It is never too soon - and you are never too young - to start controlling your image online

November 3^rd, 2011

Originally posted on CanadianISP.ca

We are at an interesting point in the Internet as a part of our collective consciousness: When I was young, the “internet” was something only accessed by geeks with specialized knowledge and a definite effort. Nowadays, it is a defacto requirement of day-to-day life.

The “interesting point” is this: When I was a kid, what I did on or off-line, whether it was stupid, dangerous or just plain silly had an extremely short half life: No one really used the 'net and there certainly weren't such things as search engines that catalogued everything, nor did anyone really think of saving data for future use – After all, this 'Internet Thing' was just a passing fancy for nerdy kids, right ?

Fast forward to today, where everything – and I really do mean everything is archived. Not only by search engines and social media networks, but sometimes, by the darker elements of society.

One of the best examples of that 'darker element' was last year, when there was a minor scandal at my daughters' grade school involving sexting: More than a couple of young girls took pictures of themselves, partially or completely unclothed and sent them to their “true loves” - “Love”, at that age, of course, is fleeting and when the inevitable breakup occurs, teens and pre-teens being whom they are, sometimes take great offense at the heartbreak and look to lash out: Some of those by sending above-mentioned photos around their social networks with predictably embarrassing results all around.

Now, that's pretty embarrassing, no doubt, but that's not where the real damage can happen: Take that same young lady or young men (boys certainly aren't immune from compromising self-photography, either!) who sent a picture on to a significant other.

Now, fast-forward fifteen years: The folly of youth is long-forgotton as one enters the corporate work world... right ?

It never ceases to amaze me just how long people can hold a grudge for real or imagined transgressions. Suddenly, those photos you thought were a long-past childhood embarrassment appear in your new employers' inbox; Or worse, if you work anywhere near the public: In a media outlets' inbox. Bye bye exciting career; Hello ditch-digger, burger flipper and 'floor sanitory maintenance engineer' (a fancy title for “mop pusher”).

Some of you, especially the younger readers, might be smugly saying to yourself “Ahh, but I was never foolish enough to take pictures of myself in the buff! I'm safe!” - Are you ?

How many times have you posted about that wicked bush bash you attended last weekend where you got really wasted and “totally made out with those hot chicks, even though they were really wasted themselves and then ran from the cops when you threw the newspaper box through the high school front window” ? Or shared some laughs on Facebook with your buds about that mind-blowing acid trip all of you took ? Or the several dozen tweets you made about the hillarious flash-mob you took part in where you happened to “find” new Nikes in the store you mobbed ?

All harmless, childish fun, right ? Kids will be kids, right ?

Not always. More and more employers today, as a standard part of their employment hiring practices, scan search engines and social networks for the names of their potential new recruits.

Here is the real kicker: They don't care that you were fourteen when you stole the neighbours' car. They don't care that you were only sixteen when you smoked a half-pound of weed and bragged about it for a week. What they do care about is the fact that your name was tied to the act and was found by a trivial Google search. In fact, it's not even that they “care” that it's your name tied to the criminal or embarrassing acts, but that it would be their company name that would be tied to those same acts by their customers, investors or business partners.

You won't be asked to explain. You won't be “given a chance”. You won't be forgiven for 'kids being kids'.

You simply will not get a phone call. Ever.

I'm not on a moral high horse: I'm not even trying to say don't do silly and stupid things as a teenager; For one reason, you wouldn't listen to some random Internet marketing guy and for the other, I did it all myself <big grin>.

BUT

Do you really want to brag about it – or even refer to it – on Facebook, Twitter, your personal web page, or even in email to a friend (who may, years later, decide that juicy tidbit you've just admitted to would make a really nice form of revenge for stealing his girlfriend the night of the prom ?”)

Remember: The Internet doesn't just have a long memory: It never forgets. Which means that a whole host of people will never forget, either, even though you really, really wish they would...

Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario, Canada

Copyright © - 2011 Internalysis.com / Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario - All rights reserved -

Email marketing - The Real Deal

October 17, 2011

 
Originally posted on CanadianISP.ca

To use an overly simple analogy, there are essentially two ways that you can approach email marketing: The right way and the wrong way. (The geek in me translates that as the light side and the dark side): 

You can spam, or you can engage in actual public communications. 

Email “marketing” is actually something of a misnomer: In general terms, marketing is the term used when broadcasting a message for all and sundry to hear and, if the message about your product or service is enticing enough, people will respond. (That's not the literal dictionary definition, but enough of the general public – and more importantly – people new to using email for commercial gain, tend to think of the term)

There are several important steps to good, successful (and profitable) email marketing, but the very first one is the most important of all:
 
Consent.

You must have the explicit consent of the person you are sending mail to.

To be clear, here: This article deals in using mail to sell something to a second party; This is not about casual conversation or general business queries, although if the 'general business query' is a lead-up to selling something, then these rules apply.

Consent is not just about someone sending you a single request to receive your email, but of you receiving the request and asking for confirmation of the request before any commercial content is sent out. Some people mistakenly call this “double opt-in”, but that is not the case: You are not opting in to one or more things twice: You are requesting communications and confirming the request for communications. This did not arise from an over-abundance of lawyers in the world, or a saturation of bureaucrats: This is a direct result from spam, itself. Without confirmed opt-in, it means that anyone can sign anyone up for commercial mailing lists. It is akin to ordering a pizza to your neighbours' house, but multiplied tens of thousands of times, for a single person – in the space of five minutes.
The importance of confirmed consent cannot be stressed enough in commercial email communications: In addition to the ethics of it, in addition to the basic respect you are showing your potential (and existing) customers; It is also about avoiding the worst-possible label an Internet marketer could get stuck with: Spammer.

Once the label of 'spammer' sticks to you, it is difficult and lengthy to remove. Unlike as little as forty years ago, you can't just pick up and move to another town and start again: The Internet is global and its memory – and records of your exploits – are, literally, forever.
Being labelled a 'spammer' is not just about having a black mark against you that you can just brush off: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can and will refuse to provide service to you: Not just web service, but basic connectivity to your home and office. The 'spammer' label is the digital equivalent of walking around with a plague marker on your forehead: It is not that the ISPs want to “punish” you for being a bad boy or girl: After all, your money is just as legal as the next persons', but if YOU are labelled a spammer, then THEY are labelled a spam supporter, which means THEY get isolated from the 'net from all the other providers that do not wish to touch that plague marker, either. No matter how good your money is, it will not make up for the tens of thousands of customers they will lose if they get cut off, so the reputable ones will not take the chance.

Of course, the next logical thought for the unrepentant spammer is “I'll just use the unreputable ISPs!”- of course, using the unreputable ISPs means using an ISP that most of the rest of the world does not wish to receive content from (because most of it is spam and viruses), which means your content will not be received, simply by the fact that you're using an unreputable ISP.

While the emphasis on the importance of acquiring consent could go on for pages and pages, those of you still reading should by now understand that the consequences for not acquiring it are not only disastrous, but expensive and potentially career-ending (Or, for those truly with zero ethics, a shift into the darker and questionably legal side of Internet business).

