-time employees, or by replacing present full-time employees with part-time new hires. The elimination of all benefits for 40% of Google’s payroll will also produce significant enhancement of Google profitability.

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Yelp Update Reading Time 3 min. 45 sec.

Does Yelp Manipulate Reviews for Advertisers?

The newsletter on Yelp produced feedback that Yelp is not popular with site owners, particularly those who have experienced high-pressure sales tactics or have seen perfectly good reviews from customers they recognize categorized as not recommended. This is indeed a story “ripped from the headlines,” as they say on TV. Here are some recent developments.

A producer has shot much of a coming documentary about Yelp, called Billion Dollar Bully. It’s being produced in San Francisco, right in Yelp’s back yard. A number of Yelp customers have agreed to tell their tales of woe in the movie. There is presently a Kickstarter effort underway to fund the completion of the film.

It would not surprise anyone if some Yelp salesman, in order to make quota, told a business owner that he could influence ratings even if he couldn’t. Since there are thousands of Yelp salesmen, this could happen many, many times throughout the organization. It also would not be a surprise if a business owner saw such a threat, and then saw a negative review the next day. That could be just a coincidence, but of course you’d never convince the business owner of that. Or the unethical salesman could have written a bad review!

So how does one decide whether Yelp is what they say they are, or what their critics say they are?

The Courts

One good mechanism for deciding is the courts. Yelp attorneys on one side, building their best case, and a plaintiff’s attorney on the other side, doing his best to build the case against Yelp. The last such case was at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which in their ruling in Levitt v. Yelp, affirmed the dismissal of a number of extortion suits that had been brought. Yelp cites this decision as evidence that it did not threaten to manipulate customers’ ratings if they didn’t buy advertising.

However, a reading of the court’s decision shows that it’s not completely clear-cut in Yelp’s favor. The court found that the plaintiffs had speculated that Yelp had written bad reviews on their businesses but never provided evidence to support the speculation, and that the businesses didn’t make a claim for specific damages so they couldn’t be awarded any damages. The decision really doesn’t clear Yelp of manipulating ratings–it just says the plaintiffs didn’t prove them.

Of course, if you have resourceful lawyers, if a company with thousands of employees is manipulating reviews to sell advertising, the smart lawyers are likely to find an unhappy ex-employee to testify about what’s happening at the company. The several suits that were brought appear to have used co-occurrence of purchasing or not purchasing advertising and changes in how reviews appeared on the site as their evidence of manipulation.

The FTC

Yelp claims that the FTC investigated their operations, including how their software treats ratings for advertisers and non-advertisers, and informed Yelp that they did not intend to take any action. However, no official documentation is cited.

Harvard Business School

Finally, a Harvard Business School study of Yelp was conducted. They found that restaurants are more likely to write fake favorable reviews on themselves when they lacked a solid reputation of their own, as when they were starting, and they tended to write unfavorable reviews on their neighbors when the neighbors served similar cuisine. More of interest to us, though, they found that “neither 1- or 5-star reviews were more or less likely to be filtered for businesses that we advertising on Yelp…”

This was an impressive study that used a very large amount of data from Yelp’s site, along with information about which companies were advertisers, from the site, and historical information about advertisers from Yelp.

The Bottom Line

Yelp advertising can be helpful–they’ll show your company name along with your competitors’ listings. But what should you do if your Yelp salesman threatens you? Be polite and make the business decision that you’d make without the threats. Yes, he can personally write a fake negative review, but that one will be swamped by the positive reviews you normally get, and he will move on to his next prospect.

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Yelp, Extortion, Lawsuits and Negative Reviews–Reading time 5 minutes

Yelp is Frustrating

Yelp, the well-known review site, is the subject of complaints from all sides.

Web visitors wonder whether the reviews are genuine–have positive reviews been written or influenced by the business? Or have negative reviews been placed there by the competition? Can the reviews be trusted?

