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Archive of CEO's Blog: 2007 |
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2007 Archive - Click below to read an archived Blog >Get Out There And Sell Something. The World Is Wondering What You Are Waiting For ! >Internet Privacy, How to Protect Yourself >How To Build An eCommerce Site >Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Web Security But Were Afraid To Ask >Where's The Value In Web 2.0? >What Does YouTube Mean To Your Web Site? >Don't Fall For The Buzz Words
Get Out There And Sell Something. The World Is Wondering What You Are Waiting For ! Is it time for another holiday season again? Bah, humbug. Back when I was a young expat working in London I used to leave Europe for Asia when the Christmas—New Year season began to roll around. Back then, as the Western world shut down to enjoy the Christian holidays, things were still hopping in Asia and one could busily work there throughout Christmas and New Year with nary a nod to old Saint Nick. For workaholics like me, it was wonderful… around about mid November I would pack my bags and leave London for Hong Kong, set up meetings with clients in Tokyo, Jakarta, Seoul and Beijing, and happily work like crazy through the holidays until the Chinese New Year popped up, usually sometime around early February... at which point I would wrap things up and head back to Europe to resume where I left off, arriving just about the time Europe’s executives were getting back to focusing on business again. Wishing to travel down memory lane, I just returned after a three week round trip from Brisbane to Jakarta, Singapore and back again... to see what impact the holidays have on South East Asia today, as well as to begin a few rounds of discussion with some of the local mobile phone operators regarding a new business product we are developing. My report is this: the Christian holidays... or, rather, the profit potential they represent to businesses in Asia, have taken control. Asia today is not what it was in my youth. But then again, neither am I. The fact that Asia has discovered how to make billions off of western holidays is nothing unusual. Nor is it unusual that they are making this money by selling holiday themed products to not only us, but their own local non-Christian citizens as well. That’s not what’s unusual. What’s unusual is that we in the West haven’t figured out how to make money selling things to them, things that underlie their non-Christian, Eastern holidays. The truth be known, everyone likes a holiday, those in the East no less so than we in the West. It’s no wonder then that I saw literally thousands of Hijab covered Muslim women packing the shopping centers of Jakarta, eagerly buying Christmas season gifts at any number of the exclusive Gucci, Versace, Armani and other shops in Jakarta's shopping centers. So why, if everyone likes a holiday, and likes to spend money during them, do we in the West not recognize that there are more people in the East who spend money during their holidays than there are those of us in the West who spend money during our holidays? Why don’t we begin to market goods and services to the people of the East, goods and services designed to be bought during their holidays, instead of ours? Yeah, I know what I am saying here is pure capitalism… but hey, if they can make things to sell to us during our holidays, why can’t we do the same to them? Especially since the size of their market is 11.8 times bigger than our own (based on 1998 estimates)? Perhaps the answer is that we know so little of these people that we don’t have any idea a) what their holidays are, b) what values these holidays hold for them, c) what impact they have on the families that celebrate them, or d) what people who celebrate these holidays might be inclined to buy. If so, then, ah… why don’t we know this? Are we so arrogant as to think that people from other countries have cultures of so little significance that we need not learn of them? Or develop products that meet the needs of those cultures? Isn’t the task of a CEO to find the biggest market he/she can find and sell products or services to it? Then why are so many CEO’s overlooking the markets of Asia. Is it because they are defined by a culture different from our own? Likely it is. It’s unfortunate but true: learning about others requires that we care about others. More to the point, we in the West, and the US in particular, are, generally speaking, so self centered and arrogant that we think that absolutely no one from anywhere else on earth, without restriction, contributes anything of worth to this earth... certainly nothing as valuable as what we contribute... so why bother finding out who they are? That being the case, why should we take the time to understand what they need, or develop products to meet those needs? It’s simply not worth our effort. There’s no money in it. Unfortunately
for those of you iconoclasts that lie easily in your beds at night,
this is simply not true. Consumers in the East are as sophisticated as
any American consumer is, and many are more so. And as for what the
East has ever given to the world, read my second-from-last paragraph
herein and you may be reminded. In the interim, if you doubt that
