The first point could have some merit, because duplicate content on multiple sites is a big no-no in search engine algorithms. However, the duplication of a couple of sentences, or a short promo text will not negatively impact one’s rankings.  If that were the case, no one would ever use a quote online for fear of being penalized by Google.  Search engines don’t like the wholesale copying of one site’s content to another.  As best as I know, online YP publishers don’t copy/paste your entire site.

The second point, that online YP directories provide customers with URLs similar to that of their main site and that that negatively affects their organic rankings, is plain nonsense.  If your website is MontrealLawyers.com, Google will not penalize you because someone else registered MtlLawyers.com.  I can’t even think of how that could possibly make sense from a search relevancy perspective.

My goal here is not to defend online YP directories.  I have heard the arguments against them, and I’m willing to admit some of their weaknesses.  Rather, my goal is to point out that quasi-expert advice like the above is doled out on the internet with non-chalance and passed off as trustworthy. After all, “Law Firm Marketing Dude” (seriously, that’s the name of his site) claims to have “20 years of experience” (I hope I didn’t negatively impact his SEO rankings by copying those words from his site). I should be able to trust his advice, shouldn’t I?

While I want to believe that most people can see through these ruses, I don’t think it’s as easy as it seems.  Once upon a time, I went to law school and practiced law (very briefly).  As a result, I know a thing or two about the legal profession.

The differences between law and marketing are vast, but one of the most important differences is that in law, there are a lot more trustworthy sources of information.  The legal profession is heavily regulated, and rightfully so.  We can’t have just anyone calling themselves lawyers and handing out legal advice.  Marketing, on the other hand, is not so regulated, and as such, anyone can call himself a marketing expert and just start handing out advice, a lot of which is nonsense.

Now, imagine a lawyer who is running a law practice.  He comes from a world where his opinions are informed by peer reviewed law journals, academic text books, and judge-written court cases.  He can trust his sources.  That same lawyer is now trying to figure out how to market his law practice online, and the option readily available to him is…  the internet?

Lawyers and other business owners are a smart lot, so I have faith that most will see through the BS, but there’s a lot of bogus information out there, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing it. Especially when your entire experience is based around having easy access to trustworthy information.

In the age of the internet, having trustworthy sources is a valuable asset and increasingly rare.  So, business owners, I would advise you that your most important task in learning about how to market your business is to first find a trusted source. Once you’ve found the trust, then you can begin to learn.

Where I failed was in what I hoped to get back for myself.  This blog has created some dialogue, but not as much as I would have hoped.  I know it’s not because no one’s reading it, because I have the analytics to prove that someone is reading.  So, I began to ask myself, why isn’t there more discussion going on here?  It’s not the quality of the writing.  I write elsewhere, and get quite a bit of discussion on my posts.  I also don’t think it’s the subject matter, because there is definitely plenty to be said on the topic of internet marketing.  So, what is it?

I’ve decided that the biggest reason that I have not generated as much discussion on this blog as I would have liked, is the audience.

Before you, dear reader, close this window in offense, allow me to explain. I’m not saying that my audience is ungrateful.  I’m not saying my audience is lazy.  I’m not saying my audience isn’t intelligent enough to have a discussion.  In fact, there is no blame to be placed on the audience at all. The blame is on me.

I blame myself because my goals were not aligned.  On the one hand, I hoped to educate small business owners.  On the other hand, I hoped to get challenging discussion back in return.  Small business owners were never going to take the time to read my blog, give the ideas in it a great deal of thought, and respond with some esoteric comment.  Small business owners are some of the busiest people on the planet.  If I was at all successful with some of my posts, they read the post, and immediately went to put the ideas into action. They didn’t philosophize over them!

If I wanted conceptual discussion about my industry, I was really writing the wrong articles all together.  As a case and point, some time ago, I wrote a post that was in no way advice to small business owners, but rather a commentary on the state of social media, and the prevalence of “experts” in the field.  I’m sure some small business owners may have read that with some passing interest, but none would argue that it was among my most useful posts.  However, that post generated comments and e-mail dialogue with Chris Brogan and Naomi Dunford, two people in the industry, whom I have incredible respect for.

Therefore, my biggest mistake with this blog was an error in the way I set out to achieve my goals. And I’m certain that there are many people blogging, tweeting, marketing out there, who are making the same mistakes.  So, before you spend anymore time and/or money, stop and ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve with the work you’re doing online.  Then, ask yourself if what you’re doing is really the best way to go about doing it.

