Then again, will readers as a whole be made obsolete by projection glasses, as Epson have just released? The glasses look absolutely ridiculous, so maybe we’ll have handheld devices for a while yet — at least until we have LCD contact lenses.

Either way it shows that reading is alive and well, despite the constant cries to the contrary.

What’s so special about it? Why did it go viral? Is it just because the writer is 85 and uppity internet-dwellers are laughing at her naïveté in reviewing such a “mundane” restaurant? Or is it because the review is so refreshingly honest and un-cynical that it’s particularly noteworthy?

Unfortunately I think the answer is the first one, especially going by the news hosts’ condescending demeanor (Oh ho ho, look at this little old lady who’s so impressed with plain old Olive Garden! How cute!). I get the impression that people have been sharing this review because they’re laughing at the uncultured Grand Forkians (Forkites?) who are  just happy to have a new place to eat in town. If it were a sushi restaurant, would the review have been so popular? I doubt it. In this case it looks like people are just being snide.

Here’s the video from the link above:

Are prospective clients online?

The first, and arguably most important, question seems ridiculous — are the people willing to buy your product or service actually online and using search engines? If your business serves a demographic that isn’t online very often and doesn’t know what a Google is, your money may be better-spent elsewhere. As the population in general becomes more tech-savvy this will be less of an issue, but for now it’s still an important consideration.

What are they searching for?

Once you’ve determined that there are customers to be found online, you have to figure out how to reach them. Since text ads are contextual, i.e. show ads that are relevant to the user’s search, you have to determine what your customers-to-be are searching for to give your ads the best chance of showing up. There are a number of tools you can use, most notably Google’s Trends and the Keyword Tool built into AdWords (Google’s text ad service).

It’s easy to get lured into vague, untargeted keywords but that will usually prove to be a money pit. Target specific queries and design multiple ad variants rather than a generic one — it’s more work upfront but it will save you (and make you) money in the long run because you’re going after people who are searching for very closely related terms rather than overly broad ones that won’t convert.

Landing pages

Far too many PPC ads suffer from the elementary mistake of pointing the visitor to the target site’s homepage. While that may seem like a good idea at first glance you’re wasting money by not using a targeted landing page.

Let’s suppose you sell plumbing supplies online and you nave PPC ads for “buy copper pipe”. A user has clicked your ad and made it to your site — great! Now he has landed on your homepage where he must get his bearings and find his way to the copper pipe section. Will he bother? Maybe not.

The better approach would be to build a page for each PPC ad group — copper pipes in this case — and point the ads to that page. At the very least, point the ads to the “copper pipe” section of your site. That’s far more relevant to the user’s search and he’s much more likely to find what he’s looking for.

Optimize the website and landing page

If you’re paying Google to get people to visit your site, don’t burn that money with a website that’s confusing and hard to navigate. Make sure your website — and the landing page in particular — have good content, a nice design, and most importantly a clear call to action. Once the visitor is on the page, don’t leave them wondering what you want them to do. That’s essential in web design in general, but it’s doubly important when building a successful PPC campaign.

Email converts so well because people already know you. They went to your website, read a bit about who you are and what you do, and willingly gave you access to their inbox in return for something special.

Disclaimer: Talking about how great you are isn’t special. Linking out to your TV commercial on YouTube isn’t special. If you don’t think anybody would pay for what’s in the email, it probably isn’t worth sending.

That may seem excessive — why give away something people would pay for for free? — but that’s what marketing has come to. Think of those few lost dollars as a part of your marketing budget. Rather than paying for direct-mail pamphlets or a billboard you can use that money to send out something really useful to people on your email list.

Most email newsletters are either educational or provide some kind of discount (e.g. coupons). The latter is generally easy to implement (and sell!) but good educational content is more challenging because it can be difficult to avoid excessive self-promotion. A well-crafted how-to video is a perennial classic, but it should be more “documentary” than “infomercial” if you don’t want people to unsubscribe en masse. Don’t squander that precious mailing list once you’ve built it!

Unsurprisingly this has caused an outcry from Facebook and Twitter (among others) since the only social media platform that benefits from this very preferential placement is Google+. A review of the legality and anti-competitiveness of this is pending.

