Entries from March 2010 ↓

Please note that this is a cross-post with my other blog: 52 Short Stories

Last week, I wrote about the story behind launching my new side project, iL-Logic the webcomic.  However, I thought of myself as a writer long before I launched iL-Logic with Paul.  I’ve been writing outside of work and school for pleasure or for money since the age of about fourteen. While I’m much more satisfied with my career now than I was upon graduating law school, it’s still a far cry from the artist’s lifestyle that I fantasized about as a teen, and yet, I wonder if I didn’t end up exactly where I needed to be.

As much as any artist will tell you that the work itself is the reward, there’s still a big part of himself (that he’s probably buried) that longs to have his work in front of hundreds of eyeballs.  That’s why many aspiring artists end up giving up their craft. They never get there.

I’ll use the launch of iL-Logic as an example.  On March 1st, the day the webcomic was launched, it went quasi-viral.  Before I could announce it on Facebook or Twitter, or even tell friends about it, someone had come across it and submitted it to social bookmarking site Stumbleupon.  On that first day, Stumbleupon accounted for 80% of the site’s traffic, and that first day saw twice as much traffic than my best day on any of my other sites.  If you don’t think Paul and I were elated by that day because we were just doing it for the art, you have too high an opinion of us, and probably of all artists. The bottom line is that all artists get off on seeing their work in front of others.

And what’s the best way to get content in front of eyeballs?  That’s right, marketing.

With the highly competitive nature of just about every industry, the main differentiator between two options will always be the quality of the content, product, service, etc. The best people to create great content and products are the artists and craftsmen (and the best craftsmen are artists). But even a great product needs attention, and for that, artists must once again rely on marketers.

Marketing is becoming a numbers-based science, and that’s a great step for advertisers. Advertisers are sure to get their money’s worth when they’re paying for performance, rather than conjecture. However, it’s not very appealing to artists, who generally speaking don’t love numbers. Talk to a lot of old school ad men, and I bet that a fair bit of them are nostalgic for the times when clients like John Wanamaker knew that, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” That’s because old school ad men were artists at heart, trapped in the bodies of marketers.

Still, “true” artists have always had a certain disdain for marketing.  Whether this stems from a mistaken belief that commercial marketing cheapens the work, or that it equates to “selling out,” or simply because marketing was associated with business, and business was not art.  And so, artists have traditionally stuck to making art, and letting someone else sell it for them.

Agents, publishers, galleries, and other entities whose goal is to take the work of artists and sell it have left most artists poor and desolate. Unless an artist becomes a part of the top 1% in his field, he is unlikely to make a middle-class living off his art using the traditional models.  This is simply because the entities that have existed to sell artists’ works on their behalf have become so bloated that they absorb all of the revenues of the work.

As an example, a writer who spends a year of his life writing a novel can expect to get a paltry advance of perhaps $5,000 to $10,000 on the book, and then will receive royalties, that if he’s lucky may go as high as 10%.  This means the publisher, who is taking the expense of marketing the book keeps 90% of the revenues.  The writer’s agent will then keep 10-15% of whatever the writer makes.  Despite this model, publishers are going out of business, and writers can’t find anyone to publish their work. The model is broken.

The good news is there are alternatives.  There are so many examples of artists doing well for themselves by embracing online marketing techniques:  Hazel Dooney, Hugh Macleod, and John T. Unger, JC Hutchins. To name only a few whose stories I’m familiar with.  These artists have stepped away from the traditional model and market their own work.  They are both artist and marketer.  In so doing, they turn the traditional model on its head, and make it so that the person producing the work is actually receiving the majority of the revenues from its sale.

They are not doing anything magical.  They are simply taking advantage of the cheap publishing platform that the internet has given them and used marketing techniques, many of which are the same ones I write about on a weekly basis, and have enjoyed the fruits of their own labours.

Doesn’t it only make sense that artists should be the marketers?  Who knows the target audience better than the author of a work?  Who is best suited to sell it, if not the person creating it?  If artists want to thrive, they need to become marketers. Not only will it benefit their work, but their previous work as artists will make them better marketers than the rest – their imagination and craft will set them apart.

If you’re a writer, painter, sculptor, photographer, designer, or any other kind of artist, drop me a line.  I’d love to discuss what you’re doing to market your work.

The majority of small businesses don’t plan their online presences. They just happen. This kind of presence is inefficient and ineffective.  Advertisers duplicate efforts in some places, while others offer no benefit.  If we’re agreed that a small business must have an online presence, then the next step is to determine what that presence should look like, and how it should be organized to drive the greatest value. Every part of the advertiser’s presence on the web, should be leading a potential customer further into the conversion funnel.

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of having an online HQ.  From this piece, the rest of the presence will be built.

The small business online HQ needs to accomplish the following things:

1. It needs to have the essential information about the business
2. It needs to accurately reflect the business in both design and content
3. It needs to be optimized for conversion, ie. it needs to sell

In my previous post, I said it didn’t matter what your HQ was, whether it was a full-fledged website, or a social media profile.  I stand by this, as long as the HQ meets the three criteria above, we’re ready to move on to the next step.

