Articles

By Stefan Sojka

In the age of ideas, creativity might be a little overrated.

I’ve been suffering a bit of performance anxiety lately, when it comes to creativity.  It seems everywhere I look I am being told to unleash my creativity, ‘Think Different’, stand out in a crowd and think outside the square.  It’s like I am not a complete person unless I can revolutionise an entire industry, transform society or claim responsibility for one of those emails with all the Photoshopped animals morphing into vegetables.

What makes it worse is that I am bombarded daily with thousands of examples of other people doing just that; effortlessly manifesting their creative genius and splashing it all over my screen.  My own inadequacies are being hammered home with every news story about the latest viral sensation, dot-com billionaire and amazingly simple but absolutely brilliant business ideas I wish I had thought of.  Then comes the slick new gadget advert, telling me that it has unlimited potential in my hands, if only I will buy it and swipe my fingers all over it.

If I zoom in, however, I find a slightly different story.  Sure, there seems to be an explosion of creativity on the planet, but it is being done by millions of different people – each individual only coming up with a tiny sliver of inventiveness, if not simply recreating what already was and giving it a slight twist.

Most apparently brilliant ideas are just rehashed and adapted versions of what already was.  Before FaceBook, there was MySpace and before Twitter, there was SMS.  People were uploading videos of themselves doing all kinds of things, way before YouTube came along.  Look at all the latest design trends in the so-called ‘creative industries’.  The same design themes and styles are popping up everywhere.  Musically, there hasn’t been a song like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in the charts for over 30 years... despite the ridiculously powerful creative tools everyone has had at their disposal recently.

Perhaps that old adage about 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration is true.  Thinking outside the square is not something to be done that frequently.  In fact the more time I’ve spent in creative La-La Land, the less actual work I got done and the harder life became.  I have to fight that urge (and all those marketing messages) to be more creative than everyone else in the entire world and focus on getting stuff done.  Who knows, that might just leave me relaxed and comfortable enough, one magical moonlit evening, to allow that 1% spark to kick in.

Small business, particularly online business, depends so much on mundane activities to prosper; technical implementation, keyword analysis and optimisation, mailing list management, spreadsheets, link building, regular maintenance and updating, proof reading, file management, administration and processing…. you couldn’t be any more ‘inside the square’ by renaming 100 photos from DSC0003456.jpg to keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.jpg, but that’s what has to be done.

As I surrender to this mechanical reality of my day-to-day life, I am actually enjoying the process of building the systems, habits and infrastructures I neglected when I believed being creative was the only way to go.  Now I am not only freer to be more creative in my down time, but I am much more prepared to do something with my ideas when I get them.

I can also do what all the other ‘creatives’ have been doing for centuries; borrowing and adapting from those around them who continue to be seduced by the enticing and rather unproductive realm that exists outside my humble – but very effective – little square.

By Stefan Sojka

Look closely… attention deficit creates disorder.

How strange our brains are.  Organic supercomputers, with 80+ billion neurons and as many as 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, capable of rendering total immersive live 3D video and surround sound, controlling an entire eco-system of organs without us hardly noticing and practicing such diverse skills as architecture, astrophysics and lead guitar – yet we always forget the milk!

It seems our meat-based computer operates rather differently than our silicone-based cousins.  They can recall everything perfectly (if you tell them to) yet find it a lot harder to be nuanced and subtle, poetic or virtuosic.  Everything our mind does seems approximate and even vague, depending on our focus and requires a lot of repetition to forge the desired neural pathways.  There’s the old musicians’ joke; what’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?  You only have to punch the information into the drum machine once.

So what happens when silicone and meat supercomputers meet?  The brain realizes the immense power of the chip and begins pounding instructions and content in until the cows come home (on well-worn neural pathway-like cow-tracks).  Highly focused people – lawyers, marketers, programmers – have filled our digital world with unfathomable amounts of information that they expect us to read and understand, while we seem much happier giggling at cute kittens or piglets wearing gumboots.

We now have a bit of a problem.  I believe we are all beginning to suffer from attention deficit disorder.  With a supply of information so vast that we can never hope to absorb a fraction of what we would like to, we have all become habitual skimmers, scanners and non-readers.  When was the last time you actually read and understood the terms and conditions before ticking the box saying that you had?  How often do you triple-check your important emails before sending them off?  How many days did you spend analyzing every phone plan on offer, before confidently choosing the right one?  What about software licence agreements?  Insurance policies?  “What, no flood cover!!??”

Closer to home, what about your Website?  Did you write and review every single word, or just leave it up to your Web Designer?  Whose business is it?  If you can’t take the time to write and review it all, why would anyone else bother?  What about the “thank you” page when someone registers?  What does that say?  It is a perfect opportunity to do a bit of PR and build relationships.  Ditto any confirmation emails and even invoices.  Which is best, a dull “Message submission received” or “Thank you for registering with our new service, we look forward to getting to know you…”?

