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The problem with 'design' and websites

2010-03-06: Here's a video that illustrates perfectly what's wrong with web development led by graphic design (it's a bit flaky in it's delivery, btw, so hit refresh if it doesn't work first time).
I've not got a problem with good design, who could have? That would be like having a problem with tasty food or great music.
Many people are lazy about how they think about design. Perhaps designers encourage it. It's nice to think you're cool, and if you're going to be a designer you really ought to embody your practice. That leads to choosing great products like cars, clothes, and phones which .. is kinda cool. So maybe it's just part of being a designer. And perhaps people think if they knock around with designers some of the cool might rub off on them. So, designers look cool and have lots of people to hang out with. What's wrong with that?
The book I'm reading at the moment talks much more about design for the uncool, the disadvantaged, the poor, and the disabled. So now I'm more interested.
Let's give that video some hassle. Looking at how the user interacts with that screen, poking and gesturing, I get irritated. Do any of you use a screen like that? Do you like working that way? It really looks like I'd feel it was an effort to use a screen by poking at it. I think it's because moving your hand and arm like that requires a shift in musculature throughout your torso. Whereas with a mouse, your hand is already rested over it. Subconsciously, it's a big deal to move your whole arm just to turn a page. So you won't want to do it. So using a tablet is irritating, not a pleasure. Which puts you in the wrong frame of mind to browse lifestyle articles and magazines.
This, though, is the big, fundamental issue with the video. He talks about the user interface (UI), and it's clear he's a designer, perhaps a graphic designer. But it's as if the UI is a higher level of graphic design .. and it isn't. Human computer interaction is a huge field where huge disciplines like psychology, information architecture, and usability and accessibility stuff meet.
For instance, he keeps demonstrating the horizontal scroll to more content, but half the time he ends up at that car ad. There seems to be nothing on the screen that tells you what you're scrolling to. That breaks a fundamental rule of usability, that the user should know what will happen when they choose an option, and when they arrive on the next screen, it should be basically what they expected .. no surprises.
The demonstration seems to imagine a Halifax CardCash kinda world where people have the spare time and inclination to sit with a gadget and try to read a magazine on it and the brand of the magazine they are trying to read is so trusted that we'd pore over every page, letting the editor and publisher lead us wherever they want. That's an advertising person's dream, but it's not real.
Let's strip out the idea that someone would sit and read some glossy lifestyle magazine on a tablet like this. We'd be more likely to browse YouTube or Facebook. I mean .. we absolutely do sit and browse through stuff on our computers, letting the wind blow us wherever it may, but .. and here's the thing .. underneath both of those experiences is a whole heapload of programming that provides us what we want. "You like that? Then you'll love this." He makes no mention of the enormous amount of work and yes, design, that goes into making that happen. Do you think YouTube would be as engaging without it?
There's personalisation. People new to YouTube may not have seen Maru the cat, but for others they've seen the top 100 funny videos on YouTube and they want something more. Two users, two different desires. YouTube presents them both with different content because it knows something about what they like. That makes it engaging .. because it's showing each of us what we want to see.
So what's groovy about carrying around some form of handheld computer is that it provides what we want, when we want it.
When I went to that meeting of the Yorkshire Mafia the other day, I prepared by checking where the hotel was. The postcode in Google Maps puts it at Leeds Railway Station, and I used to live in Leeds so I thought no more about it. As I drove in at night in the rain from an unfamiliar direction, I got lost. When I found the station, I couldn't find the hotel. The static station information didn't tell me. The interactive screens didn't tell me. Tourist information had closed for the night. There was no-one from the station who looked like they might help. The WiFi seemed to need a login. And I couldn't see the hotel nearby. Turns out it wasn't really nearby at all, and it was a new-build. I had to ask four people to reach it. That's what you want a handheld computer for, and if it took you by a route where you were less likely to get mugged that would be nice.
What if I were in Japan? I'd need internationalisation.
I haven't got a problem with aspiration, and I understand that advertising has to appeal to our lizard brains in order to work, that's absolutely fine.
But this video isn't an ad. Actually, maybe I'm wrong about that. Perhaps it really is. And in that context, fine, advertise what you do, it's a great ad, so long as you make clear what you're doing isn't really user interface design in any whole sense. You're designing the look and feel of a user interface. That's not the whole story by a long way. It's not even the hardest, most heroic or most interesting part. It's the way you've painted the house. I'm much more interested in the house, its location, its services and its community.
So if it isn't an ad, my fundamental problem is that this doesn't seem to be addressed to any problem anyone's actually got. It's a top-down, brand and business-led imagining of how corporations might be able to sell to us in the future. More than that, it's a design company's pitch for how they might help corporations use new technology to improve their business. It depicts a cosy world where business calls all the shots and we just spend our money on Porsche branded sneakers.
Or as a friend put it: "it's like annoying electronic doors and windows where a door knob and a hinge would have done nicely. 'We're doing it because we can'. Beyond that, no justification nor use. Will it 'save the planet', less paper, less ink, less chemicals. No, just even more south africans and koreans down pits searching for precious metals to power the computer, more wars, more instability, on and on .. so .. it's bollocks really. But it will happen because it can. And for someone returning from one of the war regions full of precious metals with all their limbs blown off, I guess not having to turn pages in a mag will actually, one day, be of use after they have stopped weeping".
If it's design, if it's business, surely it should address a need. That's the whole point .. we come to work every day to solve people's problems in a way they can discover and afford. Their problems. We solve people's problems. That's what makes for a better world. That's the promise of free market capitalism. It spots a need and solves it and thereby improves society.
There's no reason I would want what's shown (even if it were free), it would be irritating to use, I wouldn't use it the way they want me to use it, it doesn't do what I want, and it appears to corral the design of a user interface as a graphic design job (which it absolutely isn't). But it looks nice, so that's OK then.
Incidentally, I'm not trying to kill all graphic designers here, I'm just tackling that video. Funnily enough as I was writing this I did keep thinking about Electric Angel, the efforts Adrian's made .. with Chart Scarborough to understand urban navigation and in the railway project looking into the history, to try to look into things more deeply. Of course, you have to deliver something that looks nice and the budget probably doesn't usually provide for much research, but I actually think Adrian's got soul, does the right things. So I'm really not knocking designers. I'm knocking that video.

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The Yorkshire Mafia

2010-02-26: I got a strong feeling that many business-people's new year's resolution was to use Linked-In more. On mySpace you can talk about how awesome club nights are, on Facebook your Auntie's probably on there so you share your holiday snaps, recommend scented candle shops and wonder aloud about whether you should get a pet piglet. Twitter is for live chatalong with reality TV and updates about the morning's commute, while on Linked-In you wear your suit .. it's business only.
That was tongue-in-cheek btw, I've had lots of business from Twitter. I'm just reflecting back people's views of the different services. I spoke to a friend and business colleague yesterday and he honestly can't see how Twitter would be useful to him.
Anyway, at the start of the year I did get a sense that people in business had gotten the measure of Facebook, tried Twitter, and were now ready for LinkedIn. I was one of them.
So I'm trying a few things out and one prevailing means to success is, apparently, to help people out and give things away. I'm concerned that what will happen is that will become a popular and then trite way of carrying on as the recipients begin to recognise an 'is there anything I can do to help?' as the beginning of a sales process, that once you accept help you also accept an obligation to reciprocate. What may well be a genuine offer to help may become poisoned by becoming a known sales technique. Sad, because I always feel genuine. Maybe everyone does.
Anyway, apparently Linked-In groups are a great way to connect with people, and answering and asking questions are too, so I got invited to join the Yorkshire Mafia which appears to be a networking group aiming to promote the doing of business within Yorkshire. There's a lot of this about, I see it when working on TweetCloser, lots of Chambers of Commerce activities promoting regional business. But this is a genuinely popular group promoting the real strengths of an area so, nothing wrong with that.
Yesterday was a Mafia meetup in a hard-to-get-to hotel in a bit of Leeds reminiscent of the bit where Corro Roy was nearly drowned then saved, and preceded by an unprotected bit of canal in the middle of the plaza area in a direct line from where you enter the plaza to the entrance to the hotel (honest, lookee see for yourself (obviously it wasn't built yet when that aerial shot was taken, but that canal is completely unguarded and unannounced. Could easily text-"hello love, finally found the hotel, aaaargh"-phone-amble yourself into the dark waters of the canal, I'll have nightmares about that)).
It was full and hot and friendly and contained so many tall people I thought I was in Amsterdam. Perhaps Linked-In promotes growth. Being a Linked-In-driven group it had a higher proportion of Internet marketers than exists in the real world. So, it was nice to meet other likeminded souls but it might have been nicer to meet people I could trade with. There was the chap who ran The Devil's Guide to IT in a black suit, red tie, and sunglasses, and the man with the best Twitter tale I heard all night, Dan Sumption who, working on iPlayer programming for the BBC, was able to tweet a bug-complainant to say "I fixed it, try it now". How cool is that? You're sat at home watching i-Player, something goes wrong and you report it, then .. not customer services, but the actual programmer, tweets you and says "thanks, try it now, I've fixed it". That direct connection and immediacy is, for me, the essence of Twitter.
As for Linked-In advice from a roomful of Linked-In users? One devotes an hour a day to using it and has lots of work from it. Seems like a lot of time. The social media guru lady at VentureFest talked of maybe a quarter of an hour each morning. That sounded optimistic at the time, though.
So yes, a good gathering, certainly popular, and everyone's genuine about working with each other. There's certainly a lot of reason to, and with such talent in Yorkshire very little reason to look to London for anything much .. Trooping The Colour maybe. I'm pleased to be part of it and I'll keep you informed.

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Starting a bed and breakfast business

2010-02-21: OK, this blog is all very well but let's make it real. Let's take, over time, a bed and breakfast, preferably someone who is starting a bed and breakfast business near to Scarborough, and publicise it using all the things I know.
How did that idea come about?
As I was writing the previous blog I was thinking, well, I'm not really taking my own advice. The best way I've found to blog is to write the blog, leave it overnight, then tidy it up, add-in key search terms ("start a bed and breakfast business" is one for this article), and then publish it.
So I took the previous blog's text and put it into Google's Keyword Tool. That is supposed to take the text, work out what it's about, and provide other keyphrases that might be of interest.
It can do this because Google, obviously, knows what people type into the search engines. So its suggestions are based on those search terms, and it provides both the frequency of use and an indication of how competitively each term is fought over in Google's Adwords pay per click advertising system.
If you've not seen this sort of tool before, let's be clear how big a deal that is. Type in any phrase (for this, I typed in "starting a bed and breakfast"), and Google will tell you the number of times people are searching for that phrase (320 times per month) and similar ones ("how to start a bed and breakfast", 170), and how keen people are to bid for each of those terms (maybe 6/10). It's nothing to do with your website, it's about search frequency in Google. That's awesome market information, even if you're not doing Internet marketing, even if you just want to know what to stock in your shop.
Anyway, it's a bit imperfect when presented with a lot of text. It thinks the key issue I talk about in this blog is starting up in business. I mention 'startup' only twice and talk about all sorts of other things, so that doesn't really make sense, but the point is .. perhaps in that case my own blogs should be more optimised for keywords than they are.
So wandering down the results of Google's Keyword Tool, a phrase like "start a business" has 90,500 searches per month in the UK, and 10/10 for competitiveness. I don't think I really have a right to be in that space, so let's keep looking.

Marketing a bed and breakfast business online

Well, to cut a long story short I settled on "starting a bed and breakfast" (I kinda like people who are willing to type out "bed and breakfast" rather than B&B). As I said above, that phrase attracts 320 searches per month, so 10 per day, and the competition's maybe 6/10. I've worked successfully with lots of B&Bs so I know what I'm doing .. I live in Scarborough after all .. so I think I have a right to be there when someone types in "starting a bed and breakfast", "how to start a bed and breakfast business" or even "run a bed and breakfast". And if I can get to work with a new startup bed and breakfast business every month, I'd be happy with that.
So I think what I'm looking for is a guinea pig bed and breakfast business, someone who is willing to go through the whole process of publicising their bed and breakfast with me, 'live', even on camera. YouTube, blogging, Twitter, Facebook .. the whole shebang. And let's see if what I say and do works on a real business. It can be a new bed and breakfast business or one that needs more visitors.
So basically, if you are a bed and breakfast, especially if you're starting a bed and breakfast in or near Scarborough and you fancy that, get in touch. First come, first served.

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BarCamps are great. This isn't a BarCamp

2010-02-14: A BarCamp is a conference with some key differences. What excited me about the idea, realised at BarCamp Bradford, is that it's a user generated conference. It's the delegates who present. It's a sharing of ideas.
The key moment around which a BarCamp pivots is when the empty framework for the day is posted on the wall, a call to action is given, and the delegates, armed with marker pens, volunteer their presentations into empty slots. Ten minutes later, you have a completely planned conference.
Typically that free sense of giving and sharing is complemented by free coffee and pizza (cake, too, at Bradford) and the whole event is free. Also, in moving between tracks (BarCamp Bradford had four) and from presentation to presentation there's plenty of opportunity for networking and meeting great people. This is aided by the fact that these are more or less amateur presentations which sometimes finish early (in one case for me at Bradford, so early that as I sat down the presenter said "so, any questions?")
Because a BarCamp is created by the people attending, they are free to give presentations on whatever they like. So you can have a public transport BarCamp and you'll have a taxi driver, the local councillor responsible, someone from the Green Party talking about emissions, and someone from a traffic planning organisation saying how they could fix it given the chance. In other words, it's a real mix of people with enough gumption to get up and talk about it. Cool, engaged people, in other words. Where else would they mix?
But also it comes from the open source community, the sort of people who brought you Firefox, Linux, Blender, Audacity and pretty much all of the Internet by sharing ideas and working together freely. A BarCamp open-sources its organisation, providing the bare bones of a structure and trusting the delegates to make the conference their own. Good people, people who would share their food and look out for you, like BarCamps.
Other stuff makes it a BarCamp too, here's Wikipedia on the subject, but here's a central place where BarCamps get registered, I mean it's a bloody awful site but if you're into BarCamps (and hey, there's one in Newcastle .. yip, might see you there :-) ), that's how you find out where and when the next one is.
As part of Digital Scarborough, there's (this link has now been amended, see discussion below) BarCamp Scarborough except .. it isn't. It's 'loosely based' on the principles of BarCamp. Well .. which principles? It's free to attend, but that's about it.
There's only one track, so there are fewer mixing opportunities. But crucially, it's no more a user generated conference than any other conference. Eight presentation slots which you have to apply for ahead of time, which implies someone will decide who gets to present. That's the opposite of a BarCamp.
At Bradford Barcamp for most delegates it was their first ever BarCamp. What I'm upset about with the Scarborough BarCamp is that it's not a BarCamp, but whoever has organised it has used the word. Perhaps they thought it was cool. Maybe they don't really get what the point of a BarCamp is. There are plenty of people around who for whom open source hasn't clicked yet. Possibly they didn't think it mattered that much .. whatever it takes to make the event a success. I don't know, I'm just guessing, that's what it feels like, reading the material on the website. Perhaps whoever's behind it has laudable motives that I haven't discerned, if I hear anything I'll let you know.
But I think it takes from the idea, the brand, of BarCamp, without giving. Scarborough BarCamp isn't a BarCamp. So delegates might come away with the idea that a BarCamp is just a mini conference. It's not. Well, Scarborough's is. A BarCamp is a people-led help-each-other mindshare, and that's a beautiful thing. This isn't that.
I'm not saying I'm going to boycott it or anything. I am just very upset that the Scarborough BarCamp organisers seem to have taken the good bit (the name, the buzz and the kudos) without respecting what it stands for that gives it the buzz in the first place. It pollutes the water for those who follow. It has upset me. But, hey, worse things happen in Withernsea.
Update: there's been discussion on Twitter as a result of this:
thejawline: @JohnAllsoppIM talk to Richard Askew, he'll explain more about Digital Scarborough 2010 Barcamp http://richardaskew.co.uk/ :)
thejawline: @JohnAllsoppIM his twitter is @richaskew 2:51 PM Feb 14th from web in reply to JohnAllsoppIM
richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM @sfrost2004 it is loosely based on the principles of a BarCamp (i've never been to one) with a little more planning 5:07 PM Feb 14th from web
richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM @sfrost2004 There is no budget - at all. anyone can present, on any topic, its free, its going in the right direction 5:13 PM Feb 14th from web
richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM If we get enough interest then it can run as a normal BarCamp. Numbers are crucial and Scarborough isn't a large city 6:18 PM Feb 14th from web
richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM @sfrost2004 I take your concerns on board and I will put it to the other organisers. 6:23 PM Feb 14th from web
nipclaw: @JohnAllsoppIM @rah_rah @Charonqc @nooption @LightbulbDesign @Little_Lawyer Many thanks for your good wishes.
electric_angel: @richaskew @sfrost2004 for what it's worth, i think @JohnAllsoppIM is right. a 'bar camp' needs to be a bar camp
electric_angel: richaskew @sfrost2004 @JohnAllsoppIM don't want to be critical though - i'm excited at all the stuff happening and glad to help promote it
richaskew: @electric_angel @richaskew @sfrost2004 @JohnAllsoppIM Agreed and it will be if people show - no registratnts from Scarborough yet
sfrost2004: @JohnAllsoppIM I wanted a true BarCamp originally, but some on the DS10 cttee thought no-one would come. Hence prebooked guests compromise about 9 hours ago from Echofon
richaskew: @sfrost2004 @JohnAllsoppIM changed wording on the site. It can't be relaxed anymore people need to register like at Bradford
sfrost2004: @JohnAllsoppIM I'd love to comment on your last blog post (but can't on your blog)...you seem to make a lot of unfounded assumptions
sfrost2004: @richaskew @JohnAllsoppIM @electric_angel Just to correct a few misunderstandings: #BarCampScarb is totally free #digiscarb
sfrost2004: @JohnAllsoppIM #BarCampScarb is open source. All presentations should be made available afterwards, as per #BarCamp philosophy #digiscarb
I sent:
sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel since it's free and scarborough's nice, small attendance isn't death, just finish at 2pm and go beach 8:12 AM Feb 16th from web
sfrost2004 email me a reply john@johnallsopp.co.uk if you like and I'll add it to the blog, I've appended all the Twitter comments 8:14 AM Feb 16th from web
sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel but I think it's because it's not a BarCamp that people aren't showing interest 8:13 AM Feb 16th from web
sfrost2004 by 'totally free' are you providing food too? 8:15 AM Feb 16th from web in reply to sfrost2004
sfrost2004 #BarCampScarb it's the organisation that isn't open source, that's the crucial part. "Places will be allocated" .. by who? 8:17 AM Feb 16th from web in reply to sfrost2004
sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel #BarCampScarb an open list of delegates and a threshold? "will run if >30 book, top limit 100?" 8:19 AM Feb 16th from web
sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel #BarCampScarb It's partly a publicity job, I hope u haven't killed it by putting off the early adopts 8:20 AM Feb 16th from web
richaskew where are you making these changes, I see none here 9:40 AM Feb 16th from web in reply to richaskew
richaskew OK, I see the changes and appreciate the dialogue. about 24 hours ago from web in reply to richaskew
and, slightly out of synch, here's what I got back yesterday:
richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM Due to funds (none) we have room for 35 people, some refreshments. We need sponsors to do what you want, not enough time. 8:52 AM Feb 16th from web
richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM text has been changed re allocation. Twitter isn't the medium for this discussion. It would have been simpler to email us. 8:53 AM Feb 16th from web
richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM allocation enabled us to ensure we have a full program. People to stand up and be counted or loose out to leeds etc yet again 8:56 AM Feb 16th from web
richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM so now it is a BarCamp apart from we can't provide free food - I reckon that is close enough for the first run. agreed? 9:01 AM Feb 16th from web
richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM Well they are there - no mention of allocation now - Refresh Cache? It is how it is now. Either get behind it or don't 10:06 AM Feb 16th from web
So where are we now? I have to say that last Bushian ("you're either with us or against us") comment doesn't sit well, but looking at the amended text I expected it not to address my main concern which is: who decides who is presenting .. it has to be the delegates themselves.
Well now it doesn't mention selection, they just want an idea of numbers so maybe it is close enough. I need to let this settle, but I'm a lot happier with the way it's presented now. I'm making a presentation next week so if that works I'll make a decision.

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Trying to increase Google rank for "Starting a bed and breakfast business"

2010-03-02: So, to get a Scarborough (or nearby) bed and breakfast business to pick up on my offer, I decided I wanted to increase my Google rank for "Starting a bed and breakfast business", which means I want to appear on the first page of Google.co.uk for a search on that term. Currently I don't appear anywhere.
I could find a candidate another way, but I don't want to try to reach someone through social media because I don't want to prejudice the choice. Finding someone that way would find me someone familiar with social media, so they'd already have a head start in marketing their business online. If there's someone who isn't doing any Internet marketing, that might (just might) be more interesting. So if someone's looking up "Starting a bed and breakfast business" in Google, I want to be there because of my experiences with marketing Scarborough's B&Bs online.

So what am I going to do to increase my Google rank for that search term?

First thing is to check Google has found my page by entering the page address (URL) http://www.johnallsopp.co.uk/blogViewer.php?blog=1877 into Google. Turns out, at the time of writing (1 March 2010) it hasn't.
Is that because Google is maybe a week behind or so? Not really, it's not listed http://www.johnallsopp.co.uk/blogViewer.php?blog=1867, 1857, 1847, etc. (again at the time of writing).
OK, so when I wrote this, if I searched for http://www.johnallsopp.co.uk it showed my site in the search results, so Google knows my site is there, and there's a link to 'show more results from www.johnallsopp.co.uk'. When I clicked that and then maybe 'all results' I could see there were some blogViewer.php?blog= results, Google had spotted one here http://www.johnallsopp.co.uk/new/blogViewer.php?blog=624 but ah .. it was in /new/ which was where I was developing this facility before making it 'live'.
OK, well the first thing was to password protect that directory, that stops Google getting in there. Google has made big efforts to handle duplicate content and likes to credit the first appearance of some content. So yes, that location is all wrong because the RSS feed there isn't up to date.
So now I'm a bit concerned that there's something Google's not liking about my blog index. It knows about the page .. if I search for "Top five at Retro 36" which is a line on that page, Google finds it. But if Google were following all the links on that page and indexing them, we'd know from the tests above. It could be the site's HTML doesn't verify (I haven't checked it yet and to be honest, I threw this site together as another one of my bootstrap games so it's seriously bare bones stuff under the bonnet) or maybe Google has something against pages with loads of links. Google doesn't usually go public with its rules so these things usually just feed rumours and it's hard to find out the truth without testing and if we don't know what's true we waste time and in my case if this were for a client it would be my clients time I'd be wasting. Best not to dive into that pool.
So proceeding on the basis of science and what we do know, what I decided to do was to give Google another route around my blog entries. At the end of each blog entry I decided to put a link to the next and previous blogs, and of course I decided to make that a text link containing the blog title, so I would be creating keyword-rich links. I then went off to do that ..
.. and it took just half an hour's time to implement, yet it gives every blog entry two extra keyword-rich inbound links, it helps people navigate around my blog and catch up if they've not been for a while, and it's completely automatic.
I left this blog thinking: let's see if Google prefers that to my big index page. (Note to myself: Another good thing to do might be to automate the creation of my RSS feed and automatically pinging the various RSS indexes, tackle that in a future blog).
So now it's the next day, the morning of 2 March, and amazingly Google has now dropped the 'new' directory listings and knows about 3,250 blog entries (compared to none yesterday). Not, interestingly, the most recent ones though. Nor is it showing my blog entries in its search results in any big way .. it usually takes a few days for what the spider finds to be processed and find its way into the search engine results. Nor am I completely convinced I've written 3,250 blog entries, but hey .. actually, it's close.
It's far too early to say what difference that might make to my traffic, but here's a very early indication. Yesterday 56% of traffic from Google to my site arrived on a phrase containing "cam" .. they were looking for my Scarborough webcam.
Today, it's just 22%. Which suggests I'm starting to get traffic on other things .. like perhaps search phrases linked to my near 7 years of blog entries. That suggests that Google has started to process my blogs into its search results.
I'm pretty chuffed. Correct diagnosis of the problem, a fix that took just half an hour, and the results the next day. How cool is that?

