Session: SEO Through Blogs & Feeds

Session Score: 4.11
Speaking Score: 4.12

Session: Beyond Googling: Where Will Your Customers Be Searching in Five Years?

Session Score: 3.55
Speaking Score: 3.80

I did check… the scores are out of 5, not 10!

I do agree with the audience. I think “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds” offered real, practical ideas that people can take back to their businesses. “Beyond Google” is – by its nature – a little bit of crystal ball gazing. Interesting, but less readily affecting the bottom line.

My next presentations are:

• A4U Expo in October, Excel in October
• International Search Summit in November, in the British Library. (We have cheap tickets for this internet marketing conference.)
• Pubcon in Vegas in November. (I’m sure I should be displaying a badge for that somewhere)

I am also running an intensive training day in London at the end of October, with Andy Atkins-kruger from Webcertain.  Not sure if this is public yet, but it is looking like a pretty decent organic SEO training day if you want to get to the heart of your SEO issues.

by Dixon Jones

What was your speaker rating?

My company, Receptional Internet Marketing are now making use of a new Google product called Website Optimizer. I am at a conference in Dublin where Jon Myers and Russell Sutton from Conversion Works are talking about landing page optimization.

I know that Russell is one of the few Google Optimizer professionals in the country (we have Nick Gaunt at Receptional) but up first was Jon Myers who is from Mediavest. Like Receptional, Mediavest is a Google Certified Adwords company. Their presentations give a compelling case for using this technology.

Jon talked a little about Website Optimiser, but then really started to concentrate on the “quality score” metric in Google Adwords. He pointed out the need to ensure that the quality score of your advert is “good” or “great”.

To improve your Adwords campaign, you can test different landing pages for your adverts. Within the Google Adwords system, you can set Google up to alternately send traffic to first the home page and then alternately the product specific page, for example, and Google helps to tell you which page engages the user better and – assuming you have conversion tracking set up in Adwords – you can work out which page generates a higher return on investment.

Jon also noted a few other tools. www.usertesting.com was recommended as well as a particular favourite of Receptional – crazyegg.com. Jon also noted that www.conversion-rates-expert.com has all the decent  free tools listed in one place for conversion and landing page testing.

Jon than went on to the main course – A:B Testing and Multivariate testing and used a case study  of Skype, who tested three different layouts for their “buy” page (which is pretty close to their home page). Using Google’s website Optimizer, they were able to randomize the three variants for the users and track the orders and revenues generated from the three layouts. The audience were asked to guess which page worked best… and most got it wrong.

Jon showed some nice screenshots from  Website optimizer that showed how you can easily drill down and understand the effects of what you test, but did warn about the issues of some mathematical principals surrounding test using limited amounts of data.

Jon feels times are changing and that the marketer is really starting to get in control of the message from search, but you only have 1.8 seconds to attract your user from search these days. This means that you now need to start treating Google itself as a landing page. Local business listings in Google can have phone numbers ON the Google results, for example, meaning that  now your customer doesn’t even have to come to your wesbite to convert.

As an aside to Jon’s presentation, Receptional have a number of technologies that allow us to track users by ohone number – one of which can even tie phone numbers into Google Analytics results.

Russell came on next. His business really only concentrates on conversions, not traffic generation. He started by asking the question: “What’s in it for you”? and said that it is all about outcomes – in terms of money or actions or market share or any other chosen metric. Knowing what you want to get “more of” is key to knowing what to test.

Russel; says that when you know what you want more of, you then need to use analytics to find the pain. (Receptional has Google analytics and Yahoo analytics expertise in-house). He took an example from Google analytics which clearly showed two pages that had a much higer bounce rate on a site than any other and chose these to start testing variations. He pointed out that the higher the traffic to those pages, the more the pain for your business.

He recommended starting with a super small test to get used to the Google Website Optimiser technology. You then need a hypothesis of why you think a particular page may be broken. You then should be bold – try some  changes that look really different and test the outcomes.

Russell used a courier company case study. The home page had a huge bounce rate and their hypothesis was that the “get a quote” button was tiny. They then came up with 8 variations on a theme – not just one.  Again – the audience was asked which variation worked best. It turned out again that we all guessed wrong.

The winning result increased the click through to the quote page by 101%.

Russell and Jon’s presentations – together with Receptional’s own experiences – show that Google optimizer can make an incredible difference to your buttom line. The maths is compelling. At Recetional, Nick Gaunt has taken on this specialism and has taken the Google website optimizer exams. If you would like to contact him, you can do so via www.receptional.com/contact .

by Dixon Jones

Landing Page Testing

No 6: SMX Sweden. This is a lovely conference. I enjoyed it when it was SES driven and I am still enjoying it now. Mostly for the conference food, which is the best I have had consistently. I always feel saddened when I bust a gut to do a presentation because I know the audience paid a lot… then the audience sits down to eat a sandwich from a box. Not in Stockholm though!

