John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

29 August 2009: Print this page. Now that's how web pages should print.

28 August 2009: In an effort to clear some space in my tip of an office, I'm occasionally clearing a thing that's within reach of my seat. That's always my approach .. add an action to the equilibrium rather than take a day (week?) and sort it. To my mind if I did the latter, another problem would only build in the time I wasn't holding it back, necessitating another push in that direction and before you know it, I'd be out of control, firefighting all day.

Anyway, back to the point. Music: The Business - The Essential Guide to the Law and the Deals is a clear guide to British music law written by someone who qualified as a solicitor in 1983 and worked here in Scarborough shortly after.

It is a great book, fabulous for someone serious about working in the music industry. I mean really serious. By page 11 you're getting a lawyer. By page 14 an accountant. By page 20 a manager. Then there's getting a record deal and a publishing deal. If you want to go on tour you're going to need a booking agent, a promoter, a tour accountant, tour manager .. and that's before you have your sound and lighting engineers, backing musicians and so on.

In other words, it's not really for the likes of us local bands messing about in pubs.

On the other hand, it kinda is because it shed a lot of light on a record contract a band I know was trying to get out of and there was legitimate cause for that .. it turns out, for instance, a publisher can't hold exclusive rights without actually promoting you.

Then there's stuff about bands, what happens when they split, who owns the name, how do the assets split and so on.

There's a whole chapter on sampling, how to get paid if someone samples you, and how to clear samples for use.

I was in a band (Splat!, and helped to start Ron Johnson Records), and got solidly in my head the difference between the three different types of (what follows is from memory and may not be right) copyright: song, recording, and mechanical. I was hoping to brush up on those from such a clearly worded book but it didn't happen.

One very nice thing about this book is that it's British. Apparently, and she makes this point numerous times, the music industry in the US is a completely different animal.

All in all, a great book and I would recommend it to anyone interested in working in the music industry, even just for fun because if there is some money to be made, someone will make it. Might as well be you.

High Probability Selling

21 August 2009: I'm struggling a little with a book and principle called High Probability Selling. The process it advocates seems too .. controlling and not very warm or genuine. Perhaps it's a selling tool for people who don't need or want to create a relationship.

I got called by someone the other day who was obviously taking me along a sales path. He wanted all sorts of information until I said: "why am I telling you this?". He said "I've told you, what we do is .... ". I said "I still don't understand what you do, or what you want, perhaps this isn't going to be a fruitful conversation" and he just put the phone down on me.

High Probability Selling, AFAIK, would have a call from me to a prospect go something like this: "Hi, I'm John Allsopp and I offer a service that helps you sell more from your website by building traffic and helping to improve conversion. Do you need that sort of service?" If the prospect says "no", we're done. So maybe it does work. My next question would be "why?", which is curious. See it does seem a little rude, I'm one sentence into a call I just made to someone out of the blue, and I've got them on the back foot already. I'd be interested in your feedback if you buy the book yourself. Anyway, it's of academic interest, I've no plans to implement a sales campaign.

More simple SEO changes reap big rewards

20 August 2009: Marketing by numbers: Six days ago I edited the page of a freelancer who was getting no traffic to her website at all. Google spotted the changes after two days and thereafter she's been getting two new visitors every day. She's now on page two for a keyphrase she was on page four for when she first came to me. That keyphrase gets no traffic. For a slightly different keyphrase that does get traffic and for which she wasn't ranked at all, she's now on page three. Not a bad start for minimal effort.

Now we have some traffic, the market will tell us what people want. When people find her, we will be able to see what they typed into Google. That tells us what they were looking for.

More than that, we'll be able to see which keyphrase variations people had high bounce rates (a high percentage of people who arrived on our site and left immediately).

So we'll know what people want, and where we are close to fulfilling what they want.

The numbers will tell us our next move.

Small changes make a big difference

18 August 2009: Marketing by numbers: I made what I thought were fairly minor changes to some Adwords ads the other day. I was running two very similar ads differing by just one word. It turns out one word was good, the other wasn't working.

Interesting because it clearly indicated what people wanted to see. Imagine marketing Volvo and getting a clear indication that the word 'safe' was working much better than 'reliable'.