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Google ranking and bounce rate

2010-03-04: Funny, this, I've not read it or heard it anywhere but it's fairly clear Google takes account of bounce rate when ranking sites.
There's a problem with TweetCloser's Google ranking. A big point of developing it was to use Twitter content to create local pages where people talked about what interested them. Google would see these pages and list them.
The problem is the time the process takes. Google's search spider sees a TweetCloser page, reads its content, and passes it to the back-end processes which explode the words, index them, work out whatever they need to work out to decide the page's ranking, and pass them to the search answering bit that provides Google's search results.
By the time all that's happened, the TweetCloser page has changed and no longer contains what Google thinks it does. So if I tweet that I had some amazing fish and chips on Monday. Google spots that, indexes it, and provides it to searchers on Tuesday. They find that TweetCloser page in their results and click through, by which time my tweet has been replaced by other stuff. They don't find anything on the page about amazing fish and chips, so they hit the back button. Google spots that and the same happening for everyone else and concludes no-one gets satisfied on their visits to TweetCloser, so pushes me down the rankings. Google lives or dies on the quality of its search results, the Google ranking algorithm (the bit that decides who gets onto the first page) is the most important part of that.
TweetCloser is getting less and less traffic from Google, and the bounce rate for it (the percentage of people who arrive and leave immediately) from search is like the end of civilisation, whereas it's nothing like so bad if people arrive from a source other than search.
As a quick fix, I've increased the number of tweets shown per page so there's more of a chance of the tweet still being there when people arrive through search.
But then, someone bounced off this page yesterday on a search for "Lexxycarter". At the time of writing, every single tweet on the page is from Lexxycarter. Oh well.
Anyway, the takeaway message is that conversion helps with ranking. Google wants happy searchers.

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The story of me, Marigold and customer loyalty

2010-02-23: I've never been a fan of dishwashers. I don't like the smell when you open it up to put more dirty dishes in. I don't like the 'extra' job of bending down to load and unload it. I don't like the feel of crockery washed in a dishwasher, and I certainly don't want to pre-wash my pots before I put them in the washer. Then there's the maintenance, the scary limescale buildup and having to care and maintain the dishwasher, and the electricity and water it uses.
So I'd like to say I wash up but obviously I just leave the dishes around the kitchen until it looks like some industrial plant that closed down a decade ago, then I wash up.
Detergent dries my skin and gives me a rash, so I've taken to wearing rubber gloves. Incidentally according to Wikipedia these were invented in the 60s by William Halsted who also removed his mothers gallstone on the kitchen table, turned himself and his colleagues into cocaine addicts by experimenting with its anaesthetic properties and performed the first radical mastectomy.
One day I bought generic rubber gloves. They were slippy. It turned washing up into a risky business, every pot and glass needed a two-hand transfer to safely make it from bowl to drainer. So I decided, only Marigolds would do. They are non-slip. I became loyal to Marigold because they offered something others didn't.
In the meantime, we have rather taken to shopping at Aldi. It's quick, simple, the staff are happy, and the other shoppers are, by and large, polite. However, they don't sell Marigolds.
So yesterday after my thumb had poked through my existing pair for long enough, I set out for the corner shop to buy some new ones and they didn't sell Marigolds, but they did sell Happy Shopper gloves with, according to the packaging, a non-slip grip. Happy Shopper bad, non-slip grip good. I thought I'd take a punt.
Back at home, I'm back to the two-handed transfer. The gloves said they had a non-slip grip, but, well, they may have, but it's nothing like that provided by Marigolds.

Customer loyalty

So where does all that get us? It gets us to the complexity of reputation, branding and loyalty. Clearly I have a strong loyalty to Marigold gloves because I've found I break fewer pots when I use them. I've found them to suit my needs better. Perhaps if people want to clean the toilet wearing Happy Shopper gloves, it matters less if they are non-slip.
Happy Shopper .. well I've never had a good relationship with that brand. I don't think I need to elaborate.
My loyalty to Aldi, of course, has gone down a notch for making me go through all that fuss. And the local Costcutter too .. I'm only loyal to that because it's my closest shop.
But here's the big deal, and it's happening a zillion times a day every day for all of us. I lost a little trust in being sold to. I'd love to think that sales people were primarily good and there to help me find a suitable solution (dream on Allsopp), and that when a package says it has a non-slip grip that means what it contains has a non-slip grip. But it turns out non-slip grips are relative and I bought a product that disappointed. I feel bad about that. And that feeling is transferred to my customer loyalty or otherwise to Happy Shopper.
How do you, as an online business person, get a grip (har har) on the ebb and flow of your customers' loyalty? Most people, even if you asked them, would just grunt "they're shit" at you if you asked how they felt about the rubber gloves they bought last week. Yet, it's really, really important information for you.

Customer loyalty and usability

One way would be to do a usability test. Get a group of people to use your website and report back to you how they felt. Usability tests are amazing. No-one believes me when I say that .. it's something I offer that no-one buys. I think it's because my sophisticated clients think, well, "what can a bunch of ordinary people tell me about my website that I don't already know?" And the answer? I promise you'll be surprised. I promise what they tell you will change your business. I absolutely promise it make your business more profitable. Usability studies make my jaw drop by pointing out what is in retrospect blindingly obvious. But only in retrospect. It gives focus to your efforts to build customer loyalty by reframing your efforts from the customers' perspective.
Anyway, since you still won't do a usability test even though they are quick, cheap, I have usability testers waiting for your business, they'll revolutionise your website and cause peace and harmony throughout this land, you might like to build customer loyalty by checking your numbers.

Building customer loyalty by playing the numbers game

OK, the local Costcutter might be tied somehow to Happy Shopper, but let's imagine for a minute they are not, and they are selling online. They'll be able to measure whether people buy their rubber gloves twice, and compare that to the average re-buy rate for products in their shop. So, what if they try to build customer loyalty by creating a policy of taking the ten products in their shop with the worst re-purchase rate and either replacing them with a different brand, or even better, testing them alongside another brand.
By selling two types of rubber glove and checking what percentage of customers bought the products again, then in the end keeping the winning glove that had the best customer loyalty, they are not just improving the sales and profitability of their rubber gloves, they are improving their brand by providing their customers with what they want. And it may be they clean toilets with their rubber gloves so they want the cheaper glove. We don't know. But we can test and find out.
In supplying what the customer wants, we get fewer bad experiences linked to our brand, and more good experiences. And the customer will be slightly more willing to pop into the shop .. more loyal, in other words. Perhaps they come back for that particular brand of rubber glove they know works for them, and while they are there they buy some other stuff too. And if those other things have been tested among the shop's customers too, we are starting to build customer loyalty.
OK, zoom out. What have we done? We've harnessed our customers to help us improve our shop. Our customers don't know it, we haven't gotten in their way, we haven't asked them to complete a questionnaire or phoned them in the evening or asked them to ring a bell on the way out of the shop. We just watched and learned from their behaviour.
Websites allow you to collect information on your customers like never before. So use it. It's a massive force for good.
It's consistent with the whole social media thing because it blurs the boundaries between us the business and them the customers. Here we've roped in our customers to give us feedback so we can improve our business and build loyalty, and they don't even know it.
I think this comes before pushing into social media. I might, in my Facebook status write "I'm a Marigold man", or "pah, Happy Shopper non-slip gloves are slippy". I might even start a tongue in cheek group called "I use Marigolds". The good and the bad get talked about. Marigolds get my vote. Happy Shopper and Costcutters don't. Better to be doing a good job before courting social media.
Of course, social media can be used to get feedback too, in fact the best way to use social media is to listen, rather than to speak, but that's for another day. For now, two things. 1) Every customer experiences you differently, and you can manage that if you 2) watch the numbers and test everything.
Or you could do a usability test. But you won't. Even though it gives you special powers your competitors won't have.
I am right about usability tests, you'll see.

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Finding a UK ecommerce website design company

2010-02-22: Finding a UK ecommerce website design company Time-was ecommerce websites had to be designed from scratch or you bought a commercial ecommerce package like Actinic (I never have), but there's a revolution going on.Ecommerce website setup has never been easier
Originally, when companies like IBM sold 'big iron' mainframe computers they basically gave away the software required to run it. After all, they wouldn't sell anything if all it did was make your electricity meter whizz faster.
Apparently, and I'm a little fuzzy on this, when IBM created their PC and didn't really know what it was or what to do with it, and spotty herbert Bill Gates wandered along with a cut down UNIX as an operating system to run on it and they signed the agreement that made Gates one of the richest people on the planet, it was at that point that the idea of selling an operating system for money went mainstream. And from that came the idea of buying extra applications for your computer.
But, you know, computing is a child of the swinging sixties, the decade of love and freedom. And there's this idea that a computer program is just a way of doing something. It's just a method. And just like "how to catch fish in the local lake" is something you'd pass to your friends and family and through the generations, you might want to pass on software too, it's just a big campfire song or scary story that trains the kids not to go into the woods alone.
The difference between software (knowledge), and a tin of baked beans is that once you've eaten the beans it's all over. There was only one tin of beans and you've eaten it. With knowledge, with software, you can tell someone else what you know, or give them the software you've written, and not only do you still have the software or knowledge to use and give to someone else if you see fit, you've created a bond between you and the person you gave your software to. By giving away your knowledge, you've improved society.
I love the story about whalesong (if you've been reading my blog for a while you'll know I've mentioned this before). A researcher recently discovered that whalesong evolves. This season's song might have an extra blip in it that wasn't there last year. The implication is that 'fashion' is a way of checking who is well connected, who is in the loop. The whale that fails to connect with their fellows, fails to spot the new song .. well, there's something wrong. It's another way of testing whether someone is all there, fully functioning, a good mate.
Giving away software and knowledge increases social cohesion because you have to have friends and connections, you have to have credit in your social favours bank, in order to receive favours from others. If you're out of the loop, you're going to get left behind.
By contrast, paying for software breaks down society by increasing competition. If I want the best software I have to earn it, and that means I have to be better than you in order to get the job. In that scenario I don't want you to succeed, I want you to fail and me and my family to succeed.
I'm not saying there aren't plus sides to competition in increasing our focus and determination in the face of others who do want power over us. I guess there's a time and place for everything.
You know how the Internet is lovely and democratic and mostly free? Well the Internet itself was a military research project. But the people developing software for it, they came from the software is free, big iron culture. Every email you send. Every domain name you find. Almost every web page that's served. All that and more has been given to you by this culture of free software.
The Internet allowed those who believed in free software to collaborate globally and build software together. It's huge, and it's not done yet.
Ecommerce isn't the only place people have been collaborating to build software. Almost everywhere you turn now there are open source equivalents to commercial software. Can't afford Photoshop? Use The Gimp, it's free. And if you fancy starting a bed and breakfast there's free online room booking software you can just plug in and use.

So how does this apply to ecommerce web design?

Nowadays, there are lots of free options if you want to build an ecommerce business. I just got someone set up with capabilities that would have required maybe £20k of software development just a few years ago, for, well, less than £400. Website design prices have come down and the only question is: how far do you want to go from the out-of-the-box setup.
Does that make building a profitable ecommerce business easier? Of course not. £20k used to be a barrier to entry. Now you've got competition from anyone and everyone who gets pocket money.
It means, if you want a successful online ecommerce business, you'd better be good. Because if you're good your customers will tell their friends and they'll link to you because (oh yes) by passing on great information they build kudos with their friends and nowadays with Facebook et al that happens so quickly and on a much larger scale than it ever did.
And 'good' isn't absolute. It's relative. You'd better be better than your competitors. And they want to be better than you. So you have to work smarter and harder to win people's business.
So free software seems like free money. It isn't. It means you've saved a cost, but so has everyone else.
So how do you succeed in ecommerce? Well that might be the subject of another blog or two but let me say two things: 1) social media, and 2) attention is the new oil. Oh, and it might help if you had someone like me around to help out. Following my advice, an ecommerce business has doubled its turnover in just four months. Maybe you'll let me do that for you someday :-)

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Your search traffic is much more diverse than you think

2010-02-20: I've never met a new client that has a real idea of the breadth of the keyphrases that will be, or are being, used to find their website.
Usually if I ask what keyphrases they'd like to be on the first page of Google for, they say "Bosch power tools" or similar. Which is fine, but many of my clients are startups or are struggling for their first main search engine position. On page one for "Bosch power tools" are established businesses.
To give you an idea, for "taxi insurance", I know others are spending £6,000 a month on search engine marketing (SEO (Optimisation)).
Locally, a chain of plush hotels are employing a full time SEO person. So even if they only pay them £15k that's probably £25k of costs or £2k a month .. and is that level of salary going to give them great SEO?
For a client of mine who gets 1,000 website visitors per month, 81% of those are from natural search and there were 11,379 different search phrases used to successfully find their site. So there are probably many more keyphrases they could get traffic from but where they don't have a good search engine position. That's more than twenty completely different keyphrases every day for a year. That client doesn't even blog and isn't on any social media sites ("too busy, don't believe in it"), so that's just from the content I created for their website.
So, as a startup business, how do you get a foothold?
You could pick a longer keyphrase to target: "mobile phone GPS tracking software" seems long enough to give you a chance at the first page, if that's what you sell.
But the problem is, with those longer keyphrases there are almost infinite combinations. For mobile, try cellular or Nokia. For phone try PDA. For GPS try satellite. For tracking try location. For software try download. That's 48 combinations before we start. How can you manage all that?
The best way might be to start blogging. Or at least Tweeting. Or at least changing your Facebook Page status every now and then.
Because if you blog about what you do with half a mind towards your keyphrases, you'll naturally write about the things people are searching for and long search phrases will exist naturally in your writing. That's true because those long phrases aren't particularly competitive, so even just one mention could get you onto page one of Google.
It means you can just write, not worry about keyphrases at all, and it'll all fall beautifully into place (given time).
Perhaps someone will find this blog who has £6k a month to spend on SEO for their taxi insurance business. Particularly now I've mentioned it twice.

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Longer search phrases convert better

2010-02-19: They say that longer search phrases convert better. Think of how you search. You might enter, say, "mole remover" and realise that covers both moles in the ground and skin aberrations so you go for "mole catcher". That brings up all sorts of national things, and you want one near where you live, so you enter "mole catcher Pickering". You realise there's a Pickering in Yorkshire and one in Ontario, so you enter "mole catcher Pickering Yorkshire". Now you click on someone from the listing.
They say that searches of one or two words are 'research searches', while longer searches are buying phrases. It's not always true, if you want a Bosch 123XP then that's pretty much all there is to say.
But I wondered. I have a client who gets about 1,000 visits per week so I checked their results for the last year.
Keyphrases containing 2 words converted at 0.77%. 3 words, 1%. 4 words 1.13%. So 4 word keyphrases converted 46% better than 2 word phrases.
That's interesting from a search engine optimisation point (SEO) point of view, because it's a lot easier to get a first page position for "mole catcher Pickering Yorkshire" than just "mole catcher", and anyway unless you are genuinely a national organisation you'll be wasting money trying to get a listing for a national phrase.
So, work on getting a great position for a long phrase that relates specifically to you and where you've had good conversion. When you're on the front page for that, work on another. You could take one a day if you really wanted (this particular client was found for 11,379 different phrases through the year, note: those are just the phrases they were found for, there might be lots more relevant phrases they weren't found for).
It also means in Pay Per Click (where conversion really is key to the success of your campaign) that you might want to advertise for longer keyphrases only. Since there are lots of those, one way to do that might be, in Adwords, to advertise for, say "party games" as a phrase match, which means your ad will appear for "beer based party games", "rude party games" and so on .. so long as it includes "party games", but then put in [party games] as a negative phrase, so you exclude the 2-word phrase "party games", leaving you with just the longer phrases.

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Honesty, trust and social media attitudes

2010-02-17: I've learned a lot from Big Brother. One consistent thread throughout the whole programme has been that people insist on others being honest and straightforward.
I've not noticed it quite so much recently, but there was certainly a time when the best thing to do, always, was to say it how it is, to speak ones mind. Your truth was the truth, and to keep it quiet was to be dishonest. As I've said before, I'm with Germaine Greer on this that actually it's often nicer to be polite, but that's my generation, and I'm talking about the generations younger than me.
In Tower Block of Commons, a programme that places MPs into council tower blocks for a week to see how they cope with life there, Tory MP Nadine Dorries off camera whips £50 out of her bra "for the kids", leading to on-camera uproar from the mum "when things get tough, I can't just whip fifty quid out of me bra". The problem was, Dorries wasn't really playing the game. And the mum couldn't feel honest unless she outed Dorries on camera.
Honesty is the basic currency of modern dealings.
We don't trust our politicians. I can remember my grandad having that attitude, but it has to be worse now. We don't trust sales people, of course. We don't even trust our doctor .. there are postcode lotteries for treatment and bad surgeons and good ones. We can't trust TV phone-ins. Corporate influence is strong in science so it's increasingly difficult to trust that. You can't trust the Internet. And, oh yes, we can't trust banks either.
I didn't manage to crack the forums when I was working on hair loss. I'd satisfied myself that my client was honest and true. It was probably the top UK hair loss clinic. They used only treatments that worked, no hocus pocus. So I tried a few times to bring that to forums. It felt dishonest to hide my allegiance, but if ever I let it out, I was marked for spam almost every time. I do worry about that. Who knows most about hair loss? Those clinics who treat hair loss every day. If you can't say what works in a forum, that leaves forums to the alternative and heebeegeebee people and people suffering hair loss can spend years trying different rip-off remedies before finding the mainstream treatments that actually work.
Sometimes it seems the only people we can trust are the handful of time-served people closest to us: if we're lucky, our family, and our closest friends.
So what do you think the reaction will be if you weigh into a social media platform like Facebook, friend people, and start selling?
Sales is kryptonite in social media.
For many, money carries quite extreme values. The band I was in once gave a £50 music shop voucher as a thank-you to a student who spent his day mixing our tracks in the college studio. Our relationship was destroyed from that moment. Even though we knew he needed the money, it was poison to him. We'd reduced his gift to us to a financial transaction as if we were employing him to work for us.
So how do you 'do' social media?
Basically you be a genuine friend to people. Use what you have for common good. How do you feel when a famous artist does a concert, for free, for some charity cause? Right .. "guys, if you really care don't do the concert, just pay some of your huge wealth over directly, and don't bother telling us about it .. because if you do, you only did it for the publicity (ie. you did it for profit, meaning you were thinking of your wallet rather than the cause when you decided to do it)."
If you're a plumber, and your friend's boiler packs up, what would you do? Pop round, diagnose, and offer to fix at a genuinely good price and quickly. But you'd only offer if you saw a clear need or you were asked. And you'd be very, very careful about fairness. People don't want charity.
One of the Internet marketing gurus talks about "moving the free line". He means, online people expect to be able to get stuff for free, and the more you give away, the better you appear. By giving things away, you create a fairness imbalance in the receiver who feels obliged at some point to repay the favour. Moving the free line is about finding more things to give away. Here's an example of an often used strategy in software, giving away the basic version of the software and charging for extra features.
You might like the fact that this means you can be successful online without 'selling'. No-one wants to be like Reg Holdsworth selling double glazing.
Interestingly, though, and uncomfortable though it may be, we can probably forgive Davina for her Garnier ads because it's consistent with her brand and she is clearly 'acting' in an ad .. we don't seriously believe that's what she's like in real life, so we play along, like panto.
But basically the strategy is to help people. "Is there anything I can do to help". So, in the spirit of that .. is there anything I can do to help you? I'm up for it, just get in touch.

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I just reached for a (British English) dictionary

2010-03-07: In the previous blog I wondered "flakey" or "flaky"? My first thought was to check a dictionary online.
But there's a real problem for us Brits trying to be sure that the dictionary we are checking is British English (I love internationalisation issues).
Then there are the ads they have to deliver in order to pay for their service.
My 1986 Oxford Reference Dictionary
So I reached for my 1986 copy of the Oxford Reference Dictionary. The cover's falling off. The sleeve's long gone.
It's on my nearest shelf, always, because if I lift a book off that shelf I always put it back on the far left. If I buy a new book, it goes there, far left, and I remove books from the far right to make room for it. They go to a shelf further away. It's a caching system, applied to the real world.
I found my answer quickly. I'm sure it's correct and British English. It was a more satisfying experience. I've had that book for 24 years.

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Make your website headers small

2010-03-01: It's a simple thing. The newspaper people used to talk about having the headline 'above the fold' so when it was folded for display on the newspaper stand people could see the main story at a glance .. it improved sales because it gave people the chance to get a sense of the top story while still walking.
The equivalent online is .. your best stuff needs to be there on the page people see when they land on your website, not after a bit of scrolling. Scrolling's a faff. The fold, online, is the bottom of the page.
Of course, everyone's experience of the bottom of the page is different. People's screen sizes differ. Fonts are displayed differently on different machines. Some will come to you using a mobile phone or PDA.
I've been brought in to improve a website which has a 63% bounce rate (that's, 63% of people arrive and leave immediately, only 37% stay .. 1 in 3), and on my screen the website header, while nice, takes up more than half of the screen. The content (what people are there for) is pushed down so far that we can't actually see what the site sells until we scroll.
My sense is that the person who graphic-designed it was really pleased with their design to the point where it encroached on the usability and functionality of the website.
So, make small website headers. People use websites like they use cash machines. They want what they want. Get out of their way and give them it. They need enough header so they know what site they are on and they can navigate. That's it.

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The first suntrap of 2010

2010-03-03: the first suntrap of 2010, St. Mary's Churchyard, Scarborough
The first suntrap of 2010, St. Mary's Churchyard, Scarborough, looking over south bay. It's a pathetic attempt by me to combine two exposures, one for the sky and t'other for the land.

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How can I tell a web developer what I want?

2010-02-27: A genuine question and something that I think illustrates a (another) big difference between me and many web developers.
From what I can see, many web developers just do the web development bit or web development plus graphic design. Or maybe graphic design with a bit of web development. They want you to provide the text (graphic designers are not usually big on text), the photographs, and tell them what pages you want. Then they look around for a template you might like and maybe they adapt it and that's kinda it.
I really struggle with that. I used to work with a old guy designer (now dead, sadly) who used to say "I didn't design it for you, I designed it for your clients". In other words, it didn't matter whether I liked it his design or not. He hadn't designed it so I'd like it. He'd designed it so my potential clients would get my message and do what I wanted them to do. If I run a maternity shop, the 'look' of that shop isn't going to appeal to me, as a no-kids guy. It has to appeal to mums and maybe dads with kids. Anyway, it isn't about whether anyone likes anything, it's about whether it works. A design is there to do a job, does it do that job? Online, we can measure that.
So, a website design brief? Sounds limiting. 'Design' -> graphic design. I want to know all about your market. Who do you sell to? Why do your customers buy (from you)? What do they buy? What do you want to sell? OK, you might not 'sell' on your website, but even a local youth club website is still selling the idea of a young person turning up one night.
If I get good answers to those questions I'm happy. Once I know who I'm trying to reach and influence, I can design the website, write the copy, even take the photographs, and create something that will not only reach those people but be persuasive when they visit. And of course I'm not going to disregard your opinions about the 'look' of the site I develop. Of course you're going to like how it looks (or you won't pay for it and I'll starve).
So I think the difference is that if you provide the design, copy, photography and structure to a web developer you're really just employing a programmer and the responsibility for whether your website is a success or not is yours. So you'd better know your PageRank from your Twitter. And anyway, if you want to give a really good brief to a graphic designer, they are going to want to know all the ways their design will be used. Which means you need to know what all your web pages are going to do so they can create a grid system that works for you in all cases. In other words, how the site looks depends on what it's trying to achieve which zooms right out to getting into the head of your customer, wondering what they want and how to speak with them and 'reach' them. That's all functionality stuff. What do people interested in clothes and fashion want? Catwalk news, new stock, ways to dress to suit their body shape, etc. How can we deliver that? Twitter through to YouTube via blogging perhaps. OK, so our website design brief is no longer about how our new website is going to look. It's not even about how our brand is going to look across a variety of media and different style pages on our website. How it looks isn't the most important thing. Without content there's nothing to see. It's a lot about how we are going to create that content every day and push it out through all the different media our audience uses.
With me, you tell me the problem you want to solve, and I solve it for you. You tell me what you know about your business, and I build you something that will grow your business. My favourite goal is to double your online business. My way makes it simple for you. You can just get started right now, you don't need to think about your website, you only need to think about what you live and breathe already .. your business. You can pick up the phone and brief me on that right now. The rest is my problem to solve.