No 5. Affiliates4U Amsterdam. To be fair, this conference hasn’t even happened yet, but having seen just how professionally run A4U was run at London Excel (which doesn’t make my list due to the location), this looks to be a great show for speakers. 

No. 4: SMX Advanced.  [Edit-add: The one in Seattle] As a speaker in pure business terms, this must be seen as a pinnacle. I have to be honest – I’ve not been a speaker here. It’s a conference where everyone in the room seems to have been a speaker at some conference or other… so getting a speaking gig here is a bit rarer than some others.

No. 3: Pubcon, Las Vegas. I like the diversity of speakers, attendees and sponsors here. Some people think that this conference was for “mom and pop” companies but they really should have gone to the last few. After one talk I did, the people that came up to ask questions and shake my hands included Facebook and Ebay. It’s also in Las Vegas… if you like that sort of thing…

No. 2: SES San Jose. It’s huge… and it’s really nice and warm. For a Brit, we are not used to either. The hotels have massive pools and the whole town seems to be connected to WiFi. You also get to go to the Google Dance… although I have heard that may be coming to an end

No. 1: RIMC in Iceland. You just cannot beat this conference as a speaker. I have gone twice and I have been taken to Hot sulpher baths, Massive Ice-covered waterfalls and Geysirs. I’ve been to Viking villages and eaten everything from Argentinian steak to rotting fish. The rotting fish was voluntary. It is THE event that speakers go for not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

Tata for now.

Dixon.

by Dixon Jones

Best Search Conferences for Speakers

Malique’s design won for the following reasons:

1. Great calls to action
2. He kept to the brief very well
3. He showed me the internal pages, not just the home page
4. He cleverly blended in my company colours without making it obvious

The while experience of using 99designs was great too. You set out the design spec as a contest and let the designers run wild. The interface is very intuitive for me and the Intellectual Property gets properly handed over at the end. On the down side, you have to commit to a prize, regardless of the quality of the entries – but there were many entries and if Malique hadn’t been in the batch, others woud have won and I would still have been happy.

The other finalists (who deserve the “nod” after all their hard work) were:

Runner Up: Hammer aka Luis Fok 

Finalists: 

Webcosy

Ritesh

Cyrixian

Authenticstyle

GoldenPearl

Gdesigns

Crearc

Ckolic

There was also another very close contender, but he has withdrawn his design, presumably for use another day. You can see most of the contestant entries here.

by Dixon Jones

Web Design Contest Winner

Matthew – can I get on that panel again please?

by Dixon Jones

Affiliate conference in London will be unmissable

It dawned on me just how often I have been wanting to say this to people again and again when my wife and I broke open the Captain Morgan the other night. Rum and coke is a great drink for relaxing the tongue without giving it that sharp “just drank Gin, now beat me” attitude. As a drink we found it on honeymoon a decade back and it’s amazing our livers are still functioning to this day.

Anyway – my wife and I were drinking and she asked me for maybe the 50th time about her used items exchange idea for the local village. Or was it her “Mums back to work” recruitment agency? Anyway – I finally said “write it down” and however the conversation went on from there, I had to come back to the same advice as the only “next step” that was viable in the development process.

Even if you are a local plumber looking to have your own 5 page website, you still need to write it down. Going to a web designer and saying “please could you build a simple website, nice and cheap” already got twice as expensive as if you went along with a word document to the same guy and said “can you make a website out of this text”. It has to be your text in the end doesn’t it? So you are going to have to write it however much you pay. All I am saying is that you need to write your thoughts down, not just mull them over in the pub.

Well – oftentimes I am a disaster at listening to me own advice. But not this year. For better or worse, I have written down my business plan for my main business, and properly budgeted income and expenditure right down to the postage costs. Then I agreed the plan with my fellow directors and then summarized the objectives and delivered these to the entire team (15 people). Having written it down, we had much better boundaries for the annual review round and a clear idea of what needs to change to be able to meet our targets.

Writing a business plan – in the first instance at least – is not about WHAT you write as much as it is about THAT you write anything at all. 90% of business ideas fail right there. What – would it kill you to write the idea down on one sheet of paper? This blog post is more developed than 90% of business ideas. We have a one page business plan in the office, which is maintained and updated monthly – in addition to the more elaborate business plan. But if you are trying to get your business off the ground, here’s my 10 things you should write down before you even talk to a friend in a pub.

1. An advertising headline and tag line that explains and sells your product all in one go. Mastercard are calling Mastercard “the new change” encouraging micro-payments on cards these days. You know the product, you know the USP, you know that you don’t need to go to the cashpoint anymore to buy a sandwich from Tescos.

