Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

Nestle’ has been under attack this week by a guerilla social media attack. Environmental activities have taken to social media to tell everyone that Nestle’ uses palm oil from Indonesia which is destroying the rainforests.

The amount of palm oil used from this supplier is only 1.25% of their total use across their products but it’s not stopping the activists.

The YouTube video has had over 176,000 views within a few days and the KitKat facebook has had an extra 95,000 fans. The new Facebook fans are not happy with nestle and their Facebook page has turned into a nightmare.

Is social media giving power back to the people? Is this a warning to all corporations that if they do the wrong thing, they could be attacked by social media tactics?

This is a guest post by Sara Lundgren who designed, setup and analysed the data from a recent survey that I sent out to our web hosting customers. This is part 2 of 2.

The power of knowing your customers
I think many small and medium size businesses are missing out on a lot of valuable information because they believe they don’t have enough time/money/resources to do proper research. I believe this is one of the biggest mistakes a business can do. There is no excuse for not monitoring your customers closely! If you don’t know what your customers want, how are you going to provide a better service/product than your competitors?  If you can’t provide a better service/product than your competitors, how are you going to stay in business? You won’t!

Don’t base your decisions on old information
Another excuse for not continually surveying the customers is that some companies think that they already know their customers‘ needs. But, and this is very important, what you think you know might not be (actually, it seldom is) the truth. We found this out first hand with our survey. Many businesses base their strategies on assumptions and old, outdated information. This is a very dangerous strategy because what was true five years ago, or even last month, might not be true today. In hypercompetitive industries, such as the internet industry where technology and competitive structures changes rapidly, all companies (large corporations as well as small businesses) need to constantly monitor their customers’ needs because they constantly change.

If you know what your customers’ needs are you can adopt your strategies and processes to that and the customers will get what they want, you will get lots of business, and everyone is happy!

What are you doing about it?
Setting up an online survey like the one we did doesn’t take long and it is well invested time. When was the last time you evaluated your customers’ needs? Are you continuously surveying your customers? Do you have any smart tips to share on how to do this? In my next guest blog post I’ll share some of my tips on how to construct a good online survey.

The power of social media is gaining momentum everyday. Large companies are taking social media serious.

Jetstar is leading the airline industry with innovative social media tactics with the recent announcement that it will direct 40% of its marketing budget to social media -

“We’ve conducted some very successful marketing and PR campaigns via social media in the past 18 months, including YouTube and Twitter, and the response has been phenomenal,” said David May, Jetstar’s head of marketing.”

In comparison to social media, traditional marketing is increasing in cost but I believe the effectiveness is decreasing -

“Social media offers more value for money and is a smarter way to reach our customers – which is what Jetstar is all about.”

Jetstar has previously has sales exclusively on Twitter with proved extremely successfuly -

“In line with the increasing need to talk to smaller, interconnected communities; communities that when aggregated deliver large numbers of engaged and involved brand advocates, we are likely to shift a large percentage of Jetstar’s above the line media spend into digital areas, with an increased focus on social media,” said Richard Smith, managing director of Jetstar’s media buying agency Maxus.

More information can be found at MarketingMag – Social media 40% of Jetstar’s marketing budget

Wrap Up
What are you doing with social media to help your business?

There’s an interesting statistic e-commerce statistic that I have written about earlier. The average time for a customer to make a purchase is 30 hours. This means that most people do not buy a product or service on their first visit. It is usually after they have thought about it and they come back the next day to make their purchase.

What is Remarketing?
The remarketing tool allows advertisers to hit the user days later to try and get their booking or purchase.

Example of Remarketing in action
Imagine someone wants to go to a concert in Sydney. The user visits a particular hotel’s website in Sydney but does not make a booking. The next day, they go to the booking website for the concert which is part of the Google Content Network – they have Google display ads running. The ads that they see are for the hotel they visited the day before. This is remarketing through Google Adwords.

Using this new tool
This new tool is available in your Adwords account if you advertise with Google. More information about this tool can be found here – Now Available: Reach the right audience through remarketing.

