Why Referrals Matter

February 10th, 2010

I was just reading a post by Aaron Wall (of SEOBook.com) about how successful people, especially in the Internet Marketing arena, seem to become jerks as they become successful.

It’s SEOBook, so obviously it’s a great post, but it got me thinking about another topic that comes up a lot: Untouchable Marketing’s Marketing.

It’s a pretty common joke around the UM offices that this company has never had to avail itself of its own services. Sure, we show up for searches like “denver web marketing consultant” and we’ve done the minimum due-diligence on optimizing our site, but the point is that exactly 0 of our current clients came to us via the contact form on our website.

So how did we get enough business to sustain the company? 100% referrals.

Why Referrals Are So Great

In Million Dollar Consulting, Alan Weiss talks about peer-to-peer referrals being the ‘Platinum Standard’ of marketing for a consulting firm, and I couldn’t agree more (he also mentions that you should carry a nice pen, which is something that I do not agree with, as the Pilot G2 is the finest pen ever invented).

The standard explanation for why referrals are great is that there is no better way to convince someone that you can deliver what you say, than to have his friends convince him for you.

However, I think referrals are great for another reason: screening.

In the world of business (as you can read in Aaron’s article referenced above) there are people who want the universe for a nickel. They will bargain, argue, and tear apart every single line item in a proposal. In the end, they aren’t happy with the results.

By getting a referral from a mutually-trusted acquaintance, you end up screening potential clients ahead of time. It’s unlikely that the small-minded “deal-makers” who want to nickel and dime you to death would be friends with your better clients. Their personalities are incompatible.

Personal referrals protect both the client and the consultant, and that is why I always recommend that you find a Web Marketing Consultant the same way you would find a good Lawyer or Accountant; because if they have resorted to spending money on advertising, then they need your business.

Keep in mind that the consulting world is very different from most other industries. If you have a repeatable process that would apply and show results for 90% of your clients (think software like Quickbooks, or an office cleaning service) then you really just want to get the word out to every applicable lead that you can. And that is why there is a vast market for what we do.

Tags for This Post: denver web, marketing consultant, personal referrals, alan weiss, nickel and dime

Always Remember Google is a Business

January 8th, 2010

Search has become such an inherent part of life in developed countries. It’s so ingrained that it is now considered rude to ask a question of someone that you could’ve “Googled.”

But it is important to remember that all the major search engines, no matter whether they began as a business venture or a labor of love, are beholden to the objectives of their shareholders or private owners.

An Illustrative Google Bias

The goal of this blog is not to point out every internet meme that we come across, but this one is particularly relevant to the point of this post.

Go to google (with Javascript enabled) and begin typing “Christianity is”. Notice the list of suggestions that appear.

googleChristianity

Now try “Judaism is”.

googleJudaism

And finally, try “Islam is”.

googleIslam

(No guarantees this will last, but as of now you can see for yourself that Google provides no suggestions).

Do you find it interesting that Google is choosing to show suggested searches that might be considered controversial for Christianity and Judaism (not to mention Buddhism, Hinduism, and I dunno… Wicca?), but not for Islam?

But how far can this go?

Some people have been targeted for perceived anti-Islamic sentiment, so naturally people and businesses will be inclined to take steps to protect themselves.

But what if Google launched a product which was competing with another popular product. Would they censor search recommendations for their product while leaving negative or controversial topics in the search suggestions for the competing product?

Let’s see what Google suggests we search for regarding Apple’s iPhone:

googleiPhone

Interesting: disabled, frozen, locked up… not exactly complimentary. Sure, maybe those are based on the most popular searches, after all, we turn to Google for help, right?

So given the mediocre launch of the Nexus One, there should be some interesting suggestions based on popular searches, right?

googleNexusOne

Wow, no suggestions? This was a well-anticipated launch. Let’s get some real-time results from Twitter to see what the buzz is:

twitterNexusOne

(By the way, about 50% of the Tweets on the entire page are disparaging to the Nexus in some way).

Could Google be holding back on search suggestions for the same reason they don’t want to create the perception that they harbor anti-Islamic sentiment?

Google is a Business, too.

Keep that in mind.

