Reach24 Blog » Internet Marketing

All Your Base Are Belong To Google

Sunday, April 22nd, 2007

It’s probably not just me who thinks this, but Google’s knowledge of and access to the inner workings of people’s online businesses is becoming very disturbing.

And yet people are still letting Google get away with it. The introduction of Google Checkout (which has just launched here in the UK) is just another example of this.

The combination of free transaction processing until 2008 with a £10 off orders over £30 offer for customers using Google Checkout is, on the face of it, an extremely attractive proposition.

However, the reality of the situation is that you are giving Google access to information it shouldn’t really have. They will know your best selling products, your average basket size and more.

God forbid that you should be using Google Analytics or the Google Adwords conversion tracking tool as well. In that case, you might as well hand the management of your entire business over to Google as they will know the conversion ratio of all your keywords, they will know the most common paths of your visitors, they will know where your conversion process breaks down. They will, know, quite literally, everything that your marketing department knows.

And you can bet that they will be using this information at some point in the future. Otherwise, why give away free tools like Google Analytics in the first place?

You can be certain that minimum bid prices for certain keywords will start to increase as the oh-so-benevolent Google squeeze the margins of their advertisers. And that, of course, is just a starting point.

Repeat after me : ‘I will stop handing Google extremely valuable and private business information for FREE’. OK, got that.

Right? Now, stop doing it. You will only damage your own business in the long run.

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Google’s Competitors at Local Level

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

It’s good to find that, actually, there are still some other sources of UK traffic than Google.

Certainly, for local and regionally based keywords, both WebFinder (those nice people at ThomsonLocal) and Yell.com are capable of delivering reasonable volumes of good quality traffic.

If WebFinder could just cut out a few of its, shall we say, less high quality partners (like PrimoSearch, whatever that is), then they would find more of our advertising budget being pushed their way.

So, how about it, WebFinder…let me exclude certain of your partners from sending us traffic and I promise I’ll double our spend with you over the next quarter.

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I Am Credible…Honest

Friday, January 19th, 2007

One of the most difficult things to do on a website is to establish your credibility and build trust with your audience.

After all, many of your visitors will have never heard of you, won’t be impressed by testimonials (after all, these can be faked) and may only visit one or two pages of your site.

Thankfully, there are a number of things you can do to establish your company as one that can be trusted. Rather than reproduce the whole thing here, I found an excellent list of credibility building tips over at AffiliateKB.com.

While the article itself focuses on sales copy…the 17 tips provided apply equally well to those of us in the business to business sphere. The points about ‘proving your claims’ are particularly salient for business to business marketing as you only have a short time to impress your visitors that you are the service provider they are really looking for.

tags: credibility, customer trust

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Sorry, No Time For Clients…Must Social Network

Sunday, January 7th, 2007

As the director of an company, I’m well aware of how many hours one can spend on the internet every day.

Much of my online time is spent on these two basic tasks :

Things that will deliver more leads for our clients.
Things that will generate more clients.

I do, however, spend some time reading blogs, websites, checking on the football scores, downloading software that I’ll never actually use and obscure music that I’ll never actually listen to.

I expect most of us are like that to a greater or lesser extent.

However, in the time I spend reading blogs, etc. I’ve come across what I consider to be a slightly strange phenomenon. That is: ‘the expert’.

The expert is someone (usually an online marketer, an SEO or one of those types) who, no matter where you find yourself on the web, always has a presence there.

All the major internet marketing forums : check - there he is.

Facebook - yup, he’s there. MySpace - he’s there.

LinkedIn - yup.

Twitter - all over it with important messages about riding his bicycle to the office and how, like, really cool it is to be able to mini-blog.

Blog ? Did someone say blog? This particular type of expert has several : his personal blog, his corporate blog, his blog for his dog and maybe a couple more.

In between all this, our expert is Digg-ing stuff on Digg, adding bookmarks to his del.icio.us page and generally making a nuisance of himself on some social networking website you and I have never heard of.

My point is this : if these individuals (if you want names, I’ll supply them) are such major players in the internet marketing space, then surely, honestly, they can’t possibly have the time to be so active at all the social networking and media sites ?

My increasing suspicion is that many of these types are..shock, um, horror…not really the experts they claim to be. If they were, they’d be far too busy to be posting on Twitter, sending MySpace bulletins, adding del.icio.us bookmarks, commenting on Digg, etc…ad nauseam.

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Archive for the �Internet Marketing� Category

All Your Base Are Belong To Google

Google’s Competitors at Local Level

I Am Credible…Honest

Sorry, No Time For Clients…Must Social Network

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