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March/April 2008 DRIVING YOUR WEB TRAFFIC January/February 2008 THE FOURTEEN TRENDS IN NEW MARKETING HOW DO YOU BECOME AN ORGANIZATION THAT THRIVES QUOTED FROM SETH GODIN'S NEW BOOK,
"MEATBALL SUNDAE." TREND 1 Organizations hear more and more often, directly from consumers. Organizations can also sell directly to customers, eliminating the middlemen. And they can build a permission asset, which allows them to market directly to prospects. Even better, organizations can create products for their customers instead of searching for customers for their products. TREND 2 In a market where everyone is a critic, the need to create products that appeal to and satisfy critics becomes urgent. The same is true for after-purchase issues of service and quality. TREND 3 Consumers hear about organizations from many sources, not just one. As a result, you have to get your story straight. Saying one thing and doing another fails, because you'll get caught. TREND 4 The death of mass marketing is partly due do the plethora of choices and the deluge of interruptions. As a result, complex messages rarely get through. TREND 5 Chris Anderson's work demonstrates that in almost every single market, "other" is the leading brand. Domination by hit products is fading, consumers reward providers that offer the most choices, and the economics of creating and selling a product have fundamentally changed. TREND 6 It's not just possible to find someone to make/code/do something for you quickly and cheaply; it is now easy. The means of production of physical goods and intellectual property is no longer based on geography but is based on talent and efficiency instead. TREND 7 Google and other search engines have broken the world into little tiny bits. No one visits a Website's home page anymore-they walk in the back door, to the page Google sent them to. By atomizing the world, Google destroys the end-to-end solution offered by most organizations, replacing it with a pick-and-choose, component-based solution. TREND 8 Even with the near-total chaos most media confront, the chaos is certain to get even worse. New forms of publishing, communication, and interaction will arrive in an already cluttered world. Some organizations will thrive from this increased chaos, some will be unprepared, and some will merely fight it and lose. TREND 9 eBay is the beginning of a significant consumer-to-consumer connection in the marketplace. As social networks become more powerful, consumers will gravitate to each other, not just informing each other about their experiences but banding together into unions that will pressure organizations for more of what consumers want. TREND 10 Your organization is based on exploiting scarcity. Create and sell something scarce and you can earn a profit. But when scarce things become common, and common things become scarce, you need to alter what you do all day. TREND 11 In a factory-based organization, little ideas are the key to success. Small improvements in efficiency or design can improve productivity and make a product just a bit more appealing. New Marketing in the noisy marketplace demands something bigger. It demands ideas that force people to sit up and take notice. TREND 12 As we saw earlier, marketing is often like a funnel. Attention is shoveled in at the top and, over time, sales come out the bottom. The funneling process sorts the wheat from the chaff, separating those who can buy from those who either aren't interested or can't afford to participate. This focus on mass is understandable if you assume that all consumers are pretty much the same or if you can't tell them apart. The thing is, they aren't, and you can. Now, for the first time, marketers can focus on who is hearing (and talking about) their message and they no longer use mass as a placeholder. TREND 13 Rich people used to be all the same, just different from the rest of us. Now they're not just different from the rest of us but different from each other. Rich people used to do similar jobs, wear similar clothes, live in similar neighborhoods, and read similar magazines. As a result, marketing to rich people was pretty easy. No longer. As the gulf between rich and poor continues to widen, and the number of people considered rich increases daily, the diversity of the rich increases as well. It turns out that not only are the wealthy like us, they are us. Despite the widening gulf, there are more wealthy people than ever before. In fact, you're probably one of them. Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske of BCG talked about this in their book " Trading UP", and the trend has only become more pervasive. TREND 14 One way big organizations got bigger was by working with the other big guys. It used to be critically important to get your product into a major retailer or on the end cap of the A&P isle. It mattered that you were featured on a network TV Show or chosen a magazine to be highlighted. Big companies wanted to work with other big companies, and so the big got bigger. November 2007 SPECIAL REPORT: Have you protected your domain from cybersquatters? BetterWhois.com, Inc. Copyright 2007 Business is stolen from successful web sites everyday. Did you know that anyone with $35 can register a variation of your web site name and set up shop in about five minutes? No ownership checks or trademark searches are done at the time of registration. Since most registration services are automated, even the most obviously malicious names are approved with a click of the mouse. Cybersquatting, the act of registering a name in bad faith, has become one of the major problems facing businesses on the Internet. Although the term Cybersquatting was originally used to describe the act of registering another's trademarked name, the term is commonly used to describe many different forms of bad faith registrations. In order to protect yourself, you should be aware of the following forms of cybersquatting and domain misappropriation. 1. 'The Sneaky Competitor': One of your competitors sets up a web site using a variation of your domain name in order to lure your customers away. Since URLs can be hard to remember or deduce, your competitor may be be able to lure away both existing customers and new prospects. This can cost thousands in lost business. 2. 'The Porn Funnel': A variation of your domain name is used to 'funnel' traffic into a pornographic web site. Operators of some adult web sites use almost any method to attract new visitors. If one of these 'porn pirates' registers a variation of your domain name, customers who mistype your URL will be transported to a pornographic web page. 3. 'The Employee Hate Site': A disgruntled past (or present) employee reserves a variation of your company name to post company secrets or gripes. Registering domain variations cannot prevent critical sites, but it can minimize the incentive to create these sites and the reduce the damage they can cause (a critical site which is not found easily is less damaging). 4. 'The 'Sucks' Site': Similar to #3, an unhappy customer reserves YourCompanySucks.com in order to post complaints about your business. This has become a virtual internet phenomenon. In fact many savvy web users make it a habit to see if a company 'sucks' web site exists before buying a product on-line. For example, if John is about to buy a new pool table from 'coolpooltable.com', he first checks to see if 'coolpooltablesucks.com' exists and contains any negative feedback. 5. 'The Ransom Artist': Someone reserves a variation of your company name before you can and then attempts to sell it back to you for an outrageous amount. Fear of being victimized by the above scenarios causes many companies to spend thousands to recover names that were overlooked when they initially registered their domain name. Can this really happen? Is this legal? Yes, it can and does happen everyday. Is it legal? Depending on the situation, site owners may have legal recourse (e.g. trademark infringement lawsuits or arbitration). However, even when a cybersquatter is breaking the law, it can be time-consuming and expensive for a site owner to win a legal judgment, especially if the cybersquatter is located in a different country. In some circumstances, it is possible to reclaim names through domain arbitration, however this can cost thousands and can take many months. Full blown domain related law suits can take years and cost tens of thousands of dollars. The easiest (and cheapest) way to prevent most cybersquatting is to register a few basic variations of your company name before the damage is done. Which names should I register? 1. COM/NET/BIZ: Hopefully, you have already registered the .COM version of your company name. To be safe, register the .NET and .BIZ variations. Some companies also register the .ORG and .INFO variations for additional safety. 2. Hyphenation: If your company name has more than one word in it, register it both with and without a dash. (e.g. usair.com and us-air.com) 3. Singular/Plural: If your name lends itself to it, register its singular and plural versions. (e.g. fordtruck.com and fordtrucks.com) 4. Common Misspellings: If your name can be easily misspelled, register common misspellings (e.g. volkswagon.com and volkswagen.com) 5. And finally, the juvenile sounding but damaging 'sucks' variation: Many experienced internet users routinely type in the 'sucks' variation of a company name on their browser to find complaints about a company. Most savvy companies now make it standard procedure to register this name before a vindictive person does. (e.g. verizonsucks.com) Isn't this going to get expensive? Registering 'protective' domain names is now becoming a necessary and expected cost for doing business on the Internet. Luckily the domain registration industry has been recently de-regulated. Domains which have traditionally cost $70 to register can now be registered for about $20. A small price to pay to help protect against the time and expense involved pursuing a cybersquatter. Have you protected yourself from cybersquatters? By taking just a few minutes now, you can help prevent costly and potentially embarrassing cybersquatting incidents from occurring... Now that you know the basics tactics used by cybersquatters, you may want to make a list of your domain names and use the following worksheet to see if you are protected.