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Misty the sentry cat

2010-03-08: Sometimes when I go to pick up the morning paper, this cat (Misty) is on sentry duty.
Misty the sentry cat

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OK, I have a Google position for Starting a Bed and Breakfast Business

2010-03-05: It's not the best Google position in the world, but today my blog on Starting a Bed and Breakfast Business appeared in position 34 for "Starting a Bed and Breakfast Business" and position 36 for "Starting a Bed and Breakfast" in google.co.uk. Yesterday we were nowhere, so that's cool. I'm not seeing extra traffic yet, but it's early days and you wouldn't expect to be deluged with traffic and business by being on page 4 of the search results.
That blog does appear in, strictly position 4, but first Google natural search position after the Google map entries for "Starting a Bed and Breakfast Business Scarborough". But I'm guessing there's very little traffic for that term, a few a year perhaps.
Do be aware, though, when unscrupulous SEO companies call you and promise you first page results, it's easy to get endless first page results in Google for long tail search terms (that don't generate any traffic), and for localised terms. I'm in position 34 for the general term, and position 4 for the localised one. Easy.
In the early appearances of a page in Google's search results it tends to move around a bit, so tomorrow I may be nowhere or on page one. So I think I'll let it settle for a while because there's no point working on it if it's heading for a page one position anyway. Particularly since this is a one-off thing, I don't want to create a permanent position for this blog entry.
My feeling is there's still work to do, but let's just see what Google does next.

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Facebook ad example

2010-01-04: Marketing by numbers: I placed a Facebook ad for a client to promote their Facebook Page about one of their products which, interestingly, ranks higher than their product page on their website.
Back on the 27 September they had 5 fans and now they have 32. The ad cost £74 for over half a million displays (impressions), 208 click throughs and those extra 27 fans (if all came from the ad) so costing £2.74 per new fan. I didn't optimise the ad, it was just a quick, cheap test. The client pulled the idea before we'd made enough to test the numbers. Ideally I'd want more like 200 new fans before we could say whether it's worth working on or not.
People who visit my client's website from this Facebook page are converting into enquiries at a rate of 10%. The volume's not there, but that's a good rate.
We've had interaction on that Facebook Page. And those 208 people who saw what we do and over half a million people who possibly saw our ad, they must count for something in the same way as you think when you place an ad in a magazine about the circulation. Even a classified ad in a 500,000 circulation magazine would cost more than £74.
I doubt ads that cost ten or a hundred times as much get subjected to this much scrutiny. I know there's always pressure to tie marketing spend to results, that was there even back when I started in 1981, but it sometimes feels like those systems that can be measured by their results aren't given their due. They are quickly and easily dismissed by the results they willingly show. Whereas a magazine ad .. "ah, well, you can't measure the results, but look how many people we reached with our message".
For my money, if you can measure the results in this detail, you have a fighting chance of making it work because you can improve it, see the difference, and keep improving until it's profitable, then keep improving until it's very profitable while starting other ads and campaigns using the income stream you've generated.
There was always the rule about magazine ads that says someone has to see your ad nine times before they buy, and they only see one in three ads in a magazine. Ergo you have to print the same ad in the same magazine twenty seven times (over two years in a monthly) before you can begin to measure the results. I don't know if anyone thinks that way any more. But I certainly think that if you put a marketing activity in motion, part of the benefit is what you learn from the results. If you plant an apple tree, then change your mind and want a lawn so cut your tree down before it fruits, the fault isn't in the apple tree, it's in your approach.

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What's Deqq?

2010-03-03: I stumbled across Deqq in Twitter where its bio "A social marketing tool to engage, energize and grow your audience and fans" sounded great. I clicked through.
I no longer understand. Do you?
I'm not willing to work to be sold to. This is an attention economy. What's scarce, online, is attention. Deqq, you want my attention? You have ten seconds at the very, very most to convince me you're worth it.
I want an 'about us' page that tells me what Deqq is. Without one, I'm gone.
So .. I'm gone.
That's how important an 'about us' page is. That's how important having clear text is. That's how important being honest and straightforward online is. Don't ever try to fool me or waste my time.
Make your interface as snazzy as you like with up to the minute groovy, cool and motivating graphics. But if your visitors don't know what your offer is, it's all over.

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Why your conversion rate determines the success of your PPC campaign

2010-02-18: Ouch, in setting up a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign for a client, I noticed quite a few reasons why someone wouldn't buy from their website .. conversion issues. So I've advised holding the ad campaign rollout until these issues are fixed.
Here's the big picture. In Google's Adwords PPC system, you suggest what you are willing to pay every time someone clicks through to your website from your ad. You write the ad, obviously, and you tie that ad and price to one or more keyphrases.
Your position on the page, actually whether you get displayed at all, is determined partly by whether you've bid high enough compared to your competitors. The other side of that formula is ad quality, but let me deal with that another time.
Therefore, the ad bid price for that ad at that time for that keyword is set by the market. It's basically set as high as the market can stand.
Let's just work that through. If you sell a product worth £100 which you buy for £50, you've £50 maximum to spend on servicing a client. If your bids are £1 you'd better sell one for every 50 clicks. Your conversion rate would have to be 2%.
What if your competitor has a better website and their conversion rate is 4%? Every time they spend £50 they get two sales, so actually they can bid £2 per click and support a higher position for their ad than you.
Remember, their conversion is better than yours, so customers think their site is better than yours.
So their ad is higher than yours, and their site is better than yours according to customers. Why would anyone ever buy from you?
The secret of a great PPC campaign isn't the PPC campaign, it's conversion. Because if you can get your conversion to be 5% you can beat your competitor with higher bids, make their campaign unprofitable and take their business.
One way to work out what's stopping people buying from your site is to do a quick usability study. Having a handful of users pretend to buy from your site will highlight 90% of your problems quickly and easily. Another way to do it is to ask for a critique from maybe three web professionals.
Out of interest, I love doing usability studies and have probably 100 testers ready to be selected by age, gender, work, interests and so on to check out your site. Get in touch if that's of interest.

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Avatar made me angry

2010-02-08: I went to see Avatar last night and came out angry.
I thought I was going to see a beautifully imagined other world. What I saw belied an almost total lack of imagination. All that effort and resource, and all it did was reinforce how things are.
Lean and tall are good and desirable. The American military is very powerful (underlined to the point that our hero was called "Marine" throughout). Aliens are basically like the African tribes depicted in previous Hollywood movies. The animals on another planet are those you'd see on an African safari or dinosaurs. Aliens have sex, relationships and kiss just like us.
The innovation was all visual. There was zero innovation in sound: we had an orchestral score, the blue people made sounds like African tribes.
The hero saves the day, and you can be a hero with a gung-ho spirit and zero training.
Here's a weird one, let's talk about breasts. The lean and tall blue people occasionally gave us a glimpse of their rather dainty breasts but when our American heroine helicopter pilot did her work, she had a rather fuller figure and I felt semiconsciously .. "OK baby, I'm home". Body bullshit.
This propaganda is worse than Pravda ever was. At least the Russians knew that was propaganda and read between the lines. Plus it was only ever for internal use. The Americans push this bullshit out worldwide in order to promote the American way. I think Avatar et al put us into a receptive state and while we watch the pretties the underlying messages seep in. The reality of this is worse than any scifi horror.
Plus, it wasn't even beautiful. Want to see beautiful? Come and watch the sun rise on the beach, or walk up on the moors or through the forests anyday.
Nothing in this film touched me. I cry easily at film, tv and ads. Avatar? Yeah, whatever. The guy next to me ate a meat pie. Texted. Went to the loo. Who cares what happens?
The only nice idea I got from it was a God who didn't take sides but preserved the balance.
If we're going to imagine other worlds, let's do that and play with some ideas, 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm .. I'm sure there are a million more. Give me something to think about. This didn't just waste my time, it wanted my soul. Never!
Update: It seems John Pilger sees things similarly. I adolesced to his reports on Idi Amin in the Daily Mirror.

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Got a website? Internet marketing needs you to concentrate for a sec

2010-02-25: I pride myself on being able to explain complex things in a way that everyone can understand. Well, I did. That was when I 'just' built websites.
The Internet is simple compared to Internet marketing. Explaining Internet marketing is a bit like explaining walking to someone who doesn't. It's deep stuff and you really have to go back to basics: links, PageRank, content, human relationships and social media, branding, usability, trust.
I've tried to overcome that by my most recent style of blogging where I've either picked one small aspect of Internet marketing and explained that, or I've talked about the results I've achieved. If I can double your business, who cares which buttons I pressed to do it?
The problem with the results oriented messages is it tends to feel a bit salesy and lacking in substance, and that's a problem for me because if there's one thing I don't lack it's substance. Substance is kinda my USP (unique selling proposition/point, ie. it's what makes me different, why choose me over anyone else).
What is working is when I can get someone's attention for a while. Maybe an hour. It works when I write my big, custom Internet marketing reports that people tend to refer to as their bible, and it worked the other night when I presented for about 80 minutes to the fine business people of Pickering and thereabouts about the principles of Internet marketing. It's not often I get called 'brilliant' but it happened twice last night. I'm chuffing chuffed.
It seems once people understand the principles underneath Internet marketing it's like a little light goes on and they suddenly see what I see .. all the possibilities. A way forward. A path. Then people get excited.
But until then, I'm just noise, I'm one of many Internet marketers, most of whom do this: Around the time Thatcher was PM, I walked past my neighbour one day and his daughter was getting out of her car. I'd never met her. She looked straight at me, pointed to the packages in her open boot and said "do you want to buy a fax machine?"
That became a standing joke for me and my business partner at the time, we still use it now as an example of how not to behave.
I'm not like that.
So it seems, if you have a website and want your own Internet marketing light of possibility, it's alright skimming, but really you need to invest a little time to load it all into your head and start to really 'get' it.
And the best way of doing that, would be for you to ask me to suggest, in a report, how you can improve your business online. Then what you spend your time on is geared towards your specific needs. It's time efficient.
I'll understand where you're at, and show you the way forward. Some or all of it you can implement yourself. Some of it you might need a hand with.
But it seems if your online business is going to change, we need to get deep. Give it its best chance, get in touch.

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Mo

2010-02-01: Yes, OK, I have been neglecting you. If you're still there. But there's a good reason. I'm trying to put my blogs into a magazine format as a demonstration of user interaction: the more popular stories will hang around on the front page of the 'magazine' for longer. Being wowed by what they see, new clients will flock to me for my expertise generally and because they want a blogazine for themselves.
Anyway, Mo was fabulous last night as expected. It did raise a really interesting issue, though. If Mo's illness caused some of the behaviours that essentially led to the breakthroughs in Northern Ireland that ultimately led to peace .. how very Laing (a psychologist who famously claimed (I believe) that those who suffered Encephalitis_lethargica as popularised in the film Awakenings could find lucrative work as artists' models). The point being, play to your strengths.
Simultaneously, I'm reading a book about product design that talks about the nine dot problem and how Eskimos solve it in seconds while westerners take a lot longer. This, apparently, is because Eskimos see things from all sides. To back that up he cites as an example that when living with Eskimos he'd occasionally receive delivery of a magazine and the Eskimos would circle around him reading it with him whichever way up they were looking at it. I'm thinking .. they were reading it in English? Anyway, it's a groovy idea.
Perhaps Mo Mowlam was fabulous, I certainly was a fan (here's my blog about her being 'pushed out of the cabinet'). But if others are fabulous too, sometimes you need an edge, and her disinhibition seems as good an edge as any.
So actually the Blair cabinet included the blind David Blunkett as well as Mo Mowlam whose behaviour was affected by her illness, so it might be considered to have been rather progressive in the employment of people with disabilities. I'm not saying it turned out perfectly, nor did he know about Mo, but it was a start.
But I guess the point is, we all have different things to bring to the party and sometimes what's different is what makes all the difference. Bless you Mo.

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Almost free Internet marketing advice, starting from Internet marketing basics

2010-02-24: I have a thing about starting from nothing, it's probably genetic. I fight it, but I just love that first step. So if I'm building a website for myself, I tend to head straight for functionality and publish, then continually improve it from there.
That leads to some pretty spartan looking, Times New Roman on white websites, but I'm always watching the traffic, I listen hard, and I take it from there, letting the customers guide how it develops.
As you can imagine, I've done the rounds with Internet marketing training courses. Mostly, they are delivered by video, which is probably fine for the gaming generation but frankly I've been to university, I'm faster with a book or Google and I don't feel comfortable sitting down to watch an hour's video, or even a quarter of an hours video (especially if it's one of a big series), even if it is packed full of fabulous information.
And when I meet, say, a bed and breakfast owner I know they are never going to sit through those videos to learn what they need to make their business work, and why should they? They need to be great at running a bed and breakfast, the rest will follow. Those courses are for me. It's my job to know my clients, to select the Internet marketing tools you need, and to show you how to build your business. I take the thousand things I know and I pass on the two things that will really work for each of my clients. For the next client, it will probably be a different two things. I bulk-break knowledge. Incidentally, and regular readers will know this is coming, if you are do run a bed and breakfast, do consider this Internet marketing offer for a bed and breakfast business near Scarborough .. I'm only doing that once so if you want it, get in touch.
Anyway, the problem for me is that small companies and startups don't have a lot of money or time, but I want to support them, otherwise where does society end up? The same old same old .. big companies dominating. I like diversity, I like small, I like interesting, local and different and the Internet was supposed to be all about that.
So I created this thing called Flow Marketing. Yeah, go on, laugh at the awfulness of my website.
Here's the idea. As a small business owner using Flow Marketing you can go through an online flowchart that, within a few clicks, takes you to exactly the knowledge you want. "More traffic? Better conversion? Here's my best tool for that .. ". No more hour long videos, just exactly what you need, when you need it. Hands on, step by step guidance. And no more telling you what you already know. It's a quick way to fill in the gaps in your knowledge of how to build your business online. It covers the basics, but gets sophisticated pretty quickly.
It's efficient, and it's customised for you.
Call it an Internet marketing expert system, if you like. It's my knowledge distilled.
Problem is, it's a great idea but I haven't actually built it yet. There are a few steps to my flowchart but that's about it. I mean, I won't spend the time to build it if no-one's interested, so here's the thing. I need a customer or two to take a punt, to say "yeah, sounds like a good idea". It's a subscription site. Once I've populated it with loads of seriously groovy and up to date Internet marketing advice, I'll want to charge £9.99 a month for it, but there's nothing much there now so it is a bit of a leap of faith. So for the first signupee, I'm giving it free for life. For the next one, 10p a month for life. 20p for the next, etc.
Once I get my first users, I'll be watching what you do. I'll see where your interests lie. So if you click through mostly to wanting to build website traffic, I'll expand that part of the flowchart. If you're wondering how best to use Twitter, I'll expand on that.
In the end I'll be able to help lots of small businesses grow their income online in an efficient way for both of us, which makes it affordable to you and efficient for me. So if you've been reading my blog and thinking .. "well, this Allsopp bloke seems to know what he's on about but I'm not sure I can afford him", take a punt on Flow Marketing. First one to jump gets it for free, remember, so be the first. (UPDATE: the first free one has gone, so next up is just 10p per month)

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How many pages should my simple website have?

2010-02-03: Many web developers charge per web page and certainly for a simple website that seems the simplest way forward. My advantage over those providers is they usually want you to provide the photographs and the text, whereas I'll do both those too. That's necessary because you probably don't know which keyphrases would be best to weave into each page text .. that's where my Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) skills come in.
But if we're charging per page, how many pages should you have? A single page website can be perfectly serviceable. So why would you want to break that up into multiple pages if it costs more?
Clearly businesses grow and at some point it becomes clear they need more than one page, so, when it's needed, it's needed.
But I thought I'd share some data with you from a client who went from one page to eight last week. As you might expect the pageviews has rocketed 305%, that's obvious since previously there was only one page to view, so no marks there. Same with Pages/Visit. But the bounce rate has gone from 74% (ie. 3/4 visitors left immediately) to 22.6% (ie. only 1/4 of visitors now leave immediately). So whereas before we'd only engage 26 out of every 100 visitors, now we are engaging 77. That feels like 3 times the chance of making a sale to me.
The average time on the site has gone up 578%. People are engaging with the site now. That means there's more time for people to hear our message.
Another advantage of breaking up the business into separate elements is that we can see which is the most popular. If we had a (silly example) one-page farm site we wouldn't know a lot about our visitors, but if we broke it up into pages on cows, pigs, and sheep, and people visited the sheep page the most, we'd learn something about what people are interested in. That could inform our future marketing.
Of course there are SEO advantages too. Our cow page should attract cow-liking visitors by being higher for cow searches than our former 'farm' page.
This client's traffic is unchanged. That's because there hasn't been enough time for Google to spot the change and reflect the changes. Anyway, often site changes mean your rankings dip momentarily before appearing again in the new slot. So when I know about the traffic gains, I'll let you know.
So .. multiple pages? Let's say a single page website would have cost this person £300 while the eight page website would be £1,000. Without considering the traffic effects, we are more or less saying for three times the price, you'll have a website that will engage three times the visitors. Add-in the undoubted traffic effect (let's imagine it might double the traffic), and it starts to look very worthwhile building those extra pages if you can afford it.
The thing about a website is that it's not set in stone. It's not like a brochure. So if money's tight, set a budget, even if it's just £100 a month. After three months you'd have your first page, and we can add a new page every month. In the end, you'll see the benefits in terms of sales and we can go faster.

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Johnny's rule

2010-02-16: At my school we were streamed. I was, of course, in the A stream, and in the B stream were all the people who wore Oxford bags with ruler pockets, smoked and did art.
Imagine my surprise when art turned out to be more important as Britain outsourced all its doings to China and became a service and creative economy.
Anyway it's not just quite hard to be a scientist or an accountant, it's also quite hard to be a footballer or artist too.
That's because of Johnny's rule which says "everything in life is as complicated and hard as we can possibly make it". It's the antidote to "the grass is always greener".
If something is basically simple and worth doing, others will discover that (very quickly now we are all on't'Internet) and because we can't all be in the papers or get the work, a fight starts to be the one on top. People compete to be the best, and that means when you, as a footballer, want to do that simple thing of kicking the ball into the back of the net, you are going to face someone dedicated to stopping you. And when I say dedicated, I mean they've spent their whole life working for this moment. Which means you've got to spend your whole life working on ways to score anyway. Suddenly, football isn't simple any more. It's a whole life immersion thing. And when you're the best, it can all come down to .. well, you're the one who trained on Christmas day, or didn't get drunk and drive a golf buggy up the motorway. You were 0.01% more dedicated, so you take everything. Life's tough.
Interestingly, for another blog, I may have just read (in Life Inc) why that is, and how it's been engineered like that.
But anyway, search engine optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) are similar pursuits. There's only one page we are all competing for and simply, only the best will win.
I've had a flurry of interest in PPC recently and I think it's because people have been working at SEO and not getting the results they want. They don't want to take the long haul route of creating content (even though that's really what works) and they think "ah sod it, I'll buy my position".
Google is perfectly willing to take all your money.
PPC is not simple. You have to know what you are doing. To compete you have to convert (so a PPC campaign isn't just about the ads, it's about optimising your landing pages too, so it's a conversion thing as much as anything else), and you have to be at least as good as the others on the page.
It's that ignorance thing: it seems simple to place a PPC ad, therefore it's cheap to buy someone to do it. Well, to run a successful PPC campaign requires exploding your market into fragments, advertising to each individually, measuring the bejeezus out of all of it, constant improvement and forensic attention to the detail until out of the 650 ad and keyword combinations (my latest) you end up with perhaps 10 that are bringing you profit, for now at least.
So no, PPC isn't simple. Nothing is: Johnny's rule. But get it right and it works. To get it right, you have to know what you're doing.

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Thank God Stephen Fry's gone

2010-01-05: What really irritated me about him was his becoming a lauded spokesperson for gadgets and technology. If Stephen Fry can do that, then all that matters is celebrity and we deserve the hell we've made for ourselves.
As an ex technology PR chap, I know there are incredibly insightful and hard working technology journalists out there .. people like Davey Winder. Stephen Fry should not be our most well known technology reporter. That. Is. Wrong.
At least there's John Naughton in The Guardian/Observer (not sure which). He introduced me to Wikipedia.

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Twitter and the Haiti Earthquake

2010-01-14: You may know that I'm working on a way to organise Twitter by geography. For me, Twitter has worked best locally. Again for me, rather than trying to broadcast spammy sales links, Twitter is about building relationships and that's a little easier if you happen to bump into the people you've met on Twitter when you're wandering around town one day. Plus, of course, you have at least one thing in common if you live in the same place.
We all know, too, that Twitter seems to add something to 'live' events. The downside of news coverage is that basically if the news crew isn't there, it isn't news.
Right now, over 24 hours after the Haitian earthquake, the airport is still closed. There was rumour of its control tower being damaged. So no TV crews (or anything else).
TweetCloser however provides recent tweets from people in Haiti. Apparently, yes, there are some working Internet connections. Ham radio is playing its part too.
I know about the airport because of Twitter. And people are tweeting that basically they've seen no helpers in the capital Port-au-Prince all yesterday. No medics, nothing. And every other building has collapsed. Lots of dead people.
Now the lists of missing are going up.
I'm not, btw, saying that Twitter replaces good journalism .. by no means. Journalists establish their facts and prioritise what they know. But we've been starving journalists for a while now, devaluing them, so there aren't as many of them around as there used to be.
Apparently the airport is hoping to open today, so we'll start to see coverage on the news. But for now, Twitter is doing alright, and particularly TweetCloser, because it organises Twitter by geography.
Port-au-Prince - Petitionville - Leogane - Jacmel (the epicentre) - Pignon

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The possible effects of good copy

2010-01-04: Marketing by numbers: I don't know if this is true, but it's what the numbers are telling me. For an online shop whose sales lift over Christmas, I improved their text for two products, including more keywords, basically. I thought I was writing to make the pages more findable and expected to be able to show that the pages were now being found for a wider range of search phrases.
That didn't obviously happen. Actually I've gotten distracted and didn't quite check but it wasn't obvious if it happened.
We didn't even get more traffic to those pages. Well, we got 35% more, but that was 2% less than the site overall, so that growth was purely because of Christmas.
What did happen was visitors arriving on keyphrases I targeted looked at 33% more pages on the site, and spent .. 8 times more time on the site. Actually over Christmas the time people spent on the site dropped, so compared to normal, it was 10 times more time on the site. Which means .. they read my text (and weren't reading what was there before).
I find that very hard to believe, because I really don't think I changed the page 'that' much. But that's the thing. Small changes can have a big effect. Changing a headline can make all the difference. When you study the great copywriters, you can see how mesmerising good text can be.
So there you go. I might be able to get people to spend 10 times more time on your site, hopefully leading them to buy something. Try me.
Oh, we did get first position in the search engines for one product name search and a rise from position six to three for the other main product.

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WTF is this?

2010-01-01: This is a perfect example of assuming too much. I'm in the UK and have no clue what the NPR is. Landing on that page, I need context, it's not enough to see music and artists, I need to know who is providing the website so I can put it in context.
I think that's a function of our brains being linking engines. Memories connect or they don't get remembered. Knowledge (some say intelligence) is memory. So we get frustrated if we can't gather hooks ready to hang new information on.
Imagine I read the first blog on that page which, as I write, starts "I wrote and recorded a piece for NPR's 'Morning Edition.' You can read the text below and listen to the audio version beginning today at approximately 9 a.m. ET." Well, I'm really having to work here. NPR's Morning Edition? That's in quotes, so it's the name of something. Could be a newspaper, but it mentions audio later. And ET. That's an American timezone is it? All that's hard work and if I get something wrong, I've got to trawl back through everything I just thought I'd learned and re-remember it filed correctly.
There is an "about NPR" link right at the bottom which is pretty much where the BBC puts theirs and that's fine. But that doesn't tell me what Monitor Mix is. What's the goal of Monitor Mix? Just so I know. I need to know so I can file it correctly in my head.
Without context, I'm gone.
Happy new year :-)

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Adding video is easy (and worthwhile)

2010-01-04: Marketing by numbers: I bought myself a Flip Video Camcorder and, not really being a gadget guy, I really fell in love with the packaging, presentation and design of it.
But because it's so easy to carry, it goes where I go. I'm just hoping for my day on Channel 4 News when I get to video a bank job.
It comes with its own software and plugs directly into your computer, which reads the software on the camera and gives you a point and shoot way to just simply upload your videos to YouTube. It's really childs play.
I noticed for one client they were selling products that moved in a particular way. Yet all you saw on their website was still pictures. So I popped over with my ridiculously amateurish Flip camera, took a thirty second ridiculously amateurish video, uploaded it using my old and knackered Windows machine I only use as a doorstop, and they put the video on their product page. Including putting on my coat, walking there and back it and taking my coat off again it probably took an hour.
Now, people who search for that product in Google who end up on my client's site, they look at 3.15 times more pages, spend 2.44 times as long on the site, and whereas before we didn't sell anything, now the page converts at 17%.
We also have a third more traffic to that product page.
All that from one ridulously amateurish video.

