Internet & Social media marketing case study: Nearlyheaven.com

Sue Virr is an established local entrepreneur in the Limousin offering Flying Lessons, as well as being a breeder of pedigree Hungarian Vizsla dogs and running two holiday cottages.  Following the departure of her previous designer, she got in touch with me, Richard Martin, to ask if I could pick up the reins and "Help promote the flying".

The first thing that immediately struck me in reviewing Sue's existing site was that all three business propositions were competing with each other on the same website.  This was confusing both visually and in terms of SEO.  If I were a prospective pilot landing on her home page, all I would see was information about Holiday cottages, with a small link off to the right of the screen to take me to the "Flying" part of the site.  Equally, searching "cold" for "Learn to Fly in France" (for example) did not turn up her site in the first 10 pages of SERPS, and searches using more refined geographical and flying terms (which I knew MUST lead me to her site) landed me variously on pages about Puppies and cottages and not about aircraft.  However, a backlink check on the site showed that nearly all the valuable in-links that were contributing to her PR3 rank came mostly from flying sites.

There were no analytics on site to show how people were otherwise behaving with it, although the Alexa data showed that keyword use and site page behaviour was fairly hit and miss.  Anecdotally, though, Nearlyheaven had a successful blog, which I had to be cautious to preserve.

I consequently recommended we should split the proposition into three separate sites, retaining "Nearlyheaven.com" as the main flying site and creating two new ones for the Dogs and Holiday Cottages.

The existing Typepad platform was not suitable for continued hosting of the proposition.  There are many reasons for this, fundamental to which was:

• As I was splitting the proposition into three and wanted to apply full SEO and marketing techniques to the site, I wanted full control over the code. Typepad didn't give me this.  Not being able to see even how to add or delete a link from a static page after hours of searching through  unfriendly navigation nailed it for me with Typepad.
• "Nearlyheaven.com" - being mainly a dynamic blog site with some static pages was just a redirect to a Typepad URL.  However, I wanted to turn this on its head, maximising the SEO of the static content, and bring-in the dynamic content of the blog as "additional content" once someone had signed-up to what the site had to offer.  The analytics - once we had put them on - entirely justified this impression.  They proved that the static pages were page-for-page far more browsed than the blog pages - althoug it is true that because of the number of blog pages, in total the blog received more viewings.  (There were indeed two different audiences in play here.  Web surfers who wanted to find out about flying - and Sue's bloggers who went for the blog.  Websurfers outnumbered the bloggers 10:1 so you know where my head was at!).  This was a website first, a blog second;

• Blogger is free.  Typepad is expensive (and I was about to create three sites from one);
• I like the family of Google applications and whilst I know a bad blog on Blogger won't rank higher than a great blog on Typepad, I do believe there is a marketing synergy in using the Google facilities and hoping to be found on Google search!  I also wanted to make use of YouTube, Feedburner, possibly Mapinfo over time.  Blogger ties in directly to my Google profile, etc etc etc.

So I created the three sites:
http://www.nearlyheaven.com/
http://www.pedigree-hungarian-vizslas.com/
http://www.holiday-cottages-to-rent-in-france.com/

all three had associated blogs.  The way we incorporated the blogs with the static content were:
a) access direct via iframe - so people didn't have to go to blogger;
b) newsfeeds using the feedburner feed directly to a "news" section on each static page. 
This way I felt we could much better provide for the "biggest" market (which were the random web browsers wanting to know about flying) whilst showing them the site was an active one with a dynamic community behind it.  Whilst equally not taking away from a considerably enhanced blog which we set up on blogger for Sue's existing "gang".

Using the blog feed, we were then able to feed off directly to the Nearlyheaven Facebook page which I also created, so we could keep people up to date automatically via that route as well.

 We have also lined-up a neat set of PPC campaigns.

 Site traffic has not stopped growing since implementing these major changes (phew!).  We're getting about 2,600 visitors a month now about a 25% traffic increase on legacy, and we KNOW that traffic is now a lot more targeted than before.  The main site also turns up nicely on Page 1 SERRPS for our target phrases.

The picture never stands still though, and we keep adding to the proposition. I may write a subsequent post on progress.

Spreading the net wider - Briquesetclics June newsletter

Briquesetclics June Newsletter
I encourage my clients not just to rely on their websites as a means of building their businesses. Sure, the website has to be "findable" and there is a whole art in doing this. But the website on its own is not a very proactive marketing tool. People have to be "looking" for it or referred to it by friends, colleagues, other advertisements and this is all a bit passive.