Similarly, businesses can be frustrated by critical reviews on Yelp. Are they genuine, or are they from competitors or just mischief-makers? And when Yelp chooses not to “recommend” positive reviews of a business, it can be very frustrating. The reviews sit below the “recommended” reviews, requiring an extra click to see, with the number of stars grayed out.

Then we hear stories of Yelp advertising salespeople who offer to “fix” negative reviews if the business will buy advertising…or to accentuate negative reviews if they don’t.

This is an issue that I’ve followed closely, and here I’ll give you my considered view of Yelp and this whole issue.

Extortion

Yelp has been accused of extortion several times. Many Yelp customers have reported that a salesman offered to help remove negative reviews if they purchased advertising, or offered to make negative reviews go away. These reports are so numerous and so dispersed geographically that this does appear to be happening.

There have been several lawsuits over this issue, and last November a Federal Court of Appeals ruled that plaintiffs had not shown evidence that Yelp had changed ratings because of advertising payments. This follows a pattern, where Yelp so far was won every such suit that has been filed.

It would not be sensible for Yelp to extort advertising customers. Yelp’s product is reviews–they have nothing else to sell. So if their reviews are dependable and of high quality, Yelp can succeed. However, if their reviews are being manipulated and Web users learn of it, usage of Yelp won’t grow nearly as fast as it would with dependable reviews. Because Yelp is a large organization, changing reviews for advertisers can’t stay secret very long. We could expect to see a disgruntled employee on television, telling all about this practice, thereby becoming part of many lawsuits brought by customers.

Which is not to say that Yelp salespeople don’t offer to manipulate reviews in order to sell advertising. It’s easy to see how a salesperson could see this method as the path to a quick sale. And well it might be! But an unethical salesperson–even man of them–don’t mean that the company is systematically doing what he is offering.

Given that lawsuits have never shown the company to be manipulating reviews, and given that it would be a startlingly unwise business practice, I doubt that the company manipulates results in response to advertising revenues.

“Not Recommended” Reviews

Some reviews are shown as “not recommended”, which means that an extra click is needed to see them, that their star ratings are grayed out, and their scores and not used in computing the business’s overall rating.

It’s very frustrating to a business owner who sees reviews from customers he might recognize that are classified as “not recommended”. He’d like to respond in some way to convince Yelp to display these recommendations.

Yelp’s side of the story is that they use software that runs automatically to classify reviews, and the decision of the software is final. They don’t provide a way for a business owner to reach out to someone who has written a review that has received the dreaded “not recommended” tag, or a way to reach out to them.

Yelp provides a general description of how they reach a decision to not recommend a review. Mentioned several times in this material is that the confidence that Yelp places in the individual making the review is a major factor. That is, does the person have a wide on-line presence otherwise, which tends to validate that they are a really person. And has the person written additional reviews on Yelp that have received endorsements from readers, again providing confidence that this is a real person who writes dependable reviews.

The number of friends that a review has on Yelp is one factor that’s included in he algorithm. So if the business owner recognizes a customer who has written a review, the business owner could search for that person in Yelp and invite that person to become a Yelp friend. That will increase the number of Yelp friends the person has, and the chance of the review being recommended, especially if the business owner has a lot of Yelp friends.

But in the longer run the best remedy for “not recommended” reviews is to have lots of good reviews, so that a few that are not recommended will not become an issue.

Negative Reviews

We all know that the Internet is full of trolls who love to be critical, sometimes destructively so. What should be done about a negative review that the business owner thinks is unfairly critical?

First, there’s a little gray flag below each review that lets the business owner (or anyone else) report it to Yelp as being unfair, and a menu of reasons why it’s unfair. Will this help? Who knows? But the ten seconds that it takes to click the link and confirm the choice is a reasonable investment.

Second, for a recommended review, Yelp provides a way to get in touch with the reviewer. Each negative review is an opportunity for the business to reach out to that disaffected person–who, no doubt, is telling friends the same story–and turn that person into an advocate. A message to the disaffected customer that the company is concerned about the review and would like to set things straight, and then following up on the opportunity to take action, can both eliminate some who is hurting the business and create a new advocate who recommends the business.

