Employing Market Leverage + Subsidies
September 30, 2009
Are You Employing Leverage?
A few months back I had a chat with ShoeMoney and we talked about a lot of marketing stuff. He always speaks of the importance of being able to leverage success to build other related projects. It is typically worth far more money to be a lead player with projects that build off of each other than it is to be a #10 player in many different markets trying to build disconnected brands that can’t feed off each other. Even traditional slow moving publishing organizations like newspapers are aggressively leveraging network effects in their SEO strategy.
Networks Allow You to Come From Behind
When you look at Theme Forest they came late to the market, and yet are many times as large as competing businesses that are twice as old. Envato was launched in 2006, and in spite of coming late to market they were nearly instantly successful. Owning popular blogs helped them create thriving marketplaces, and the marketplaces help them make the blogs more popular. The promotion is circular.
Most Leading Web Companies Use Networks
Larger web networks like IAC, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Internet Brands, Quinstreet, Expedia, Classified Ventures, BankRate, Monster.com, and Demand Media employ the same tactics. At $170 million Mint was a cheap buy for Intuit just to block out competition. Any additional distribution and cost savings are a bonus. Once you have distribution you have free inventory to promote a new site into a related vertical. And this strategy works with smaller niche sites as well. Publishing this site made it easy for us to get a lot of exposure for my wife’s PPC strategy flowchart.
Subsidizing New Channels
Everything that is free is subsidized. And rather than trying to squeeze the maximum returns out of any given project it is often better to look for ways to add more value. The best businesses that are sustainable create more value than they capture. Once you have multiple monetization models and multiple income streams you can be flexible with your approach to growth.
Keep Bolting On Pieces
We originally gave away free SEO tools mainly with the ideas of building links and promotion in mind. But now they also help establish a customer funnel while commoditizing the value of some similar business models. And because many of the tools are decentralized (as Firefox extensions) maintenance costs are much lower than someone who centralizes everything. Our customers on average tend to be toward the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, so giving away useful and extensible tools helps us meet that market. But a lot of our business strategy has been made up as we went along, rather than having an aggressive master plan in place.
Watching Big Companies Develop Strategy
Some companies are driven by big goals and 5 (and 10) year plans. Adobe bought Omniture and plans on offering deep analytics into user interactions with flash widget ads. Out of nowhere Adobe entered the ad market.
Google is GOD of the Web
One of the best companies to study from the perspective of using market leverage to enter new markets is Google. Recently they struck a deal with Warner to bring their music back to Youtube. But even while their music was not on Youtube I was still able to listen to it - on Youtube 
Want to try Google’s newest software in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer? Continue at your own Peril!
Google is constantly trying to extend search. And their 4 step process to entering a new market usually consists of…
- Make the service essentially free to buy marketshare, become the marketplace, and kill the business model for competing start ups in the space.
- Promote it across search, the AdSense content network, and via a thick public relations program.
- Use the work of thieves and the blurry parts of copyright law to diminish the value of non-partner content to try to force non-partners into a formal partnership.
- 12 to 36 months later start charging a fair to normal market rate for the service. Claim the service makes no profits until it is an undeniable cash cow.
One of the more cynical, but perhaps accurate, in depth research reports on Google’s use of market leverage is Scott Cleland’s Googleopoly [PDF]. You might not be able to apply every idea in there to your projects, but it should help you understand where Google intends to intersect with your market and how you can leverage some of those touch-points to your advantage.
One last tip, from Larry Ellison, “Pick your competitors carefully for you will quickly come to resemble the companies you compete with.”
Improve Google Indexing on Your Ecommerce Website
September 30, 2009
Big ecommerce websites that sell and frequently update new products online are more susceptible to Google indexing problems. A combination of different factors can contribute to slow website indexing most of which can be controlled by the webmaster. We ll go over these factors here as well as what you can do about them….
Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 - Free Trial Download the Free 180-day Trial of SQL Server® 2008 Enterprise Edition!
Small Business Guide to Tools that Help Your SEM
September 30, 2009
There are plenty of tools that a small business can and should use to make their limited time most productive in online marketing. Some are free, some are paid, but all of them are worth the investment of time and money to learn to use. …
SEO Horror Stories
September 30, 2009
Our industry has made so many strides in gaining a more credible reputation. Yet we still suffer from many people and companies who claim to do SEO, but that really don’t know anything beyond how to write a title tag. …
Design Trends: The Single Purpose Homepage
September 30, 2009
Posted by randfish
It’s been a long time since I last blogged on design topics, but I think it’s time to break that streak. This post focuses on a design style that’s both retro (it’s been around a long time) and emerging (the popularity, at least to me, feels like it’s on the rise) - the single-purpose homepage.