Building a good headquarters is a task in and of itself, but even once that’s been accomplished, this is generally where most small businesses stop.  This is most evident when $5,000 are spent on creating a new website, which uses up the entire internet marketing budget for a SMB, and then there is nothing left to promote this site.

An Example of the Failure to Promote the HQ

A colleague of mine uses a classic example, wherein a friend asked him to take a look at the new website he had built for his business.  My colleague looked over the website, was suitably impressed, and then asked, “So, how do your customers find it?”

His friend gave him a blank look.  “Well, the address is on my business card,” he said.

This actually isn’t as bad as it could be, because at least the business owner in this case was promoting the site to existing customers.  Unfortunately, he had invested heavily in creating this site, and had no plan of driving new customers to it.  This is where creating the rest of an online presence comes in handy.

The rest of a person’s online presence will come in the form of outposts. These outposts will exist to provide some value to the user, but ultimately to drive traffic back to headquarters, where a potential sale can be closed.

Suggestions for possible outposts:

1. LinkedIn: If you have a decent sized professional network, your LinkedIn profile is a good place to plant seeds. People in your LinkedIn network may not necessarily be your potential customers, but they know your potential customers.

2. AmEx OpenForum: If you’re a small business, a great place to hang out is the American Express Open Forum.  The forum is dedicated to topics about small business.   Answer questions, and post relevant information, and always make sure to have a link back to headquarters, so that those you help you out can return the favour by sending some leads your way.

3. Forums for your topic: Aside from OpenForum, the internet is full of forums for niche topics. Hanging out in these forums, and offering relevant information and answering questions, all the while having a link back to HQ in your profile is an excellent way of finding exactly the people who are interested in what you’re selling.

4. Facebook: According to some sources, Facebook recently passed Google in terms of total visits.  A lot of people are on Facebook, and so creating a Facebook fan page for your business is quickly becoming a requirement. This is intrinsically sharable, and so your fans will find you new fans, and all of them, should be coming back to your website.

6. Flickr: Many businesses can benefit from posting photos in a public area like Flickr, and then pointing traffic back to HQ. For example, Mark Hayward runs a guesthouse on a Caribbean island, and he has had great success using Flickr to drive traffic.

7. YouTube: YouTube is ideal for creating How To videos. These videos create expertise/build reputation, and have the added benefit of being sharable. Just be sure they point back to headquarters.

8. Twitter:  Twitter is a great way to connect with new people in your industry by using search functions, and just being active in the community.  Don’t carpet bomb your Twitter followers with constant pleas to visit your website (or you won’t have followers for long), but occasionally steering them towards your site especially if something is particular interesting is a good idea.

9. Squidoo: Is a service founded by Marketing rockstar Seth Godin.  You can create a “lens” on Squidoo, that will aggregate content from a number of sources.  You can then take the audience you’ve found from your lens, and steer them towards your HQ.

10. Guest writing: Writing for someone else’s blog, or writing an article for a website, doesn’t pay well, but if you include links back to your HQ, guest writing, pound for pound, will produce the greatest number of leads. Provided of course you were guest writing for a publisher in your niche.

Dealing with the overwhelm

You could go out and create every single one of these outposts (and others), but the fact of the matter is that most of these outposts are useless unless you have the time to donate to them.  You should not be afraid to open & shut down outposts as necessary – you don’t need to maintain all outposts simultaneously.  The one piece of your online presence that must always stay active is the HQ. Everything else exists only to drive traffic to the HQ.

Once you’ve created your online presence, you can apportion your time where you see the best results, and in the end, everything should be trickling towards HQ, and you’re on your way to creating plenty of leads.

It’s also worth noting that I didn’t invent this notion of setting up a main place to call home on the web, and then to create satellite pieces of content.  Here are two takes on the concept of the HQ vs outposts from two very bright guys.

Darren Rowse on Home bases and outposts

Chris Brogan on a Simple presence framework

Going viral is the new “thing to do.”  Everyone and their dog wants to go viral. I’ve had a hard time figuring out just how long this phrase has been around, but it must be a relatively recent thing, because I seem to recall that not too long ago, “going viral” meant that you needed a trip to the clinic.

Today going viral generally refers to viral marketing, wherein a brand creates something, usually a piece of content, which is then spread by consumers to other consumers, who in turn spread it to more consumers, by means of the internet. Viral marketing is the hip younger sibling of word of mouth marketing, and is usually associated specifically to the web and to content marketing.

The web of today, and even moreso the web of tomorrow, is all about sharing.  Facebook and its 400 million users exist to share the details of mundane lives.  Going viral is all about breaking free of the mundane and doing something remarkable that people will be happy to pass on to each other and say, “Look how cool/funny/crazy this is!”

While this just a guess, I wouldn’t be surprised if the term viral sprang up right around the same time as YouTube.  It used to be, if you had a video worth sharing, you had to get it produced and put on television at significant expense. YouTube allowed anyone to post anything to the web, and to instantly have a potential audience of a hundred million.  There are too many YouTube sensations to mention, but the original ones had nothing to do with business and marketing.  They were just regular people who did something that others thought was worthy of sharing.