The Bottom Line

1. In order to survive and prosper in the connected age, delight your customers so that they eagerly recommend you to their friends and colleagues and on Yelp and other social networks.

2. Respond with compassion and generosity to negative reviews, converting detractors into advocates.

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Announcing!! Dave’s Review Service

A New, Important Service

I’m happy to make an announcement that’s been in the works for some time: Dave’s Review Service. The service will obtain for you a significant number of genuine, positive reviews from your real customers, as well as quality feedback about how your customers perceive your business. As you know, reviews are important because review sites have become an important part of the buying process. Today, customers will find you on review sites before they come t your site; and if they don’t find you on the review sites they may never come to your site.

Why Do I Need This?

Yes, it’s true–prospects for what you offer may never get to your site, because first they’ll read review sites to narrow down to just a few candidates, and then they’ll visit the Web sites for only those candidates. No matter where you appear in search results, you may be ignored if you don’t have plenty of good reviews.

As you’ve read in this newsletter and elsewhere, it’s important that review sites receive only genuine reviews from actual your customers, and you must not incentivize your customers to write reviews. Review sites are working hard to detect fakery, and they penalize miscreants severely when they find it. Unfortunately, the filters they use to catch cheaters can also catch authentic reviews.

What is Provided?

The service provides you three crucial results:

Genuine, positive reviews from your actual customers, on a variety of review sites that are relevant to your business
Correct listings on relevant directories of local businesses
Insightful feedback from your customers on their views of your business, in addition to what’s provided in the reviews

Dave’s Review Service provides you with genuine, positive reviews, on many review sites that are relevant for your business, from your real customers, using a proprietary method for obtaining those reviews. These are real reviews from real customers, and they are all positive. They will appear on many different review sites. The strategy for obtaining the reviews and placing them on review sites is designed to minimize the chance that these genuine reviews will be erroneously identified as questionable by the automated filters used by review sites.

In addition, Dave’s Review Service works with over 150 sites that are directories of local services, and will work to get your site listed correctly on them. You can expect to gain about ten of these listings per month, until you have a suitable number of listings (typically about fifty).

Whatever else you do–or don’t do–with Web marketing, Dave’s Review Service can bring you business now.

Does It Work?

The method used has been demonstrated to work with real businesses and real customers. A psychologist’s overall rating on a healthcare site changed from a C before using the service to an A. An apartment rental service greatly increased their tenancy rate after using the service. This method works.

Review sites typically have a curation process that they use for reviews, so the reviews don’t appear on the review sites right away. You won’t see the first reviews for a month or so after joining Dave’s Review Service.

Now you can use this method to expand your own business. Starting today.

How Does It Work?

The method that’s used is a new invention, and it’s a trade secret. It has been tested in use with real sites, and it has delivered results. After you execute a non-disclosure agreement and become a client for this service, I can explain to you how it works. Once you understand it, you’ll see that it’s evident that it will work. It’s like a magic trick–the secret is simple.

There are several pieces of technology that are needed to carry out the method, and obtaining them would cost you more than the monthly price of the service. In addition, you’d have the burden of operating it all. I’ve made a significant investment in the service, and continue to build and refine. So using the service saves you money and time, and delivers great results to your business.

Crazy Low Introductory Price

You can start reaping the benefits today. There’s an introductory price of $200 per month. You can’t do it for this price.

The Bottom Line

There’s little reason to not do this! Get in touch for more information by clicking here.

Special Offer!

An extra special price is being offered through Yelp. Take a look!

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As we enjoy our Thanksgiving repast, it’s interesting to see what recipes interest our countrymen. The New York Times asked Google to identify unusual recipes that are searched for around Thanksgiving by region. Here’s a map of the result. Note that they asked for unusual recipes; of course, turkey is probably the most frequently search for recipe everywhere. But that wouldn’t show all the wonderful regional variation of our nation. Here’s the map. I’m eager to know what Mirliton Casserole is! Not to mention frog eye salad.