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Shane Dawson

2009-12-16: OK so this video is really curious. It reached me because I follow the Twitter feed of a local teenage girl (she's a Twitter friend, alright?) So it's reached the schoolkids of Scarborough.
On the one hand, it's just a guy speaking directly to us in a very personal way, and it's affected him and we've been a part of it, so there's a real connection.
On the other hand what he's crying about is getting 1m hits on YouTube.
Back on the first hand, he's crying about not feeling like he fitted in, doing stupid stuff, but now he has us, he feels accepted.
And on the other hand he won't let us down, he'll keep making videos.
It is really interesting. See, any sense of selling gets slapped down and shot within a second. Yet this looks like selling to me, and I've been slapped down and shot many times by people who take this (kinda thing) as honest and true and shoot me for being cynical.
So, he got 1m hits because he's like the people who watch youTube, seems genuine and likeable, and speaks of the same experiences that young people have.
But there's something else .. it's the fame thing. That seems a given, an unspoken, obvious thing everyone wants. On X Factor, no-one says "I want to be the best singer", they all break up when they get a taste of fame .. turning up at an opening night or seeing Cheryl's infinity pool and they go "this is what I want" .. yeah, sure, it would be nice to have an infinity pool and to be totally adored by roomsful of hormones. I'm sure that wasn't there for my generation. That underlying obvious assumption simply wasn't there. We just wanted not to go to the local factory, our dream was to follow our noses and get a job where we could do something we enjoyed.
That's progress, I'm not complaining about that. I'm trying to split out how wanting to be famous isn't selling, and how selling is bad when everyone wants to do it.
OK, I think it's not selling, it's wanting. It's not selling if you want it. A zillion young people on YouTube wondering what to watch next. And, there's nothing to buy from Shane, so that's not selling.
(Being known is worth something, he's selling (himself), the paycheck comes later).
PS. Everyone getting behind Rage Against the Machine to give Simon Cowell a bloody X Factor nose. That's not been set up by Rage Against The Machine's publishers has it? Blur v Oasis. Punk and Maclaren. To sell more records? Nah. Couldn't be. Ah, here you go.

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'live' snow mashup

2009-12-30: Loving this 'live' UK snow mashup. It shows where there is snow in the UK based on reports from people using Twitter.
Mashups are something people are getting very excited about. Now there are Web 2.0 services like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Maps and so on, and many of those provide ways for programmers to access them (APIs), programmers are mixing them together. So this combined Twitter with Google Maps to produce a 'live' snow map.
Much as the core of me goes "pah, new fashionable bullshit trend nonsense it'll all be over by the spring", I'm wrong in this instance. Mashups (bleaugh) are exciting. I need a client to let me really integrate their site with Facebook .. just look at the possibilities.

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Automated translation

2009-12-29: Marketing by numbers: The Paragon Hotel was getting website visits from non English speakers so I thought I'd use Google Translate to provide an automated translation of the site for the most popular languages.
The result? An 8% rise in traffic from non English speakers, a 31% improvement in the bounce rate, and pages per visit up by 25%.

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Website personalisation

2009-12-16: It was my g/f's birthday recently and I went to see Peter Brewer Goldsmith Jeweller to see if between me and him we could work out what she might want and it was, frankly, pathetic (me, not him). I had no clue.
So I took my g/f there and it worked like this. We said "bracelet maybe" and he got one out and we tried it and we said "too chunky" and he got lighter ones. We said they didn't sit right, so he got others out. Finally we settled on one.
Basically, he was using his knowledge and experience to, in my world, do a binary chop.
A binary chop is the fastest way to find a record in a list (a piece of jewellery the customer will like). Let's say you have weighed all your fruit and arranged them in order of their weight. You have a new piece of fruit you want to put into the arrangement. Choose the piece of fruit in the middle of the arrangement. Is your piece lighter or heavier than that? Disregard the 'wrong' half of the list. Now do the same on the half you're keeping, take a piece in the middle, is your fruit lighter or heavier, etc. Basically you'll find where your new fruit needs to go in the least number of weight-checks.
When we said "that bracelet doesn't sit right", Peter Brewer made a mental binary chop with his stock. He knew it wasn't sitting right because of the shape of my g/fs wrist or the style of the bracelet or that's how they are supposed to sit we are just ignorant or whatever, and he disregarded a portion of his bracelet stock and chose again from the remaining possibilities. We iterated our way forward until we found something she liked.
Humans can do that on the fly because the way the stock is chopped up is different every time. The next person might have been more interested in the weight of gold, or the spiritual significance of the jewels.
And that's the problem with most e-commerce setups, like Retro 36 for instance. Want to see things related to dinosaurs for a 5 year old? Can't do it. There's one categorisation method and that's it.
So one of the things I like to do is to make websites bend to the will of the visitor. Personalisation might be what I do. But it's usability too, it's basically acknowledging that every visitor will bring with them a whole load of assumptions and life experiences and abilities before they even start to think about what they want to buy, and every one will approach it differently.
One issue with having lots of stock is how not to bamboozle the new visitor.
So one thing I've just programmed for Metcalfe Insurance is a little bit of personalisation.
That word cloud, it's currently showing the most popular pages. But as you use it, it'll show more of YOUR most popular pages.
So if you use Metcalfe for car insurance, the next time you visit, the link to 'car' insurance will be that much bigger and that much easier for you to find. But when I visit it won't show car insurance bigger, it'll display my preferences instead.
It's just the start, but ultimately, the Metcalfe insurance website will show you the sorts of insurances you're interested in, and none of those you're not. So it will look like just exactly the kind of insurance company you're looking for.
Neat, eh?
I just realised, I worked out how I was going to program that by writing literally on the back of an envelope. I like that.

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BarCamp Bradford

2009-11-15: Back from BarCamp Bradford, my first BarCamp. A BarCamp (some call it an unconference (doesn't work for me)) is a user generated conference. Basically, a group of enthusiastic and like-minded people turn up to a venue with a few rooms, coffee and wifi, there's a blank schedule of 30 minute presentations on the wall and a few pens, someone shouts 'go' and you write your presentation on the wall in the slot of your choice. If you're quick and you go to my Twitter page, I tweeted and uploaded pictures through the day.
It's not just a geek thing, there was a photography BarCamp recently in Yorkshire, and in The Whuffie Factor Tara Hunt talks about a transport one.
Confession: I don't think I've ever been to a proper, paid for conference. So I'm not sure it's fair to compare.
The coffee was shocking, for a start (made with luke-warm water). Mind you, the coffee at the paid for Spa event I went to recently tasted of meat so .. . And it was free, isn't that horrid of me for criticising the free coffee?
There was an attempt to 'theme' this BarCamp to be around muttlymedia but it didn't really happen, people just presented what they wanted, which is in the spirit of BarCamp I guess. But a talk about what was happening in the year 1784? I don't know if it was relevant, I didn't go, and people seemed enthusiastic about it and I am too ... but in that case we might as well talk about fell running and how to make the best cheese on toast.
I'm circling an issue here, working it out on the fly. I think it might be this: I went to two presentations on "how our online / social marketing succeeded" which were basically run-throughs of what happened to them in trying to market their product. The thing is, both were really great products. I think they'd have been successful with a campaign of throwing leaflets out of their car window as they drove around town combined with telling their grannies. Good products get word-of-mouth traction one way or another so long as you make some remotely sensible marketing effort, so .. nothing to learn. Their methods worked, but other methods would have worked / might have worked better and maybe there were 99 other people who used the same methods for whom it didn't work and so they weren't at the conference. It's not proof of anything. Maybe there were a couple of things there that I could try but otherwise ..
If, however, you go to a proper conference and Wally Olins or Steve Jobs is talking, well then you drink in every word, and you buy the recording of what the guy said and watch it again and again until you've wrung every drop of useful information you can from it, not just in what he says but how he presents and how he dresses and what he's chosen to present on. That's because both have done quite a few things in their time, been quite successful, so their life rules are at least repeatable for them. Even then, that's their character, their circumstances, these things worked for them at that time because of their connections and abilities and timing so may not work for you. But it's still more repeatable.
Are the people at BarCamps just enthusiastic amateurs? Certainly not. There's enormous experience and skill knocking around and it's right there, accessible. Are their lessons repeatable? By and large, yes. I went to a 'legalities of photography' talk and that seemed to come from experience and knowledge. But at the same time I arrived 7 minutes late (previous talk overran) to a talk on "you can do animation" and it finished more or less as I walked in the room which was very disappointing as I was really looking forward to it. So there's a tension about which talk to choose from the quick descriptions on the board. The one on 1794 or whenever it was, would it be good, useful, interesting, funny? Who can tell beforehand? That one relied on you taking a chance.
At the end of the day, good presentations seemed to get repeated, so that seems a worthwhile system for those who missed things the first time around.
So I think it rides on its enthusiasm and positiveness which makes it difficult to criticise. It was free, for chrissakes. Everyone gave their time and energy and if you burst that bubble, it's nothing. I learned something though. I followed a few people beforehand who were preparing for #BCBradford and one's description said he was a lifecaster. I had an issue with that. Suddenly, on that one word, I thought "bugger, am I going to turn up to a place full of up to the minute bullshitters, am I going to feel old, out of place. Is Scarborough such a backwater that I'm missing something? I thought one of the great things about Yorkshire was we called a spade a spade .. lifecasting?" And at the end of the day I got speaking more to a really nice guy at the bar and we ended up travelling back together for part of the way and I mentioned this 'lifecasting' thing and .. it turned out to be him. And he was as genuine a guy as you like. So .. Allsopp .. stop prejudging people, give them more of a chance than just reading their 160 character Twitter profile.
Would I do another BarCamp? Sure, definitely, with enthusiasm. But next time I'll do a proper presentation. Here, I did a round table IM discussion (pic) and that kinda worked and kinda didn't so I think a proper presentation showing how I structured and underwent a campaign and what came out of it, and then get improvement suggestions from the audience, that would probably work better for everyone.
Might even organise one in Scarborough, I got talking to two people who organised them and there's really not a lot to it and there seems to be a group of us who want it to happen and maybe the venue is a given. Possible themes: music / mapping. Watch this space.
Oh, it was very lovely to meet and get slightly involved with crew who held a 'decorate the Odeon' thing with bands and beeping horn drivers as an alternative to the official Christmas Light turn-on. Many parallels with us and the Futurist I think.
Funny thing. Looking at the pictures from Saturday now (on a Monday) .. I'm missing it. Missing the chance to talk with people. I think one magical thing about a BarCamp is the enthusiasm and positivity of the people there. I got the same thing from the Spencer Tunick event in Newcastle .. both were a selected group of positive people.
Other opinions: Charlotte Britton, Jane Lambert or just check out the Twitter hashtag #BCBradford.

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Top five at Retro 36

2009-11-21: Want to know the top five products people have been looking at on the Retro 36 website?
Dead Fred .. there's a whole range of theseWell, except for the Dead Fred pen holder and the Jack Skellington Head Knocker which they blogged about, so they don't count, here's the top five:
In fifth place, it's the giant duck.
In fourth place, the popping martian.
Third place contains the ever popular polystyrene glider.
In second place: the backwards clock.
Finally in first place, the most popular product you've been looking at over the last week, it's the baking powder powered diving submarine.
Don't forget, if you do like Retro 36, there are two competitions running. There's the Big Christmas Giveaway where all you have to do is fan Retro 36 on Facebook or Twitter and watch out for weekly questions. Prizes are awarded each Monday.
The Big Prezzo is a bit more weighty with bigger prizes. And all you have to do is Tweet or mention somewhere in your Facebook status what you like about Retro 36, and let us know so we can see it. But you get extra points for making it entertaining, such as doing a video. Check out the Big Prezzo and .. enter.

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Improved copy

2009-12-10: Marketing by numbers: As a test, I improved the copy (writing) for one product on an ecommerce website a couple of weeks ago. Stripping out the overall growth of the website for Christmas, they now have 50% more search traffic to that page. Pageviews to that product page on the site are up by 2.37 times, and the visitors who see the page are spending twice as long on the site as previously.
The new copy didn't take too long to improve, so it's exciting to think what the effect would be of improving every page (there are 300 products now, but potentially lots more without losing quality).
So that's the power of copywriting, and I don't even think that's the best I could do .. I only set out to make a single pass through the text to see the effect.

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I paid for myself in the first week

2009-11-07: I'm working for a company (you don't know who) whose online turnover is about £10k and I'm doing about £500 of Internet marketing work for them. After the first week their website traffic is up by 7%, Google organic up by 16%, Facebook referrals up by 58%. If that all pans out, 7% of £10k is £700 so I've already paid for myself, yet my work is up to Christmas, and the benefits of my work last for years.
To all those who inhale sharply when I disclose my hourly rate ... it's an investment with a clear return. Employ me and you'll make more money, even if your turnover is only £10k/yr. And for bigger companies: I don't charge any more if your turnover is £100k/yr, but the benefit to you would be much greater.

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Longer term growth

2009-12-01: Marketing by numbers: When you're working with clients with relatively low traffic volumes (in this case maybe 15 visits per day) it's hard to play some of the games you'd like to. If you make a change, you've a long wait before sufficient visitors arrive for you to judge your work, and because the client's only getting 15 visitors a day they are obviously keen to see some quick improvements so you can't hang around.
So I thought I'd cheer myself up by looking at the longer term and a full quarter, comparing this client's performance for September through November last year to this year. We've been working solidly together for longer than that, and I can't claim all the gains by any means because the offer's improved for a start. But here's the difference.
If we take my starter-for-ten goal, which is to improve traffic by 25%, conversion by 25% and loyalty (long term sales) by 25% (1.25 * 1.25 * 1.25 = 1.95 which is almost double the business), then for this client over the year, traffic has increased by 1.55, conversion from new visitors by 2.06 and return visitors by 1.83*, making 1.55 x 2.06 x 1.83 = 5.84, ie. almost a six times growth in their online business (*I put it that way because I get confused about percentages, an increase of 55%, or an increase by 155%?).
This is in a business where I personally feel like it's an uphill struggle because it's a highly competitive market, so every gain I make is matched or bettered by the competition. I feel like I'm running to stand still, yet actually we're making gains like that.
Have you thought about how far you've come in the last ten years? Just think what you were doing ten years ago. Really, go get a cup of tea and sit back for a minute and picture it. Are you in the same house? Same job? Same country even? How was your environment? Were you on the Internet? What were your interests? In ten years a lot can change. The exercise is designed to show that we underestimate our ability to change where we will be in ten years time, but overestimate what we can achieve next week. Once you've realised how completely different your life was ten years ago, you're mentally free to design your new life for ten years hence.
Well here's an exercise for you. What if you had six times the business in just one year's time?

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BarCamp video

2009-11-30: The National Media Museum made a video about the Bradford BarCamp. I didn't spot myself on there, though.

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Cooking

2009-11-19: I don't think I've ever quite gotten over, or forgiven, the BBC for stopping publishing BBC Vegetarian Good Food magazine. I subscribed to it (I rarely subscribe to magazines, although I currently do have an open subscription to PHP Architect) and cooked from it.
Then one day in 2000 they wrote and said they'd stopped publishing it. It was like a horror film. Nooooooooooooooooo!!!
It made no sense whatsoever. Vegetarianism is growing not declining, and vegetarians don't like seeing meat in their cookery books.
Anyway, I still cook from those magazines today. The week comprises four recipes from BBC Vegetarian Good Food magazine, one of the magazines from the current month (so, I've 1996-2000 for November out atm, for instance) so I'm cooking seasonally, and then three 'standard' meals that I don't have to think about.
Planning recipes and turning up to the supermarket with a list means I spend less and only buy what we need, so less waste.
Anyway, I mentioned some cheese and parsnip sausages last week and a Facebook friend wanted the recipe, so here it is. Actually it wasn't terrifically tasty so I'd season it before you add the egg (so you can taste it without dying). And I had to use Cheshire nor Caerphilly so that was probably my downfall. Maybe I've got Caerphilly wrong but I think Cheshire was my closest. A more tasty cheese might be interesting. I ran out of breadcrumbs too which is how come I used crushed cashew nuts in the recipe too. Then I oven baked them. If I'd fried them they'd probably have tasted nicer but the house would have smelled of oil. Click the pic for a bigger version you can put into Word and print out.
Cheesy parsnip sausages from BBC Vegetarian Good Food Magazine Nov 1997
This other recipe didn't work either but it tasted very nice, and it's from The Observer a couple of weeks ago: pear and almond upside down cake. Except the way we did it it was wrongsideup cake. And maple syrup is £6 a bottle so honey might be worth trying instead.
Pear and almond upside down cake, from The Observer Magazine 8 Nov 2009

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A climate change suggestion

2009-12-16: Every tonne of carbon emitted affects us all, not equally, but the poorest more. If there's a finite amount of carbon we can safely pollute, lets divide that up equally between everyone on the planet and give every child, woman and man their annual quota.
That quota is worth something. A nomad in the desert is unlikely to use theirs. They can sell it. It's a market of finite resources. But it doesn't matter how it changes hands, it still adds up to the same total.
So let Chrysler buy the quotas from African farmers. The farmers will buy seed and educate their kids. In the end, we get food and more stability.
At its heart is a principle. Climate change affects everyone. So let us all take our share of the responsibility. Give us our quota, let us decide what we do with it.

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Stocking fillers

2009-11-04: Might as well mention that Retro36 do have a great range of stocking fillers. When this was Upstairs Downstairs in what is now the council's arms-length voter interface unit they used to do fabulous Christmas decor as well as toys and furniture. Their strength always seemed to be in knowing what to buy.
Now as Retro36 they are doing the same thing with toys, games, gadgets, gifts and collectables. They go off to the toy shows and come back with one or two items .. very keen to bring only the best to Scarborough. My favourites atm are the Momiji Dolls each of which have personalities defined by two traits. The one I like best so far is "likes cheese on toast and pilates". Plus, you can put a personal and perhaps loving message up its bottom for the receiver to read. What's not to like?
Oh, and if you want to try accidentally setting light to a random person's shed there are sky lanterns too. That reminds me of a third hand joke (thanks Christina (and Billy Connolly)) .. before you decide whether you like someone, walk a mile in his shoes. Because, if you decide you don't like him, he's a mile away and you've got his shoes. The link is something to do with .. if you want to set fire to a shed, may as well do it from a distance.
If you order online they'll do free postage for orders over £20 but I'm told that might rise soon. No really, I'm not making that up for faux urgency .. often all his profit's going on the postage so it really has to go up.

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Video at Retro 36

2009-11-10: I went out to interview the manager at Retro 36 this morning and, well I can't tell you how shocked we were at what we found, you'll have to see for yourself:

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New website

2009-11-10: It's ridiculously early to point you in its direction but I'm starting to work on a new shape for this website and if you want to poke fun at it even though it's only a baby, feel free.

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Smell Yo Dick

2009-11-02: Can't quite believe this, it's a proper actual song with a video and everything: Smell Yo Dick. I guess we had Wayne County in my day so perhaps nothing's changed.

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My altitude, orbiting over the Green party

2009-10-17: There's a marketing rule, maybe not a rule, maybe a 'saying', that you have to be where the people are. If they're on Facebook, you'd better be on Facebook. And when they move, you move too. Because they're talking about you, and you need to be there to hear it.
I'm a mild mannered guy. Really. I've lost my temper on average once per decade. Right now though, if someone Green came to my door I fear I'd lose it. I mean really axe attack -> prison lose it.
Just as when communism fell almost exactly twenty years ago, free market capitalism fell recently, but we don't want to acknowledge it.
On Wednesday a GM report is due out that will probably say we need GM to feed the earth's population in the face of global warming. That'll be the global warming to which large companies, hegemony and monoculture have contributed. Population control anyone?
I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling rage about politics and business. We are ripe for a Bastille moment. There is so much wrong I'd be surprised if more people come out to vote next year than turn up underneath parliament with gunpowder.
And what does my local Green party do? They write to ask for my help, and to talk about the great success they've had with allotments.
Well, I offered my Internet marketing expertise at one gathering and no-one took me up on it. Fair enough. Bit weird that they preferred to print leaflets. But hey, that's my personal thing, the point is not "I was rejected", the point is they are asking the same question again which I've already answered. They are not listening.
It was the allotments thing that got me though. Look, I know local food is important. I know growing our own is pleasurable and important .. I've had four allotments in my time. But there's a general election coming.
I think it might have been Thatcher who started talking about the importance of a party's manifesto. Perhaps before her, parties didn't keep too well to their promises. And by the way she argued, successfully in my case, that with our current system you can elect a party and that party will implement the manifesto the majority voted for. With proportional representation, you elect people and they bargain in leather-chaired rooms and you never get anything you voted for. So she definitely had a strong manifesto thing going.
And I also think it was her who wanted to talk about 'the things people are bothered about': schools, the NHS, whatever that list is (but it doesn't include allotments).
Now, I like the Green party in principle. I've been a Green voter on and off my whole life. But I am simultaneously repelled and attracted by them and the balance of those forces holds me in orbit around them. I don't get too close, yet I'm also always aware.
I believe in Green politics, as much as I know about them. Well OK there are nagging doubts .. like what would the Greens do if the Germans invaded and I'm a long way from rejecting free market economics .. I need to be guided slowly.
I'm repelled by the idea that if I turned up at a Green meeting I would be 1) judged by the car I turned up in, the clothes I wore, and whether I'd got a brick in my cistern (I haven't), and 2) they would want something from me .. like shoe leather (ha ha) delivering leaflets. I'd turn up to a meeting to find out about Green politics and be expected to chip in. So I don't turn up.
Here's another. Imagine a room full of Greens. Do you like them?
"No", I think is the answer you're searching for.
For one thing, they are mostly fringe dwellers. These are not normal people. It's OK, they'll never read this, they're down the allotment. And I think I'm a fringe dweller too, I don't mean it as a bad thing. I just mean if you're a political party you've got to occupy the top of the hill in the middle of the playground or it's all just chinwag.
Greens need more 'normal' people around to dilute the repulsion effect. Then I (and thousands like me) will orbit closer.
But here's the key thing. This is really important. I think Greens favour the environment over people.
And if you do that, you'll never get into government because it's people who vote and "no, you can't" isn't a very good slogan.
So what is the point?
And I really, really don't want to feel that way. I want to feel the hope that Green politics could provide.
I said some of these things on Facebook one day when it got to me and I got more than the usual response. Almost all agreed and had followed very similar paths. The one person in defence said in support of the letter "but local food is important". Yes. Very. But in the face of it all, it doesn't speak to me.
Who was missing from that discussion? My local Green party member who I've voted for and who is one of my Facebook friends. Also missing was our local Green party councillor who doesn't seem to be on Facebook at all.
So I wrote to the Green party about my frustrations and got a nice note back from their press officer asking what I'd do differently. So I've been pondering.
He was happy about the Green Party Facebook Page that now has 3,283 fans. It doesn't feel like a huge achievement to me but .. The Conservatives don't seem to have one at all, and Labour have 3,675 so maybe it is.
So here's what's coming out of the Green Party Facebook page:
I haven't clicked any. They don't grab me. I'm a satellite, remember, equally repelled and attracted by the Green party. I don't want to invest time in Green politics (yet). I just want to know what Greens want to do and I'll make a judgment when I come to vote.
These stories are aimed at existing Green voters and members. Their votes are already in the bag.
One way or another, Green policies have to reach out in a way that makes people go "oh, thank goodness someone's got their head screwed on". It rests on a single sentence and everyone's magic sentence is different: "them, I voted for them, they're for British jobs", "what, the BNP?", "was it? Oh, well anyone who stands for British jobs, that's what I believe in".
There is a beautiful place Green politics is trying to get to. An Eden where children can play, sweet fruit ripens in the garden, we chat to our neighbours, where craft and skill and experience are respected. An African friend told me how hard it was to come to England where no-one says hello, no-one smiles at each other, no-one talks. There is a world within our grasp where we don't dump minority world toxic oil waste on a weak majority world country poisoning 10,000 people and then try to gag the resulting investigative report, where, instead, we all actually like each other, we trade nicely and everyone takes on board their own consequences.
That's my Green dream anyway. My problem is, that's a people dream that suits my personality. I worry the Greens are not people people. And that not everyone is like me. I imagine Rupert Murdoch might see things differently.
So Green politics has to have a dream, and have the power to take us there. Not just give us the option .. to take us there. That's why it's called being in power.
Anyway, I've no clue what the Greens would have done on that weekend when Brown knew if he did nothing, the cash machines would be turned off on Monday. I've no idea what the Greens would have done after 9/11. I've no idea what the Greens would do with the NHS. Or with the road outside my house.
Through this whole crisis of capitalism, the Greens haven't reached me with a single message. Yet I have an eye for them. So. It. Is. Not. Working.
My own personal contribution to the solution is this. Firstly, it's unforgiveable that key local Green party members are not actively on Facebook. Here in Scarborough there's a local person bringing local news to Facebook and stimulating debate every day. We have the 'threat' of a supermarket development within earshot of my home in the middle of town just a year after all the road disruption and expense of a park and ride scheme development aimed at cutting traffic into town. Local businesses are up in arms. Others are baying "ASDA! ASDA! ASDA!" Greens? Nowhere.
I guess it's a hard slog to convince a Green candidate to spend time updating Facebook. But simply .. you have to go where the conversation is. This isn't a choice. It's an imperative, we've a world to save for chrissakes. Talking to people down the allotments, on marches, at meetings .. those are already converted. Carry on, and the Tories will be in this time next year. This at the moment Green politics should be providing the emergency lighting from our crashed system.
And the conversation is on Twitter too. I would expect Green candidates to be on Twitter. Really.
The deal is .. both of those systems part the beards and peek out into the real world where people commute and have big TVs. Also, the people on Facebook and Twitter are tech-savvy. They know how to re-Tweet, how to blog. They spread the word. The messages that reach out need to pose the possibility of a different, better life. I don't give a hoot about the details of politics. I care about me. I want to hear, over Twitter and Facebook, stuff from the Greens that gives me hope and makes me happier without feeling like I have to write a letter of complaint, march to Trafalgar square, or wear three jumpers.
And there's part of the problem too. I fear if Greens get on Facebook and Twitter, their messages would be somehow cold, maybe preachy. It needs to be done right.
Green Party. I don't care about you. I don't care about your members or your candidates. I just want you to do your job, make this fucked up system better, and do it fast before the Tory's get in and we all slip off into hell together.
If you want my help, you know where I am.
Having said that, I'm still smarting that when the Green Party held their conference in Scarborough Spa my partner and I were in Scarborough Against Genetic Engineering (SAGE) and we had a stall in the foyer and my g/f hand-made chocolates (she's very good at that) from the best organic ingredients and her friend, who was staying, turned coloured card into presentation sandbuckets. We packed them with chocolates, she calligraphed a message on each and we presented them as take-home gifts from Scarborough to the delegates' loved ones.
We sold none over the whole weekend.
Fine. Might have been wrong in a number of ways (in assuming they mostly had a loving partner and a job so they could afford anything to accompany their chick peas, perchance?) But none! Where was the warmth, the humour, the love, the embrace, the thank-you, the recognition of our locally produced efforts .. the support of SAGE. What were they going to take home from Scarborough?
Yet when it comes to candidate time, there's always someone knocking on my door when I'm in the middle of something wanting a quorum of signatures.
Yes Green Party, we have a history. Look out one starry night and you might if you have good vision see me orbiting. Am I friend or foe? I'm potentially both. It's up to you. Please, please, please get it together before I really do get annoyed.

