Internet Marketing for Independent Professionals

I went to a web-design talk presented by Refresh Seattle last night. I had heard good things about their previous events and was looking forward to seeing what the presenter had to say.

Kevin Tamura of Blue Flavor gave a good talk on the design process, using a case study of his redesign of the Refresh Seattle website. Kevin seems like a nice guy and certainly knows his stuff when it comes to HTML, CSS, the graphic design process, typography, color, design tools like Photoshop, and web-page layout. But I’ve got to admit that I was put off by the lack of a strategic vision and/or an explicit business rationale for the redesign.

As a business strategist, I was put off by the lack of a clearly stated business intention for the site and its redesign. Granted, this is a small site for a small audience and was done pro bono. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to think through your business intentions (announce events? promote events? showcase prior speakers? link to presenters’ websites? link to related content? demonstrate content-area expertise? articulate the organization’s mission?) before undertaking any design project.

As a content strategist, I was put off by the fact that the redesign called for a one-page site. How about archiving info on old events so that folks know what you’re about and so that search engines have more content to index so that they can infer what your organization does?

As a web usability advocate, I was put off by the lack of consideration for sight-impaired users. Web usability best practices call for fonts that the user can resize, but the design he showed uses fixed-pixel-size text sizes. It also uses unconventional “navigation” (if one can navigate a one-page site), including a confusing, albeit clever, block of text that flips back and forth between presentation info and the presenter’s bio.

Anyhow, this event got me thinking about the importance of taking a strategic approach to internet marketing. I’ll write more about this soon because I’m tired of seeing friends and colleagues waste their hard-earned money on sites that show off the skills of the designer or programmer that built them rather than helping them achieve their business goals. I want to make it clear that I don’t think that folks like Kevin are malicious or poorly motivated; they are simply ignorant of, or indifferent to, internet marketing best practices, which is what this blog is all about.

So what can you as a bodywork professional do with this information? Well, I strongly suggest that you always keep your business objectives at the forefront when you undertake any design or technical project. It’s very easy to succumb to the esthetic vision of a designer or the leading-edge technical prowess of a programmer, but always ensure that those whiz-bang factors take a back seat to your business priorities.

Ever wonder why you buy stuff you don’t need? Why you find yourself driving away from a dealership in a car that you paid too much for? Why otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people would join a cult? Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion can help you understand these and other situations in which people influence each other.

This is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read. The author, Robert Cialdini, has incredibly broad and deep social psychology knowledge and a constantly fresh curiosity about why people behave as they do. Unlike many academics, his writing style is clear and engaging, so the book is actually fun to read.

Cialdini identifies six “Weapons of Influence.” Each of these weapons is based on predictable human responses in various situations. He calls the people who apply these weapons to their work - sales people, marketers, fund-raisers, et al. - “compliance professionals.”

1. Reciprocation obligates you to future repayment of gifts, favors, invitations, etc. Reciprocation explains all kinds of interesting behavior, like why in 1985 Ethiopia, which was desperately poor and in the throes of war and famine, would send $5,000 to earthquake victims in Mexico City. It turns out that Mexico had sent Ethiopia aid in 1935. Fifty years later, “the need to reciprocate had transcended great cultural differences, long distances, acute famine, and immediate self-interest.” Reciprocation also explains free samples in grocery stores and how airport solicitors like the Hare Krishnas are successful, as well as more subtle ideas, like the “gift” of a sales person backing away from selling you a high-priced item to sell you a lower-priced one.

2. Commitment and Consistency uses our desire to behave, or to appear to behave, consistent with what we have already done or said. Cialdini cites research that shows that if you leave valuables by your beach blanket and stroll away, observers to a staged theft will intervene only about 20% of the time, but if you simply ask someone nearby to keep an eye on your things the intervention rate rises to 95%. This idea also explains why so many American soldiers appeared to collaborate with their Chinese captors during the Korean war and why college-fraternity hazing rituals are so resilient in the face of public criticism.