We need to accept that it is becoming increasingly difficult for all of us to keep up.  Our minds work best when they concentrate, so we have to take the time to do just that.  One less YouTube video, one more re-read.  My business partner, thank heavens, is one of those people who naturally double-checks everything, while I admit I am more the ‘creative’ type who tends to skim, because I am always thinking of the next big idea, but I am learning.  Skimming is asking for trouble.  Missing important details, making costly mistakes and missing great opportunities, creating embarrassing misunderstandings and often making more work for myself than I thought I was saving by rushing.  A short cut is often a long cut.

It’s time to recognize the inherent limitations and great power of our biological computer.  Take time, concentrate and get the important stuff right.  It makes very good business sense.

By Stefan Sojka

It’s easy to believe that the Web has transformed over the last few years into a high tech Grand Slam, where the only contenders are the mega-corporations with Internet superstars providing the pre-match entertainment.  There’s still plenty of action away from centre court.

I was a huge Deep Purple fan when I was about 14.  Please keep in mind hip-hop, electronica, R & B or grindcore had hardly been invented.  Three choices:  Rock, Pop or Country & Western.  Besides that, I was trying to learn guitar and Smoke on the Water enabled me to instantly play a hit song with no lessons …or practice!

In those days, Rock superstars were about as inaccessible as today’s celebrities, not because they had a wall of agents and publicists protecting them, but simply because there were no means of communication.  If you didn’t find them in the local phone book, they were out of reach.  You could join the fan club, but that meant becoming the pen friend of the band’s single most obsessed and deranged follower and still never meeting the band.

This could become a column about how to follow your favourite artists online, but I only have one page, so I’ll get back to my point:  I recently contacted the bass player and keyboard player from Deep Purple and they both emailed me back personally.  This got me thinking…

According to www.internetworldstats.com, there are over 3 billion people using the Internet.  If you can imagine applying any ‘bell curve’, or ‘long tail’ graph to this population, you will find a massive swell around the YouTubes, Mashables and Lolcats, with thronging hordes milling around Internet superstars like Ashton Kutcher, Justin Beiber and Community Channel.  These destinations are largely one-way streets, more like mass media.  Huge audiences eliminate your opportunities to interact personally with the object of attraction.  It’s out in the ‘burbs where the real action is.

Every has-been, wanna-be, could-be, also-ran, did-run-once-or-twice and going-to-do-it-again is out there – you and me included.  We don’t get a million hits a day to our blogs and videos, but maybe 10s or 100s, even 1000s.  We get a couple of emails a day/week from people who stumbled across us while Googling something else.  Think about it – everyone is out there!  And the ones who aren’t being bombarded with attention are more than likely quite happy to get some.

Scientists, musicians, sportspeople, business owners, charity workers, teachers, inventors, builders…. need I continue?  Whatever you want in life from the Internet is available and it is extremely likely that it is not happening in a high-traffic supersite.  Network science dictates that, like the deeply profound and effective work our subconscious does all night (and all day, for that matter), the less clicked regions of the Web are where we are going to find the answers, make friends, collaborate, instigate and activate.

Think of exactly what you would like to know, do and become in your best-lived life and I bet you will find the people to help you if you start looking and asking.  For me, it begins with old rockers like Deep Purple’s band mates and probably ends with me inviting a whole bunch of them to guest-feature on my concept album by simply emailing me their contributions to my tracks as MP3s.  For you, it might be a super-talented 3D artist who can render your invention so you can win your pitch to those venture capitalists to get it made.  Or perhaps a massive niche market in a non-English-speaking country accessed via a local bi-lingual micro-blogger.

Your ultimate personalised network is out there.  Get off the beaten track and start clicking.

By Stefan Sojka

As technology intertwines itself into my existence, information moves at the speed of light and everyone is either offering or expecting instant solutions, I realise the necessity of taking the long view; the download of a lifetime.

It’s not often a movie title makes its way into common use to describe a phenomenon, the way “Groundhog Day” has.  I can’t imagine anyone is going to feel very “Twilight” or “Avatar” and it’s been a while since I had my last “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” moment.

Danny Rubin’s idea of an endlessly repeating day has landed him a gig teaching screen writing at Harvard.  Such a clever and powerful concept and so well executed, wrapped as it was inside a romantic comedy.  For the sake of this column, I hope you have seen the movie.  You’ve had 17 years to get around to it; don’t tell me you’ve been stuck in your own Groundhog Day that long!

Ever since I bought a ticket on the digital media express, time seems to have hit the fast forward button.  I simply can’t get everything done in one day that I want to.  Every gadget has a 200-page instruction manual, each software program needs a 12-month college course, while my music and book collections remain un-listened to and unread.  I haven’t caught up with friends and family for years.  It’s hard enough keeping the email inbox from overflowing.  No wonder it feels like Groundhog Day!