The next question, of course: How do you get that consent ?

The simple answer: You ask for it. The question you have to ask before that, though, is: What is it you are asking consent for ? These are several of the most common mass-mails with commercial gain in mind:

(These all apply whether the frequency is Daily/weekly/bi-weekly/monthly or less)

• Notification emails about sales and specials
• Notification emails about new products or services
• Newsletters about your company or its business
• Advice newsletters ('credibility builders')

Consent is usually asked for on a web page, but is by no means limited to that: It can be your business card, print newsletter, word-of-mouth, print-media advertisements, radio and television, and so on. In each of those cases, however, the reader should be made clearly aware of two things:

1. What it is they're signing up for. Do not advertise that you are publishing an advice newsletter on a weekly basis and then bombard your subscribers with sales promotions.
2. The fact that they will not be subscribed until they confirm their subscription after your system emails them back at the address they provided.

One thing needs to be made very clear, here: If you do not receive that confirmation, you do not have permission to mail them again. No communication means no permission. Even though some jurisdictions allow in law the use of 'opt-out' systems (Where you can subscribe anyone you like, regardless of permission or not and they have to tell you to stop), you will very quickly learn that the Internet, as a whole, follows no one countries' rules or laws: Acquire confirmed consent or give up on using the Internet for legitimate business uses. Period.

Newcomers to mail marketing are often tempted with shortcuts to acquiring lists of names and email addresses from list vendors, who sell thousands or millions of email addresses that are 'confirmed opt-in':

Do not do this.

Not only did you not get the consent, but the lists you are buying are full of addresses that have not only been unethically harvested from various sources around the web with absolutely no consent, but more often than not have “honey traps” - email addresses that serve no other purpose than to notify email blocklist operators that there is a new spammer on the block; Often, it will not be you that is notified, but your ISP: In many cases, your only notification will be starting up your computer at the beginning of the day to discover you have no Internet connection.

If the recipient did not give you and specifically you their consent, you should not be mailing them.

Of course, it is not so simple as to just putting up a page or an ad requesting the general public to sign up for your weekly words of wisdom or fantastic daily sales: You need to give them a reason to go to your subscription page in the first place and that reason must be good enough that they will choose to give you their email address and confirm this fact. (Yes, we're working backwards in the email communications evolution, here). There really is no better analogy for giving them this reason than “Try before you buy”:

If you run a weekly advice newsletter (Where you may make money by adverts within the newsletter or solicitation for personal consultation), you'd better have a website up showing many of your words of wisdom for people to read through in the first place.

The same with weekly sales: Your website had better be showing at least some of your typical sales that people could be receiving, if only they were subscribed to your newsletter.
If your mail is about your products or services, you should have content on your website, which is updated regularly, that shows people why they would want to read about your services in email, rather than just the single once-only of perusing your website. 

Ironically, the relationship between your website and your email publications is like an endless chicken-and-egg cycle; The usual case is that people buy from your website, so that is where you want them to end up. However, most people do not purchase on their first visit so you need a method to get them to keep coming back. One (of many) method is the regular email newsletter: So you use your website to drive people to your email newsletter which is used to drive people to your website to make a purchase.

Remember, too, the 'magic number': Four percent. Four percent is the conversion rate of a visitor acting upon the call-to-action. This four percent number has proven consistent across at least a hundred years, if not more and holds true for radio, television, print and Internet advertising. This means that for every hundred people that see your ad, you can expect forty of them to visit your business or website. That doesn't mean all forty are going to purchase, because that four percent still holds true, or at least it does in Internet business (It's a fair bit higher in the bricks and mortar world, simply because of the effort and commitment the customer made to physically attend your store): Online, though, you can expect four percent of those that visit your site to actually make a purchase.

This, of course, assumes that you are selling a decent, quality product or service, your website is professionally designed and the people who interact directly with your customers speak in a manner in which they are understood and are professional, polite and courteous.
So, to sum it all up, you need:

• A website that shows what you do, that is updated regularly and creates a desire and benefit to not only know more, but know more on a regular basis.
• A request page for your newsletters/publications that clearly shows what they're signing up for and that their confirmation is required before content is sent.
• Staff that answer your telephones and email who are knowledgeable, professional, polite and timely in their responses and follow-up.

Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario, Canada

Copyright © - 2011 Internalysis.com / Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario - All rights reserved -

So you want to be an ISP ?

August 22, 2011

Originally posted on CanadianISP.ca

This is going to be a multi-part series, covering the very basics of getting into the ISP business.

I'm going to start from what might appear to some to be the “last” step, however: The ISP website.

There is no such thing as a “irreplaceable” component to being an ISP (or a business, for that matter): We've all heard the arguments that sales is vital, without which the ISP fails. Or tech support is vital, without which failure occurs; Or server admins, or accounting or marketing, ad infinitum.

The truth is, they're all vital. Without any one of them, the business falls down.
The website for an ISP is often the very first impression a potential customer has of the business; In todays' wired world, more people are using the Internet to find an ISP than the phone book. Even on recommendation from a friend or colleague, the first step is to look up the ISP online, be that from work, a friends' place or the library.
Just like any other website striving for success, your ISP home or main page has just thirty seconds to persuade the visitor to make another click – And that click is vital – It doesn't necessarily have to be to the sign up form, but getting the first click means you've engaged the visitor at least into looking for more information.

Your main page says a lot about you: If it is shoddily designed, the subconscious message is that the service is the same: Amateur and half-hearted. If the wording is poor, be that spelling or grammar mistakes, use of Text Speak or jargon-heavy terms, it tells many a visitor they will not be able to communicate with you.

If you are offering service across the nation, or across an entire province or state, but the home page focuses on 'Home town pride' – You tell visitors from outside of your head office location that they're not your focus, so they won't buy.
Ideally: Your main page must say (at least) 4 things:

1. Who you are
2. What you offer (DSL, Cable, Wireless, VoIP, etc)
3. Why you're the choice (best price, best addons, best support, broadest coverage, etc)
4. Why they should make another click.

There are two other, critical, considerations:

1. You have ONE screen in which to state this message. That “one” screen must fit within the broadest possible number of monitors and resolutions. To test this, drop your monitor resolution down to 1280 x 1020 and go to your home page. What you see, before any scrolling, is the message a first time visitor sees and bases their decision on for the next click.
2. Make sure what your marketing message(s) are saying matches what they see on the main page. If your focus is on unlimited/no cap accounts, the last thing you want focused on your home page are your accounts with transfer limits. (This holds true with any business: If your marketing message focuses on price, but the home page explains high quality = high price, you're turning away visitors by the thousands, all without making a second click to find your low price deals)

You must have other content on your site other than your price list and a sign up sheet. A first time visitor is there to determine if they should sign up with you in the first place:

• You should be showing off your technical savvy by having a detailed FAQ on common issues faced by customers: This list should be added to as your tech support people run into things. It shows the customer you're able to handle any issues that show up.
• You should have a comparison page with all your account types at a glance WITH PRICES. The tired old horse of “call us for a price” turns a lot of people off: If you're not willing to put at least baseline prices online, your competitors absolutely are.
• You should have an “About us” / brag page: Who makes up your ISP ? Why are you the best people to be running the business you do ? What has your company done to make it stand out in the community or industry ?
• You need to have a clearly laid out Contact page. Potential customers want to know how easy it is to get in touch with you, and not just your sales lines. If you have specific hours of operation, this needs to be laid out. If you've got specific contact policies, such as paid support or premium support, this needs to be laid out, as well. One thing you do not want to do is restrict contact to email only. While this is hugely tempting and a lot more efficient, when dealing with the general public, there are is a large segment of the market who wants to talk to an actual human being before making a buying decision. Restrict voice contact at your peril.
• Ideally, you should have a news or events section. While this isn't strictly necessary to make new sales, it does show that you're more involved than just taking money and providing connections. If you are active in the advocacy for fair Internet access, if you're involved in CRTC/FCC petitions, if you offer classes or workshops, if you've got customers with news items – These should be highlighted on your news page.

