Thanks to Han Lee for permission to use this Photo.
I have found in my many years in the advertising business that a way to keep perspective is to know and respect the customer. For example, if you are developing advertising for a restaurant, go to the restaurant and experience it as a regular customer. Observe the service, the menu, the décor, and the atmosphere. Observe the customers around you. Are they families or single persons? Do they appear to be locals who live in the area, or are they visiting from far away? How are they dressed? What items are they ordering? Observe the staff. Do they seem happy or harried? How much time do they spend conversing at each table? These kinds of first-hand observations can add knowledge that research figures cannot provide. This is especially true in Internet marketing.
Your web development team has just finished creating a whole new web design for the company. However, many times the company finds out that regular users can find a web site confusing. Because it is so easy for someone to abandon a site in the middle of a shopping experience, it is essential to ensure an easy navigation system for the most basic of users. Many companies will bring in focus groups consisting of people in their target market to click through the proposed site design and make any suggestions before the site goes on line.
If you are working for a company that manufactures parts sold to other businesses, visit those businesses, if possible. Talk with the people who actually use the parts to assemble the final product. Find out what they think of your product versus that of the competition. What do they think of the advertising for the parts? Is it truthful? Is it meaningful to them?
As I discuss throughout Ashworth’s Internet Marketing Program, the best business owners and managers stay in touch with their customers. There is no substitute for meeting the customers and the people responsible for selling your product.
Thanks to Gene Hunt for permission to use this Photo.
I finally took the time to read a book that I’ve been interested in checking out for awhile. It’s called The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris and its’ innovative perspectives on how almost anyone can create an entrepreneurial lifestyle for themselves is definitely worth reading. Instead of summarizing the contents of the book here, I’ve included this podcast interview with Ferris conducted by Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur’s Journey.
I think all of our students will be motivated by Mr. Ferris’s very pragmatic ideas on how you can break free from “the system” and pursue your own business endeavors with confidence. Please share your thoughts with your student community on the Ashworth Student Forum. I’ll talk to you again soon. Thanks…
The insights of cultural/media theorist Douglas Rushkoff are always contemporary and often prescient. He was deciphering the social codes of the virtual psyche, lifestyle, and marketplace before such concepts were formally identified by the so-called “machine.”
In this video snippet from Rushkoff’s presentation on “word of mouth” marketing at the CMA’s Word of Mouth Conference, he summarizes why the death of traditional advertising may not be such a bad thing for businesses willing to listen to the voices.
I guess that being paid $10 million for the advertising campaign and appearing with the chairman Bill Gates might be the sole reason why Seinfeld is joining forces with Microsoft, but maybe not. It might not be the money, and certainly not the fame (even though Seinfeld might be less famous now than 10 years ago). I believe that his reason might be all related to creativity and the opportunity a huge advertising campaign brings. Seinfeld is a comedian, and he is a creative person. He is one of the best people in the business, and now he has the chance to work with some of the best people in marketing. The advertising campaign will most likely be really cool, and people will be talking about it for months.
But what is he going to promote?
My first thought was that he can’t be hired to promote something like “start using Microsoft Windows”, because way too many people are already using it. But according to Washington Post, that’s exactly what he’ll be doing, and it’s all because of Apple.
The next question is how?
The first thing that comes to my mind, is the “Get a Mac” ads. But hopefully they will do something completely different, because trying to do the same thing, that would be just plain stupid. The funny thing is, if you look at most of the Seinfeld episodes, you’ll see a Mac on his desk in the corner. Maybe that’s what they’ll be focusing on in the advertising campaign, that Seinfeld finally switched from his old Mac to a PC, and started using Microsoft Vista?
My tips to a creative and cool campaign would go with Truth or dare, Jerry Seinfeld vs Bill Gates. (more…)
Thanks to Kit Kowan for permission to use this Photo.
Seth Godin’s ability to reinvent conventional perspectives in an original framework has earned him celebrity status in the marketing world. Praised for his seemingly prophetic insights into developing digital trends, Seth is the kind of entrepreneur who doesn’t find it necessary to break the rules in order to generate consumer attention; he simply interprets the rules in ways that the “experts” had said were too undefined, open, and ironically enough: consumer-centric. The communications channels that Seth proposes to reach customers (get their attention) should be understood by any entrepreneur trying to make it in online marketplace, which is already yesterday’s— a reality that has informed Godin’s strategic principles throughout his career. The following video is a nice introduction to the sometimes bizarre, but always inspiring perspectives of a truly creative business mind. Click on the image above to watch this video. We encourage you to share your thoughts with the community afterwards. Take care.
Thanks to Chris Metcalf for permission to use this Photo.
In the hyper-competitive business environment of today, there are millions of dollars invested and mistakenly often wasted by companies looking for the “next big thing,” the elusive innovation that will electrify the marketplace. When most people think of innovation, they automatically consider it in the technological sense, but innovation means much more than producing a faster computer or a telephone that doubles as a home entertainment system; innovation is ultimately about ideas. In the following video, innovation expert Charles Leadbeater discusses how innovation isn’t just reserved for the corporate giants with infinite capital, but rather how independent thinking entities, people like you and me with a vision, are now empowered like never before to compete in the marketplace on our own terms. I found this presentation both informative and inspiring. I hope you feel the same way after viewing it and approach your next lesson with a sense of enthusiasm. Click on the image above to watch this video.