Even though the movie’s title entered the vernacular to describe the hellish vortex Bill Murray’s character found himself in, the true message of the film is that he got out.  It took him many years, but he did it – and it all started with a decision to live life right.  It has even become a self-help book – “The Magic of Groundhog Day” by Paul Hannam.  The key to getting out is the decision to make every moment count and realise that small daily steps lead to big life transformations.

I have decided to turn that corner and start getting it right.  From here, now that I'm seeing everything in bite-sized chunks, everything looks so much more palatable and easy to swallow.  I can gradually chew my way out of the abyss.

I'm unsubscribing from any newsletters that are not in line with my plans and subscribing to more that are.  I'm using good old-fashioned RSS feeds to send me relevant news and insights.  I'm subscribing to on-line video tutoring sites to learn how to use all my software.  I'm using as many of Google’s tools as I can (Insights, Alerts, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Picasa, etc.), to help me get things done, filter information and manage my life.  I'm bookmarking the best blogs that seek out and compile everything I am interested in, so I don’t have to.  I'm spending a few minutes each day updating my Website, writing a little blog post, following up a few leads and researching powerful new productivity tools.  Above all, I am eliminating all those on-line activities that, let’s face it, are doing nothing more than locking me into an eternal cycle of underachievement.

With an optimised, focused online regime, my perfect day is within reach.  Maybe soon I will have more time to relax, exercise and nurture relationships.  I'll throw in a bit of piano practice and before too long I’ll be rockin’ the house, just like in the movie.  Tomorrow I might even wake up to a brand new day.  Until then… it’s happy Groundhog Day.

This article came from http://www.totallycommunications.com/ – There are very few Websites that don’t undergo at least a minor facelift at some point in their lifecycle.  But a Website re-design can be a major undertaking and a substantial investment, thus the importance of ensuring it is undertaken for the right reasons.

Here are 7 good reasons why you might want to take the plunge and give your business Website a makeover:

1. Your Website looks and feels outdated

This is a fairly obvious one.  If you don’t find your Website nice to look at, then neither does anyone else.  An organisation's Website is quite often a customer's initial point of contact – so you want to make a good first impression.  It needs to be engaging, pleasing to the eye and puts your brand’s best foot forward.  If it doesn’t, users will leave as quickly as they arrived.

2. Your Website is difficult to navigate

Similar to the look and feel of your Website, if users find it difficult to navigate your Website and can't find what they are looking for, they will promptly leave.  They are usually searching for something specific and if not easily found, then you're road-kill on the information super highway.

3. Your Website is not optimised for SEO

Does your site rank well for the keywords people are using to find the products and/or services your business provides?  If not, chances are your site may not play nice with search engines and has not been properly optimised, resulting in your business missing out on lots of potential traffic.

4. Your Website has slow performance

The load-time of your Website should be within seconds.  If your site takes longer than five seconds to load, people can become disinterested and will leave (particularly if they have to navigate through a number of pages to find what they are looking for). Large images can cause slow loading of pages, as well as videos, JavaScript, HTML errors or even a sluggish server.

5. Your Website is not mobile-friendly

Can your Website be easily viewed on all devices, from desktops to smartphones and tablets, without hindering the experience?  If you cannot confidently say “yes”, then you could be missing out on a huge opportunity for business.  With mobile devices set to overtake fixed internet access by 2014, it's vital your Website is mobile-friendly.

6. Your Website is hard to keep updated

It's important that the back-end content management system (CMS) used to maintain your Website is easy to use.  The whole point of a CMS is to enable non-technical people to make updates and changes to your web content easily.  Badly designed systems however, can frustrate users with poor accessibility and usability, with the time taken to maintain your Website cumulatively adding up quickly.  This can ultimately lead to a Website becoming outdated, which is exactly what you want to avoid, as an updated and fresh Website is a key factor that influences users to return.

7. Your Website does not represent your business anymore

If your business has grown in the past few years, your Website may very well no longer represent your organisation, brand, products and/or services accurately.  Your Website should truly reflect your brand’s personality.  Moreover, it should reflect what you are communicating to your clients/customers.  How can you expect a customer to trust your Website as a secure place to purchase products and services if its design is circa 1995?

If you have read this far, my best bet is that several of the above scenarios are happening to you.  If that's the case, then it is probably time to find a web design agency for your business and take it from there.

Contact us to find out how we can inject a whole new lease of life into your Website and help it to start to make a big difference in your business.