Finally, your site must be realistically navigable by someone who is completely unfamiliar with your industry. While some think of this step as too much effort, the best method to determine if you've achieved this is to as a couple of friends, family members or neighbours who are not technically savvy to sit in front of your website and sign up for an Internet account. Can they actually find the sign up form ? Does it make sense ? Do they know what they are committing to ? Do they understand all the words and terminology being used ? Believe it or not, there are more than a few ISPs where not all of these questions are true (There are even some where all are answered “no” !)
There will be another article on using your site for public and customer relations in the future, as well. The above are the very basics of a good ISP site. At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself this: Can I, or my staff, design a site like the above ? If the answer is no, hire a professional to do it for you. I did exactly this for both www.canadianisp.ca and www.masterhostlist.com because my design skills are non-existent. If you fall into this category, like so many do, hire a professional: It pays off in spades.

Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario, Canada  

Copyright © - 2011 Internalysis.com / Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario - All rights reserved -

Consider your market – No, REALLY consider your market!

August 3, 2011

 
 Originally posted on CanadianISP.ca

Most of you reading this may be tempted to skip over this – After all, the title is suggestive of Marketing 101, right ? Right ? If it is, then why, oh why are so many products and services aimed at people who cannot afford them, use them or need them ?

Todays' article was inspired by a friend who manages a theatre: She was telling me that a local production for a childrens' show was suffering from low turnout and its future was in question. Why does it suffer from low turnout, you ask ? Well, the cost to attend this show is $29.95 per person.

Yes, per person – Young, old, babies, toddlers, families, individuals, it is per person. For a typical North American nuclear family of four, it would be $135.37 ( 4 x $29.95 + 13% GST) to attend this childrens' show.
Now, some of you, especially those who earn a good amount of money, will be saying that a hundred and forty dollars is a good price for a family of four for an evenings' live entertainment.

However: According to www.pembrokeontario.com/economic-development/site-selection/demographics , the average family income for Pembroke is $77,506, before taxes. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume 33% in taxes (According to the Fraser Institute, however, the average Canadian total tax burden is closer to 41.5%) so the family income goe from $77,506 to $51,929.02. To make the next paragraph easier, let's divide that by twelve, to get an idea of monthly money: $4,327.42. Across Ontario, the average monthly housing cost (rent/mortgage alone) is $814.64, according to CMHC. A Nutritious diet for a family of four is $759 ( www.ottawa.ca/residents/health/living/nutrition/services/price_eating_well_en.html )

Pulling a bunch of numbers from www.immigration.ca/primer-ontario.pdf tells us that average monthly expenditure for everything else, including: Household Operation, Household Furnishings, Clothing, Transportation, Health Care, Personal care, Recreation, Reading Materials, Education, Tobacco and Alcohol, Games of Chance and Miscellany works out to between $2000 - $2800, depending on where you live in Ontario: Taking the lower end of that (for the Pembroke example), that's $2,000 for all of the above. Let's be scrupulously fair and remove $425.00 from that number, which is the monthly average entertainment amount. When all is said and done, the average target market in Pembroke, Ontario, will have $1,178.78 left over for the month – You'll note that the categories above do not include things like RRSP or RESP contributions, emergency funds (Car break downs, emergency medical, emergency home repair, etc). Assuming that the average Ontarian doesn't save for trivial things like a retirement, education or unforeseen emergencies (in case you missed it, that last sentence is dripping with sarcasm), this leaves a grand total of $39.29 per day for anything else. Let's be generous and say an even $40.

So back to our original example of the theatre production at $135.37 for the family of four: This means spending 3.38 days worth of 'other' money for one nights' entertainment (Which does not include the cost of getting there, food, beverages and the like) - Let's say four days worth of cash for one evenings' worth of entertainment, or about three hours.

Of course, your average consumer doesn't break down their costs to 'daily allotment of “other” spending money”, but more along the lines of “How much is it going to cost and what's in it for me ?” In this case, a children's show will most likely be seen by at least three people (Mother, Father and child or single parent and two children) and often by four people (two parents, two children), which breaks down to $101.53 in the three person scenario and $135.37 for four – For about three hours of entertainment. You can expect to add anywhere between twenty to fifty dollars to that for cost of transportation, food and beverage for the evening, bringing the expense to just under two hundred dollars (or five days worth of 'other' money for the entire family). That is asking a lot for just one evening which, with all due respect to the childrens' show production, isn't exactly the same level of quality as, say, Les Miserables or Phantom of the Opera (Or Phantom Menace, for that matter :) )

In the “Let's call a spade a spade” department, let us also recognize that live theatre does not have the same drawing power as, say, modern movies, theme parks or sports events (Professional or Bantam league) – Yet the pricing suggests that they're top notch in everyones' estimation which they are obviously not. 
 

So what should they have done to increase both attendance and revenues ?

 
Firstly, the whole pricing scheme should be revamped. You could either take the standard route of higher price for adults and lower tiers for children or – my preference – charge the premium amount for each child under 12, a slightly lower amount for 13-18 and a token cover charge for the adults – After all, it's not like Mom and Dad are attending a live action reproduction of a show designed for the 4-12 market for their own entertainment.

The next – and tied in – strategy would have been to either focus in on concession sales (if applicable – not all venues make this available) and, more likely, sales of show-related merchandise pre-show, during intermission and post-show, with the offer of autographed items from the cast as incentive (Heck, some add a fee for the autographs). 

Another creative option would be a ticket sale for a drawing during intermission where the winner would be called on stage for participation in a scene, with photographs provided to the winner (for a (optional) fee). In addition to the purely 'gravy' revenue this would provide, it creates incentive for repeat visits for those members of the audience who particularly crave their 'time in the limelight'. 

In all, the major mistake made by this production was the utter failure to consider their market – In Pembroke, $100 for a family outing is pushing it a little. $50 is a lot more palatable, with extras and options being just that: Optional; The basic entertainment is there for an affordable price and the extras (and profit that goes with it) is there for those who can afford it, but not required and therefore not a detriment that keeps people who would have attended away from the show in the first place.

 

What does this mean to you and your product or service ?