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Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

2009-10-10: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a long term condition where the sufferer has fatigue that isn't relieved by sleep. It can be mild, allowing the person to sustain a job. It can be severe, leaving the person bedridden and requiring care for everything. My partner has CFS. There was a time when she was almost bedridden, but she is slightly improved now.
Without wishing to make comparisons, it is a particularly cruel condition. Alright, many CFS sufferers aren't in constant pain (but some are), it's not too disfiguring, and you retain most of your faculties, but it strikes a particular sort of character - people who care, hold themselves to very high standards, and who work hard for the good of everyone.
The fatigue isn't just physical. Your heart can't get up the energy to pump blood fast enough for you to get up a hill, and your brain can't summon what it needs to remember or form a sentence.
So a life that was ambitious, vibrant, caring and good turns inward. Can we go for a coffee? Well, how far is it? We can't go if there's music on because music and coffee is too much to handle.
And the narrowboat living, countryside gardening, Girona conversation loving life turns to a sort of limbo where the thing that really makes a difference is a bath seat so you can shower while seated.
It's an impotent life. No-one sees you day to day. And when you complain to the council about the noise from the traffic outside the house you're trapped in as they drive on an unmaintained road, they ignore you because you're just one and you're weak. "It would help your case if you got up a campaign with local residents". If we could get up a campaign, my friend, you'd know about it.
There isn't really a cure for CFS, but the NHS considers it to be a mental illness and thanks to the work of Simon Wessely offers mainly graded activity which is basically: 1) stop boom and bust with your energy usage, 2) establish an activity level you can maintain each day, 3) gradually increase it. There are plenty of people for whom that simply doesn't work, the maintenance level is the level, and that's that.
The CFS community has issues with Simon Wessely. He's the nearest thing we have to a hate figure. If he ever found himself within a crowd of CFS sufferers he'd be slept on until he was very sorry.
It doesn't feel like a mental illness. It feels like something is wrong with the mitochondria throughout the body.
So that's sort of that. In limbo, with no-one listening.
But last night we opened the laptop to do our crossword and there was a news story: "Has science found the cause of ME?" Well, CFS is an umbrella term for the symptoms. There would appear to be multiple triggers and multiple causes and it feels like, over time, researchers will gradually identify specific mechanisms at work and they'll be split out into individual syndromes until there's just one left under CFS. One promising possibility is that there's something wrong with the metabolism of vitamin B12. Anyway, ME is one such specifically identifiable, physical cause.
But as we read the article, the senior author of the study, Judy Mikovits, director of research at the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, says ".. With those numbers, I would say, yes we've found the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome."
I don't know if I can tell you what that feels like. We certainly weren't expecting it. It's a turmoil of emotion and an eyes wide open for information. It's incredibly important that the article is accurate and the journalist has done a good job because .. we're hanging on every word.
At the same time, nothing's really changed. Until it turns into a cure we can get from the doctor, it provides hope (which is important) but nothing more.
The upside? Well the best upside is that, with luck, the NHS will stop thinking of CFS as a mental illness and more researchers will work on finding biological causes and cures, after all, 250,000 sufferers in the UK alone isn't a small market and many of them are go-getting people wanting to do great things for the good of all.
And yes, this might directly lead to a cure.
The downside? They are saying CFS is caused by a retrovirus (HIV is a retrovirus too) and might be treated by the same drugs. Well those aren't healthy, organic, lickable and nice drugs. That's serious stuff. And if the companies marketing those drugs start thinking of CFS as a market, then we have to be careful of being sold to and .. someone's got to be the first guinea pig.
What's a retrovirus? Well as I understand it .. all viruses inject their DNA into their host and use the cell's reproduction process to create more viruses. Many viruses cause sneezing as a means of distributing themselves and if they happen to kill the host or the host's immune system learns to recognise and destroy that virus that's OK from the virus' point of view so long as it's infected at least one other host.
Retroviruses establish a stable relationship with their host and stick around as long as the host sticks around. They become integrated into the hosts' DNA without triggering an immune response. Infected cells can sit there spilling viruses for weeks or years before the cell dies. It sounds scary but I realised when battling against GM foods that actually, DNA isn't anything like as locked down as we might wish it was. Everything we eat has DNA in it: "you are what you eat" is probably truer than it seemed when the phrase was coined. After all, gene therapy is based on the idea of using a virus to replace our cellular DNA with improved DNA. That's what makes a virus a virus, that's its defining mechanism.
Because a retrovirus establishes a long relationship with the host, it doesn't have to be virulent. So long as it infects at least one other host over the hosts' lifetime, that's enough for it to propagate. HIV, again, isn't triffically easy to catch.
And the CFS retrovirus isn't just in a small club with HIV, there's a whole cosmos of them and historically the 'retrovirus' mechanism goes back to the beginning of cellular life. "Waiter, there's a retrovirus in my primordial soup".
And btw, there are lots of people on the CFS groups saying if they caught it, it wasn't through sexual transmission. That feels like our brains making a connection between it and HIV - more of a tabloid thing than reality.
There are three types of retrovirus. Oncornaviruses are usually benign but some cause disease including cancer. Lentiviruses (HIV is one) affect the immune system. And spumaviruses are benign. Here's ours.
So, there's plenty more to do in working this one out. And guess what? Excitement and stress is tiring. So after the excitement last night for everyone with CFS, expect them to be in bed for a few days.

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Asda

2009-11-02: I am frankly really creeped out by the amount of support there is on Facebook for an Asda on the Dean Road site in Scarborough.
The support for it seems mostly to be monosyllabic, like "ASDA!" Or the thinking is along the lines of "we already have a Tesco and lots of Tesco Expresses, I don't like Tesco, we need an Asda because we haven't got one". I did see someone say that Asda offers the best value. There's strong feeling too from people on low income wanting affordable food and goods. As a result of this I visited the York Asda and yes, it's an attractive shop. But it supports a city four times the size of Scarborough. Think we'd get an Asda as big here?
The first thing that comes to mind for me when thinking of Asda is Wal-Mart, their owner, and the frequency of their appearance in American labour protests.
The second thing that comes to mind over this project is that we've just spent millions on, and endured the disruption of, a new traffic system in Scarborough that is supposed to cut down on traffic coming into town. I'm thinking putting a supermarket in the centre won't help with that and, I imagine we (taxpayers) will get to spend even more money providing infrastructure support for a supermarket on this site, and one lot of spending will negate the other lot, meaning there's a lot of wasted budget being spent on contradictory projects.
I heard someone talk about the jobs a new supermarket would bring to Scarborough. This doesn't seem to be well thought out. Scarborough has a fixed population. If you add another supermarket, it simply means the same shopping will be spread more thinly across the supermarkets. That might lead to more price competition (but 4 supermarkets Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Aldi is enough competition, don't you think?) So I would say if you create a till operator's job at a new Asda, you're probably just lessening the need for a till operator at one of the other supermarkets, net gain in jobs: nil. Plus, local businesses will surely go out of business, meaning those jobs would be lost.
Finally, I'm amazed at the lack of involvement by the Green party in any of this online debate.
Anyway, particularly for those of you who aren't familiar with Asda's parent company Wal-Mart's practices, I wanted to give you this from Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back: How We Traded Meaning for Markets, Society for Self-interest, and Citizenship for Customer Service by Douglas Rushkoff. It's a damn cheek of me to reproduce such a big chunk verbatim and without permission, but that's what I'm doing, here goes:
"Wal-Mart may be the easiest and most obvious target for us ... but that's for a very real reason: its practice of colonizing new regions for stores amounts to a scorched-earth policy that leaves financial and social ruin in its wake. Wal-Mart monopolizes new territory by pricing items below cost and rendering local merchants incapable of competing. Once the competition goes out of business and the community is dependent on Wal-Mart, the corporation raises prices to more profitable levels. Free and fair competition, as defined by the market, favors the company with more money to burn.
Although Wal-Mart enters new regions promising gainful employment and an expanded local tax base, the opposite usually occurs. A Congressional Research Service report found that for every two jobs created by a Wal-Mart store, the local community ended up losing three. Furthermore, the jobs created were at lower wages (an average of under $250 a week), fewer hours and reduced benefits. A majority of Wal-Mart employees with children live below the poverty line, qualifying for public welfare benefits such as free lunch at school. Seventy percent of Wal-Mart employees leave within the first year of employment, and do so - according to a survey that Wal-Mart itself conducted - because of inadequate pay and lack of recognition for their work. Other studies have shown that, as a result of the increase in social services spent on the families of Wal-Mart employees, the net effect of a new store is to place a greater financial burden on the taxpaying community.
In spite of a huge "buy American" campaign, Wal-mart purchases 85 percent of its merchandise from overseas, and is consistently associated with sweatshop scandals, from Kathie Lee Gifford's clothing line and Disney's Haitian-made pajamas to child-produced clothing from Bangladesh and Wal-Mart-brand apparel manufactured by underage Chinese workers in New York City sweatshops. So maybe it's not even in Americans' best interests to be manufacturing for Wal-Mart, anyway.
There's nothing new in attacking Wal-Mart for poor corporate citizenship. There are plenty of organized protests and lawsuits under way, as well as at least some action on the part of the company to correct this impression and perhaps even its own behavior. What's more important to recognize here is that Wal-Mart's activities do not appear to be the conscious choices by a mean-spirited board of human directors who have any real relationship to the communities in which they operate. Rather, Wal-Mart's relationship to the world seems to be directed by the sort of charter written four hundred years ago for trade monopolies. The company's practices - abroad and at home - erode regional stability and self-sufficiency in order to conduct the long-distance trade at which Wal-Mart excels. Wal-Mart turns its home territories into colonies, robbing them of their ability to generate value for themselves and creating greater dependence on the colonial empire.
Wal-Mart's relationship to place has become so abstracted that the company views even its own stores through the conquistador's eyeglass. Like temporary forts build solely for purposes of territorial conquest, any one of them can be abandoned at any time. For example, it is deemed efficient by Wal-Mart to open two stores very close to each other if this quickly and most completely puts local merchants out of business. Once a monopoly over the region has been established, Wal-Mart can close the less profitable of the two stores. Residents will then pick up the externalized costs of fuel to travel to the farther one. As of 2000, by utilizing this strategy, Wal-Mart had already left behind twenty-five million square feet of space. In one Kentucky town, the abandoned Wal-Mart was eventually torn down at taxpayer's expense, according to the corporation's own website. After peaking at more than two new stores per day in 2005, Wal-Mart still planned to open 212 stores in the US in 2009, despite the credit crisis.
Wal-Mart's behavior is not terribly mysterious. What's more puzling is the widespread acceptance and patronage of this company and its peers by people who actually live in the wake of their damaging effects. While regions with very strong advocates for the environment, labor, local commerce, or health may have been successful in limiting the spread of the "big box" chains to their neighborhoods, the vast majority of American and, now, European counties have succumbed to or even welcomed their own colonization by international branded retail stores."
The only thing all that doesn't say that seems to be relevant to us is that .. part of Scarborough's charm is its shopping centre, containing as it does a number of individual shops and businesses that offer something different from normal life inland where every high street and out of town shopping centre seems the same.
By placing any large supermarket in our town centre, we run the very real risk of the demise of many of our local businesses, not necessarily because of their weakness or because they can't compete on price, but because our tax money would very probably go towards supplementing a supermarket on the Dean Road site, paying for infrastructure support like site clearance, road alterations and so on, to give them an unfair advantage and .. I somehow doubt such a store would pay the equivalent in council tax that a shop on town centre streets does. Imagine what that money paid instead towards the support of the town centre might achieve.
I'm not, incidentally, pro local businesses for the sake of it and I'm certainly not into protectionism or into retaining traditions for the sake of it. I just love Scarborough's variety of shops and think that's a major attraction. Having spent loads of money developing the town as a destination for tourists and as a result having gotten the attention of some big name retailers, I seriously fear we risk damaging one big reason people come to Scarborough .. they can wander around the sort of shops that no longer exist where they live.
More than that, the level of comment on Facebook suggests we might just sleepwalk into all this without people being aware of the track record of the supermarkets and Wal-Mart in particular, and that would be a real tragedy.

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Energy Performance Certificates

2009-10-06: Some new legislation has come into force recently (well, maybe in the last year) that says before you market a rented property (here in the UK), you must first have an energy performance certificate that gives the property an energy rating from A (fab) to G (less than fab).
The idea is that the purchaser will get a hint about their future energy bills and how much they personally are about to commit to contribute to the destruction of the planet and everyone on it, and given that G rated properties will attract lower rents than A rated ones, encourage the landlord to lag the boiler.
Sounds like a good plan, actually. Except that all additional costs of business are eventually born by the customer. But then, that's a shortsighted way of looking at it. Doesn't the money the landlord pay to the EPC provider then go to the EPC provider's staff's wages which they then spend, perhaps on whatever it is the person renting does for a living? It's all the same money spinning around. It blows my mind, like trying to think of a colour we haven't seen before.
Anyway, I have a new client who will, upon request, provide you with an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) in Scarborough, Yorkshire, or Humberside or maybe further.
It's not my website, I've inherited it.

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The Fall

2009-10-03: I went to see The Fall yesterday at the O2 Academy in Leeds and it was a very lovely experience. Unlike The Rezillos where drunk people ended up urinating in the sinks, my path merged with a young lady on the stairs outside the loos and she stopped and said perfectly clearly "after you", to which I replied "oh no, after you" and she relented.
A short lady in the audience slightly behind me kept catching me with her bag and I was conscious of not blocking her view (I'm 6'6" tall) until in the end she beckoned me down and said "I notice you've brought your stack heels tonight".
I met a friend of a friend for the first time, and two people from a local Scarborough band and good conversations ensued with lots of handshaking at the start and end.
This was a polite gig. Perhaps The Fall are for thinking people who see through the bullshit.
We even got a wry smile and an eye twinkle from Mark E Smith himself who comes across as a cross between Bernard Manning and a fairground owner, prowling the stage tweaking the amp settings of his musicians, one time stopping the bass by putting his hand on the strings and I'm sure at one stage he turned off the guitarists' amp completely. The musicians remained professional throughout.
A sound-man's nightmare, he also passed the mic to the audience, hit cymbals with his mic and when he left the stage simply dropped his mic to the floor with a clear thunk through the PA.
By their third encore the venue management had had enough. They turned the PA off and the house lights on, leaving us listening to The Fall drummer on his own and ending with a Smith smile as they strolled off to a huge audience cheer.
They played for all of 50 minutes from 21:50 to 22:40 on this Friday night. I'm told they were booked for an hour and a half. For this venue, there can be no licence issue at that time on that day. I hear, too, that The Fall wanted to start later, and that there was an issue with the pre-gig preparations so it seems The Fall and The Management did not see eye to eye. I'm left with bad feelings about the O2 Academy, since they denied us all that final song especially since the encores were oldies, "Psykick Dancehall" and "Pat-Trip Dispenser" .. for the fans.
I remember Peel playing Bingo Master's Breakout, their first single in 1977. I probably have it on tape somewhere. In fact the only time the band I was in, Splat!, got covered in one of the music papers the headline was "Biscuit Master's Breakout" due to the fact that our singer worked in a biscuit factory.
The Fall are important. Difficult, tuneless and sometimes very, very challenging though the vocal style might be (I have previously paid to stand through an entire gig where Smith's vocal seemed to concentrate on a high pitched squeal that seemed to act like triangulated radiotherapy on the core of my brain) you have to give Smith full marks for originality, perception and diarising our changing times, giving us new insights into the hall of mirrors we inhabit. You would need the lyric sheet, though.
I seemed to be the experienced one who had seen The Fall numerous times. That's good, that The Fall are still catching new fans. I told people that The Fall were always a huge disappointment when I saw them 'live'. That is how I remember it. But today was different.
Nowadays Smith employs musicians with a professional attitude. Powerful (I'll probably buy the album as a playalong to build my drumming stamina) and rock solid, they support the undoubted star of the show. It's a little different from the time of Mark Riley (yep, that Mark Riley) and Craig Scanlon's famously cheap guitars, fights on stage and general bad feeling.
I think Smith has found his own happiness. He's not fighting for recognition any more. He is, according to Wikipedia, married to the Fall's keyboard player Elena Poulou. It is, actually, nice to see. Awwwww.

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Here's someone who hates SEO

2009-10-14: Here's someone who hates SEO. Interesting. I don't know anything much about the darker side of things he talks about, and in my 10 principles of web success one of the points is "be interesting". In other words, I'm kinda with him.
I have to say, though, I've never met anyone from the dark side he describes. For background, there are said to be (from cowboy films of old) white hat practices which are all good, and black hat practices which aim to get a quick gain by finding holes in the system they can exploit.
I don't really use any automated systems for what I do. I don't even link my Tweets to my Facebook status because I think they are different sorts of audience.
Most SEO practitioners think they are doing good, not just for their clients, but for their clients clients too. It's basic marketing. If you have a cure for something, you really should be making an effort to find the people you can help .. do you not have a moral obligation? If you sat with your cure and said "I won't use marketing", wouldn't people be sickened by your lack of humanity? And economics stops you from employing people to doorstep everyone.
Internet marketers help make their websites clear. Basically we watch how people arrive on our websites and what they do. If we find people like something we offer, we try to find more people who would like it too. That, in all honesty, seems like a recipe for improving happiness to me.
I know ads are a pain in the arse. But .. well there are two sides to this. There's push marketing .. ads between your telly programs. You were sat watching Hollyoaks and now you want a McDonalds. You didn't start out looking for food, but now someone's planted the idea in your head, Derren Brown stylee. Then there's pull marketing, which is most of the Internet. You go looking for something you want, a few clicks and boomshanka it's on its way. Most of the time Internet marketing helps make that happen. Actually, it makes us powerful. In control. Able to organise services to make our lives what we want them to be.
So I like pull marketing. I like SEO and Internet marketing. I think most people are good people. And I think there's a whole bunch of people out there trying to do good.
We didn't create this system. Stuff grows in fertile soil.
There's something else too. SEO is dying. The web is becoming something you contribute to, not something you receive. Every time you review something, link to something, comment on something, vote for something, you're giving it a positive vote. Systems are listening, watching, taking note.
The sum of those 'votes' will overtake anything SEO can do. So in the end, the only real thing we can do to have a better business is to build a better mousetrap and tell our friends and colleagues about what we've done. The rest will happen naturally.
Of course, that depends how good your networking and relationship building skills are. Have I mentioned Twitter yet?

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Carole Nash

2009-09-23: Want a master class in online reputation in this Web 2.0 twittered facebooked world? Check this out: the Carole Nash Inside Bikes twitter page. Follow the link to her web page and up to the home page.
Who the hell is Carole Nash? Check her out on Google and Google images. Sure looks the part. Wonder if she was a competitive rider at some point.
Now tell me you don't want bike insurance from Carole Nash. And you don't even own a bike, right? I'm even considering buying a bike just so I can buy insurance from her.
Is she top of the search engines? What do you think?
Here's a bit of the truth behind the image.
Seriously, that's a master class right there, perhaps the strongest I've ever seen.
Let's start with the idea of the persuader being trustworthy and likeable. Who the hell wants to buy insurance from a tidy guy in a suit when, especially if you're a biker, you can buy from a hot biking chick who looks like she's at the centre of all things bike (and she's a chick) and probably holds the world land speed record for hot chicks. Honestly, I'm going to call now and pretend I've got a bike just so I can be part of it.
Dodgy ground maybe. Persuasive? You know the answer to that.
The crux is the thinking behind all this. This wasn't thrown together. Everything you see is honed to appeal to her market.
Now tell me you only want to spend £200 a month on marketing.

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20% increase in traffic

2009-10-03: Marketing by numbers: Remember this blog about how increasing the functionality on your website can improve your search engine position and traffic on particular keyphrases?
Well the result, looking back over the month, was a 20% increase in traffic, and a 67% improvement in search engine position on the phrases I'm tracking.
Interestingly, whereas previously 51% of traffic landed on the home page, now only 34% does. That's good. We want people to enter a search query and land on the page that best answers their question. We don't want to intermediate with the home page if we can help it. The most popular pages after the home pages are now the ones I created that collect together art of different types, for instance this collection of Whitby paintings.