We now have a 13% improvement in click-through rate for the ads (the number who click the ad/the number who see a page on which it's displayed), and a 22% improvement in the bounce rate (those who arrive at your page and leave almost immediately). Visitors from ads are looking at 37% more pages and spending 2.5 times the time on the site.

All from testing ads. Remember, everything is a test.

On-page optimisation

18 August 2009: Marketing by numbers: Someone told me my website was 'intense' the other day. Result! :-) Anyway, sometimes my job is remarkably simple. Just decide on a keyphrase that actually matters. Put it into the website. Reap the rewards.

That's how it went with Whitby Art Net. A few keyphrases carefully placed and I've got 37% more traffic, a 7% drop in bounce rate, 35% more time spent on the site: it took just an hour. Curiously, only 1 visit on the phrase I chose, and they bounced. Wonder if I chose the right phrase.

Frames

14 August 2009: Marketing by numbers: Back in the day people said "frames are bad, Google can't (or won't) read frames". A frame is a technical way of providing a website that says, OK browser, here's a page, but there's nothing in it .. I want you to get the content from this other website over here and pretend.

It often turns up when someone's bought a domain name (a website address) from one company and website hosting from another (I recommend doing that) and then has clicked a button at the domain name company that says "get the website from (your host)". They put your website in a frame.

I'd have thought Google wouldn't have been too bothered by frames in this day and age, but I've had two instances recently where simply removing frames and serving the site properly, and doing nothing else, has resulted in the site moving from zero traffic to search engine positions and traffic in just a few days (once Google's had a chance to see the new site and re-index it). So it appears Google really still doesn't like frames.

How do you know if your site is served using frames? One clue is, if you navigate from one page to another of your site and the website address doesn't change in the address bar, ie. it still just shows your homepage address, then you're probably using frames.

To confirm, in your browser somewhere in the menu you'll find an option to display the page source, in Firefox it's in View->page source. That shows you the web page instructions the browser has received from your web server, basically it's a web developer's view of the web page.

If it is a small page containing, for instance,

<frame name="main" src="http://www.......

then that's defining a frame.

Try it on this if you like Sustainable Scarborough .. it's not my site and I don't think I'm damaging anything by pointing that out and you might like the cause.

Anyway, the solution that I use is to point the domain name to the name servers at the hosting company. The host will tell you the addresses you need to use and then you just need to find the menu option at the site where you bought the domain and go from there. I'd write down what they currently are before you change them just in case you want to reset it. Give it a day or so, and it's all over. Oh, that will screw up your emails if you're using the domain for that so, if you are, that needs a bit more thinking :-)

The Dogger Bank Earthquake

14 August 2009: I didn't know about the Dogger Bank earthquake until about five minutes ago, apparently it was the strongest earthquake recorded in the UK, and it happened under the sea.

Home Information Packs

14 August 2009: This is really just a link to prompt Google to visit this site about Home Information Packs which I've inherited and will be doing SEO work for over the next few months. But hey, if you want one, he's a nice guy so get it from him :-)

Waking up to the top slot

10 August 2009: Marketing by numbers: Wow, that's a nice Monday morning present, the Scarborough B&B I'm marketing has beaten all other B&Bs to the top slot for the keyphrase I've chosen. And that's not an insignificant phrase like "dog friendly B&B with sea views and a bar", it's a proper search term people use .. the phrase that describes the business best, and where there's a real bunch of traffic to be had.

We've been on the front page for a while, but now we're above all the other B&Bs, which is fabulous. And that's before I do .. well, I have a meeting in the next few days to get permission to proceed with five fairly major improvements. Starting to get into overkill territory maybe, but the next task is to fill their hotel outside the season and .. there really are plenty more Internet marketing targets this B&B needs to hit before my work is done.

I love it when it all works, though :-)

The Changeling

2 August 2009: I just watched The Changeling and I'm minded never to watch a Hollywood film ever again.

I loved the sets and the props, lets say that to start with. And it's not that the film was badly acted or sans story or anything. It was a good film about a true story that needed to be told.

But I am truly sick of the Hollywood agenda wherein films transmit American family values. Honestly, it feels like what I imagine communist propaganda was like, although I've read that was far more obvious and less subtle.

Kids, for a start. Well, I've chosen not to have kids. That puts me well outside the norm before we even begin. Don't get me wrong, kids are great. When I (rarely) enter a school and look at the stuff on the wall, it fills me up that we are teaching kids such fabulous stuff.