 
So you think that your product or service is so different from a childrens' live action production that this advice doesn't apply to you ? Think again. Every market is different. There is a reason for the expression “charge what the market will bear” - If your products' cost is $100 and you need to make at least twenty percent profit to justify a sale, selling in a region where the average income is $18,000 a year is financial suicide. Unless you are selling a product or service in the twenty dollar or lower range (and even then, you may fall into the 'too low to be considered valuable category), even a national, single-message campaign will see tens of thousands of dollars wasted on entire markets that simply cannot afford what you are trying to sell. 

All the statistics provided in this article for Pembroke, Ottawa, Toronto, Kitchener and Waterloo, Ontario (the five cities used to make up average numbers) were all easily found from reliable sources using a search engine within a few minutes. I did it just to reinforce the credibility of this article – Shouldn't you be doing the same to increase the sales for your business ? 

Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario, Canada

 

Copyright © - 2011 Internalysis.com / Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario - All rights reserved -

Making Money on the Internet – With your own Expertise

May 31, 2011

Originally posted on CanadianISP.ca

I'd like you to imagine, for a moment, that you are flipping burgers on the barbecue... and someone pays you twenty dollars.
Now you're watching your favourite television show ... and someone pays you fifty dollars.
Next, you are reading your child a bed time story... and you've earned thirty dollars.
No, I am not talking about running a brothel next door or investment banking. I am talking about earning revenue on the Internet.
Now, before you roll your eyes with the thought that I am just another Ron Pompeil, I'd like to say “But wait! There's more!”
I am also not talking about is selling anything, recruiting anyone or investing any money. This is about you and your expertise.
“But I am just an average Jane in an average job!” You're thinking. “I don't have a university degree and I'm not a recognized expert in anything!”.
The Internet says you're wrong. There is literally nothing that you can think of that isn't searchable – with thousands of results – on the 'net. Think I am exaggerating ?

• “How to sweep a room” - 11,000 results
• “How to pick my nose” - 47,300 results
• “How to cut my lawn” - 16,100 results
• “How to carve wood” - 178,000 results

The chances are that if you enjoy doing something – especially if it is something you do often – you are good at it. It might not be “good” in the way that will give you a syndicated talk show, but I can guarantee that you have ideas, advice and techniques that thousands of other people will read and think “Hunh, I never thought of doing it that way. You know, I'm going to book mark this page and see what she has to say next week”
By this point, you may be thinking “Okay, he might have a point. I am pretty good at making fly fishing lures, but no one's going to pay for that, after all, he just said that you can search all that for free!” - And my answer to you would be: “You're right”. The idea, of course, isn't to get money from the people who are reading about your fly tying secrets, but from the people who want to show those same readers.

Three elements to making a revenue generating site

There are three key elements to making a web site where people will pay you for ads:

1. You must have the content that people will seek out and read
2. Your content must be findable – Not only on search engines, but other sites, too
3. You must have the traffic – the number of people reading your content – to make it worthwhile to put up the ads.

Believe it or not, doing all of this is trivially simple and can be done without spending a dime. Of course, there are methods and techniques where spending a little will help speed up the process, but it is by no means necessary.

The Steps in Detail

So let's take a look at these three steps

1. The content. In creating a content rich website, you first need to choose a topic on which you know a lot about, are passionate about and know will be able to keep writing about regularly. You do not have to have a university degree or accreditation to write on most topics, although it is worth pointing out that if you do, they will add weight to your words.
   
   It is also not about writing one essay and waiting for the money to come in – because that's not going to happen. It is about writing a constant, regular stream of content that your visitors will come back to, time and time again, to read and learn more about what you have to say.
   
   You can also flesh out your content with related stories from other sites such as news reports, studies and statistics. Adding your own commentary and experiences further increases the value to your readers.
2. The second point is making your content findable online. A presentation on search engine optimization and online marketing is a topic all on its own, but briefly, there are many ways for your content to be found by the rest of the world:
   
   While the search engines will eventually find your content on their own, you can submit your sites to them to speed up the process. Other links to your site are also critically important, as well; This doesn't just mean getting other websites to link to you: You can use your own sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot and other sites you own to link to your articles. Getting in touch with media organizations who run regular columns related to your topic and telling them about your site will sometimes result in them linking to you for a specific story or even running a feature on you and your site. Link exchanges are popular, too: You link to a related site in exchange for them doing the same for you helps not only get the word out, but increase the popularity of your site to the rest of the world.
3. Finally, the traffic to justify the advertising dollars. This is a long process, especially if you are doing it with zero budget, but it is by no means impossible. Unlike all the get-rich-quick schemes out there, this process really is about time and dedication. How much you put into it will dictate how much you get out of it and how long it will take. If you spend an hour a week on your site – which is perfectly acceptable – you'll probably see results in about a year or less. If you're spending an hour or two every couple of days, your traffic numbers will jump all the faster.
   
   Key to justifying advertising on your site is the type of people, or the demographics of your traffic. This is where it comes full circle, back to the content of your site. The more focused your site, the fewer the regular visitors you need in order to be considered valuable to an advertiser. For example, if you ran a general interest site, say a news like like cnn or cbc, you'd need at least 50,000 monthly visits to be worth an advertisers time. This is simply because the nature – and interests – of the visitors covers such a broad spectrum that advertisers will see a much lower chance of interest in their ads.
   
   On the other hand, the more focused your site, the lower the visitor count needs to be for it to be worthwhile to advertisers: This is because if your site is about one narrowly defined range of related topics, it means that advertisers of related products know that the interest – and the likelihood of purchases – is much higher. Depending on the nature of your site, a monthly visitor count as low as 5,000 uniques can be enough to generate ad interest.

To Summarize

To summarize earning an income on the 'net;

1. You need the content that you will write about regularly.
2. You need your content to be found on search engines and linked to from as many other sites as possible.
3. You need the numbers of people visiting your site regularly – and telling others about it – to generate interest in advertisers who will pay you to expose their messages to your readers.

An example of how it is done

I will end with an anecdote about a friend of a colleague of mine who did exactly what I have just spoken to you about:

He's a do-it-yourselfer – Always looking for ways to save a few bucks by doing his own repairs, building his own things around the home. He had a regular job, working in accounts receivable for a high tech firm in Alberta, but he also had a passion for writing about his little tips and tricks and posting them to his website.

For the first year, it was pretty much just his own passion. He'd write his articles, tell a few friends about them and even had a few friends write articles for him, just to make his collection bigger. During his second year, he had a hardware store ask if they could put a banner up on his site for $100 a month. Hey, free money, right ? By the end of the second year, he was seeing about a thousand dollars a month. Not enough to quit his job, but it paid off his debts and bought him some nice toys.

Two years ago, before his site was bought out by a major content conglomerator, he was making roughly thirty thousand dollars a month. He had long since quit his job, spent about two solid days a week writing for his site and the other five in pure heaven: Puttering around his house and his shop, coming up with new ideas to write about and making his home a nicer place to live: Not only while saving a few bucks, but while making a fortune at it, too.

Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario, Canada

Why cost per acquisition advertising doesn't work – For the media provider

(Also known as “Pay per conversion” or Pay per action”)

May 18, 2011

Originally posted on CanadianISP.ca

Cost Per Acquisition, or CPA, reminds me of my high school politics teachers' comments on communism: “It is the absolute best and fairest system of them all – On paper. It's when you try to actually make it work that all its faults crop up”.
The idea behind CPA really is the most fair: An advertiser places an ad on your site and only pays you each time they get a new customer. Sounds fair, right ? In principle, it is: They are only paying for the success of what you are providing them: Promotion of their products and/or services.

However.

There are a lot of problems with this model, of which, we'll cover the big three:

1. The risk is entirely upon the media provider: In other words, all the work of providing the content that 'attracts the eyeballs' in the first place fall upon the media provider with no compensation until and unless the advertiser makes a sale. Furthermore, while the media provider may well have the best website/radio program, television show/magazine, etc, the advertisers' ad (or destination web site) may, well, it may suck. Or their sales people may be ineffective (Choose your reasons: Too forceful, uninformed, not personable, etc). Or their product or service itself may suck (Buggy whips for your 2011 SUV, anyone ? ). Because of this, you've not only taken up the ad space on your site/other medium, but now you've alienated your viewers because, fair or not, they will assign part of the blame – even unconsciously – for their rotten experience to you.
2. Your site's content will quickly be drowned out by advertisements. In todays' advertising world, it is a fine balance between consumer content (The stuff they're coming to your site, reading your magazine, watching your show) and advertising space (The stuff that actually pays your bills). If you accepted every Tom, Dick and Jane who asked you for CPA ads, you'd be running something that looked like your local grocery stores' community bulletin board with the content that all those eyeballs – your viewers/users – came to see drowned out. “But wait!”, you exclaim, “I'll set limits on how many ads I accept!” - Which brings you full circle back to issue #1 above: All the risk is upon you to gamble on which advertiser will provide the successful ad which will see both sales for them and revenue for you.
3. You're actually missing out on a lot of revenue. No one likes to say it, but there is always the risk of trust issues with CPA: How do you know that a sale/acquisition/conversion was made ? You don't. You can try to use the assumption that 4% of the viewers will be converted, but that runs the risk of either you or the advertiser getting the short end of the stick. (In my years, I have seen as low as zero percent conversion and as high as 75% conversion). There is also the issue that just because a viewer sees an ad and clicks through to a site/calls the store/visits, they may not make a purchase now, but their decision to make that purchase in six months started directly because of the ad they saw on your medium – And guess who's not going to get paid for it ? You.

So what is the best way to price your ad space ? In a nutshell, there are three primary means of compensation, plus the age old swap of one service for another:

1. CPM or cost per thousand impressions; You select a price for which your advertiser will pay you X amount of money for every thousand times their ad is displayed¹. (Alternatively, though for more highly targeted sites, you can use CPI, or Cost Per Impression, where X represents each impression made, but this is fairly uncommon) – This works well for higher volume sites of 25,000 unique visits or more per month.
2. CPC or cost per click; You select a price for which your advertiser will pay you X amount of money for each clickthrough from your site to theirs¹. This works quite well on nearly any type of site, as you are compensated for every action, the advertiser only pays for active participation of the consumer with their brand and it is entirely up to the advertiser whether or not the actual conversion happens.
3. Fixed monthly, quarterly or yearly fee: This is perhaps the simplest form of payment (and one that I, personally, use on my sites) where the advertiser pays you a set amount of money per time period, whether they see a million impressions, clickthroughs or conversions, the price is all the same. You are compensated for the space, the advertiser has a guaranteed time frame and budget and the risk is evenly distributed: It is up to you to “keep the eyeballs coming” and it is up to the advertisers to turn passive eyeballs into active customers.
4. The swap: This is simply an advertiser putting up an ad on your site in exchange for you putting up an ad on theirs, where no money changes hands at all. Sometimes, in business – especially on the Internet – making money isn't always the end goal of the day: Getting traffic, exposure and new readers is of extremely high importance. Having other sites link to yours can be extremely helpful to your search engine rankings, so this method of advertising should definitely not be completely ignored.

So the next question, of course, is how do you set a price for your chosen method of advertising ? That is an article in and of itself, but suffice it to say that not all traffic is equal (A thousand hits on your website may well be worth a heckuva lot more than a thousand on the other guys'), experimentation and communication with your customers are all key.

¹ Measuring clickthroughs and impressions: It is extremely important for you to use SERVER SIDE metrics to measure these: I.e. Javascripts, Google Analytics, Quantcast and other traffic measuring tools are very handy for getting a general idea on your traffic, but given the sheer number of privacy tools available to the general public, as well as the number of users who have things like JavaScript turned off on their browsers, the difference in what your server reports as actual impressions and clickthroughs (Clickthroughs being measured through an intermediary CGI script that is, again, purely server side and not client side) can be surprisingly large. It is important to point this out to your advertisers, too, as it will save you a lot of explanations, trying to teach them the basics of traffic measurement when they tell you that they saw only 500 impressions from your site where your server is telling you there were 953. Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario, Canada

Copyright © - 2011 Internalysis.com / Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario - All rights reserved -

What you can do in the fight against pedophiles and child molesters

 
Originally posted on CanadianISP.ca

You're just an average Jane or Joe, right ? You're not in law enforcement, so you're thinking this article does not apply to you ?

You could not be more wrong.
 
Each and every hour of every day, children are exploited, harmed and molested by truly evil people and they are helped, unwittingly, by thousands of people who would be mortified if they knew just how big a role they're playing in the spread of child pornography and advocacy of pedophilia. 

So how can you make a difference ?

Secure your networks.

 

For one: Secure your wireless devices – Iphones, wireless routers, laptops and so on: Your networking setup should absolutely be using some form of encryption or network protection. Many, many pedophiles take advantage of unsecured wireless networks by simply driving around a town with a laptop, looking for unsecured networks. Once they find one (Many home-use wireless routers have more than enough range to reach clear through a house and across a street), they pull over and start sending and receiving child pornography images – or worse – engage in the solicitation or grooming of children for their “needs”. What is worse second only to the child abuse itself is that if and when law enforcement traces this heinous activity back to its source, they will find YOUR network as the source of the illegal activity.

Scan for viruses

 

Second: Run regular virus scanners. In addition to computer viruses that can harm your computer by deleting information, much more common are the viruses that turn your machine into a “zombie”, or a computer that sends out hundreds of thousands of spam messages. However – and more crucially – not all those spams are ads for penis pills or stock frauds: Many of these zombie machines are used to spread child pornography images in order to keep their pedophile authors and true distributors safe from discovery. Once again, however, if and when it is traced back to its source, the phrase “world of hurt” will not even begin to describe the scenario you will face in trying to prove your innocence through ignorance. Better to avoid it all in the first place.

Change your passwords regularly

 

Thirdly: Many, if not most, regular home users not only use the same password for years on end, not only do they use the same password for multiple online resources (Perhaps the worst example would be using your Facebook password as your online banking password) but people also use disgustingly easy passwords to guess (or rather: Brute force attack by a computer running your account through a dictionary): At the very least, your password should not be:

1. found in a dictionary
2. found in a baby names book
3. be a date of birth, phone number or address of anyone you know.

