Marketing via Saying the Right Thing (or at least NOT the wrong thing)

May 8, 2007

I was busy writing a sweet post on my thoughts about Seth’s latest post when I ran accross someone who already said what I was looking to say.

(Sometimes you just can’t say it any better… )

Stu writes:

Seth Godin today writes that when a store helper asks, “May I help you,” it’s equivalent in its uselessness to asking a teenager “How was school today?”

It’s funny because I was thinking about the same thing when I walked into Radio Shack the other day. The RadioShack employees are paid on commission, so helping you is pretty important to them. When I walked in, the sales rep asked me if he could help me today, and I politely declined. I tend to decline most of the time, perhaps because I’m stubborn and perhaps because I’m a man.

At the same time, though, I was thinking, “If I were him, I would be asking customers something they don’t have a predetermined response for, like, ‘What are you looking for today?’” It’s a little tweak in language, but it would make all the difference in getting a response.

“Oh, you want headphones, it’s over here – follow me.” In this way, I am not supposing the customer is helpless or incompetent (which is what the customer feels when you ask him “May I help you”), but rather, I am now cutting down his or her time in the store. I am suddenly a value added.

Tweak your questions, and you’ll get a much better response.

1 Comment | Blog, Business Development, Development, Marketing, Startups | Permalink
Posted by mikeglanz

An Oldie but Goodie on SEO, Blogs, and getting hits…

May 8, 2007

Seth Writes – (or wrote?)…..

How to get traffic for your blog

My friend Fred, a talented blogger, asked me for advice the other day. Here’s a partial answer, with a few apologies to Swift:

  1. Use lists.
  2. Be topical… write posts that need to be read right now.
  3. Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
  4. Break news.
  5. Be timeless… write posts that will be readable in a year.
  6. Be among the first with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to blog on the same topic.
  7. Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
  8. Announce news.
  9. Write short, pithy posts.
  10. Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
  11. Don’t write about your cat, your boyfriend or your kids.
  12. Write long, definitive posts.
  13. Write about your kids.
  14. Be snarky. Write nearly libelous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog.
  15. Be sycophantic. Share linklove and expect some back.
  16. Include polls, meters and other eye candy.
  17. Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
  18. Coin a term or two.
  19. Do email interviews with the well-known.
  20. Answer your email.
  21. Use photos. Salacious ones are best.
  22. Be anonymous.
  23. Encourage your readers to digg your posts. (and to use furl and reddit). Do it with every post.
  24. Post your photos on flickr.
  25. Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
  26. Start at the beginning and take your readers through a months-long education.
  27. Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.
  28. Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
  29. Highlight your best posts on your Squidoo lens.
  30. Point to useful but little-known resources.
  31. Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers–like gadgets and web 2.0.
  32. Write about Google.
  33. Have relevant ads that are even better than your content.
  34. Don’t include comments, people will cross post their responses.
  35. Write posts that each include dozens of trackbacks to dozens of blog posts so that people will notice you.
  36. Run no ads.
  37. Keep tweaking your template to make it include every conceivable bell or whistle.
  38. Write about blogging.
  39. Digest the good ideas of other people, all day, every day.
  40. Invent a whole new kind of art or interaction.
  41. Post on weekdays, because there are more readers.
  42. Write about a never-ending parade of different topics so you don’t bore your readers.
  43. Post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts.
  44. Don’t interrupt your writing with a lot of links.
  45. Dress your blog (fonts and design) as well as you would dress yourself for a meeting with a stranger.
  46. Edit yourself. Ruthlessly.
  47. Don’t promote yourself and your business or your books or your projects at the expense of the reader’s attention.
  48. Be patient.
  49. Give credit to those that inspired, it makes your writing more useful.
  50. Ping technorati. Or have someone smarter than me tell you how to do it automatically.
  51. Write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive.
  52. Write in English.
  53. Better, write in Chinese.
  54. Write about obscure stuff that appeals to an obsessed minority.
  55. Don’t be boring.
  56. Write stuff that people want to read and share.

Feel free to post your own ideas (satirical or otherwise) in the comments below.

 

Leave a Comment » | Blog, Marketing, Startups | Permalink
Posted by mikeglanz

Seth might be wrong?

May 7, 2007

So I’m usually in huge agreement with Seth, on just about everything… but this time… I’m not quite sure… I’d be interested to see his blog stats… but judging from mine, every time I comment on a blog post, I get 3 times as many referrals if its less than three lines… my guess is that people enjoy the snack size… (who wants to make Jello Pudding, when you can have Snack-Packs!). Snack size means you can have variety and the variety can be in different genres, flavors, or colors. Whether it be advertisements, or entertainment you can taste something new and not be committed to eating the whole box, finishing the movie, or reading the last page.

Seth’s big on Small Business right now… and I think he has a right to be… but small business is thriving now for the same reason that “Snack Sized” entertainment is… people want variety… we do have “unlimited real-estate” as Seth Points out… but it doesn’t mean we should build just for the sake of building.

Lets focus on quality (a debate on topics worth hearing for example), rather than quantity (a 24 hour debate channel), and keep the supply just slightly behind the demand… slowly increasing the quantity of our advertisements/content/whatever as the population demands. So instead of building an city for 40 million people with our unlimited real estate, lets build a city for 10… then when we fill that up work on building an even better area for 10 more.