Tags for This Post: search suggestions, private owners, google, controversial topics, major search engines, search recommendations, iphone

Google Copies Untouchable Marketing Business Strategies

December 19th, 2009

You might think Google and a Web Marketing Consultancy specializing in SEO would be on opposite sides of a line dividing an industry. But both companies are partaking in a business strategy that may become prevalent over the next couple years.

What do Goo.gl and umktg.com have in common?

On October 12th we launched UMKTG.com, a URL-shortening service made specifically for use on Untouchable Marketing’s projects. Why?

We noticed when sending client emails that while we may be able to answer a question, or explain a concept in just a few hundred characters, any reference we made to a Google results page took up hundreds of characters. And anyone who’s ever sent a business email knows that if you want your message heard, concision is key.

So being able to take a search string like: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=url+shorteners&aq=f&aqi=g10&oq=&fp=52e8f388e5caca67 and turn it into http://umktg.com/URLShorteners is quite useful.

There’s also a bit of power that comes along with owning a URL shortener. If I gave you the above link, I could see if, when, and how many times you viewed the link.

Google knows this too, so 2 months later, on December 14th, they launched Goo.gl. So far, it’s only for their internal projects and products, but eventually they will launch it as a full public service.

What Else Can You Do With Your Own Shortener?

Make money. If you had a widely-used URL shortener you could sell banners and pop-ups on the page that redirects visitors.

In fact, if you had a good amount of ad-data to query against, you could probably crawl the destination page to determine the topic, and then show a related ad to the visitor. Now, who would have the ability to host a fast URL-shortener, crawl pages to determine their topic, and also have ad-inventory to match against… hmmm…

Want to Try It Yourself?

If you think you’d like your own URL shortener, I can recommend BrokenScript. It’s a very easy to customize script, and as you can see, not too hard to put your own look on it.

Tags for This Post: google results, business email, pop ups, client emails, www google com

Web Marketing Education

November 6th, 2009

1257548945_applications-educationI’ve been wanting to talk a bit about the education behind web marketing, but now seems especially timely as I am participating in the launch of a course to educate non-profits, and small & local businesses on how they can take advantage of search marketing.

So What Makes a Web Marketer?

As with any fledgling industry web marketing is full of pioneers. The most common backgrounds I see are traditional marketers gone tech-y, web designers gone marketers, and then the “wildcards.” I would classify my own experience in the latter category.

There are, I believe, three main categories of contributing factors to my success in this industry: programming, network-admin, and finance.

Programming

I began programming when I was about 10 years old. My father often programmed astronomy-related algorithms to determine what constellations or planets would be visible in the night sky over our house. Eventually, I found out what BASIC was and started writing my own programs. In school we used to write scripts to display “Formatting Hard Drive C:\” with a slowly increasing percentage. It drove teachers nuts.

Eventually I moved on to Pascal, C++, HTML, CSS, and PHP (maybe Ruby someday soon, too). It’s amazing how much a knowledge of programming languages can contribute to SEO success. HTML and CSS are obvious, as knowing their capabilities is a great way to accomplish certain goals. But knowing how server-side languages work has allowed me have great relationships with the developers at the companies I have worked with. Marketing managers also appreciate working with someone who can help them translate their web goals into actionable items for their developers.

Network Administration

During my high-school career, I managed to exhaust all of the available options for programming classes. Through a relationship with another nearby vocational school, I was able to take a professional-level course which resulted in my A+ and (more importantly) Cisco CCNA certifications.

Although I no longer keep these certifications current, they (and specifically the CCNA curriculum) provided me with a solid foundation in the inner-workings of the hardware that powers the internet. While many people are confused by DNS propagation, IP addresses, or the differences between Apache and IIS, I have a solid knowledge of what makes the web go around.

Also, I know the vulnerabilities of Cisco 2600 routers, and can strip a CAT5-E with my teeth and build a patch cable in under 2 minutes.

Finance

Odd as it may sound, my college degree in finance has also been of great service to my career in web marketing. Although I never intended to take the Series 7 and get into trading securities, I have always been interested in finance principles, specifically in stock markets and real estate.