Those are the top three easy to guess/easy to find pieces information to get your password. In addition to cracked passwords potentially causing you to lose money from online banking accounts, your online game accounts or cause embarrassing posts supposedly made by you, your cracked account can then also be used to send and receive child pornography images by the very pedophiles you would rather see in jail, rather than helping them out.
It is not just the complaints about inappropriate postings allegedly made by you, or the complaints you will have to make to your banks and other online accounts you need to worry about, but the possible legal ramifications, the damage to your reputation and, most importantly, the fact that you've made it easier for pedophiles and child molesters to do what they do.
Avoid it all by following the common-sense advice above.

Copyright © - 2011 Internalysis.com / Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario - All rights reserved -

Hockey: Bloodsport or National Icon ?

or
“No, Virginia, violence isn't the answer, unless it's hockey, in which case, beat the @*#^! out of him!”

Originally posted on Beachburg.com

 In this day and age of easy access to all forms of media at all times of the day, be it through your television, PVR, the Internet, movies or what have you, parents are expected to teach their kids right from wrong, real from fake, entertainment versus reality and so on. In reality, many parents these days never even have the conversations with their kids about what is “right and wrong”, other than “don't hit your sister” or “clean that up, so help me!” - So, the powers that be have little reminders to nag at the conscience of parents, to remind them that some content may not be suitable for kids under a certain age or, at the very least, a reminder to the parents to tell their kids that what they're about to see is not real, potentially scary/upsetting and wouldn't really happen (“No, Virginia, aliens don't burst from your stomach. Now, pass the popcorn”)

So, where are the warnings before NHL games ? I never see a pre-screen that says “Warning, may contain content not suitable for children under the age of 14” or “May contain gratuitous violence and coarse language”. What seems to be worse is that without these warnings, some parents sit right beside their kids and scream at the television screen for one guy to “kill him” or “beat the crap outta him!” or “Smash that @#$&^er into the boards, you idiot!”

What is even worse than that is these same parents take that same attitude to the little league rinks and scream the same brilliant “advice” ... to a bunch of ten year olds.

So the kids see their “heroes” doing it on TV, they see their parents worshipping those same “heroes” for doing it on TV and then those same parents again encourage the kids to emulate this behaviour in a game that is supposed to be “in the spirit of fun, team work and physical fitness”

Why is it that if you send a hockey kid to the second grade and the teacher advocates other kids to beat each other up for the privilege of getting out for recess first, that parents would be screaming bloody blue murder and it would be a race between the lynch mob to string her up at the gallows and the police to take her away for child abuse, yet when little league coaches (and the wannabe “coaches” in the stands) advocate it, it's cheered on ?

Why is it if a kid breaks another kids' arm (or neck) on the playground, in the classroom or on the streets, a police investigation and a lawsuit are highly likely, but if that same kid ends up in the paraplegic ward at the hospital, “it's just part of the game, eh ?”

People make the low-brow argument that hockey is a fast paced sport where contact is inevitable and fighting is “part of the game”. Well, basketball is a fast paced sport and contact is inevitable – but: Contact is called a “foul” and these things called “penalties” are given out and ejection from the game is given if too many fouls occur. If a basketball player were so colossally stupid as to actually raise a fist against an opposing team member, he'd be ejected not only from the game, but from the building so fast his head would spin.

Funny thing is: Same thing with soccer. And football. And cricket. All of those sports are just as high energy, just as high adrenaline, just as “testosterone-laden” as hockey, yet if you raised a hand against a fellow player: Out you go. Even in football, where part of the whole game is about tackles and ramming into each other, you do not see players throwing gloves to the turf and beating the living daylights out of each other, while crowds of moms and dads with their kids beside them scream “KILL HIM! KILL THE @#*^&ER!!!!”

So why hockey ?

And especially: Why a sport that is supposed to be our national sport, to which tends of thousands of kids aspire to ?

Many of the (again) low-brows claim that fighting and aggressive checking is “part of the sport”, “makes it what it is” and so on: Yet each Olympic hockey, fighting, violence and aggressive contact is severelydecades after some Olympic games. curtailed, at the risk of ejection from the game, yet tens of millions of people speak of games in hushed tones of awe for years and

Furthermore, finally and, perhaps most importantly: Thousands and thousands of doctors, nurses, health care practitioners, child health experts and sports safety experts are calling the advocacy of violence in youth hockey no different than child abuse. Because that is exactly what it is: When you advocate for a child to actively and consciously go out and harm another child: That is abuse.

Funny thing is, in anything but hockey, not only is that an arrestable offense, but it's one that will get you put into a segregation cell in prison, because even murderers and rapists won't have anything to do with child abusers.

Marc Bissonnette is the proprietor of CanadianISP, Canadas' largest Internet Service Provider search and comparison site.

InternAlysis - Customized, specialized, dedicated eMarketing specialist
CanadianISP - Canadas' largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) list and comparison web site

How "last mile" providers, telcos and cablecos, could improve the entire industry

(And how they could do better for the public, the ISPs and their share holders )

Originally posted on CanadianISP.ca


There has been a lot of controversy in the past few years over how last mile providers are operating with regards to consumers in general and wholesale ISPs in specific. 


Charges of monopolism, restriction of trade, unfair trade practices are rife, to name but a few. 


Just to be clear, a "last mile" provider is someone to whom a consumer pust pay, directly or indirectly, to get from their home or business, out to the rest of the world; This is through the physical copper (or fibre) connection from their home or business, out to the poles or conduits, to a switching station, then to the rest of the Internet.


Obviously, you cannot have multiple last mile providers for each home; No one would want to see a solid wall of telephone poles lining streets or having their roads dug up once every three months when someone new enters the market to provide service.


Someone has to provide this service. Nine times out of ten, this is your local telephone or cable company. This has been accomplished over the past century and more by grants of right-of-way by local, provincial/state and federal governments to ensure communications were available to all.

The problem

A monopoly made a lot of sense thirty years ago and more: As mentioned above, you don't want five poles in front of each house and frankly, POTS was such a simple service that having one (or very few) carriers simply made it easier for all to ensure thorough communications reach to citizens.


In todays world, however, communications is a lot more - a VERY large amount more - than simply converting a voice to electrical impulses and re-converting them on the other end to create a conversation circuit; We have email, web, VoIP, video conferencing, VPNs, and many, many more forms of multiple-way (note: A LOT more than simple "two way") communication.


To state the obvious, some companies do things better than others. Some companies are so specialized that ALL they do is one form of the myriad of communications options we have today. It would be the very height of hubris to state, or even vaguely suggest, that one company can do all of this better than all the rest. This includes the last mile providers.

The harm

So why is it that governments in North America, specifically in Canada and the United States, are allowing a BACKWARDS slide in this competitive world ? One does not need to be radical, left-wing, ultra liberal or a conspiracy theorist to know - and cite many examples of - the fact that monopolies, duopolies (any form of genuinely limited competition) in critical infrastructure in a capitalist society does not work. In fact, they cause harm to large segments of society, ALWAYS.


