Category: Business development

Categories
Business development content marketing SEO

4 reasons content matters for growing your business online in 2021

In 2021 quality content looks set to take on even greater importance for SEO and the performance of your business online.

Google wants to rank the sites at the top that users love the most, and in 2021 plans to roll out a major algorithm update that focuses on page experience.

What is page experience? Some aspects are technical, such as site speed and broken links. But others are all about content – the extent to which you, or your competitors, are delighting the people searching for answers in your niche.

Google tracks how long people spend on your website, what they do, and the pages they visit. And these factors contribute to Google’s understanding of whether your website is providing a good user experience.

Here’s four ways quality content can help your business grow, and help to improve your search engine rankings, right now:

1. Good content helps to generate leads

When visitors like the content on your website, and it provides what they are looking for, there’s a good chance they will explore more pages on the site, and subscribe to your newsletter or otherwise leave their contact details.

They may subscribe in the hope and expectation of getting more useful content, and/or to learn more about a particular product.

2. And increase reach and brand recognition

High-quality content will generally engage, directly or indirectly, with current or evergreen issues that are also in circulation on social media.

Appearance in a relevant context on social media will help any company increase visibility, as well as reaching a wider audience and potential new customers.

3. Good content helps to establish authority and trust

By creating and posting high quality, timely content, you can help to establish your company as a thought leader and trusted source of information and opinion in your field.

This helps to increase your visibility in your niche or industry and attract more engaged readers to your website.

4. And build relationships

In addition, content marketing helps you develop relationships with customers.

When your content helps readers, when readers find your content useful and valuable, they will likely return to your website and, in time, are more likely to become customers. And not only customers – but fans who feel confident in recommending you, and your products or services, to their friends or followers.

Good content will get you noticed, draw visitors to your site, and help you establish an ongoing relationship so that, in time, your readers can become your customers.

For SEO, and for visitor conversion, good content matters

By posting helpful, quality content, you can begin to create brand awareness, loyalty and, most importantly, trust. And as readers begin to comment on your content, you can gradually build a tightly connected community, loyal to your products or services.

The most important job of SEO is to get good ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). And for this, good content matters: it’s a long time since search engines ranked websites based on keywords alone.

Quality content that is unique, well-structured, and focused on the needs of your target audience will deliver a great page experience for your visitors – and, in turn, help to gain a better ranking for your page in search engine results.

Like to talk about content for your business? Just hit me up, right here.

Categories
Business development Work life

Why marketing muscle matters for going virtual-only

An article in Marketing Week flags up the tendency in the online world for the larger players to edge out smaller competitors, resulting in a ‘concentration of power among a small number of brands.’

Over the last months we have all learned to participate in events online – online meetings, fitness classes, teaching, virtual pilates, etc. The list goes on.

As we emerge from lockdown, many of those who used to provide an in-person service, fitness coaches for example, are thinking of staying virtual. This promises the advantage of potentially serving more clients, in more places, more of the time. With none of the extra hassle and costs of travel, venues, and so on.

However, going virtual-only also has the effect of drastically lowering the barriers to entry. No longer are you one of a few local providers in your niche, providing your service to a fairly captive local market. 

You can provide your service to anyone, anywhere – but so can the big guys, with their ability to ruthlessly cut costs and amp up their marketing.

In short, the move online suddenly introduces a ‘drastic and permanent increase in competition from bigger, less expensive, more famous alternative suppliers.’

Ouch.

To make the long tail work for the local supplier – in other words, to leverage the potential of a small niche – will require developing and nurturing a strong brand: Good marketing will be critical for survival.

There are some who are smashing it. For example, take a look at https://www.instagram.com/lynseysuzanne86/ for example. Though Lynsey combines virtual with in-person sessions, which I think is probably a better, more sustainable model that going totally virtual. 

You can read the full Marketing Week post here.

Thank you Mark Masters of You Are The Media for drawing my attention to this article. Top image by Scott Beck on Unsplash

Categories
Business development Life Personal development

Commitment, leadership and paths not taken

Out of the blue, two very interesting quotes on commitment dropped into my inbox last week. Though coming from different angles, both illuminate the nature of commitment and our understanding and appreciation of what is gained when we commit to a specific path of action.