Regional Thanksgiving Recipes

The Bottom Line

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Storytelling–How to Do It

A previous edition of this newsletter talked about the benefits of using storytelling in your marketing. This newsletter talks about how to write a story–what’s the appropriate structure. It turns out that the structure of stories, called dramatic structure, has been analyzed since the time of Aristotle, and is well understood. There is a well-established pattern that successful stories follow, after centuries of experience that we humans have had to perfect the craft. This issue discusses that structure.

Freytag’s Analysis

Gustav Freytag was a German novelist who lived in the mid-19th century. His analysis of dramatic structure, now called Freytag’s Pyramid, is often cited as the definitive work on the subject. There is usually a protagonist the main characters, with whom the audience is intended to identify. The protagonist comes into conflict of some kind with the antagonist. Freytag’s Pyramid, shown below, consists of these five parts:

1. Exposition–introduction of important background information, such as the setting, back stories for the characters, events taking place before the plot, and so on.

2. Rising action–a series of events that build toward the point of greatest interest. These events are usually the most important part of the story; the entire plot depends on them to set up the climax

.3. Climax or crisis–The climax is the turning point, where the protagonist’s fate changes. In a comedy, things may have gone badly until now, and they start going well. In a tragedy, things have been going well and now change from good to bad.

4. Falling action–during the falling action, the conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist unravels, and one or the other prevails. There may be a moment of final suspense whether the outcome of the conflict is in doubt until the very end.

5. Denouement, resolution, revelation or catastrophe–the unraveling of the complexities of the plot. A tragedy ends with a catastrophe, a comedy with the protagonist better off than at the start of the story.

An Example

You may think that this complex structure, used for Greek and Shakespearean dramas, isn’t applicable to a modern story in a newsletter or Web page. Indeed it is! Here’s a well-know example of storytelling by Moe Levine, a famous plaintiff’s lawyer. Juries usually listen to long closing arguments; this is the complete closing argument famously used by Mr. Levine:

“As you know, about an hour ago we broke for lunch. I saw the bailiff come and take you all as a group to have lunch in the jury room. Then I saw the defense attorney, Mr. Horowitz. He and his client decided to go to lunch together. The judge and court clerk went to lunch. So, I turned to my client, Harold, and said “Why don’t you and I go to lunch together?” We went across the street to that little restaurant and had lunch. (Significant pause.) Ladies and gentlemen, I just had lunch with my client. He has no arms. He has to eat like a dog. Thank you very much.”

As you can imagine, he obtained a large verdict in favor of his client, who had a double amputation because of an accident.

The Bottom Line

When you use storytelling, consider Freytag’s Pyramid. It has stood the test of time and it’s a way to write stories that move your reader.

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Web Marketing 101

These posts have been written since 1998 and cover all aspects of Web marketing. I’ll write one when a client situation that I’m working might be of interest to a larger audience, or when my research turns up an interesting idea.

The collection is reviewed and edited from time to time, and posts that are no longer relevant–because things really do change in this business–are removed.

If you find any posts that interest you, please share them using your favorite social network. And consider subscribing to the newsletter, so you’ll get one of these ideas per week!

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The Box on Your Site That Costs You Money

The Coupon Box

If you have a coupon box on your site, it can be a great tool for promotions. Offer a special discount by getting out that coupon number to the people who can use the offer. But there’s also a cost of having that coupon box on the site–no, there aren’t any extra charges from your hosting company, the costs come from lost sales.

What Happens

When a customer is ready to buy and has put merchandize into the shopping cart, and then goes to the shopping cart to check out, what happens if they see a coupon box and don’t have a coupon? What message is sent? How do you feel when you get to the checkout page and don’t have a coupon?

The customer without a coupon can infer the message “You’re paying more than someone else who has a coupon!” That’s a nicer message than the other message that’s just underneath it: “Some other customer is more important to us than you because we gave that customer a discount that we’re not giving you.”

What To Do

What can you do? You’d like to be able to offer coupon discounts from time to time, or perhaps offer a coupon to some special customer all the time. Take a close look at the use of coupons. How many sales do you actually make with coupons? If that coupon box is on your site but you’re not giving coupons now, take it off. And put it back when you make an offer. Or, instead, when you offer a discount, offer it to everyone who comes to the site!

