Greg Krehbiel on Publishing and Online Marketing

I was just signing up for a conference, and the registration form had a couple “usability” problems.

First, it asked me for my zip+4. I don’t know what it is. I had to get a piece of mail addressed to me to find out.

Why would you do that? How many people actually know their zip+4?

Second, it asked for my fax number. Again, I don’t know it off the top of my head. I have to consult my business card.

Third, there was no indication of which fields were required and which were optional, so I didn’t know if I had to go look up my fax number.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

I’m in the market for a dishwasher, so I thought I’d go to consumer reports and see which ones are the best.

I tried to sign up for their service and I got an error on the registration page. When you sign up you have to “create an account” with a username and password, and passwords on consumerreports.org have to be all lowercase.

This is a stupid mistake. Why limit your customer’s choice in creating a password?

I’ve developed a little algorithm I use to create passwords on websites. It helps me remember a secure password for each site. But sometimes it requires an uppercase letter.

So Consumer Reports lost my sale because of their silly password policy.

The lesson is simple — don’t restrict password options!

Then I wanted to send them a note telling them about this so they could fix it. But I couldn’t find a “contact us” page, or any way to send them an email.

That’s two mistakes.

They may know a lot about dishwashers, but their web team needs some help.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized 2 comments

Google has a new tool called the “Wonder Wheel.” Yeah, it’s a silly name, but it’s a good tool, and when used in combination with Google Trends and a standard keyword tool it could be a very effective way to increase traffic to your web pages.

First, give it a try.

1. Google a term that’s relevant to your site.
2. Click on the “show options” link at the top of the search results on the left-hand side.
3. Under “standard view” click on “Wonder wheel.” This shows different subcategories of topics under your search term.
4. Drill down into narrower concepts by clicking on one of the subtopics.

Each time you drill down you’re finding a group of related terms and you’re getting a more granular perspective on how the term relates to search.

With the “Wonder Wheel” you can get an idea of the structure of your search terms — e.g., how they might fit into folders in a content network campaign. And you can also get ideas for other terms.

But you don’t know which term gets more traffic. That’s where Google Trends comes in.

So you use the Wonder Wheel to get a sense of how Google organizes all the terms related to your primary search term, and to get ideas for related search terms (you can also use a simple keyword tool for that), then you use Google Trends to find out which terms and phrases get the most traffic.

Then comes the hard part. You need to go through this exercise before you finalize your content.

Let’s say you’re writing a story on the health benefits of green tea and you’re wondering what headline will attract the most search traffic.

First you go to Google Trends to compare a few ideas. Try “tea health, tea healthy, tea benefits” and get a chart like this.

Obviously “tea benefits” is the right way to go, so then you google “tea benefits” and try the “Wonder Wheel.” The first set of subcategories looks like this.

roibos tea benefits
oolong tea benefits
white tea benefits
black tea benefits
green tea benefits
herbal tea benefits
ginger tea benefits
chamomile tea benefits

Obviously you want “green tea benefits,” so you choose that one and get the next set of drill-downs.

green tea metabolism
matcha green tea benefits
green tea skin benefits
lipton green tea benefits
green tea benefits weight loss
green tea diet

Does the story have more to do with general health benefits, the effect on skin or metabolism, or diet or weight loss? Let’s say it’s about weight loss, so now you know you want “green tea benefits” in the title of the story, but do you want “weight loss” or “diet” (assuming they’d both fit from an editorial perspective).

Now consult Google Trends, compare “tea benefits diet, tea benefits weight loss” and see that weight loss is the clear winner.

I’m not saying that search results should drive all editorial decisions, but the simple truth of the matter is that if you want people to find your article, you need to use the words they’re looking for, not necessarily the words you like. The headline “Green tea is good for you” isn’t going to get the same traffic as “Green tea’s health benefits include added weight loss” for the simple reason that it has more of the terms people actually type into search engines. So use it as the title of your page and the headline for your story.