The analogy lacks…. how about this… Apple started with a few of their “Get A Mac” ads… they tried out the waters… built a few new “homes” on their real-estate, waited to see if people bought, and when it was a success built a few more, and a few more. As soon as people stop buying, they can stop building.

Charles Schwab started their “Ask Chuck” advertising campaign at the same time. It’s lame. No one makes copies of it and posts it on YouTube… no one shares it with their friends… but they keep milking the thing for all its worth. They used their “unlimited” real estate and now they have a 3000 unit apartment complex that no one wants.

So here we go again… lets take a poll…

I have a colleague that teaches e-commerce and he has a phrase “How long has it been since we’ve taken a poll?” and all the students immediately respond “Too Long!”. So in honor of the esteemed founder of PlumberSurplus.com lets hear what you think…

Mike vs. Seth – Round 1 :

Post a simple “mike” or “seth” comment with your choice… Build cause we can? or Not? Feel free to offer you thoughts on the matter as well.

3 Comments | Blog, Business Development, Marketing, Startups | Permalink
Posted by mikeglanz

Re-evaluating my target market…

May 7, 2007

Seth writes: “…you’re way better off helping the perfect improve.”

Who is my target market… I have always considered the target market to be homeowners who want to save money… the Do-It-Yourself-ers.

I don’t really have an answer for this question yet, consider it and get back to me:

Who would you market a service to that allows users to hire local helpers for cheap, to do all sorts of manual labor jobs?

Post your replies fellow bloggers. I’m curious to your thoughts… Is there a “perfect customer” for HireAHelper?

3 Comments | Blog, Business Development, Marketing, Startups | Permalink
Posted by mikeglanz

How Bad Design Increases Business

May 5, 2007

Sorry for you designers who read my blog regularly. Let me explain something though:

Better Design does NOT mean Better Website.

I’ll give you the background:

I’m looking to get HireAHelper designed and I know a guy who does a decent job of that sort of thing, actually he’s pretty much a genius when it comes to CSS/HTML/Photoshop and using the three to make unbelievable sites. He very much subscribes to the methods of building sites that people like the founders of HappyCog preach about. I would dare say that he might be better than people that are working there and better than some best selling authors on standards based web design.

So I’m thinking great, I have the ultimate hookup, I’ll use this guy to get me first class design for a fraction of the cost and it will help us in the long run. Well he flaked. He didn’t hold up his end of the deal he did two things that will deter me from recommending him:

1. He set deadlines and didn’t meet them.

2. He set more deadlines and didn’t meet them.

But you know why he got “fired”? The thing that made me put a stop to his work, decide that it was worth paying him for what he had done, then trashing it, admitting my mistake and starting from scratch with another designer? It’s reason 3.

3. He designed (or started to design) a site that looked great but didn’t accomplish the task at hand. It has the foundation of a site that would win awards for design… but not one that would keep customers. So I trashed it.

Why?

I know HireAHelper needs to “be” a few things in order for people to trust it. It needs to be established… not the website that was thrown together and has been live for 2 weeks. People need to “know” subconsciously seeing the site that it has been around for a while (even if it hasn’t) and that its reputable. Really great design doesn’t mean reputable. Lets look at some examples.

Ask yourself the question “How long has this company been in business?” when looking at the following sites:

DoMyStuff.com

HeyAmigo.net

ma.gnolia.com

Would you say more than 2 years for any of them? Why not?

Let’s contrast this with the following “Badly” designed sites:

Emove.com

HelpUSell.com

NetFlix.com

Even if you hadn’t heard of them… would you question that they had been around for a while? Would you know exactly what they do?

Here’s my point. It’s MUCH more important to represent stability/reliability/trustworthiness than to win design contests.

Its even MORE important to get conversions that to focus on “semantic” html/css.

I have heard stories about HTML so bad it didn’t have the <html> tags in it, to be honest I would take the <html> tags out of my entire site, AND do the entire design in frontpage… NO… Claris Homepage even with 15 embedded tables per page and have NOTHING compatible in Firefox or Safari if ONLY TO GET .01% MORE CONVERSIONS.

The web is a marketplace. When people stopped respecting the rules of the market it crashed. They put priority on getting users with no revenue stream. They put priority on fancy trinkets of websites that didn’t produce income or even have a business model. That was Web 1.0 bubble.

This is Web2.0. Whether its a bubble or not is up to us. You can put priority on pretty design, and trendy colors (essentially this). Or you can put priority on getting more conversions, on making your “storefront” (whether you sell advertising, products, or services) more profitable. Even if that means putting an ugly sign up form on your homepage.

After thinking long and hard about HireAHelper’s home page I have come to this conclusion… it’s worth it to pay for design ONLY if it leads to conversions. Right now I would pay twice as much for the designer (some college intern no doubt) who designed HelpUSell.com, as the “world’s best” design and branding company HappyCog if the resulting site was going to be like Ma.gnolia.com. Why because my target audience (I’m not targetting “web2.0ers”) is a group of people who will associate the “bad” design with a reputable company. They think the site looks “professional” and not “like a college project” (while the exact opposite may actually be true).

So hears my warning to designers. Don’t design yourself out of a job. Put business first. When using your little key terms such as “increased usability”, “softer colors”, and “semantic code” you better have a reason for those things that points to more profit for your employer/client.

Look for “How Bad Design Increases Business Part 2″ in the near future…

For now check out what these people have said about design as well…

Seth

Matt

14 Comments | Business Development, Design, Development, Marketing | Permalink
Posted by mikeglanz

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