The Webmaster Place

Instant Hebrew is a set of 3 videos that teach people to read Hebrew in only two hours. I helped create the course because there is a strong desire out there to learn Hebrew, for a number of different reasons, but many people are put off by hurdle of not being able to read the language. In fact, though, if you can read English or another language you really can learn to read Hebrew in just 2 hours with this product, so Hebrew will no longer look like Chinese.

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Today, a story. This is a blog after all…

Last night I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with someone in another country to make a sale plus another 40 minutes of followup afterwards. Here is what happened:

Someone came to a site where I am a minority partner and filled out the form to get the service in question. But she didn’t complete the payment process at PayPal. This has happened a number of times lately so I was very interested in getting the sale. After an exchange of emails where the woman mentioned the technical problems of reaching her on the phone I called her anyway because I doubted from experience that I could get the sale via email. I got lucky and reached her.

After a pleasant exchange she agreed to give me her credit card information over the phone. She has had lots of problems with PayPal in the past and couldn’t pay now because her email addresses were already registered in PayPal from past purchases. Which is weird but apparently true.

Again from experience I knew that things can go wrong during the payment process even if I do it, so I kept her on the line and filled out all the information using a new email address. Everything worked out and I destroyed her credit card info.

My reward? $67, of which I get about 1/3. Whoopie.

Why did I do it? Because I will do almost anything to get a new customer, especially for a new business like this one. The lifetime value of this nice lady is probably going to be a lot more than $67, as she will probably renew the service when her membership expires in a year. She may even upgrade to a better service. Or buy something else we have to offer.

Shockingly, most web sites neglect the fact that a customer can be sold to more than once. Otherwise they wouldn’t sell ads, which is basically pushing potential customers off of the site to another site where they will become lifetime customers. Dumb, huh? In fact, just about every successful business relies on repeat customers to survive. How long would McDonalds be around if every customer only bought one burger one time? Not long.

Online people forget this critical lesson. Many such sites even succeed, and succeed big, but eventually their revenues will start to go down and down, and there is seemingly no way to stop the downward drift. That is becuase they never built a business with a successful back end that keeps making more money from existing customers indefinitely. By focussing only on the front end they constantly need new traffic to get by, and when the competition improves or the nature of the ‘Net changes (read: Web 2.0) they lose traffic and revenues. And there is nothing they can do about it.

The lesson? Get as many customers as you can. But capture the email addresses of potential customers and stay in touch with them and your past purchasers until they buy again. And again.

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I am posting the following at the suggestion of a partner/client of mine after sending him the advice therein by email. I have removed the specifics to protect the innocent and clarify the message. This message is critical to help a web site succeed.

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The idea of a USP (unique selling proposition) of a site is critical. Some (not all) people will intrinsically understand the advantage of a particular site over the others but the case should be made clearly and immediately.

It must be the first thing that people see when they get to the site. The top of the home page (in the main text area where people actually look) has to emphasize clearly on the home page that the site has something to offer that the others don’t and couldn’t even if they wanted to. All individuals, businesses and yes, web sites, have something very special that (almost) no one else has. By pushing the unfair, insurmountable advantages you have over
the other guys you tilt the board in your favor. The competitors will lose if the visitor/potential client focusses on what you are the best at. And if the competitor makes the mistake of trying to emulate you he will be competing against you on your home turf and get beaten even worse.

If you think you don’t have such a special advantage, think again. No two people are the same and no two sites are the same, mirror sites and duplicate content excluded. What do you have to offer that is different, special, cheaper or better?

Your email list (you are fanatically collecting your visitors’ email addresses, aren’t you?) can be a bit more subtle than your site because people are hopefully going to read more than just one of your emails so you have more than one shot at them. But your emails, or better your autoresponses, should also focus on what you have to offer that the other guys don’t, and can’t.

This is a critical point in business — play to your own strengths. I learned this point last summer from Rich Shefren. Unbelievably I had been focussing on my weaknesses over the years and competing with other guys where they were strong and I was weak — design. I am a programmer, and SEO guy, an Internet Marketer, a great analyst, but not a designer. I have figured out what my strengths are and have been pushing them and it has really made a huge difference in they way that people look at me and the kind of clients I have begun working for.

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I mentioned in my last post that Webmasters need to design their sites such that their clients will actually make money from them, but yet they don’t know how.

The problem is actually worse than I thought. I recently began marketing my online marketing skills as opposed to just my ability to create sites and it looks like my biggest clients are going to be… other webmasters. SEO, sales flow, basic business concepts like lead acquisition — whoa, they want to offer those to their clients but they have no idea how to do it. Better bring someone onto the their team that can!

Works well for me but it speaks very poorly of those other webmasters. The mere fact that they want to bring in the competition to help them instead of learning the skills which they should have acquired long ago themselves is an admission of guilt.

