| LED Digest 2593: Doing It Yourself |
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The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom http://www.WillMaster.com/LED : the LED's Key Sponsor Will Bontrager Builds Powerful Software for your Website http://www.SEOToolSet.com/training/ : the LED's Premier Sponsor Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization Training & Certification ================================================== Guest Moderator: Published by: Nathan Holley LED Digest nate, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. February 19, 2008 Issue no. 2593 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Google Base ==-- ~ Jeff Folger "I just saw Google base show up in my tools and they tout it as a business tool..." --== Doing It Yourself ==-- ~ Michael Linehan "I think there are basically three ways to go in using the Internet..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Selling Customer Data ==-- ~ Marty R. Milette "...commercial businesses can't be entrusted with personal data..." --== SEO Relevance Factors ==-- ~ Nathan Holley "This is what some people in the industry call 'text book SEO'." --== Professionalism ==-- ~ Tom Anson "...if we listened to our consciences, they would prove to be much closer to black and white..." ========= NEW ===================================== From: Jeff Folger Subject: Marketing through Google Base Google Base as a business tool? I just saw Google base show up in my Google tools and they tout it as a business tool for listing your business and that it will... (may) show in in live google searches... I'd be interested in knowing a good way to leverage this as a tool back to my website.. As always more clients to my website can't be a bad thing.. Jeff Folger vistaphotos.net ========= Begin Sponsor Message ========= New Library for Site Owners ^^^ ^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^^ Lots of how-to. Tutorials. Tips. Tools. Demonstrations. Click and bookmark. http://www.willmaster.com/lib ========== End Sponsor Message ========== -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: That material on do-it-yourself The balance between using Professional services and doing it yourself... Everyone wants economy. And with the Web, there is a fascination that leads many business owners to doing more hands-on work than they might in other areas of their business such as bookkeeping, accounting, brochure design and more. One prospective client asked me if he should go to an upcoming seminar on paid advertising on Yahoo. It was to be given by two top people in Yahoo plus four high-quality companies who offer such PPC as part of their services. So it was certainly a quality seminar. I thought my answer to him was generally useful enough that I'm offering it here for consideration. I think there are basically three ways to go in using the Internet: 1. To be a passive, mostly ignorant consumer of specialist services. Not usually a great idea. Too easy to get ripped off --- usually not by crooks but just by people who don't know how little they know. 2. To be an educated consumer of such services and a partner in what is done. Concentrating on those parts that are most cost effective for you to do (e.g. writing the first draft of site content). 3. To be totally hands-on. Learning about optimization, PPC, social media marketing, analytics analysis, dayparting, ad bidding and many more topics --- then doing the work oneself. I recommend #2 — "Partnership”. On #1, it's just way too easy to lose money to amateurs. On #3, it's way too easy to lose vast amounts of money and time in being incredibly inefficient, and then ending up with mediocre work, anyway. In deciding where on the continuum between 2 and 3 to go for, there are a couple of questions that come to mind: 1. What is the best use of your time, day by day. 2. Do you do your own 4-colour separations? 3. Do you do your own editing for any TV or radio spots? 4. Do you do your own graphic design for brochures? LED is fantastic. Being educated about the Web is fantastic. But there is a real 'do-it-yourself' mythos around web sites that I think frequently goes way too far. I had one site owner a number of years ago who used me as a "trainer". I'll never do it again. In spite of my several attempts to persuade him otherwise, he did almost everything himself. It took him six months working a couple of hours every day to produce a site that I could have had done for him in a week. So he ended up with: - Lost profits for six months - And a site that looked nice but was hopelessly optimized --- a common situation. So after all that work, it didn't do much for him anyway. Unknown lost profits for ever. Just in building the site, it cost him (valuing his own time like mine) at least twenty times what it would have cost to have me do it — without even counting those lost profits!!! Very, very silly. Meantime, someone spent $500 with me more than five years ago and has made about $400,000 DIRECTLY attributable to that investment. So first core idea is --- what's the best use of your time --- every day; every week? For most most business owners most of the time, I don't think the answer to that question includes much time spent administering your PPC campaign, or optimizing the site, or micro-tweaking copy over and over, like one current client with a multi-million dollar business. That said - being an informed consumer is part of that ideal partnership that I recommend. And from that point of view, any seminar could be valuable. For the PRINCIPLES you'd learn, it may be worth it. I just recommend you don't start eating up your time doing incredibly inefficient work on your website, its optimization or on PPC or SMM campaign. There's an awful lot of work I don't do around our house. I pay a plumber, and a cleaner, and a yard guy. There's a lot of work I don't do on the Internet. I pay designers and programmers to work for me. Doing all the work yourself is not how to make big money, right? Furthermore, you already have your own profession. Why try to learn another? Ultimately you should be doing NONE of that work. You could pay out say $10,000 in a given period to specialists --- and in all that time you didn't spend on being a "web professional", you make yourself $100,000. So my ultimate recommendation on learning: Study with the attitude of developing yourself as informed consumer of professional services and partner in working on your site. Do not go with the idea of adding another profession to what you do. I can barely keep up with this field, doing it every day! There is no way you can. So just pay for top-level services. With all due respect, I don't believe you will be able, however many of these workshops you went to, to get yourself up to top Internet marketing specialist level. So you have the choice of just paying for top services, or putting a large amount of time into becoming maybe medium at this work--- while taking away huge amounts of time from your primary profession. That doesn't make sense to me. Why would you be satisfied with medium level work? Would you pay someone else for work in this critical medium that you knew was only medium? If not, why would you want to give yourself that medium work? What is so wonderful about do-it-yourself that you’d want to do this --- i.e. spend large amounts of time to give yourself medium level work? My answer - nothing. Unless it is saving a huge amount of money and effort, or unless it is being done by someone who just has next to no spare cash and has much more spare time than money. A profoundly powerful goal in business is to delegate EVERY SINGLE ACTION that can be done by someone other than you --- and ONLY to be doing the work that no-one else can do. If that resembles a part of your goal of how to work, then you should start building that strategically starting today. And taking on another profession would not fit with such a direction --- any more than would learning how to tweak the nuances of a $2,000,000 Heidelberg press for best colour reproduction. Michael Linehan, Marketing Alchemy www.marketing-alchemy.