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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As the director of an online lead generation 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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One of the 10 commandments of B2B marketing - handed down over, well, a couple of years at least - is that you should give away free reports and guides. This, apparently, is a way of capturing potential clients or something.

The idea is this: offer a free guide/report - capture a name and email address - follow up with, um, stuff - convert that person into a client. Something like that, anyway.

And you still see bunches of sites with PPC landing pages that are geared around getting a prospect to download a ‘free, impartial’ guide. And, hey, I’m sure their download numbers are great.

It’s just a shame that these free reports and guides are very, very far from impartial. In fact, they can often be damaging to the credibility of the company that produces them.

That presumes, of course, that the person downloading the report ever reads the damn thing.

My view is that - more often than not - this kind of stuff is a pretty poor way to engage a potential client.

OK. I accept that the B2B sales process can be a long one. But I certainly don’t see giving away ‘free’ guides and reports as an effective method of communicating with prospects in the 21st Century.

After all, if you endeavour to produce a genuinely impartial guide, then you are not going to be able to pitch the unique values of your company properly. Conversely, if you produce an guide that is really designed to promote your services, then people will see through it in a flash.

We’re all media and marketing savvy these days. Such transparent ploys as ‘free reports’ and ‘free guides’ should be left back in the last century where they belong.

Instead, you should persuade visitors that you can help at each stage of the buying cycle. At the very least, your visitors should feel that you will give your expert advice freely and with no obligation. However, that requires more than just allowing visitors to download some PDF report that may - or, more likely, not - address their specific needs.

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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.

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The last twelve months seem to have been the time that so-called ‘usability experts’ have risen like the mythical Kraken to tell us lesser mortals how to make our websites, um, usable.

Part evangelists, part snake oil salesmen; these so-called ‘expert consultants’ preach the gospel according to Nielsen until they are blue in the face and yet…..well, they have no product. No real value to add to your business.

Nevertheless, it seems that every third person I meet these days claims to be a ‘web usability expert’ of some kind.

Let me be very clear. I’m not saying that ‘usability’ is not an important factor in web design and in converting visitors into leads. It is.

But it’s such a simple thing. There really isn’t that much to understand. If you’re visitor knows where (s)he is on your website, recognises what is a link and understands what to do or to click to find the information he or she is looking for; then that’s it. That’s usability.

It doesn’t take an overpaid ‘consultant’ to tell you that if you make your links blue and underlined, then your visitors will recognise them as a link, does it?

It doesn’t require outside expertise to tell you that if you want to make your website better, watch a few people using it and then make changes to make it easier to use.

The whole notion of ‘web usability consultants’ angers me. Probably more than it should, admittedly, but then again I’ve never claimed to be Mr Calm and Considered.

Part of the problem is that many usability ‘gurus’ are evangelicals, whose interest is not so much in the conversion process of the website but in advancing an agenda that would keep all websites looking like they were designed (badly) in 1996.

Personal opinion and subjectivity of this kind has no place in 21st online business processes.

As I’ve already stated, usability in it’s most worthwhile form is so simple, there is no need for any so-called consultants to assist with it. Furthermore, despite what usability evangelicals might tell, it is - to use So-Cal teen speak - not all that.

If it was, MySpace.com would never have been successful and no one would ever wear a thong.

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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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