The massive amount of data manipulation needed to understand how financial markets work has been remarkably helpful in helping me build and interpret keyword research studies, or analytics data. I have also used this knowledge to develop methods for calculating the click-through rates of the Top 10 search results.

The Sum Total

So what’s it all worth? Allow me to illustrate with an anecdote.

Recently, a company I had been working with for a year downsized and my contact left without telling me who I should be contacting going forward, and without letting anyone in the company know who I was.

Eventually, my clients’ replacements reached out to me to find out what it is I do, and how it can help them. I could tell from the tone of our first phone call that they were highly skeptical, but they decided to give me a shot.

Last week, they invited UntouchableMarketing to their office to speak with the heads of their marketing and sales teams about PPC, SEO, and the usability and design of their site.

At the end of the meeting, one of the members of their team stood up and said, “I thought this would just be a re-hash of everything I already knew. I’m glad to say I was totally wrong. Thank you.”

The moral of the story is that all of that knowledge is useless without the ability to condense it and translate it to make it fit for business organizations to act on.

And that’s where LocalIgnition comes in…

In just a couple weeks, myself and two colleagues: Luke (a user-experience and design genius) and Scott (a master of KPIs and Operations Management) will be putting on a small pre-launch class on the topic of web marketing for non-profits, and small & local businesses.

I say this class will be pre-launch because it is Denver-only, and will only be 2 hours long. The full course will be 5 weeks, with videos and write-ups for each module, Q&A conference calls, email support, and much more.

If you’ll be in Denver, we’d love to have you join us at the Deproduction studios on November 18th.

If you’re interested in the full course, check out the LocalIgnition website and join our mailing list.

Tags for This Post: marketing managers, fledgling industry, traditional marketers, web marketer, industry programming

The Magic of Replication

November 2nd, 2009

IMG_1231bWe all know the golden rule of business: “it’s {10x cheaper|3 times easier|90% more profitable} to sell another unit to a current customer than to acquire a new one.” What we’re really talking about here is “replication” and it has much wider applications than customer acquisition.

A “Black Hat” Example
3-5 years ago, the name of the game in SEO was the “blog and ping” method. Essentially, this involved writing a blog post, and then “pinging”, or sending that URL to aggregation websites (Technorati is probably the most notable surviving member) where the links would be posted.

These aggregation sites were great for search engines, as it gave them an inside track to breaking news. They began to crawl the “New Posts” pages frequently, leading to rapid indexation for bloggers who participated in pinging. Eventually, the size of your ping list was just as important as the content of your post.

Of course, like anything with the potential to generate money, methods were invented to automate and scale. One method was to hide a 1-pixel iFrame on your site which loaded the submission page for a ping website. You could load 100s of these pixels on each page of your website. Because the page was loaded by your visitor’s browser, these 100s of pings seemed to come from all over the country, from different IP addresses.

What does this have to do with replication?

Let’s say Google crawled the Technorati page showing the most-pinged posts and saw John’s Blog post on “How I Repaired my Credit” at the top of the list. The spider makes a note to crawl John’s site and moves on. The blog post gets indexed, and John gets 5 hits on his site, each of those 5 people load his iFrames, which ping Technorati 5 more times.

Google comes back to the Technorati page an hour later and sees John’s post is still at the top of the list. The spider tells Google to put a rush on indexing John’s post. The post gets indexed and John gets 25 visitors on his site. Once again, the iFrame is fired 25 times from different IP addresses.

This could go on for days. Each time John gets a visitor, Technorati thinks that John’s site is growing in popularity, and Google sees John’s blog climbing the ranks. Google begins to think that John’s post is the authority on “how to repair credit” and sends him visitors. Those visitors inadvertently ping Technorati (and others) and Google keeps finding links to John’s site.

This is a great example of replication: 1 visitor leads to 2 visitors, leads to 5… on and on until you max out the machine.

A “White Hat” Example
If you haven’t signed up for LinkedIn you have probably at least gotten “invitations” to connect from friends and colleagues. That’s because, in the middle of the registration process, LinkedIn requests permission to look through your contact list to see who else is on LinkedIn. They also give you the option to spam invite people you know who aren’t yet on LinkedIn to join.