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Adwords

2009-09-27: Marketing by numbers: I'm running some pay per click ads through Google Adwords. If you're not familiar with that, if you look on the Google search results page, usually the top three results, and the right hand column of results, are paid ads.
Businesses pay each time you click on one of those ads. How much they pay depends on demand for those spots and on a formula that tries to ensure the ad is relevant to the search query.
Remember Google is nothing if it doesn't provide relevant search results. So Google doesn't want people advertising weight loss products when we're searching for a new car, for instance. It manages that by pricing those ads out of profitability.
One of the factors Google takes into account when setting the price we pay for the position we want is the click through rate (CTR) which is the number of clicks the ad received divided by the number of times it was displayed, expressed as a percentage. Ad appearances, displays, are called 'impressions' by Google. So if your ad appears 100 times and 1 person clicks on it, you have a 1% CTR.
Clearly, what you say in your ad affects the CTR. If your ad says "our product's really boring, I don't know why I'm advertising it" no-one will click, whereas if it says "you won't believe how much weight I've lost / how well behaved my dog is / what my house is worth" maybe they will.
So, rule number one in marketing is "everything is a test". Adwords encourages you to create alternative ads to run alongside each other. So we can write two ads and see which one has the best CTR. When we decide that we can ditch the worst ad, and create a new variation based on the better ad. That way, we gradually improve.
Well, I just checked an ad I've been running for a week. I've been slowly improving the ad for a while and all's been well, but this week my new ad got a CTR of 3.27% against last week's winner which only got 0.71%. So last week's ad tweak provided a 4.6 times improvement. Wow.
Testing. You never know what will work, but the rewards are there when you finally stumble upon it.
And .. I've gone through maybe seven different ad variations to get that. For me that underlines yet again that while clearly it's good to make a good first stab at a website and its text, it's not really what you the client and I the consultant decide would be great on your page. It's for the users to decide. All we have to do is give people the choice, and listen.

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Kenneth Williams

2009-09-26: Gotta love him

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The Age of Stupid

2009-09-26: I'm burned by Fahrenheit 9/11. Did I learn anything from that? Nope. All it was was a gathering of likeminded people sat going .. "yeah, Bush is a c**t". "You think so?" "Yeah, I think so?" "We all think so."
Well, we knew that from day one.
No-one who didn't think that would be at that film. So .. what was it? It wasn't persuasion. Was it .. making money from a supportive customer base?
And the point of going to see it was what exactly? To feel better? To stroke ourselves that there are others who agree Bush is a c**t and gather evidence that he really is.
The Animals Film changed my life (it dessicated me .. I've never cried so much) and I seem to remember seeing a film called Protest and Survive many times in local churches and community centres but can't find that online .. maybe I have the wrong title. Maybe The Age of Stupid is up there with them.
I like Tony Robbins and I like his thing that says our beliefs are entirely within our conscious control.
I'm a Linux guy. Like most open source advocates, I don't like the smell of Microsoft. But were I to get a job at Microsoft, I'd be surrounded by Microsoft success stories, Microsoft advocates and experts, cool ways to do stuff, and I'd come around to Microsoft. At the same time I wouldn't have the time or inclination to read about Linux success stories, so my head would gradually fill with Microsoft stories and I would turn into a Microsoft advocate myself.
So our beliefs come from our experiences (they aren't actually 'us'). So, Fahrenheit 9/11 just bolstered those experiences for the majority of those attending. In that sense, it actually did damage by making those beliefs more absolute, more black and white. Very Bush.
I've always been able to see (perhaps) all sides to an argument. I understand, for example, that the people in the companies who are helping to destroy the planet are in the most part acting out of goodness. They want their company to be successful, to feed and educate their families, and to provide whatever products or services their company provides to their customers in the best way they can. Most of the time they are progressive, switched on, and just that .. doing the best they can with what they have.
And now we have an American president who is making headway internationally by bridge building, understanding, negotiating, giving and taking, trust, diplomacy and generally being nice.
In today's Guardian there's an interview with Jo Brand. About 4/5 of the way down that interview she talks about her favourite gig ever.
It was in a working men's club in Bradford where the audience initially hated her. She "did a bit of guerrilla comedy", "funny bits, and then when they were laughing I whipped in a few home truths". She ended with a standing ovation.
That's the battle that needs to be fought. Opening up people's minds to the richness of life and opinion and experience, not bolstering opinions that are already set.
That's even more important now we can control our own media. We no longer sit and watch 'the news'. We get the news we want .. the information we already agree with. Increasingly we bolster our own views by choosing our environment to suit ourselves. That's why Borat was genius (it got serious points through while appealing to people who liked American Pie). And it's why I make an effort to read about what I don't know, and check out media with other viewpoints: ever actually watched Al Jazeera or read The Times of India? You can even read something like Al Quds (the most popular newspaper in Palestine) in English care of Google Translate and if you do you realise, it's not all wailing and not washing in Palestine .. they are almost like normal people. Isn't that amazing? Yes, of course, I'm a Guardian reader. So box me in. I'm not saying I read The Times of India avidly. I'm just saying it's nice to get a rounded view sometimes.
Moore is making me not watch The Age of Stupid (Join Moby, Radiohead's Thom Yorke, Gillian Anderson, Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Heather Graham ...) because I fear it'll be more of the same and I so thoroughly don't want to be like Bush I don't want to have unyielding views about anything. I want to be open. Flexible. Interested in other people's views. And anyway, Moby and Radiohead?

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The Tap and Spile, and the New Tavern

2009-10-08: I just heard this morning that Matt, landlord of both these Falsgrave pubs, was declared bankrupt on Tuesday and is, in his words unemployed and homeless.
That's really sad. Matt is one of the good guys. He's supported music in both pubs in Scarborough for as long as I can remember, always paid fairly and took chances with bands and artists.
The British pub is in serious decline not least in Scarborough where it seems many pubs are either available for lease or have closed. Sure, many are a little less salubrious than they might be, but they were ticking along OK. It's not the government's fault or the smoking ban's fault or Tesco's fault. Whatever we want in our lives, we have to use it. Spend our money there. Support it. So, no moaning. Matt's pubs' demise is our fault.
I was talking to the owner of a music shop yesterday and his first words to me were "what's happened to the local music scene, we're selling fewer strings, fewer drumsticks, people aren't playing". At the start of the recession there was an upsurge in pub band gigs as pubs tried to keep their beer flowing. I didn't think it would last. People aren't in a knees-up kinda mood.
And if the worst pubs get shaken out so we're left with the good ones and in those gather the socially minded people of Scarborough, maybe we'll get back to the days when you could get yourself a social scene by turning up at the Hole in the Wall.
But times change. The student intake at the uni aren't going to spend their nights in the Alma, they'll be in a bar drinking things multicoloured.
Along similar lines, I met a very nice local retailer the other day. Far from being a money grabbing businessman he was a nice guy trying to make a living at what he does best .. finding great products and presenting them well to his customers, and he's been doing that for a long time. If he makes loads of money, great. But right now, he's just ticking along.
And on Facebook, what I can only describe as a baying hoard gathered to press the idea that the waste ground on Dean Road should be turned into a big Asda. Honestly .. "ASDA! ASDA! ASDA!" was the sort of comment.
No matter that we've just spent a load of money trying to stop traffic driving into Scarborough. No matter that we have four supermarkets already. No matter that we've spent years developing Scarborough only to give away the benefits to a multinational. No. "Asda provides the best value". Which in one sense is fine, but it seems to me we're going to end up with no pubs and no independent retailers, and we will lose some of what makes Scarborough a great attraction to people.
I came from a city with no wet fish shop to a town with three. We have so many butchers they have to specialise (pies, lamb). It's a joy to shop in Scarborough because it's like a shopping centre used to be. We are in danger of becoming what everyone else is coming to us to escape: a rubber stamp town.
If everyone just simply wants an Asda, then we have a deeper problem than I thought.
Having said that .. Barry the coffee man looks like he's opening another place. So I guess we just have to bend with the wind.

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B&B has best August ever

2009-09-22: The Paragon Hotel (Scarborough) just had its best August ever thanks, I'm pretty sure, to my Internet marketing activities.
I also had a call from the Scarborough Hospitality Association and I asked .. because I can't work it out .. whether Scarborough's B&Bs are having a great time because everyone's having holidays in the UK and Scarborough's regeneration efforts make it a great place to be, or whether the recession is hitting others who would normally come here in equal measure. Are we up, generally, or down? He said this is the year it all went online. B&Bs that aren't savvy online marketers have seen their business decline. Those who have embraced the Internet have found bookings to be up.
That ties in, too, with how things have felt generally. B&Bs no longer seem to have their August booked up from about February. In July they are staring at a near-empty August diary. But it fills. People have been booking perhaps even the day before.

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Eliza Carthy

2009-09-14: Most of the songs the Big Brother contestants all knew, loved and sang along to I'd never heard before. Not sure I'd really even heard of the artists. I work in silence. I don't own an mp3 player. I'm out of touch with music.
Of course, I enjoy it though. I play in two bands and adolesced to punk and where I used to wonder whether life could exist without music, now I hear teenagers say the same and I think .. gawd, I couldn't live life 'with' music .. quiet is nice. How can you think straight if music's on?
Which takes me up a side alley about this year's Acoustic Gathering which seemed to attract a younger crowd. Lots of chatting while the bands were on from people who will happily text, flick tv channels, eat, drink cheap tinnies and chat at the same time. Those are tomorrows skills as we take on board wearable computers and total connectivity. I clearly am becoming a dinosaur (do I get to choose which one?). In a recent few days off we planned (didn't manage it, tho) to get out the record player and play some old records. Like gran did with her 78s.
While I'm being an old fogie I might as well dole out some advice to young people. As 'acoustic' followed 'rave', so what everyone is talking about now will soon be out of fashion and its opposite will be back in. As a teenager today, I would hone my concentration skills. Everyone will have the ability to hold three conversations at once. But you'll be the one who can sit down for an hour, concentrate on a task, and reach a higher level without taking a call, sending a text or checking your Facebook. You would be independent of external stimuli, how cool is that? That skill will be rare indeed and you'll be in demand.
I am connected to Eliza Carthy by two things. Firstly, she's a friend of a friend. I've never met her. But barring once seeing someone from Crossroads at a HiFi exhibition in London, and seeing David Bowie's knob in a film, that's one of my big claims to fame.
Secondly, she's local. In these parts we feel a little blessed by having the Carthy-Gods around.
Eliza Carthy
I was put off Eliza Carthy by this photograph (which I have 100% stolen) which would seem to want us to think of her as someone we are about to have sex with. It's the open mouth. It didn't need to be open.
Anyway, that kinda puts me off. I don't want to be dragged to the record shop (if such a thing exists any more) by my gonads, I'd rather my ears.
It's more, if I'm honest, that I don't want anyone else to think that's how I made my choice. Unfashionable it might be, but I work hard at this. I had formative years in Leeds University where every woman was a feminist and I read Spare Rib because I did, and do still, want the world they fought for.
Anyway, that's all wrong. She headlined the Acoustic Gathering last night. She's sexy all right, but through intelligence, writing and playing skill, capability and feistiness. I don't think I'd last five minutes in her company. Think ribald drinking games, lightning wit and solid earth. So .. record company .. get that across in the photos. There has to be a match between the marketing and the reality otherwise you get a disjoint, cognitive dissonance, post purchase blues.
Have a listen but I have to say .. 'live' is better. The band is exceptional. Think 'Elbow', maybe. I loved what the drummer played but I can't seem to find it on the CD .. different drummer? The freedom of playing 'live'?
So, from a dinosaur feminist who doesn't listen to music .. may I recommend you catch her on tour? The tour dates are here and it's just started.

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Twitter process farmout

2009-09-28: Marketing by numbers: For a particular client I am able to farm out a specific Twitter process. It took the person about 3.5 hours through July and August and resulted in 18 visits to the client's website.
The enquiry rate from Twitter for this process and this client and these few enquiries has been 50%, lots higher than the 4% average for that client.
From a sample of enquiries from last month, each enquiry is worth £10 of turnover. So, this Twitter process has brought £90 of turnover.
Of course, Twitter users might be lots more or less keen than average to book. The figures are from a small sample. Turnover is not profit. Everything changes with time. The business is seasonal. And we haven't accounted for repeat business or friendly recommendations from satisfied customers (or damnations from dissatisfied ones).
But it would appear there is a pay rate where outsourcing a good Twitter process might prove profitable.

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Coldplay

2009-09-21: Coldplay are boring, middle class white kids making bland, meaningless music for white kids who have new cars. Coldplay enables those people to fool themselves into thinking they enjoy good music and have awesome experiences of live music so they can feel cool easily.
At least .. that's what I've absorbed from the ether. I think that's the image Coldplay has. I've no idea, I honestly haven't gone near them.
But then in its own death throes, the South Bank Show gave us an hour of Coldplay last night and the guys turned out to be beguilingly nice, self deprocating, aware of the improbability of them reaching their dizzying height. They were together, close. I liked them. I liked them a lot. I want to be one of them. I'd like to know them.
I still think the music's bland. However, the programme showed them working with Eno, and him telling them they were OK but could be better, so perhaps the next album is worth a minute of my attention.
So .. a couple of things. Firstly: what a PR job! By showing the reality of the band and softly showcasing their achievements, I enjoyed it all and I'm now warm to them. Wow. That was a good job well done.
But actually I'm inspired. Coldplay are just a smidgeon over ten years old. Ten years ago, they were just some friends at uni.
What a lot can change in ten years.
I think I need to start thinking much bigger.

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m700 screen repair

2009-09-09: One birthday or Christmas someone bought me a travel alarm clock. It folds neatly into a small pillbox shape 50mm diameter and 23mm deep. It weighs 180g (about 7oz). I have a travel alarm clock that weighs 180g. Where am I going with that? I think it's made of lead.
One day my travel alarm clock rolled off the desk and landed on my E-Ten m700 PDA screen, rendering it permanently white and leaving a lovely dent in the bodywork.
I quite like not having a mobile phone.
Good thing because E-Ten were irrideemably useless. No response whatsoever to emails.
And because I'd bought something unusual, the repair companies didn't want to know either.
Nor would the home insurance cover it. Besides the excess, apparently your premium rises if you make more than one small claim. That would be my first, but the point is, it's not worth it.
And then I discovered the E-Ten users' group. The people there helped. They helped a lot.
I ended up with an offer of repair and the means to repair it myself.
So the first lesson of the day is exactly that. On the Internet, people can help each other outside the control of companies. You knew that, I know, but .. it's worth meditating on to get the full impact.
No-one in the UK would sell me a replacement screen, but I was able to buy a replacement E-Ten m700 screen in French from a French company. Partly that was because I could push French language messages through Google Translate, but mostly it's a usability thing. The site was usable enough that I could use it even though I didn't understand the language .. cool, non? (/ c'est easy peasy) And they didn't kick off about postage overseas and I got the product in a few days. Isn't that something? Usability is lesson number 2.
Then there was this set of instructions about how to dismantle an E-Ten m700 .. oh no, it's in Russian! Ah, that's better.
You know, I even feel better towards Russia now. Not everyone in Russia is trying to send me 3,000 watts of spam in the periods between hunting bears. Some people take the trouble to upload detailed instructions like that. I am their friend. Lesson 3 is .. I now feel good towards http://www.pdacenter.ru/
I had a few false starts. Mobiles apparently commonly use a Torx screwhead so I had to buy some Torx screwdrivers but before you order those, make sure you have a Philips #0 screwdriver too, not all the screws are Torx.
But. Seriously pleasant shock. I took it apart, replaced the screen, and (2 hours later) it damn jiggly works!
I had to recalibrate the screen, I didn't expect that .. there's a utility for that in the software under something like Settings->display.
But wow. I'm proper chuffed with myself.
Just one other thing. My big message for now and for all is "how have you contributed to the Internet today?" So of course I contributed back to the forum what I'd learned, so those who follow in my footsteps have an easier day. Here's the full story.
And don't buy anything from E-Ten. Screw them. Preferably with a torx driver.

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Kicking myself

2009-09-21: Marketing by numbers: Grrrr, I'm kicking myself. For Metcalfe Insurance who offer, for example off licence insurance I've just completed a re-style. It's more or less the same content, but with much better design. You might get an idea of what it did look like from the Wayback Machine.
I was hoping to be able to evaluate the effect of re-styling a website without making any other changes but actually we made significant other changes too. The company now offers direct on-line quotes as well as traditional insurance brokerage. That makes the before and after incomparable.
The client wanted to restyle the front page like the supplier of those direct facilities. I think that came from deference. I might be wrong, but perhaps the thought was .. 'this company knows what they are doing (more than us), we'll copy them'.
That supplier had a front page with lots of buttons, one for each offering. So I went to a designer to design the buttons and the designer did what I guess is probably a great way for them to get new business .. he said, more or less, "well, I thought the whole page could do with an update so what do you think to this:" and provided a revamped design.
That was how we got into doing a restyle. It was just a sweet shop thing.
So there was never a budget, and it's hard to say .. well, you know, we ought to think this through and even though you already have the design, it will be several thousand pounds for me to think on your behalf. I mean, that really is a tough thing to sell.
And honestly, I was with the designer, yeah, great, let's do it and see what happens. That's the great thing with the web (as opposed to say, writing a book), you can always change things.
So. As well as copying the other site's buttons, the client liked image fadeouts, so we ended up with this, Metcalfe Insurance Services, Stockport's home page.
Once the dust settled, the figures revealed themselves. The bounce rate (the percentage of people who arrived on the site and left immediately) had risen dramatically. We would now require almost twice as many visitors as before to maintain the same level of business.
Wow. So what had gone wrong?
Looking through the figures in Analytics, the problem seemed to come from the home page and it transpired that most people were arriving on that page and wanting pages that didn't have buttons.
See, the buttons were meant to denote the on-line, 'live' quote and buy facility. So for, for instance, taxi insurance there's no button because Metcalfe only offers it through its normal brokerage services .. ie. mainly by phone. No button, so it's only available on the home page through the menu.
That might be OK if people (that'll be people who already have a relationship with Metcalfe) weren't searching for 'Metcalfe' in Google and then wanting to navigate to what they want. I was rather hoping, for instance, taxi drivers would type 'taxi insurance' into Google and find the taxi insurance page directly. But that's not most of the traffic.
By copying the online quote supplier's website, what the client requested, I'd seriously messed this up.
Basically, a website home page ought to channel the popular needs of its visitors onto pages where they can get what they need. "Taxi insurance sir? Over here", basically.
The simple answer would be to add other prominent links for the main areas that aren't currently covered. But I think there's a less obvious problem which is pervading the site now, and I haven't quite tackled it but I wonder if it's too professional looking (many successful insurance websites look amateur). The navigation might be it. Not sure. But certainly on that home page, even for someone wanting insurance for which there's a button, they still have to read all the buttons to find theirs. It's not good. Even the crossfade ads aren't right. By the time you've decided you want to click it it's whisked away from you (probably fixed by the time you read this).
So I've put in a proposal to make popular links more prominent on the home page. I'll let you know about what solution I chose if/when it's approved. But the moral of this story is: do the job right. For me, it's a great lesson learned. See, I look around at local web developers and designers offering clients what they want and I think I must come across really awkward when I keep saying "yes, but (that's a really crap idea Mr client because .. so) why don't we do this". But basically, that's my worth. That's my expertise. The one time I essentially went with what a client wanted .. I somehow allowed the initial "oh, I redesigned your website, why not just do it" to take me in .. it messes up. Back to awkward Johnny: "great idea, but have you considered .. ". It's what you're paying me for.

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Rare control

2009-07-18: I have the rare opportunity to compare a business I am doing SEO and Internet marketing for with an almost identical business where I'm not.
It's important because they are seasonal businesses so, without a control, any improvement I claim may just be down to the season, the economy or whatever.
So. Comparing this month to last, for my business, traffic grew by 11% and conversion by 27.88%, meaning 'business' grew by almost 42% month on month.
With the 'control' business, traffic grew by 12.5% but conversion dropped by 18.4%, so 'business' only grew by 3%.
The John Allsopp effect, then, has been a 38% growth in business month on month.

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Best Top Gear car

2009-09-24: For me, the Top Gear car that's stayed with me the longest was the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti. Don't forget how amazing Clarkson is, no-one has come close to doing what he does. And in this particular Top Gear he fell in love with the idea of driving a Ferrari tourer around Europe. And I did too.
Look. If you lot can play fantasy war games and Farmville bullshit, then I can have one part of my head reserved for my own dreams, and in there, I'm driving a Scaglietti around Europe without worrying about legroom, fuel bills, or who's feeding the cats .. alright?

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Psychological copy test

2009-09-13: Marketing by numbers: If you are marketing, you should always be testing. That was the mantra when I was doing direct marketing twenty years ago and it's still true today. So every website, even every web page, should have two or more versions, one where you're running your normal page, and another where you've changed a headline or photograph or the copy or whatever to see if it helps.
The way it works is the visitor always sees one version of the page, but the version they see is determined randomly when they first arrive. OK, they may see the different page on their home computer to the one at work, but it's good enough.
Once the 'experiment' proves one page is better, you keep that one and try another test. In that way, you're always gaining.
Except, that's not how my latest test went. Remember the psychological profile work I did on taxi drivers? My g/f (who is a work psychologist) did a fabulous psychological profile on taxi drivers based on some questionnaires I sent out and some other data (trade publications and so on), and based on that I wrote new page copy designed to appeal to them.
140 visitors went to the two pages. 6 converted off the original page, and .. wait for it .. 0 converted off my spanking new psychological taxi copy.
So what went wrong?
It certainly wasn't the psychological profile. That was breathtaking.
It was my interpretation of it. In my excitement, I wrote it too quickly. I didn't really, really, take the profile on board. I didn't think enough about it. Didn't really, really put myself in their shoes.
What's exciting about those figures is the power of copy. Remember, the other power of copy is to draw visitors through the search engines by containing keywords people are searching on. Ignoring that hugely important thing for a moment, here we have an awesome demonstration of the power of copy. Two pages. Equal in every way except for the text. One converted at 8%, the other at 0%. Isn't that something? Does that mean if I actually got the psychological text right I might be able to get it to 16%?
And .. just think about those numbers. 8% versus zero. Zero! I've never had results as absolute as that. Copy, then, is probably the most important thing on the page.
So .. without testing .. who knows what state the other (many) pages on this website are in. Let's say they are at the 4% level. That means, through testing, I could improve all of them to at least the 8% level (via a few 0% waypoints, admittedly). And what about beyond 8%? Why not? If 8% is just what it was, unoptimised, untested, where's the ceiling? What enormous potential! I could carve a career out of just that.
My rage is building. Because the discussion between client and web developer is always about how the page looks. And web developers who have a portfolio of nice looking websites get more business and yes, they may even have happier clients because our main sense is our eyesight and the thing the client can judge is how it looks.
My contention is always .. you've a limited budget. Spend that on what matters. I'm also testing some different graphic designs atm and afaics the implementations I've put in place make almost no difference, yet they take hours to implement. Copy is just copy, you can make changes instantly.
I'm almost at the point of saying "screw how it looks". I'm sure there are great graphic designers who can make a really big difference, and maybe the fact that clients can get stuck in and say "move that over there and make this bit more purple" turns any design into a committee decision. Maybe that's what's wrong. I mean, the big design and brand people just turn up and say "here's your new logo". Lesser designers turn up with a choice for the client to pick from (oh yes .. how to make friends and influence people, JA style). But honestly I would rather launch a page of black text on a white background saying something useful than have something pretty that said nothing much of any use.
John Allsopp Web Design - "screw what it looks like". It's kinda catchy don't you think?
The other thing about it is .. writing is hard to sell. Anyone can write. Yet .. just look how important it is. It really needs to be done right by someone who knows what they are doing.
It's perfectly possible that the reason I know what I know about Internet marketing is I've made more mistakes at it than most. I certainly get the strong impression that there are 99 ways of doing this stuff wrong for every 1 that's right. Hopefully I can spot more than your average bear of those 99 ways of doing it wrong before we reach implementation. It's a tough job though, if you're brought in to make a nice lovely website and all you keep saying is 'no'.
The beautiful thing about this is .. if I hadn't tested it, I wouldn't have known how wrong it was. So .. how much of your website is wrong without you knowing? If you're not testing .. how can you know?
The numbers are your clients and prospects talking to you. There's not much that's more important than that. Much as I might (do) come across as cocky sometimes (always) here, there's only one God. It doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what you think. Seriously. It only matters how your clients interact with your website, and you get to peek at that through the numbers. The numbers settle all arguments and answer all questions, uncomfortable though that may be sometimes. The numbers are God.
The alternative, test version of this blog is a lovely one about kittens, obviously.