In my case, the kinds of articles I was writing, probably would have been useful if my objective were to find clients for a consulting business.  However, I’m not a consultant. I work for a marketing company, and I don’t work in sales.  The only times I’ve ever consulted on the side, were on a pro bono basis (if you run a non-profit, feel free to drop me a line).  I don’t sell my services, so why am I running a blog as if I did?

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I have enjoyed every minute of writing this blog, and I appreciate each and every single one of my readers, and don’t expect any of them to do anything more than read these posts.

However, I do think it’s worthwhile rethinking who my target audience is, and what kind of stuff I should be writing to achieve my goals.  With that purpose in mind, I’ll be taking some time to rethink the direction of this blog.  There’s a good chance that at the end of that reflection, this blog will be much more “big picture,” and a lot less “nuts and bolts.”

Until then, I encourage anyone operating online to do the same. Rethink what your goals are and evaluate if you’re really going about accomplishing them in the right way.  Don’t just keep doing what you’re doing because it’s what you do.

Guest blogging, though, isn’t just for bloggers. Small business owners have a vested interested in participating in the conversation as well.

I’ve written on this blog about the advantages of content marketing, demonstrating ones expertise and creating a human connection with your audience. Guest blogging works by extending your reach. When you write for someone else’s blog in a related field, you are in essence borrowing that person’s audience. If you make a strong enough connection, you can convince members of that audience to become members of your audience as well.

The key is to increase your profile in your industry, by connecting with those bloggers and websites where your customers will already be spending their time. Then, by contributing, you spread your expertise to them, introduce yourself, and you have just made an easy connection with a person who was already looking for the kind of content you were providing.

The more you write for sites in your industry, the more ubiquitous your name becomes. When guest blogging, being prolific is a good thing.

However, it’s important to remember though, that guest blogging is not just a numbers game. It’s not simply about how many readers you can attract back to your own blog, or how many visitors you can get back to your website. Guest blogging is also about the connections you make with the others in your industry/niche/area. If you run a site or a blog, and you let someone else write for you, there is a level of trust required there, and a certain bond between host and guest is created.

It’s important not to to underestimate the value of those connections. Bloggers and website curators are quickly becoming industry leaders in the 21st century, and cultivating relationships with these people is going to become more and more important as time goes by — just as it’s important to have good relationships with reviewers and trade publications in your industry.

It’s also important to note that while the guest may gain a lot of benefit from blogging, the host is also benefiting. After all, websites and blogs publish content. Without content, they have no purpose. Guest blogging affords bloggers fresh, free content that they can use to continue to build their own audience. Furthermore, as a guest blogger, chances are you will promote the fact that you have posted on someone else’s blog, and will be sharing your audience with your host.  The same way he is sharing his with you.

Guest blogging is networking in digital form. The same way local business owners will help each other, guest blogging allows individuals in the same industry to partner for the mutual benefit of all.

As an analogy, when I used to run a handful of bars and restaurants, it would occasionally happen that something would go wrong in the ordering process. Either someone forgot to place an order for a particular item, or the supplier ran out, and therefore we’d run out (this always seemed happen with beer kegs for some reason…). On these occasions it became almost standard practice that neighboring bars and restaurants, even if they were technically our competitors, would loan us a couple of kegs to get us through a weekend. When the same thing happened to them, we would return the favor. In the end, everyone ended up ahead. I see guest blogging as a very similar practice.

There are a number of tips for how to go about guest blogging, and a much longer piece could be devoted to just that topic, but I find that most advice on guest blogging complicates the matter too much. First, find a site that you’d like to guest blog on. Make sure you understand the site and its audience. If it has guest blogging guidelines, read them. Then reach out to the site owner, and start a dialogue. All too often, people forget that at the other end of an e-mail address is a person, and the same way you’ve interacted with people your entire life is the way you should interact with people online. Be polite, make it easy for them to say yes, and give them something of quality to post on their site. That’s all.

I have not done a lot of guest blogging — something I hope to change in the near future. In the meantime, however, you can find me as a regular contributor at Workshifting.com and TheNextGreatGeneration.com.

Have you had any success with guest blogging? If so, share some of your tips. If not, what’s held you back?