Setting aside the questionable ethics of this move, Google have opened up a solid opportunity for people (and businesses) to get more exposure in search results. The feature’s future remains unclear — Google may be forced to remove it altogether, or they may blend in other social media — but either way it’s worth your time to use it.

Basically, it means a small picture of you will show up atop the page if your profile contains information relevant to the user’s search. You must have some kind of connection to that person on Google+ for that to work.

Say we were in each other’s circles and you searched for “moncton logo design” — you’d see my Google+ profile pic at the very top of the page with the label “in your circles”. It’s subtle, but it’s prime real estate. The catch-22 is of course that you need to be in people’s circles if you want this to work, but you should already have a solid social media strategy in place before thinking about Google Plus Your World anyway.

Many business sites at one point or another used Flash to some extent. Some were even built completely in Flash, where the entire site — menus and all — was basically one huge interactive animation. Glittery graphics and flashy transitions abounded. Having looped background music was very cool (actually, no, it wasn’t).

Now, like horse-drawn carriages or AOL, it has reached the end of the line. The internet has evolved dramatically in a direction almost completely opposite from what Flash does. It has now become a liability to have it on your site and almost all that it offers can be replicated using better, more modern tools. Furthermore, its drawbacks tend to outweigh whatever benefits it provides:

Site speed

Flash animations are almost always bulkier than their alternatives. People may have been willing to stare at a “Loading!” bar for 10 seconds in 2002 but nowadays visitors expect a website to appear almost instantly. We don’t even want to wait for a video to load, much less sit through a gratuitous intro animation with a company logo flying around with fireworks in the background (if you have something similar on your website, please take it offline and email me right now).

Search Engine Unfriendly

A Flash animation is a closed box with a window on it. Google can’t see the nuts and bolts inside, which means it can’t properly index the site. The reasons why that’s bad are pretty self-explanatory, especially if you’re hoping to draw in new customers with a good ranking.

This is especially bad if your whole site is built in Flash — Google will only be able to index the homepage, and it will be almost impossible to rank for any relevant keywords. You may as well have no website at all.

Unnecessary

A lot of things that people have used Flash for should be avoided (like the aforementioned intro animation) and the rest can be done in other ways. If you want a fancy-looking menu with nice drop-downs and colours you can do it with CSS, which is much (much!) more efficient than Flash and still allows your site to be search-engine friendly. If you want video you can use an HTML5 player or embed a YouTube video (which admittedly uses Flash, but at least it’s hosted off-site and has no adverse impact to your own webpage).

So Now What?

If your site was designed in the early ‘00s it almost certainly uses Flash in one way or another. Setting aside the fact that if your site is that old it probably needs a revamp anyway, you should especially do so if it makes extensive use of flash. If it’s just a video here and there then you’re probably fine, but if your navigation is all-Flash (or your whole site!) you really aren’t doing yourself any favours and should strongly consider bringing your website up-to-date.

Back in the day (which in internet terms means just a few years ago) everyone saw the same search results. If I (in Moncton) and someone in Florida searched for something we would both see the same 10 results in the same order. If a business was ranking at #7 we would both see it in that same position.

That isn’t the case anymore. In their efforts to make search results more relevant, Google have woven in an a variety of metrics and factors that affect and greatly modify those ten search results (that may not even total 10 anymore). Those factors include your location, your search history, whether or not you’re logged in to your Google account, and who your Google+ friends are — and those are just the factors we know about. Beyond that there are now images, videos and local results crowding that first page, so much so that sometimes you can’t even see the “organic” links. That all means it’s highly unlikely that two people will see the same search results, even in the same geographic area (or in the same house!).

Of course that doesn’t mean it’s no longer important to have a good ranking — the top three still get the lion’s share of clicks — but it’s less important and far less measurable than it used to be. Take a more holistic approach rather than rigging your site to reach that top spot. You can still game the system but it only works in the short term and it probably won’t bring in more money either way.