What is the GoogleBot?
The googlebot is the automatic spider program that Google uses to visit websites and report back with results to put into it’s search engine results. By understanding how the GoogleBot works and how it interprets your web pages, can increase your search engine rankings.

There are many factors that Google considers when indexing web pages. Here are a couple of questions and answers about how the GoogleBot works and how to get better search engine rankings.

What is host load limit?
Host load limit is the number of connections that your webserver allows at any given time.

A webserver with a lot of busy websites, would be limited to the number of connections each website can have.

That is why it’s important to have a reliable host that does not have overloaded servers. This means that the GoogleBot can index your website quickly and entirely without being restricted.

What is crawl budget?
Google will index a number of web pages on your website which is directly proportional to your PageRank. The lower the PageRank, the less pages of your website will be crawled. If you have a higher PageRank, most, if not all of your pages will be crawled.

The better your PageRank, the deeper the GoogleBot will go with indexing your website.

How does duplicate content affect crawl budget?
If the GoogleBot crawls three of your web pages and they all have the same content, Google will only index one of those pages and scrap the other two pages. It will then assign a lower PageRank value because of the duplicate content resulting in less pages being indexed by Google.

Are Session IDs bad for my website?
Google does not recommend the use of session ids for a number of reasons. They look ugly which is hard for the user to remember the address and less users are likely to click on a complicated link.

Google and Yahoo both have tools to remove unwanted variables in the address bar. Any variables that do not add value to the user’s experience can be removed for indexing.

Does 301 redirects take the link juice?
If you move a page or even change domain names, it is highly recommended to use 301 redirects. The link juice is carried to the new page. If the original page has a PageRank of 3, the new redirected page would take it.

There is some decay in the PageRank value but much of it is carried on.

What is a canonical tag?
Google has a fantastic post that describes everything about canonical tags including the new cross referencing of domain names. Specify your canonical.

This is a book that explains what blogging is, how it works and what to do with it. There really isn’t much on marketing your blog.

I was hoping to get more information on how to market my blog better to increase the number of readers.

Internal communication
What I did get from this book, is how blogging can help big businesses by running internal blogs to help communication within a large organisation. This is great information for the corporate world but no good for the one man blog (ie. mine).

Blog styles
There is a good section on the styles of blogs that exist. Wright calls them – the barber, blacksmith, bridge, window, signpost, pub and newspaper. It gives you an insight into what type of blog you are running or wish to run. Many blogs are a mix of the different styles but it gives you ideas on how to improve your existing blog.

Managing your online social presence
This is a very under-estimated area of social media. Many large companies do not pay attention to what is being said about them or even to find out what is being said.

When a potentially bad situation comes up in social media, companies need to deal with the situation in the best possible way. When businesses react to a vocal customer in social media, they are in full public display. By handling the situation properly and promptly, you can win back that customer and may more through the power of viral social media.

Wrap Up
If you want a book that is targetted to the corporate blogging world with only some information for smaller blogs, this is a great book to read. Do not expect much in the help of getting a lot more readers. I’m going to keep looking for a real blog marketing book.

Lady Gaga is the first music artist with over one billion online video views. She has three music videos on YouTube and Vevo -

• Poker Face – 374 million views
• Just Dance – 272 million views
• Bad Romance – 360 million views

A total of over 1 billion online video views.

She is closely followed by Twilight saga with 980 million and Soulja Boy with 860 million, as of today.

What is she doing that makes her such a star? Maybe add your comments below.

Here are her three top videos -

I’m going to describe an important concept about content that appears year after year on your website. If you had a product that came out each year, for example – a car model from Toyota called the Corolla, what address would give it?

• http://toyota.com.au/corolla
• http://toyota.com.au/corolla-series-8
• http://toyota.com.au/corolla2009

Still unsure? read on and I will explain which one to use.

What is Cyclical Content?
Cyclical content can be defined as information about a product, service or event that comes out each year or period.