I pay all my bills online, and no one ever sends me hand-written mail. I don’t even know my postal code. I check my mailbox about once per month, at which time, it is just about bursting at the seams with circulars, fliers, and other promotional stuff I can’t be bothered to look at. All of that wasted paper, that’s all marketing content, and it’s called direct mail advertising. Most people despise it. I do.

In the online world, a similar beast exists, and it’s also called junk mail, or spam. Some estimates say that as much as 85% of the e-mail sent on a daily basis is spam. As a result, modern e-mail softwares and servers have developed sophisticated spam filtering. My e-mail inbox used to look like my physical mailbox, but on a bad day, only one or two messages will trickle through the filters.

If most people are like me, and they simply toss out a month’s worth of fliers and circulars, and have decent spam filters set up in their e-mail, why would any marketer go to the trouble of direct mail? The simple answer is because it works. The equation with direct mail has always been simple. You don’t convert many people into customers, but the incremental cost of getting more people the message is minimal, so you still end up with a decent return on investment. In the world of e-mail marketing, the incremental cost of sending more e-mails is zero, so even if you have a terrible conversion rate, you’ll probably still see a return on investment.

So, what’s an honest businessperson to do? On the one hand, you know what it feels like to be inundated with junk, on the other hand, you’ve heard that this marketing method works?

The answer is to create targeted direct mail advertising. The reason direct mail converts so poorly, and is so annoying, is because there is no targeting. It’s carpet bombing people with paper. With just a little more creativity and effort, most direct mail campaigns, especially electronic ones, can be made to convert far better, be less annoying, and have the added advantage of creating not only a customer, but a loyal fan.

The first step is to pick your audience. I live in an apartment building. Why do I get fliers for landscapers? I also get mail for things I don’t want, don’t need, or don’t like. If you can exclude from your direct mail campaign people who don’t want, don’t need, or don’t like what you have to offer, then you will finally be targeting an audience that cares about what you have to say.

Once you’ve found your target audience, the next thing to do with your direct mail is to be useful. A tagline and a phone number, or an e-mail address is not useful. A promotion can definitely be useful, but it can also be boring. Do something interesting with your promotional material to get people’s attention. Run a contest, provide valuable content, do a give-away, entertain or just plain do something different. Alternatively, provide something useful. I’ve never used a real estate agent, and yet I know the names of a few of them, because I often write on complimentary pads they’ve sent me.

Finally, don’t send anything out unless you’ve received some form of sign that the person wants to receive it. This is the basis of permission marketing. The person may explicitly give permission by opting-in to a mailing list, or they may give it implicitly by purchasing something and giving additional contact information (note: whenever you deal with implicit permission, make sure opting-out is VERY easy).

Not all direct mail marketing needs to be spam. When direct mail marketing is done right, it is a cheap marketing method, that provides excellent returns, and creates loyal fans. Think about that before licking the next stamp, or hitting send on your next e-mail blast.

People are inherently distrustful of marketers, and as much as it pains me to admit it, rightfully so. In my relatively short time in the profession, I have met far too many sleazeballs.  You know the types.  The ones that seem friendly at first, but then after hours of talking at you, give you a sales pitch for something you don’t need.

Online, you might call these guys the yellow highlighter brigade (because they’re the ones that design the landing pages that have tons of yellow highlighting on them).  They’re the ones who fill up Google’s search results with gobs upon gobs of crappy landing pages for shitty products so that they can make a lousy commission.

They’re the same people that follow you on Twitter, and then you realize that they’re following 100,000 people and the only thing they tweet is generic promotional tweets, pre-scheduled, selling even more crap.  If you do make the mistake of following them back, you’ll find that in a couple of weeks, they’ll unfollow you, so that they can go follow another hapless soul without having their following:follower ratio look too out of whack.

They’re the guys who promise to teach you how to make money online, when they themselves have never made a dime online.  They’re the ones who promise to teach you how to connect with your customers when their idea of connecting is mono-directional.  They’re the ones that throw around random buzzwords and call themselves experts because they’ve read a couple of blogs, and maybe even purchased an information product or two (but probably not).  They’re the ones that would throw their closest friends under a bus to make a buck (or alternatively, sell their valued customers’ information to make a buck).

There are a lot of those guys out there.

