| LED Digest 2278: It's not WEB Marketing |
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It's not WEB marketing, it's Marketing on the web. From that perspective, here's a simple model of the five factors necessary for a successful business website: Strategic Planning, Content, Design, Technology and Promotion. ================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. October 31, 2006 Issue no. 2278 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== <Moderator Comment> ~ Ebooks, Partnerships, SEO Glossary --== It's not WEB Marketing ==-- ~ Michael Linehan "...I state a simple model of the five factors necessary for a successful business website..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Sweet 16 ==-- ~ Trevor Johnson "There is an inherent contradiction between Principle #1...and...Principle #3..." --== The Can Spam Act ==-- ~ James Miller "I would also agree that spam is increasing..." --== What Shopping Cart and Why? ==-- ~ Stephen Mareches "One thing we definitely stay away from is online credit card processing." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Firefox 2 and IE7 ==-- ~ John Smart ========== NEW =================================== <Moderator Comment> The ebook partnership program looks like a winner. We've got several excellent authors and resources joining the LED Digest Library. If you're interested in being a part of this, please let me know: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it One ebook in particular caught my eye on the subject of Web design and business. I've contacted the author and I'm hoping he'll partner with us to make it available to LEDers for a discount. I'll keep you posted. New blog! Featured posts on the LED homepage www.led-digest.com now have commenting options. From now on selected posts here will feature an additional "Blog" link below the post so you can publish your comment to the site. Use it or lose it. I was surprised that not many of you commented on the Sweet 16. Do yourself a favor and go read it right now! http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1286/174/ . Then comment there, or here, or anywhere. Last update: I've published a slightly modified version of Aaron Wall's excellent SEO/M glossary to the LED site. Aaron is a leading mind in the SEO field and has graciously offered this resource to the community. Check it out here: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1295/174/ Adam -------------------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: It's not WEB marketing Adam has written an interesting call for new threads. As a start, the material he has republished about the Cluetrain Manifesto is very useful --- there are many comments about personal connection, marketing principles and so on. This reminds me that in all our important discussions of various Web oriented tactics some critical factors are often under-addressed. I'd like to bring up a couple of those factors. A great number of businesses I talk to find they are just not getting the return from their website that they expected. I believe the reason is revealed by what people say to each other about websites, "Who designed your site?", "Do you know a good web designer?", "I like this design." and (maybe), "What shopping cart do you use?" In other words, most companies, most of the time, are focussing on design and technology. Rarely does anyone say, "Who helped you plan your website promotion?", "Who wrote your site copy?", or "Who helped integrate your site as part of your overall strategic marketing plan?" Attractive, professional design and appropriate technology are certainly important in making a business website successful --- but not to the extent of investing 95-100 percent of the thought, time and money in only these two aspects of the website's construction and use! Let's consider the critical tasks a website needs to accomplish -- bring people to the site, make the sale and develop relationships with prospective and current clients. When thought of in these terms, it is clear that design and technology do not actually do any of these things. Yes, absolutely they can ENHANCE AND SUPPORT, but they don't actually DO. What accomplishes these three critical tasks are the information, products and services offered, how well the language of the site captures people's attention and make the sale, and the actions that promote the site and bring people there. Every factor can be made enormously more powerful by the focussing effect of truly strategic planning. It's critical to have a clear, simple and actually effective model of strategy. Marketing every day is not, in and of itself strategic. Nor is having the latest cool and sexy or extensive or expensive collection of tactics. The power of strategy is like the difference between a handful of flashlights and a laser, or between someone who has learnt a pile of techniques in some martial art and someone who understands, feels and embodies the fundamental thread that connects all those tactics. Strategy means connecting your marketing and all your activities into one coherent, business building force that will take you to another level. I like to summarize this by saying, "It's not WEB Marketing; it's MARKETING on the Web." From that perspective, I state a simple model of the five factors