Eastern consumers are able to afford your product or services, or are
as sophisticated as your own customers are, you need only take a trip
to Dubai to see how well healed, urbane and financially capable Eastern
buyers can be. And if you doubt that their needs are such that your
technically superior product will hold value for them, try visiting a
developing country like the Philippines, where cell phone users can
track, on their cell phone, in real time, where their pre- and primary
school children are, 24 hours a day… and have been able to
do so for five years now… and all of this with instant one
button messaging that alerts the police when an incident occurs with
the child… while we in the West have to hope and pray that
our children return safely home from school each day, and worse, depend
on antiquated technologies like Amber Alerts for help in finding our
kidnapped children once they disappear. Internet Privacy, How To Protect Yourself I’ve been travelling “down under” for the past few months, Australia and New Zealand mostly, and everywhere I go MySpace and Facebook is in the news. People down here are paranoid that recent announcements about selling subscriber data to advertisers is going to compromise their privacy. As those of you who are world travelers know, the Data Protection Act (1998) that was passed in Great Britain is among the tightest in the world. In terms of protecting a person’s right to privacy and establishing a requirement that vendors protect and keep private any information they hold over their customers, the British act goes far beyond the watered down and simplistic laws that exist in the U.S. And since Australia and New Zealand are still part of the British Empire, their laws tend to be a reflection of British law. Be that as it may, the simple fact is that rights to privacy and the protection of personal information is governed much more closely and completely in the U.K. and the Commonwealth of Nations (a group of 53 former British colonies that include countries from Antigua to Zambia and count among them powerful economies like Singapore, South Africa and many more) than it is in the U.S. If you live in one of these countries, your privacy is much more protected than it is in the U.S. But how threatened is your privacy, anyway? Is the fear about Facebook’s recent announcement that it is going to be selling subscriber information really warranted? Are they really going to start selling the facts of your private life to the highest bidder? Not likely. To begin with, let’s get some things straight: the Internet is a bane to privacy. Without a doubt, if you frequent the Internet you are opening yourself up to having everything about you known to anyone with even a remote interest in you, not to mention being swindled, exploited, duped and targeted. But that’s life in the 21st century, isn’t it? The internet is treating you no differently than your local bank is, when they sell your financial information to credit card companies, or the company whose magazine you subscribed to is, when it sells your consumer data to a national marketing clearing house, or your garage mechanic when he blithely tells your neighbor that you still haven’t fully paid him for the repairs he did to your car last month. It’s not that the Internet is a sink hole for private information (which it is), it’s that everything in society is too. So what should you do? The answer is simple: first, understand how the Internet gathers and uses private information, and second, form a plan of action to protect your on-line information, just as you do your off-line information. As for how the Internet uses private information, in simple terms private information on the internet exists in two forms: personally identifiable information, and that which is not personally identifiable. Personally identifiable information is information that can be tracked back to you by name, whereas non-identifiable information is consumer information about you that is generally not directly able to be tracked back to you, such as in the case of aggregated information (often called metadata). Generally, metadata is information about you that ends up being placed into a database of sorts, where the details about you are lost to the extent that you, as an individual, can not be individually identified, while what your interests are, and where you are on the internet can be. Why this difference? Because the goal is to find you wherever you are on the internet and place before your smiling but slightly blood shot eyes an advertisement likely to appeal to your particular interests. Doing this can be done one of two ways, (1) sloppily via a technique that identifies who you are by name, what your interests are, and where you are on the net at any given point in time (therein allowing nefarious people to use this personal information for unscrupulous purposes, such as identity theft), or (2) elegantly, via another technique that converts your personally identifiable information into metadata in a way so that you, as an individual, can not be identified by name, but can be identified in terms of what your interests are and where you are on the net at any given point in time. If you’re having a hard time seeing the difference, think of the latter