Chris Poer

Google sent me $100 to start my first AdWord campaign yesterday afternoon for Connexius. I set up the campaign last week but suspended it to do some work on the landing page. The funny thing is the email came in shortly after I did a bunch of Google searches on Microsoft’s AdCenter. I wonder…..

Seriously, the $100 seed is a great marketing strategy and timing it to customers that hold off on releasing their initial campaign makes complete sense. Since AdCenter is almost a carbon copy of AdWord, I wonder if Microsoft will send me a $100 promo if I hold off for a week. If I can only figure out a way to scale these coupons 100 times, I will have my marketing budget for 2010!

-Chris Poer

I read a report from Experian Hitwise that Google’s market share in the search engine market is slipping at the expense of Bing. The numbers are:

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This got me thinking (I know, usually a bad sign). As a small startup with limited time and budget I decided to focus solely on Google from an SEO and advertising perspective. It was an easy decision as I am not a big Microsoft fan (coding websites for a buggy IE is a major headache, my XBOX360 died, their OSs seem to get worse with each release, and their treatment of partners is just wrong) and I do not know anybody that uses a search engine other than Google. However, I am not satisfied with the expected ROI for a Google AdWord and AdSense advertising campaign that I am building. This article got me thinking that ignoring Bing might be a mistake.

From an SEO perspective optimizing a site for Google pretty much takes care of the other search engines (see note below). A great article by Tom Costello shows that Bing doesn’t seem to use any new signals to evaluate website relevance. However, there are some differences in their algorithm that he noticed including:

• Bing gives stronger emphasis to keywords in URLs
• Bing seems to give more weight to capitalized terms
• Bing prefers pages from large sites

Other than to making large sites and capitalizing keywords there really is not much you can do different to make the first page of Bing’s search engine results.

It really is the potential to get a better ROI on advertising campaigns for Connexius and NorthCarolina.me that drew my attention to this study. The economics of Google’s Adword/Adsense auction process drives the cost to the point that the campaign becomes marginally profitable for commodity keywords. My thought was using a second tier search engine that is growing in popularity might make for a more profitable advertising campaign. So after spending a couple of hours playing with Bing’s AdCenter and analyzing the estimated bid prices for my keywords and the impact of important business case variables such as CTR, spam, and click fraud I came to the conclusion that it is impossible to make a judgment without running a few simultaneous campaigns. The data that is presented by AdWord and AdCenter just cannot be reliably compared. So I have decided to split my budget in half for the next couple of months and see which performs best on identical campaigns.

Stay tuned for the results.

- Chris Poer

Note 1:
Search engines use traditional signals like title, URL, emphasis/heading, document length and number of occurrences on page to generate an on-page score. They then make an off page score from a count of matching anchors, possibly weighted by the quality of the source page. They combine these scores with some proximity information, and some notion of page popularity (e.g. PageRank). Finally they demote spam and they promote pages that are clicked on for this query more than one would expect.

I spent a week looking at themes to modify for my new Connexius website before settling on Unisphere Corporate from Themeforest.net. I trolled for days looking for a free theme that I liked before giving up and deciding to pay for something nice. The total cost of my selection, $27. For that money I got a well written, multi-page theme with multiple skins, a nifty slider, and support across all major browsers. However, all of that is secondary to the primary value for my $27. What I really got was a developer that stood behind their product and quickly responded to email questions. I got a response back on a technical question faster than it takes for me to connect with GoDaddy or AT&T technical support. Themeforest lets you look at all of the comments that users leave on the 100s of themes in their database. This makes it easy to see which themes work and which ones have developers that stand behind their product.

So the moral of the blog is when looking for corporate themes, check the support the developer provides.

In my last post I mentioned the reason for using WordPress for a new corporate web site was the numerous and rich 3rd partry applications that support their websites and blogs. Somehow in the post I failed to mention the most important plugin, database backup. I learned this the hard way when I mistakenly uploaded my new Connexius.com MySQL database to my live chrispoer.com MySQL database. I host both websites on the same account at GoDaddy and I selected the wrong database when loading the new Connexius website. I have religously backed up the HTML files, but somehow I never thought about backing up the database which is the heart of WordPress.