The two newsletters have nothing really in common, but share a characteristic that appeals to me – their wide-ranging approach. Whilst each is based on a specific topic, books and learning guitar, the way they talk about their subjects resonates across the wide spectrum of life and work.

The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.

Anne Morriss

Anne Morriss is managing director of the Concire Leadership Institute and I’m definitely late to the party as far as this quote is concerned. It’s even been printed on a Starbucks coffee wrapper – although perhaps only in the US which lets me off the hook a bit since I live in the UK. But, always, better late than never, especially where wisdom is concerned.

Anyway, I read this quote in this month’s Book Club Newsletter from Neil Pasricha (http://1000awesomethings.com/reading-club/). It’s free, and there’s always at least one book of interest. In this case, ‘Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You’ by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss. And, of course, that quote.

You can almost feel the anxiety of hesitation, of weighing up the pros and cons, slipping away as you read the words. Decision made. 

In love, it’s perhaps what the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell had in mind when she described marriage as “the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue.” 

However, the moment of commitment is only the beginning. Perseverance is needed to see any project to fruition. And it’s crucial to put in the necessary analysis and preparation (Ready… Aim…) before you pull the trigger.

Love (or that business idea) may not always turn out to be worth the risk, but if you never roll the dice… do you ever really live?

I’m not sure where the impulse to expand and improve comes from. I have it spades for the guitar, but ironically, the more I’ve turned it upside down, narrowing the scope of what I’m trying to do, the more I’ve enjoyed being a guitarist. Presumably that’s because if you narrow your focus, you can concentrate more of your energy on fewer things, the ones you’ve decided to care about at the expense of the ones you’re letting go of. The day I decided only to fingerpick, I cut adrift any sense that “well, gee, as an acoustic guitar player and roots-music aficionado, shouldn’t I be better at flatpicking than I am?” Now, I know the answer most emphatically is: ah, nope. […]

As a result of countless decisions like that over the past decade or more – and they pick up speed and momentum, the more of them I make – I feel more focused and more adept at the things I *have* chosen, and nearly negligible regret at this point about the equally countless paths not taken. In some ways, it’s a kind of creative decluttering – you let go of the things that feel like obligations, and hold onto the ones that light you up inside.

David Hamburger

I can’t remember how I came to subscribe to roots guitar player and tutor David Hamburger’s newsletter; his lessons are way too advanced for me. I’ll put it down to aspiration. But I like his way of talking about music, the guitar, and the way that working on developing your skill (at whatever) is to contribute to your personal development. Though he would never put it this way, thankfully. You can subscribe here: https://www.fretboardconfidential.com/subscribe

The takeaway

‘The countless paths not taken…’ Of course, you can hear the echo of the Robert Frost poem, and from it know that there are times you have to choose. Making the choice may be uncomfortable, but it’s the only way to move forward.

It’s worth remembering the fuller text of the famous Helen Keller quote:

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

Helen Keller

There’s no way to be sure you are making the right decision, but very often (always?) what you choose matters less than that you choose, and follow it through with commitment.

And if it doesn’t work out… Start over. 

Categories
blogging Business development Life Personal development

A Short Note on Being Authentic

Being authentic – or, rather, the need for it, desire for it – is a modern marketing mantra.

People no longer want stuffy, corporate speak or shouty sales patter. Customers, we are told, want to know they are buying into the ‘real you’. But is this really true?

Well, copy with personality and style is certainly preferable, and more effective at building a long term relationship with customers, than tired corporate clichés or the kind of sales copy that talks at you rather than to you.

And it’s definitely a plus if your business and the way you present yourself is (in existentialist speak) ‘congruent with your beliefs’. If only because it’s so much easier if you don’t have to pretend enthusiasm. Or have to force yourself to be that outgoing, exuberant character, when really you’re the quiet, retiring type.

But of course it’s not the real unedited you that people want, it’s the version of you that’s congruent with them, that strikes a chord with their beliefs, the way that they see themselves.

In a recent post on Copyblogger, Why People Don’t Want the ‘Real’ You, Brian Clark puts it very elegantly:

Very few of the things we buy are truly necessary.

