Shake The Tree

I seem to be in a ‘blog about books’ mode.  Which usually means I’ll carry something around in my work bag for a couple weeks until I get a free hour or two to dig in.   But I saw this today – and can guarantee I’ll be devouring The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice).  (If not only for the great content, the weight of this book would leave my shoulder shredded to bits.)

From some of the excerpts I’ve had a chance t read, this looks to be not only a ‘technical’ SEO book, but also a real ‘how-to’ around the business that goes into successfully driving natural search traffic (and conversions.)

Lastly, I know several of the authors from this book – and respect their work incredibly.

OK, enough already, here’s the link to the The Art of SEO
on Amazon.

Heard good things about Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive.

Just ordered it – will post a summary soon!

And getting faster.  Just goes to show how good Google is getting at spidering new content – and marching as quickly as they can to near-real-time search.

I happened to sign Conductor up for a vendor profile over at eConsultancy this morning, and in doing so, had to add a personal profile.  Please, force me to talk about myself… but that’s not the point.

Added the profile at 7:52 AM.

Got this Alert at 8:05:

Speedy.

Obviously this changes depending on how valuable Google sees your site, and how often you’re feeding the spider with fresh original content.  But 13 minutes from posting to alert is still pretty slick in my book.

Looking at the following facebook page – basically waiting up late tonight so that I can give my facebook page a custom URL.

The username needs to be 5 plus characters, or I’d be in competition with my boss for facebook.com/seth.   But the fascinating thing to me, is how the facebook PR team took a plain old feature, one that should have been there from the beginning, and have turned it into an event.

This could have easily been inserted as a feature that just appeared, ready to use, it’s not a huge departure from how people will use facebook.  Nobody looks at the url bar after they login, anyway, and everyone goes to their homepage, so it’s not really much of a feature.

Except for the fact that we’re allo meglo-maniacs, who are desperate to be unique, and the Facebook marketing team has done a top-notch job of tapping into this, and making folks scramble to ‘grab’ their facebook name.

1. They’ve set up a counter page – (seen above) so you can see how long you’ve got to wait.  Delayed gratification, check.
2. You can’t grab a name until midnight.   If it’s worth waiting up for, it must be good.  Anticipation, check.
3. Bribery of the press.  The oldest trick in the PR book – if you want ink, give a writer something free.  Exclusivity, check.

Well done, Facebook.  Now lets hope that your IT staff has been as diligent as your marketing folks, because you’re about to get slammed.

Lately there’s been a lot of hullabaloo on whether newspapers can rescue their dying print divisions by erecting subscription barriers to their online visions. Will readers subscribe?  How much does the reader value the journalistic integrity of these publications over their blogging brethren, and will that be enough to support the massive editorial departments they have?

I’d make an argument that this is, in fact, the wrong argument. The problem is, of course, the first penny problem.

The First Penny Problem.
This is a constantly overlooked maxim by marketers – that the biggest hurdle to getting a customer is getting that first penny.   We are trained to think about what our product or service is worth – is it $9.95 a month, $199.95 for a product, or $68,000/year for a B2B service.  The thing is, engagement with the customer hinges on that single moment of ‘yeah, I’m in,’  This tipping point has so much more with being on board than some sort of rational monetary valuation they’re willing to pay.   It’s not whether the article is worth $0.49 or a subscription to the gated content is work $199/year. It’s the first penny. Convincing someone to sign a contract, hand over their credit card, or get on board for a subscription to a magazine is a much greater hurdle than the associated monetary cost.

The AOL example:
In the late 90′s, I was able to experience direct marketing nirvana, with, of all places, AOL.
I was deeply invested in the consumer electronics industry, and more than any other customer, AOL knew how to forcast.  They’d order 1,000 pieces of a product, do a test, and then order 89,452 more. They knew, from their statistical profiling, how many would sell through to their end customers.  Why were they so damn accurate? Because the biggest barrier to entry was gone.

AOL already had the prospect’s credit card number, they billed the dial up service to it every month.  All the prospect had to do was click ‘OK’ – these orders had an extraordinarily low barrier to entry.  Instead of 18.99, their next bill was 72.95, and that was it.  Since this payment barrier was eliminated, AOL could get a pretty idea on how many people would buy strictly by how compelling the offer was.