So which is the best backup plugin? I did a search on “DB backup” and selected “DB Cron Backup” based solely on the WP recommendations provided. I can say that it is easy to install, configure, and operate and indeed backup files are being created when I asked them to be created. Hopefully they are good files and in the event of another failure they will restore my system. I actually have not been brave enough to test it and do a restore.

I almost titles this blog why I am going to leave GoDaddy as my website hosting provider. While I admit the DB failure is 100% my fault, I would expect that GoDaddy has a reasonable backup and restoration system. The good news is that they can restore the system to any day and time you request. The bad news is that it costs $150 and they said it would take 7-10 business days to manually pull the files off their offsite storage facility. Does that sound right to you?

A couple of people asked me why I would use WordPress as the basis for the new Connexius LLC website. WordPress is well known as a blogging tool, but a web site? The answer is the same as why I use the iPhone (and suffer with AT&T), the apps! The WordPress development community is huge turning out useful plugins every day. There are plugins for traffic analysis, social networking integration, SEO tools, and much much more. As an added bonus I was able to create a panel that allows other people to modify the text within the website without having to change the actual website code. This is especially helpful when you want different people responsible for different pages of the website.

While I noted in Part I, developing using WordPress is not trivial, the long term benefits are well worth the investment.

I started programming in high school in the 80s and wrote my last piece of code in 1992. I was tired of hardware and software development and decided to move in to business. I have wanted to learn website development for years but never had the time to figure it out. I used the formation of Connexius LLC as the opportunity to learn HTML/CSS. While the final result worked and had lots of cool features, it just did not look right. I took the lessons learned from the exercise and working from a template built iSupport Services’s website in about 1/5th the time. Using WordPress, Chrispoer.com was complete in under a day though in all fairness it is just a template with a few very minor changes.

So when it came time to redo Connexius.com I decided to use WordPress. So based on the pattern that had been established with my last three websites, my expectations were that this endeavor would not prove too difficult. I knew I needed to learn PHP and MySQL to get the website to work right but I did not believe that would provide too much of a challenge after working with HTML/CSS over the last 6 months. While not complete, the final result is up “HERE” working basically as I had envisioned. However, the lesson learned and the whole purpose of this BLOG is to warn casual/new developers like myself to respect the technology that goes in to WordPress. Selecting a theme and importing it is trivial. If you select a good theme, adding new web pages is also very straightforward. However, if on the other hand you want to make wholesale changes to the theme, be very careful and at least double the expected development time. The WordPress loop is not trivial and understanding all of the functions and databases well enough to build a fresh website is not for the faint of heart.

The moral of the story, if you want to use WordPress and cannot find a theme that is a perfect fit, hire an expert. Trust me, it is well worth the money in the long run.

SEOMoz, my favorite SEO tool site, is having an open house today to show off their capabilitiies. Being on a budget, I only use their free tools which are very helpful. If you care about SEO and do not subscribe to a full service system, I highly recommend you take part in their trial. I have used it to check up on all of my sites and my competitors sites. To access this free service, go to opensiteexplorer.org.

This is available today only.

Google “how to write a press release” and you will get dozens of articles on the elements of a good traditional press release. My favorite one is “here”. A summary of the most important basic points include:

1. Make sure the press release includes useful news and/or information.
2. Make sure it is well written.
3. Make sure it answers the basic questions of “Who, what, when, where, why, and how.”
4. Put the most important information at the top.
5. Make sure you write in the active voice.
6. Avoid hype.
7. Avoid technical terms and industry jargon.
8. Keep it short (200-300 words seems to be best).
9. Try to add a customer quote for gravitas.
10. Include the company and/or product value proposition at least once.

If you stick to these points, pick a good PR firm such as Businesswire, internet.com, or prnewswire.com, and send it directly to high priority targets (i.e. local news, customers, industry experts and SMEs) you will be reasonably successful. However, in this day and age, that is not enough. To really claim victory you need to make sure your release lives on the internet forever, directs useful traffic to your website, and increases the prominence of your web site. In short, you need to marry the art of SEO with the substance of a traditional press release.