I am really not that interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Well, don’t get me wrong. I am very interested in traffic from search engines, but I have not been studying SEO at all. I know a few things, but that’s about all. The reason why I have not studying Search Engine Optimization is that I have thought that it’s too time consuming and a very difficult task. And if I am going to be good at SEO I would have to work really hard at it, something I don’t have the time to do at the moment.… but when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, I have a few things that I am aware of.
I try to be strategic about them and I believe that they are very important and not that hard to understand.One problem regarding SEO is that search engines are always trying to change, they are very dynamic, and they are always trying to “catch” cheaters. To be among the best, you need to keep reading, keeping studying, because you never know when a new update at Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL will come. Now, to me, Search Engine Optimization is all about getting my site on the first few choices of a search engine result page, as a result of the keywords punched in. And of course, the keywords should be relevant to my content.
I am writing about Internet marketing and stuff related to that topic. It wouldn’t be that great for me to get to the top at Google for the keyword Opera singer. Well, I would probably get a lot of traffic, but my visitors from that keyword would probably be interested in reading more about Opera singers than Internet marketing. So, they would be at my site for 1 minute or less, and probably never come back. Search Engines are a great way to get targeted traffic, and that’s the kind of traffic I really want. But it’s not that easy.
A few years ago, it looked like all you needed to do was write the same keyword over and over again in the meta tags. If you did that enough times, you would get ranked in the top 10 (it wasn’t really that easy.. but to me it looked that way). Search engines do not go through each and every site carefully and then put them up on the web. You might think that, but they don’t. They have algorithms which are programmed to rank pages according to the text relevance. If you have a flawed design or irrelevant coding then your site might appear for a totally different keyword or would appear at the bottom of the result page.
There are four things that are important to me when it comes to Search Engine Optimization: (more…)
Thanks to Jesse Draper for permission to use this Photo.
You may have noticed this blog is back to a PageRank 6. Back in October 2007 my site was one of the blogs hit with a PageRank penalty because I had paid links. I dropped from a 6 to a 5 and then later when the big sweep happened, down to a 3. This article sums up my speculation during the event and lists some of the other blogs hit at the time - Possible Explanations for the PageRank Penalty Sweep.
After some thinking I decided, at least on this blog, to add ‘no follow’ to any paid links and succumb to Google’s wishes. I added the no follows, submitted a review request with Google at their Webmaster tools and then sat down and wrote this - Frustrating Yes - But I Want Google To Be My Friend. Nothing happened for a month, but I thought Google might need longer so I let it sit. Little did I know that Google simply doesn’t tell you whether you have successfully adhered to their requests or you still need to do more to have the penalty removed and apparently I hadn’t done enough.
Another victim of a PageRank drop was Wendy Piersall from eMoms at Home. Wendy was relentlessly monitoring what was going on with Google as she attempted to have her PageRank restored to it’s original status and every now and then she updated me with details on what she found.A couple of weeks ago she finally found what she was looking for - a blog post about people who had submitted requests to remove the PageRank penalty to no avail. The post itself didn’t have the answers, it was the comment stream after it that presented the solution, or should I say it was Matt Cutts, Google’s blogging rep who provided the answer because he was diligently responding to comments to the post. Matt went so far as to even personally help some of the bloggers who asked for Google to go look at their site because they were certain they had removed or nofollowed all paid links. (more…)
Whether you are an entrepreneur with small business aspirations or a sales professional chasing a management promotion, it’s imperative for you to understand how “web 2.0″ technologies are radically transforming the business landscape. In contrast to many of the highly specialized web tools of the past, which required the average user to possess advanced IT skills/knowledge, the user-friendly tools gaining mainstream appeal today are empowering both the individual and the organization. The following podcast directly addresses the sales organization and its’ management of what’s described as a “sales 2.0 funnel.” You may not be familiar with the interviewee, Stu Schmidt, but you may have heard of WebEx, an innovative communications company that provides various remote meeting/video conferencing applications to businesses. I think you’ll find this interview quite insightful. After listening to this podcast, share what you identify as some implications of the funnel for tomorrow’s sales forces.
Thanks to Thomas for permission to use this Photo.
I have been surfing a few traffic exchanges for some time now, even though it’s been a while since I have been active, I have thought about an interesting feature that I would like to see.
A Traffic Exchange is a great way to drive free traffic to your websites. A standard traffic exchange is a way to show people your advertisements. The more advertisements you see, the more people will see your advertisements. Usually, you get points for viewing other advertisements, and you use the points to get other people to view your advertisements. You can show people a splash page, banners or text links. Usually, this is all there is to it. The traffic exchanges I recommend using are also the ones I am using:
I am always (well, it’s been a while) testing new traffic exchanges, the list of traffic exchanges I recommend might be different in a few months from now, but at the moment I am suring the five above. Now, to the feature I would like to see.
I have been told that you should never use a general splash page at traffic exchanges, this is because a lot of people are using them. And the more people who are using the same splash pages, the more people will have seen yours, and the less likely it will be that they click on yours. To me, that sounds reasonable. (more…)
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