Conversion rate isn’t relevant to every website, but it applies (or should apply) to most. The notable exception are purely informative sites but even those sometimes include some kind of call to action (Donate! Sign Up!). Wikipedia doesn’t usually have a clear sales funnel but they’re currently asking for donations on every page and they’re certainly tracking the conversion rate of each ad. The creepy ones with its founder Jimbo Wales probably weren’t doing so well and now they have different ads with programmers and contributors.

Conversion is a vague term and you can apply it to pretty much any metric you want to track. For example, on my site I can track how many people land on my home page and how many move on to my contact page. I also know how many have contacted me (obviously!) so it’s easy to see if there’s a bottleneck in that funnel. If I have 500 visits to my home page and 200 on the contact page page but only 1 person actually contacted me, it’s pretty obvious that it’s the contact page itself that is scaring people off somehow.

Conversion is something you should always track and tweak. Split Testing (also known as A/B testing) is an excellent way to optimize your conversion, and the flexibility of the online medium allows us to do that much more easily than other methods of advertising. It’s possible to randomly split visitors into groups as they hit your site and show them different versions of your webpages. That can be something as simple as changing the text on a button (which can have a surprisingly large impact) or showing them a completely different page design. It’s best to test small changes incrementally though — if your test pages are completely different you have almost no way of knowing which specific changes are affecting your conversion.

This may all seem like a tedious process (and in many ways it is) but it’s well worth it. There’s a fair bit of planning and analysis involved but making just a few small changes, whether it’s changing a button’s label from “Call Us” to “Contact Us”, or moving a search box from the right to the left side, can double the leads you receive from your website — and who wouldn’t want to double their amount of incoming customers?

Standup comic Louis C.K. is a pretty successful guy. He has a strong following. Like many stage acts he has released videos of his live performances. These have mostly taken the form of conventional DVDs (or BluRays now) that go through multiple steps of production and distribution. A DVD typically runs between $20 and $30 but the artist only sees a few dollars of that if he’s lucky, or he is paid a lump sum upfront and the profits from individual units are distributed to the people farther down the chain.

What Louis did is brilliant and refreshing in its simplicity. He financed the recording of his show himself (to the tune of $200 000), did his own video editing, and released the show as a download on his website for $5. There’s no DRM — the only “security measure” was Louis asking fans not to pirate the video.

And they didn’t.  As I write this he has exceeded $1M in profit (in 12 days!) from people who paid their five dollars to download the show. There’s no record label and no big marketing machine, just the artist himself who paid a film crew out of pocket, edited the footage himself on his laptop and made it available on his site through a simple storefront. Every purchase is pure profit for him now (except maybe a few cents worth of bandwidth) and his fans are happy — they can watch the video for $5 instead of $20 or more!

And he managed that without treating his fans like criminals by imposing copy protection or anything of the sort. He was honest and upfront, telling people he financed the whole thing himself and to please play nice. He offered people something they want at a good price. He spoke to people directly on Reddit. He was honest and respectful to his fans and they treated him in kind. Isn’t it great how that works?

So why am I posting this diatribe online? I think there’s a business lesson to be learned here.

Some businesses are fortunate enough to grow to a point where they have fans — not just repeat customers but real fans, people who talk about them to all their friends, the kind of people who have Apple stickers on their car or won’t drink anything but Starbucks. Very few companies ever get to that point — like a band, you have to win them over with consistently great songs (er… products or service) year after year, and you need a strong brand. Like Tom Petty (and the Heartbreakers, who deserve more recognition!) you may get to the top of that pyramid where everyone knows who you are and nobody speaks ill of you.

If people like you so much that they put you on that pedestal, don’t piss them off. You don’t operate in a vacuum. If it weren’t for his fans, Tom would probably still be playing his local bar on weekends. I’m sure his first few concert tickets were a lot less than $200, and even accounting for the extra road crew and smoke machines that price seems extortionate. We saw Rush crank out a 27-song, three-hour set a few years ago for less than $80 apiece (in seats equivalent to those that are $183.50 for Petty in Halifax) and I’m sure the latter’s tour doesn’t have much more overhead, especially factoring in the cost of Neil Peart’s drum kit. If fans have stuck by you for all these years, don’t gouge them just because you can. Not only are you alienating your customers, it’s just the wrong thing to do.