Flaming Dragons
I’m sure I’m not the only entrepreneur sitting at home ranting at the telly, but when Mark Champkin arrived on the screen demanding £100k for 15% of a company offering a range of innovative gear for kids, I was amazed by the Dragons’ recalcitrance (hmm, that’s a good word)…. thank God for Peter Jones, lankier and richer than the rest of them put together, he went for it. What I love about real businesspeople is that they’ve got the capacity to take risk; and make a decision. Peter Jones’ decision to invest £100,000 for 40% of the company was a really simple deal. £100k for accessing brilliant originality, dead easy.I admire Mark Champkin’s chutzpah for holding out, but to quibble over 5% when you’ve got that kind of backing on the table, is madness. Nevertheless, Peter’s got a great deal, and best of luck to Mark, it was an excellent pitch.
The Baldy’s get Leopard
Quick post about Apple’s Leopard. Webreality is mainly a Microsoft shop, but at home the Baldy’s use Macs. We’ve got a big iMac in the kitchen that acts as a digital hub for the whole house - iTunes is piped around the house to different airports, and any Macs joined to the network can access all media. We’ve got a nice Canon printer/scanner tucked away and connected to Airport, because you really don’t want an ugly printer in your kitchen.This weekend we upgraded the whole network to Leopard. Leopard looks and feels fantastic, although the installation time was lengthy. One of the nice things with upgrading an OS with Apple is that performance gets better not worse, and Leopard was no exception. The main iMac has suffered from time to time with 5 users logging in and leaving apps running - Leopard seems to handle this much more easily.From a family perspective Leopard’s a great leap forward. Parental controls are really sophisticated, I can control access times, websites, application lists, even approved friend lists for iChat and Mail (they can request additional contacts remotely). I can take remote access of the home iMac and fix any issues the family may have, as well as browse logs of all internet access.Then we plugged in a new 500GB external drive. The Mac turned it into a time machine drive and promptly took an image of the iMac. Backing up my MacBook Pro was just as easy (even faster on the MacBook pro with Firewire 800). Time Machine really is the killer app for me in Leopard. Our family iMac has years of family related media which is literally priceless.Spaces is old hat (Linux users have had this for years), but still where Leopard scores, is the ambient environment of sheer designed luxury. Rush out and buy it now, it’s a bargain.
Surviving Facebook
Facebook is approaching 50 million users, 4 million of them are in the UK, and the site’s growing by 3% a week. At this rate, it will hit 200 million by Christmas.Facebook is a mature social network site (aka Web 2.0), it draws inspiration from Flickr, YouTube, and MySpace. Perhaps it’s smartest move is a gloriously open API that encourages developers to contribute applications that immediately tap into the community. Scrabulous (no prizes for guessing what this is) wallowed in anonymity until it accelerated through its tipping point on Facebook.On November 8th I’ll be speaking at Jersey Tourism’s annual conference on the threats and opportunities of Web 2.0. For the hospitality industry, networking sites like Facebook (and more pertinent still; Trip Advisor) demand attention. I was visiting the Movenpick hotel in Geneva recently, and was impressed to see their home page linking to TripAdvisor comments.For good businesses, the social networking space represents huge opportunity. Bad business will be more easily exposed in this new world of near-perfect information. But all business will need to engage in this new space. Pretending its not happening is not an option.
Google to kill off PPC?