And if you don’t believe me, here’s an interesting article about how the Tribune Company used a method like the one I’ve just outlined to achieve a dramatic increase in search engine traffic.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized 1 comment

Rupert Murdoch is realizing that the advertising model — give away the content and sell ads on the page — simply won’t sustain most major media operations.

See Murdoch vows to charge for all online content

I believe two things about media companies.

1. There are too many of them, and some will have to fail
2. They are going to have to quit giving away their content

Media companies have to provide content that’s worth something, and then charge people for access. (If people won’t pay for it, then by definition it’s not worth anything.)

This article highlights a problem media companies face today. In this case, The Washington Post paid a reporter to do research and write a serious piece, which was then largely stolen by another site. To make matters worse, the other site is earning advertising revenue from that page — off the Post’s content!

Google could be the publisher’s white knight.

When Google indexes a page, it checks to see if the content on one page is like the content on another page (and, from what I hear, marks down sites that have too much duplication).

Google could display that fact in the search results by making it obvious that site B is parasitic on site A? Google could invent a rating system based on the amount of content that is … borrowed … and give the URL a “parasite rank.”

Of course in some cases the publisher might want its content on the other page. Many content providers syndicate their content to other sites. In those cases, the publisher and the content partner would want to suppress the “parasite” label. All that would be required would be for the publisher to register with Google as a content provider and list its authorized content partners. They wouldn’t get marked down for borrowing content.

This would reward the people who actually generate content and would penalize the parasites who feed off of it.

The next step would be for publishers to push advertising networks not to place their ads on sites with a high parasite rank.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized 1 comment

I am.

I read a lot of them, but not nearly as many as I’d like to.

There’s lots of good information out there, and I’m sure it would help me in my daily work, but I’m too busy with my daily work to read the things.

I’m sure this is true for lots of other professionals in other organizations, which leads me to this odd thought.

If I was a CEO I think I’d find a young “idea guy” and hire him to do three things — and only three things.

1. Read every white paper he can find that’s applicable to my business,
2. Sit in on every meeting he can, and
3. Keep a working “best practices” document on every functional area of the business.

I suspect that the increased efficiency would far more than pay his salary.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

The last few days I’ve done some reading on bounce rates and spent some time in Google Analytics getting a feel for what’s what, and it seems that the best rule for bounce rates is that you’re doing well if your bounce rate is lower than it was last month.

Some articles will give you some fixed guidelines. For example, How to Fix a Leaky Web Site says under 25% is good, but over 40% is too high.

I don’t buy that because your bounce rate will depend on a whole lot of things that will vary from site to site. A blog has a completely different site architecture than a store that sells dishwasher parts, and different sites get different sorts of traffic.

Here are a few things to look at to get a sense of what’s going on with your site.

Look at your traffic sources and compare the bounce rates for each. (E.g., direct traffic, referring sites, and paid search vs. natural search.) Look at your top landing and top exit pages.

Do you see any patterns? Look at the pages with a low bounce rate and see how they differ from the pages with a high bounce rate. Do they attract different sorts of visitors? Is there a clear call to action, or some obvious next step on one page and not on the other?

Remember that a high bounce rate may simply be a sign of poorly qualified traffic. Your site may rank highly for a word that has several different meanings. (E.g., “cobra” can be a snake or a kind of mustang.)

I’ve set up some “advanced segments” in Google Analytics that let me track how many people stay for one page view, or two, or three or more. I then run a report on my top search terms and see what percentage of my traffic falls into those three groups. Good pages not only have a low bounce rate, but they have a high “time on site” and a high percentage of people in the “3 or more” category.

Greg Krehbiel Analytics What do you think?

I had an interesting chat with a friend of mine from SIPA.

Harry had read a statistic that people are spending less and less time on newspaper sites. (I don’t know if this is what he’d read, but along those lines see Average Time Spent on Top 30 Newspaper Web Sites Declines — More Than Half Fall)

Harry thinks that time on the site is more important than the number of visitors, and I think he’s probably right. We talked about it for a while, and then I came up with the following.

Every website has a purpose, and webmasters ought to have clear goals for their sites. Your average SIPA-member website will probably have goals something like this.

