news, search terms, and search engines

Keeping in mind that my blog still gets very few visitors, I am getting a fair amount of traffic from search terms, almost all for the 100 Fastest Growing Companies list I posted here. The only post that beats that out for views is my post about why wordpress is not good for business blogs.

The lesson for bloggers is a) make sure your post titles get in to the url, b) talk about news or c) talk about continually important issues, like wordpress and business blogs.

Notice that most of that traffic is not dependent on whether I am saying anything smart. It is dependent on who is talking about the same thing. Do a google search on ‘100 fastest growing companies puget sound.’ I am the top link. Now, not many people search for that phrase, but for those who do, they see me as the expert.

A first place in google means someone knows what they are talking about, right? In this case, yes, I give the list of 100 companies.

The challenge for you is to find those unusual search terms that can yield highly qualified traffic. Overall, 10% conversion may be acceptable for a PPC (pay-per-click, as in search engine advertising) campaign. But find a niche keyword, and you can get 25% and above.

when it’s okay to lie

I just lied to someone, I stand to benefit if they believe me, and I am not sorry.

One company I know has a web address that is a .org. The .com would of course be better- I still accidentally type in .com half the time.

The .com site is owned by someone else and is just a placeholder, making money (don’t know how much) through ads.

The aboveboard way to go about this would be to have me in my official capacity or the firm that wants the domain to contact whoever currently owns the name, and ask the price. The results would be in the many thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars, because the seller would be able to determine (correctly) that we could afford that kind of price if we wanted to.

Instead, I pretended to still be in college and working on a class project. To hopefully get a price that is less than $1k.

There is no question that, applied to daily business, this is totally unethical. Lying to get a good deal is wrong, wrong, wrong.

So why do I feel so differently about this that I am posting it, opening myself up for criticism?

In short, I believe there is some kind of property right in domain names. The courts agree- we could force the current owner to give up the domain to us, unless it happened to be their name or their business name, both very unlikely. So instead of the direct, confrontational approach, I opt for the quick and dirty approach, that gets us what we want, which we would have gotten through a legal challenge anyways, but still gives the current owner something.

Note that they would not get anything if we were able to get it through a legal challenge.

So, I am basically trading a lot of time and psychic energy, and my ability to say that I never lie in business, in order to get the domain to the people who have a right to it, while rewarding those who were smart enough to claim it in the first place.

Discuss.

Also, what if it was your domain, you could make a legal challenge for $3k and get it because it is your name, but you can misrepresent yourself (lie) and get it for $500 and far less time. Or you could buy it outright for $10k (this is not a made up number- if the seller knows who you are, and you have cash, this could be a reasonable price). What would you do?

jory the connecter

I had great fun last night talking with Jory and crew from BlogHer, the women’s blogging network. They had a get-together after the first main day of the Blog Business Summit.

I got to meet Jory, Elisa, and Kristin, who is new to the team. I also got to meet various of the bloggers.

After drinks and hour d’oeuvres, we had dinner with a whole slew of folks there for the summit. I got to talk a fair amount with a bunch of interesting people. Mark (he is on the left in the picture) had great stories to tell of his 12 businesses he has built.

I didn’t get to here that much about what Anna does as Director of Marketing at GiveMeaning, but we need to get together so I can hear more. And, this tells you how on the ball she is, I got an email from her at 1:59am this morning. So after the last of us left the restaurant around 11:30, she must have went to her hotel and started contacting everyone she had met. As I said, I need to hear more.

I got to talk with Jim who runs an early stage venture capital fund.

I met others as well, and a few people had run out of business cards by the end of that day. I expect I will hear from many of them next week.

Here are the take-homes from this event:

a) Talking with people in other businesses about what they have been through and hearing advice on your own business is really really fun.

b) You don’t have to have a lot of years in business to tell a good story.

c) If you have not checked out BlogHer, then you are missing the boat. So go read about it. Right now.

d) Everyone should be blogging. Really. You don’t know how much it is hurting you that you are not blogging right now. Get started at Blogger.

e) It is fun to work for a company where people are impressed with the clients. I had not heard of our client AmericanStationery.com before I got this job, but everyone else has. And it means something to them.

f) Most of the BlogHer women are married. Tough.

g) I need to be at the BlogHer Business ‘07 in NYC, and probably so do you.