Google has recently launched a new CPA (cost per action/acquisition) bidding tool. The Conversion Optimizer follows the roll-out of the beta programme for CPA on the Adsense network, and is the strongest indicator yet that Google is looking to move wholesale from PPC to CPA.Currently, as you know Adwords runs on a pay-per-click (PPC) model. Advertisers bid in real time for their position on the page, and pay for each click that delivers traffic to their sites. The model has several drawbacks. As many advertisers will know its easy to burn cash if you don’t optimize and track your traffic like a hawk, but the real dark side of PPC is click fraud. The CPA model removes clickfraud, because you only pay for traffic that yields. This is, of course, the bedrock of affiliate marketing.Google, however, is different from affiliate marketing, which is dependent more on relationships than technology (so, I don’t see Google’s move into this space as spelling the end of Commission Junction et al). Google’s different because it knows exactly what your site’s yielding in traffic and conversion data, and it knows what your competitors are doing. Users of Googly Analytics and Adwords will have noticed that Google’s anxious to educate you in its conversion tools, especially the monetary value of each action yielded from Google search or Adwords . I like the Adwords tracking tool, but I’d never recommend a client to add the value of a conversion into the tool. Google doesn’t need to know this data. My fear is that once Google moves wholesale in the CPA model, its effective monopoly will allow it to charge as much as it thinks you can afford, it will in effect be an international levy on ecommerce activity. Let’s hope Google can ‘do no evil’. In the meantime, I’d recommend third party tracking and bid management tools (like Webreality ATM …).
Spiral Tree Blog
Sarah Taylor has launched her new blog for Spiral Tree. It’s a perfect companion to her new WR site www.thespiraltree.com .Apart from giving Sarah a big plug - she’s done amazing relaxation work with the WR team - I’m posting this here as a great example of good (ethical) SEO technique. Sarah will build traffic for her site through the blog, but the site carries sign-up opportunities for courses, and will in due course allow pay-for digital downloads.This combined approach delivers value for existing clients, builds clients locally, and builds an entirely new global market. Delicious.
*10 Serious AdWords Beginners Mistakes*
Got this in an email from Perry Marshall. It’s gold!
1. Neglecting to Split-Test Your Ads. I’ve gotta say one of the coolest discoveries of my whole life was, in my first week of playing with AdWords 5+ years ago, noticing that “create new ad” link and seeing that I could create a 2nd and 3rd and 4th ad and try different text. Running them simultaneously, then seeing how teeny tiny changes made huge differences. I still get jazzed about this. It’s like practicing psychology without a license.
2. Letting Google Retire Your Ads Without Testing: In Campaign Settings, when you turn “Optimize Ad Serving” OFF, you declare a winner and a loser much faster. Turn that option off if you’re checking in every day.
3. Split Testing for Improved CTR Only: At first, Click Thru Rate is the only thing you can measure. You want it high so you get the most traffic. But eventually what REALLY matters is conversion rate and cost per new customer. Sometimes high CTR ads don’t bring buyers. Conversion is what matters most.
4. Ignoring the Display URL Line in your Ad: If you own www.redwagon.com, you should try www.RedWagon.com, and www.RedWagon.com/RadioFlyer, or www.RadioFlyer.RedWagon.com, or RedWagonStore.com. Tiny hinges swing big doors.
5. Creating Ad Groups with Unrelated Keywords: Do not write an ad and dump every keyword under the sun into the ad group. Make tight ad groups based on a narrow set of related keywords matched closely to the ads and the landing page.
6. Muddying Search and Content Results: If you run all three streams of traffic (Google / Search / Content Network) through the same ad group, you lose the ability to distinguish among the very different kinds of traffic. I prefer to separate Google & Search from Content, in different campaigns.
7. Ignoring the 80/20 Principle: The 80/20 Rule says that the vast majority of outputs (impressions, clicks, leads, sales) are caused by a very small minority of inputs (ad groups, ads and keywords.) Spend your time on the vital few instead of the insignificant many.
8. Declaring Split-Test Winners Too Slowly: If you can declare a winner twice as fast, your site improves twice as fast. I recommend combing through your ads as often as you can announce a winner. If you go to www.splittester.com you can enter the # of clicks and the CTR of any two ads and it’ll tell you whether the better one is really better, or if it might just be luck.
9. Declaring Split-Test Winners to Quickly: If one ad got 1% and 5 clicks, and the other got 2% and 8 clicks, that’s not enough clicks to know for sure the winner is a sure thing. Again, let www.splittester.com decide their fate. Rule of thumb: 20+ clicks on each ad.
10. Ignoring negative keywords: Just about ANY ad group should probably have some negative keywords. It should always be on your checklist. It increases your Click Thru Rate because your ads don’t get shown to people who shouldn’t see them. Less waste.