1. Get a visitor in the first place
2. Get the visitor to a second page (i.e., not bounce)
3. Get the visitor to return
4. Sign up / register in some way (e-mail newsletter, forum, whatever)
5. Buy something (probably something small)
6. Buy something else (up- or cross-sell)

Goals 3 through 6 should be cross-referenced to the time the user spends on the site. IOW, of the people who spent more than X minutes on the site, how many returned, signed up or bought something?

If those stats bear out what both Harry and I expect they do (that people who spend more time on the site are more likely to complete site goals), then a good strategy would be …

1. Find the pages that people spend the most time on,
2. Make more of that type of page, and
3. Make sure those pages are optimized towards your site goals.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

According to Forbes, David Heinemeier Hansson has caused a ruckus by promoting the idea that online customers should actually pay for products.

Imagine that three shoe companies have come to you for some venture capital. They each have a different business model, as follows.

1. Give away the shoes to get market share, then charge for them later when everybody is hooked on the brand.
2. Give away shoes, but sell advertising space on the sides.
3. Charge a fair market price for shoes.

Which company would you invest in?

Why is that so obvious with shoes, but not so obvious with online content and services? Probably because most everything on the Internet has been free for a long time.

We don’t fuss about paying for shoes because people have always had to pay for shoes. But it was a bit of a leap for people to start paying for water, or for the right to fish, because those things used to be free.

The internet culture of “free” is going to have to change (at least in some areas) because the simple truth is that ads don’t pay the bills. This is going to be a difficult transition and a lot of companies are going to go under in the process, but I don’t think there’s any alternative.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

I want a project-based operating system rather than an application or file-based operating system. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say I’m writing a business plan. I have the plan itself in a Word document, a few charts in Excel, and maybe a presentation in Powerpoint. So far so good. I can keep all that stuff in a folder, right?

But what about emails? What about tasks? What about events? Those things are all in Outlook, separate from my business plan folder. Sure, I can create a folder in Outlook for the emails, but it’s still separate from my business plan folder.

I want one project-related folder that contains absolutely everything associated with that project.

• Files
• Emails
• Tasks
• Events
• Bookmarks
• Deadlines and deliverables

So, e.g., when I get an email, I want to be able to associate it with a project folder so that when I open that project folder I see all the relevant emails.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

A friend asked me to take a quick look at his website for him. He’s not a web designer or an IT guy, so he made some pretty predictable mistakes, some relating to search engine optimization.

Over the years, SEO has been part science, part art, part b.s. Clever webmasters have tried to find ways to trick the search engines, and the search engines find ways around those tricks and punish the sites that use them.

Lesson one in SEO is to forget the tricks. The search engines want to find pages that are relevant to what the person is searching for. That should be your guiding principle. I.e., “what would someone be looking for that would make them happy to find my site?” Keep that in mind as you build your page.

For example, let’s say you’ve figured out the perfect recipe for a cup of no-sugar, dark hot chocolate and you want to tell the world about it (or sell your mix).

You might think your ideal search is “no sugar dark hot chocolate mix.”

Here’s where you have to do some keyword research. Which is better, “no sugar,” “sugar free,” or maybe even “low carb”? Try several different versions of your search in a keyword tool and find out which one gets the most traffic. Once you have a search phrase that gets a lot of traffic and actually relates to what you have to say, then do the following.

Your basic checklist

File names — Name your page something like “no_sugar_dark_chocolate_mix.html.”

Title tags — An html page has a title tag. Make sure that tag has your keywords in it, like “No sugar dark hot chocolate mix — best ever!”

Keywords — Html pages have headings, usually in h tags. The headings are a good indication of what’s important on that page, so make sure your keywords are in those tags.

Alt tags for images — Your img tags have a place for an “alt” tag, which allows you to say what the image is, or what it’s about. Put a relevant image on your page and label it with something like “a cup of no sugar dark hot chocolate.”

Once you’ve built your page, you also want to get incoming links, preferably with your keywords in the links.

That’s the very basics. It gets more complicated than that, but you should at least start with this.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?