technique as being similar to what is known about you when you go to the movies. Sitting in a movie theater watching Ahhhnold, an advertiser knows this about you: (1) you have at least $30 to spend on leisure, as is evidenced by your having paid for a movie ticket, (2) you like action packed adventure movies, as is evidenced by your picking a movie featuring the Goobernator, and (3) you live in the vicinity of Elm and Main, where the movie theater is located. In fact, an advertiser knows this about everyone sitting in that movie theater with you. They know what your interests are and where you are, and can place an advertisement crafted to appeal to you before your very eyes. But they don’t know who you are… not by name anyway. Compare that if you will to a theater company that you subscribe to. They not only know the same about you, they likely also know your name. Either technique serves the purpose: it allows someone to know what your interests are, and where you are, so that it can place in front of you an advertisement designed to appeal to you personally. The only difference is in whether the system can identify you by name or not. Anyway, you get the point: some sites collect information that they use to cross reference you so that they can target you as a known person, while others collect information so that they can lump you into a group of like-minded consumers (i.e. people who are searching for second homes, or discount airfares… or whatever). Either way, they are collecting the information for the same reason: to sell you something. The only difference is the degree to which they know who you are, as an identifiable individual. So how can you protect your privacy? You can’t. It’s already too late. It became too late way back before the Internet was born… back in the 60s when Congress allowed the advertising industry to begin to collect lists of information about consumers, and sell it for cross reference purposes (How do you think Carl Rove does his job? Answer: he buys advertising lists of people, segregated by age, income, area of residence and lots of other things that cause him to think that the people on the list might vote for his candidate. Then he targets these people by name to vote for, well, whichever idiot Rove feels should be the next George Bush and stomp all over our personal freedoms and privacy). It’s too late to protect your privacy, but it’s not too late to try to stop Internet companies from trying to identify you personally when you are on the net. How do you do you stop them from being able to personally identify you? Try thinking before you act. Make up a list of simple steps you will take to protect your privacy, both online and off, and follow them. Try these: a) Start by bitching like hell to your congressman that he needs to do something to protect your privacy. Tell him that the collecting of personally identifiable data on the Internet should be outlawed. Period. Or, as they say in Britain, Full Stop. In fact, tell him to clean up our laws so that at a minimum they are as tough as the British Data Privacy Protection Act laws.
What about MySpace and Facebook selling data about their subscribers? As best as I can see, they appear to be selling metadata, not personally identifiable data. If so, good for them... or as they say down here in Australia, "Good on ya' mate." They are at least trying to stay on the white side of the line. But be cautious. If you are a subscriber, write them and let them know your feelings. Keep an eye on them and let them know you’ll cancel your account if they sell anything that lets people personally identify you. And then do so. Remember, just recently the yahoos at Yahoo happily turned over personally identifiable information about a Chinese citizen to the Chinese government. He's now rotting in a Chinese prison. Do you really want to trust Yahoo and Facebook with your private details?
How
To Build An eCommerce Site So you have decided your company has to start selling on the web? Finally, after watching the Internet grow for 15 years, you’ve decided that it’s time to put up an eCommerce site. Frankly, I don’t blame you. It’s about time you develop a commercial web presence. How your company survived this long without it is anyone’s guess. Yup, it’s time to start selling on the web, and the good news is that the chance to do something momentous and earn hundreds-of-millions in revenue is definitely there. Web consumers are sitting out there looking for you, and the technology is available to get your company in front of their eyes. Now is the time to go out and introduce yourself and your products to them. If that’s the case, you ask, then why haven’t you heard of others making millions off of the Internet? The answer to that is simple: because the vast majority of what’s out there in the way of commercial web sites is trash. Don’t be discouraged though, because that’s good news for you. If you do your job right, you won’t have any competition. Before I go too much further, let me clarify my comment: I don’t mean to suggest that the sites out there are trash in terms of how they look… some of them are quite fetching, design wise. What I mean is that they are trash in terms of effectiveness. I mean, duh, we are talking about building web sites