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Send a link to this newsletter to a friend June 2005 Issue
Digital Wind Has Moved'Tis the Season for Duct Tape and BoxesA bit of housekeeping information: Digital Wind has moved (and so have I). The new contact information is: 1-1845 Notre-Dame-de-Graces (450) 670-1631 You can still contact me at jim.royal@digitalwind.com. Note: I promised a follow-up on last month's article "What Should You Expect From a Web Designer?" I'm afraid that one will have to wait for next month. Too many boxes yet to unpack. Is Your Relationship With Your Customer a Personal One?Human conversations have a human voiceFollowing up from the article in the June issue titled "Idiocy Makes for a Good Object Lesson", it seems that my experience with companies selling email addresses wholesale to spammers touched a nerve. The feedback I received suggests that I'm not alone in my irritation with this kind of sleazy corporate behavior. So it still surprises me when some clients ask how to indiscriminately mass-mail every name in their CRM database. This is a marketing tactic that is definitely not worth the potential blowback. Finding yourself on a spam blocking list such as the one at Spamhaus can be the kiss of death to a company that depends on email to communicate with clients. Besides, there are much better ways to reach people than a scattergun approach. The fact is that 300 willing readers of your email newsletter (i.e., 300 qualified leads!) are a much better resource than 3000 randomly-selected recipients. You get those valuable, willing readers by first asking permission to send. It is simple as that. Grow your subscriber list slowly, organically. Build it into your regular sales process. Instruct your sales people to ask each new customer if they would like to receive your mailings. Make your web subscription forms opt-in (rather than the negative option of "Deselect this checkbox if you would rather not receive our newsletter"). And make use of word of mouth and referrals; if you have something interesting and useful to say, build a web site and a newsletter that encourages word to get around. This last point is the most important. People are increasingly immune to advertising. In these days of eBay and Epinions — which depend entirely on human interaction to function — the most important marketing tool you have is word of mouth. Opt-in subscriptions create a tighter connection between yourself and your clients. Indiscriminate mass-mailings are cold and impersonal, and easily ignored, as they have no human voice. Willing readers encourage two-way communication and actual conversations. And as the Cluetrain Manifesto is famous for pointing out, markets are conversations. Moving Up in GoogleTaming the beastThey say justice is blind. And so is Google. Back in the March issue, I detailed the struggle to get Digital Wind ranked in Google's search engine results. The efforts have begun to pay off, and the battle has been an instructive one. Many companies live and die by their rankings on Google. They spend enormous sums of money trying to game the system, and finagle a ranking in that magical top ten list. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. What I've discovered is that it does not take buckets of cash to get a decent search ranking. But it does take some hard work. Back in March, I was dealing with the conundrum of ranking well with Yahoo! and MSN Search, while being persona non grata with Google. There was much speculation among webmasters that Google may levy a penalty on younger web sites as an anti-spam measure. It turns out that suspicion was correct. In June, Google filed a patent application that outlined how some of its search technology works, and within the filing was a policy of artificially depressing the ranking of new web sites. Fortunately — and coincidentally — Digital Wind's time in the young web site purgatory expired in June (after 15 months), and digitalwind.com finally popped up in Google's search results. Woo hoo! Beyond the age filter, the patent filing also shows that Google is taking great pains to circumvent those companies who are trying to game the system and take a shortcut to top-ten results. The best method to ensure good ranking in Google is to take a long-term approach, and to work steadily at it. The following are the highlights. There are two things that Google especially likes to see in your web site:
Note that both of these things are indicative of high-quality web sites, and both are especially hard to do quickly. Good web sites are interesting web sites. If you build something worth reading, then not only will you get readers, but Google will be provided with content-rich pages to sink its teeth into. Google also monitors how often the site is updated, and rewards those sites that add new content every week or two. This means that if you want to rank well, you have to consider your web site to be ongoing concern. The days of putting up a few dozen pages and letting them sit for two years are over. Such a site would be considered stale and unremarkable by Google. Google is also tracking which web sites are linking to you, and how many of them there are. The more, the better. But Google has smartened up in recent years, and the practice of putting your site on "link farms" (sites that exist for no other reason that to provide links) doesn't really work any more. The best place to start is with all your business partners. Ask them to build links to your site. You can do this in exchange for reciprocal links from your own site, or perhaps other forms of promotional considerations. You can also buy and exchange links through link brokers. Here are a few free ones to start with, and they are all reputable:
It's also worth pointing out that all the techniques described in the March article still apply. Good HTML coding practices count for as much as does good writing. Contact and Subscription InformationDigital Wind's newsletter is a periodic mailing about the business of branding in the digital age written by Jim Royal. It is sent to subscribers only. If you find this information valuable, please pass it on to a friend. Past IssuesArchives of the Digital Wind newsletter can be found at http://digitalwind.com/subscribe/ FeedbackHave a complaint? Want to tell us we're doing a great job? Contact Jim Royal at Digital Wind with your comments and suggestions. We'd love to hear from you. About Digital WindMontreal-based Digital Wind can manage your company's entire public image, from logo design to web design to corporate email newsletters. SubscriptionsTo subscribe to the Digital Wind newsletter, visit http://digitalwind.com/subscribe/ If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, you may unsubscribe in one of two ways:
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