Everything else we buy is used as a way of telling the story of who we are, what we believe, and what we aspire to be.

Your story absolutely matters, but only to the extent that it helps people tell the story they want to tell about themselves.

Be you, but then get out of the way.

As Seth Godin wrote (and from which Brian Clark takes his cue): ‘Authenticity in marketing is telling a story people want to hear.’

But there is a way to be authentic, a way to be true both to yourself and to your customer, your ‘tribe’. An approach that is helpful to you and to those you want to help through your business, nicely expressed in another post on Copyblogger:

When you approach your subject with curiosity, modesty, and a sincere desire to help, you’ll find raving fans.

That’s where I stand.

Postscript

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Categories
Business development Design Technology

Who do you want your customers to become?

Interesting thinking on innovation and customer focus in this post at Harvard Business Review –

Smart companies increasingly recognize that their own futures depend on how ingeniously they invest in the future capabilities of their customers.

and transforming your innovation mindset:

Shift the focus from extracting value from customers to making customers more valuable. Simply put, this new focus redefines the purpose of innovation — which is not just designing better products and services, but designing better and more valuable customers.

Read more here: https://hbr.org/2012/07/who-do-you-want-your-customers

 

Categories
Business development Technology

The indoor farm

Plenty indoor farm

With robots picking the produce and the humans adjusting the flavour profile of the plants. A glimpse of the future arriving?

Interesting post by Adele Peters at Fast Company. Read more at: https://www.fastcompany.com/90365627/robots-are-already-farming-crops-inside-this-silicon-valley-warehouse

Categories
Business development Life Work life

How to Give a Good Handshake

shaking-hands

Getting out and about in the New Year has got me thinking about handshakes. We all know how important first impressions are – so how can you make the best first impression with your handshake?

It’s seems the subject is fraught with insecurity – according to a survey for Chevrolet (quoted by The Daily Mail) some 70% of people said they lacked confidence about their ability to give a good handshake.

So, gathering together some advice (including from etiquette international) – How to shake hands with aplomb:

First things first

  • Use the right hand
  • Keep the fingers together with the thumb open and up
  • Extend your hand forward to the other person’s so that thumb and forefingers meet

Proper character

  • Squeeze firmly, but not bone-crushingly (!). The object is to convey trust and reassurance, not overbearing dominance
  • If the other person offers a very limp hand, consider giving a gentle squeeze; he/she may take this as a cue to grip more firmly
  • If you are sitting down, stand up before extending your hand (unless you are both sitting at a table)
  • Leave your left hand open by your side; don’t leave it in your pocket – a clear signal of lack of interest

How long should a handshake last?

  • Shake hands by creating and up and down motion by raising your hand from the elbow a couple of times so that the handshake lasts about 3 seconds.
  • Release after the shake, even if you are continuing to introduce yourselves. More than three ‘shakes’ begins to suggest ‘psycho’; or extreme nervousness.
  • Do not pump the hand (‘unless the other person is insistent on just that. Then pump the hell out of their hand” – Tom Chiarella)

Whilst you are shaking hands

  • Smile
  • Maintain eye contact with the other person
  • Offer an appropriate verbal greeting e.g. ‘Very pleased to meet you.” [Sidebar: classically, the correct answer to the question ‘How do you do?’ is to repeat the question. However, I find this a bit formal for most purpose and prefer a “Very well thank you; And yourself..?” or something along those lines. Naturally I say ‘Very well’ even if feeling at death’s door.]

Handshaking turn-offs

  • Sweaty palms
  • Limp-wristed grip
  • Extending fingers only

Handshaking tips

To prevent clammy hands:

  • Wash your hands with soap and water beforehand
  • Consider applying a spray of antiperspirant once or more a day, and/or using alcohol-based wipes
  • Drink plenty of water

If you are at an event with drinks, hold the drink in the left hand to avoid giving a cold, wet handshake

A caution

“You can tell the character of a person by their handshake.” Kathy Magliato. But beware: giving a proper handshake can also be learned and deployed by the bounder — “I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake – and the way he looked me straight in the eye, too.” Craig Brown

And finally

Thank you kindly for stopping by, and If you have enjoyed this post please share it on your preferred social networks. 