Of course, not everyone lets LinkedIn use their contact list, but there is incentive. A larger network on LinkedIn gives you certain benefits. So we know that some percentage of new users will expose their contacts to this system.

Let’s say that 1 in 10 take advantage of this feature, and that the average person has 100 contacts to send to, and that LinkedIn has a 10% signup rate, on average.

All LinkedIn has to do is get 10 signups before one person hands over their contacts, which leads to a further 10 signups (10% * 100), which leads to another 100 contacts mailed, and 10 more signups, and 100 more emails…

Optimizing the Replication
In the LinkedIn example, what would it be worth to increase their rate of “contact-allowance” to 20%? Or to increase their invitation response rate to 11%?

They would be increasing their net gain for each iteration. Improving either of those ratios leads to exponential gains down the line. If they increased both ratios simultaneously the gains are multiplied. By the third “generation” they’ve more than doubled their user population over the total if they had done nothing.

Increase Response Rate to 11%:

Userbase Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3
10 20 40 80
10 21 44 92

Increase Permission to Invite Colleagues to 20%:

Userbase Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3
10 20 40 80
10 30 90 270

Both Increases, Compounded:

Userbase Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3
10 20 40 80
10 32 102 326

By improving their process, LinkedIn would quadruple their user base after just 3 iterations!

The Take Home
How can you use you website, your emails, your customer service processes, your products or your business itself to replicate something valuable? Once you have a replication action, measure the ratio. Then work on improving that ratio.

Tags for This Post: technorati, customer acquisition, name of the game, google, money methods

What’s in a Name?

October 12th, 2009

One example of the wild image search that is 'untouchable.'Once hearing about the name, people very often ask, “Why ‘Untouchable’?” To be fair, this typically comes from non-business owners. The general populace seems to think that company monikers are something like boat names: they should be clever and personal to the owner.

Professionalism First

The first “company” I started (when I was 13) was called Bell Enterprises. One of the first things I learned when I got into the real world of business is that almost any company that ends in ‘Enterprises’ is a joke.

Playboy Enterprises and Cox Enterprises are the two exceptions I can think of. If you need proof, just recall that Cosmo Kramer’s company was named “Kramerica Enterprises.”

Professional companies have one or two word names, and end in LLC or Inc. or they stand on their own because they’re publicly traded (like Google, Microsoft, and Apple).

SEO Value

The modern equivalent of naming your company ‘ACME Dentistry’ or ‘Aardvark Used Cars’ is choosing a business name with search keywords baked in. Of course, SEO and PPC Consultants, LLC is a bit obvious (and probably, sadly, registered), but getting the word ‘Marketing’ in the name is important.

Domain Games

Here are two domain-name tips for budding business owners:

1. Try to get your exact business name with a .com extension. There is nothing more frustrating than typing in what I think should be your address and not finding you (I’m looking at you, Sunflower Markets).

2. If you are open to suggestions on your business name, go check out auction sites like DomainsWithBenefits.com to see if someone may have previously registered a name you like and then failed to renew it. Getting a domain with history, links and maybe even PageRank gives you a big headstart on search rankings.

The Untouchable Choice

Taking the above into account, I narrowed the choice down to two names. Despite the other domain having history to it, I eventually chose ‘Untouchable’ for a couple reasons:

  1. ‘Untouchable’ pretty well describes the kind of marketing we do. Traditional marketing has a tactile element: postcards, coupons, mailers, flyers, phone directories, etc. The internet is somewhat “untouchable” by nature.
  2. In Feudal Japan the ‘untouchables’ were a caste typically associated with “dirty jobs”. Although most people would view this as a negative connotation, I prefer to concentrate on the noble work ethic associated with those people.
  3. In modern parlance, ‘untouchable’ is often viewed as a positive quality, as in:
    • Out of reach; unobtainable;
    • beyond criticism, control, or suspicion;
    • a person who is beyond reproach as to honesty, diligence, etc.;
    • a person or thing considered inviolable;

So wouldn’t you want your internet marketing to be UntouchableMarketing?