You may have an awards event that is on every year or a new model of a product every six months.

The mistake most web designers make when working on your website
Many web designers will make the website address for your event, product or service with the date attached to it or the series number or something like that. For example, the awards website address that you have this year is http://yourname.com.au/awards09

What happens next year and people are searching for your awards website address in Google? They type in the name of your awards but what address comes up? This year and all your previous awards website address will be competing against each other.

The answer
The best website address to use is the same one every year or every time the product is released.

These are good addresses because it says the same -

• http://toyota.com.au/corolla
• http://yourname.com.au/awards

It doesn’t matter what year it is, the current information for your awards will be found in the same spot. Previous years’ award information won’t be competing against other years.

If you wanted to look at the 2006 model of the Toyota Corolla, you would use this address – http://toyota.com.au/corolla/2006. If you wanted this year’s model, you would use – http://toyota.com.au/corolla.

Wrap Up
I hope you understand how to use your website address in the most practical way to keep ranking your website high in the search engine results.

On March 15, 1985, the first .com domain name was registered as symbolics.com. It took 10 years before the public became aware of what a domain name was.

Today, there are over 80 million domain names with the system serving as a platform for $400 billion US dollars in econmic activity. The Internet today generates more than $1.5 trillion US dollars per year.

People often question how we found out information before the Internet. Remember when you

• had to go to the travel agent to make any travel plans
• selling your old things in the garage was done using a garage sale – not eBay
• you got the phone book out to call anyone
• price comparisons were done by visiting a number of shops
• product reviews were done by asking questions
• receipe books or pieces of paper were used when making a dinner
• an overseas phone call was kept short because it was too expensive
• correspondence between businesses took days – no emails
• faxes were used all the time for businesses
• videos were rented from the video store
• short videos was only seen on the funniest home video show – not youtube

We’ve come a long way in 15 years. What will the next 15 years bring us?

Did you know that Google penalises websites for duplicate content? If Google thinks you have copied content from elsewhere on the Internet, you can get banned from Google.

If you sell the same products as other merchants, are your descriptions of your products unique or copied from the manufacturers website?

Did you copy your content?
If they are copied directly from the manufacturers website or from a competitor, you run the risk of being banned from Google or at least penalised with your search engine rankings.

Make your product descriptions unique
The benefit of having unique product descriptions may give your website a better ranking. Having your own product description that you wrote means you can make it more targetted for specific keywords giving you more control of your ranking.

Search engines love content that is unique. Customers like reading product descriptions that say more than what’s your competitor websites.

Wrap Up
Make your product descriptions unique!

We have read and analysed the statistics – newspapers and magazines are loosing readership – and fast!

Will the introduction of the iPad revitalise magazines if they take advantage of this opportunity? Wired Magazine and a couple other magazines are leading the pack with new formats of their magazines.

Wired Magazine

It seems that everyone has forgotten that digital magazines have been around for a long time. I think that magazines could have done this previously using existing technology but the iPad has the cool factor attached to it and the big players are jumping onto the digital magazine bandwagon.

Wrap Up
The final two questions are – how will publishers charge for their magazines and how will advertisers be able to be added without being ignored?

This book is great for anybody who inspires to be a full-time blogger and make money while doing it.

This is not a book about generating buzz for your business by blogging. If you are wanting to learn how blogging can help your business, you will want to read another book.

I’ve read a number of books about blogging and this book is unique. It’s unique because I cannot think of any other books that explain the number of money making techniques used for blogging. It even talks about buying and selling blogs.

Blogging for money
Blogging is often thought as a hobby based activity. A bunch of enthusiasts who enjoy talking about a particular hobby and they do it for the fun of it.

This is not true for the professional blogger. They do it to earn money. By picking the right niche for your blog, your blog has more chances at succeeding.

Blogging Networks
These are used to get more exposure for your blog, share the skills of other bloggers in the network and earn more money.

Wrap Up
This is the professional bloggers manual. No other book holds such great information about blogging for money.