necessary for a successful business website: Strategic Planning, Content, Design, Technology and Promotion. If that is a valid model, perhaps we should be discussing all five factors in LED. Michael Linehan, Marketing Alchemy www.marketing-alchemy.com Comments? http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1296/172/ ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Trevor Johnson Subject: Sweet 16 There is an inherent contradiction between Principle #1 (Maintain Absolute Integrity) and the pro-spamming example about the launch of Adventive.com touted as being 'good business' in Principle #3 (Put the Power of Inertia on Your Side.) The misuse of mailing lists for the purpose of unsolicited bulk emailing - aka spamming - remains as repugnant now as it was back then. Just because it was 'successful' does NOT make it legitimate. Trevor Johnson http://www.bestprac.org -------- new post - new topic --------- From: James Miller Subject: The Can Spam Act > I am a web / software developer that also happens to > be a US attorney... I have concluded that US law, although > sensible in theory, more often than not is unfriendly > towards businesses, especially small businesses. - Bob Huntsman, LED Digest 2277 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1291/55/ I can sympathise Bob! I am married to a barrister who specialises in family work, our son is a criminal defence lawyer, who works with Gareth Pierce and I count about four judges amongst my friends. I also write legal web sites. So I know a fair bit about the law. I had a similar situation in the UK, where I was getting spam from both Tesco and Asda (part of Wal-Mart). I wrote to both and after six weeks, I got a belated apology from Tesco, who explained what had happened. Someone had used daisy.co.uk as their address, rather than daisyzzx.co.uk. So muggins got the spam. Asda was a different matter and it still kept coming. Eventually I wrote to the Information Comissioner in the UK and within four weeks it stopped. I didn't get an apology though. They can fine a company up to 50,000 pounds for each e-mail they send. Without a court appearance too! Let me know the major US companies that are spamming and I'll search my spam to see if they are sending me any rubbish. It would be worthwhile reporting them to the UK Information Commissioner. We have to get smarter. One thing that has worked here is a polite personal letter to the Chairman or CEO at his home address. They are often easy to find. The trouble is they like to do good works and end up on charity, school and church web sites. I would also agree that spam is increasing. Look at the entry from my blog: http://www.jamesmiller.com/mtmblog/2006/10/spam-goes-on.html James Miller Daisy Analysis: www.daisy.co.uk Comment? http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1294/172/ -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Stephen Mareches Subject: Shopping carts > ... I realized it was time to write my own cart, and I did. > It is perhaps not the best one in the world, but it is good, > and whenever someone needs an add-on, I am able to do it... - John Smart, LED Digest 2277 I must agree with John here. We went through several shopping carts and finally decided enough was enough. It's not so much how much the cart costs or how simply the cart sets up, but a matter of what do you do when your clients come up with odd-ball requirements? So we opted to start from scratch and create a shopping cart that could be customized for clients with 1 to many products to offer. One thing we definitely stay away from is online credit card processing. For a CD sales site we did in 2001 the client opted for online credit card processing. It was about $300.00 to set up, the company goofed around for two months before it was usable and when he finally gave up the business it was another $300.00 to end the service. Now we plug our shopping carts into PayPal after first gathering customer info, then pass it to the PayPal payment interface. We do this because in many cases customers don't wait to be returned from PayPal to our Thank You page, so if we didn't have the order details and customer info in our database already, we'd know an order was placed, but not much else! Stephen Mareches, Web Consultant Sophia Solutions www.sophiasolutions.net We're with you every step of the way! ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: John Smart Subject: New browsers > What are fellow LED-ers thoughts on > Firefox 2 and IE7? Any problems? - Roy Williams, LED Digest 2276 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1287/55/ I love tabbed browsing! I am not too sure how I survived so long without it! I played with Fire Fox, but found it frustrating. IE 7 is very nice, hasn't crashed on me once (yet!) but the RSS doohickey is pretty weak. When you have several tabs open (as I usually do!) there is a little icon that shows you all the windows, shrunk down on one page so you can choose the one you want -- or you can ctrl-tab through them all. Once you use it, you will never want to be without it! With IE7 I did lose my "home" button. You can just launch a new tab to get to your home page, but I do miss the button. John Smart InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. 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