Tags for This Post: exact business, word names, playboy enterprises, domain games, cox enterprises, word marketing, naming your company, cosmo kramer

Friction in Design

October 7th, 2009

I have to say, that I’ve been impressed with Comcast’s re-branding efforts over the last 12 months or so. People (not me) seem to like the singing commercials with the bird’s-eye, 90’s video game artwork. And their website has become much more colorful, friendly and well thought out.

HOWEVER, there is one thing about this site that really irks me. Comcast aren’t the only ones who are guilty, but this is one of the more extreme cases I’ve seen lately. Take a look at the picture below and tell me what’s wrong. Can you spot it?

Sign In To Comcast.com

The field is asking me for my user name. Underneath the field, in 10-pixel, gray font, there is a very definitive statement: “Your user name is your e-mail address”

If my user name is my email address, then why don’t you just ask me for my email address in the big, bold font?

First of all, ‘User Name’ indicates a sign-on which is specific to this site. That puts the user in the mode of trying to remember their standard user name, or what user name they might have chosen for this site. Email addresses are global, everyone knows theirs and it only has one meaning (this is contextual, of course. But I would know from my purposes of using the site if I needed to use my business or personal email).

Second, I understand the difficulties in switching from a user name based system to an email-based one (I’ve been through it), but there is a definitive statement that my user name is my email address, so that’s not what’s happening here.

Why frustrate your users? Why increase the usage of your “Send my user name” form?

Where are the friction points on your website? Where can you improve your language to be clear and concise?

Tags for This Post: friction points, gray font, e mail address, definitive statement, game artwork

Polluting the Crime Scene

January 9th, 2009

If you watch enough TV (in this case, ‘enough’ is probably an hour a week) you’ve seen a crime drama. And if you’ve seen a crime drama, you know that at least 30 seconds of each show is always dedicated to somebody scolding someone else for contaminating the crime scene with boot-prints, finger-prints, their own blood, whatever…

Catching up on my weekly reading I stumbled across the story of Liskula Cohen, a model who is suing Google to release the identity of a Blogspot blogger who has allegedly defamed her character. The TechCrunch article states “It’s nearly impossible to identify bloggers who don’t reveal their real name without the help of the companies that maintain publishing platforms.” but as we all know from recent history (Walmart’s Jim and Laura, JoyniceKanellis), there is almost always a way to find out someone’s identity, and SEO’s make great detectives…

Turning this into a public media circus is certainly not the least-damaging way to manage it, for two reasons: one, the linking profile of the Skanks in NYC Blog is now totally lopsided with parroted news reports from all over the web (and articles like this one) and two, news stories about you suing some “defenseless blogger” from sites like TechCrunch, CNet, Wired, etc. are 10x more likely to show up for a search of your name than some PR N/A Blogspot blog ever was.

Okay, so maybe obfuscating the linking profile of the blog isn’t the worst thing in the world, but the truth is that if you run a blog for any significant period of time, eventually you’re going to drop a link to it from somewhere where you don’t have anonymity. Even a forum-handle can be the key that unlocks a whole wealth of information about your past (see the JoyniceKanellis example above). A skilled Online Reputation Management firm could have deduced the attacker’s identity from linking profiles, keywords, nicknames, etc. and a lawsuit could have been filed under the radar.

It’s possible I don’t know how the world of modeling works, and maybe coming off as attention-seeking or as being the kind of person to hang a picture with a sledgehammer is desirable in the modeling community. It seems to me that it would make more sense to play the lawyer card on a real author or journalist who defames you in a real publication, not some two-bit blogger who can’t even afford a domain name.

As hurtful as it may be to see this kind of thing printed about you, let’s think about what the real exposure was, and what it will be now:

* I seriously doubt (but can’t confirm) that searching for her name + the word “skank” produced any more than 1 relevant result before this frenzy, probably from the blog in question, if even that. And to be honest, if someone is searching for “[your name] skank,” they’ve already formed an opinion of you.

* Big news sites picked up the lawsuit story, and 2 of them already rank for a search of Liskula Cohen. Now 20% of the results feature her name and the word “skank” in the same headline.

* You have no recourse against news sites because they are simply reporting on the court proceedings, someone searching for your name will now almost certainly see your name associated with the word “skank” in the future.