The Bottom Line

Don’t leave that coupon box on your checkout page unless you really need it.

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Design Lessons from the Apple Store

I found a wonderful blog entry that talks about six design lessons from the Apple store. It’s an old blog–from 2004–but the message is still valuable. Store design is like Web site design, and this piece makes it clear. So here is the Web context for each of the design lessons.

The Lessons

1. Create an experience, not an artifact.
Consider your site as an experience for the visitor, so that every aspect of that experience helps convey the message you’re trying to communicate.
2. Honor Context
Think about the visitor’s point of view when organizing your site, not your point of view as a business insider. Your categories don’t matter; the visitor’s do.
3. Prioritize your messages
You can’t say everything you want to say to each Web visitor. Decide what’s most important and say that–clearly and emphatically.
Institute consistency
Use all the tools you have to convey your image. Make the site design consistent with your products, if you have products, or your offices if customers visit your offices. And be sure that all those tools are consistent with the message.
4. Design for change
Marketing is the discipline of continually changing how the company deals with a changing marketplace, and this is exactly what happens on the Web. Search engines actually give higher rank to sites that change often. So design choices need to enable change.
5. Don’t forget the human element
Remember that the next step after your site is the encounter an interested visitor will have with your people. Make sure that they also reflect the message of quality and consistency and service that you want to deliver, or your visitors will quickly discover that there’s little behind the pretty site.

The Bottom Line

There are parallels between Web site design and the design of a retail store. In both cases, every aspect of the design and how our employees behave within it should be used to convey our marketing message.

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Dave’s Four Laws of Marketing

Marketing is different from selling–the marketer figures out how to sell, the seller actually sells. This issue of the Newsletter gives four simple Laws of Marketing: follow all of them for success. The Fourth Law is most often not followed.

The Laws

Here are Dave’s Four Laws:

Keep trying new things

Don’t get into a rut! Your prospects may be tired of what worked yesterday–or you may have reached everyone you’ll reach with yesterday’s marketing approach. Keep looking for new ideas, and keep trying them. But be sure to keep Laws Two through Four in mind!

Measure the results of each thing you try

If you don’t measure effectiveness, you’ll never know if it works. There are a lot of different ways to measure–when I was sending a newsletter in snail mail, I put in a postcard into each envelope once in a while asking recipients if they still wanted to receive the newsletter, and giving some space for a comment. This simple step provided a lot of useful feedback.

When you find something that works, do more of it

Marketing changes, and when you find a good technique, expand its use! Don’t waste too much time, because your competition is looking for new methods also. If you move quickly to capitalize on new marketing methods, you can play a leadership role in acquiring prospects who are in the market.

When you find something that doesn’t work, do less of it

This Law is the least often followed. Often companies have sacred cows, that weekly ad in the newspaper that’s gotten more and more expensive, or that direct mail piece that brings in fewer returns each year, while it costs more to send each year. Be ready to reduce your use of methods that aren’t working as well any more. If you don’t take this step, you won’t be able to give the proper attention and resources to new methods that are working for you.

The Bottom Line

Marketing is a process of continuous improvement. Markets don’t stand still, so your marketing can’t either. Keep experimenting and improving. And consider killing some sacred cows!

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Google’s Warning on Article Directories

Article Directories

There are many article directories. The way they work is that you write something that’s, say, 300 to 500 words in length and you post it on the directory, including a link back to your site. Your article is then available for others to download and post on their own sites, either for free or by paying a fee. Users agree that if they post your article, they’ll include the link to your site.

Article directories are promoted as a good way to get additional links to your site. Indeed, at one time this was a good way to get links to your site and boost your position in search engine results.

Google’s Warning

Matt Cutts of Google’s search engine team has recently posted a video about article directories. He says that increasingly, Google is finding that a lot of the material in article directories is of low quality, and replicating to other Web sites results in low quality in lots of places.