AppStore lubrication hardware.
Another example?  The iPhone.   Once you’ve entered your credit card into an account, all you needed to do is click ok – but you really needed to be motivated to give that first cc #.  My Credit Card bill is riddled with incremental charges that would never be there if I needed to engage with the brand for payment individually.

The Book of the Month Club model for online publishers
So what’s the lesson the newspapers should be taking?  Move your customer along in value buckets that divorce the payment method from the incremental charges, and give them something really valuable and with low risk for that first penny.  Then upsell.

1. Give them something of value for free – as long as they provide you their email address.
2. Once you have their email address – get them to contribute, or become a ‘vested’ member.
3. Then offer a can’t miss opportunity – a la the old book of the month club, where you can cancel at any time, even delay payment up to a year, but need to provide your cc# to get the gated content.
4. Then you’re in.  The first penny is overcome, as they’ve given you much more, their commitment.
5. Continue to offer low hurdle ‘click to add to your account’ up-sells, content, alerts, etc…
6. The pennies, and dollars, follow.

What’s your biggest obstacle to getting a new customer to commit?  And can you solve it with the first penny principle?

SEO by the Seas has an interesting article about about Google’s new patent on operating data centers 7 miles out to sea, and in 30 feet of seawater.

Environmentally – sounds like a great idea, but does anyone else think this is just a way to get into international waters?

Next up – turning the floating fortress into the next Googleplex – Eric Schmidt as Dr. “Do No” Evil, cloning Mini-me engineers, and holding the worlds search and analytical data for ——   ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

So some big news this morning – my company, Conductor, Inc., announced it’s $10 Million Series B financing.

If you’re not aware – I’m employed at Conductor - where I work with some amazingly clever folks to help large organizations bring science and metrics to their natural search efforts.

I recently finished up the second edition of our study on Fortune500 organic search visibility, really the first study to take a methodical and metrics-first approach audit of the seo effectiveness of some of the largest US public companies.

Some key takeaways of the study

• The Fortune 500 as a group spent millions of dollars a day on 88,792 keywords – yet only 20.82% of these keywords rank in the top 100 natural search results.
• Large brand visibility is improving throughout natural search results, but even high performers struggle with inconsistent execution across brands.
• Only 1.41% of the domains (not companies) surveyed showed a significant number of their terms in the top results. In all cases these companies had domains with significant visibility issues that offset their overall score.
• 46.76% of Fortune 500 companies have very low or non-existent visibility for their most advertised keywords.
• Fortune 500 natural search visibility dropped 5.8% when search queries increased to 5 or more words.

If you’d like to take a look at the whole study – head on over to the Conductor Research Section:

I’m particularly guilty of a bad habit of holding off sending a project off into the world until it is ‘just so.’

One manifestation of this is the ridiculous amount of time it took me to launch the ‘hello world’ post to this very blog.  Somewhere deep in my (BRAIN PART) there’s a series of synapse connections that screams  “If you’re not going to say something brilliant, shut the f**k up.”

Another example?  I am pretty much dissatisfied with even the most successful projects that cross my plate, primarily because I can look back and figure out what I/we should have done to make it more effective.

There are some positives to this mindset – I’m not going to pass along something that’s garbage.  You can consume that way too easily on your own.    I don’t think too much of the talking heads that spout unoriginal drivel into the world without providing any original insight or tangible use to the reader.   I fear for the re-tweet generation.  Because of the ridiculously low barrier to syndication on the net there are more and more individuals channeling repeats, and way too few networks investing in original content.

But it has real drawbacks.  To extend the 80/20 rule, the amount of effort required to move a project from 98% done to 99% is more than moving from 80% to 90%.  There are other projects that suffer, and you might get a lot more from a second project that’s ‘only’ highly effective.

So here are the rules that I use to try and kick those mostly done projects out the door.

1. Commit to  a deadline
2. Tell someone else about the deadline, preferably your boss or significant other, and make sure that they’re going to call you on it.
3. Run through a ‘dress rehearsal’ release – where you run through all the actions of delivering the project, and then do a ‘pre-release-post-mortem’.
4. Surround yourself with people that think differently.  Not idiots, but people who jump in feet first.  You will be driven nuts by your perception of their lack of attention to detail, but simply having them be wrong will move the process along.

What works for you?

I’m staring at Inbox Three.

“Getting Things Almost Done Except for Those Things You Can’t Process” ≠ “GTD”

I think I don’t trust my system.