that make money for you, aren’t we? If so, then let’s measure them by their effectiveness in doing just that, as opposed to how pretty they look. Look at the facts: most commercial web sites have browser-to-buyer conversion rates of 5% – 15%. If the sales people in your company had a conversion rate that low, would you find that acceptable? Then why accept it for your web site? My suggestion: don’t accept it. Instead, build a commercial site that sells products. As for how to build such a site, the answer is simple: the same way you built your sales department. Build your web site so that it follows the same sales process that you use in your company. Likely as not, the sales process your company uses looks something like this: a) identify what products you are going to sell, in what combinations you are going to package them, and how are you going to price them, b) identify who you are going to sell your products to (in other words, identify your buyer demographics), c) find out where your buyers are located (regionally), d) find out what places your buyers frequent (so that you can advertise to them), e) identify the needs they have that relate to your products, f) develop a sales flow that demonstrates to your buyers how your company, products and services meet their needs, g) close the deal, collect the money and go home and celebrate. Selling on the web is no different: you have to build your eCommerce site so that it follows your normal selling process, you have to position it so that it gets in front of your customer's eyes, you have to write the content so that it shows how the product meets their needs, and you have to assign someone to manage (on a daily basis) the “selling process” that is built into the site. Doing that will surely get you a few sales; but it’s only the beginning. If you want to play in the big leagues… along with the Googles and ebays who earn hundreds-of-millions on the Internet, then you have to do more. One thing you have to do is put the customer first. Repeat after me: “I promise to put the customer first, and money second.” A report in the February issue of .net magazine stated that an impromptu poll of online shoppers indicated that in making buying decisions price came fourth, after convenience, range and availability of product, and quality of service. Service came first. What do these people mean by service? Think of it from your own perspective. How many times have you been frustrated when you couldn’t find a phone number with which to contact a company selling something on the web? How angry do you get when hidden charges show up on your credit card? How annoying do you find it when product statistics, sizes and details aren’t clearly listed or are inaccurate? How nuclear do you go when buying something from a web site results in you getting 50 more spam messages every day? Repeat after me: “I promise to put the customer first, and money second.” Another thing you need to do if you want to earn millions off of the web is focus on your delivery channel. If your products are simple, fit in a box and can be shipped by normal carrier, then be sure to tell your buyers when to expect delivery. Also, if you have to back order something, remember to ask if the buyer wants you to ship a partial order or wait for everything to be available. Be sure too to get their confirmation that you may levy a charge against their credit card for the pieces that you are shipping… and inform them that you won’t charge for backordered items until after they are shipped. And, when the remainder of the order is ready and you do ship it, don’t charge your customers a second shipping charge. If you don’t clarify these points with the customer, you will likely lose business. One client of ours found that if they back-ordered an item and shipped a partial order, and didn’t confirm with the customer that it was a) o.k. to ship a partial order, and b) o.k. to charge their credit card for the pieces in the partial order, then fully 76% of the customers reversed the charge on their credit card after receiving the partial order… complaining that they didn’t receive what they ordered and paid for. As for what you should do if your products and services are too complex for normal web selling (i.e. they don’t fit in a box), then you need to employ Web 2.0 to build a social network platform to support the selling and product fulfillment process. Companies that sell intangibles that can’t be boxed, like medical travel, vacation rentals, cosmetic surgery, insurance and the like, can increase their closing rate and customer satisfaction if they simply employ social networking to support the selling process. With an effectively designed social network you can recruit new customers, use existing customers to generate new sales leads, promote customer satisfaction, sell at higher prices, engender repeat sales and, best of all, dramatically increase your revenue stream. If your company has decided to start selling on the web, welcome to the group. But follow this mantra: a) build a web site that models your normal selling process, b) put the customer first, money second, c) focus on delivery, and d) if your product is complex or intangible, focus on the use of social networking to support both sales and service.