Lately, we have been inundated with new enquiries for Websites of all descriptions.  It seems the marketing being conducted by many a service provider, including hosting companies, domain name registrars, ecommerce providers and Content Management System (CMS) developers is getting through.  The message is loud and clear, you can have a Website, it’s quick, easy, cheap and amazing.  Business magazines also are recommending that every business embrace the Web as a sales and marketing medium, embrace social media as a communications and customer acquisition channel, view smart phones as the next great gold rush as customers now hold you in their hands 24/7 and view the Internet as this vast resource where unlimited riches await the entrepreneurial and creative business mind.

It is true; the Web is certainly expanding and evolving at an incredible rate.  Overnight success stories are now an almost daily feature of on- and off-line news sources.  The subjects of each story seem to be getting younger and younger, with kids building apps seemingly in minutes that go viral and fill their bank accounts with cash. 

It is easy to see how everyone is becoming entranced.  Quick, easy, cheap ways to get rich have always been extremely appealing, especially when times are generally quite tough, as they are now.  Even in a nice, rich and safe country like Australia, the cost of living is very high, with some prices like electricity and insurance skyrocketing, cash flow seems very tight for many small businesses and families and competition is getting stronger and stronger in the globalised world, as international businesses promise to deliver products and services far cheaper than local businesses can ever hope to.

Of course, the Web is now a great place to start looking and considering when contemplating ways to improve your bottom line or launch a new business, service, product or idea.  However, here is the problem… everyone is thinking the same thing.

All those marketing campaigns that have been targeting you have been targeting millions of other people as well.  All those opportunities to get rich quick have been offered to everyone.  It is simply not possible for everyone to be as successful as everyone else.  It is like a massive fun run with millions and millions of people at the starting line.  The winners will inevitably be those who prepared the most. 

So, prepare thyself.  If you already have an idea of what you would like to do online to promote your services or sell products, it would make a lot of sense to do as much preparation as possible before you approach someone for professional assistance.  Professionals can help you prepare, but it will cost you money, when you could at least have thought through and researched some of the basics.  There are so many resources online these days, there really is no excuse for not having done your homework.

Quite often it seems the only preparation people do is reading the marketing material of various service providers.  If people wish to sell something online, they tend to go to all the various ecommerce application providers and read their feature list to see if it will do what they want it to do.  We get so many people enquiring about setting up an online shop in such-and-such a system, without having even written the first line of content, or determined their postage methods, product descriptions, customer profiles, etc.  Almost always we find that the solution they have chosen is not necessarily the right one.   The considerations are often technical, which the solution provider will not tell you and which you cannot be expected to know.

The role of the Web Developer or Web Consultant is to help determine the best technical solution based on your requirements.  So your role is to explain your requirements. Your time will be best spent working on the details of your business.  Write your content.  Source great photos.  Research your market and other providers with similar or identical offerings.  Prepare a business plan or marketing plan or at least write a document that details all of your ideas around your business.   That way, a Web Developer or Website Consultant can work with you to determine the best solution and can have a much better idea of the ballpark costs and efforts that might be involved in helping you.

The worst thing you could do is contact Web Designers and Website Developers before you have done any planning or research and tell them you want a Website and you want them to quote you a price.  You will be putting yourself at their mercy and you will most likely fall victim to the service provider with the best talent at making a sale, not the one that will serve you best.  

If you are to have any chance of succeeding in the extremely competitive and overcrowded online world, you must prepare yourself.  The ones who succeed have done just that and the ones who struggle are almost always the ones who jumped the starting gun, ran straight to the nearest service provider and asked them to do all the work.  The old adages of 'you get what you pay for' and 'you only get out what you put in' are no less true online.  We can help you only so far and as far as your budget allows.  The real success factor is how much you are prepared to invest yourself.  After all it is your dream, not anyone else’s.

Happy New Year!  Each year we make resolutions that we stick to or don’t stick to, depending on how realistic they were to start with, or how much we really cared about them.  Perhaps this year it is more appropriate for a revolution instead.  Rather than simply trying to break old habits or stick to new ones, how about setting yourself on a whole new course altogether?

It might not be practical to drop everything you are doing and start afresh, but an internal revolution might just be the way to see some big changes take place this year.  A new mindset, a cleaning out of the closet and a new level of motivation could take you new places – beyond resolution and into revolution.

Once you decide you can do it, it can start with the smallest of steps and build to a feeling that you have truly turned a corner and set a new path.  Why not start with your own Website?  Your own online presence?  Your own computer/tablet/phone in whose company, let’s face it, you spend more time these days than with any individual person?

May I suggest that your relationship with your interfaces to the Web is critical in not only how the rest of the world now sees you, but also how you feel about yourself?  If your online presence and interaction is highly tuned, proactive, interesting and action-oriented, you and everyone you touch will be lifted, motivated and inspired.  It’s like you become one of the neurons in the globally networked mind that is active and firing, where previously you might have remained more dormant and passive.