Categories
Business development

Why Customer Experience Matters – Data

Businessman jump and calling over success sign outdoor

Customer Experience (CX) is now widely discussed and duly name-checked in any web marketing context – but all too often this is as far as it gets. There is no follow through or readiness to invest in improvements.

However, as this 2014 study by Watermark Consulting vividly demonstrates, the top 10 leaders in Forrester Research’s annual Customer Experience Index Rankings not only outperformed the market over the last 7 years, generating a total return that was 26 points higher than the S&P 500 Index, but also enjoyed

  • Higher revenues – due to better retention, less price sensitivity, greater wallet share and positive word-of-mouth.
  • Lower expenses – due to reduced acquisition costs, fewer complaints, and the less intense service requirements of happy, loyal customers.

By contrast, the CX laggards (the bottom 10 in the Index) not only posted a negative stock return of -2.5% during a period (2007-13) when the broader market rose, but also suffered in terms of lower revenues and higher operating costs.

How to create exceptional customer experience

The Watermark report offers some valuable insights from the leaders of the top performing companies as to how to create a compelling and memorable customer experience:

  • Aim for more than customer satisfaction – shape interactions that cultivate loyalty, not just satisfaction
  • Nail the basics, then deliver pleasant surprises
  • Understand that great experiences are intentional and emotional
  • Use cognitive science to manage both the reality and the perception of the customer experience
  • Recognize the link between the customer & employee experience – Happy, engaged employees help create happy, loyal customers

Why it matters

The opportunities offered by delivering exceptional customer experience are significant, as the Watermark report suggests:

The competitive opportunity implied by this study is compelling, because the reality today is that many sources of competitive differentiation can be fleeting. Product innovations can be mimicked, technology advances can be copied, and cost leadership is difficult to achieve let alone sustain.

But a great customer experience, and the internal ecosystem supporting it, can deliver tremendous strategic and economic value to a business, in a way that’s difficult for competitors to replicate.

Full report 

The above offers a quick digest of Watermark’s short but powerful report. You can download the full report from this page.

Categories
Business development Design

Past and present: Design is how it works

The Word

The good thing about magazines – I mean the actual, real, glossy paper ones (glossy not mandatory) is that you can sometimes find them, years, long after you’ve forgotten you ever had them, in the back of the desk drawer, under the sofa or wherever. Like this issue of The Word magazine. And that wonderfully tactile act of flicking through the pages brings the past back to life with the intensity of Proust’s madeleine.

Here’s Kate Bush back in December 2011 saying “I’ve got no plans to tour again, but never say never.” And possibly in the very act of saying these words, repeating them probably for interviewer after interviewer asking the same question (she’d just released her album 50 Words for Snow), the germ of an idea begins to form in her mind – ‘what about, instead of touring, I stay put and get the audience to come to me?’ And hey! three years later…

Also, this being December 2011, there is an obituary of Steve Jobs. Actually a very good one by David Hepworth. It includes this brilliant quote which identifies the understanding of design which propelled Apple’s success:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s the veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not we think design is. It’s not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”

The Word did not itself survive to review the Kate Bush ‘tour’, but I’ve just discovered that the best bit of the magazine – the podcast – is back. I’m not sure if it’s in any way a regular thing, but anyway it’s a hugely enjoyable 40 minutes or so of chat, and somehow works in the way the magazine didn’t. The lead for Word podcast 223 (just released) will give you an idea of the kind of thing you can expect:

In which Mark Ellen, Fraser Lewry and David Hepworth consider U2’s album, the rum work done in the name of the “rock doc” and the proper duties of a household cat

In other words – content worthy of the name. You can find it on hipcast and iTunes.

Talking about Steve Jobs and lost things, I’ve also recently discovered his ‘lost’ interview, which also contains a lot of good stuff on product design and development, and the importance of making great products. It dates from 1995, when he was still running NeXT Computers. Six months later he rejoined Apple and the rest, as they say …

Categories
Business development social media

Can social media actually generate sales ? – Data

social media players

Do posts or ads on social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest and twitter actually generate sales? According to a new report from Business Insider the answer is emphatically Yes. And growing.