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Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Web Security But Were Afraid To Ask Is Web 2.0 security as difficult as everyone says it is? No, it’s not. It takes some “smarts” to make your website as secure as it can be, but it doesn’t take as much as most developers would have you believe. First, it’s not something you should be paying extra for, and second, if your web development people don’t know the following (and how to apply it in your case) then you’re probably working with the wrong guys. Defending against Web 2.0 security threats is all about employing security measure that address the standard mix of characteristics that comprise Web 2.0: Syndication (RSS, Mashups, etc.), Rich Interface Applications (RIA), and User Participation (social networks, Wikis, blogs, et al). In order to have Web 2.0 security, all you need to do is address the vulnerabilities and risks each of these categories introduces. Fortunately, while each of these three characteristics introduces its own form of security threat, most of the security threats that they introduce come from one common attribute: Web 2.0 depends on intense client-server interaction to accomplish its magic. And while the trend towards shifting application processing from the server towards the client does wonders in terms of creating wonderful user experiences, it creates a nightmare for security… unless, that is, you simply understand that security weaknesses in Web 2.0 tend to also be shifted from the web server towards the client. In other words, the methodology by which dynamic Web 2.0 content is created causes security issues to trend towards client-side issues. So, you ask, if developing client-side security solutions is the answer to Web 2.0 security, why hasn’t more of it been done? The answer relates to tunnel vision: for years now web developers have been taught to stay away from the client. Developing client side security checks was considered a no-no. It violated documented best practices for protecting Internet applications. Old school guys like me though, who cut their teeth on three tier client-server architecture, never have seen the internet as a stand alone server-based monolith where the client should be protected from us. Instead we have always seen it for what it really is: a glorified n-tiered client-server architecture, where we were expected to work our magic on both the server and the client.
For us, blurring the distinction between client and server code has always led to an increased exposure to application problems, and, having known that, we've simply written code to overcome it. Now that Web 2.0 is here, what we have always known to be true is happening again. Doubt me? Then just look at the most common Web 2.0 security issues – directory traversal, SQL Injection, session and cookie tampering, and cross site scripting (XSS) attacks – and tell me what they have to do with? Answer: a migration from server side code to client side code, and the interaction created between the two. "Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, RSS, and client-side JavaScript libraries allow enterprises to build more responsive, immersive and collaborative applications,” says Andrew Jaquith, Senior Analyst at Yankee Group. He also goes on to say “Although many of the technologies are not new, the threat model for Web 2.0 is not yet fully understood by developers…" My response: well, it should be. This is not rocket science. There is nothing new going on here. Web 2.0 problems are nothing more than early 1980’s issues coming back to haunt those who think that understanding HTML is all they need to do to become an expert in website development. What’s the bottom line you ask? It’s simple: for those in the know, Web 2.0 security is a non-issue. Hire the right guys, and not only will your data be secure, but more importantly, your customer’s data too. Hire the kid down the street though… you know him… the guy who builds websites for $75 a page, ask him to build a few blogs for you, a couple of Wikis, let your customers upload a few pictures, maybe write a testimonial or two, and expect to find yourself in court when your customers sue you for having blithely given away, via the cookies you set, their credit card data to someone from one of those Eastern-European-Stan countries. Next month I’m planning on writing technical stuff… dry and boring, unless you’re into security issues and how to safeguard your online data. So this month I thought I would give you a break, and offer something fun to do instead. BTW, my apologies for not posting this until the 17th of this month... we've been busy on a project for one of our clients, and as usual, meeting our customer's needs comes before posting Blogs and playing. But now on to the fun... Lot’s of people have asked if Web 2.0 is really as useful as I am always preaching it is. This month I’ll give you a chance to judge for yourself. I have a personal list of over 1,500 Web 2.0 sites, grouped into over 50 categories. Listed below are a few sites from a few categories that you might find interesting. Hopefully they pique your interest as to what Web 2.0 is all about, and how you might be able to use it to increase your company’s business. While many of the sites below are commercial enterprises in and of themselves, the concept behind how they work can just as easily be used by your company to increase your own site’s traffic. Before checking out these sites though, read this site in its entirety… read it completely, commit it to memory, tattoo the important parts on the back of your hand, and then pass our site on to your friends. Oh well, you can’t blame us for trying, right? Anyway, enjoy these. Drop us a line if you want the entire list. For now though, use the links below to learn what Web 2.0 can do. Then let’s talk about how to put some of these features to work on your web site. >Sample Bookmarking Services (>50 Web 2.0 sites available) Personal favorites include:
>Sample Collaboration Services (>125 Web 2.0 sites available) Personal favorites include:
>Sites where users comment on other sites, rank them, and even collaborate on presented information (>110 Web 2.0 sites available) Personal favorites include:
>Sample Photography Services Sites (>90 Web 2.0 sites available) Personal favorites include:
>Sample Office Services (>45 Web 2.0 sites available) Personal favorites include:
>Sample Polling Services (Only about 5 Web 2.0 sites available, but all excellent) Personal favorites include:
I hope these sites give you some idea what Web 2.0 can do, and how its interactivity can bring value to your site. We'd be happy to sit with you and look more closely at your sales process, and how we might be able to use Web 2.0 to support your selling efforts.