Now, here’s the thing, there are also a whole lot of NON-sleazy marketers out there. People who are bright, articulate and driven.  People who care about their clients.  People who have a proven track record of success.  People who are interested in more than how many targets receive their e-mail blast.  People who actually give a damn, and do this marketing thing properly.

A few days ago, I was reading Mitch Joel’s blog.  I don’t know Mitch personally, but I’ve followed his blog for some time.   I’ve read his book.  I’ve heard good things about his company.  He wrote a post about Facebook’s recent privacy debacle, and took the stance that it is an incredible tool for businesses, and that ultimately it’s up to the individual to protect their own privacy (I don’t want to misquote him, so please do read the post for yourself, it’s worth the time).  I still haven’t decided how I feel about Facebook and the privacy issue (I’m not a believer that privacy is dead), but I respect Mitch’s opinion, even if I may disagree with it.

In a follow-up post, Mitch mentioned a comment from someone who basically dismissed his opinion based solely on the fact that he’s a marketer.  Let me be clear, Mitch is one of the good guys.  But can I really blame the commenter for assuming otherwise?  I know Mitch is one of the good guys because I’ve been following his work for a couple of years.  Had I stumbled upon his blog and read his opinion on Facebook, knowing all the sleazy marketers out there, I too may have dismissed that opinion.

So, here’s the problem: There are legions of sleazy marketers out there giving the good ones a bad name. There are ideas of smart people that can really help businesses that are being drowned out in torrents of crap.  And lastly, while this may not seem very important on a macro scale, there are good marketers out there who are really tired of being thought of as the scum of the earth.

My question, then, is how can the non-sleazy ones stand out from the rest?

I can already anticipate some of the answers:

• Do good work and let the results speak for themselves.
• Give away as much quality, useful information as you can.
• Point out the ones who are doing the good work.
• Grow some thicker skin.

The problem with all of the above is that they’re things that are already being done, and I get the feeling it’s not helping.  In some cases, they may be hurting the cause, because the sleazeballs just take that great content and then re-purpose it for their own sleazy uses.

As for growing thicker skin, maybe I should, but also, maybe I shouldn’t have to?

I will, however, make more of an effort to point out the ones that are doing good work.  For this post, I’m going to stick with mentioning Mitch, since he deserves the credit for inspiring this, but rest assured there are more.  Hell, I probably follow 100 of them on Twitter right now.

I’d also love to hear your thoughts on how we can change the perception of marketers, or even if we can at all?  Drop a note in the comments, or fire me off an e-mail.  This is something I really want to discuss.

I’d love for my mother not to have to worry what people will think when she tells them what I do for a living.

1) Not everyone uses the internet to find businesses

The standard assumption among most tech-savvy marketers (and most marketers are tech-savvy, because that’s what’s cool nowadays) is that everyone uses the internet to find what they’re looking for.  That’s easy to assume while watching the crowds of iPhone-toting Gen-Yers, and Blackberry-toting Gen-Xers.  However, there is a significant segment of the population that does not immediately turn to the web when looking to make a purchase.

My father taught me everything I know about computers from how to assemble one, to how to get online.  Last summer he needed a roofing contractor.  Imagine my surprise when I saw him haul out the Yellow Pages.  My mother is less tech-savvy, and she would never even dream of turning to Google to find a business. To her, Google is where you go to get information for your kid’s school project.

I could also go back another generation and talk about my grandparents, but I think you get the idea. You can restrict yourself to online advertising and get me as your consumer, but you’ll be missing two generations of my family that would probably be far more lucrative.

2) Mixed media value

The idea that directories are only the big yellow books that get delivered to your door is wilfull blindness.  The fact of the matter is, every important Yellow Pages publisher in the world has become a media company that offers print, online, video, search, mobile and more. Often, YP publishers offer these media in bundled packages for a value that small businesses would be hard pressed to find elsewhere.  Purchasing all of those media segments independently would be too expensive for a SMB marketing budget, but directory publishers that understand the SMB market, have crafted bundles that make sense to the small business.

3) SEO value of being in an online directory

SEO is all about the quality of the sites that link to your website.  Online directory sites, especially the biggest and most reputable ones, generally have excellent search engine rankings, and obtaining links from these directories is easy and cheap.  While the SEO value of a link from a directory should never be your primary reason for purchasing online directory advertising, it is an excellent side benefit.

