The other day I thought I lost my daughter. She was supposed to come home from school with her friend. After being told the bus would be late and waiting for an hour, we were told, by the bus driver, that someone else had taken her home, and he didn’t know who. My daughter Palamee is 4-and-a-half, and her friend is 4-years-old.
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Earlier today Google began rolling out a huge update to it’s search engine – the Knowledge Graph. This is a step toward what Google considers the next evolution of search – to understand what we’re searching for and return the relevant information. While I applaud this update as an improvement for searchers everywhere, this is another step toward a much more difficult world for any business operating online.
Here’s why…
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Words are important. In real life they’re super important and online they rule supreme. As the first thing someone sees on a website, the words you use can either entice someone to take action, or push them away. Many times the words we use are well meaning, however an easy misintepretaton can quickly turn readers off and send them to the competition.
Find out how to easily write powerful headlines and benefit bullets that spur action rather than pushing your potential clients away.
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I remember growing up and having the phone ring during dinner. My Mom would run to get it, and a few second later I’d hear the familiar phrase: “We do not take solicitations over the phone.” That happened on a daily basis, sometimes a few times per day.
As with every industry cutbacks occur and what was a voice on the other line turned into a computer with a recorded message. I’d try sending the “do not call” signal to the computer by continuously hitting the “0″ button on the phone. That never worked.
Between do-not-call lists and consumer backlash I’m happy to report those days are almost at an end! But if annoying the hell out of people on the phone isn’t getting companies leads, what is?
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The other day I was making some green tea and something struck me. After I filled the pot with water and turned on the heat, I kept checking it. I was checking it every two minutes. And each time I checked it, it didn’t seem any closer to boiling. Finally after some amount of time, it boiled, I took it off the heat, added my tea leaves, and started to brew the tea.
How often does this happen to you with your business?
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It’s been another excellent week here at Dempsey Marketing full of client work, networking, writing and learning. I had more to share this week as I wrote a post every day of this week. I’m not sure if I’ll keep that up but definitely stay tuned to see.
I did have a few big epiphanies which I’ll get into in the coming section.
But hey, why wait? Let’s get into it.
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Trackbacks are a feature of WordPress that let you know someone has linked to a page or post on your WordPress site. You’ll see trackbacks if you link one post to another (good for SEO and time-on-site) or someone on another site links to you. You can use these trackbacks for both relationship building and lead generation. Let’s see how.
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Before you read this post do me a small favor – open up your Google Analytics account, select your website profile, under Traffic Sources click the Overview link, and on the bottom right in the Keywords section click view full report.
Google Analytics Keyword Report
Do you see (not provided) on that list? Read on my friend…
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Back in 2000 I operated under the assumption that my small IT business (small as in me, myself and I) had to appear much larger than I was in order to be successful. So I did what many businesses back then did – I spent tens of thousands of dollars on a high-class website, logo, business cards, folders, letterhead and envelopes, all from an award-winning design firm. They looked super HOT let me tell you. Years later I threw away 16 boxes of folders. That wasn’t so hot.
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Get your kids out of the room and strap on your helmet – I’m about to drop an F-bomb. Ok ready? Here goes.
The ability for me to mind-fuck myself seems to be at an all-time high lately, and I thank God that I have wonderful people in my life like my wife and my business consultant Lauri Flaquer to speak with, lest I go completely nuts.
I love information. I love numbers. I love analyzing the numbers and thinking of apps I can create that will tell me more about those numbers. And today there is ceaseless flood of information, so often I’m in my happy place.
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Frankly I’m sick and tired of hearing stories about horrible web designers. It seems that companies big and small taking money from clients, putting them through a nightmare experience, and never delivering what they promise has become common place. And that’s IF you can get the person to whom you just gave your money to get back to you, or even talk with you in the first place. If that story is a familiar one, perhaps it happened to you, or you’d like to avoid this happening, this is YOUR guide.
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For one- and two-person businesses online advertising has become a dead end, and in many cases a complete waste of time and money. This post is for people that are like my clients – one- and two-person operations that have a business website with a blog, and want to sideline all the tricks and crap that gets in the way of getting more business. If that sounds like you, please keep reading and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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As I write this it’s been raining for more than 12 hours straight. That’s good because we need it. April-June are the hottest months of the year here in Chiang Mai, with temperatures averaging between 102-110F daily. Needless to say I’ve been staying inside as much as possible, enjoying the air conditioning and working my ass off.