Avoid these design mistakes at all costs, or visitors will avoid your site. Here’s the problem: just like finger painting when you were a kid, designing a website offers the chance to put so much into the site that the tendency is to overload it with everything you can. For a website to work, the important thing is not that you have fun creating it, or that it have every bell, whistle and buzzer known to man, but that it allows visitors to quickly find what they seek. If you don’t pay attention to this goal, and instead slather your site with useless flash animations and the like, then it will affect your bottom line. Keep your site simple. Take the time to tidy it up. It will be well worth the effort. Here are five things to watch out for when developing your site. 1. Don’t overpower the customer Graphics, audio snippets, video clips and animations may be fun to play with, but if they don’t actually promote your products, avoid them. Our studies show that 95% of all animations are gratuitous and don’t improve a site. But they do accomplish something: they distract the visitor from learning about your company and products. Your website should strike a balance between content and eye appeal. Keep it interesting to look at, but at the same time keep it simple and put your design emphasis on making it easy to surf. This is essential because first time visitors usually take less than 3 – 5 seconds to decide if a page is useful to them or not. If you waste that first 3 – 5 seconds by forcing their eyes to wander over useless flash animations, then you may lose them forever. How do you keep your site clean and simple? Generally, a website will look uncluttered if it has no more than two color combinations, employs one consistent font for text and an alternative font for headlines, sticks to standard conventions (like underlying links in blue), and avoids patterns and designs in the background (…they tend to distract the visitor from the copy). 2. Make sure your site loads quickly Remember, you have less than 3 – 5 seconds to convince a visitor that you have something to offer. Remember too that this time includes the time it takes for your site to load. If it has too many pages, or is full of graphics, you may end up testing your user’s patience to the point that he clicks-on to someone else’s site. One way to make your site load quickly is to pay attention to the size of your graphic files. Unless you are selling artwork, very clear pictures are not required. Since file size increases with clarity, clear images take a long time to load. Keep your images clear enough to be effective, but not so clear that they take a long time to load. Better still, use colored text instead of images. Colored text attracts attention as well as graphics, but with far less “load time overhead”. 3. Support easy “eye surfing” Fine art and graphic art students know all about eye movement. It’s what makes a picture enjoyable to look at. Your site should support comfortable and functional eye movement. What is eye movement? Think of it as the surfing action your eyes make as they roam over a site page. Think of it as scanning. It’s what your eyes do in supporting your mind’s effort to find useful information. Why are your eyes and mind teaming up to scan like this? Because your brain is trying to decide if the site it is looking at is useful to the task at hand or not. In deciding if a site is useful or not, visitors do not read the text on a page, they scan the entire page. Make your page difficult to scan and your visitor's eye-mind team will instantly rejected it. Think of it as a 4 year old eating boiled spinach for the first time. While the spinach might be good for the body, the effort it takes to get to enjoy it is more work than the child is interested in putting into the task. So he spits it out and moves on to eat something that tastes better. The child in this case is your eye-mind team. Make it difficult for them to find the goodness in your site, and they will spit out what you gave them to chew. How do you support good eye surfing? Make certain that the copy has features such as an index, subheadings, short paragraphs, bulleted points, keywords in bold, and an easy to read writing style. 4. Keep navigation simple If your site’s navigation is not intuitive, then it is wrong. If you make your visitor think about how to find something, then you have failed. Don’t be clever. Don’t hide links behind icons. Put the navigation bar where visitors expect to see it. And keep the style and position of your navigation bar consistent on all pages. When a link has been visited, change its color. Basic points like these will save a visitor’s time and make the process of navigating easy to the point that they will be inclined to keep looking around your site. 5. Make your key information available from all pages Some sites have two navigation bars. Why? Because some of the information presented should be made available from everywhere on the site. If the visitor cannot locate what he is searching for, he is apt to look for it on someone else’s site. Crucial information should be accessible from every page. |