4) Competent marketing advice from a knowledgeable advisor

The best thing about Google Adwords is also the worst thing about Google Adwords: It is self-serve.  Google does an excellent job of giving advertisers tools and getting out of the way.  In the context of large companies with marketing departments that have the time, resources, and money to spend on figuring out these tools, this is wonderful.  These companies can do things in house that they used to have to hire agencies to do for them.

For SMB’s however, this is not as appealing.  As a small business owner, you have dozens of hats to wear, and you don’t want to spend twenty hours a week optimizing your $100/month Google Adwords campaign.  In fact, do you even know for a fact that you should be spending that money on Adwords?

Small business owners are experts in many things, from their own industry, to managing the day to day operations of a business, but they are not marketing experts.  Directories employ people — whether they call them sales reps, account consultants, media advisors or anything else — who understand the media and the marketing and who can act as a guide through a confusing landscape, so that business owners can concentrate on running their businesses.

5) Trustworthy source of advertising

One of the biggest things that directory publishers have going for them is that they have been around for a long time, and are trusted companies in their own right.  In Canada, Yellow Pages Group has been an industry leader for over 100 years.  That history and brand carries weight with it.  If you’re an advertiser, are you going to trust your marketing budget to a company that has been around for a century and has a proven track record, or are you going to trust the guy who opened up shop in his parents’ basement?

The example is extreme, because in the US, the directory industry is filled with a lot of smaller players, some of whom are no more trustworthy than the guy in his parents’ basement.  However, the big players in the US, (YellowPages.com, SuperPages.com, YellowBook.com and a couple others) have an equally strong brand.

6) The demise of any medium is always slower than originally forecasted

I recently read an article from 1993 talking about the demise of the newspaper industry.  While the newspaper industry is by no means in good shape, I’d like to point out that it is currently 2010, and it is still hobbling along 17 years after people were predicting its extinction, and it will likely continue to hobble along for several more years.

I have no delusions that my children will ever use a print Yellow Pages directory, but as I mentioned above in point 1, the generations that do still use it are still around, and are going to be around for quite a few more years to come.

7) Protecting market share

While I don’t like using this as an argument to advertise in any medium, because it feels coercive, it holds true nonetheless:  If you don’t advertise in a directory, your competitors will.  This simply means that not only are you missing eyeballs by not being in a certain spot, but that those eyeballs are going directly to your competitors.  While marketing for defensive branding purposes isn’t appealing, it’s sometimes necessary.

Comprehensiveness of listings

On the flip side, there’s a certain trust that’s built around having a directory listing.  While Google prides itself on giving relevant info (almost) every time, directories for their part, are generally recognized as being comprehensive.  As such, a business’ absence from a directory conveys the sense that he’s not really fully arrived, while his presence conveys an established place in his industry.  It’s as if the space taken up in a certain heading is a validation that you are in fact a player in a given industry, and that is a small step in building trust.  Whether that trust is based on something real, or based solely on customers’ perception doesn’t really matter, because perception is reality.

9) Directories drive innovation and competition

How can a yellow telephone book drive innovation? The argument of the directory nay-sayers is that the industry is stuck in the past. In fact, the industry is going to great lengths to reinvent itself and pushing the envelope.  In the past year alone, I’ve watched YP.ca launch a simplified search marketing solution that tracks leads rather than just clicks; a bevy of online video options; two really cool mobile applications (the YP.ca app, and the Urbanizer app); a ratings and review platform; integration with Facebook; and much more.  And it’s not just YP.ca that’s doing these kinds of cool things, YPs in the US are pushing the envelope as well, most recently YP.com’s Buzz platform has caught my attention (even if the name choice is questionable).

It’s also not just about what the YPs are doing themselves, but about what they’re forcing competitors to do.  Google’s current Enhanced Local Business Listing product (aka Tags), is an attempt to win SMB business away from YP publishers.

The fact of the matter is that in the local marketing space, YPs are the incumbents, and to displace them, other companies are doing cool things to win SMBs marketing dollars.  The winners in all of this are the SMBs.

10) They work: actual customers see actual results

The final reason is really the only one that really counts: Directories, online and off, still drive results. Advertisers are still seeing a positive ROI. YPs have had a hard time demonstrating this because in the days of their domination they didn’t have to.  Now, with the transparency of the internet, they’ve probably been too slow pulling back the curtains on the results they deliver, but not for fear of what’s behind it, but simply because large ships have a hard time changing course quickly.