The lesson: if you are going to build a web site, before you hire a webmaster or designer ask a few critical questions like “Is this site going to get traffic?” and “Will people buy once they come?” If the prospective webmaster admits that s/he doesn’t know about that stuff then say thank you and keep looking.

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Creating a web site is just the first step. Most clients actually want to make money from their sites, yet the webmaster builds a site which has poor SEO (i.e. no traffic) and a bad sales flow.

I have been asking site owners lately the most basic questions such as:

“Are you collecting the email addresses of your visitors?”

“Are you offering an upsell (a second offer) at the time of the purchase?”

“The holidays just passed. Did you email your previous customers to get them to buy some of their gifts from you?”

The answer is inevitably no to all these questions. And then these merchants wonder why they are not making decent money from their sites.

The rules of business are the same online as off; in fact it is much easier to make money online than off if one just follows the same rules that one would follow in their online business. Rules like “it takes multiple contacts before prospects are willing to buy” (hint: so get their addresses and start emailing them) and “it is much easier to sell a satisfied customer a second time than it is to sell a new prospect the first time” (hint: so get your purchasers email addresses and start emailing them) .

The big money is made on the back end - that is repeat business. If your clients aren’t collecting addresses and working the back end it is the webmaster’s job to educate them.

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A lot of buzz has been created recently by reports heralding the “Death of AdSense” and the “Death of Marketing”. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of their deaths have been greatly exaggerated. But one thing that clearly is dying is search engine optimization (SEO).

I recently had a discussion with a top SEO guy (who will remain nameless to protect the innocent). He wrote an SEO book, has a popular SEO blog, etc. I asked him many questions about one of my sites which gets great SE traffic but could do better. I couldn’t get a straight answer from him.

Finally I asked him point blank “So what is SEO?” His response? “Link bait.”

Link bait, if you don’t already know, means trying various tricks to get lots of people to link to your site.

What he meant (based on the rest of the discussion before and after) was that there are so many factors involved in the search engine algorithms now that it is impossible to know exactly what will work and what won’t and why. The best one can do is not make mistakes, get things mostly right, and then try to generate lots of real, non-reciprocated inbound links. I would add to that that it is wise to create lots of unique content on many different pages in order to increase your odds of getting lucky.

That is not SEO — that is SEF — search engine friendliness. You do your best to do well on the SEs in general but you will have a very hard time targetting a specific engine for a specific keyword and guaranteeing results in advance.

But that is nothing. Real changes are coming that will bury SEO for good.

Already I have begun noticing different search engine results based on location and different Google AdSense ads showing up on different computers seemingly based on surfing habits. To me it is clear that in a few years it is clear that search results will vary from person to person based on their personal interests and histories.

IMHO, that is why Google is racing to get ahold of as much personal information as it can about people. Who controls Windows and your PC’s desktop, Internet Explorer, Word, Outlook, Excel and NotePad? Microsoft. Who could easily access the oodles of information about us stored in those various products and their related files if they wanted to? Microsoft. Who has a habit of leveraging their Windows assets to bury competitors? Microsoft.

Is it any wonder that Google is racing to set up Gmail, Google Desktop, the Google Toolbar, Google Groups, Blogger, the Google Calendar and much more? Sure it may be a simple push for hegemeny, but I think that it is also a strategy to survive. Bill Gates doesn’t like to lose, and Google has an awful lot to fear.

So be on the lookout for these changes as they happen. I am betting it will be real soon so plan accordingly.

On the other hand, maybe the new social networking sites will bury the search engines altogether.

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Background: I am an expert in getting search engine traffic and also optimizing AdSense revenues. For more information please see the company site for Excellence Internet Services and especially our AdSense Optimization page.

That said, I think I have discovered a clash between AdSense and search engine optimization (SEO):

I have seen page views plummet on a number of occassions after I got more agressive with my AdSense ads. So I made changes, got more money for a couple of months and then bam, the revenues went way down.

Having AdSense code on a page is not supposed to affect one’s search engine ranking at Google at least, but it seems that is a business statement: “Having AdSense (or some competitor’s ads) on the page won’t help or hurt your rankings because that would corrupt our search engine results.” However, there is probably another rule that they don’t mention: “Having lots of JavaScript junk on your pages instead of relevent text is going to hurt your ranking according to our search result algorithm.”

Anyway this has always been a key feature of my making our pages search-engine friendly (SEF): mostly text on the page, suppressing whatever HTML code I can to the below the main text area. Having JavaScript code in the text violates this rule and it really seems to hurt.

There is a simple solution: put the AdSense and any other JavaScript code into a separate .js file. This means less junk in the HTML. This adheres to my SEF rules and it seems to help. I have been doing this with many of our sites and many of the sites that went down after I got agressive with the AdSense ads then popped back up.

