Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

At the Atlanta Online Marketing Summit earlier this week one of the panelists mentioned that the biggest mistake companies and individuals often make in starting a new blog is not doing enough prep work. Specifically prep work includes researching existing blogs within your intended niche or industry and joining the conversation before striking off on your own.

After a recent move to a new city I searched (briefly) for local blogs to get a feel for the city and to keep up on local politics and events but I couldn’t find any. I found it odd that my city didn’t have any bloggers so I decided to start my own blog which I kept up for about a month. Then I started getting pings from other local bloggers that I didn’t even know existed! It turned out there WERE in fact others blogging about my city and they were actually doing a great job. Needless to say that killed my interest in keeping up my own blog and today I’ve abandoned the project entirely. A little extra research could have saved me time and energy.

Once you’ve found other blogs related to your niche or industry it’s a good idea to get involved by commenting on said blogs. It’s a great way to introduce yourself to fellow bloggers and it helps you begin to shape the online conversation. In some cases you may even find others commenting on your comments, giving your valuable market intelligence on your potential audience.

Think about starting a new blog this way: It’s kinda like going to a dinner party where you don’t know the guests. The best thing to do first is to approach a group conversation and to observe - see what kinds of things the guests are talking about and note the tone. Next, try to politely join the conversation - offer agreement with a speaker or ask a question. After you’ve been a part of the conversation for a bit it’s possible to take the discussion in a different direction or to offer a different perspective - but only after you’ve completed the first two steps.

Nope, blogging isn’t rocket science, it’s just a different way of communicating. Use the lessons you learned about conversing in the real world to make your online communications a success!

I suppose every Web 2.0 designer should know the answer to this question but admittedly I did not. We’re working on a redesign for one of our outdoor sites and the design calls for some of the content to be placed in a show/hide div to keep the page neat. I wasn’t sure if this would be a good idea from an SEO perspective so I decided to run a test.

I created a simple page with a medium amount of text visible and outside any hidden divs. I also placed more text within a div containing my target keyword that was set to display: none. This particular page did not contain the requisite javascript link to show/hide the div but I didn’t care - this page wasn’t for users, it was for search engines.

The result: within a week the page was indexed by Google and the hidden div text was picked up along with our target keyword. This is a useful finding for two reasons. First, it means unscrupulous publishers can place unrelated text on a page and keep it completely hidden from users while search engines slurp up the illegitimate content. But it also means that if, for design reasons, you need to place some of your content in a show/hide div arrangement the content is still visible to Google. Our test page hasn’t been picked up by Yahoo! yet but we’ll keep you posted if/when it does.

As with all search engine optimization knowledge, we hope you use this tip for good and not evil

Okay, I admit it - I haven’t been following my own advice over the past two weeks. Back in May I talked about the power of blogging as a marketing tool and I said it’s a good idea to post every week day. My record for the last 10 business days? About 6/10, my worst performance on a blog yet. For that I apologize to my loyal readers

Yesterday I attended the panel discussion at the Online Marketing Summit here in Atlanta and the panelists all agreed that a blog is an important tool for providing industry/niche thought leadership, generating sales leads, and keeping your website content fresh and relevant. One panelist mentioned how at times it might seem like a blog isn’t effective when posts attract few (or no) comments but it’s important to keep the flow of information going for the reasons mentioned above. Just the motivation I needed, perhaps this will help you too!

Of course one way to understand how many readers your blog has on a daily basis is to use an analytics package for your site. It’s also important to track subscribers who may view your content in an RSS reader and I recommend the free Feedburner service (though it’s been a bit unreliable this week for some reason). But comments aren’t everything and you can’t expect to have hundreds of blog readers at launch. Determine the goal of your blog and try to measure your blog’s performance against the metrics that matter to you and your business.

One of the things we learned a few years back is that turning viewers into users is pretty important in growing an online business. As anyone who runs a forum-based website knows it can be frustrating to see so many “lurkers” who simply read the online conversations taking place without ever contributing. On the revenue path, a vistitor usually needs to become a user before they can become a customer - any webmaster’s ultimate goal.