More and more, though, directories are providing this kind of transparency with call measurement and tracking, and even advertisers are being surprised by just how much of their business they owe to their directory advertising.

I’ll leave you with this link to a recent study conducted by Burke and comScore that supports much of what I said above.  SMBs need to decide now what’s more important, the results, or buying the quick and easy line that “YPs are dinosaurs.”

The difference between the two methods is that the second method leads to more repeat customers, which is a more efficient way of building a business.  It’s also a hell of a lot more fun as a small business to connect with your customers than it is to sell to faceless strangers.  The secret ingredient to method #2 is trust.

Building trust online is not easy.  It’s a lot easier to trust someone that you’ve looked him in the eye and shook hands.  The internet, almost by definition, is untrustworthy.  Our beloved world wide web still has a reputation for being a hangout for seedy characters (the Dave Chappelle skit about what the internet would look like if it were a real place is a pretty good depiction of how the web is viewed – unfortunately, I can’t link to it because I’m in Canada, and Comedy Central doesn’t like Canadians).

In order to overcome the additional barriers of gaining trust that are imposed by the internet, small business owners need to find ways to connect with their customers.  Luckily, doing this is not as difficult as it might seem.  Connecting with a customer is as simple as dropping him a personalized e-mail to see how he’s enjoying his products; or keeping your ears open on social media for anyone talking about your brand and responding quickly and politely; or providing excellent post sale customer service; or interacting with fans on a Facebook fan page; or getting them to come in to your physical location with a Foursquare offer, and then connecting in person; or any other number of possible methods. In short, trust is about connecting, and connecting is about being human.

The above mentioned methods are all direct methods of earning trust.  If you try to do that with each and every one of your customers, you will either be limiting yourself to a small number of customers, or you’ll be tapping yourself out at some point, and then you won’t be connecting well with anyone.  Thus, small business owners need to earn trust indirectly.

Everyone trusts someone, and that person doesn’t necessarily need to be you.  As long as the people who trust you, are spreading the word about you to people who trust them, you’re building trust indirectly.  This is what Seth Godin refers to as building your tribe. (affiliate link)

The doubters of trust and human business always claim that trying to build trust isn’t a scalable business model, and so processes and efficiencies are more important than connection.  Indirect trust building, and having people that trust you enough to use their own influence to spread word about you is how building trust scales.

There are a few trust building exercises most small business can implement quickly:

1) Maintain a blog. Show your expertise in your field, and show your personality.  People trust people, not faceless entities.

2) Video posts. On the internet, you may not be able to shake someone’s hand, but with video, you can at least look them in the eye.  Videos are a great way to build trust.

3) Write a book. This may be easier said than done, but have you ever noticed that a published author gains instant credibility?  People are far more likely to trust someone who has published a work that demonstrates his or her expertise, even if they’ve never read it.

4) Provide exceptional customer service. Think providing exceptional customer service is difficult?  Think again.  All you need to do is under-promise, and over-deliver.

You can have the most efficient processes in the world in place to run your company, it can run like a well-oiled machine, but if you don’t have the trust of your customers, you’re not going very far.

Don’t believe me?  Just ask Toyota.

This is not a blog dedicated to home-based businesses, or get rich quick schemes.  Nor is it geared towards affiliate marketers, or people who sell exclusively information products. That being said, this is a blog geared towards small and medium sized businesses, and all of the above businesses fit that description, and in many cases, many SMB’s could learn a thing or two from them.

Chances are, if you’ve been looking for marketing advice online, someone has tried to sell, or give, you an e-book that will teach you how to market online.  An incredible percentage of these e-books serve the purpose of teaching you how to create the exact same kind of e-book to sell to make money online.  Others will actually go a little more in depth into broader online marketing techniques.

If you’ve downloaded or bought one or more of these e-books you know their quality varies dramatically.  I will admit to not being a huge purchaser of e-books. especially not those that promise to teach you how to make money online, but I will admit that several years ago, my first foray into online marketing was as a university student looking to make a few extra bucks, and so I bought an e-book for $50 that was supposed to teach me how to make a living as an affiliate marketer.

Most of the stuff in that e-book was not actionable, it was poorly written, and I’m pretty sure some of it may have been borderline black hat, but nonetheless, that was my first exposure to pay-per-click advertising, and the beginning of a path that would eventually lead to a career in marketing.  So, in some ways, that $50 e-book was worth more to me than my law degree (which was considerably more expensive).