3. Social Proof is inferring from others’ behavior how we should behave. The laugh track in a TV sit-com tells us that we should laugh, and we do, even if we know that it’s a contrivance designed to make us laugh. Evangelical preachers have been known to seed their congregation with “ringers” who bear witness at pre-arranged times in a service. It also explains disturbing phenomena like the infamous Kitty Genovese murder in New York City in 1964. Dozens of her neighbors witnessed the brutal and prolonged attack that killed her, but none of them called the police. Many social scientists and commentators at the time ascribed their inaction to apathy and urban depersonalization, but Cialdini offers another possibility; because all of the observers were looking for “social proof” of a problem from those around them, and since none of them offered any, no one did anything. This “pluralistic ignorance, ‘in which each person decides that since nobody is concerned nothing is wrong’” means that the idea of safety in numbers is wrong, that if you’re in trouble you want one person, not several, to happen upon you, and research bears this out. Social proof can also help explain the Jonestown cult mass-suicide and other imitative behavior.

4. Liking is simply the idea that we prefer to say yes to someone we know and like. This explains the success of Tupperware parties (you’re buying from a friend, not the company) and why used-car salesmen will inevitably find several things in common with you (”You’re from Omaha! My wife’s from there.”). It also explains the Good Cop/Bad Cop phenomenon (the Good Cop looks an awful lot like a friend compared with the abusive Bad Cop) and, in the converse, why people make death threats against TV weather people when crappy weather ruins their outdoor wedding.

5. Authority is the idea that we’ll do what people in authority, or who appear to be in authority, tell us to do. It is perhaps best illustrated by the famous Milgram experiment in which research subjects would willingly inflict horrifying amounts of pain on people at the behest of an authority figure. It also explains ad copy like “9 out of 10 doctors use. . .” and the use of TV actors to lend faux authority to a pitch. Authority can be conferred by position, obviously, but also by simply adopting a title; an anonymous call to a hospital ward by someone simply identifying themselves as “Doctor Smith” resulted in 95% of nurses unhesitatingly agreeing to administer an unsafe drug prescription (don’t worry; they were intercepted and told of the ruse before they could actually give the medication). Or you can dress to convey authority; in one experiment, people were more than three times as likely to follow the lead of a jaywalker in a three-piece suit than someone in more casual clothes.

6. Scarcity explains why something that wasn’t even of interest to you 10 minutes ago suddenly becomes urgently desirable, just because you’ve been told that the store is almost out of it (I just fell for this last week, buying my brother a marginally interesting Christmas gift just because it was the last one in stock). Naturally, sales people and other compliance practitioners use this weapon all the time with messages like “Hurry! Ends Sunday,” “Final Week,” “Last Chance to Save,” etc. It also explains why we really, really want stuff that has been banned, censored, or otherwise made scarce, even if we had little interest in it before we learned of the scarcity.

I’m sure I’ll still fall prey to these weapons, but not as often now, since Cialdini ends each chapter with a “How to Say No” section. And, of course, as a marketer and sales person I will ethically employ them. I’m sure they still work, but I would love to hear Caldini’s thoughts on them now (he wrote this book before the dawn of the internet) that media is so much more transparent. Anyhow, this is a great book, a good read, and very useful to both consumers and marketers alike.

It occurred to me the other day that most current internet marketing resources are designed for the hobbyist, the person who enjoys tinkering with their web site, honing their AdWords copy and e-mail offers, and pouring over their Google Analytics reports. Those folks are well served already, so I’m not going to jump on that bandwagon.

This site is for independent professionals and small-business owners who don’t care about internet marketing. Well, you care about it, the same way you care about your Yellow Pages ad, your logo design, or your utilities. But you’re not about to divert time away from your core business activities to learn the intricacies of print advertising, graphic design, or plumbing.

My mission is to help you benefit from the power of internet marketing without having to learn the details of every new business practice and technical advance that comes along. To be honest, I don’t know yet exactly how this will pan out. I will certainly blog a lot about this, and I will flesh out the “Internet Marketing” articles, always aiming to give you non-jargon-ey advice and step-by-step guides to the 20% of internet marketing activities that will give you 80% of the results you need. I may even succumb to the frequent requests I get to offer consulting services (but don’t call me yet).

Stay tuned. . .

Gerry McGovern is clearly excited by the way the web has demystified the economy and empowered consumers. By tapping into their collective wisdom, customers and citizens can make better decisions and finally get big business and government to pay attention to them. As he opened his talk, he contrasted this informed society with the information society we’ve already heard so much about.