The Social Web (Web 2.0 as it is also called) provides a ready means of putting your marketing message out there much more proactively and obtaining far many more referrals than you could get just by having a website. But for many, the breadth of tools available (email, social networks, blogs etc) and establishing a cohesive strategy to use them (without giving up one's entire life to the web!) is baffling.

As I mentioned last month, I am compiling a Social networking "Brain" containing all the web and social web tools that really work. I have already added to it considerably and will continue to do so. Check it here and check back. The subject is large and constantly evolving.

But I've also put together a simple process flow below that really works and which takes just ONE STEP to update all those platforms listed (presuming certain capabilities are put in place on the website itself). I have just implemented this flow for two of my clients using tools I also mention in my "Brain". Contact me for more details.

Bing Vs Google

At the risk of writing the gajillion-and-first post on "Bing Vs Google", I thought I'd nonetheless pen down my own impression of these two engines, just based on my own findings.

Without question the search results I get for some of my websites are very different between the two engines - to the favour of Bing, I have to say! However - and maybe tellingly - the results between Bing and say Yahoo, Altavista and Ask are not that far apart.

All the websites under my care are new startups. And whilst I am able to write and optimise the content of each of these sites whilst staying within the rules - i.e. not getting spammy - it seems to be "this" activity that gets my sites - e.g. infrared-heating-redwell.co.uk to page 1 line 1 of Bing, whilst leaving it nowhere to be seen on Google.

Also, all the sites under my care, as new startups, have very little web history behind them and we're only just beginning to break ground into link building estate, so our history with Google and consequently our reputational score, will be low.

As if to prove the point, one new client of mine is a well established, 'old' site which is very-well linked into for a number of historical reasons but poorly optimised, covering about 3 or 4 major and very diverse topics. However, look up any phrase for any of those topics and "blammo!" page 1 on Google and often-times nowhere to be seen on Bing.

The trouble is that this client's site, offering such diverse services and not very well optimised is confusing - if not offputting - to customers. So despite their good SERPS results on Google, quite often you'll be searching for one thing and land on a page about something else.

Can I presume therefore an over-preponderance of "age and in-links" to Google's ranking and maybe a bias the other way (towards highly optimised "niche" sites) on the other engines?

I don't have enough evidence to suggest that is "the definitive" answer and nor do I think it will be a long-term one. Clearly over time I believe a balance of the four forces (niche; content; history; inlinks) will be in everyones best interest to obtain great results. Perhaps at the moment the greatest value in Bing is to "nudge" the people like my new client into looking at their propositions and content and seeking to bring both up to date!

A triumph for web over real-world

Here's a great example of the virtual world (the internet) beating present-day real-world "Europe" with all its structural rigidities, mis-allocation of goods and services (currencies, politics and psychologies etc etc) that still define this continent.

Have a look at Sterlingshopping.co.uk. Many will know how far the pound has slid against the Euro (it's less than parity at the moment). And groceries anyway in France are expensive. So for any Brits living in France and transferring pounds to euros - groceries are even more expensive.

Well, Sterling shopping allows you to buy online at Tescos, Asda, (you name it) in the UK and will then deliver to France for £15!!! They arrange a fixed number of drop-off locations and set times.

Needless to say they are inundated. You can more than redeem the price of the delivery off the same goods bought direct in France so long as you buy in bulk.

This is how things are going to be whilst real-world Europe still possesses such currency, psychological, cultural and structural rigidities. The virtual market is pulling the rug from under the real-world's feet!

Google analytics interface - fantastic

OK, so your site is all designed and optimised. All that traffic is coming screaming to your (virtual) front door now. Well done!

Except, they stay for 10 seconds and leave the site.

But there's really no excuse not to use Google analytics, and they're absolutely free.

And I have to confess they've saved my bacon and that of my clients

You see: search optimisation is a relatively straightforward activity: follow certain rules, apply them to your site and you can expect traffic to come to your site. (OK, its a bit more involved and ongoing, but you can see huge results from relatively simple initial steps).