A look at the real estate bubble and it's root cause: The banking and financial corruption that caused not only millions of people to lose their homes, but the massive impact to the global economy that we are still feeling, today. A look at the rare earths market and Chinas' decision to cut back 30% of exports and the sudden panic on the effect this will have if Canadian and US mines don't start up because so much of the worlds' supply came from one place. WalMart, though a huge success for stockholders and consumers looking for the lowest price, has created entire 'business ghost towns' where there is literally nothing but a WalMart and residences - nothing else.


Without reasonable competition in an industry, the desire for greater and greater profits causes greater and greater harm to those around them; Choices are removed from not only consumers, but from businesses that provide jobs and contribute to the GDP and tax base, as well as the diversity of a community, be that on a local or provincial/state wide basis to weather downturns in a particular sector or unforeseen force majeures.


Obviously, calling for the end to all telcos and cablecos would be utterly foolish: They provide an infrastructure that both businesses and the consumers need to access the rest of the world at large. Where I think they are falling afoul of the "desire for greater and greater profits and causing greater and greater harm to those around them" is that they are looking towards the fact that entertainment content is moving entirely over to the Internet and they want a solely captive audience with zero competition. By entertainment content, I refer to television and movie content moving at an increasingly rapid pace to being delivered over IP, rather than over the air (By broadcast or satellite).


In my view, they see the profits in this not only from subscription-based content, but in bandwidth used for such content. At present, the global average for content usage is 11 gb/month ( "Cisco Visual Networking Index Study Finds Today's Average Global Broadband Connection Generates 11.4 Gigabytes of Internet Traffic per Month" newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/prod_102109.html ) - This is up from only a year ago where the average content used was between five and six gigabytes per month. This number is, obviously, going up and an exponential rate, year over year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

A solution

So, what is the solution ? The average price for DSL in Canada, for example, is $47.55 per month (Source: CanadianISP.ca pricing data) - This works out to roughly 43 cents per megabyte, per month, on average. What I believe the telcos and cablecos SHOULD be doing is encouraging MORE isps to get MORE customers to engage in MORE transfer. In other words: The telcos and cablecos could not only be the "White Knights" of the ISP industry by encouraging competition, they can PROFIT from it, as well as the ISPs. How do they do that ?


Right now, the average ISP pays a wholesale cost between $16 - $20 / month / loop to the telco for a DSL line. Given the average, bare bones DSL contact tends to hover around $24 / month for the consumer, that does not leave a lot of room at all for the ISP to profit not only to pay its bills, but to expand, invest or innovate. Telco and Cablecos could encourage - and profit - from this with the following model:


Change the loop access price to $5.00 / loop / month


Bill $0.0012 per megabyte, starting at meg 0 - With an average of 11 gigs / month used, the telco will see $13.20 / month plus the $5.00 access fee plus any overages. This not only encourages ISPs to aggressively recruit new clients, but for the public to consume more in terms of bandwidth, for which both the ISP and the local loop provider will profit from. It also encourages new entrants to the ISP market, with all of the related benefits of job creation, equipment purchases, taxes collected and so on.


Edit - January, 2011: After speaking with many people using the 'net more and more for TV, movies and other, high volume content, a better UBB model presents itself:

Speeds up to 6 Megabits / sec: ~0.0020 / megabyte (Assumes roughly ~10 GB/mo)

Speeds from 6-20 Megabits / sec: ~0.0005 / megabyte (Assumes rought ~120 GB/mo)

 (Plus monthly connection fee of $5 / month for <10 Mb/Sec, $10 / month for >= 10 Mb/sec)


At the rate this is going, the current model will not hold out; There will be a consumer backlash to the point where the current system will be overhauled. The worse case scenario is that foreign competition would enter the scene with even more money that the Canadian telco and cablecos, throwing a lot of the industry out on its tail, not to mention the massive fallout in stocks and bonds. The least worst (and it's still bad) is they'll be legislated into a scenario described above, but that will not rectify the intervening years of massive profit gouging, harm to the market and the dismal 36th place Canada currently sits at, in terms of broadband speed and availability.

-Marc Bissonnette, Beachburg, Ontario
CanadianISP.ca
October 29, 2010

Life in a small town and the knowledge economy

 Originally posted on CanadianISP.ca

By now, if you've looked over more than two pages on CanadianISP, you will probably have deduced that I live in Beachburg, Ontario. Many, if not most of you have asked where the heck is Beachburg ? That's okay if you did: A common joke around here is that you have to turn the map of Ontario over to find our little farming village of nine hundred people.

Given I grew up in Ottawa and spent a good part of my sales, marketing and Internet career in both Montreal and Toronto, many ask - Why a village of 900, more than an hour and a half from Ottawa and four and half hour drive from Toronto ?

There were two reasons, initially, though after nearly nine years, now, that list of reasons has grown a lot. Initially, however, it was: Cost of living and family. We moved here after our third child was born because Toronto was insanely expensive to live in and the thought of our children playing outside, unsupervised, without armed guards and an attack helicopter hovering overhead gave us the willies.

When looking for a new home, we hadn't even heard of Beachburg: Our methodology was to take a piece of string that represented 200km and trace a two hour circle around Ottawa. (We still hadn't heard of Beachburg at that point) - When looking at homes in Renfrew, Arnprior, Carleton Place, Almonte, Calebogie (all places we both knew about and had spent time in), the real estate agent said "I'd like to show you a couple of places in Pembroke and Beachburg".
Pembroke ? I'd seen the city name on the sign for the westbound 417, but that was about it. Beach - what ?!? A long drive later, we found a house and property we fell in love with. The price was right, the neighbourhood was amazing, school literally steps away and - best of all - 6 megabit DSL with a switching station (Heck, the actual telco itself) about 800 meters from the house.

SOLD

Some may think that two hours from Ottawa is too far to live from major shopping (Though Pembroke, a town of 14,000, is less than 20 minutes from here), but really, how long do you spend in rush hour in Toronto or Ottawa ? (Two hours in rush hour in Toronto ? That's an *amazing* time! Ottawa is certainly creeping up there, but is still no where close to T.O.)

With broadband to the home, a business like mine (InternAlysis, a virtual marketing director is my 'real' company) in the knowledge economy is a no brainer in a setting like this. As the global economy becomes more, well, global, cost of living is becoming an important factor for an awful lot of people. Before I started CanadianISP, the bulk of my work was in perl CGI scripting, MySQL application design and emarketing consulting. I charged $100 / hour and had *no* problem filling my billable hours. (In fact, I was middle-of-the-road in terms of rates. I knew - and learned from - some absolutely *brilliant* coders in T.O. who charged $350/hour with an eight hour minimum and they still had to turn clients away for lack of time)

Nowadays, however, you can get some extremely talented coders from Russia, Pakistan and India for as little as US $10/hour for their work. Why compete in what was once a unique and specialized area that had become commoditized ? This is especially true if living in a city like Toronto: Supporting a family of five on ten dollars an hour simply is not possible.

So, from my home in our little community of Beachburg, where, compared to my parents' place in Ottawa, I literally have ten times the property size, twice the square footage in the house, I pay less than a fifth of their property taxes, water rates and insurance costs. Yes, meeting up with the family or old friends takes a little more planning (Especially when one child with Angelman Syndrome is in a wheelchair), but overall, it is massively worth it.