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Marty R. Milette Subject: Customer data > One of my clients raised a question about > the cost of his database of members if > someone wished to market to them... he has > the option from his customers to share > their data. - Quaid Joher Surti, LED 2592 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/2007/190/ This particular case identifies the crux of why commercial businesses can't be entrusted with personal data in the first place. Certainly not without an iron-clad privacy policy that is communicated with crystal clarity to anyone filling in a form. As Quaid J. makes clear, the data collected by business has "value" to other businesses far beyond the original need or perceived application. Capitalism at its finest -- ANYTHING that can be sold, probably will be. I'm sure that if the customers were asked when they initially provided their data whether they wouldn't mind if it was re-sold to third-parties, who may then repackage, mine, combine, reprocess and resell it to others for 'unspecified' future uses ad infinitum -- whether they would be so ready to agree to it. How would you respond to, "Dear Mr. Smith, thank you for placing your order with our company! When you placed the order, you implicitly gave your permission for us to sell, repackage and resell your personal details. If you do not agree with our policy, please feel free to return your order, along with a $50 restocking charge, and we will happily remove your data from our externally sold list." How would you feel if Google started selling your search requests and click-through data to insurance companies? You think that just maybe the fact that you had been doing a research project on liver cancer recently could possibly affect your life insurance rates or chances for renewal? How about when your purchase of huge quantities of alcohol for the company party -- would your car insurance company find that interesting? Tesco in the UK takes huge advantage of presenting 'relevant advertising' based on your itemized purchasing habits. Sound familiar? Are you comfortable with that? Google, at least for the moment, keeps all their harvested data pretty close to home, (unless you include readily honored requests from the government) -- but there are millions of 'small fry' more than willing to sell whatever they have on you for a few bucks to whoever is willing to pay. Call me a conspiracist if you will, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to harvest, combine and mine your "searchstreams", "clickstreams" (purchased directly from your ISP) and third, fourth and fifth party data. Gee, wonder how much Google got from DoubleClick? (Come to think of it -- why DOES Google need all those rocket scientist PHds anyway...) Marty R. Milette http://hotel-club.net (Zero Advertising) -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Nathan Holley Subject: SEO relevance factors > This is the order that 'search terms' are > indexed/used/supplied. URL, Page Title, > Keywords, Page Content (This includes the > description) > > My "small" question is... Does this seem > the same to everyone else? Do you agree? > Disagree? - Jon Langley, LED 2592 I'm not going to comment on the "order" of relevance factors... but some comments in general are: - keywords in the domain tend to do well at google, but it's spammy and doesn't take use into consideration (not to mention branding). those hyphenated long domains aren't long for the world... methinks they'll have a short half-life. - yes to title, no to keywords (if you mean the meta keyword tag). Yes to page content and keywords within the body - in headings, bolded, emphasized some way. - keywords in links; works a treat internally. This is what some people in the industry call "text book SEO." That means it's extremely basic and unchanging. This is the kind of stuff that should be widely publicized and available... the kind of stuff that we all should know about, like how basic websites work. -Nathan Holley -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Tom Anson Subject: Professionalism In response to Marty Milette's comments about my earlier post (LED Digest 2588 http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/2003/190/ ): I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. In my original post, the question was about doing things that were either illegal or immoral for the sake of the business. The point, as I understood it, was compromising your own standards of right and wrong, or violating what governing authorities have set as legal limits, for the sake of making a buck. And, for the sake of full disclosure, I guess I was assuming something of a Judeo-Christian morality. I realize that, in today's world (if not always) there is a lot of relativism in ethics or morality. Pretty much everything is seen in shades of gray. And certainly, things that are generally accepted in North America would be highly offensive in the Middle East. But, that's not what I was writing about. I also realize that people can take offense at things that would never have occurred to others as a possible area of sensitivity. But that, to me, is not a matter of morality, either. The things that Marty cited in this post don't seem to be the same as the original statement. It's neither immoral nor illegal to use clipart that depicts a black lady holding a watermelon. At least by the commonly-held standard in North America, it's neither immoral nor illegal to have a bikini shot on a web site. Not knowing what Marty had specifically in mind with his original comments about morality and legality, I'd have to restate my opinion that true professionalism can never be immoral or illegal. And, while there may be some truth to the idea that some issues that must be dealt with in business are seldom "black and white", I think that, if we listened to our consciences, they would prove to be much closer to black and white than what we generally settle for. Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials http://www.therapeutic-grade.com (c) Copyright 1995-2008 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- |
