Joel Pinkham

Excellent blog post/video on SEOmoz – read Danny’s article over at SEOmoz.

Big Jake (aka Jakob Nielsen, usability guru), wrote an article in 2005 about 10 common blog design mistakes. Sadly, 5 years down the track a lot of them are still common. I’m guilty of a few of them, and although it’s only basic stuff it’s extremely common for blogs to look past these simple things.

The biggest takeaway for me: Don’t hide your “classic hits”

Do you have some blog posts you’re really proud of? How easy can someone find these from your homepage? Perhaps try adding a sidebar widget to promote your best work, or even a feature above your blog posts on your homepage (easy if you have Wordpress). Luckily for me, everything I blog is rubbish so it’s not an issue.

Remember when someone comes to your blog homepage – they most likely want to know about you. It’s not always the most relevant for the first thing they see to be  your latest blog post. What if your last post was a YouTube video of talking animals? What does that say about you?

What should you do now?

I’m not the expert on it – so you should probably just read his article. But my favourite quote (and I admit to being one of this people)

Many weblog authors seem to think it’s cool to write link anchors like: “some people think” or “there’s more here and here.”

But I think it’s bollocks, and these types of comments are fast becoming my pet peeve.

I’ve just read a blog post about the value of a Facebook user (the rest of this rant won’t make sense unless you read that).

I have a habit that always makes me want to argue anything that’s come from someone biased, so here’s why I think this “detailed” report was a waste of time:

• It takes 18 pages to make the point that a Facebook fan spends more & and engages with you more. Here I was thinking that if someone was my fan then they hated my company.
• It puts a value on the average Facebook fan and then throughout the report it constantly states the obvious by explaining that every company has a different value for a Facebook fan. To me this basically says “the value is $136, but not really”. It’s merely a number to catch headline and for the social media racquet to pull out and impress in pitches and presentations.
• The recommendations are written as general as a horoscope “Loyalty, Spend, Recommendation, Fan Acquisition Cost, Affinity, and Media Value are the key factors that impact fan value. Brands need to develop strategies that address these areas”. In other words, develop the perfect business and the value of your Facebook fan will be higher.

Of course a Facebook fan is valuable, they’re your fan and they’re wearing it on their virtual sleeve.

But don’t believe the hype. My problem is that reports and articles like this have caused a common mentality of “wow, I need to get a Facebook fan page!!” as if it’s the magic answer, but it can easily turn into a meatball sundae. A lot of companies would be better off using their time thinking about how to make something remarkable enough that people genuinely become fans of.

The real value of a Facebook fan – it’s the perfect medium for your true “fans” to spread the word for you. Your happy customers have been doing this for centuries, Facebook just makes it easier for them to do so and much more effective for you.

Integrated Marketing Communications: one of those terms that marketing people throw around but are usually too lazy or in too big of a company to actually do it properly. This safety video is one of the best examples of integrated marketing I’ve ever seen.

The video ties in with their latest ad campaign and strongly communicates the positioning to an extremely captive audience, we weren’t escaping anywhere.

Extremely captivating, you can’t take your eyes off it. Although supposedly no 2 planes are the same, every single safety video is. This video however, is memorable and stands out from the boring stuff we’re used to while impatiently waiting to take off and reach our destination.

5.3 million views on YouTube so far, obviously others feel the same way as me.

When search engine optimisation (SEO) is the main part of your business model, chances are you spend too much time trying to get traffic and not enough time improving your customer experience or building a brand.

I’ve heard plenty of people with “improving rankings” at the top of their list – SEO is one of those things people get caught up with when they don’t even have fundamentals right. It’s an easy trap for small businesses to fall into, but at the same time an easy trap for big businesses to dodge.

Let’s put SEO into perspective – imagine 3 restaurants

First restaurant ranks 1st for “restaurnts in internetville”

They’re going to get a lot of people discovering them this way and maybe even make a few $$$ along the way. Their food is average, nothing exciting and the service makes you yawn.

They’ll do OK but repeat visits and referral business will be lacking.

Second restaurant is invisible in search, but has a great reputation

This is the trendy place you heard about from your trendy friend. Always busy on a Friday night and serves a mean meal.

These guys will do pretty well…until the next trendy place comes along. Repeat visits and referrals will be what they rely on, fresh new business will be hard to come by without an established customer base to pass on the good word.

Third restaurant ranks 2nd for “restaurants in internetville” and has a good reputation

I think it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with my point. The 3rd restaurant of course wins the race.

Without good cusomer acquisition tactics (of course SEO is a big one) your business will peak and die as the trends do. With ONLY good acqusition tactics, you’re never going to grow organically.

So the point is: you do need both SEO & customer satisfaction to be significant. Thanks Captain Obvious.

There are a lot of Dotcoms who need SEO to survive as a business – to me they are the rats of the industry. The dodgy corner convenience stores of the web. Why would you want to be one of those?

