My teenage daughters are staying over this week. Millie, the eldest, is a vergetarian. So, I’ve been planning veggie meals and have discovered Quorn. Cottage Pie tonight….

What’s this got to do with anything?

There’s an advert on TV at the moment that’s been in my head for a month or so (Shock horror, TV ads may still work). It sells Quorn for what it is. Not a food for vegetarians, but a food for the family. See it here…

Imagine the size and variation of the new market.

Take Parker Pens. By realising that they are not selling pens, they are selling gifts, they redefined and clarified their market.

I’ve used a phrase twice in meetings this week… I’m not selling websites, I’m selling sales leads.

Speaking to an ‘old school’ customer today I realized the mixed expectation of a website, when they can only relate to the way a brochure is produced. Getting the content exact first time, by specific deadlines overshadowed the flexibility of the content managed website that is being delivered. It got me thinking about the differences that I come across between the real differences of a traditional brochure and a website.

Speaking at vs. conversation

A traditional brochure is a leave piece harking back to the days when salesmen knocked on doors and wanted to leave an overview document. As such, it was there to announce and is all about the organization… me, me, me.

A website is usually found, or discovered. It needs to grab attention on a very competitive medium. Engagement in this case is a much more personal action, requiring connection at an emotional level. With their abundant choice, it’s now about them, them, them.

A website is fluid

A brochure gets designed and printed. Hours are (should be) spent honing the copy to sound impressive and attractive. When it’s printed, that’s it until the next print run. Although digital printing has brought down print costs, it’s still a major expense to the marketing budget. There is no room for mistake.

A website goes live. If there is a typo, or a more appropriate set of words, they can be edited. What’s more, there are no physical constraints (if your structure is flexible): You can have as many pages as you want. You can embellish. Finish a job in the morning and have a relevant case study on your website by the afternoon. You can approach clients in different ways and test variations of approach on the fly.

A website is not “produced”

A brochure gets printed; end of production until the next run. Pay the designer, pay the printer, get it posted. Same next year?

When a website goes live the work does not stop, it starts. To stay relevant and attractive to search engines a website needs constant investment and needs to be budgeted accordingly. This allows for flexibility and adaptability but needs constant nurturing.

Reach

A brochure gets picked up by, or sent to, a prospect. Every time you use one, it costs you part of your budget. You can only put in the hands of people physically, therefore your reach is limited.

A website can be marketed the same way as a brochure without the need for postage: E-mail people the link. Your website can also be discovered. With good content and ‘right’ words on your pages, relevant prospects will find you and every page impression doesn’t cost you extra (unless you are paying for your traffic).

Personalization

Your brochure can be printed personally but you are talking variable data, limiting your production run, increasing your costs. Most brochures are generic trying to sell to your entire customer base using the same language and approach.

Your website can be personalized. Either focussed, with user log-ins, or into groups using relevant sections and landing pages. You can answer client questions by adapting your message. Different pages on your website could be saying the same thing in a different way; not in generic marketing speak, but in a language that engages subsets of customers.

If you can begin to understand the differences, you can change your approach. You can reassign your budgets and start increasing your opportunities online with a website that engages with existing customers and brand new prospects.

Many companies want to use social media tools and online marketing techniques to connect with their customers.

It’s more effective in some industries than others but the key to success or failure boils down to the actual organization and if they are prepared to modify their business behavior.

For instance, I have seen online agencies with poor offerings and I have seen Lawyers who are Blogging about topical items, so it can’t be the industries that can’t adapt to online marketing.

I’m currently reading Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin. If you don’t want to read the book, you can get a summary here.

Seth argues in the first part of the book (I’m still reading) about the need for organizations to adapt to new marketing, if their product or service fits.

Too many companies are trying to jump on a marketing band-wagon without being able to sustain the effort or have the infrastructure to react.

A simple example of this is a Blog. I get asked to generate Blogs for Companies keen to get in on the act, who then rarely post and, when they do, it’s a bit of a lazy effort probably doing more harm than good.

Online marketing is an attitude, not a discipline and, where it differs from traditional advertising, it’s a marathon not a sprint.

This is a cautionary tail of ‘expertise’ vs. expertise and something I see a lot of in my own business as I pitch against other companies who do what I do.

As you may know, I am a Director of The Escape. We turnover about £1.2m and had an appropriate accounting firm for our needs. They got bought last year so we became a smaller fish in a bigger pond.

We felt we weren’t getting value for money and the meetings that we had to pay for by the hour consisted of someone having a general chat. An hour and £500 later we realised that it was time for the change.

So, we approached a guy that we had dealings with a couple of years ago. At that time he had pointed out something in a deal we were doing, something that our accountant back then had missed.