For while direct referrals from a social network may account for only a fraction of sales today, the volume of social commerce is growing quickly – in many cases in triple digits. Overall, last year social commerce sales grew at three times the rate of overall e-commerce.

Some key points from the report:

Social commerce is growing fast

According to the Internet Retailer’s Social Media 500, the top 500 retailers earned $2.69 billion from social shopping in 2013, up more than 60% over 2012. By contrast, the e-commerce market as a whole grew by only 17%.

First click vs. last click

Social commerce is even larger in terms of revenue generation when you look at where consumers begin their purchase process, i.e. first click, (as opposed to using traditional methods such as last click before purchase)

Buy buttons

Growth is very likely to accelerate and conversion rates improve as Twitter and Facebook roll out ‘Buy’ buttons; this will allow social-network audiences to initiate an e-commerce purchase by clicking on a retailer’s post or tweet. Facebook’s tests began in July, Twitter’s in September.

Facebook

Facebook is the clear leader for social-commerce referrals and sales: This is due in large part to the sheer size of its audience — 71% of US adult internet users are on Facebook. A Facebook share of an e-commerce post translates to an average $3.58 in revenue from sales, according to AddShoppers. On Twitter, a share or retweet is worth only 85 cents.

Pinterest

But other sites are gaining, and even leading on, specific metrics, such as average order value (AOV): Polyvore, for example, sees $66.75 in AOV from social referrals, according to Shopify. Pinterest sees $65, compared to Facebook which sees $55 AOV. Pinterest also drives more social sharing of retail content than any other network including Facebook.

Read more here.

Image courtesy of jscreationsz at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Categories
Books Business development

If we could show you the future…

The Future

would you walk all over it?

Back in the day, at the agency where I was working, we were pleased with this mailer to the customers of a flooring manufacturer announcing their new website.

If-show-me-the-future

Those were the days – when you sent out a mailer to tell people you had a website. In a world of contradictions, perhaps not a huge one. (And maybe, as the virtual world becomes ever more omnipresent, a return to actual letters and real mail may re-emerge as a useful way of differentiation).

But, in our increasingly digital-first world, it’s not only the paranoid who are questioning whether the future may be threatening to walk all over us – rather than the other way around.

The Circle

In Dave Eggers recent novel, The Circle,  he presents a dystopian view of the future in which social participation and connectedness allows for the individual’s entire day to be totally monitored. No choice or action goes unrecorded, as ‘Circlers’ joyfully embrace their social media duties – or opportunities:

“See, you’re getting all last week’s stuff, too. That’s why there’s so many. Wow, you really missed a lot.”

Mae followed the counter to the bottom of the screen, calculating all the messages sent to her from everyone else at the Circle. The counter paused at 1,200, Then 4,400. The numbers scrambled higher, stopping periodically but finally settling at 8,276.

“That was last week’s messages? Eight thousand?”

“You can catch up,” Gina said brightly. Maybe even tonight. Now, let’s open your regular social account. […]”

Whilst it is explicitly NOT about Google, the recent claim by (Google CEO) Larry Page that fear of data-mining of healthcare may be costing as many as 100,000 lives a year could be straight out of the pages of The Circle.

Managing to be both hilarious and chilling,  The Circle is essentially a 1984 for the digital age.  With the twist that this time it’s not a political regime but a commercial enterprise that is making the bid for total control. And making headway fast in that direction.

[You could describe it as the author looking at the world around him and asking not ‘What would Google do?‘ but ‘What would George Orwell think?’]

Once you ‘go clear’ (Eggers appropriates a term from Scientology), the only escape from the all-seeing eyes of your ‘watchers’ is the bathroom, and then only for 3 minutes or your watchers will begin to bombard you with their concerns for your health. And of course you can’t visit the bathroom too often or you will provoke a similar torrent of concern.

But nothing is ever enough for The Circle in its voracious desire to be your friend, and every shard of privacy and autonomy is under threat in its bid to get inside your head and make you a passenger in your own life – for which the perfect metaphor, and the perfect vehicle, is the driverless car.

