Author Archives: Trevor Dumbleton

Your Customer Comes First and Is (Almost) Always Right

Whilst it should go without saying, does your customer always come first?

And do you allow them to think they’re right all the time?

Sure, customers aren’t always right – we’ll come onto that a bit later – but in these days of instant complaints, they need to think they are right or, at least, that their concerns are being heard and that you’re doing more than paying lip service to them.

Customers almost always have a choice. Even when there’s a near-monopoly as there is in search, they can still choose someone other than Google.

Depending on the country you live in, some or all of your utilities such as electricity and water could be a single option.

But for our businesses, that’s never the case.

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Are Internet Marketing Shortcuts Really Faster?

In almost every area of life including internet marketing we always seem to be looking for shortcuts.

But are they really quicker?

Or do they just give the illusion of being a shortcut when they’re actually nothing of the sort?

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Keeping on Top of Internet Marketing Methods

At times, internet marketing can be frustrating.

Things that worked yesterday stop working today, often for unfathomable reasons that are related to how computers “think” and how the search engines try to out-wit the spammers who are trying to out-wit the search engines.

There’s been a long post recently on the Warrior Forum from someone called Steven Wagenheim about how he was relying totally on article marketing, back when EzineArticles drove much more traffic than it currently does. Then as their traffic reduced, his clicks and his sales dried up.

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How to do Keyword Research Without Losing Your Mind

Keyword research is the heart of internet marketing.

It’s almost always a keyword phrase – several words in a specific order – rather than individual words because it’s rarely possible for a single word to convey the intent of what you’re searching for.

There are occasional exceptions and they’re usually short lived. For instance, when Hurricane Katrina hit the headlines in 2005 you could search for that one word and relevant results would show up.

It still shows at the top of the results for a search for Katrina but there’s now Google’s equivalent of a disambiguation page: the top three results currently are for the hurricane itself, a Wikipedia disambiguation page and an actress called Katrina Kaif:

Part of the reason for that change in the results is that Google has a freshness factor in its algorithm which allows its computers to include certain results whilst that news is popular and then downplay them again once people lose interest.

But normally you’d need to add a qualifying word (so you’d search for hurricane katrina or whichever other hurricane you were interested in) to get more relevant results.

This applies to almost every keyword you’re likely to be targeting – you need several words to make up a keyword phrase.

It used to be the case that you needed to target an exact phrase in order to rank for it but Google now uses something called latent semantic indexing (LSI) to include synonyms in the search results. So when I searched for hurricane arthur (which I found on a Wikipedia page when I was researching this article) the top result was for Tropical Storm Arthur (2008).

That means that Google “knows” that a hurricane can also be called a tropical storm.

Interestingly, although that storm name goes back 8 years, it’s about to be re-used. And there was a news article that talked about storm names on the first page of the search results.

As a general rule, the shorter the keyword phrase, the more difficult it will be to rank high in the search results.

That’s because there are more pages competing for that search term – either deliberately or just because the word is included on the page.

So, in theory, this article is competing for the word hurricane.

But, in practice, it’s not. I’m just using it as an example and the page will get counted in with the 43 million other pages that include the word or the almost 11 million pages that include hurricane arthur either as a phrase or scattered somewhere on the page.

How Google interprets people’s searches

It’s important to have at least a bit of knowledge as to how Google interprets the searches people type in.

Whilst there are around 200 factors involved in ranking a web page, some are more important than others.

You’ll know from your own searches that the words you typed in are bolded in the search results. It often also bolds LSI words – lose weight and losing weight are usually bolded in a search for weight loss – so if your page is considered good enough, it can get included in the search results even if you’re not targeting the precise phrase that was searched for.

That’s important to remember when you’re targeting longer keyword phrases as far fewer people are optimising their pages for those phrases and Google is clutching at straws for even half way decent results to show on the first page.

In theory, putting quote marks around the phrase you’re searching for tells Google that you’re looking for that precise page with all those words in the order you’ve typed – that’s often quoted as being a way to find out how many other pages you’re competing with for any given phrase.

In practice, that’s not always true. It depends on the phrase as you can tell from this search:

The top two results don’t have the phrase I searched for anywhere on the page. Which means the figure of 556 results is wrong.

And if you click through to page 2 of the results, you get this message:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 13 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Clicking on the option to repeat the search still brings back 13 results.

Which is another important lesson in keyword research – just because a computer shows you a figure doesn’t mean that figure is even vaguely accurate.

By any stretch of the imagination, 13 is a lot less than 556.

And once this page is indexed, the total is likely to go up by one, even though I’m not targeting that phrase on this page, I’m just including it as an example.

As a general rule, weight loss is a competitive niche and difficult to get ranked for. I chose that phrase as an example because it came up in the suggestions as I typed and narrowed down my search – more about doing that soon – but it didn’t show up on the first page of suggestions in the Keyword Planner, which is probably why it’s not being targeted.

What this means is that keyword research isn’t a precise science.

But you can get enough clues from a variety of places to make sure that you’re going in the right direction.