The problem with e-books is that no one trusts them, because there are so many bad ones floating around the internet.  E-books can be written on any topic, and while “how to make money online” is often a popular topic, e-books exist on every topic from immigration to pet grooming.  And there is an equal number of really terrible ones on each of these topics, and those probably account for 99% of the e-books on the web.

I’m a big believer in the web as a publishing platform, but despite all the flaws of the traditional publishing model, it has one huge advantage: it acts as a filter. Publishers will only publish something they think is good enough to make them a profit.  Online, anyone can publish anything with nothing more than a prayer that it’ll be read, and if it doesn’t, oh well, no associated costs, so no real risk.  The result is a deluge of terrible works being self-published, and users/readers having to wade through all this garbage to find a few gems.

This is why users/readers are weary of the e-book. They’ve been burned too many times by really bad content, and don’t want to be bothered sifting through anymore.

The age where selling e-books was a profitable online business model is rapidly coming to a close, because there is not enough value in them in general.  While some e-books are worth their sticker price, users will not pay it because of poor previous experiences.

That does not mean, however, that the e-book as a tool is not useful to businesses looking to market online.  While the e-book should not be looked at as a direct source of revenue, an e-book can be used as a lead generation tool.  The idea is to create an e-book that has so much value, and offers so much to the reader, that the publisher actually breaks through the perception of bad content, and builds trust with the reader as an expert in a given industry.  This trust is then leveraged in such a way that the reader can potentially become a customer.

The e-book needs to have great value for a potential customer, while recognizing that it will likely not return significant revenues in and of itself.  However, its value to the business that publishes it as a reputation and awareness builder can be worth far more than a few hundred dollars of revenue from the sticker price.

If this sounds familiar to readers of this blog, it’s because the process is the same as it is for many other forms of marketing.  Instead of writing an e-book, to build that trust, a business can build a kick-ass blog; it can guest post on other people’s blogs like crazy; it can help users in forums; it can participate in social media discussions.

At the end of the day, whether the format is an e-book, a white paper or a blog, the end goal is the same: Provide exceptional value to a potential customer in order to build trust, and to hopefully generate a lead that will be likely to generate a sale.

I’ve written before about how marketing is more than a funnel, it’s an hourglass, and marketing efforts don’t end at getting customers in the door, but rather continue on to post-sale support, because a return customer is infinitely more valuable than a one-and-done customer. And the way to get repeat customers is to deliver exceptional customer service.

In July 2009, Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer showed the world just how much exceptional customer service was worth by buying Zappos.com for about $900M.  For those that are unfamiliar with Zappos, they are an online retailer, much like Amazon, that started out selling shoes.  While many online advertisers compete on price, what made Zappos unique was that it built a reputation of providing exceptional service.  Service so exceptional that customers who bought from Zappos, would continue to buy from Zappos even if they could find their goods elsewhere for less money.

So, why did Amazon buy Zappos?  Let’s be clear, Amazon is a technology juggernaut.  When it comes to technology, there was nothing that Zappos had that Amazon did not, or could not have built for less than the $900M purchase price.  What Zappos had was a world class customer service reputation, and a philosophy that Amazon saw that it needed to emulate if it wanted to continue to succeed in the low margin world of online retail.

Zappos’ service is unique in a number of ways, but their difference starts with their corporate culture, and the kinds of people they recruit.  Zappos has a policy that after weeks of intense customer service training, they will pay employees to quit.  The goal of this seemingly bizarre practice is to weed out anyone who will not be compatible with Zappos’ values.  Zappos never says that the people that don’t work for them aren’t good enough, but they do say that those who do work for them all share the same values when it comes to customer service.

While I was not able to find anything more recent, there is a telling stat from 2005 that showed that in that year, 60% of Zappos’ business was from returning customers, the holy grail of any business.  That is telling of just how satisfied customers are with their service.

However, beyond any stats, to understand how truly exceptional the company is, you need only talk to a customer.  I’ve spoken with people who are as loyal to Zappos as Grateful Dead fans.  They love this company the way most companies can only dream of being loved.  You will hear stories of Zappos replying almost instantly to anything posted on the web about them, to customer service agents walking people through an order process on a competitor’s website, accept returns on items that clearly should not be returned, and even just talk to customers who need an ear.

