Step Inside Design Best of 2006
By David Golding
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Step Inside Design just issued the Best of the Web 2006 list. I’ve always enjoyed taking a good peek at what sets these sites apart from the rest in their cutting-edge design.
What’s strange, though, is that the judges’ pick seems to coincide with their own private ventures. For example, this year’s judges were Tim Barber, Christopher Simmons, and David Lai. Their pick was the site redesign of USA Network done by Hello Design. Interestingly enough, aside from USA Network not being that impressing of web design, David Lai was the creative director for the account. Hmm… playing favorites are we?
This year’s group of top sites are great ones, though. At least they made for a fun afternoon surf.
How to Go About Marketing on the Web
By David Golding
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I believe very much that e-marketing doesn’t exist. Really, it’s all still marketing.
Now, what do you do when you want to develop sound marketing strategies for the web? Let me recommend some great helps that are much cheaper than paying for that “magic marketing e-book” other sites try to tempt you with.
Books, by the Experts
There are some wonderful reads written by the world’s best experts. Here are some of my favorites on marketing:
- The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula & Richard Tong
- Marketing Warfare by Al Ries and Jack Trout
- Positioning by Ries & Trout
- Cracking Creativity by Michael Michalko
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Ries & Trout
- The Origin of Brands by Al and Laura Ries
The concepts taught in these books are much better than what you’ll find anywhere on the net, if you ask me. And, what’s more, you can usually fare well on sites like Amazon.com or Half.com. I was able to purchase each of these for less than $10. (Usually around $5 plus shipping.)
Another strategy for getting the right material, and which will typically cost more than the books previously mentioned, is to seek out upper-level marketing instruction. Now, don’t feel like I’m saying to go get an MBA. But, you can follow the same path as MBA students.
What does every professor do? They require one or more textbooks to read during the class. So why not look up curriculum from top classes? You may not have gotten into Harvard Business School, but does it hurt to check out what they have their students read? Many times the professors themselves are experienced marketers and publish their own textbooks. So why not go find their publications? With the internet, it’s all too easy.
I already checked out Harvard Business School and followed links so easily that in less than 2 minutes, I had citations for marketing textbooks used in their MBA program. I can either try to hunt down the books at the library or find them online somewhere. This material is worth so much more than what the next guy is writing about on the net. Why? Because it’s the stuff the top-level marketers behind sites like eBay are reading.
Case Studies, and the Money You Could Lose
A family member once asked me what I thought about the Internet Marketing Center. It’s a site that offers tons of e-books and videos of success stories of people putting up sites on the net. I said that I was wary of sites like that because typically they emphasize techniques that are trendy in nature. Yes, they worked for Johnny two years ago, but now the web market has evolved enough to make it difficult for them to work for you.
Case studies are some of the most valuable literature on marketing that can be read. But you’ll profit more by reading well-researched case studies instead of some guy’s interview on a multi-level-marketing-style website. All the major business schools in the country emphasize case studies when studying marketing.
I recommend you hunt down case studies as best you can. Using the strategies already discussed, you can track down useful, real-life, case studies of what works and what doesn’t. This will add to your understanding of marketing, and internet marketing (cause it’s all the same!) considerably.
Last but not least
Let me conclude this post with another recommendation. I love the site Quick MBA because you can get fundamental, useful business information without spending a dime. Go ahead and browse through their marketing page if you want trusted info on how to market your site and business.
How to Generate More Site Traffic—The Easy Way
By David Golding
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Many folks approach me with the question, “How do I generate more traffic?” This is a loaded question. Ask the wrong person and you could end up spending literally hundreds or thousands of dollars for zilch. Ask someone who calls himself or herself a Search Engine Optimzation expert (SEO professional in common internet vernacular), and you’ll be told that advertising is not as good as search engine marketing. My take on it is this: what would you do if you built a brick-and-mortar store? No traffic comes easily in the real world, so why should the web be different?
The Nature of Web Traffic
Don’t get me wrong, I love the web for its high volume of traffic. And in some ways it is easier to get someone to come to your site than it is to get someone to come into your store. But I’m conservative in my view of internet advertising. There’s no such thing as “e-commerce” or “internet marketing.” E-commerce is just commerce. Internet marketing is just marketing. Folks these days try to make it all sound like it’s different, but it isn’t. The world’s top internet marketers are actually high-level marketing experts. Do you think Google hires internet marketers because they’re specialized in the internet way of doing things? Or do they go after the dude who got his MBA at Harvard in marketing? Last I checked, the top management at Google all have Ph.D.’s. So, be forewarned, the folks on the net that claim they have all the answers, you just have to pay $40 or $50 for they’re awesome e-book are full of crud, most likely. Put that $40 toward a good marketing textbook on Amazon.