First, a brief example:
In the above design, Spokeo has just one, singular, all-consuming goal - get your email address so they can show you how their product works. There may be a few secondary links for registered users to login, access to the blog and about pages, and some logos to help improve credibility, but basically, we’re looking at remarkably driven intent behind the design.
Five Reasons I Like the Single-Purpose Homepage:
- It Gets the Message Across Quickly
With only a single headline and call to action, visitors quickly parse the critical message you’re attempting to push. In longer, more complex pages, designers and marketers constantly have to worry about the percentage of people who are actually exposed (in any meaningful way) to the intended triggers.
_ - It Forces Simplicity in Communication
This singularity of messaging also means that the language, words and images chosen have to communicate simply or risk failure. Simplicity in web design has proven itself over and over again as a driver of success, and simple messages are the easiest to understand and to transmit virally - a marketer’s dream.
_ - It Reveals What Matters (and Obscures What Doesn’t)
When external forces compel us, we tend to find our greatest strength is all that remains. That principle is in clear effect with these designs, as the unecessary is completely stripped away, leaving only those items (graphics, font, layout, links and messaging) that serve the singular purpose of the page. If you’ve ever fought over which ten things to put on the homepage, get ready to trade that in for which ten words can express the entirity of your business (not necessarily an enviable trade, but it can be a net positive).
_ - It Sorts the Visitor Wheat from the Chaff
Visitors who reach this page will instantly know whether the product is for them or not. The uninterested are immediately disengaged, leaving only true potential candidates for marketing and targeting. This means every piece of data you can collect and refine about your remaining audience is precious — but it does remove the "noise" that’s often mixed in with an unfocused audience.
_ - It Makes it Easy to Optimize the Funnel
If you’re doing lots of A/B and multivariate testing (and if this doesn’t convince you that you should, abandon all hope), the simplicity of having only a few input boxes, links and headlines is a miracle. Tests run faster, produce more compelling results and give you the focus you need to improve click-through and conversion rates efficiently. Tiny changes in these percents are frequently responsible for millions of dollars of revenue (which is generally a good thing).
Is It Good for SEO?
It depends… If you have the type of site that’s very product focused and single-purpose in nature, this can be an ideal page type. Even if you run a blog, promote articles, or have other types of secondary content, you can always embed links to them in smaller, more background-style fonts and retain crawlability and good information architecture.
The only real trouble may come from the homepage’s loss in ability to send traffic to more viral, less product-specific parts of the site (which will then cost links, which will in turn cost SEO opportunity). If this is a danger, it may be a viable reason not to implement this style of design. You also definitely shouldn’t be using this style if it doesn’t fit with your strategic goals - publishers, blogs, newspapers and most retailers probably don’t want to go this direction (though taking cues from it in deeper, more focused pages is probably very wise).
Eight Examples of Single-Purpose Homepages in Action:
The URL shortening service j.mp (run by Bit.ly) is remarkably focused on helping provide their product with little surrounding clutter. I particularly like the approach of stretching the URL bar so it’s always the dominant focus - and once you use j.mp, you’ll never go to any other service (part of the reason they can focus so heavily on getting the product used in the first 5 seconds of the first visit).
Tumblr’s message "the easiest way to blog" is made credible by the fantastically simple signup process. They’ve also smartly broken the "single purpose" literal interpretation by having a callout in the green box of "21 Reasons Why You’ll Love Tumblr." Just for the record - even though I’m an advocate of this style for the right type of site, I do strongly encourage testing often and early. The beautiful part is how easy pages like this are to test (in comparison to their portal-entry-like peers)
Shopify employs simplicity and text-based callouts to highlight its messaging. I like the layout visually, but I wonder if they’ve done extensive testing about the impact of the three text boxes.
If you’ve seen the dozens of popular weather sites around the web, you know how horrifyingly cluttered they can be. UmbrellaToday breaks with tradition and provides possibly the dead-simplest method for getting solid weather reports. I’m a fan of the clever name and branding, too - I love personality in startups 
Although Silverback’s homepage is a bit long-form vertically, the message is singular - convey what the app does and why you need it, then get a click on that download link. I’m not sure if they have tested it, but I’d love to see a version that puts the "What does Silverback do?" graphic in the text bubble spoken by the Gorilla.
Popular travel site Kayak technically has multiple foci, but the strength of the homepage’s conviction that you want to find airline pricing and their ability to stick with it for so many years (and probably through hundreds of rounds of testing) illustrates the single-purpose homepage brilliantly. It’s also in sharp contrast to their competitors in the travel market, who insist on promoting specials, deals, partnerships, news, reviews and a thousand other disparate items that distract from the intended goal of both website and visitor.