Here are three things you can do to graduate your visitors to users:

1. Offer something of value for free. Some sites promise free stickers in the mail if you sign up for an account, others dangle email coupons for subscribers to newsletter lists. Review App gives registered users access to online features like wish lists and the ability to post photos. Users won’t sign up just to be on your email list - give them a reason to take the next step.

2. Hold out your best content for registered users. This is similar to the idea of offering something of value mentioned above but it can oftentimes have a much larger impact. For example, on one of our web projects we routinely saw about 200 users sign up for accounts each month to access online “members only” features like those above. We then decided to make a key piece of information on our site - directions to bike trails - available only to registered users. We instantly went from 200 registrations a month to 2,000 and today the site is registering more than 100 folks PER DAY! Since the information left off is minor in relation to the other content available our search engine-visible content is  affected very little.

3. Make it easy to sign up for an account. You’ve seen it before - a sign up form that scrolls for pages and pages just to get a free account. Some sites may even require a credit card to start a “free trial” while other sites’ sign up forms are choked with marketing offers for seemingly unrelated items. The shorter your member sign up form, the more likely folks will get through it and become users of your site - so keep it simple! Review App new user forms ask for 2 things: an email address and a screen name - that’s it.

Giving your visitors a reason to become users and making it easy for them to do so is a great way to improve the number of folks entering your transaction funnel. Take a look at your site and see what you can do to increase your user base!

It was all over the news last week - ex-Googlers launched a “Google-killer” search engine that was going to blow away the competition. Morning news shows picked up the story and curious netizens (myself included) flocked to the site causing it to overload in the surge. Co-workers at companies around the country stated “we need to optimize for Cuil” (seriously). So what’s the deal?

From a marketing and online traffic perspective Cuil is mostly a disaster (see the visitor estimate chart from Alexa above). Cuil did a great job generated buzz and PR but clearly people came, they saw, and they never returned. Surely the folks at Cuil expected the launch to kick start their site’s growth but when your product isn’t quite ready for prime time this strategy can backfire.

So what did Cuil do wrong? Here’s are my thoughts:

• Over-promised and under-delivered. The promise was the Cuil answered search queries better, faster, and more thoroughly than existing search engines. Based on my (and others’) tests it failed on all three fronts. Some searches returned zero results where other search engines return thousands; other queries returned strange and irrelevant listings at the top for simple keywords. On top of it all, Cuil was painfully SLOOOOW on launch day.
• Unprepared for launch. Clearly Cuil wasn’t prepared for the curious users who flocked to the site on the first day and this meant the site was slow or unable to load entirely. Bad first impression for customers who may never return.
• Terrible name. Come on - if you can’t afford “cool.com” then pick another name. I won’t remember how to spell your brand, I’m not sure how to say it, and I don’t understand what it even means. Seriously horrible branding.
• Unconventional layout. Yep, there’s a reason search engine listings aren’t laid out “magazine-style.” When folks are searching they’re usually in a hurry to get somewhere else and they’re not interested in curling up on the couch and perusing the listings before going to an actual website. Give users the relevant information with a minimal amount of scrolling and eye movement and they’ll appreciate your service (and perhaps return). The thumbnail photos are terrible as well and most don’t always come from the website that’s being listed. The WORST search engine user experience I’ve seen yet.

Those are the big problems, each one pretty much a company-killer in its own right. Of course time will tell if I’m right to pronounce Cuil dead on arrival - anyone want to take bets on how long it takes?

After writing on the subject of how much webmasters rely on Google earlier this week I realized I forgot to mention the one product that is, in my opinion, the most risky for webmasters: Google Maps. Even if you don’t have a website of your own you’ve no doubt used websites that have integrated Google Maps into the site to help you find directions, locations, etc. It seems that everyone is using Google Maps these days including some big companies like Zillow and Trails.com.