The good news is if you are familiar with the techniques of optimizing a website for search engines (SEO), than optimizing a press release for search engines is easy. The basic steps include:

1. Picking the optimal keywords (no more than 5)
2. Sprinkling these keywords throughout the title, sub-title, body, and summary of the PR.
3. Adding a handful of links back to your website. The rule of thumb is one link per hundred words but I believe you can pump that up to one per 50 myself.

You will have to accept that a press release optimized for search engines will not read as well as one optimized for humans. Keywords will be repeated through the text which will come across as redundant to human readers. They key is to make it as unobtrusive as possible without sacrificing SEO. Anyone that understands SEO will be able to spot and hopefully appreciate your strategy. Hopefully the ones that do not understand SEO should not be bothered by the redundancy. Lastly, you will have to use a PR agency that allows hyperlinks in press releases (most do today, but only a few of the free ones allow them.)

I write press releases in two steps. First I write it as a traditional release sticking to the points at the top of the article. Then I optimize it for SEO. “Here” is my first example which was released via business wire’s EON service. You will see I have embedded several hyperlinks back to my web sites which if done properly will build their prominence on the web. The keywords were carefully chosen to attract viewers based a combination of Google search data and my companies value proposition and service offering.

I chose Business Wire’s EON service because it is the first of the major press release agencies that built a PR service from the ground up to be optimized for SEO. One cool feature is if you hit refresh on your browser while looking at the release you will see it grabs different pieces of the release as a highlight. This keeps it fresh for search engines thus keeping its life longer on the internet.

This is Part 2 in my Press Release Study. The next article will show the initial results of my EON release.

Good Night,

Chris

Historically press releases have been used only to announce major events and mark historical corporate milestones. They were considered pretty big events and were primarily used to draw favorable publicity to a company. Creating press releases were expensive and time consuming and typically required either an internal PR organization or a contract with an external publicist. They were used in the marketing and sales process as a way of validating company momentum. The most obvious example is announcing a sale which would be used by a savvy sales person to tell potential Customer A that Customer B (usually a competitor) analyzed our product and came to the conclusion that it was best. You, Customer A, should do the same or Company B will use our product to kick your butt.

The advent of the web and search engine technology has radically changed the way press releases are created and used. Now, a savvy marketer can create a press release in about 15 minutes and release it for free to be picked up by all of the major search engines which will put it in front of interested people in a matter of seconds if they enter the right set of key words. In addition to driving traffic, this press release can generate backlinks to your site which in turn will increase its importance and visibility which makes it more likely to be found by even more interested parties. If done properly over time you generate a self perpetrating cycle that will really drive your business.

Knowing this but not having a background in public relations I had the following questions about the best way to use press releases to market my companies:

1. Why use major paid press release companies and when they can be done for free?
2. What is the best major PR company?
3. What is the best free PR outlet?
4. Does it make sense to release a PR through multiple outlets?
5. How much traffic will a press release drive?
6. How many back links will a press release generate?
7. How to optimize the press release to create maximum traffic and backlinks?

So like any good engineer I did weeks worth of research and designed a batch of test using my two companies Connexius and iSupport Services to answer these questions. The very first release went out yesterday which can be found “here”. I am going to release a series of blogs over the next month that hopefully will answer these questions and more so that you do not have to go through the same effort.

I saw first hand during the 90’s how the internet is the great equalizer and can and will drive all inefficient enterprises out of business. Remember when calling long distance was “special”. If I had really been paying attention I would have identified the telecom equipment market decline in 2003 and done something else whether than taking one last job in a very quickly declining industry. I was definitely on the wrong side of that trend.

Fast forward to today and look at what is happening to the newspaper and traditional advertising business. They are experiencing the exact same decline as the telecom market 10 years earlier. People will fight the inevitable and look for new ways to reinvent a dying market. Instead of fighting the inevitable, I would argue that it is much better to get on the opposite side of a negative trend. In this case it is the geotargeted ad display market. BIA/Kelsey forecasts that this market will grow 66% from 2008 to 2013. I would argue there are few businesses in the world that plan on anything close to that much growth in this day and age. This is the trend I am trying to catch with iSS and northcarolina.me.