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Sarah Rayner

2009-09-02: Sarah Rayner has a new website. It's not one of mine, it's been created by a friend (hopefully still).
It's built almost entirely using Flash. That's a bad thing. The devil makes shiny things to distract us from what we should be doing.
When the Google robot visits this site, it will see nothing barring the metatags: the page title: "Sarah Rayner - The Creative Pumpkin", the description and the keywords which it ignores.
Not only that, when you work out the navigation (unusual navigation is bad, imagine cars having different controls) and click to see a new page, what you're seeing is another part of the Flash presentation, not another webpage. So Google sees this website as simply one blank page.
Google needs content, mainly in the form of text. Flash has hidden the content from Google. That's a real pity since it seems Rayner is a copywriter.
It's sad too because, except for the page sliding effect which isn't worth the downside, there's nothing there that couldn't have been done by bog-standard website means.
So. How to market this site on the Internet given there's nothing we can do about the on-site content? I'm speculating, I don't know Rayner at all, so it all depends what she wants to do. For all but a social media strategy, this website will hold her back in terms of getting a position in the Google search results. So I would be tempted to use it as a brief and rebuild it properly, but she's probably already spent her money for the website and it might even cost more to rebuild it properly so that would be hard to swallow.
So we've basically got two strategies left: build inbound links (because they will contain text Google can use to classify the page), and social media .. build a fanbase on Twitter / Facebook et al. (update: I forgot: PPC too of course)
With inbound links, basically the value that needs to be implemented is "how can I contribute to the Internet today?" We would need to work out in what way Rayner would be confident contributing .. would she have an hour a day to write a blog? A couple of hours a week to write an article? Would she be willing to get involved in forums? Are her paintings for sale, should we post them in online galleries (are they, actually, relevant at all or is it really a hobby)? We need to create a content machine, and I'd guess she's unlikely to want to outsource any of the creation of that because text is her business. But she might want to outsource the publishing and publicising of what she creates so she concentrates on creation, then gives it effectively to her online publisher who does all the crazy Internet stuff that turns it into traffic and kudos and interest and enquiries. That is the main hope of raising her position on the search results with this website.
With Web 2.0 and social media, it's about thinking through all the ways people can and might want to connect with her, from RSS feeds to YouTube channels, from Facebook to Twitter via LinkedIn, and from Podcasts to newsletters and creating material for her and her 'fans' or followers through the channels that work for her.
All of it is about giving and contributing in order to get back kudos, social standing and reverence. So when it comes to it, people will turn to her for help. Here the website isn't dragging us back, so at least we'd be battling on equal terms.
That should be implementable with a few hundred pounds a month ongoing to create and implement the strategy, assuming Rayner creates the core content.
But the truth is, that all sounds like hard work and if she's a freelance copywriter she doesn't need a huge amount of work to keep going. These strategies are forced upon us by the initial website because without the ability to test and evolve the website we can't do the central, core website thing which is to be there on the first page of Google when someone types in that they want what we sell.
So I'm back to the website. I'd rebuild it properly and go from there.

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New pages

2009-09-01: Marketing by numbers: God I love this. OK, if you delve into Internet marketing it won't be long before you are advised to write articles and syndicate them around t'Internet. That's fine. But writing articles takes time and it's a pain if you have to go through a clearance cycle. The temptation is to lower the quality in order to issue the quantity.
The reason article writing is good, though, is because it creates permanent, relevant links to your site and because the reader will hopefully be in the right frame of mind when they arrive.
Inbound links are not good just for traffic, they help raise you in the search engine results.
However, the article syndication sites have been mobbed by Internet marketers, the quality dropped, so Google downgraded those sites.
And, a link is a link whether it's from outside in to your site, or from within your site.
So one of the advantages of using me over most Internet marketers is that I can do the technical stuff too.
I've just added the ability for visitors to view the artwork on Whitby Artnet by art type: ceramics, paintings, etc. That's a nice bit of functionality for the user. There's more to come.
It fits nicely with my growing view that a sales style is 'out' while a functional, service style is 'in'.
But, most importantly, it creates four new pages on the site. You can link to them like this: Whitby paintings and art. So the site may well now rank for, for instance, 'ceramics from Whitby' because there's now a page of ceramic art from Whitby.
Each work shown on one of those pages contains multiple links back to the artists. The more artists enter their work, the more links they'll get.
So what I've done, in about an hour and a half, is probably the equivalent in effectiveness of writing and syndicating an article but we're not beholden to any of the article websites. On a bigger site, this would be a much bigger deal, and I think utility wins.
Update: see the results of this change here.

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What's dubstep

2009-09-19: Everyone's talking about dubstep. Here's a great explanation of dubstep. With the help of Wikipedia I can keep up with the kids. Skankin, bo? Nasty.
Having said that, my attempt to inspire a dubstep version of Keith Harris and Orville's "I wish I could fly" seems to have fallen on stony ground. It worked for Prodigy and "Charlie Says".

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Our kettle lasted ..

2009-09-28: Our Dualit kettle lasted three years and four months.
Ooh no, I'm wrong, it lasted two years and eleven months.
Kettle blogs eh? People like to poke fun but they're just jealous.

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Firefox error

2009-09-08: Firefox just had an error and so gave me a page headed "Well, this is embarrassing", going on to explain the issue "Firefox is having trouble recovering your windows and tabs." "Well, this is embarrassing" made me laugh out loud, what a lovely way to report an error :-)

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More simple SEO changes reap big rewards

2009-08-20: 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.

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High Probability Selling

2009-08-21: 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.

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Music The Business

2009-08-28: 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.

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Home Information Packs

2009-08-14: 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 :-)

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Waking up to the top slot

2009-08-10: 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 :-)

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Print this page

2009-08-29: Print this page. Now that's how web pages should print.

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Paid listings

2009-07-13: Marketing by numbers: When a website links to your website it normally passes some of its Page Rank to you, within Googleworld at least. Page Rank is a score that represents how many inbound links point to your page. Popular pages have more links. Google takes that into account when deciding in which order to list websites when you use Google search.
Clearly, this opens up a way for those with money to dominate Google search. If all you have to do is pay someone to put a link to your site in their site, those with deeper pockets will dominate.
Google lives or dies by the quality of its search results. Its income comes from pay per click ads. If people perceive Google search results are less effective than Microsoft's or Yahoo!'s, they'll simply use those engines and Google will lose income. Google does not, therefore, want people to be able to pay their way to the top.
So Google publishes quality guidelines which state that you can buy and sell links for traffic, but not to manipulate search results.
They provide a tag attribute rel="nofollow" to add to paid links. This tells Google not to pass Page Rank along that link. That's fine.
Once a rule like that is in place, there's a huge pressure to conform. If I'm promoting a site and I come across a competitor who is buying links for PageRank, be absolutely sure, I'll report them through the above link. I'd encourage you to do the same.
So, don't be tempted to buy links to improve your search engine position. Buy for traffic only and make sure you're not in breach of the guidelines or some nit picking bookish whining paper pushing bastard like me will report you. Button power!

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Page one listing

2009-07-11: Marketing by numbers: So, for my B&B client I've gotten them a page one listing, third highest ranked B&B in Scarborough for the keyphrase that matters most (not some crappy niche phrase). The only problem is, I can't quite work out what worked. Actually, that's not the only problem. When I refresh the search, I get a different result. I'm told that's because when I refresh I get allocated (randomly) to a different server farm at Google. And if one farm's made a recent change but another is yet to, then we see seemingly random differences. Let's hope it settles down with my client on the front page :-)

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Small changes make a big difference

2009-08-18: 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.

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On-page optimisation

2009-08-18: 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.

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The thin line between success and failure

2009-07-27: Marketing by numbers: I often feel the line between a roaring success and abject failure is very thin. Take the changes I made to a B&B website's front page a few days ago. They were fairly subtle, nothing major. Just a tweak of style, a little more warmth, a bit more of a textual hug for visitors.
Our Google traffic for those who didn't already know our name has gone up 100%, and our conversions the same.
In a key place, it can just be a word added or removed that makes the difference. The key is to know what to change especially since it's not all positive, make the wrong change and your Google position can drop, sometimes dramatically.
That's why everything I do is a test, an experiment. So next time, I know what worked. And I do that all day every day. Years of testing. Lots of learning. Lots of knowledge. It makes getting out of bed easier to do .. I want to get in the office and check my lobster pots, see if I've caught anything.
The good thing is, it might take just the right tweak in the right place to get your business to the next level. Tweaks are inexpensive. They might hold the key.
It does make it interesting come invoice time. "So Mr Allsopp, you've charged me this amount, what did I get for my money?", "well, most days I spent 45 minutes working out what to do on your site, then actually doing it took maybe a minute".
The thing is not to confuse activity with progress. You can work as hard as you like at Internet marketing, but if you're not doing the right things, you're wasting your time.
And the difference between second page and first page is a matter of those subtleties and tweaks. Internet marketing snakes and ladders. Make the wrong tweak and it's a snake for you. Make the right tweak, and it's another ladder.

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Page title change gets page 1 position

2009-06-24: Marketing by numbers: I'm working for a local b&b and, having spent £300 on pay per click ads, worked out that while those were generating traffic, pay per click visitors weren't turning into enquiries at anything like the rate that normal Google Organic enquiries were.
I'd previously worked out which combination of Scarborough and b&b was most often searched, so I knew which phrase to target. No point working hard to get a good Google search position on a phrase no-one searches on, we want traffic.
I also knew that the page title was important for page ranking. So I optimised the page title for their homepage, that was on the 29 May.
I left them alone for a while and came back to it today. Whereas they used to rank 35th for the favourite phrase, they now rank 13th. Sounds like a second page listing. No, 13th after Google Local. So, a search for my key phrase brings up a Google map and 10 local listings, then there's a directory double listing, then there's us. Jeepers Creepers, that's a number 3 listing just below the best performing directory and against all the other b&bs in Scarborough. OK, maybe b&b's aren't the best online marketers around, but they employ perfectly good web developers.
The curious thing is, I'm not sure when the ranking changed and if I assume perhaps it happened after a week, well traffic from Google organic has only risen by 27% comparing 6-23 June to 16 May - 2 June. I don't think it's a seasonal variation because the sum of all the other traffic is essentially unchanged.
I have to say I expected more traffic from such a great position but it's possible it's only just happened. Comparing yesterday's traffic from Google organic to Tuesday last week, it's up 143%. That's more like it.
The other nice thing about page title changes is, yes there's some intelligence to apply in choosing what to write so perhaps it takes at most half an hour, well that's a great result for half an hour's work.
So, what's next? Well I've still not hit my traffic waypoint, and the home page isn't the only page I could optimise, there are all the others too. So I don't have to just target one high-traffic keyphrase, I can target a handful ...

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Waterson Carthy

2009-07-24: There's a slightly embarrassed face people pull when a friend plays them a tune they really like. You know you've at least three minutes of listening, and you don't know where to look.
There was a lot of that at Old St. Stephen's Church in Robin Hood's Bay last night. Built in 1821 and closed in 1870 it is spartan, has no water or electricity, and feels like an early example of an Ikea flat-pack church.
It has a curious layout, with the pulpit in the middle of one long wall, boxed pews, and an upstairs gallery along the opposite wall.
Its location, however, is truly stunning, with views over the whole bay.
I know so very little about religion I'm in serious danger of making a fool of myself but if I had to guess which brand outlet this church represents, I'd have to opt for Church of England, but that raises questions because the CofE churches I've been in had stained glass windows and the usual ornate decorations, so I don't understand why this church seems so puritanical.
Apparently .. and again, I'm so far out of what I know about I could be talking about alien life forms .. in similarly spartan Scottish churches, the folk songs they sing show gospel roots, leading to the idea that that's the seed from which American gospel music came. So I can't moan about white people nicking black people's music any more and anyway, that's another thing I know very little about.
Anyway, in the aisle of that church, various members of the Waterson and Carthy families and harpist Celia Briar played and sang last night in aid of church funds. I'm not sure who was there because I only really saw Martin Carthy. Norma wasn't there, she's in hospital apparently. We missed someone great, I'm told. Mike Waterson .. is that right? He was there. And three ladies, not sure who they were but Eliza wasn't there although she's headlining this years acoustic festival in Scarborough. I took a pew behind the altar and so didn't see a thing. But that's OK. Well, I did think they'd wander up and down the aisle a bit but hey.
Sight is our main sense, most people lead with that, but some, like me, prefer hearing, and what delicious hearing it was.
Music without hiss or crackle. No sampling, modulation or demodulation, no frequency range, no hum, no pops, no background noise. No digitisation, no stereo, no dolby, no bass bins or tweeters. Just them. A church with fine acoustics. And us. You could drink it.
I know nothing about folk music either, but listening to their songs somehow made me think of peering down a hole in the ice to the waters below. It was a view into history, a way of making it live again. Not, perhaps, an even sampling of history .. mostly 'working class' early industrial and agricultural Britain, but seemingly timeless and eternal.
You might like these: Martin Carthy sings Georgie in his back garden, Norma Waterson sings Coal not Dole (they sang this, but as I say, Norma wasn't there), No one stands alone. There doesn't seem to be much on YouTube of Mike Waterson, seems that should get sorted by someone. Here's the nearest I could find to what he sang last night.
Here's a programme about Eliza Carthy in case you want to get excited about this year's Acoustic Gathering.

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Frames

2009-08-14: 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 :-)

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The Dogger Bank Earthquake

2009-08-14: 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.

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Tesla

2009-07-10: I've a list of things I want to blog about that I'm not getting the time to, and one is Nikola Tesla. Since it's his birthday, perhaps today's the day. And since Wikipedia has already written about him fascinatingly enough, maybe there's nothing more I need to do.

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SEO company charges

2009-07-18: A friend contacted some SEO companies and told me how they charge. I didn't know. Here's the idea.
You say "I'd like to be on page one of Google for the phrase 'blue margarine'". They say "that'll be £100 a month". If you agree, it's a two year contract, and they charge you £100 a month for each month you are on page one of Google for that phrase.
Less popular phrases cost less, more popular ones cost more. Basically, they are looking up the Pay Per Click cost for the phrase and working it out from there.
I said it seemed interesting and he said he didn't think they were selling much that way because once he called the company, they were all over him like insurance sales, pushing him into buying.
He said he "felt dirty" having spoken with them. I wondered whether it he felt they were using their knowledge against him. He jumped at that. "That's exactly it, I hadn't worked it out before, but that's exactly it. I felt like they knew something I didn't that meant they'd make lots of money for not a lot."
As IT practitioners we clearly work in a complicated area, and one of the key parts of the British Computer Society code of practice is that we shouldn't use our knowledge against the ignorance of our clients. We are not here to take clients money based on secrecy. We are supposed to do a professional job for a fair price. That's why I'm a member.
The other thing that bugs me about this pricing method is .. there's nothing there that says they'll do anything about your website. If they are not going to help you do all the good stuff like improve your site, talk about blogging, Facebook and Twitter and how to integrate them into your site in order to provide new channels of communication with your clients leading to good news travelling around cyberspace (if we still call it that), then they are left with link building.
Manual link building is hard work. Automated spammy robotic link building is easy (and so, not worth the money they are charging).
So what you're buying into here is a system that would encourage the crappy side of SEO. Comment spamming, buying links, that sort of thing. It's not good.
So, err, use me instead. Tadaaaah. Did you see how subtly I managed that?
Seriously .. their way is candyfloss. Mine is a full meal. My methods are satisfying because they make sense, they feel right, they build your business and your brand and leave your customers wanting more. I'm not 'just' SEO. I'm about getting your business and your customers to love each other online. Yes really. I want your customers to be thinking great things about you and telling their friends online. Now that's a link building programme I can buy into.

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Pages

2009-07-10: Marketing by numbers: I've a client in a fairly hard area where I'm struggling to get them a good position in Google. I'm working, and they are dropping, currently in position 373 or similar. But suddenly, their Facebook Page came up in position 38.
So I think Facebook Pages are increasingly important. Remember, a Facebook Page is for a business. It's a different thing to a normal Facebook account which is for you, personally. You can have multiple Facebook Pages.
It doesn't take long to set one up and it can provide a quick and easy website if you're starting out in business. Plus, of course, it provides all the social, viral and interactive functionality you'd expect from Facebook. For instance, if your client 'fans' you (people 'fan' Pages rather than 'friend' your personal account on Facebook) then all their friends will see it. Which is a bit like a personal recommendation. It's also a nice way to get your message out to a demographic or interest group. Plus, your page will probably appear in the Highlights section for a while, too.
If you don't know how to do it, nor how to integrate your Facebook Page into your business, I can help. Whatever, it seems to be increasingly important you have one.

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Not jittery / how I got 2.5x more broadband down my pipes

2009-01-24: Many, many hot dinners ago, my g/f had the jitters. Actually I had the jitters too, but it was er wot was moaning about it. YouTube videos that started, then hung, then did a bit more, then hung.
Many, many .. hoards. Crowds of people ask me every day which broadband service I recommend and when I say I use IDNet and it costs £35 a month they go, Life of Brian style, "how much? I can get it for a tenner". Every single time it begs the question, "wtf did you ask me in the first place?"
The point being, I don't want the Internet for fannying about on while there's nothing on tv. It's my job, it's my work, it's my calling. It's what I do. I want it to be there always. And the fact that when I ring up my provider with a question I get to speak to someone is pretty cool. That they aren't in a call centre in Bangalore is nice, nothing against Bangaloreans. That it's the same person each time and he remembers my issues is fabulous. That he can fix things is nothing short of awesome. That's what my £35 is for. I'd choose that every time.
So I called him about these jitters and he had me run a speed test and it turned out I was getting about 2.7mbps.
I had BT come to check the line and the man said everything was fine.
I called back Mr Nice from IDNet and he said basically it was likely to be the telephone wiring in my house, and I should move the router so it connected directly to the BT line coming into the house. Then the exchange would notice and automatically morph itself into a better thing and I'd be happier.
Did I mention that the telephone cabling in my house included a connection I'd made by cutting the phone cable and a B&Q extension cable and twisting the copper cores together before wrapping them in electrical tape and then avoiding hoovering around it because sometimes when I did it cut off my Internet?
Moving the router kinda worked enough for me to be able to ignore the problem for a bit, but I did get some drop-offage and I didn't really like where the router was (geeks like to watch the flashing lights and make big decisions based on what they see). Plus, I had to dangle a long network cable along the stairs in a non-health-and-safety-approved manner in order to be able to do what I do, so .. it wasn't ideal.
So I tried to talk to BT about getting the phones rewired, which was just a joke. Do I want a new extension fitted? No. Do I want a new line? No. That was kinda it. I tried to explain to someone in a call center, yes, in Bangalore, what I wanted and I don't think we really saw eye to eye and so he gave me some random number and the whole thing reached a dead end.
I tried searching for "telephone rewiring Scarborough" and it didn't come up with anything.
After a few months of ponderations it occurred to me that what I want might be a 'telephone engineer'. Once I'd clocked that, I managed to find Graham, Telephone Engineer (07748 691302). He's a telephone engineer in Scarborough, which is what I wanted. Although I didn't know it.
He's been. For £160 I've got new wires between my phones and router, a lot less wire around the house, a plate thingy that tidies up the electrons in the cable and buffs them 'till they shine .. just think of it as a weeny cyber Lakeland Plastics, it just gets things organised inside the wires .. and I now have 6,609kbps on my 8mbps service, which I think is pretty amazing.
So IDNet were right, and I was right. Right to buy a service I could trust and then risk £160 on finding out if they were right or not. I was probably wrong about the electrical tape connection though. Never mind.
But seriously, as well as that dodgy connection of mine, the phone wiring in my house had been built up over many years, the top floor was once a flat, so there were many junctions and long cable routes. So, if you have similar issues, perhaps Graham's the man you need.

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Beeny's website

2009-07-15: Gotta love Sarah Beeny on the telly talking about property, she surely knows her stuff, but you could see she was outside her comfort zone with the website recommendation she made last night for the Tavistock Railway Station nutcases.
They developed their own website which looked old fashioned and text heavy, and Beeny presented them with a mock-up of a website that seemed to me had been put together by the TV team. It used their architectural model of the building, and was image-heavy. It looked fabulous, but looking good is only part of the solution.
The questions to ask are: "how usable is it?", "how findable is it?", and "how easily can it be maintained into the future?"
Part of the reason for using the architectural model was that they wanted bookings but hadn't finished the building work yet so there was nothing to photograph.
I've a few issues with this. Everyone knows that an artists' impression is a poor substitute for a photograph. It's someone trying to pull the wool over your eyes. So as soon as photographs become available, they are going to want those on the site.
Beeny said her website would cost £3-4,000. A good chunk of that would be for the graphics.
I think they'd spend that money getting a lovely website and then discover, because it's graphics-led, that it was hard (costly) to maintain. So four weeks (or whenever) later when they say "Ah, we've got photographs now", they'd be faced with another £1,000 to update and change the website. And it's unlikely to be something they could change themselves, tying them to their provider.
Really, I've got two major problems. One, I didn't like the impression given that the old site was text heavy and old fashioned and that the cure was to make it graphics heavy. The web isn't TV, it's the web. On TV, do what you like with graphics, make dinosaurs come to life, we'll all sit and enjoy the show. On the web, we're all using different equipment and have different speed lines and increasingly we're using mobile devices to access the web. I doubt her graphics-heavy website would display on a phone. The rule for the web is to provide content in the format people want it, which means graphics, showy though they may be, are not always the solution.
My second problem is there was no mention of marketing the site. It's OK to spend that budget if you want, but half of it needs to be spent on search engine optimisation otherwise no-one will find the site.
In order to generate traffic, normally you would work out what people are searching for that's relevant to what you're selling, and then write about it on pages on your site. Maybe "Tavistock holiday accommodation" would be a start.
A nice site **might** convert visitors into bookings. But you need the traffic first. It's like the old hi-fi rule, spend all your money on your turntable, then buy the amp and speakers with Green Shield stamps or whatever. Basically you can't make up for what's missing at the start so focus your energy at the source and upgrade the rest later.
If you don't have traffic to your website, nothing else matters. Spend the money on search engine optimisation. If, in fact, you spent **all** your money on search engine optimisation, that wouldn't be a bad thing. Because to do search engine optimisation you have to write content that's focussed on the search terms that mean the person searching wants what you're selling.
By concentrating on search engine optimisation, you're building a lean solution. You're answering their search query. It keeps you focussed. It saves you money.
When you've got traffic, people visiting your site with a clear problem to solve that you've got the answer to, you could put up a [don't press this] button and you'll make money.
But to make the most of your site, you can make changes gradually and test the results (you can't do that without traffic). Then choose the best option and set up another test. Websites are fluid and ongoing because the economy, your business, your market and your customers are changing all the time. Websites are not like brochures, you can keep changing them .. if you've designed it to be flexible.
Your customers will tell you what they want to see on your site and how they want to see it. All you have to do is listen.
Anyway, they didn't go with Beeny's graphics in the end. It's a lesson in not taking people's expertise out of context, something I've blogged about before. Listen to Beeny about property, but she's just an ordinary person when she talks about canal cruises, websites, or how to hunt caribou.
The Tavistock Railway Station nutcases still have an issue with price, I see.

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Overhead Cables warning

2009-05-26: From Scarborough to York on the A64 nowadays, every time there's an overhead cable, there's a sign either side of it on both sides of the road. We couldn't work out how that could benefit anything. My view was that in increasing the signage count, it made each sign less significant which could lead to people paying the road signs less heed, so increasing accidents.
Anyway, here's our local MP and newspaper on the subject.
It still doesn't make any sense. There's presumably a standard height for anything over a road, and so a standard maximum height for any vehicle. Freight and emergency services people must have a database of low bridges. Any vehicle over the standard height must have to make a detailed journey plan and perhaps have a police escort and there must be data available to help them do that. Such a driver would be acutely aware of overhead cables and be on the lookout.
What I think is frustrating is the inability to drill down and get to the bottom of how the decision was made and why. There may be a perfectly good explanation, something like: "We did a health and safety assessment, found that risk and according to law we have to show we've taken measures to mitigate those risks. It's your law, people, put into place by your parliament, people, we (the local council) are just abiding by what you want. Don't like it? Change the law, because if someone electrocutes themselves with their crane on the A64 one day, we'd be in court anyway about why we hadn't done anything. Damned if we do, damned if we don't." But because nothing ever seems to get traction we just end up shrugging our shoulders.
I'd be very happy if Goodwill or the local paper pushed further. For instance, it seems to me that Goodwill's question was "what risk assessment was carried out before the posts were put up", as in, what led to the decision to put the signs up.
The answer relates to a risk assessment done before sending out the workers to put the signs in the ground, well after the decision was made.
So Clark didn't answer Goodwill's question and the temptation is just to give up, certainly as punters. But it's the local paper and Goodwill's job to push these things home. I hope they do.