The hero: Angelina Jolie battles the system and will not give in because she has right on her side. Well yes, great. Of course. But that can bite you back when you decide that America is 'right', democracy (hanging chads and all) is 'right' and there is nothing that will stop you bringing democracy to the rest of the world.

I'm not even saying that the media doesn't have a great role in transmitting a good value system. It's there in Coronation Street every night and I applaud it. There is a mass of people who can hardly string a sentence together, probably came away from school with nothing, and they procreate and God help their kids. So if Coro carries a good message to them then praise be.

I guess what I'm stuck against are the values themselves in Hollywood films because they set up a white picket fence aspirational vision that I don't share because in order to achieve that vision you have to play the whole game which makes you a very pliant citizen.

There's a second, minor point, which is all about entertainment. Wasn't it shocking that the Los Angeles police department put Angelina Jolie into a psychiatric department for speaking the truth? Yeah, but there are plenty of countries where that's going on right now, sometimes on a mass scale. But somehow what the film doesn't do is say "see this? Get angry, do something", it says "see this? That's what happens when people do bad things. Make sure you behave nicely and everything will be just fine." What a waste.

People into horror: just read the newspapers. Read what happens in African wars, it's worse than any horror film. People into gaming: it's a waste of your life, face it. Real life is a much harder game .. what's up, can't hack it?

Co-incidentally, and I don't think it influenced how I feel about The Changeling, the covers band I'm in recently voted two songs through: Bullet in the Head by Rage Against The Machine, and (Slip and Slide) Suicide, by Kosheen. The latter is d&b which will be interesting to drum, but the RATM tune is basically violent and American and I'm quite sure it won't go down well with our audience. But I feel for the wind and see where people want to take the DTs (less Slade, more serious), so fine, I'm up for that. What I want to cover is Systematic Death by Crass .. absolutely seriously. Check out the lyrics. Makes more sense to me than anything from Hollywood and maybe thirty years on it seems even more relevant than it ever did.

So, on another level: the Hollywood message, along with the messages from our politicians, companies and scientists in the UK, have to resonate with us. They have to have the ring of truth. I think possibly Brits (with their inherent cynicism) are becoming the world's most canny consumers. So right here in the UK, right now, something's changing. Old, coarse efforts at guiding us will move some towards Crass.

I happen to be nonviolent, for the record, and I believe in marketing as possibly the world's most powerful force for good because it's simply helping people achieve what they want from life. You want a hovercraft / bed / new knee .. great, I'll organise myself into a company to provide those things, I'll be there when you want me, and make it easy for you to get what you want. That's a good thing.

Here's a blog entry about Tamiflu and it's very persuasive. Yet we don't "know" he's a doctor. We don't know his agenda. But we feel ready to trust him. Look up NHS direct, listen to our politicians, listen to an expert, and we have to take a long journey with any of them before we are ready to trust them. Yet the NHS is paid for by us, staffed by people who have dedicated their lives to our welfare. Even politicians are at least partly there to 'serve'. What is it that makes that lone voice on the blog seem more authoritative? Does he just tell us what we want to believe? If that's it, we'll be drowning witches within a few weeks. It's partly that he doesn't seem to be selling anything, but that's not all, it's also the feeling that he's telling us the secret truth. The problem with that is .. that's a technique marketers use too.

Right now, it feels so very messed up. Marketing needs to be stronger, and to do better. People are sick of being manipulated. My marketing vision is not manipulation, it's empowerment.

Social media is part of it. As a company, you'd better be consistent or people will blog about you, comment about you, pick you apart and that will be that. Do it right, and you'll have loyal supporters forever.

In Big Brother, a place mostly populated by twenty year olds (our future, I guess), the worst thing you can be is 'false'. If you're seen to be two faced or playing a game, you're out. Truth and honesty are the keys. I think that's a shining light of hope. If, even among people who want, basically, the life of a celebrity, the key ticket, the key brand value that will get you there is honesty and truth, then I actually think that's showing us the way forward.

If you want to be successful in today's world of openness, cameras filming the police and uploading to youTube, Twitter, blogging, Facebook, and so on, you'd better be open, honest and true. I'm up for that.