If you run your own business and it does not rely on a lot of face-to-face on a regular basis with your clients, you may want to ask yourself if you really need to be living in the high priced urban areas.
Before we moved here, financially, we were making it happen, but things got tight from time to time. After the second month here in Beachburg, after the bills had a chance to come in, there was a ton of money left over in the bank account. Suddenly, luxuries we hadn't thought of were possible. We took our first trip to the Carribean. Our children have gone to Nova Scotia and Florida, amongst other places. Our kids can play outside and not have to worry about muggers, drug dealers, rapists or pedophiles.

Small town living ? Oh heck yeah!

Organic marketing versus, well, everything else on the Internet

 Originally posted on CanadianISP.ca

Organic, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Socila Media Advertising, Link Farming, print/paper/radio/television advertising, direct mail marketing, email marketing – The list of methods for getting your company's brand and message out there actually goes on even further.
So which is “best” ? Depending who you ask, this is where the blood gets ankle deep and children are turned into orphans. This commentary, however, will be on my observations of thirty years on Internet use, twenty of them professionally in all three of technical development, sales and marketing (All three of which, I still do today)
The quick answer, for me, would be “Organic marketing is the way to go, period.”

Why is organic marketing better ?

Why ? It takes longer to see results, the feedback loop is no where near as immediate, so evolving your strategy can often be a matter of months, rather than hours, and, in general, organic marketing is time and labour intensive.
Why ? Because it works. Not only does it work to bring people your message, thus bringing the people to you, but it's because it gives them the answers to the solutions they are actually seeking. Pay per click, push media like television and newspaper, mail or email marketing, most of those are typically a scatter gun approach, or “Throw enough mud at the barn wall and some of it has got to stick”. They rely on the sheer volume of people seeing the message and the hope that that message is good enough that that magical four percent conversion ratio, or view-to-click ratio, will be achieved.

So what is "organic" marketing ?

Organic, or “natural” marketing, is the process of getting other people, web sites, blogs, social media, word of mouth and private emails to not only link to your business, but recommend and endorse it because it is relevant to them and to those they think will benefit from it. Organic marketing automatically contains the subconscious recommendation-from-a-satisfied-friend benefit, because the chances are when you are reading a site that you already follow faithfully, you do so because you value and/or trust that sites' content: When that trusted source recommends another source, you automatically give that second source a higher chance of earning your business, rather than a random Joe along the street who happens to see the same thing.
Of course, organic marketing, when successful, also gives the same benefits as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, in that you're placed at the top of the search engine results. To be fair, this is not only harder to do, but also harder to maintain, but this is pretty standard: You can spend your entire weekend fixing your own car, getting dirty, cuts and scrapes, lost time that you'd rather spend on the boat, or you can pay someone else to do it in an afternoon in their shop.
Like fixing your own car, the satisfaction of having done it yourself is tremendous. Unlike fixing your car, however, organic marketing success also brings you financial benefits in the form of increased business. If you're doing things right, this is not only an increase in short term sales, but in the long term retention of loyal and repeat customers.

A little advice for successful organic marketing methods

The purpose of this commentary isn't really to get into the how-to's of organic marketing (I might put up something like that at a later date if there is enough interest), but I will make a few suggestions:

1. Content, content, content! Just like having a repeat customer come back to your store for new and interesting products, repeat visitors to your site are looking for new and interesting content. Never forget that most people do not make a purchase on their first visit to a site: Give them reasons to come back.
2. Don't insult your customers by telling them to buy your products on your say-so alone. This is related to #1, above: If your website is nothing but a catalogue of your products, along with their prices and a bunch of checkout buttons, you are insulting your customers by telling them “Buy our stuff because we tell you to”. When selling widgets or services online, you need to show, via your site, how to use your widgets, why people use your widgets, creative use of same, feedback from your customers on your widgets good and bad – that shows you listen to your customers.
3. The Internet is much more than just your website: You, your company and your staff should be all over the place. There are literally millions of forums, websites, blogs, social media sites and so on where your company's presence should be felt. HOWEVER: Be aware that sometimes, “presence” and “spam” can have a very fine, sometimes invisible, dividing line between them. If you're not sure about putting content about your firm on someone elses' site, try asking the site owner. At the very least, if you can't see other examples of companies doing the same on the site you'd like to expose yourself on, try asking the users. A message like “Hi everyone, I represent a company that is very much related to this forum and I think we've got a lot of insights and advice that would be of interest, but do not wish to have the appearance of spamming – Can anyone point me in the right direction for what is and isn't acceptable here in terms of company participation in the discussions and community ?” - That will give you a lot warmer reception than blatantly jumping in, head first, with an all-out ad for your latest product, no matter how closely related to the site's interests you are.
4. Email marketing and confirmed opt-in. This is critical to email marketing and communications: You should never, ever be sending email to any member of the public without whom you do not already have a business relationship, are answering a direct query or have a record of the confirmation of their permission for your to send them bulk email. Keep in mind that the first two, direct business relationship (i.e. They just bought something from you) and query response (They just asked if your products also come in pink) does not constitute permission to send other, bulk, email. Bulk email includes newsletters, site update notifications, sales or promotions mails, solicitations for new business and so on. Failure to adhere to confirmed opt-in for email marketing will very quickly find your company listed with Spamhaus or AHBL, which means your internet will quickly turn into an intranet – meaning you won't be able to email anyone but yourself.
5. Given the perception that email marketing is cheap, quick and 'has the potential to reach millions', read #4 again.
6. Cross-linking; The ideal goal is to have as many possible sites linking to yours as possible, in order to raise your profile both to the general public, as well as to the search engines. However: The concept of “pay it forward” or “Do unto thy neighbour” also applies, here: Don't be afraid to make your own recommendations for complimentary (but non-competing) businesses of your own. In fact, doing such is a great opener for getting in touch with the company you'd like to recommend with a note along the lines of “You know, we're really impressed with your product and would like to let you know that we are recommending your company on our site, here (URL here) – We would like to know if you would be interested in reciprocating the link because, as you know, the greater the cross links sites have across the net, the better we each appear in search engine results”. Of course, it is even better if you can actually pick up the phone and ask this of someone you have a business relationship with, rather than an “out of the blue” email.

There are so many other hints, tips and suggestions on true, successful organic marketing that it would literally take a book – a large one – to cover them all. Some of it is through trial and error (and yes, I have the benefit of twenty years of such for my own efforts), but the above is a good starter. You can also search for “Organic marketing tips” and similar terms in your preferred search engine and get a lot of healthy tips and ideas.
At the end of the day, Organic marketing success should be your ultimate goal, whether you've just started a new business or are a long term player in your industry. I guarantee you sales and profit from organic marketing are a lot higher in the long run than the quick injections from PPC or similar.
How do I know ? Well, running Canada's number one Internet Service Provider ( ISP ) list and comparison site, CanadianISP, from Beachburg, Ontario, a farming village of 900, should be an indication of just how well it works :)