You can’t drive over a cliff if you’re not at the wheel. “If my thought dreams could be seen…” as Dylan sang all those years ago.

Day 1

In a recent profile in The Observer, hung on the launch of the Fire phone, I discovered the ‘Day 1’ obsession of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and his view – expressed in a recent letter to shareholders – ‘that we haven’t even reached Day 1 of the internet yet. That the “alarm clock hasn’t even gone off yet” and that the world is “still asleep” to what the rest of Day 1 will bring.’

Founded 20 years ago (5 July 1994) as an online bookstore, Amazon clearly intends to become (if at all possible and as soon as possible) the shop for everything.

The  recently launched Fire Phone is, as The Observer reports, ‘the latest salvo in the great three-way tech battle between Amazon, Apple and Google. They want each other’s business and are, as wired.com suggested, “all turning into each other”.’

At the launch Bezos is reported to have spent as much time talking about Amazon Prime as he did talking about the phone – which is expected to lose £176m this year and up to £330m next year, according to analysts. To make up for this loss, each phone owner would have to spend £207 more on Amazon products than the average customer.

Someone has clearly done the math:

The average Prime member spends £719 a year on Amazon, £411 more than a regular user. Prime members’ purchases and membership fees make up more than a third of Amazon’s US profits. And membership is projected to rise 150%, to 25 million, by 2017.

The in-built network connectivity of the Kindle makes it easy to purchase books, and also means Amazon can ‘see’ not only what you are reading but where you have got to in the book. And now comes… Kindle unlimited – the equivalent of a streaming service for books and audiobooks.

Between us, ideas become reality indeed.

 

Categories
Business development

10 Ways To Make Money in a Free World


This is the freebie e-book distillation of The Curve by Nicholas Lovell and, whilst he does not address the short tail specifically, (surveyed here in this post), The Curve essentially argues that there is plenty of life left in the long tail – if you do it right.

Or, as the blurb puts it, The Curve is Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail meets Seth Godin’s Purple Cow.

So – how do you make money when everything is going free? You take advantage of the amazing opportunity to connect with the people who love what you do:

The same technology that enables files to be shared easily also offers an unprecedented opportunity to build one-to-one relationships with your customers and fans. The web enables artists and businesses to share what they do at a very low cost while building relationships with customers, some of whom will become fans, some of whom will become superfans. How you choose to respond to this opportunity will determine how you fare in the digital age.

Superfans are the key to the curve’s economic model, and how to make the long tail work for you. It’s a three step process:

  1. Use free to find an audience
  2. Use technology to stay in touch with that audience and figure out what they value
  3. Allow those who love what you do to spend lots of money on things they really value

He is right (I think) that content is not enough any more, only great content works now; and adds something valuable in his analysis of the mindset for the digital age:

If you are thinking about units sold, you are thinking in a pre-digital way: you are focused on your product, not your customers. If you are thinking about Average Revenue per User (ARPU), you are putting your customer at the heart of your business.

The customer needs to be at the heart of your business, but the sustainability of your business depends upon finding customers for high value experiences (cynic: are we just saying here ‘ask – what would Apple do?’)

 The solution is to flip your thinking. To focus not on finding the biggest possible audience but to seek out the superfans who love what you do. To use the cheap distribution of the internet to start the process of connecting with fans – and then craft products, services and artistic creations which they will pay lots of money for.

In the book Lovell cites the inspiring example of musician Zoe Keating who is making a good living embracing free, giving her music away but asking fans to make a purchase somewhere along the line or the show will be over.

Go ahead. Stream it. Share it. Pirate it. Torrent it as much as you want. But keep in mind I am 100 per cent DIY. I trust that if you love my music, your moral code will compel you to come to a concert, or buy an album, or a T-shirt directly from me.

The example of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is less convincing. Because although he is making a massive success of embracing digital and free, he had already established his name through the record company system.

In a very direct way, Lovell himself is also testing his theory. 10 Ways to Make Money in a Free World is the short, free version of The Curve. Will you go on to buy The Curve? Or tread further up the superfan highway and attend a Curve lunch; consult with NL himself (a £POA limited opportunity); or even commission a bespoke Curve masterclass for up to 25 people?