When I first visited Resumator, I wasn’t sure it belonged on this list. However, after spending ~9 seconds actually reading the copy on the page, I was impressed. I instantly knew what they did and actually considered sending it over to some folks inside SEOmoz for consideration (since we’re going to be on the hunt for new hires soon). Single message - check. Delivered quickly - check. Focused direction to one action - check. All that, and it looks pretty useful
Gist plugs your email in with the web’s social features to help give context and content around your inbox and contacts. It’s a pretty spiffy piece of software, particularly for those in sales, and the homepage does a good job of conveying the value proposition quickly and simply.
You’ve probably never heard of this tiny, Mountain View, CA company, but apparently, they do pretty well
Your thoughts?
Consulting Compromises
September 29, 2009
Top Intersection: Most of these people are not available for traditional client consulting projects because they simply lack the time needed to do them and run many successful projects of their own.
Right Intersection: The person who is available and under-priced quickly gets overworked. I have experienced this with multiple contractors in other fields where they would offer killer services and be surprisingly affordable and fast…and then on the next project they would disappear.
The guy who made the logo for SEO Book back in early 2004 was probably the most talented and most unreliable logo designer I have ever worked with. Sometimes he would be fast, sometimes he would be slow, and sometimes I would pay him and get no response. I wanted the guy to become more successful and reliable so much so that I offered him tons of free marketing so long as he would be available for the boatload of work I was going to send him. He said sure. Before beginning that marketing campaign I asked him if he was ready and got no response.
And last year there was a designer/developer that had amazing skills. We hired him full time and it took him 2 months to make a website design. There are a lot of people in the world who are talented at what they do, but just are not skilled at business and/or do not approach their business like a business.
Left Intersection: There are lots of people who are good at sales who have no substance. If an SEO firm contacts you out of the blue (via tele-spamming or email spam) that is a good hint that they have more salesmen on staff than they have practitioners. If SEO is bolted on as a package for cheap then it is usually a scam.
It is nearly impossible to have enough time to study a fast changing craft, brand yourself as an expert in the space, and yet still find time available for doing consulting. It is not hard to do any 2 of the 3…but all 3 is brutally tough. In consulting so long as you have popularity you do not need much knowledge, as some well known SEOs have proved. But knowledge without popularity can be hard to monetize effectively.
Even if you are pretty decent at sales and have a strong brand it is hard to make an SEO services business model scale without watering it down. And watering down is rarely a solution because it leads to churn.
- WebSourced at one point was the largest SEO firm, but closed abruptly, largely because their clients were not getting any value.
- The guy who speaks at 40 SEO conferences a year does little SEO work…his job is to generate leads for the firm where an intern can work on the project. And the projects that the interns work on are rarely top shelf because you often pay expert rates while getting automated and systemized mystery meat services from someone new to the market.
- Some of the smallest clients tend to be the most demanding, even while paying crumbs. And Google/the search market, which is becoming more corporate, is making it harder and more expensive to service such clients profitably.
- Corporate client projects which at first may seem like mega-paydays still perform poorly when compared against putting the equivalent effort into growing your publishing projects.
- Rather than watering down we have decided that scarcity and value are a better strategy. But that is still a work in progress. This site is about 90% of my work time, had a 5 year head start on most of our other publishing efforts, and yet the SEO industry is so hard to monetize (unless you use loads of hype) that this site earns a minority of our income. As we get better at sales we can try to increase earnings…but lately we have just been pushing more on what is working and maintaining this site’s quality for existing members (and closing it off to growth) while putting a bit more effort into the higher yielding projects.
Who Sets Your Prices?
September 29, 2009
Underpricing
In the past I historically set my prices too low. Some of that was due to starting out with a low self-esteem, but just as much of it was due to not appreciating the actual value of what I was delivering. Because I could do something cheap I had no problem doing so, even if my pricing was well below the value delivered. Another thing that caused me to charge too little was a distaste for traditional salesmanship techniques (a difficult hang-up if you are a marketer!)
Where I learned how off my pricing was is when I reviewed work done by some competing firms for 5 figure sums. Some of which was of far less value than what I was offering in my $79 ebook. Well that made me feel a bit like an idiot.
When Low Prices Make Sense
I think when a person is new to a field it makes sense to set prices somewhat low so you can…
- overcome starting friction
- build customer experiences & interaction
- get feedback from customers on how to improve your product or service
- gain testimonials & social proof of value
Setting prices a bit too low helps subsidize creating other pieces of your sales strategy…whereas if you set prices way above market expectations you won’t get sales or market feedback.
