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| Seth Godin on internet marketing - the weekly interview | ||||
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In this issue: 1. Seth Godin on internet marketing 2. The watercooler: stories of note in the past week 3. NEW: Search Engine Marketing – Roundtable Briefing (Free) 4. NEW: Affiliate Marketing – Roundtable Briefing (Free) 5. JOBS: Latest internet jobs 6. Top forum post: How to improve your site search 7. Top forum post: SEO tools - link management and indexation |
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| 1. Seth Godin on internet marketing | |
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Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. Godin's books have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. Permission Marketing was an Amazon.com Top 100 bestseller for a year, a Fortune Best Business Book and it spent four months on the Business Week bestseller list. It also appeared on the New York Times business book bestseller list. Seth has just launched Squidoo, his latest venture. 1. Does it perplex you that many big brands still have reservations about the web? Not at all. Big brands got that way by doing the things that worked over and over. They're not good at the new, and they're horrible at experimenting. 2. Should every business use the internet to communicate? What are the basics of an internet communications strategy? You should only use the internet if you want your communications to be FAST and you want to reach LARGE NUMBERS with no intermediaries. If you can't handle that, though, you shouldn't try. 3. How can an enthusiastic marketing executive convince a senior board of Luddites to invest in digital? What works is success. That's how Google got so big. Once people make money paying 10 cents a click, they beg to buy more at 15 cents a click. The best online efforts have worked because of this incremental approach. 4. You've written about permission marketing extensively, yet intrusion is still a big part of the average internet session. Does this frustrate you? Not any more. Like everyone else, I ignore it. What a waste. 5. Interruptive online ads are thought to damage brands, yet we still see an awful lot of advertising clutter on the major publishing sites. What would you say to these publishers and advertisers? They're not listening, so I can't say much of anything. If they were listening, I'd ask them to do one thing: measure. 6. About 7 years ago you suggested that banner ads would be finished by 2000. Well, we're still seeing them, but paid-search is now king. Is there a place on the web for display advertising? I was awfully close to being right, my friend. The value of online banner ads is close to zero. The best display ads are contextual, relevant and interesting. And not banner shaped. 7. Does online advertising have to be purely about response? What about the brand benefits? There's zero evidence that you can build a brand with interruptions online that don't lead to action. Zero. 8. Something like one in four rich media ads are those horrible floating ads, essentially pop-ups 2.0. Is it just me or is this totally nuts, given the ever-increasing percentage of installed pop-up blockers...? Not sure how many people have them actually installed, and ironically, most of these are bought by those that measure (spammers measure too). If it works, people are likely to try it... 9. Do you have any insight on the value of a customer who responds to an intrusive call-to-action such as a floating ad, as opposed to something permission-based? It depends what you're selling. There are many businesses that depend on (and profit from) clueless consumers 10. I guess that the majority of online marketers still perceive the web as an acquisition channel, rather than a customer relationship channel. Would you agree? I would agree that they perceive it that way, and of course, they'd be expensively and dangerously wrong 11. I think a big trend over the next few years will be a shifting focus towards using the web channel to increase retention, repeat business and referrals. Can you sum up the basic opportunities in this area? It's like dating. Communication is good. Isolation is bad. No sense letting people simmer with bad feelings, right? 12. Right. So what about email? What’s the future looking like for email marketing? Not good. RSS, I believe, is the next big thing 13. Yahoo has just added RSS feeds to Yahoo Mail, which will help RSS reach the masses. Right now RSS usage isn't into double figures, but could this be a white knight for email marketers? It is if they do it right. Abuse your RSS feed and you're invisible (again). 14. What's Squidoo all about? Squidoo lets anyone build a simple, free web page that points to blogs, online stores, maps and other information on a single topic—any topic. Each page can contain insight, bullet points, links, products and pictures, and each page earns royalties for its creator or for charity. Squidoo leverages the power of personal recommendation. The site will eventually host millions of handmade ‘lenses’, each a focused, useful guide to some area of expertise, some glimpse of the net. Instead of aimlessly poking, a lens lets a user see the big picture—a human being’s big picture, the overview you need to get the meaning of the idea. 15. Can you explain more about ‘lenses’? The heart of Squidoo is the lens. A lens can point the best hotels in London. Or blogs with pictures and articles about Paris Hilton. Or personal accounts about Hurricane Katrina. A lens can expose a cross-section of the web, a more personal and more humanly relevant take that no computer could ever create. A lens is an easy-to-build page of links and referrals. Two lenses may be on the same topic, but they are never the same — every lens is personal, and every lens is built by a person, a Lensmaster. 16. Soothsayer alert: 5 predictions for 2006? 1. Inventory of adsense begins to catch up with demand 2. Thumbnail photos show up in adwords 3. Web pages get DRAMATICALLY better at teaching and interacting 4. Several large marketers cease to do TV 5. The Supreme Court bans email attachments Seth was interviewed by Chris Lake, editor. Comments? Email me or take them to the forum. |
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| 2. The watercooler: stories of note in the past week | |
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| 3. NEW: Search Engine Marketing – Roundtable Briefing (Free) | |
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Notes from a recent E-consultancy roundtable that focused on search engine marketing, where we discussed key trends, issues, tips and tricks, over a two hour period. Roundtable briefings are presented as a bullet point overview of the discussion.
View White Paper / Report » |
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| 4. NEW: Affiliate Marketing – Roundtable Briefing (Free) | |
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Summarised notes from a recent E-consultancy roundtable that focused on affiliate marketing, where key trends, issues, tips and tricks were discussed by attendees over a two hour period.
View White Paper / Report » |
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| 6. Top forum post: How to improve your site search | |
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There are two basic types of problems that a user can experience when they are searching for something: user error or search engine error. This post explains how the two affect your on-site search, and suggests ways of overcoming these common problems.
View Forum Message » |
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| 7. Top forum post: SEO tools - link management and indexation | |
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We're trying to compile a list of tools for advanced link management, as well as for indexation reporting and analysis. Which SEO tools do you use to keep an eye on your rankings, and levels of search indexation, over time?
View Forum Message » |
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