There is a morale to this post beyond the inevitable shill for my website. Successful startups are equal parts vision, passion, execution, and a little luck (with money being a big help). Some people are just born with vision. If this is not you, look at the trends and stay a head of them with your business plan. Being at the right place at the right time is half the battle.

When you have been in an industry for 20 years you are pretty much one degree of separation from anybody that you need to meet. That is the genius of LinkedIn. With a couple of clicks and a phone call you can reach out to just about anybody of substance in your industry. However, the problem I have run across is how to get contacts and introductions in a new and less connected industry. I believe I have solved this problem with Jigsaw. I recommend giving them a try (especially in combination with LinkedIn) if like me you find yourself working in a new industry and needing to build a network quickly.

While in a meeting yesterday with a potential client someone started vacuuming outside of the conference room. The potential client apologized saying that office cleaning is now being done during normal business hours as a result of a corporate cost reduction initiative. This gave me flashbacks from 2001 when Lucent turned out half of the hall lights to save money. Fortunately, the vacuuming played right in to the Connexius value proposition I was pitching of less cost, better service.

This got me thinking afterwards about how now is the perfect time for entrepreneurs to start a business with a cost-based value proposition. Historically I have sold based on revenue generation. However, with the economy the way it is with no real prospect of imminent improvement, cost is definitely what you lead with now. Additionally, because cost reductions flow straight to the bottom line, $1 in savings equates to $5-10 in incremental revenue. I believe if you can prove that your product or service will reduce a potential client’s operational expense, you will be guaranteed a legitimate shot at their business which is really all you can ask a potential customer.

The biggest hassle in starting a business for me was selecting a name with a reasonable domain name.

The problem is that it is next to impossible to find a name that you like, reasonably represents your company, and bows appropriately to the SEO gods. I spent 2 weeks working through hundreds of names before settling on iSupport Services. The maddening thing and the object of my rant is that most of the names I wanted were taken by cyber squatters, not people running a regular business.

My solution to this problem is to charge a $100/year tax on .com domain names. People that know me would be shocked that I would voluntarily advocate taxing anything. I know this sounds extreme for something that costs about $10/yr to register. However, this tax would force cyber squatters that hold hundreds of names hoping someone is desperate enough to big money to get the one that best matches their business to re-think their business plan. Hopefully the result would be for them to release the bulk of the names back to potential real (I would say honest) business owners.

To be a successful entrepreneur, I believe you need help from a good lawyer, accountant, and banker. The purpose of this blog is to give an endorsement to my banker, Mary Rose Willis at First Citizens Bank. I came to her with a business plan and a need to open a simple business account and she has treated me like the treasurer for Cisco Systems. I even got a round of golf with FCB’s regional VP who has helped me with introduction to perspective local customers. If you are within FCB’s footprint, I strongly recommend you consider banking with them and if by chance you are in Greensboro NC, ask for Mary Rose Willis.

I spent close to 20 years in telecommunications starting in the mid-80s and saw first hand the impact the internet and its related technologies had on that industry. The price of a telecommunication class 5 switch dropped 99% from $400/port to a couple of bucks/port (and guess what happened to the price of Lucent stock). The cost to place a domestic long distance call has dropped 100% (fortunately companies like Verizon and AT&T were more adept than Lucent and found new revenue sources). The ripple effect his had created on the entire US economy created a recession in the late 90s.

Well, it is no surprise the same thing is happening to the media market. According to the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper ad revenues dropped 28% in the 3Q09. If you believe Google searches are the best arbiter of a trend, try entering “newspapers are” in to a Google search and look at what Google suggest.

The point here is that I learned from the lessons of the 90’s and with northcarolina.me am trying to get a head of the curve. I believe the strategy is sound. Now I just need to focus on execution.

My career path over the last 20 years has steadily moved from large corporations to increasing smaller companies while my job satisfaction level has steadily increased. Last year I decided to not to seek further employment and to instead dive in to the world of startups and entrepreneurship. It has been an excruciating slow process from concept to actually going live with Connexius and iSupport Services. I have learned many lessons along the way (including how to create a Wordpress-based website). The purpose of this blog is to share my lessons and hopefully build a community of budding entrepreneurs like myself so we can all share and learn together and hopefully create successful businesses.