The 5HITS

Fact 1: The cost of publishing online is cheap. If you are too tight to even pay for hosting, you can use blogspot or even Google sites, but hosting is essentially free these days.

Fact 2: Content is cheap and getting cheaper. The going rate for very at times average articles from India is around $10. That is cheap.

Fact 3: Google keeps on saying, “Write unique content for your users, or that people will link to, or that people will enjoy”

So how can we differentiate content. Huge slabs of content are daunting when a user lands and yet all too familiar. Users are lazy, full of self interest and are arriving at a remote server, with no word of mouth referral and you expect them to read 1,200 words in a single paragraph. Don’t let the click hit the close tab button before you’ve had a chance to get your message across. Getting people to your site takes effort and actions. Why waste this?

First things first. make sure you have done your keyword research and ensure your site is logically structured to allow people arriving to find familiar keywords and that the site hierarchy supports great search engine optimisation (SEO) for data retrieval and indexing purposes by the search engines.

Then think about what makes great content:

• Using headings
• Using bullet points to break up facts
• Using numbered points to show prioritised lists
• Short paragraphs and bolding to facilitate scanning
• The clever use of images to keep the reader engaged, not just smiling faces which add no value
• Conversion placements and options
• Alternate user paths to navigate the path from any page

When a user reads a page on your website, what do you want them to do?

Generally you want to communicate a certain point, and then get them to perform an action. In many cases unfortunately this action is seeing the footer and being not sure what on earth to do next.

Engage with your users, let them get value from your content and finish the page with a need for more.

A KPI alwasy available and seldom used is pages viewed and time on site. Surely, this should increase as your content improves? Look at the time on site for a specific page, look at the number of words on the page and calculate how many users are actually reading at an average reading rate of around 250 wpm. You may be shocked. If you are serious about user engagement, its not always about the biggest website but increasingly about the stickiest content. Watch Google make it so in coming months.

So everyone has a website or a blog, or both. Many dream of retiring to a deserted island and running their networks of websites, getting rich and having this amazing work life balance. Well guess what? It ain’t going to happen, easily anyway. Of those with sites, many are limited by their developers to various CMS’s and expensive changes. For those who control and manage their own hosting, their main tool and marketing method (and Im talking small business here) is content and ofcourse SEO. You can get lots of content written around the world for $10 a 500 word article or less.

So setting up a site and getting content and even some basic SEO in place is simple, cheap and can be done by yourself with some experimenting and time. So anybody can publish and many are indeed. Whose making the money so far. The hosting providers and those selling ad ons for Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc.

So now all are publishing, what are the monetisation options?

• Ad sense, selling contextual ads from say Google
• Selling a virtual product, like an E Book
• Selling other ads or listings, if you can get them
• Being an affiliate
• Selling some sort of offline or related product or service

While all of these are valid, most of them require significant pageviews to make them viable. Click throughs can be as low as 0.25% on a banner or ad, affiliates also require conversion, so getting enough traffic takes lots of something.

To be continued…

New business models for social marketers. Managing your brand on the web just got interesting. Sidewicki, the tool in your Google Toolbar allowing you to see comments made next to websites has been upgraded to allow you to view these for an entire domain, per the Google blog. You are pretty quickly going to get a view on what a business/ restaurant/ website is about using this feature.

On the upside, to comment users need a Google profile and also need some “trust” or “authority”, lets call it PageRank for profiles before they are published. As more people comment so this bar will rise. So you spam the sidewicki, as with search you will become invisible. But comment wisely and responsibly and you build an ability to influence an extremely important part of todays marketing mix.

Granted:

• Low use and understanding of Google profiles
• Not that hard to set up a profile
• Low use or understanding of Sidewicki, let alone having the toolbar installed

But

• Gmail, Local Business Centre and so on will continually enhance our understanding
• Google social will encourage all to set up profiles, also just to claim your own space
• Online profiles will continue to grow in importance and need to be managed

So this has the opportunity to bring power to the people. You want to book a flight and have some adventure, search for “air tickets to Iraq” and find the #1 ranking site, but low and behold there are numerous sidewicki entires about how that airline runs late, loses your lugage, are rude to customers etc. You still going to book with them?

In the future of search, if there were enough of these and the quality was good, why would they not Read more…