Here is what I am doing, and suggest you do too:

• Update your copyright notice(s) to 2013 immediately
• Create some fresh new content for your Website, perhaps a review of the year that was or a new push for your future plans & service offerings
• Test your Website forms, email accounts & any other functional aspects to your online life.  Email yourself & submit enquiries to make sure everything is working.  Fix it if it is not working
• Review all of your settings, passwords, email accounts, domain names, hosting & other assets 
• Review your Google ranking & traffic
• Review your social media presences, followers & interests
• Google yourself to see how much impact you are or are not having
• Follow some of the links you find & see if you might improve or add anything
• Spend some time looking at what other people are doing, including seeking out those who you might aspire to
• Review your financial situation to see where savings can be made or new means of income can be found
• Clean up your smart phone of all the dodgy apps you purchased on impulse, so that you can focus on any apps of real value
• Clean up your computer desktop, documents, email folders, sent items & inbox
• Clean up all your digital photographs, deleting all the bad ones & collating the good ones into useful categories, renaming them & publishing any of value
• Clean out your office drawers & cupboards
• Clean up your desk, shelves, filing cabinets & boxes
• Pull out your plans & revisit them
• Ask yourself what you really set out to do when you started all of this
• Every night, before bed, write down three things that went well today and why.

It’s just the beginning, but why not make it your resolution to begin your own personal revolution?  See how you feel in 12 months time.  My guess is that you will be pretty proud of yourself for having turned things around.

We are always asked to provide fixed quotes for new Websites.  Whether they be for a small business looking to set up a site for the first time and start promoting themselves online or someone with a great idea who wants to build a Website to make that dream come true, almost invariably the approach is to tell us broadly what they are after, perhaps sending through a brief or a site map and asking for a quote.

The only problem is that a Website is not a thing.  It can’t have a fixed price because it is not something to be bought and delivered.  It is a complex interaction of design, content, creativity and business modelling, interacting with a potentially limitless array of connections on the Internet and the people who are logged onto it.

For someone looking to get a Website, what they are really after is the services required to make that Website come about.  Even when looked at as a set of services, it is still not something that can be delivered for a fixed price – not without either the Website owner or the service provider losing out.  Costing services is generally a time-based practice, so a fixed quote must be based on a fixed number of hours.  The time it will take to build a Website is unknowable before the project commences.  So, the service provider is going to have to overestimate to allow for the contingencies, or underestimate to try to get the job when the client is shopping for a competitive quote.  

Another aspect to Websites is that they are very much dependent on the Website owner as to how much time they will require their service provider to put in.  If the Website owner prepares their content meticulously, they save time.  If they expect the service provider to create, edit or organise the content, they are adding more time to the project.

There are many theme and template-based, fixed-price Website packages available these days, but they still require input from someone to create them, modify them to suit your needs, maintain them and market them.  Again, while they seem like fixed price objects, they are actually much like a lease on a real world shop i.e. a fixed price for the facility and space to run the shop, that does not give the shop owner anything else but that facility and space.  It is up to the shop owner to do all the rest.

This is where people can get led astray.   Websites are in many ways intangible and their functionality and code is often hidden or operating on levels beyond or behind the pixels on the screen.  So, it is easy to be fooled into thinking that a Website will give you everything you need.  Every Website we visit looks like it is doing just that, but behind the screen lies the code, the man hours, the creativity, strategic thinking, analysis and ongoing work necessary to make a Website succeed.

So if you are contemplating asking for a quote for a Website, perhaps the better question might be “can you help me do what I need to do for my business and if you can, what kind of arrangement would you be happy with?”

If you are looking for someone to help you with your Website, you are looking for a relationship with someone you will be working with on many aspects over many months, before and after launch.  You might like to get your hands dirty or you might expect everything to be done for you.  Either way, you will not be buying a thing, you will be creating a living, breathing, multi-dimensional business tool that you expect to make you money.

…and my guess is that the amount of money you expect to make is just as unquotable as the price of your Website.

Usually I delete all SEO spam that arrives in my inbox, but I decided to stop for a minute and take a closer look, to see:

• How much of this stuff I was getting every day and
• Just what kinds of styles and techniques are being used to try to get me to use the SEO services of these spammers.

The other ironic and slightly devious thought I had was that I could use these SEO spam emails and actually get some value out of them.  After all, they have cost me in wasted time and annoyance.  I can post them all on my Website and get Google to index all their keyword content, and get some real SEO value out of them!  Or not…

It’s all very informative and entertaining stuff!  A mix of badly written copy, badly programmed automation scripts and offers that I must refuse, because half the time, I can’t even tell what the offer is.  I guess I am just supposed to phone them and give them my credit card details to kick things off… : )  SEO

Spam #1

Stefan.net.au Team, I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough Social Media and Organic search engine traffic for Stefan.net.au

(I actually don’t want any social media and organic search traffic.  I don’t know why they presume that I do)

1. Social profile is not available in top Social Media Websites.

(Actually it is.  I have facebook, blogger, twitter, MySpace, YouTube and about 10 others)

2. Your site has 0 Google back links, this can be improved further.

(It has a few back links.  ‘Zero’ is a bit harsh!)