I’m not suggesting that every business should go and become the next Zappos, but I am pointing to them as an example of two things.  First, customer service is an excellent marketing tool because it costs less than most other marketing, and returns more.  Second, delivering exceptional value in some form or another, is a fantastic way to build a business.

Don’t believe me?  Just ask Zappos, they have 900 million reasons why you should.

SMBs generally have very small marketing budgets compared to big business.  As such, if they’re to compete, then they need to make sure that every dollar of that budget is being spent as effectively as possible.  The small business doesn’t have the luxury of buying media space and running 30 second spots in primetime on the prayer that it’ll make the phone ring.  The primary concern of every SMB should be, “How do I spent my budget most efficiently?” The only way to answer that question is to track ROI.

There is a misconception that tracking ROI is difficult.  It simply means tracking what kind of revenue each of your marketing efforts is returning to you.  ROI is calculated simply enough as ((value generated)-(investment))/(investment)*100.  This means that you need to track three things:

1. investment: The amount of money being put into a given marketing campaign.  This should be the easiest part.
2. Value generated: The amount of money that was generated that can be tied specifically to that marketing campaign.  In order to accurately track this number, you need the third element of tracking.
3. The conversion funnel: The process by which visitors arrive at your site, and the path they follow until the eventual conversion.  This can be done relatively easily using free tools such as Google Analytics.  I could devote an entire post to ways of doing this, but for now, I suggest playing around with Google Analytics.

Instead of focusing on step-by-steps of how to set up conversion tracking, I want to instead focus on some fundamentals that are often overlooked.

First, you can’t measure ROI, if you haven’t determined what a conversion on the web is for you.  It’s unrealistic to think that for every business on the web, a conversion is a sale.  If your website is meant to make your presence known, and create awareness, and purchases happen in store, measuring your ROI for a web marketing campaign by sales is going to be frustrating.  Instead, define your conversions as the end goal that occurs on the web. Some common examples include newsletter registrations and other sign-ups, requests for estimates, downloads of a brochure or an e-book, or even arrival on a specific page of a website.

Second, remember that at the end of the day, we’re tracking return on investment, and the only way to do this is by using monetary values.  Therefore, whatever you have chosen to define as a conversion, you must assign a monetary value to it. This is often where businesses break down in their conversion tracking process.  How can one assign a monetary value to a free newsletter?  The answer is to rely on estimates and experience.  As the business owner, you and only you, should have some idea of what kind of value certain actions have for you.  If you know that for every 100 newsletter sign-ups, you sell 1 widget for $375, then the revenue associated to each sign-up is 1/100th of the revenue generated by the widget: $3.75.

The more precise your estimates as to the value of each action in your conversion funnel, the more accurate your calculation of ROI will be.  Therefore, the longer you track ROI, the more accurate it will be, because you will be refining your estimates as you go.

To continue our earlier example, we had determined that a newsletter sign-up, our defined conversion was worth $3.75.  However, we have yet to determine exactly what the ROI on this marketing campaign was.  So, let’s assume that you spent $1,000 on this marketing campaign, and it generated 2,000 visits to your site, and that you converted those visits at a rate of 10% for 200 newsletter sign-ups.  I threw a lot of numbers in there, but in reality, we’re only concerned with the beginning and ending numbers: $1,000 spent, and 200 newsletter sign-ups as a result.  Recalling that ROI is ((value generated)-(investment))/(investment)*100, we can calculate our ROI.

Value generated in this instance is 200 newsletter sign-ups at a value of $3.75 each, so 200 x $3.75 = $750 of value generated.  We also know that the investment was $1,000.  Plugging all this into the above formula we get: ((750)-(1000))/(1000)*100=-25

So, the return on investment was -25%.  This marketing campaign resulted in a 25% loss of its initial investment.  While that may not be great news for the business owner, the fact that he knows that this marketing campaign is returning a negative ROI means that he can now take appropriate measures to correct this, either by modifying the marketing campaign, or ditching it for a new strategy.

At the end of the day, what’s important is to know exactly how your marketing budget is being spent, and to determine whether it’s being spent effectively.  Business owners need to think of their marketing as an investment if they want to be successful, and as with any investment, what matters is the results.

Do you track ROI on your marketing campaigns?  If so, what techniques do you use to do so?  If not, what’s stopping you?  Let’s chat about it in the comments.