Let's face it. Customers are a pain in the ass. Always asking for annoying things like service, honesty, quality. Always whining if they don't get what they want. Well, you're in luck. Here's my 13-step process for making sure your customers hate you. Just build… Read More »
The whole fuss around buying competitor's keywords in pay per click marketing campaigns is stupid. Moronic. Foolish. Wasteful. Did I mention bad? And stupid? There is nothing wrong with bidding on a competitor's brand name. Let me say it a different way: If you're Infiniti,… Read More »
Today, ShoeMoney and Marketing Pilgrim provided great insights into why they think search engine optimization has no future. I don't agree. Times infinity. Nyah nyah phbltbltbltblt. So there. Marketing Pilgrim says: "Take my industry of health supplements. Do you think Google wants to reward the… Read More »
May 15, 2008 by ian
OK, guys, my post yesterday about Google going downhill was tongue-in-cheek, OK? So stop putting the hatesss on me! Since about noon today, almost any search I do from my innocent Macbook Pro gets me this page: I've checked carefully, and I'm pretty sure I'm not an automated program. Unless I'm living in a matrix designed to keep me happy while I provide power to a race of intelligent machines...…
May 14, 2008 by ian
Google now controls the United States. I mean, we knew that already, right? But now it's official. Hitwise reports that Google received 67.9% of all US searches. So Sergey, can you do something about Iraq?... Now What? The Long, Slow Slide to Mediocrity The problem for Google at this point? They really have nowhere to go but down. Sure, they could gain control of 75% of the search market. But folks will just shrug. They complain because GOOG's share price is only $576, for heaven's sake. Steve Ballmer can sit back and laugh as Google goes through the same pains…
Continue Reading Google Gains 68% Search Marketshare, Could Go Bankrupt Any Day Now »
May 13, 2008 by ian
Let's face it. Customers are a pain in the ass. Always asking for annoying things like service, honesty, quality. Always whining if they don't get what they want. Well, you're in luck. Here's my 13-step process for making sure your customers hate you. Just build these features into your web site. They're like an internet marketing mullet: 1: The Flash Intro I've written about this three times now. Somehow people still argue with me, saying that 120 seconds of totally pointless dancing raisins, spinning squares and cheesy, porn-inspired music loops is a good marketing tactic. It's not. It's. Just. Not.…
May 12, 2008 by ian
How do you differentiate between linkbait and debate? How's about "Don't"?! Last week I published a rebuttal to Shoemoney's riff on the death of SEO. Most of the world ignored it, which I'm used to. But I got a few responses that basically said "Ignore him, he's just linkbaiting". The way I see it, a smart post that incites discussion may be linkbait, but it's also a good post. And it deserves some debate. And I'm not about to ignore good posts (with which I don't agree, by the way) just because the author might get a few links. When…
May 9, 2008 by ian
The whole fuss around buying competitor's keywords in pay per click marketing campaigns is stupid. Moronic. Foolish. Wasteful. Did I mention bad? And stupid? There is nothing wrong with bidding on a competitor's brand name. Let me say it a different way: If you're Infiniti, it's perfectly OK to make sure your ad shows up if someone searches for 'Audi'. Why It's OK: It's Called Competition See, putting your ad next to someone else's ad is called competition. On TV, commercials say "Our product beat [competitor name here]'s product 3 out of 4 times!" Competitors buy space opposite each other,…
Continue Reading Bidding on Trademarked Keywords is Fine: It's Called Competition »
May 8, 2008 by ian
Today, ShoeMoney and Marketing Pilgrim provided great insights into why they think search engine optimization has no future. I don't agree. Times infinity. Nyah nyah phbltbltbltblt. So there. Marketing Pilgrim says: "Take my industry of health supplements. Do you think Google wants to reward the SEO contortions of unknown companies and affiliates with lots of free business? Of course not–they want to send their visitors to the top supplement sites in the industry." Very true, but only where it applies to affiliate sites offering no additional value. Why should an affiliate site rank higher than the manufacturers it represents? It…
Continue Reading SEO Has A Future: Rebutting ShoeMoney and Marketing Pilgrim »
May 7, 2008 by ian
Internet Marketing isn't all misery and torture. So, in honor of National Grump Out Day, I dug deep and celebration-worthy advances in our industry: Analytics: No Longer Death By Details Two years ago, "analytics" meant "hope for the best". Lousy interfaces, slow reports, moronic support staff and high costs drove us all crazy. There haven't been any revolutionary changes since then. But industry consolidation, for once, may have been a good thing: The state of the art is far easier to use, runs faster, and (apart from the last week) very reliable. A lot of this, I think, is because…
Continue Reading 5 Internet Marketing Advances I Like, and What They Mean To You »
May 6, 2008 by ian
Beware bad statistics. They can kill your internet marketing campaign with bad assumptions, incorrect assessments, and by sending you far off track. By 'bad', I mean: Statistics that are collected from a small population. Alexa, for example, collects a lot of their data based on Alexa Toolbar users. It's very possible those users behave differently than the rest of the internet population. So being top 10,000 on Alexa may not mean a heck of a lot. Statistics that are just a rough model of the real data. Google's toolbar pagerank (the pagerank number you see in the Google Toolbar)…
Continue Reading 5 Kinds of Bad Statistics, and How They Can Kill Your Internet Marketing Campaign »
May 5, 2008 by ian
In any one day, I keep track of: 400+ web sites and blogs and news regarding 10-20 clients. In about 1 hour. I do not have a photocopier for a brain. Nor do I read particularly fast. Instead, I have a system. Here's how you can use it: Step 1: Set Up Google Reader Time required: 3 minutes. This one's easy. Go to Google.com/reader. If you have a Google account, you can just sign in using that username and password. You have a Google account if you use Gmail, Google Analytics or Adwords. Use the same login, and skip to…
Continue Reading Solve Internet Marketing Overload with Google Reader and a Process »
May 2, 2008 by ian
If you're using Google Analytics to record sales data, you may have noticed really horrible sales over the last couple days. Don't panic. I don't think it's you. It appears that, starting April 30th, Google Analytics isn't correctly reporting e-commerce revenue. We figured this out after noticing that, of our 10+ clients using Google e-commerce reporting, all were showing the same drop in sales. Here are graphs from two completely different sites, on different servers, in different industries: Bounce rates, site traffic and visit quality have all remained totally stable on these sites - there's no evidence anything went wrong.…
Continue Reading Google Analytics Is Losing E-commerce Data: Don't Panic?!! »
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