The nature of web traffic is that in some way, tons of people visit your site. You have less than 2 seconds to get them to stick with it, or they’re going to leave. Imagine someone coming into your store, standing in the doorway and looking at everything all the walls, the tables, etc. and in less than 2 seconds they decide to leave and *boom* they’re gone. What would you do in that situation? Well, you would have a sales rep pop out and ask if the customer would like some help. This analogy is at the heart of how I see web traffic and advertising: in the customer’s mind, it’s all really the same, so behave online like you do offline. Put something on your site that will act like that sales rep: live chat option, well-designed ad banner, page flow that catches his or her eye, etc. You get the point.
Two Options: PR or Advertising
You have two options for generating traffic:
- Paid advertising links
- Non-paid links
Don’t be fooled; just cause I call them non-paid links doesn’t mean it’s not going to cost you any money. Sometimes, the time and effort you put into putting that non-paid link campaign into action will cost you just as much or more as the advertising option. Again, in real life, a PR campaign is costly, just like a traditional ad campaign. So it is with the net. To get a bunch of sites to link to you usually requires lots and lots of campaigning, which, in turn, takes lots and lots of time and resources, hence lots of money as well. There is no special exception because it’s the net. The days of freebies are ending.
The benefits of advertising: yes, you pay for it, but you instantly start pulling in traffic. Benefits of non-paid linking: it takes longer, but that traffic comes consistently over a long period of time.
Why I believe in advertising
I believe in advertising. It works, and it has worked for a long time. Not that PR doesn’t work; it does, and in many ways, works better than advertising. But advertising is a creative way of pushing your message in front of prospects. Yes, it’s pushy–but it gets in the customers’ faces and to me, that is what is important. So leave the non-paid linking strategies for another day, and I’ll tell you about good online advertising strategies.
Advertising Options
So how do you advertise on the net? You can pay another website, like you would pay another medium like a newspaper or radio station, to run an ad. One way they can bill you is on a per-click basis. This means that they track how many clicks have gone through your ad and they set a rate for each click. Another way is based off impressions. They track how many times your ad appears and bill accordingly. A third was is that they bill based off a flat rate based off their own traffic. I recommend this method the most. You get more value for your money in my opinion.
Pay-per-click has its problems. For one, what if someone clicks on your ad 50 times? You don’t want to pay for junk clicking. Or, what about competitors clicking on your ad? That’s just plain fraud, which happens at a rate around 30% on Google’s site. I dislike the current pay-per-click model not just for this major problem, but also for the pricing model. Folks like Google and Overture allow fellow advertisers to bid on a price for certain keywords, which puts you out a bunch. The price gets run up by folks who don’t know what they’re doing and you can end up paying as much as $5 per click. Ridiculous!
Impressions pricing is bad, too, because some of the same things happen. Some guy has internet timeout errors while he tries to access your site and ends up refreshing the page 3 or 4 times. Yeah, you get billed for that. The impressions model is also kinda out of style. Banner ads are being shown to be less effective (I have my issues about that, but that’s for another day). The net just isn’t there yet, in my opinion, to give a fair price for pay-per-click or impressions-based advertising.
The Burden is On the Publisher
In the real world, the burden of setting the rate and hosting the ad itself is not on the advertiser but on the medium. If I go down to the newspaper, I’m going to pay a negotiated rate based on the circulation and the page size of the paper. I shouldn’t have to be charged based off the other advertisers in the paper. Imagine: I just happen to place an ad next to a full-page ad from Nike and get blasted because they are billionaires. That doesn’t happen in the newspaper, so why should it happen online? The publisher should have to be what runs up the cost, not other advertisers. And a publisher has to perform well in the marketplace if its going to successfully run up the cost, which means the ad will truly be worth more.
You can advertise based off a flat rate and the traffic of the publisher through a service called
Ad Brite. These guys are fabulous because you can shop through publishers instead of shopping through keywords. The cost is more economical and the price is based off more measurable factors like traffic, click rate, and total exposure.
There you have my recommendations. Go out there and get some traffic: the easy way!