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It seems that everywhere you turn you hear about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Every web developer worth his/her salt is out their flogging their SEO skills. Should you bite and hire an SEO expert? Likely as not, yes; but not until after you have done your best to optimize your site yourself. With today’s focus on technology, it’s easy to forget that website copy should be written for users as well as spiders, bots and search engines. Whatever you do, don’t abandon your readers in favor of what you think a search engine wants to see. If your copy isn’t relevant to the reader, it’s likely to fail a search engine test too. How can you optimize your site? The answer is simple, but the amount of work involved is not, so, roll up your sleeves and get busy… 1) Plan your site around keywords. Know what keywords you want to emphasize and make these the basis of your copy. Be sure to include today’s popular phrases, even if you wouldn’t think of using them yourself. Search engines know what people are searching for, so don’t fight it. Get a list of today’s keywords, and adapt them to your site. 2) Don’t stuff your copy with too many keywords. If you do, web bots will reject your site and you’ll end up with a low ranking. A density of 6-12% is ideal. Be careful though, make the copy readable for the reader, not the web bot. If you don’t, then both the bot and the reader will reject your site. 3) Write your copy like you did your compositions back in Mr. Wilson’s English class: the content of paragraphs should be written around one, or at most two key word phrases. Pages should echo one theme, key word phrases should be reflected in page titles, anchor text and headers. 4) Tempt your audience. Surfers often scan a page before reading it or clicking through to a point of interest. Using bullets helps a reader scan a page to determine its relevance. Linking bullets to other pages helps keep them on your site. 5) Avoid the temptation to appropriate copy from another site. Original, high quality, purpose built text will always rank higher with your readers, as well as search engines, than plagiarized copy. Your reader may not remember where they saw your copy before, but the search engine will. Get caught plagiarizing someone else’s work and your site could be blacklisted. 6) Attract the experts. Write copy that other sites will want to link to. Great copy is copy that other sites will link to and share with their own readers. When they do, your site ranking will go up dramatically.
What Does YouTube Mean To Your Web Site? The power of YouTube looms large. But what does it mean for your company and why should you care? The answer lies in understanding why Web surfers love YouTube: it meets Andy Warhol’s rule that in life everyone will have 15 minutes of fame. With YouTube, people can convince themselves that they are famous. Best of all, they can be famous today, and again tomorrow… and again any time they want to upload a video of their Mom spray painting yellow racing stripes on their dog. Back in my days, we used to squeeze people into telephone booths to get attention. Today people just upload a video of themselves to YouTube. Why should you care? Because if you let people become famous on your site, the public will flock to it. Not only will your customers love it, but they’ll tell their friends about it and draw even more people (read “customers”) to you. Don’t want videos of spray painted dogs on your site? No problem, set some rules: if your company installs rugs, offer a price discount for videos showing the most outrageous use of a rug; if you are an auto repair shop, offer a free tune up for the best video showing a costumed mechanic making a mess of his car. Use your imagination… or better still, have your Marketing Department use theirs… that’s what you pay them for, isn’t it? Recognize it: the YouTube phenomenon is here to stay. Why? Because it meets people’s social needs. It’s all part of the concept of social networking. Social networking is powerful. Add a social network to your site and your customer base could easily double every month.
There's always something to complain about. How about site designers that toss around buzz words like they're holy water? Most of these people don't have the foggiest idea what they're talking about. You hear it all the time... "we're into Web 2.0... customer management systems... information management... influence networks", and on and on they go, spouting words like they have some idea what the words mean. The next time you hear one of these blokes, listen to them carefully. Ask a couple of questions and see how quickly they get tripped up. Likely as not they only learned the word last week and think that by using it this week they'll get more sales. Not here folks. At WebSpecks we not only know what the words mean, in many cases we defined them. Want to know what Web 2.0 really is? Want to know how Web 2.0 can help you find and capture more customers from the web? Then take the time to browse our site. Don't be surprised though if you find our competition copying our content... with their logo neatly cut and pasted on top.
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