I did some quick research on the subject and found nothing but I am pretty confident about my results. I strongly recommend this because it is easy and at the very least it can’t hurt. Give it a try.

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I read in the recent issue of the Trafficology print newsletter that “most web searchers find Google to be less-and-less helpful every day”. People have been saying “Google AdSense is dead” lately. That is an exageration but there are serious concerns about AdSense. But Google’s search engine itself becoming less helpful? How could anyone say that about the #1 search engine by far?

Well, they said it and after reading it I agree. Basically they said people are leaving the search engines in favor of social bookmarking sites like Technorati or Del.icio.us. This makes sense — Google was the first to use the idea that links to a page prove that it is a relevent page. Social bookmarking is similar, but just the next step.

Now that spammers and link farms have destroyed the original Google model of relevent linking Google and other major search engines have been working hard to stay ahead of the game. Too hard. The answer is in going back to what humans are picking, and the social bookmarking sites are doing that. For now at least they are mostly spam free so Google will have to create their own social bookmarking site or buy one to keep up. I am betting on the latter since they have so much money. If they don’t do either they are going to be in trouble.

For those of us who rely on search engine traffic, we need to get into these social bookmarking sites ASAP.

You heard it here first.

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Everyone who has a brain stresses the importance of delegation in business. However, after many years of doing just that (but not nearly well enough) I want to express the following caveats:

1) Delegation is very time consuming and difficult to do properly. It requires all kinds of training, followup, damage control, etc.

2) No matter how good the delegater the delegatee will usually do a worse job than the delegater, unless the delegatee is a highly-paid expert in his/her field. Passing the work onto a cheap grunt is a recipe for less than perfect results, though that is not necessarily a reason not to do it anyway.

3) Sometimes it is proper to do the work oneself for a while to develop the system properly before delegating it. A properly designed system is much easier to delegate and will work better for longer. Don’t expect a delegatee to refine and improve your system for you unless s/he is well-paid.

4) If you are serious about delegation, here is how to delegate certain tasks (those that will be delegated to an inferior, and not to an expert):

For every task that you do take very careful notes how you do it. Organize these notes into a list of actions for each task so that someone can just follow the list of actions to do it. When doing the tasks refer back to your own notes and revise and improve the notes as you revise and improve the way you do the tasks. Then when you are ready to delegate it to an inferior the person will just have to follow the notes and the task will get done more or less properly. The better the note the cheaper the delegatee can be.

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A colleague of mine forwarded me the following excellent discussion:

AdSense Bad For Your Business

Here is my response to this discussion:

First, we are moving to a new apt. in 3 days so I just don’t have the time to read it all, but I agree with about 95% of what I read.

The AdSense model is flawed in a few major ways, which they mentioned:

1) It encourages webmasters to create junky sites which is bad for everyone.

2) It encourages webmasters to get people to leave their sites, which is normally the opposite of what you really want to do, because:

3) The real money is in products or services. Think about this: My wife does Google Cash. She and other Google Cash-ers shoot for a 100% ROI at least. She in turn sends to another program that has to pay her and probably also wants 100% ROI. So the final product has to make 4 times what Google and the publisher get combined, or about 12 times what the publisher gets.

Who is smarter?

I have been making high-4-figures on AdSense for years but I have been forced away from the AdSense game to a certain extent for the reasons people say. I have been pushing AdSense harder and harder but have been getting less and less money. So I have been getting back into consulting, partnerships, etc.

There is an important caveat though: Some people are very good at creating real content sites. For people like that AdSense can be an important revenue stream, though one has to be willing to push the ads hard (sell out).

There is, however, a solution that allows for the best of both worlds: Building a mailing list. The REAL money is in your mailing list, whether you have an information site or a product site. EVERYone says this and has been doing so for years. If you think about this, it is also obvious (once you understand it): Would you rather someone visit your site once and click on an ad and never come back, or email them over and over and over again, making some money each time? Same thing if you replace the words “click on an ad” with “buy something”.

So my advice to webmasters is:

1) Keep building information sites with real content if that is what you do. Content still rules.

2) Keep making money from AdSense. If you have an information site, you should probably push it hard to make money while you can to finance your next steps, as listed below:

3) Keep your other options open: keep doing consulting and seminars. Look into selling eproducts or real products. Explore other opportunities like real estate investing. If something else works you can keep the info sites on autopilot and they will keep making money.

4) Start collecting email addresses ASAP on your sites, no matter what kind of sites you have. It will take time and learning to start making money from these but it is critical to your business and the sooner you start the sooner you will be making real money.

Don’t say I (and everyone else) didn’t warn you.

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