There are many additional improvements that could be made to your Website, and if you would like to learn about them, and are curious to know what our working together would involve, then I would be glad to provide you with a detailed analysis in the form of a WEBSITE AUDIT REPORT for FREE.

(Of course I can improve my Website.  Every Website in the world can be improved – Even Facebook just upgraded their interface, and though they might need a better share price, they certainly are not short of search engine traffic.  If I would like to learn about them, I could always Google ‘how to improve your Website’ or, I could audit my site myself.  Perhaps I should ask for that free report and find out what working together would involve…)

Our clients consistently tell us that their customers find them because they are at the top of the Google search rankings.  Being at the top left of Google (#1–#3 organic positions) is the best thing you can do for your company's Website traffic and online reputation.

(Ironically, the reason I am getting this email is because you found me in Google, and I have received this kind of email from more than three people… so if four or more of you are telling me you can get me in the top three ranking, someone is winding me up)

Sounds interesting?  Feel free to email us or alternatively you can provide me with your phone number and the best time to call you.

(That is a strange request, as my phone number is on my Website)

Best Regards,
Nancy Brown SEO Consultant

(John Smith?  Susan Jones?  Mary White?  Fred Flintstone?)

SEO Spam #2

It’s a fact:  more people find out about your business on Facebook or Twitter than on search engines.

(I am wondering if it might have been worth providing some data to support this ‘fact’.  And do you mean my business in particular, or businesses in general?  Because either way that would be hard to prove…)

Making these sites work may be tricky for you, but it’s business as usual for us.  Let us improve your visibility and enhance your image.  It’s part of our complete Internet Marketing package.  We’ll be more than your friends – we’ll be your partners.

Stella Fair

(“Complete Internet Marketing package”?  That is a bold statement.  Complete Internet Marketing is essentially infinite in scale.  When you said we could be more than friends, are you talking love and marriage?)

SEO Spam #3

The Web is getting more crowded all the time.  If you’d rather not get lost in the crowd, we can help you be a whole lot more visible.  The system is easy:  Search Engine Optimisation is the key.  Help us help you get more business. Best SEO Company Ivan Ballard

(At least that is clear and to the point.  I’d almost get back to this guy, except that I Googled his name and found an empty LinkedIn profile and no mention of SEO.  In fact, if I type in “Ivan Ballard Best SEO company” all I get is numerous versions of this same email posted all over the Internet as comments to blog posts.)

SEO Spam #4

Hi Sir/Madam,

We are happy to announce a very attractive Christmas and New Year Offer on our different SEO packages discount ranging from 10–25%.

(But I don’t know what the packages and prices were to start with!)

In brief, we are a Delhi-NCR, India-based, leading Web services and Google certified partner company that specialises in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).  As an outsourcing vendor we have partnered with many reputable SEO agencies based in USA, UK, Canada and Australia.

(I would like to check your credentials, but you haven’t identified the name of your company, even though you say you comply with the Can Spam Act of 2003)

We have a dedicated team of 300 professionals who are backed by experience and expertise.  We provide both SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM solutions to achieve top rankings on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing for your Website and requirements.

(Again, I would love to know more, but there is no Website to check)

(offer is valid only for the month of December 2011)

(What offer?  I don’t know what the packages are.)

Our principles on which we base our work:

– Ethical processes and white hat techniques

(That’s a relief, I would hate to hear that you practice unethical black hat techniques, like spamming)

– Agency or client oriented approach in our process

(In other words, we pay you money either way)

– Ready to sign NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements)

(You sign ours, or we sign yours?)

– White label for client re-selling and re-branding

(Can I re-brand and re-send this white label email to 10,000,000 people?)

– Facility to provide effective Online Project Management tracking tools

(Show me)

– Frequent reporting with required formats and information

(For example?)

– Timely and smooth communication

(This email is certainly ‘smooth’)

We can ensure that you will enjoy high SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings with our high track record of success.  Our SEO solutions will help increase the traffic and sales of your Website.

(Sounds good.  Where do I sign?)

Please get in touch with us to discuss your SEO requirements and more details about our Christmas offer.

(Merry Christmas to you, too)

Kind Regards,
Priyanka Jain
Manager of the Marketing Department Delhi-NCR, (India)

P.S.  This is an advertisement and a promotional mail strictly on the guidelines of CAN-SPAM act of 2003.  We have clearly mentioned the source mail-id of this mail, also clearly mentioned the subject lines and they are in no way misleading in any form.  We have found your mail address through our own efforts on the Web search and not through any illegal way.  If you find this mail unsolicited, please reply with "Remove" in the subject line and we will take care that you do not receive any further promotional mail.