But is this wise? First of all, let’s consider why Google created Google Maps in the first place. It would be nice to think Google built an open mapping application to help out small business owners but in reality Google Maps was created to make money (eventually, somehow). Serving all those map requests and licensing the map data is EXPENSIVE and clearly Google would like to recoup that investment. It’s not obvious how they plan to recoup but it’s safe to guess they will do that through sponsored location marks. That means sites like Trails.com may start to see icons on their maps for Krispy Kreme donut shops or Jiffy Lubes scattered among the trail locations.

Suppose Google doesn’t decide to monetize their maps through location “sponsorships” because advertisers aren’t interested. This won’t be good news either (remember how I mentioned that serving maps is expensive?). In this case Google may decide to pull the plug on the Maps API entirely. Thousands of websites would go dark instantly without any real mapping alternative. There’s no such thing as a free lunch and those who rely extensively on Google Maps for their web operations may be in for a wake up call in the future.

We’ve been tempted to offer further Google Maps integration on our own sites but so far we’ve resisted for the reasons mentioned here. For us this has meant investing in alternative technologies (like professional mapping software from ESRI) and so far it’s worked well to distinguish our services from the competition. Consider who you rely on for the success of your business and make sure you at least have a backup plan - you never know what can happen tomorrow!

If you’re a webmaster who makes a living (or a part time living) through your website, imagine this for a moment: what if Google disappeared? How would it affect your business? As an MBA student at Duke we learned in business strategy classes that over-reliance on a single supplier or partner can be a risky proposition but on the internet in 2008, do we have much of a choice?

Don’t get me wrong, Google is great and I firmly believe the company tries to make good on its promise to “do no evil.” But consider this: What if Google stopped the AdSense program due to ongoing problems with click fraud - how would you monetize your website? Or what if Google started charging the market rate for Google Analytics - say $100 a month? Could you afford to keep using the service?

Even more frightening, consider the power the Google search engine has to direct traffic and customers to your website. We had a bit of a scare with one of our sites just last month when our traffic dropped from around 6,000 visits per day to just over 1,000. Sure enough many of our important keywords had dropped from page 1 to page 7 or worse. If things had stayed that way our business would have been ruined for sure - luckily everything was back to normal after about a day and a half.

E-commerce operators use Google’s Base service to upload products for Google’s product comparison shopping engine; companies and individuals rely on Gmail for critical email communications; Google’s AdWords program drives paid search traffic to millions of websites (though since this is such a money maker for Google I doubt we’ll see this go away any time soon).

The point of all this is to say it’s important to diversify your online partners and suppliers to maximize your business’s flexibility and ability to weather competitive threats. For us this has meant diversifying our ad placement beyond AdSense by partnering with vertical ad networks and shifting paid advertisements to Facebook and other platforms. Google still provides the bulk of our traffic and customers and we love all the free tools they provide - but it’s important to be cautious when relying on such a powerful market leader (as many eBay sellers can attest).

If you’ve been following web development over the past couple years you’ve undoubtedly heard the arguments for separating markup from style information. You know, instead of using tags like <font> and <b> you should be using <span> and applying formatting via CSS. Great advice for sure - but what do the search engines think?

For this test we decided to see whether markup or style could communicate the importance of a single keyword to the search engine crawlers. In our test we created 3 pages: the first contained our keyword with no markup or styling, the second contained the same keyword but placed within bold tags (<b></b>), and the third contained the keyword within <strong> tags. Common wisdom is that <strong> is the better choice because it is markup (rather than a specific style) and thus communicates something (importance) about the words other than how they should look.

Anyway, the result: the search engines still prefer bold to strong. In fact, this is the first time in all our tests that both Google and Yahoo! agree - bold is more important than strong. Interestingly neither search engine picked up our page without any emphasis on the test keyword.

What does this mean? For me it means that I’m not quite ready to start replacing all my bold tags with strong tags. Honestly I understand and agree with the need for separating markup from style information. But it’s just too convenient to simply slap a <b> around a couple words than to go through the trouble of defining a style and calling it via <span class=”important”> or even <strong> which is 3 times as long as good old <b>. Funny thing is, it looks like for now Google and Yahoo agree with me