He adds that Google has “algorithmic features” so that this practice would not be recommended as a way to improve your position in search engine results.

The Bottom Line

It’s simple: do not use article directories to promote your site!

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Ron Burgundy and Content Marketing

Anchorman 2 is now in theaters. The promotion for it is a great example of content marketing, an example that we can apply to the Web.

What is content marketing? It’s providing content that attracts and engages an audience, building a relationship that may bring the audience to make purchases at some time. Content marketing doesn’t even have to reference the product being promoted. In this case, all the content marketing consisted of Will Farrel appearing as Ron Burgundy, and in 70 YouTube videos highlighting these appearances, not once does he mention that a new movie is on its way.

For example, he appeared (in character) on Conan O’Brien’s show to promote a fictitious Ron Burgundy autobiography. The appearance was hilarious, illustrating how funny the Ron Burgundy character is, without even mentioning the movie.

As Ron Burgundy he did a series of ads for the Dodge Durango, and sales for the car increased, although it’s hard to tell which figure for the increase is real and which is part of a spoof. The commercials featured Ron doing such things as deciding that the name should be pronounced “Yodge”, talking about how many packages of gum the glovebox would hold, and so on. These ads were successful at selling cars, as well as promoting the movie.

I’ll confess to being influenced by all the content marketing–I saw the movie and thought that it was terrible! I didn’t even check reviews before seeing it.

There Can Be Too Much

When we’re developing content, there’s a danger that, knowing that we need to create a serious presence, we can produce too much. This happened with the Ron Burgundy campaign. Several weeks into the campaign, there were complaints that there was too much Ron Burgundy. The studio’s reply was that no single moviegoer would see more than a small part of the campaign, so individuals weren’t being saturated, although people in the media might think so. As someone who doesn’t see a lot of television, I personally saw only a small amount of the campaign, so it wasn’t saturating for me. However, this campaign either came close to overdoing it or they overdid it.

Good Content Won’t Rescue a Bad Product

Ultimately the movie was not a big success because of poor reviews–moviegoers who weren’t taken in by the content marketing campaign, and checked the reviews, didn’t go, in droves. So the clever content marketing didn’t save the film.

The Bottom Line

Because of the advertising results the content marketing campaign delivered, the Ron Burgundy character will continue for a long time, long after the dud movie is old history.

Like Ron Burgundy, build your content for the long term, so that your content can keep its value and contribute to the brand over the long haul.

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Evolution of Marketing Style

Things Are Changing!

In the time I’ve been involved in marketing I’ve seen quite an evolution in the style of best practice marketing. Clearly, the Web has influenced best practice in marketing, and now social media are exerting their own influences. In this Newsletter, I outline the stages that I’ve seen as marketing has evolved. Different commentators may characterize the evolution with different stages, but all the accounts that I’ve seen portray the same trends. Where is your company in this evolution?

Features

In the first days of advertising, there was a focus on features. For example, this slow cooker has two different temperature settings, “low” and “high”. There’s a presumption that the prospect knows that the high setting will cook faster than the slow setting.

Feature selling works best if prospects are already experts in the use of the product. For example, a commercial laundry doesn’t need to be told that bleach will make fabrics whiter. They might like to know that this bleach doesn’t emit gases that are harmful to equipment operators, though.

Features and Benefits

The next refinement in marketing was to point out not only the features, but the benefits associated with them. A feature would be described in enough detail that the prospect could understand how that feature would produce the associated benefit, so the claim for the benefit would be credible.

For our slow cooker example, a feature-benefit discussion might be that it has a non-stick coating on the cooking insert, making it easy to clean.

Feature-benefit selling might take the form of a table of features and associated benefits, or advertising copy could spell out features and benefits. Either way, for feature-benefit advertising to be effective, it’s important to focus on benefits that are important to the prospect. If you simply present long lists of irrelevant benefits you risk losing the prospect’s interest.

Solution Selling

For particularly complex products, where features and benefits selling might be difficult, such as complex IT products, suppliers began offering “solutions” to “problems”. The technical person who accompanied the sales person made the elegant transformation from “sales support” to “solutions architect.”