(I am pretty sure that to avoid being accused of spamming, you must identify the name of your company, not just your occupation and geographic location)

SEO Spam #5

It’s an old truth:  people won’t beat a path to your door if they don’t know where your door is.  If you’re high on the Google list, the door to your business is right there to see and to use.  We can improve your rankings so the door stays open.  Email us now and we’ll tell you how our expert Search Engine Optimisation staff can provide you with the key.

(I love the door and key analogy, I hope you don’t mind if I use that one in my own marketing materials…)

Homer Castaneda

(I Googled Homer and the only place he comes up on the Internet is as posts of exactly the same material on various blog comments, or people saying they received his email.  Surely Homer would be all over the Internet as an SEO guru, with everyone beating a path to his door, if he really did hold the key.)

SEO Spam #6

Dear Webmaster,
Greetings of the day!

(Greetings of the day to you, too, even though it is 11pm)

My name is Jones, and I work as an Online Link Building Manager with Mosaic ITES Service Pty Ltd.  I would like to discuss a business opportunity with you.

(Alias Smith and Jones?  I Googled them and they actually do exist!  They have a LinkedIn and CrunchBase profile and everything.  Their Website does not look great and has quite a few technical issues, like broken images.  That is not the kind of thing that gives me confidence with letting them get their hands on my Website’s code!)

Link Building is one of the most significant aspects of the Off Page Optimisation process.  It is a major determinant of the popularity of your site and given maximum weightage by Search Engine algorithms.

(Actually, you must be careful, because Google has become quite wary of excessive link building and you can actually harm your ranking if your external links are of consistently low quality – it is almost at the stage where you ought to hire a company like this for your competitors to send them down the Google ranking list!)

Keeping in mind the latest developments in search engine algorithms and industry trends, we have launched two new services:

1.  Geo-specific Link Building:  Thematic one-way links with high PR from specified country/continent.  We provide links from whichever domain you require; we are the first Indian company to launch this service.

(That claim is a big one and very hard to prove, unless you have some evidence of a newspaper report or something

The links will come with the following parameters:

– Theme-based relevant link
– Manually built, without using link farming/link harvesting/automated back-linking techniques.
– Only from quality sites
– Permanent links
– Search Engine friendly
– Full report of the exact placement for verification, as well as a dedicated Account Manager for each project.

(That does sound very good, however, one wonders just exactly how they plan to do this.  Those parameters imply that the SEO company has way more control over third-party sites than one imagines possible.)

2.  Dedicated Resource Hiring:  We will provide a dedicated Link Builder with at least 3–4 years of experience, who would work exclusively for your project, more like an employee and would be able to provide you with:
– Thematic One-way links
– Contextual links
– Link wheel
– Blogs links.

(More like an employee – at least I don’t have to pay PAYG tax, super and Workers Compensation.  I hope you have good OH&S.  Somehow I suspect that my ‘employee’ will only be getting a tiny fraction of the money I send to this company, so may harbour a deep resentment to his employer and not care as much as I might hope)

For search engines, back links or links pointing to your Website indicate that you are ‘hot’ in the online marketplace.

(Or it might also indicate to Google that you just paid someone to do link-building for you, as Google is very clever these days and can tell genuine links and genuinely ‘hot’ online properties creating a real buzz)

We have a fantastic track record of building more than 2, 00,000 links in the year 2011 and have successfully completed more than 400 campaigns, all one way.

(Is that a typo of a missing zero, making it 2 million, or an extra comma and space, making it 200,000?  Maybe the 400 is a typo too, then it is actually 4)

If you are interested, we would be happy to share our proposal, recent works and client testimonials.

(Probably would be good if you just sent them first, oh hang on, there is a link below… I’ll check that)

Looking forward to your reply!

Best Regards,
Jones
Online Link Building Manager
seotechnologygrouponline.com

(seotechnologygrouponline.com – “This account has been suspended” – I guess it was really 4)

SEO Spam #7

Online enquiry form submission:

Your Name:  Maria Wilson

Email Address:  webfirms.service@gmail.com 

Company/Organisation:  NA

Phone:  (347) 329-2976

Message:  Team, I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough Social Media and Organic search engine traffic
1. Social profile is not available in top Social Media Websites.
2. Your site has 9 Google back links.  This can be improved further.