With Facebook overtaking Google in terms of traffic, there’s an obvious increase to the importance of recommendations from friends over pure SEO. But Google is definitely not going away, you just need to be more accountable for your product/service.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is a huge factor in any online business and something that can’t be ignored. While it presents a bunch of opportunities, by itself it’s not a sustainable strategy to run a company by.

These guys have been producing these videos for years now. It’s always amazing to see the latest stats, but apart from being cool and having a wow factor, it mystifies “social media” even further.

While I love these videos, they beat around the bush when it comes to business. Social media shouldn’t really make any change to “good” businesses, social media just makes it even more important to run a business well.

The main thing to take away is that you need to be very good at what you do and keep happy customers who are happy to endorse you. Of course this is nothing new, it’s just word of mouth…on crack.

Social media is simply the way the message about your product/service spreads quickly – positive or negative. These stats show just how quick the message can spread.

I’ve been on the cusp of launching a new website for 2 weeks now and while it was a very tight deadline it’s always frustrating when you need to push it out.

For websites the 80/20 rule is more like the 90/10 rule.  10% of the project tasks takes 90% of the time – but most importantly though it’s worth 99% of the success of your website.

I wanted to share (and keep a reminder to myself) a couple of things I’ve learned over the course of this website project:

Plan more time for the finishing touches than the actual development

No-ones perfect, particularly not when developing websites. When planning a timeline, allow more time for tweaks, bug fixes and most importantly improvements and optimisation than the core development.

This is the mistake I’ve just made and won’t ever do it again!

Expect that your initial requirements are going to change

In the past I’ve spent a lot of time putting together functional spec docs to communicate to agencies and it just doesn’t work – there’s so many better ways. For any web savvy business this model can’t move fast enough.

I’m now much more keen on the idea of using cheaper dev resources and when you get a new idea after something is done you can actually act on it.

I don’t know much about it but had a bit of a chat to a friend about Agile Development on the weekend and I think it’s something I need to invest some time in learning.

Use as many external sources for testing as possible

When you don’t have the luxury of focus groups or actual user testing, this can be tough. But for testing this website – I’m sending it to as many people around the office as possible that are far removed as well as to some good fellows in Pakistan who are going to spend the hours on testing that we simply couldn’t afford the time or to pay a local agency charging their exorbitant fees.

Don’t lose sight of the results

It’s easy to be burnt out on a project, I’m well over this website but as soon as I remind myself that the most exciting part is seeing the improved results and actually marketing the website I’m excited again.

All of that hard work at the start will go wasted if you don’t give the same attention to detail at the end.

I’m proud to say out of all of the many websites I’ve worked on over the years, this is by far the best. It’s also been the most rushed with the lowest budget and there’s only 2 of us working on it but the fact that we’ve constantly improved it means that it’s something a lot better than we first envisaged.

Plus, doing it so cheaply – with what we’ve saved on development we’ve used on persuasion architecture consulting and marketing.

I’m confident at the end of the day it’s going to be the winning formula. Now I’ve just got to get back to work and get the new site up and running! To my valued 29 subscribers, I will post the link when it’s done.

It's now a cliche

It’s everywhere. Everyone has “trendy” icons plastered all over email/web marketing materials lately. “Find us on Facebook”, “Follow us on Twitter” or a “View me on LinkedIn”. It’s at the stage where it’s become noise.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have an issue with people and companies “trying to connect with their audiences” but it’s pretty obvious a lot of it is done because they think they should or because someone else is doing it.

With so much media attention on Twitter lately, management types who likely don’t understand what’s happening will put the pressure on underlings to “setup a twooter” or perhaps make a “bookface fan page”. If everyone else is doing it, we HAVE to do it to stay competitive. Perhaps not a good philosophy.

The best example of it I’ve seen is with the ATO (Australian government tax organisation – same as the IRD or IRS). You can become a fan of completing a tax return using their e-tax software. Exciting stuff, people everywhere want to be a fan of tax returns.

Last time I saw it had 550 fans. In the scale of things, with 20+ million people in Australia and let’s say 10 million of those completing tax returns, it’s nothing. Why bother?

So what do I think you should do?

Evaluate if it’s going to really going to make a difference. Then make sure you’re going to follow through with it, so many people (including myself) might start something and not continue.

If you don’t understand what it is – try getting into something like Twitter on a personal level. Understand the dynamics of the twitter community so you can figure out how to leverage it for your company.

I haven’t followed through with Twitter myself, but notice I don’t promote my Twitter account?

I’ve just finished my first outsourced web project, and I don’t know how I could ever go back to paying a full rate. We paid US$15 an hour and after simply providing designs to get a Magento customisation, within a couple of weeks we had a fully functioning store made exactly to spec. Brilliant.

With a local agency on the other hand we would’ve paid a fortune, it would’ve taken longer and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more of an issue.

It’s definitely changed my outlook – as long as you don’t need the advice and experience from a digital agency, why not outsource?