But that wasn’t the main point of the event. This presentation was about “customer carewords,” the very small batch of words that describe the main ideas and tasks that customers have come to your web site to learn about or accomplish. These words typically have a positive connotation, and they alway resonate with the customer’s gut impressions of your business. Figuring out what these words are and using them appropriately on your web site can result in big improvements in sales and other web site activities.

One of the biggest disconnects between customers and businesses is the language they each use. Companies have their internal lingo, and it all too rarely meshes with the way customers articulate their needs. Airline customers are looking for “cheap flights,” but airlines continue year after year to promote “low fares.” College students are looking for “career” help, but colleges are pushing “courses.” HR departments push “learning,” but employees are looking for “training.” (This, by the way, is why I’ve always favored search engine marketing over other forms of marketing - in order to effectively promote your web site to search engines and their users, you have to get out of your own head and into your customer’s.) Anyhow, the lesson here is, Use the language of your customer, not your internal jargon, to address your web site visitors.

Gerry has developed a three-step methodology to identify these customer carewords. His system is designed for big enterprises with tons of resources and the ability to poll large numbers of people, so it is of limited use to small businesses and independent professionals, but I’ll talk about it a bit anyway.

His method involves 1) brainstorming and other research to come up with a list of about 100 possible carewords, 2) polling a few hundred site users to see which words they think are most important (you’d be surprised, he says, at how many folks are willing to fill in 100 boxes to indicate their top word choices), and 3) analyzing the results. He says it’s remarkable how consistent the results are - you can pretty much always reliably identify the top 3-5 carewords with a sample size of 100 and the top 10 with a sample of 400. Companies (his clients include Toyota, Rolls-Royce, and the BBC) have seen huge improvements of click-through rates in on-site calls to action by replacing old copy with carewords discovered this way.

I talked with Gerry after the presentation and asked him if he could imagine a way to scale this methodology down for us small-business folks. He couldn’t (it’s survey data, after all, and you need numbers for that), but he’s open to possibly being polled about careword research best practices some time in the future. I urged him to explore the idea of developing a careword research tool, something analogous to WordTracker, but I got the sense that it won’t rise to the top of his to-do list any time soon ;>

A couple of ideas I took home from this talk:

1. Even if you can’t employ Gerry’s detailed methodology in the rigorous way he does, do what you can try to figure out what the “long neck” of your customer’s careword distribution is. That is, try to figure out the top carewords (the “long neck” is the left side of the typical keyword distribution chart that shows the most commonly used terms, the right side being the “long tail” of less-commonly-used terms) that matter to your customers. You’re probably already doing a lot of the stuff in his preparation step if you’re doing keyword research for search engine marketing campaigns (using WordTracker and other keyword research tools, evaluating competing businesses’ keyword strategies, looking at your web analytics data, etc.). Instead of a full-on poll, you can do mini-polls of a few customers at a time and begin to get a sense of which words keep percolating to the top. I’m going to buy Gerry’s book, Killer Web Content, and try to figure out other ways to bring his enterprise-level content strategies to the small-biz world.

2. The search terms that bring customers to a web site are often/usually different from these customer carewords. Someone searching for a “cheap hotel” won’t respond well to a landing page with a headline that says “Stay at Our Cheap Hotel.” Search terms get people to your site. Once they’re there you need to use customer carewords in your calls to action and other content to address their needs in the terms that they expect. Or, as Gerry put it, “Search gets them to your site; carewords take them through your site.”

Steve Krug, a usability expert, gave a presentation in Seattle tonight on web site usability entitled, “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Perfect Web Page.” He says usability comes down to two main things:

1. Use effective “You Are Here” indicators to let readers know where they are in a site. These should be ubiquitous and consistent, and they should be LOUDER than parallel but less important elements on the page. See the way StumbleUpon uses “live” tabs that are brighter than other navigation choices and that blend into the main content background color for a good example of what he’s talking about.

2. Use prominent, well-placed page titles to let users know what the page is about. These titles should, of course, be consistent with the link you clicked on to get there (e.g., if you click on a link that says “Green Blocks” you should land on a page with a prominent title that says “Green Blocks”).

That’s it. Use those two elements consistently across your web site and your site visitors will happily navigate your site.

In the “Stump the Chump” part of the session, he took a look at my new web site, Bodywork U, which he found no major flaws with (though I did leave the presentation with a to-do list of ways to better apply his advice to the site).