 

Categories
Business development Music social media

Is This the Era of the Short Head ?

Rhino
Rhino, courtesy wildlife-pictures-online.com

Have you noticed how winners seem to win ever bigger these days. That one book/film/app/search engine etc. takes a mega-portion of the market, leaving all the rest fighting over a tiny slice of the cake?

Well, there’s a theory for this: the short head.

In the 10 rules of the short head, Dan Chen provides some persuasive statistics:

  • The top 10% of songs on iTunes get 86% of streams, and account for 90% of the store’s total sales
  • 2.7% of Amazon’s titles produce 75% of its revenues
  • 4.5% of apps generate 86% of the revenues, 0.1% generate more than 50%
  • 14% of movies generate 90% of revenues
  • Even in live performance the top 5% of artists get 84% of concert ticket revenues (56% of revenues going to the top 1%)

In January 2014 Oxfam claimed a similar type of concentration in terms of the world’s wealth – that the 85 richest people are as wealthy as the poorest half of the world.

So what about the long tail ?

All this is in stark contrast to the long tail, the theory developed by Chris Anderson in the early 2000s, that the future lay in selling less of more, that “our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of ‘hits’ (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.”

The short head is essentially the opposite of the long tail, and appears to be prevailing: the present reality of business is selling more of less. But why?

Ring Tailed Lemur
Ring Tailed Lemur, creative commons

Choice and social media

One of the reasons lies in the sheer quantity of choice available. Who has the time to go through all the options, check out all the new games, listen to all the new bands?

Instead our attention is drawn to the  apps/songs/games etc. that get featured on iTunes, Amazon etc., the ones that are most popular, have sold most, have the best/most reviews.

And this effect is multiplied by social media. Here’s Dan Chen again: ‘New stuff spreads through social interaction and, thanks to social media, we now have hundreds a day, where before we might have had just a few. Thus we adopt much faster.’

It took the telephone about 75 years to reach 50 million users. The app Draw Something achieved the same milestone in something like 35 days.

Instead of broadening our horizons and nurturing our unique, niche interests – it turns out we all want the same stuff.

Is the news all bad ?

I don’t think it’s time to throw in the towel just yet. To some degree at least, there are a huge number of niches in the tail, and the internet has enabled huge numbers of small businesses and solopreneurs to find a market.

We may not be making fortunes but, in many cases, we are making a living.

And there’s always hope: The developers of Angry Birds released 51 apps that failed to make an impact before hitting the jackpot.

Furthermore – though this cuts both ways – there’s no clear map to hitsville for big business or micro business (see this post on Seth’s blog).

Gartner’s January 2014 report says that less than 0.01 Percent of Consumer Mobile Apps Will Be Considered a Financial Success by Their Developers Through 2018.

“The vast number of mobile apps may imply that mobile is a new revenue stream that will bring riches to many,” said Ken Dulaney, VP and analyst at Gartner. “However, our analysis shows that most mobile applications are not generating profits and that many mobile apps are not designed to generate revenue, but rather are used to build brand recognition and product awareness or are just for fun. Application designers who do not recognize this may find profits elusive.”

Categories
Business development

Google redesign and page titles

You’ve probably noticed Google implemented a redesign of its search results pages recently.

accountants-search-web

Jon Wiley, the lead designer for Google search, posted in Google+ that:

We’ve increased the size of result titles, removed the underlines, and evened out all the line heights. This improves readability and creates an overall cleaner look. We’ve also brought over our new ad labels from mobile, making the multi-device experience more consistent.

If you look closely you’ll also see a faint grey line beneath the sections of results. In the example above, beneath the ads at the top and below the first three organic search results: maybe the first move towards the card-like look of Google+ and Google Now.

Adwords

In bringing over the new ‘Ad’ labels, Google adwords results no longer have a shaded background, separating them from the organic results, and the little subtitle that used to display at the top of the shaded block – ‘Ads related to [keyword]’ – has also gone.

These factors tend to break down the separation between ads and organic search results – a reflection of Google’s policy of taking into account the quality of the destination landing page as a factor in determining which ads rank highest in the ‘ad auction’ for particular keywords. See more on this in Adwords Essentials.