The Problems With Discounting
But typically discounting should be done for a short period of time, only as something that is given as a reward for being fast acting. If you frequently discount you just lower the perceived quality and value of your product. And while you think you might be giving someone a good deal by discounting you have to look at it in the broader perspective. Offer a lower price and the customer…
- respects and values it less
- is less likely to use it and act on it
- is more likely to be demanding (since they don’t see as much value they expect you to spend more time and effort proving it)
all the while you…
- become over-worked and burned out
- work over twice as many hours servicing twice as many people (and, not surprisingly, miss an email or 2 because you are constantly behind)
- sell your time at a discount while watching your health erode
Really the whole set up to discounting is quite stupid.
What About Free?
In a world where traditional advertising is losing efficacy, offering something free that helps gain mindshare and establish a relationship is smart. But free does have limitations. One of the biggest limitations is a sense of entitlement. If a person is a non-paying customer they are not a customer. You have to assume their complaints are worth $0. You owe them nothing and they should be thankful for whatever valuable tools and services you offer for free.
Overcoming Entitlement
After you get enough momentum it makes sense to erect barriers to entry so you can gain value while giving it away. Rarely do one way exchanges build lasting value. If 1,000’s of non-paying users are sending you emails asking questions then they are noise that must be filtered through … a non-trivial cost.
The hard part is that it feeds the ego when you give stuff away and help people out. You think that you help so many people and that lots of people care for you. Put any barrier in their path and you will see how selfish and worthless many of those people are though. Every barrier brings about some level of hate from the most ignorant, greediest, and least appreciate members of the crowd. But if you get something like this you can’t respect the sender:
This is crap. Every download link goes back to the same page. Like how are you suppose to download the tool if there’s a download link which say #.
Instead of spending time collecting peoples emails and spamming them you should try more in giving better product and easier way to access them.
I like your tools, but it was easy last year to use them, now it’s a waste of time. If this system keeps on getting more slower and I’ve to go through more registering then using I’m better off using something which is less good but instantaneous, which was your product, but it’s not anymore.
So I hope you start easying out the process of installing your tools or you’ll start loosing your customers.
So that person…
- is not paying me
- uses our CUSTOMER support area
- tells me they like our tools
- wants me to create BETTER products
- calls me an email spammer
- expects me to dismantle my sales funnel in return for nothing (other than random critical hate mail)
- tells me I will lose customers if I don’t make it easier for freeloaders to use my stuff
- never intends to pay me
As far as my business interests go, that person is worth less than nothing. If they are still breathing, it is no doubt a waste of oxygen.
Would I rather spend my time helping out that ungrateful USER, or would that time be better spent spending it with someone who loves me and cares for me?
Resourcefulness
Now some people have a tough break and sometimes it is worth helping them out. But in most cases a lack of resources is simply caused by a lack of resourcefulness. And, since change comes from within, if you try to help those kinds of people out they are far more likely to pull you down than you are to lift them up.
Recently a person asked me via a blog comment what they should do if they are smart but can’t afford a conference ticket and know nobody. The frame of that question is one which is lacking in resourcefulness. When I was new to the SEO industry part of why I got known was because I syndicated content to other sites, participated in some online forums, moderated some online forums, and blogged day in and day out. I further spent tons of money giving away free software, which some people appreciate
And even when I was less known, had no money, knew nobody, etc. I did not see those as obstacles. They were opportunities. Since I lacked capital I could leverage my time as an undervalued resource until the market started to value it more. I got a job to create cashflow, spent everything I could on learning + networking, helped organize a conference in exchange for a free pass to go to it, and out of the process the only thing I regret is that I didn’t savor obscurity as much as I should have. 
How to Effectively Monetize Your WordPress Blog for Better CTR
September 29, 2009
Monetizing a blog effectively involves more than just plopping some ad code into your WordPress blog and waiting for clicks. Unfortunately many beginning WordPress bloggers fail to monetize their blog correctly and don t ever see any real revenue. If you receive any amount of traffic to your blog it is capable of making money. The keys to getting the most from each and every visitor that visits your site are to optimize your ad placements choose the correct ad network s and or products to promote and continue to provide useful content to your readers….
Free Access to SAP BI Resource Center Empower your users to discover how to explore business at the speed of thought.
What Is Your ‘R’ for ROI in Social Media?
September 29, 2009
Each company needs to define its own “return” in their ROI when they implement social media strategies. You can have several reasons you want to implement a social media strategy, those can all be measured as a return. …
International SEO 101, Part 1
September 29, 2009
International SEO, otherwise known as global SEO or multilingual SEO, is an important component to an effective global Internet marketing strategy. …