2. Write down a list of boring things you will need to arrange and very rough costs in money AND TIME. Here’s a few:

• Bank Account: £nothing ….. 1/2 day
• Legal trading name (LTD Company?) £50… 2 hours
• Website domain and hosting space £10… 2 hours
• A place to work from? A filing cabinet?
• An accounts package?

Usually – the realization that you either need an accounts package or alternatively a VERY expensive accountant right at the start puts most people off right there.

3. SWOT analysis on your competitors. What – going to Google and finding out who they are will kill you?

4. A spreadsheet with cash-flow projections based on SALES NEEDED after costs are incurred, not “SALES EXPECTED” before costs are decided. Bank managers have given up looking at projections because they all start with “I will sell 2 more memberships every day ongoing, so I will break even in six months and be a millionaire in two years… just look at the figures”.

5. Write down some building blocks about how you are going to meet your sakes projections… Look at the sales funnel that you will need so you can get early warning signs if you are missing the target. I am looking for a certain level of new business each month for my main company. This equates to for new contracts a month, based on experience. To get this I need 12 opportunities assuming I convert one in three. Most leads are not going to even turn INTO opportunities, so to create 12 opportunities I need (say) 36 leads, or about two every working day. Now I can get these through the web, through network meetings, through conferences or through cold calling… (except I could never personally do cold calling) but the point is that for 4 new bits of business I need nearly 40 people saying “hmm… tell me more”. All of a sudden that first million looks a little harder to attain – or easier if that’s your thing.

by Dixon Jones

Success is Easier when you Write it Down

I have been on various panels in the past at SES New York, but I don’t suppose even hardened professionals at these conferences realize that the day before or the day after the bigger conferences, SES runs a much smaller – more intense training day. This year it is on the Friday after the man event.

I was first asked to to Link building training for SES back in their SES@A4U event in the autumn. I was so worried that I would make a fool of myself that I flew of to SES San Jose JUST to watch how Debra Mastaler and Jennifer Laycock coped with four hours of intense training to a small, hyper-interested group of delegates. Talking for 15 minutes to a mass audience is one thing, but four hours is quite a different matter!

Anyway, the London event went fine in the autumn and I my feedback scores were at least good enough get a chance to go again in New York. I hope that the US audience will be kind to me too.

P.S. Happy Birthday Shimrit.

by Dixon Jones

Link Building Training Course at SES

The best way to get noticed is to be an interesting conversationalist.

It really all started with a Árni Matthíasson who – instead of coming up to me after my spot to thank me for talking or to bring up a problem in his business, came up to take the thoughts in my presentation and leap forward in the argument by a magnitude – leaving me to realise just how much further I needed to think ahead than I had done to date. He told me about the concept of the Panopticon prison. I had been presenting the concept that individuals now – like never before – had the ability to change a brand’s marketing message if they didn’t like it… by talking about their view of a brand or their experience on the scalable mouthpiece that we all live with now day to day. Arni give the analogy that this gave individuals the same power as the Panopticon. We don’t now have to police brands all the time, because brands are imprisoned in the knowledge that at any point in time, someone may be spying on them. Powerful stuff I thought.

Then just a week later in London, I was delighted to find myself drinking with Steve Jackson (Warning… noisy link) whom I had thought was a games designer until that point, but clearly there are more than one. I had several stimulating conversations with Steve. The merits of Finnish saunas probably doesn’t warrant further discussion sober, but we had an interesting conversation about where people turn when faced with adversity. Steve turns to Winston Churchill’s We will never surrenderspeach which – being a Brit – I obviously know. But for those that don’t, you can get motivated via your Iphone. Again, a great conversationalist whom I will look forward to meeting at conferences again.

Neither person, though, quite prepared me for the late night conversation between Jim Sterne and the Fantomaster… Talk about Law meeting Chaos! Jim set about asking Fantomaster what he would want if nothing was impossible. Fantomaster replied “magic”… but then Jim went on to ask “for what purpose”?

That’s when I really understood the difference between Law and chaos. For these two, It was nothing to do with Good and Evil and everything to do with philosophy.

The moral of the tale is to be a good conversationalist if you want to be remembered the next morning.

by Dixon Jones

Getting Noticed at Conferences

It was fun. turns out that a guy in theaudience was upset about the guy that achieved number one for car Insurance… which happened to be a client of one of the guys on the panel. Who says the old guard SEO guys don’t still have what it takes?

by Dixon Jones

SES London has 2000 attending

Link Building Video Example

I used the above bits of video in a presentation at RIMC in Iceland last week. Thanks so much to the guys there at Nordic Emarketing, as well as Joost, Dennis, Rob and Ton.

I’ll put the presentation itself up in the next few days, as I also put the presentation on Video.

by Dixon Jones

Link Building Case Study