I understand that seeing pictures of yourself with such hateful words printed could be enraging, but in my opinion, public celebrities need to expect some amount of that kind of thing. So what would be my first line of defense? Cut ‘em off at the knees.

Someone who starts a blog to say these things wants traffic, otherwise they’d just email it. There are many ways to have a site demoted or removed from search engines, especially on a weak subdomain with few incoming links of its own, and in a neighborhood as bad as Blogspot (Blogspot? A bad neighborhood?! Bull!).

As it stands now, all this attention is probably making ‘Skanks in NYC’ one of the most powerful blogsot sudomains in history (up there with Stuff White People Like), which makes it a thousand times harder to “de-optimize”.

By applying a few blackhat SEO tactics quietly, this blog could have been made to never rank for anything for the rest of its existence, and would either discourage its creator, or enrage him/her to the point where they come out of hiding (probably to DigitalPoint asking why they don’t rank for “liskula cohen skank”). No media craziness, no permanent “skank” stamp on your personal Google results.

But what do I know about being a model? Or a CSI for that matter…

Tags for This Post: online reputation management, walmart, great detectives, finger prints, media circus, google, boot prints

The Choice to Hire

August 20th, 2008

For a couple months now I’ve seen it coming: the need to hire someone to take over some of what I’m doing, so that I can do more. I think the one thing that shocks most people who’ve never run their own business is that you don’t get paid for all the time you work. What do I mean?

Think about working in a corporate environment (I started my business life as a Corporate SEO). If someone calls to talk about a contract, you send it to your sales team. If you need copies made, you can drop them off with the Admin Assistant. When you receive an invoice, you forward it over to Accounting. If your computer goes down, you call IT and go out for coffee. And, at many companies these days, your pay is direct-deposited so you don’t even have to go to the bank.

All of those services fly out the window when you go out on your own. You are your own IT, Admin, Accounting, HR and Management teams. All of that in addition to the fact that you need to get your work done every day. But you can’t exactly send a client an invoice with “5 hours – Fixed my computer” on it, can you? And that is why people who have only worked for companies are shocked to find out I may only do 20 hours of “work” per week. Except that those 20 hours of work took 40 hours of supporting effort. Even getting paid requires me to drive to the bank to deposit checks a couple times a week.

So, a few months ago when I stood with a total of 9 clients and could see my work-hours quickly outgrowing my ability to be more efficient, I began to work on the next challenge: what do I hire out? Assuming I could only afford one employee at the current volume, do I hire an Admin Assistant to take calls, make copies, and help organize meetings? Should I hire a sales person to manage my current contracts and help me find new ones? Should I attempt to find another SEO/PPC expert to take on client work (and if so, how can I be sure I can trust them to uphold the level of quality I demand for my clients?)? Or should I bring on an intern and hope that the amount of smaller-tasks I can hand off to them will outweigh the training time?

I am notoriously demanding when it comes to resumes. I often say that the minute I find the first typo I toss the resume, which is not far from the truth. I expect that one-page of writing shouldn’t be difficult to produce, and that you should have it so polished by the time you’re ready to send it out that I won’t find a thing wrong with it (from a technical perspective anyway). When I receive a five-page resume, or one written in the third person (another story for another time) I have to wonder what some people are thinking. So what’s the best way to get a job with Untouchable Marketing? Don’t send a resume.

As it turns out, the old adages about networking are correct, and knowing people is often greater than knowing anything else. I am going to try out an intern-esque position on a contract basis for the next 15 weeks or so to see if the outsourcing of tasks outweighs the training time. The candidate is actually family of a good friend/business partner who’s situation is well-suited to working from home. He’s qualified and never had to submit a resume.

How will I judge the outcome as a success? Like everything I else I look at numbers. I will feel the experiment is worthwhile if the dollars I pay are returned 2x in either hard dollars, or client approval (as measured by frequency of emails and number of referrals). If the experiment doesn’t meet this goal, then at least I was able to help out a friend and find out that I need to look for a partner or an assistant next.

Tags for This Post: management teams, sales person, deposit checks, couple times, corporate environment, admin assistant