That said, if you get your target keywords wrong, you’re at an immediate disadvantage in the search results.

Too broad and you’re competing with millions of pages, lots of which are from stronger sites than yours.

Plus you’re probably not targeting your real customers.

Too narrow and you can get to the top of the results quite fast but there are only a handful of searches a year.

Pre-research keyword research

You’ve probably heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”.

That is very true for keyword research.

Regardless of the keyword tool you use, if you give it the wrong instructions in the first place you won’t get meaningful results back.

If you know your niche well, you may be able to this on your own.

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Internet Marketing: Always Under Promise and Over Deliver

We’re bombarded by hype from an early age. Television commercials make sure of that.

But that also means that we learn to tune out from most hype at an early age too. Not totally – especially if the hype is under the control of a master copywriter who knows how to press all the right buttons to almost compel us to buy. But certainly often enough for our built-in anti-hype defence mechanism to kick in and protect us from a good number of potentially rash decisions.

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Internet Marketing: Should You Do As I Say? Or Do As I Do?

It’s often difficult to know what works and what doesn’t work in internet marketing. It’s even worse when things are at odds with each other. For instance, it’s often a wise decision to follow one or two people quite closely, maybe even get mentored by them.

But what happens when something isn’t congruent?

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How to Find Affiliate Products to Promote

If you’ve got a website or a list (or, ideally, both) then chances are that you’ll need products to promote to it. After all, earning even a bit of pocket money from those promotions could turn your hobby from something that costs money to something that earns money. Or it might even take over as your full-time income source.

The best way is to sell products for commission – a bit like normal retailers do, except you’re not investing in stock.

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Do You Care About Your Customers? Or Do You Surcharge Loyal Customers?

Often companies treat loyal customers with contempt:

Higher prices

Insurance companies are masters at this tactic although most have the grace to match the online renewal price when you phone them. Which is OK if you’re the kind of person who instinctively goes to an online comparison chart when the renewal letter arrives (we’re sometimes called rate tarts) but less good if you just accept this year’s price unquestioned.

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Internet Marketing: Let Yourself Come Through

Personality counts for a lot. Big brands know that – it’s why they pay celebrities large amounts of money to endorse them or even create a brand mascot like Tony the Tiger to help create a personality for their products.

Yet when it comes to internet marketing so many people think they need to leave their personality out of it.

I did that when I first started and it’s something I see a lot of people doing. Probably because they’re worried that someone won’t like what they say – that was certainly one of the things running through my mind when I first started out.

The trouble with that approach is that bland just isn’t memorable.

And we’ve got so much going on in our lives that if something isn’t memorable, we’ll forget it in an instant, never to return.

Which means you need to give your audience something to relate to.

Over time, even though you’ve almost certainly never met each other, your site visitors should feel as though they know you.

Think about the emails you read regularly – do they have a personality or could they have been written by a robot practising for its Turing test exam?

Chances are it’s the ones where the author has a personality. Whether it’s a brief “I related to this content” or a longer story about how bad the traffic was today on the school run or anything else.

Don’t be afraid of doing this.

Sure, you’ll get some people who don’t like what you say but that’s the same in real life. You really can’t please all the people all the time – it’s impossible.

One of the things I like to do is get my site visitors to nod their head in agreement. Not because I read a sales book that said I needed to get 3 “yeses” before I asked for the sale. But because it’s fun.

So often, things hide in plain sight. Not just missing keys that turn up in the first place you looked for them (but only once you’ve been through the whole house at least once).

Lots of things are obvious but only once they’re pointed out.

Or you can just say things that have been at the back of people’s minds but they’ve never vocalised.

For instance, I run a Scout Troop and UK schools don’t allow children to have time off for holidays during term time.

That’s generally accepted – although one company recently got a lot of attention and publicity when it said it would pay any truancy fines if people booked a skiing holiday during term time.

But there’s also another exception: school trips.

In the summer term, the local school runs an activity week where the pupils go away for several days and take part in various activities such as rock climbing, canoeing, etc.

An activity holiday in other words.

So I occasionally point out the double standards – my Scouts can’t go on holiday in term time with their parents but they can go on holiday with the school in term time.

Heads nod every time.

If you can work out a way to get that happening in most of the content you create for your website, that will help your personality to shine through and will encourage loyalty from your visitors.

One other very important thing with letting yourself come through into the content you create is to press the “publish” button.

It sounds obvious.

But if you’re always tweaking something until it’s completely perfect but never actually publishing it, no-one will have a chance to find out what you’re talking about because it’s just permanently waiting on your hard drive.

If you’d like to know how to write sales copy for your website or need ideas for content to write about, check out this offer.

For more thoughts on this, watch the video or listen to the audio:

Internet Marketing: What to Do If You’re Not a Writer

Whenever I talk to people about how to improve their websites, I almost always say they need to create more content.

Which normally gets a scared “deer in headlights” look and the comment of “I can’t do that, I’m not a writer”.

Here are 5 simple tips to get over that:

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