And to get back to the title, thank you to Jory for inviting all those who hang at BlogHer.org. A great night, more good contacts, and probably more than a few good new clients. Thanks!

pleased to meet you

You think I would understand this by now, being in client services and all, but it surprised me a bit when we talk with a client this morning by phone who expressed how pleased he was to talk with us, to meet us.

Now, we had emailed back and forth, but never talked. Or rather, our boss and his boss had talked, but not us. So now we know what each other sound like, and have a good sense of where the other is at, how happy they are with where the project is at.

We also both got extra information that the other may have deemed not important enough to include in an email, and yet colors the situation in an important way. As in, there is this other project following yours, so we need the site to get done before we can start this other thing.

So besides doing a good job, clients want contact. And they don’t get it much. So give them a call, just to say that everything is all good.

how to say thank you

Today at Service Untitled they are talking about how to say thank you.

One tack we are going to work on is getting company postcards, so after a client meeting, we can go that little bit further in saying thanks.

How can you thank you clients in a way unusual for your industry?

why we settle for poor marketing

Fear and lack of imagination. Read Seth for yourself.

Where else does his logic apply?

#76 fastest growing blog today

would be our very own All For You- the client services blog.

I found this out by looking at the WordPress dashboard, under blog stats, and looking at my referrers.

Thanks everybody!

what i do

Start talking about the marketing side of things, the part we get to after main site design is done, and I start smiling. At least that is the evidence from a recent meeting. The big boss noticed that I was grinning like an idiot. I thought (afterwards) of how best to explain what exactly I do.

During the design and development stage of rebuilding a site, I keep the clients up to date on what is going on. I manage expectations. When they have low level questions, like “How do I make my CMS do this?” I answer them. Actually, if it is a fairly technical question, I find the person who knows, get the answer, make sure it is in plain english, and then relay that answer to the client.

If the question is high level, like “Should I try to compete in this particular market over here?” then they talk to Ian, and I get to listen in and offer my thoughts.

In this first stage, I am performing a function. And it is fun, because I get to help people understand what is going on. At that meeting, we talked about URL redirects and how they should be. The boss claimed he was an idiot with this, and wanted it in plain english. So I said:
“I call person A, she answers, I find out who she is. I call person B, the code routes me through to person A again, but I am expecting person B, so I am not happy. That is what you have now. What you want is, when I call person B, their message machine says that I should really be talking with person A, and gives me their number.”

And he was happy. Because, when put in language you understand, URL redirects are not complicated- it is more of a language barrier thing than a requires technical background thing.

So design and development is fun because I get to help people understand stuff.

But then, when the site is mostly finished, we get to work on the marketing stuff. SEO, PPC, maybe landing pages… and here I both get to help people understand what is going on as well as play a direct part in making them money. Also, I understand a lot more of this aspect of what we do. I don’t have to ask anyone about what a landing page is supposed to do, so I can answer client’s questions immediately.

And I get to see a direct impact on sales. Did this ad work? Did that landing page work? How can we tweak this? These are all questions I can sink my teeth into. And, more than being a conduit and a translator of information, I can have a greater impact.

So what do I do? I help people understand their project during all phases, and I help make them more money.

Now that is fun.

crayon: new marketing company has headquarters online, in second life

The problem with a company of people from all over is how to bring them together. The new marketing company crayon is doing that in Second Life (think The Sims + World of Warcraft).

So the employees can all meet together even as they live far apart, within their headquarters online. For me, I wonder when I can meet clients avatar-to-avatar. Cheaper than face-to-face, but better than just being on the phone.

Thanks to Shel for the story.

kinko’s part three: becky comes through

So we have business cards. They are not high quality, and we will go to a professional house soon to get nice ones done, but they will work for tonight. Becky came through.

5 minutes this morning, not more than 20 minutes of Anna’s time designing the cards, 10 minutes of our time to drop them off, 5 minutes of my time to pick them up. Done right, the first time, fast, with no exceptions. Of course, it wasn’t Kinko’s first time, but it was Becky’s first time. And she came through. She completely met all my expectations on the first go.

The next time I have a rush job: “Hello, this is Brian with Portent, is Becky available?”

PS The Kinko’s in question is at:
112 Andover Park E # A, Tukwila, WA
(206) 244-8884
Ask for Becky.