Where to register your domain name variations? You can use any active registrar to register additional variations of your domain name. We use and recommend Register.com. In our opinion, they offer an excellent mix of advanced features, reliability and knowledgeable support. If you use their service, be sure to take advantage of their free URL forwarding feature. This will allow enable you to link each of your domain name variations to your correct web site without paying any additional hosting fees. Due to our high volume, we have secured a discounted rate of $20/yr with Register.com This special discount is available to all BetterWhois visitors via the following link: http://www.regdiscount.com October 2007 Quality of content and content placement can make or break Lacking content means losing sales By: Michelle Megna, managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com September 13, 2007 In marketing news, a recent study by The e-Tailing Group underscores the need for online sellers to include quality ad copy at their sites, going beyond a simple description and product shot. It's no surprise that 77 percent of those surveyed say they are directly influenced by the content that goes with a product. More telling is that the inclusion of detailed descriptions and online shopping tools also influence shoppers' decisions, and that often there isn't enough information to help them make a purchase. In fact, according to the study, "Seventy-six percent of those surveyed report that content is insufficient to complete research or purchase online 'always, most often or some of the time.' Incomplete content is also a factor as 79 percent 'rarely or never' purchase a product without complete product information. And, resulting actions for 72 percent are to abandon the site and go to a competitor or research further online, typically finding what they want elsewhere." The study goes on to show the importance of a full-featured product page, citing that 52 percent of shoppers spend six (6) minutes or more on the product page, and allocate that time as follows: September 2007 Have you protected your domain from cybersquatters? Business is stolen from successful web sites everyday. Did you know that anyone with $35 can register a variation of your web site name and set up shop in about five minutes? No ownership checks or trademark searches are done at the time of registration. Since most registration services are automated, even the most obviously malicious names are approved with a click of the mouse. Cybersquatting, the act of registering a name in bad faith, has become one of the major problems facing businesses on the Internet. Although the term Cybersquatting was originally used to describe the act of registering another's trademarked name, the term is commonly used to describe many different forms of bad faith registrations. In order to protect yourself, you should be aware of the following forms of cybersquatting and domain misappropriation. 1. 'The Sneaky Competitor': One of your competitors sets up a web site using a variation of your domain name in order to lure your customers away. Since URLs can be hard to remember or deduce, your competitor may be be able to lure away both existing customers and new prospects. This can cost thousands in lost business. 2. 'The Porn Funnel': A variation of your domain name is used to 'funnel' traffic into a pornographic web site. Operators of some adult web sites use almost any method to attract new visitors. If one of these 'porn pirates' registers a variation of your domain name, customers who mistype your URL will be transported to a pornographic web page. 3. 'The Employee Hate Site': A disgruntled past (or present) employee reserves a variation of your company name to post company secrets or gripes. Registering domain variations cannot prevent critical sites, but it can minimize the incentive to create these sites and the reduce the damage they can cause (a critical site which is not found easily is less damaging). 4. 'The 'Sucks' Site': Similar to #3, an unhappy customer reserves YourCompanySucks.com in order to post complaints about your business. This has become a virtual internet phenomenon. In fact many savvy web users make it a habit to see if a company 'sucks' web site exists before buying a product on-line. For example, if John is about to buy a new pool table from 'coolpooltable.com', he first checks to see if 'coolpooltablesucks.com' exists and contains any negative feedback. 5. 'The Ransom Artist': Someone reserves a variation of your company name before you can and then attempts to sell it back to you for an outrageous amount. Fear of being victimized by the above scenarios causes many companies to spend thousands to recover names that were overlooked when they initially registered their domain name. Can this really happen? Is this legal? Yes, it can and does happen everyday. Is it legal? Depending on the situation, site owners may have legal recourse (e.g. trademark infringement lawsuits or arbitration). However, even when a cybersquatter is breaking the law, it can be time-consuming and expensive for a site owner to win a legal judgment, especially if the cybersquatter is located in a different country. In some circumstances, it is possible to reclaim names through domain arbitration, however this can cost thousands and can take many months. Full blown domain related law suits can take years and cost tens of thousands of dollars. The easiest (and cheapest) way to prevent most cybersquatting is to register a few basic variations of your company name before the damage is done. |
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