So we started 2008 with a new firm and already our new accountant in Basingstoke has found a glaring hole in our VAT returns to the tune of nearly £40k, which we can now claim back.

Value is always great when you can clearly measure it. I guess that’s why I love online marketing so much.

And, as a bonus, offering value creates a happy customer and word of mouth, arguably the best form of marketing… hence my little Blog post.

I am new to these kinds of sites but I can see value for the smaller business.

Basically, they are websites for lead generating. You pay per lead (in the case of Approved Index) depending on your sector. Saves hiring a cold caller.

Here’s two for starters:

• Set Your Rate is pretty new and designed for SMEs.
• The one we are trialling at work is Approved Index.

If you find any more, add them in the comments.

There are a multitude of tools out there that do simple things very well, saving you so a lot of time.

A point in case is the keyword list generator from SEO Book’s Aaron Wall.

Using a combination of Wordtracker and this smart little tool, you can quickly create some keyword specific advertising with hundreds of combinations.

Having appropriate links to your website can only be a good thing… or can it?

The idea is that the more relevant links you have coming into your website the more authority you have.

About five years ago, the main strategy for building links was for webmasters to swap links (reciprocal linking) . I wasn’t doing it myself but I got the odd e-mail to some of my sites along the lines of, “If I link to you, will you link to me?” So, you ended up with lots of websites with ‘links’ pages. The problem is that so many of these ‘reciprocal’ links simply weren’t relevant.

Of course, search engines rely on giving good results so their criteria for who they place at the top of their search engines, as their algorithms have improved, has become more focussed around the basics - quality and relevance.

They still put a lot of emphasis on incoming links, as well as out going links, but the quality of the sites you are connected to can also help or damage your own reputation.

And, arguably, it doesn’t stop there, with the search engines creating the connections once, twice, or more times removed, ie. the site that’s linking to the site that’s linking to you, could affect your ranking.

For instance, if you have a reference article from an industry magazine website this could be good, depending on the anchor text and general content of the site. Compare this to a link from a spammy website (with low page ranking) about something off-topic.

No following

Some websites have got around this, in terms of their external linking, by using a tag called No follow (looks like this). It tells a search engine not to take the link juice with it when it follows the link, hence, not adding weight to the target page.

This stops people trying to abuse links.

Laws of attraction

With the advent of user generation through blogging and social networking, a more effective link building strategy now in my opinion is in content generation, with the added bonus that the search engines love new fresh content.

Here, we are talking Blogging, article writing and any aspect of your website, including tools and games, that ‘attract’ people - both physcially, in terms of visitors, and arguably more importantly, through links.

The one key important thing to remember is your website goals and traffic funnel.

Often in meetings I try and explain a concept by using an everyday analogy. Today’s related to clothes and how a website needs constant new “stock”…

A website is like a clothes shop; you have your shop, and you have a specialism which needs to be displayed. For instance, a clothes shop catering for women between 25-50 supplying designer labels.

First of all you need to display your generic offering (your services). You can split these down so people have bite-sized chunks of information, eg. skirts, blouses, dresses, evening wear, etc. Perhaps you may cross-categorise by brand? eg. Armani, Jimmy Choo, etc.

Now people know what you sell.

On top of that, you have regular new stock, new season’s collections, etc. People also need to be aware of these constantly changing so they can see you are up-to-date and still selling the same ‘brand’ promise.

So to the analogy, if it’s not yet clear. You have a website with your generic company information and services so people know what you do.

On top of that, your ongoing credibility is based on case studies and knowledge and you have to continually prove that you stay in fashion.

If you promote your business through a website, the chances are that your content is quite commercial. Yes, you may have some reference articles on there, but these will always have the stigma (for want of a better word) that there is a commercial enterprise right behind it.

This takes away some of the value of your good content, in terms of potential incoming links from external sources.

A way to add a layer of separation to this process is by creating an independent, non-sales oriented website, full of quality, non-biased content that has a chance of growing credibility.

If you add in some discreet, non-biased links to your commercial website, you can also benefit from the link “juice”, ie. the fact that a respectable, linked-to website, is linking to your website. eg. Jessica Nails for TS Beauty (arguably a weak website but does get regular traffic that pushes through).

There are other ways of creating the same sort of effect, without the need for a complete website, namely websites such as Squidoo (Jessica Nails) and Hub Pages (Building better web pages).

Effectively the aim is to attract credibility. It is extra work that will probably not lead to a direct kick-back, but these tactics, if applied regularly, will benefit a medium to long term online marketing strategy.

I’m not sure on the use for this tool, but it amused me for five minutes.

Seriously though, there probably are reasons or uses for adding a computer ‘voice’ to a web page and this tool - VozMe - does just that, creating MP3s from free text entered in the box.