This week was another busy one. Let’s get into it.
Books Read And In-Progress
I started and finished an excellent book by Doc Searls of Cluetrain Manifesto fame – The Intention Economy. Doc believes, and is working towards, enabling customers to take control of their data and provide it to vendors on an as-needed basis, on their terms. This would relieve many companies of the need to track, or really attempt to track, all of the movements of their current and potential customers online. More about that later in the post.
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If you’ve recently seen my Twitter or LinkedIn profiles (not sure why you could but it’s a possibility) you’ll have seen that I have two “job” titles: CEO and Founder of Dempsey Marketing and VP Client Marketing at Gunner Technology. The reason for this is that I have a very strong business relationship with my friend Cody Swann, the owner of Gunner Technology. It’s taken some time for he and I to reach this level and I wanted to share some lessons that I’ve learned over the course of the few years he and I have worked together.
Lesson One: Relationships Take Time
Cody and I have known each other for a few years. We became friends via the web development community. He was asking online if anyone was interested in Node development and I answered that call. While we didn’t work much on a project that started things off. The rest, they way, is history, some of which you’ll read about today.
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I recently sent an email to all of my awesome blog subscribers that asked a single question: what is the one thing that will help your business the most? I’ve received a number of great responses, and wanted to take today to begin to answer one of them.
As a side note, the question I asked falls into the “people know what they don’t know” view of people rather than the “people don’t know what they want until they’re shown” view – something I’ll be talking about in posts to come.
With that digression out of the way, here is the question I received back:
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Bounce rate is a great metric of how much your visitors like your site, however it can also be completely misleading when taken out of context, especially for business-to-business (B2B) companies. Let’s put this bounce rate thing into perspective by looking at what the heck bounce rate is and then seeing how you can use custom segments in Google Analytics to gain the perspective your business needs.
First, the definition.
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For many businesses clients and customers are targets for product announcements and future purchases. While we could debate whether this mindset is good or bad, for this post let’s keep “good” and “bad” out of it. Rather let’s approach the conversation from this viewpoint – if a business views it’s clients and customers merely as targets to be sold to, that business is missing out big time.
As a consultant, a false and dangerous idea for me is to think that I have all the answers for my clients though they have none for me. This could not be further from the truth. In fact there is a metric ton that I can learn from my clients, and I don’t mean simply how to sell them on more products and services.
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A major part of all marketing is creating content for your current and ideal customers that is fun, helpful and informative. One type of content is what you’re seeing right now – the written word.
Dempsey Marketing clients and millions of other folks use WordPress to publish content. And while I love WordPress to a fault it isn’t the best place to write posts. There’s simply too many things to distract you.
For a long time I’ve used tools including Evernote and Scrivener to write the drafts of posts and then copy/paste them into WordPress where I put the finishing touches on them. Scrivener also has a fantastic “typewriter” mode which will keep the text at the top of the screen as you type.
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When my family and I moved to Chiang Mai in July 2011 we looked at a few of the TV packages available. The companies here know what people want, and to get it you need the best package they have. We skipped that and stuck with the free channels, which includes the BBC. Back in the US we watched CNN and one show in particular – Fareed Zakaria GPS.
I was very excited when I found out that I could download, for free, video episodes of Fareed’s weekly show via iTunes. It was going great until one day I noticed that the video segments shrank down to around 7 minutes showing only highlights of the show. Ultimately I found out why – sometime around January 2012 they created a paid subscription for the videos, keeping the audio free.
The backlash was swift and harsh.
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When you log in to any analytics tool, for instance HitSniffer or Google Analytics (or both if you’re a super geek like me) you’re greeted with an overwhelming amount of data. Having this wealth of information at your fingertips is awesome, but it can also hinder you.
When it comes to analytics – less is more. And by less I’m talking about segmenting your visitors like there’s no tomorrow.
I’ve written before about how to create custom segments in Google Analytics so I won’t repeat that (only link to it) however in this post I want to show you how to not be mislead when it comes to seeing where your email subscribers really come from.