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Embedded GPS tracking

2009-05-26: My personal GPS tracking device client, is about to supply trackers to a group of extreme athletes who are going to go from Lands End to John O'Groats by frankly unsavoury means. One will run cross country. Another will kite surf the coast. And another will cycle there .. and back again.
They wanted to embed a location map into their website so I've been working on that. Where better to test it than here. If it works, this shows their location:
\n"; $return .= "\n"; $return .= ""; echo $return; ?>

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Quick and easy websites

2009-07-13: For those wanting a quick and easy website, I currently charge £300 for the first page, £100 for each page thereafter, £10 for each photograph used, and hosting and a domain name (maybe £60). I used to think that wasn't the cheapest offer around, but then I discovered that unlike others, I'll write all the text and take all the photographs.
Where I do spend less time is on the graphic design. I think it's more important to make a site that works than spend all my time making it look pretty. Anyway, often the prettier a site is, the more likely it is to break when someone wants larger text or uses, say, a mobile phone to access it. A website has to be designed to be there in the search engine results when your target prospect enters the search term that means they want what you sell. When they see your listing on the page along with maybe twenty others, it should speak to them. When they land on your page, it should solve their problem.
To manage that whole process, I need control over everything. Dodgy photographs need to go in the bin. Blather is out too. No-one wants to read what you want to tell them. They just want what they want. All you have to do is organise yourself around giving it to them.
So I was gratified to have to write a hosting renewal letter to a client who spent just under £500 with me a couple of years ago for a single page website for her shop. I was pleasantly surprised to see the website was getting 200 visitors a month through keyword searches alone, and that almost all of those were proper sales-enquiry terms not just searches on the name of the shop from finger-lazy existing customers. She had multiple first page Google listings. All that .. 200 potential new clients a month .. from a single web page I haven't touched in two years.
This stuff does actually work you know, it's not just talk :-)

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Writing

2009-06-18: I wasn't triffically good at writing at school and I still wonder (every time) when I write what I've done in the day for a client and head the email "Today's progress" whether that apostrophe should be there. And yes, I've read (and enjoyed) Lynn Truss.
And as you know, I studied Internet Computing for three years to get my degree, and I've been studying Internet marketing for as long.
So it really does surprise me that people come to me for my writing. For some reason .. some say there's a rhythm to it.
I think what it is is that when I took three aptitude tests in the careers office in my final uni year, one was numerical skills, one was shapes, and the other was written comprehension, I discovered that I'm really not good at written comprehension.
I think that forces me to be clear and to the point. To chop things up and make them simple.
Isn't that weird though? My weakness turns out to be a strength.
Ha! One more thing to hit mediocre training companies over the head with when they turn up wanting to discover everyone's weaknesses and bring them all up to speed. I never 'got' that. Nope .. work on your strengths, let others (whose strengths are in your weak spots) do what you're bad at.
Except writing. Hmm. This is getting complicated. I'll get my goat.
/Coat. Damn smellchecker

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Some people make money from blogging

2009-04-28: Not me. Well, maybe I do in the sense that I get some clients from this and that sometimes people pay me to write in their blogs so yes, I'm in profit with blogging, but that's not what I mean.
Content is valuable. When Google set up Adsense it enabled people to make money from pure content. How so? If I write a page about setting up a successful cheese business, I can sign up to Google Adsense, put their code on my page, and they will read my page and serve relevant ads (eg. from companies selling cheese presses, muslin, and white hats and coats). When someone clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays something, and I get a secret percentage of that for my trouble.
The effect of that? Loads of people writing blogs that recycle secondhand information on the web. Whoop.
Now, it's not really going to make a lot of money if you're not writing about something worth some money. Look at the top right of this blog page, Adsense ads are there, and I've made perhaps a tenner over the whole life of this blog, and I've written good, honest content and I have lots of traffic.
But two things. One, I don't write consistently about anything, I just write about what's on my mind, so it's difficult to think I'll have any actual regular followers besides those who already know me. My traffic strategy is more .. I'll write about what's interesting to me and that will attract interesting people who might want some web work. That's worked for me.
Secondly, I don't hammer the Adsense. It's just there. If I was serious about making money from that, there'd be Adsense after every blog. That might happen, but I've not done it yet. It doesn't feel right.
But, the cruise. Cruises cost thousands of pounds so clicks will be several pounds each.
So. All my cruise blogs are getting re-written and published here: http://ganninoot.blogspot.com/. Blogger is easy to set up, it's owned by Google and it's easy to set up Adsense. The only problem? I've zero traffic. Zero. Not one person so far. But hey, I'm already blogging the cruise, I may as well republish it there. And anyway, it's only a few days old.
But you see how Adsense is working there? I'll let you know how it goes. Maybe it'll pay for the next cruise, maybe it'll pay for a coffee somewhere foreign, who knows?

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The Changeling

2009-08-02: 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.

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Morrisons trip

2009-07-16: Tesco is the worst at this, but trained by them, we always check that any offers we've purchased at a supermarket are actually shown on the receipt. Currently, this has happened on the last two supermarket visits. So at Morrisons today I bought two coffees instead of one because they were on offer, and they didn't appear on the receipt and I ended up at the customer service desk hidden well out of sight of the checkouts.
Heather served me. I showed my receipt and the coffees. She tannoyed for a call from groceries and while we waited I said something lighthearted which she didn't acknowledge.
When the call from groceries came, she asked them to check the shelves because "I have a customer who seems to think they are on offer".
"seems to think"? I don't know why, but that's really, really bugging me. I don't even know what it really means. Yes, I do appear to think that. I'm quite clear on it, so it's evident yes I do think that. Ah .. got it. "Seems to think" implies that I might be pulling a fast one. I might be saying that I think the coffees were on offer, but actually just trying to get away with something I know is untrue. She was accusing me of being dishonest. That's why it's bugging me.
Anyway, groceries called back and said, no, my coffees aren't on offer, but the offer notice was in front of the coffees I bought. Right. So she said "I'll give you your 38p". Thanks.
She didn't say sorry. I mean, I don't want a squirming apology .. just a normal interaction would be good.
My view is that the supermarkets are not too bothered about tightly policing their offers because mostly they gain from it. If I hadn't checked my receipt, they'd have gotten me to buy an extra coffee. And people buying the coffee that is on offer would mostly buy one, so the supermarket wouldn't pay out on the offer very often.
Anyway, check your offers. And if you serve customers, be nice. It makes the world go around.

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Marketing by numbers

2009-06-16: I wonder if I could sustain a marketing by numbers blog series, or even a brand. For instance, 4 days ago I improved the meta-title of a web page. The page was in the depths of nowhere: position 196 in Google. 4 days later it's at position 145 and we've had 27% more visitors.
You can get Google to rank sites by just considering their page title alone. By that method, my page's ranking was below the ranking is was getting by an ordinary search. Therefore, the page title was dragging the whole page down.
Running the same check now, the page ranks higher than normal by page title alone. The page title is now an asset that's pulling the page up.
Fabulous. Make a great change to your page title, get 27% more visitors. Next up is the page content.
And the "marketing by numbers" thing? I think that's what I do. But the problem with branding myself as Mr Marketing by Numbers is it misses out the inspiration part. I use the numbers to tell me where to focus, then I use psychology, sales and marketing acumen and usability for inspiration and ideas on the human level. I'm quite big on trying to deliver warmth and love over the Internet. Big on relationships. Big on humanity and emotion. So it's a mixture. Maybe I'm the Kraftwerk of Internet marketing. Or maybe no-one would understand that either.
Google doesn't understand it. The Google ads to the right there ---> which are supposed to be relevant to the page content, when I first published this page: "Huge Curtains Sale Now On". How?

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Romantic thunderstorm

2009-05-30: The first night, after dinner and after leaving Acapulco, we retired to our balcony and, in the warm, heavy air, watched a night-time thunderstorm on the horizon. Thoroughly beautiful and romantic. Flashes of fork lightning illuminating clouds and coastal mountains, lightning behind clouds turning them into lanterns and dramatic forks to ground. Unforgettable. Tough to capture on camera, mind.
Nighttime thunderstorm off Mexican coast, 21 Feb 2009 20:35Nighttime thunderstorm off Mexican coast, 21 Feb 2009 20:35
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Food

2009-07-21: Run, eat, or have sex*. That's basically what the old brain is concerned with. So adding a lovely picture of some food might improve my page.
It did. Before: a 100% bounce rate and 11% of visitors left the site on that page. After: no bounces, and only 6.5% left on that page.
Cool. Add food pictures.
* It's "or" not "and". All three would give you indigestion. Interesting line of thought for selling Rennies though.

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Wix sticks it to web norms

2009-06-24: Client "I've decided to use wix.com to build my website for now". OK, well, I know what to expect but go to check it out anyway. Here's what the wix.com homepage looks like for me:
wix.com screenshot
So, what are the chances of whatever wix.com does working on Mac or Linux, on handheld devices, on different screen sizes. It looks like accessibility and usability are just ignored.
But the guy's got no money. And he wants to sell on the Internet. I said eBay, etsy, Paypal, Facebook pages, YouTube, blogger. You don't need a website. He obviously thinks different. What can I say?
Imagine I sell cars and a guy comes in and wants to buy a car. His budget .. £1. So I say he'll need a little bit more than that, but I've got a banger for £50, buy that and AA Relay and you're good to go. He says, actually, I've a shopping trolley and an old lawnmower motor. He'll use a torch at night. He thinks that's a better option. I know it's not legal on the roads and is dangerous. But the customer leaves the showroom anyway. It's that sort of thing. Really curious.

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Horror

2009-05-28: OK, this is possibly the worst thing I've ever seen, so .. don't read on, basically.
But I have to put up a link. Now, I'm not a big fan of PETA because I feel their marketing is all wrong. I don't want to see animals treated badly, so I might join PETA. Then they send me images of animals being treated badly. It's wrong.
What I'm going to link to is, they say, video from a Chinese fur farm. It's gross and hideous beyond imagination. I'm not even a fan of shock tactics. But this is something else.
So, if you think you can take it, here's the link but you have been warned. It'll stay with you.

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The EDP

2009-05-28: Wow. I'm currently reading a ranting religious nutcase work, maybe fifty pages of dense text stapled together, that someone pushed through our door a few years ago (it found its way to the top of the reading pile). The world is run by (might as well be) lizards aimed at massive depopulation. Medicine is poison. Politicians are in on it. The oil's running out. Swine flu, aids, et al are all man made. The moment is coming soon when we will all carry the devil's mark and the only way out is to follow Jesus, whose return is imminent.
Compared to the English Democratic Party, my religious guy seems perfectly sensible, I wonder if he's standing.
I know someone who is considering voting for the EDP. So make damn sure you place your own vote on the 4th or my religious nutcase friend's predictions might just come right.

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The Paragon Hotel

2009-04-26: It looks like this North Bay Scarborough Hotel is my latest client. That's the 'before' you're looking at. It's funny, I often look at websites and go "yeah, that looks alright" and then actually engage my brain and look a little more deeply and the flaws then seem obvious. For instance, it only mentions "hotel" once, right at the bottom in tiny letters. It's hard to see how they might rank for Scarborough Hotel. So, yes, watch this space. Wonder what a paragon is. Oooh look, it's a comic book superhero.

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The power of celebrity

2009-06-30: Marketing by numbers: Scroll down in this The Paragon bed and breakfast in Scarborough website and you'll see a lovely picture of Hayley from Coronation Street endorsing my client. It was pinned to the back of the bar.
They mentioned it, I photographed it, retouched the pin holes off it, and put it on the website last Wednesday (six days ago).
Since then the conversion rate (enquiries/visitors x 100) has risen 55% compared to the equivalent period a week prior, and 155% compared to two weeks ago. OK, some volatility there, so this isn't a scientific test, but it seems likely Hayley has helped.
So when Hayley sent her publicity photograph to The Paragon with her note, that must be part of her routine. She must do it every day as part of being a celebrity.
It's a gift. She knows (probably better than we did) that that was money in the bank for us. With that on our website, we just got half as much business again as without her.
Her sending of thank-you cards relies also on our knowledge of its worth. We might just say "ahhh, she's nice" and pin it up somewhere. But if we know what it's worth, we'll use it far and wide. We'll blog it. We'll use it in direct mail. And in doing so, we'll also be sending out a message that Hayley is a nice person, building her 'brand' too.
It's a win-win situation, good for everyone.
It's my first encounter with celebrity endorsement. If Hayley can add 50% to the business of a local B&B, well, I'm beginning to understand.

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Paragon Hotel

2009-05-26: Eeeh, the world of social networking, you hardly need a website at all. For The Paragon, I've just added a Facebook page and a Twitter page. They look pretty nice don't you think?

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More writing

2009-06-19: Hmm, I kinda missed the point with that last blog. The point was that I spent a little time working for the Microloan Foundation which might become my favourite charity if they are not careful. They basically seek out Malawian women who, if they weren't in poverty would be supporting their families and community. If they have a way of making a living and are just missing a bit of equipment or whatever, the MLF makes a small loan.
Christina from CGA Management had been running a .. I don't want to get my terminology wrong here .. basically she'd been helping the MLF work out what their 'forever values' are. For instance, one value is they listen to the people they are helping and they provide the means for them to achieve what they want. There's no dictating what we think would work best. No big irrigation projects. It's a million small helps.
Having done all the workshops and meetings, CGA had identified key values but wanted someone to put them into words so they could be communicated and 'lived' by everyone concerned.
Given that writing isn't what I have as my uppermost strength, I did wonder whether I was the man for the job. I mean, there are actual writers around.
But I worried away at it and managed to reach some clarity. Peter, a/the founder of the MLF, is very hands-on so I expected a whole load of feedback from him about the words I'd written. But in the end, we wrestled some big ideas that ended really as a couple of minor tweaks and it was done.
All of which is a pre-amble to reporting what Peter (MLF) said: "These are wonderfully written. You have captured everything, they really put the icing on the cake of Christina's work." and "Just to let you know that the values in their rewritten format were formally agreed at the Trustee meeting yesterday and received some warm words of support across the board. Christina thanks for everything you have done on this and John you have worked magic."
Which is all rather beautiful. I'll show you the text if I spot it published somewhere. It's for them to publish, not me.

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Directories

2009-05-19: The rule used to be get yourself into the Open directory and pay to get into the Yahoo! directory and go from there.
Then there was a wave of interest in creating your own directory in order to make money from paid entries. The way Google works spurs that because directories are likely to be able to get high search engine positions.
Well now, I'm getting great traffic volume from people who are interested, stick around and buy things from choosing the right directory entries for my clients.
I had a call from Scoot yesterday wanting £104 for a listing that would, they said, get a great position in Google for me.
But I've a huge resentment against Yellow Pages (and possibly Thomson too) for charging well over the odds for things like website links. And I just bought an entry for under £40 for one client that's creating fabulous traffic right now .. no bounce rate, spending an average of 10 minutes on the site .. even before we fully complete the entry with our photograph and other details.
So my point is: choose the right directories to be in, and they are probably non-traditional ones. Ditch the Yellow Pages in favour of what will actually work in your area.
Now, I can't tell you what that is because it depends on your keyword research and how the directory is structured. But I can tell you I'm getting great results from ditching the obvious directories in favour of better choices.

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Pic test

2009-06-29: Marketing by numbers: Google provides the ability to split test your web pages. You just create two different versions of your page and Google chooses which one to serve. It then measures the difference in conversion (what percentage of visitors buy something or enquire) and once you have enough traffic through the site to be confident in your conclusion, you can run with the best option and split test something else.
I've recently split test a photograph on a page. I inherited the page and the photograph was a standard, boring photograph that almost everyone else had a version of on their site too. It was like an unwritten rule that everyone had to use the same sort of pic.
So I applied the rule about us fearing loss more than we want gain, and I found a photograph that showed not the thing you'll get if you buy, but the problem we were trying to solve. I split tested that against the original pic.
The result? A 32% increase in conversion.
Run lots of split tests on your site so it can evolve and become better. It saves arguments anyway. Disagree with someone about something on the page? Run a test.

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First steps into Acapulco

2009-03-18: I'm quite cautious and Acapulco is big and I'd no idea what to expect. But the boat is berthed near Acapulco old town so we were able to leave the ship, walk left along the dual carriageway, and then in as the bay curved left to find a church and a shaded square, you can see it here alongside Calle Independencia.
It was hot so we sat for a while in the square and a chap came up to us saying he was an official guide and did we need any help. No, we're fine thanks except, where's the market? He pointed the direction we thought.
So, this is the bandstand thing you can see just off the road in Google maps if you zoom in:
Acapulco old town bandstand on Calle Independencia, 21 Feb 2009 10:28
This is the church at the top end which I can't find any information about but something around here begins with an X .. I'll try to find the guidesheets and fill in this blank:
Church in Acapulco old town on Calle Miguel Hidalgo, 21 Feb 2009 10:32
I don't think I fancy anything from Acne Facials (go on, take the p*** out of the locals, you know it makes sense):
Acne Facials in Acapulco old town, 21 Feb 2009 10:33
And here's a local lady doing her thing:
Feeding the pigeons in Acapulco old town, 21 Feb 2009 10:36
The square was filled with fabulously up-tempo music and after a short while we realised it was from an exercise class a few stories up, of course with all the windows open:
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Littering

2009-05-14: So there I was taking sunny day pics of people enjoying the seaside
Kids in the sea at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:45
when this chap,
Littering at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:49
despite being only this far from a litter bin,
Littering at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:47
decided he'd done with his chips and threw the box out of his car window.
Littering at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:49
Notice the birds? They wouldn't be there if he hadn't just thrown it. Using nature against them, I love it. So I stood there and waited to see what the woman in the back would do with hers.
Littering at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:50Littering at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:50
Well whaddyaknow? When she'd finished, she just threw the box out of the window too.
Littering at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:47Littering at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:47Littering at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:50
Eventually they noticed me and his mate wanted to see so he opened the sunroof to take a look.
Littering at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:50
Here's the vehicle reg.
Littering at Scarborough's North Bay (Yorkshire) 9 May 2009 14:50
Now, I don't know how you feel about littering but for me it encompasses so much and is one of the few things that I really can't seem to compromise on. I can always see the other person's point of view on things. Except for littering.
I really can't see the point of coming somewhere nice, sitting to enjoy chips looking at the view, then doing something to mess that view up and driving off.
Is it attitude? Is it .. "I'm the most important thing here"? Well, if he felt that you'd think he'd take better care of himself. Someone who feels that would surely drive something better than a T reg and would't be quite so lardy. Maybe.
There's the one that goes "it gives litter pickers a job". That one has the faint air of working people sticking together, unionism, power to the people. But, it's cobblers, really, innit?
I guess closer is the prison mentality, born of a life of being shat upon: "nothing you can do will hurt me, therefore I'm powerful". OK, I get that. But it's not a lot to ask to get out of your damn car and put your rubbish in the bin. Given that the bin is really only a few metres away and you are in a car (so could actually drive to it).
But even if you do feel you've been disrespected all your life, these are simple choices to make. It costs nothing to put your litter in the bin. It might even make people like you more. Just the simple act of littering makes everyone know you're worthless. Putting your rubbish in the bin lets everyone know that, on occasion, you think of others. Just that makes it more likely you'll find a relationship, find love, build a life, and lift yourself. Littering is repellent, how can you get people on your side behaving like that? And the big deal about being male is you want people on your side. A tribe, a group of mates within which you can demonstrate your influence, makes you attractive. Billy no mates does not mate very often.
Littering is actually illegal. So I reported it. Yesterday evening I got a call from Harry Briggs at the council, he wants to see my pics (at flytipping@scarborough.gov.uk ).
I'm working a little for the Micro Loan Foundation. In simple terms what they do is seek out poor, rural women in Malawi who, with a small loan, could buy something to kick start their lives, start a small business, and lift themselves out of poverty. They target women because their help goes further. Women care for others and so when a woman lifts herself up she brings her family with her. Her kids, and the future, benefit. They also only give micro loans to people whose idea has high leverage so it benefits the wider community too.
See the difference? There are great people in this world and lovely things will happen to them. And there are people that we would all simply be better off without, who few good people could support. Since that follows them like a raincloud, they are mostly making their own world bad. And the start of making their lives better is using the litterbin provided.

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Acapulco transport

2009-03-29: Loving the Acapulco transport. Plus, I get novelty taxi pics for my low cost taxi insurance page. Hmm, wonder if I can claim the whole trip against tax? (Just joking)
Buses and taxis in Acapulco, 21 Feb 2009 10:56Buses and taxis in Acapulco, 21 Feb 2009 10:55Buses and taxis in Acapulco, 21 Feb 2009 10:53Buses and taxis in Acapulco, 21 Feb 2009 09:48Buses and taxis in Acapulco, 21 Feb 2009 10:56
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Adsense from scratch not motorway to riches shock

2009-05-26: I've probably said before, when I do blog about the holiday, I'm putting up a version here which is liberally sprinkled with Google Adsense advertising. When you click on that, I get paid a hidden percentage of what the advertiser paid per click through Adwords.
So far, despite me submitting it to a few blog directories, only 24 visitors have gone to that site, and the bounce rate is 80%, which is high and suggests people don't like the immediate look of it for whatever reason (probably that because it's got loads of ads in it it looks like a crap site).
Anyway, of those 24 visitors, I've had one click that paid me $.42. Let's say a cruise would cost about $6,000 for two people, I'd need 14,285 clicks per year, and at a rate of 1 click per 24 visitors, that's 342,857 visitors to my holiday blog each year, or 939 per day.
If I had 939 visitors to that blog each day, I'd be looking at other ways to earn money from what is a serious amount of traffic.
Or, look at it another way. Let's say it takes, on a good day, 15 minutes to produce one of those blogs considering there are photos to process. I've blogged 16 times here, which is four hours, and earned 42c. Granted, that should be 42c every month for a while, so when does it become sustainable?
Let's say I blogged like that for 8 hours. I'd deliver 32 blogs a day and after day one would be able to expect 84c in a month, and after a month of that, $25. So after a year of that, $300 per month. Ten years, then, before you get to around $3,000 a month which is more like a living wage.
Clearly if you were going to do that for a living you'd optimise the living daylights out of it, writing more quickly, positioning the ads, writing about things that have high value clicks, doing everything you can to get traffic, and every now and then with a following like that you'd be able to persuade some of your readers to buy something either from you or from some sort of affiliate programme. So maybe if you cut your expenses to a minimum, can write, and are willing to do that all day as a full time job, you might get to sustainability after a few years.
Even more interesting is the idea that actually, if you carry on, then unlike a 'proper' job, there's no ceiling to your earnings, you can just keep on going. You're going to get to be a super blogger after all that.
And all extrapolated from that one click. As they say, your mileage may vary.

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The psychology of persuasion

2009-06-23: The other day I had an enquiry from someone with a well developed website. When I wrote about the market it seemed (to me) clearly to be addressing, she said later she got upset because that wasn't really the market she was aiming at.
Everyone wants everything "today", but her problem was, she'd gone quite a long way like that and ended up with a nice website addressing the wrong problem. And no sales. She'd spent her money, and her project wasn't working.
So there really is something to be said for looking before you leap, and I don't think there's anything more important than defining your market. Forget 'ideas'. Markets are it.
When writing, you have to write to. You need a clear idea of who you're writing to. What is your reader like? What would attract them? What would persuade them?
You know I'm trying, on and off, to develop this taxi insurance business. I wanted to write to taxi drivers, so I needed to understand them better.
I started with a questionnaire, and then I let my partner loose on the ones we got back. She's a work psychologist.
Her report really shocked me. After the introductory page, the findings boiled down to one page of seriously actionable advice. And it meant a complete rewrite of my taxi page. In other words, I'd been getting it really wrong.
So, that text is at the client for clearance, once it's up I'll link you to it and you'll see what I mean. Assuming I don't get fired for being too clever for my own good I'm going to test it and we'll see if it makes a cash difference. If so, we're on to something.

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A new client

2009-05-09: I've just started work on Internet marketing for this organic b&b. What does that tell you? That 'organic b&b' is a phrase I'd like them to rank for. They presently don't appear for anything much useful in Google. Nice people. That's the 'before' website if you're looking around the 9 May, otherwise it's whatever I've done since, probably starting with photographs.

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