But you need traffic analytics to actually determine how people are interacting with your site. This is not SEO, but rather Internet Marketing, but it does improve your overall reputational score and therefore your rankings. Things that have really benefitted me hugely:

a) Merging or deleting files with low click-through. This improves your overall "time on site" statistics and page/search relevance. (I kid you not, I merged 9 files for a client which had about 6 clickthroughs a month each,into 3 files relevant to a specific subject, EACH of which obtained over 59 clicks in the remaining 2 weeks of the month.)

b) Tuning page contents and navigation. If your page is exhibiting high "bounce rate" and low "time on page", then you need to tune your contents and navigation. High bounce rate says people are leaving the site without doing anything else on site. "Time on page" is exactly what it suggests: the length of time people are staying on a particular page. Ideally you want a low bounce rate (<40% is good) and a representative time on page (I can't give you an ideal figure: but perhaps time yourself reading through your page contents and if people are generally exiting well before that, then your content is not appealing).

c) Determining where people are exiting your site. Google stats show you (% Exit) where people are leaving your site. Of course everybody leaves your site at some point. Ideally you want them to leave having taken an action - if you have any sort of action confirmation page (e.g. A thank-you message for contacting you), this is the best one to have the highest % exit from. Any pages prior to that are worse news, depending on your content and desired action.

I'll post a separate article on "how" to tune your content - things to look for.

How success kills companies

I originally wrote the fuller article (see link) in 2001 for the Institute of Management Consultancy. Unfortunately due to a reorganisation at the time they did not publish and I did not follow-up. In retrospect I should have.

Expectations of business longevity should be set low. Of the 100 largest UK firms in 1917, only 28 still existed by 1987 and only 18 of those were still top 100. In 1935, an S&P top 500 firm had a life expectancy of 90 years. By 1975 this had dropped to 30 years and by 2001 was 15 years.

Survivors do not perform. The market index (Dow, FTSE etc) consistently leads survivor performance and is not defined by it. Survivors systematically underperform both the market as a whole as well as their industries within it by up to 300 points. Indeed, were one to base the S&P on long-lived companies, the index would have depreciated 20% year on year from 1962.

New companies outperform incumbents and decay over time, suggesting that effective market competition is based on innovation (product competitiveness), not efficient operations (price competitiveness).

Why is the above the case?
Most CEOs spend most of their time pursuing operational efficiency of their company (a management task) as opposed to new markets (a leadership task).

Consequently incumbents fail to change at the pace and scale of the market. They tend to innovate around a continuum of their core products. Higher market value accrues to companies that introduce brand-new products (i.e. disruptively innovate).

Consequently incumbent companies enter "cultural locking" of their market position and product into the corporate psyche and build. Disruptive innovation heralds dilution of present earnings, organisational disruption and cannibalisation of existing fixed capital.

What should companies do?
They should act more like the markets. Create, operate and then "trade-out" their business units.

Create at the pace of the markets and destroy at the pace of the markets.

Buy companies at the early end of the growth curve or on the periphery of the established market at the same pace of investment as the capital markets.

Seek the business units they should sell-off - that is, those at the top of the market - to use those dollars better for new businesses at the bottom of the market. This also allows them to discount the top-end performer to the buying company who can use the saved capital to rejuvenate and re-tool the "incumbent" unit.

White label sites: white lies?

One of the more recent trends with successful, proven web technologies is to re-publish them to other would-be entrepreneurs as "White-label" sites that they can buy, brand (under their own label) and then run as a business themselves. Sounds great.

The trouble is - like the California Gold Rush - its not the diggers who make the money, it's the people who sell the spades. If you buy a whitelabel web engine (be it online dating, car hire price comparison, car insurance comparison, whatever) just think "how competitive is the market and how far down the food chain is my startup going to be?".

Seriously. These are highly successful products that have already dominated their market. The Pay-Per-Click advertising cost for the "obvious" phrases that sell is going to be high (however well you optimise). The conversion-rate of people clicking-to-buying from you is going to be low because there is a lot of choice in the market (and a lot of people with competing white-label products).

And remember, with a lot of these engines, you only earn a commission, by way of being an "introducer" to the engine. You don't earn the full value of what you sell.


So, say you earn $20 per successful sale at a conversion rate of 1 sale to 60 visits (yes, that bad and worse). This means your PPC ads are going to have to be $0.25 or less to have a chance of making you money (in this case you'll get $5 from a $20 commission).

What PPC ads for phrases that sell in a competitive market are going to be that cheap? For Car hire, these phrases cost $20 a click! You could have spent $1,200 on advertising to make $5!

You can go for "long tail" phrases (rarer: cheaper) but equally remember that you will get less click-through - Say 5 clicks a day - unless you open up the ads on the "Content Network".

You'll then get your click throughs, but they will be poor quality ones and your conversion rate will plummet (say 1 in 200).

I'm not saying "don't go fo it". I am saying "Do your maths before you part with your cash".