Shorter page titles

The larger typeface and removal of underlines creates a cleaner and clearer look.for the page titles and the results page as a whole.

However, increasing the font size does mean that long titles (for example, of 70 characters) will no longer fit; they are cut short with a trailing ellipsis – see the example above.

Due to the different widths of letters there is no definitive cut-off point below which you can be certain your title will be displayed in full. However, if you keep your title to 55 characters or less, and not all caps, it will almost certainly be displayed in full. Well, 95.8% likely likely if the analysts I’ve read are correct.

If you want to be more certain how your page title will display in Google search results, there’s a useful tool at moz.com where you can test it out.

The page description, incidentally, gets cut off after roughly 160 characters.

Categories
Business development Music

The St James Infirmary Blues

Folk songs, memes, and going viral

It’s been a long road down but I hope I’m finally and decisively on the way back up and I won’t be playing the pneumonia blues no more.

However I have been playing the St James Infirmary Blues and what a great song it is. You can play it quietly as a lamentation, fiercely as a howl of rage against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or any combination in an extended improv.

Credited as ‘traditional’, it has been taken up and reinterpreted through the generations, moving across time and space.

The song is based on an 18th century English folksong ‘The Unfortunate Rake’, which recounted the story of the untimely death of a soldier from venereal disease after frequenting too many prostitutes.

The St James Infirmary of the title is often claimed to be the St James leprosy hospital in London; however since this hospital closed in the 1530s when Henry VIII acquired the land to build St James’s Palace , this is questionable.

When the song emerges in the USA in the early 20th century, somewhere along its transatlantic journey the subject has become a young woman, and the cause of her downfall is drinking and gambling.

There are countless variations in the lyrics, and of course in the playing, but the version recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1928 begins

I went down to St. James Infirmary,
Saw my baby there,
Stretched out on a long white table,
So sweet, so cold, so bare.

Going viral

It strikes me that folk songs are an early form of going viral, or of memes threading their way through different cultures.

They also provide a perfect example of content with soul – that is, content produced by people who are passionate about their mission and their audience.

(That is, if describing folk songs as content is helpful in any way.)

I have a feeling content marketing may give content a bad name. Endless stuff produced with ever decreasing effect because it is transparently marketing as opposed to a genuine and meaningful value exchange (see digitaltonto for an interesting post on this).

But if we take the richness of experience of the St James Infirmary Blues as a guide then maybe, just maybe, our content (and even our content marketing) may have the impact we hope for. And staying power.

In the meantime, play it one more time. From the top…

Categories
Business development social media

How to Knock Off a Bag

Why are expensive leather bags so… expensive?

Watch this brilliant and witty video by Dave Munson of Saddleback Leather Co. and you will know.

In the video he shows pirates how to knock off his bags, and demonstrates that the only way to make his products cheaper is to make them worse. Use lower quality leather, lower quality thread, more seams etc.

By the end of the video you know just how good his bags are – and you want one.

Of course I want a bag with straps consisting of two long continuous pieces of high quality leather, not scraps spliced together. I want a bag which uses highest quality 316 steel for the buckles, not nickel plated plastic; that’s stitched together not with cheap cotton thread but with the finest and strongest continuous filament polyester thread. And, most especially, I want a bag that I know has been made by artisans, not child labour.

Specifically I want a front pocket briefcase. Simply gorgeous. You can see it at saddlebackleather.com.

I bet you’ll want one too.

 

Categories
blogging Books Business development Work life

Penelope Trunk homage

Penelope Trunk

I read this paragraph. Then I read it again. It’s so wonderful and perfect I’m co-opting it here until I can write one this good:

The books were late, but of all the people who bought books, I only got one really angry note. Unfortunately she put the note in my comments section on the blog, for everyone to see. Fortunately, it’s my blog and I can do whatever I want, so I deleted the comment. I sent her a nice response, though. I did not tell her that she is outside the US and because I am a mail-order rube, I gave all international orders free shipping. But at least now I can say I’ve got experience in the export business.

I’m about two years late bringing this post to your attention (even later than her books!). But I think it’s a gem. if you haven’t read the whole thing, go straight there now. Enjoy.