There are many additional improvements that could be made to your Website, and if you would like to learn about them, and are curious to know what our working together would involve, then I would be glad to provide you with a detailed analysis in the form of a WEBSITE AUDIT REPORT for FREE.  Our clients consistently tell us that their customers find them because they are at the top of the Google search rankings.  Being at the top left of Google (#1–#3 organic positions) is the best thing you can do for your company's Website traffic and online reputation.  Sounds interesting?  Feel free to email us or alternatively you can provide me with your phone number and the best time to call you...........

(This is the same email as we received already, from ‘Nancy Brown’.  This time ‘Maria Wilson’ has provided a phone number.  I Googled it and the top Search Engine result for her phone number is a site called “Rip Off Report” along with other sites like “Stop Forum Spam”.  Not quite the best reputation I would expect from someone I might entrust my SEO services to)/em>

Stay tuned for more Spam!

When anyone thinks about developing a new Website, or revamping their old site, they understandably come at it from the perspective of a Website user – from the ‘front end’, so to speak.  Even if they have administered a Website in the past, they have usually experienced that administration through a ‘back end’ user-interface that was created for them, allowing them to do what they needed to do.  So, when it is time to create the brief for their new Website, almost always, the brief tends to be written almost as if written by one of their visitors, offering opinion, advice and feedback.  

‘Easy to use’, ‘professional look and feel’ and ‘must have feature X or Y’ are common requests in a Web design brief.  Business considerations usually cover aspects like ‘must be search engine friendly for this list of keywords’ and ‘competitor sites A and B have such and such a feature and we want our site to have the same feature but better’.

Often the solution has already been decided upon, perhaps on the suggestion of another developer that the business owner may have already received advice from and quite often a budget has already been set.  If a budget has not been set, then the typical request is to build the site with price as a major consideration.  

Rarely does a potential client come to us with a platform-independent functional specification, that lays out the exact requirements of how the Website will work, what processes will be needed and specific details of the way the site will be, programmed, managed, integrated with the rest of the business (including the marketing strategy) and how a visitor will actually use the site.  The supplied brief is almost always a high level overview of the kind of site it needs to be in terms of quality and style, but the technical details are left to the Web developer to simply make happen when they build it. 

This leads to some potentially risky and costly problems:  

• It places all the responsibility of many of the strategic business outcomes on an external service provider who may not be experienced in anything more that design and programming
• It ignores the potentially disastrous issues that might arise if the Website project is undertaken on the requested platform that turns out to be unsuitable for the business requirements
• It assumes that a price and scope can be determined before the price and scope can possibly be determined
• It leads to the business owner being provided with totally disparate proposals as each provider bidding for the project tries to second-guess the business requirements and budget in order to secure the contract
• It leads to providers under-quoting in order to get the job or over-quoting to cover themselves for the huge risk of scope creep and cost blow-outs that will inevitably happen as the true scope of the project is realised through the development process. 

This does not serve the business owner or the service provider well.  Business owners, who are understandably none the wiser when they prepare their brief, expect quotes and proposals for Website development just like they might expect for printing or other production services.  Web service providers are caught out either agreeing to take on a project at a price they can’t support or not getting the job at all, because of the under-quoting firms who convince the business owner that they can develop the Website cheaply. 

It is difficult for a Web developer to risk losing the lead and throwing cold water on the business owner’s plans by suggesting that perhaps the brief is not enough information to provide a quote, when other firms are providing quotes.  It is equally difficult to find a diplomatic way to suggest that perhaps the business owner is ill-informed, or simply doesn’t understand what they might be getting themselves into.  

Business owners often believe that they don’t need to know the gory, technical details, as that is the job of the Web developer to take care of and deliver a user-friendly solution.  To leave that responsibility in the hands of the developer and expect them to do it well, is the difference between hiring a builder to build your house, or an architect to design it and oversee the building process.  When the brief is going straight to builders and implying that they also need to be the architect, without allowing for that process in the cost, or assessing the builder’s capability to do such a thing, the risk of disastrous outcomes is great. 

The only way to ensure a Website – particularly a complex one, such as an eCommerce site – will be developed successfully in line with all of the business and technical requirements, is to start with a functional specification.  Don’t go straight from an overview brief to a quoting process and straight into development by a successful proposal writer.  Take the brief to someone who can develop a full specification that takes into account every aspect of a Website:  How it will work, how it will be marketed, how every little detail will function, from form fields to product variations, postage and fulfillment. 

Once you are certain that the functional brief addresses and considers all aspects of workflow, ongoing site maintenance, customer experience and any other consideration, then and only then should you take that detailed brief to potential developers to offer solutions and estimate costs.  It is the only way to ensure the right technical solution, the right business outcomes and a realistic quote for the work that will be specifically and explicitly stated as being required.

Even if it is impossible to develop a completely detailed functional specification, because maybe some of the details cannot be determined until the project is developed iteratively, still one ought to do one’s utmost to detail as much as possible in order to ensure the best outcomes for the project and that as little as possible is left to chance.