It did not take long for the world of marketing to take note, and now every agency worth its salt is trying to put together a viral marketing campaign for its customers.  Producing content is cheap.  Sharing is now made easy.  Every time content is passed along, that’s essentially free promotion.  Why wouldn’t everyone, including SMBs, be doing viral marketing?

The answer to the question of whether you should go viral is easy: Of course.

The answer to the question of how you to go viral is not so easy. There is no magic formula for something to go viral.  Brilliant people have created incredible content and then stopped and wondered why it didn’t go viral. Meanwhile, Pants on the Ground has been viewed six million times.  There is no set way to make something go viral (except possibly for using kittens in your video).  Trying to go viral is kind of like trying to figure out a formula to win the lottery.

The best way to go viral online is to do something that no one has done before. The second person to do something never goes viral.  The first stands a chance.  The first time you see someone make a basket from the opposite side of the court while sitting down is impressive.  The second time is, “been there, done that.”

That rule, however, is nothing new.  Long before the web was a great marketing platform, if you did something that no one had done before, you were going to get attention.  This used to be called publicity stunts.  Now, it’s called viral marketing.  Richard Branson was parachuting into press conferences long before Twitter.  And someone was launching himself out of a cannon long before YouTube.

Therefore, the best advice I can give to any small business that is trying to go viral is this: Instead of trying to go viral, try to be remarkable. Try to do something no one’s done before.  Being remarkable and being the first to do something will have a way of paying off, even if it doesn’t get a million views on YouTube.

Old habits die hard.  In my experience, the hardest habit to break for SMB’s is considering their advertising as placement advertising instead of performance advertising.  Digital marketing is no longer about where you show up, or how often you show up, it’s about how well convert, and how high your return on investment (ROI) is.

Aside from branding exercises, I’m a strong believer that the only metric that counts when measuring the effectiveness of advertising is the ROI.  Oftentimes, this belief is in direct conflict with the mistaken belief of many advertisers that the only place they should be advertising is on Google.

If you were to advertise on Google, Yahoo and Bing, you could potentially reach 99% of the traffic on the web between them (and their associated networks).  While that sounds fantastic at first, let’s take a step back, and recall that advertising on search engines is a pay for performance (pay-per-click) model.  Therefore, that means, you’re not paying the search engines for the ability to appear, you’re paying them to deliver clicks.

Search engines are very good at delivering clicks, and they’re also very good about managing your budget.  Once you’ve used up your budget for clicks, the search engines stop delivering them, and you stop appearing in the sponsored links.  You get nothing for free.  Now, let’s revisit the idea that you have the potential to reach 99% of all web traffic by advertising with the Big 3.  Is that true?  Not really.  It’s only true if you’re willing to spend enough money on advertising, that no matter how many clicks you got on your ads, you’d still have enough budget left to keep your ads running continuously.

I can not even conceive of how large that number would have to be in order to actually capture every impression on the Big 3.

This fact does not make these search engines less valuable as media, but rather it teaches us a very important lesson:  It doesn’t matter how often you show up in the search results or where; what matters is getting those clicks from users who will convert into customers.

So, if we accept that small businesses generally don’t have a big enough budget to show up more than occasionally on major search engines, then we must acknowledge that the fact that Google captures 70% of search traffic is irrelevant when deciding where to advertise, because a SMB will never touch anywhere near all of that traffic.  The relevant factor is what the ROI on your advertising will be.  In limited unscientific tests I have done, I have found that the Big 3 yield very similar conversion rates, and that Yahoo! tends to deliver a slightly better ROI than Google (probably mainly due to the fact that clicks are generally cheaper on Yahoo!).  Therefore, this means that the logical thing for a SMB to do is to advertise across all three search engines, and see which yields the best results.

There is no logical reason to prefer Google as your main advertising channel.

This is where the second tier comes in.  If we’ve seen that Yahoo! and Bing can deliver results as good or better than Google, what about all those other lesser known search engines (most of which have PPC programs)?  The fact of the matter is that they can be just as good a source, if not better, than the Big 3.

Remember that what’s important is your conversion rate and your ROI, so as long as a search engine is delivering you relevant traffic, it should not matter which search engine that is.  Given that the second tier search engines often have ridiculously cheap clicks compared to Google, trying them is definitely worth it for small budget advertisers.  They may not have the traffic Google has, but most SMB’s will never touch a fraction of Google’s total traffic, so that’s irrelevant.

Search Engine Watch had posted some of the better second tier search engines, but my advice remains to test them out and see which ones deliver results.  Again, the clicks from these engines are cheaper, so testing should not put a huge hole in a SMB’s budget.

The bottom line is that most advertisers who say, “I just want to be on Google,” are ego-marketing.  The source of your clicks does not matter.  The content of your site matters. Instead of worrying so much about where visitors are coming from, SMBs should be worrying about optimizing their sites for conversion.  That way, regardless of source, once visitors arrive on the page, they will be more likely to purchase.

Have you used the second-tier for your advertising? What’s been your experience? Let us know in the comments.