Related to solution selling is system selling, where a product is promoted as a “system”. For example, the Rainbow Vacuum Cleaner is now the Rainbow System, thanks to “the Rainbow’s cutting edge technology and nature’s own cleaning solution: water.”

Solution selling does involve a refinement in selling beyond just changing the name of the approach. Selling a solution requires the seller to have some understanding of the problem; that starts with a focus on what’s important to the customer, what problem the customer wants to solve.

Content Selling

The Web allows us to view a prospect not just as someone with a problem to solve but as an information seeker. We offer information that allows the prospect to solve a problem. We provide content that establishes ourselves as an authority on the subject. To help establish that authority, we show testimonials on our site, showing that others endorse our authority in the area. And we offer a newsletter, that lets a prospect subscribe to more of this useful, authoritative content to help solving the prospect’s problems.

Of course, the content we provide supports the use of our particular solutions to the problem. However, the approach taken is different from a traditional sales pitch, which is why the prospect should choose this particular approach; rather, the approach is to provide more comprehensive information that allows the prospect to decide on their own that the offered solution is the best one.

Social Networking

Today there’s great buzz around social networking. Sites such as Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ appear to offer the opportunity to reach prospects and engage them in conversation-like dialogues. There is evidence that some companies have achieved a certain amount of selling success directly through social networks, although there are different views about the effectiveness of social networks for selling.

A way to use social networks in our marketing today is to consider them as support for the content approach. That is, use contact in social networks to bring prospects to our Web site, so that they can use the content that we provide there to learn how our products and services are appropriate for them. Used in this fashion, social networks can provide high-ranking incoming links to our Web site, which improves its position in search engine results. And, of course, the mention of our site in a social network can also directly bring visitors to our Web site.

The Bottom Line

Think about your approach to the use of your Web site and social networks. If you’re using your site to deliver an obsolete sales pitch, consider an upgrade. And while it’s too early to bet the farm on social networks, it’s time now start using social networks to strengthen your Web marketing.

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Dave’s Laws of Marketing

The Laws

Here are Dave’s Laws:

Keep trying new things
Measure the results of each thing you try
When you find something that works, do more of it
When you find something that doesn’t work, do less of it

Continuous experimentation is the key. When magic happens and you find something that works, then capitalize on it and do more of it. But the key is to not just keep adding marketing costs, but to also trim expenses on things that are not working as well.

If you have “sacred cow” marketing practices that are not delivering business, or you don’t know if they are delivering business, find new ones, measure them, and consider discontinuing old practices. An example that’s quite current is a spend on newspaper advertising, that is becoming less useful all the time as newspaper circulation declines.

The Bottom Line

Marketing is a process of continuous improvement. Markets don’t stand still, so your marketing can’t either. Keep experimenting and improving. And consider killing some sacred cows!

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Design Lessons from the Apple Store

The Lessons

1. Create an experience, not an artifact

Consider your site as an experience for the visitor, so that every aspect of that experience helps convey the message you’re trying to communicate

2. Honor Context

Think about the visitor’s point of view when organizing your site, not your point of view as a business insider. Your categories don’t matter; the visitor’s do.

3. Prioritize your messages

You can’t say everything you want to say to each Web visitor. Decide what’s most important and say that–clearly and emphatically.

4. Institute consistency

Use all the tools you have to convey your image. Make the site design consistent with your products, if you have products, or your offices if customers visit your offices. And be sure that all those tools are consistent with the message.

5. Design for change

Marketing is the discipline of continually changing how the company deals with a changing marketplace, and this is exactly what happens on the Web. Search engines actually give higher rank to sites that change often. So design choices need to enable change.

6. Don’t forget the human element

Remember that the next step after your site is the encounter an interested visitor will have with your people. Make sure that they also reflect the message of quality and consistency and service that you want to deliver, or your visitors will quickly discover that there’s little behind the pretty site.

Now Read the Blog

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The Bottom Line

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