In the Q&A session after his presentation, someone asked about the best way to use breadcrumb trails. He said that any one page on a site should have only one breadcrumb trail and that if you link to it from some other place on the site think of it as a cross reference. I love this observation. For one thing it’s the way I’ve always used breadcrumb trails. For another, I love that this now well-established usage works differently than the source of the analogy - that is, a real breadcrumb trail would be a list of the pages you had visited previously to get to the current page.

I also made a small-world connection with Steve after the session. He had mentioned that he went to Boston College, and I know a bunch of BC alumni from my East Coast days, so I asked and, what do you know, it turns out he’s good friends with my pal Jim in Boston.

I ran into a Google ad sales rep at a web usability presentation in Fremont tonight. He offered these tips for creating effective AdWords ad:

1. Use a call to action in your copy. This is a basic ad-writing concept, but it was good to be reminded of its importance.

2. Use dynamic keyword insertion. The syntax is {keyword:_________}. This will put the keyword that the searcher used to get to the page in your ad headline (if it fits; if not, your default copy will appear). This can dramatically improve your click-through rate. One caution I would add here. High click-through rates aren’t all you’re looking for from these ads. Be sure to monitor the conversion rate of these clicks, too. Reflecting the searcher’s interest by putting their words in your headline will certainly improve the CTR, but if your landing page doesn’t actually offer what they’re looking for, it may not get you the conversion you want.

3. Do a lot of A-B testing. Again, this is a pretty basic tactic for evaluating any ad campaign, but it’s so easy to do with AdWords, and the results can be so effective, that it’s good to be reminded to always have this technique in mind.

Yes, it’s completely crazy to do this even as I launch Bodywork U, my new massage education web site, but here it is: 80/20 Internet Marketing.

You know how when you have the exact same conversation approximately two thousand times you realize that maybe there’s something you need to do? In my case the conversation has been with friends who are independent professionals and small business owners, and it typically goes something like this: “Oh, you know about online marketing. Can you build my web site and get it listed at Google?” These are inevitably people I like, even love, and it kills me to leave them at the mercy of their web-developer nephews and other ill-prepared marketing advisers, but I simply don’t have the time to do internet marketing consulting these days (two full-time jobs is plenty).

Theoretically, I could help you get the kind of results that I have with the web site for my Seattle massage therapy practice, but it would cost several thousand dollars and take years. More to the point, it would drive me crazy and impoverish me to do this for you at rates that small businesses are typically able to pay, so the goal of this site is to empower you to do internet marketing yourself. I’ll do this by posting as much info here as I can on how to do the myriad of activities that comprise internet marketing, always focusing on how to do the 20% of work that will give you 80% of the internet marketing results you need.

Qualifications

Why should you pay attention to what I say here?

I’ve been intrigued by, and involved in, the small-business and indie-professional market ever since I developed a magazine prototype for “Home Business” magazine at a summer publishing course 20+ years ago. Since then I have built my own book publishing company, launched or been a principal in several start-up businesses, and run both an internet marketing consultancy and an independent massage practice. I have also hosted regular networking events for independent business people (the Fremont Noodle House Group) for the past ten years. Most of my friends are entrepreneurs, massage therapists, personal trainers, dance teachers, musicians, real estate agents, free-lance writers and editors, and computer consultants. So I know a fair amount about being an independent professional and running a small business.

I have been marketing online since 1989, browsing the web since before it was invented, building web sites since 1994, producing big database-driven publications since 1996, and practicing and writing about search engine optimization and other internet marketing topics since 1998. From 1998 to 2001 I was a senior manager at an internet start-up called workz.com, where I wrote about web design and development and internet marketing and managed several marketing initiatives. After that I was Director of Marketing at another start-up that delivered internet marketing services to small software development companies. And from 1997 to 2003 I consulted with a number of internet start-ups on business planning and search engine optimization. All of this experience has given me a broad and deep background in the business, creative, and technical aspects of online publishing and internet marketing.

What to expect

The idea/hope/plan is to share with you my internet marketing expertise in the form of informational and how-to articles, case studies, and random blog entries. I’m having a lot of fun getting back up to speed on state-of-the-art internet marketing as I launch Bodywork U, and I hope I’ll be able to quickly share many of my findings here for you to use. I’ll also try as often as possible to address the many questions and requests I get from friends (hang on, Michael - help is on the way ;> ) .