Andy White: This is “Internet Marketing.”

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Andy: Welcome back to the show where we give you the low-down, the inside information, the word from the experts, to help you use the Internet as part of your marketing machine. “Internet Marketing” is brought to you by Academy Internet, at academyinternet.com, and Wild World Productions at wildworldproductions.com.

Welcome to episode 27. This is Andy White. And today, we are talking to Daniel about a wonderful invention from Google called Website Optimizer, and we will talk to a lady who has a subscription website, which is making some really nice use of a lot of the things we talk about on “Internet Marketing,” such as audio, email, and affiliate marketing, all coming up on “Internet Marketing.”

But first, over to Daniel, where I discussed with Daniel Website Optimizer, which is a great tool from Google. And it makes this process of making little tweaks to your website in order to change marketing results a lot easier to track and measure. Enjoy the interview. I have to apologize about Daniel’s very echo-y office and the very summary background noise, but I suppose that’s the price you pay for having a really funky office in The Lanes in Brighton. Anyway, enjoy.

Now, Daniel, Website Optimizer; tell us all about it.

Daniel Rowles: This all started, the other day, I was doing some roundtable events and they were on website usability. And website usability, that was my table. There was one on Web 2.0, one on webcasting, one on podcasts. And I was thoroughly expecting my table to be completely empty, because, to be honest, usability is not the most sexy or exciting of issues to deal with online. But it does underline all the other issues, because if your usability’s no good, your website’s not going to work, at the end of the day. OK?

So, key thing was I went over, “OK, how can I kind of get this presentation a bit more interesting? I know a few of the tools. I know the way we’ve approached it before. I did a bit of research online. And I came across something that had just been launched: Google Website Optimizer.

Andy: Tell us all about it.

Daniel: Well, what it is… A lot of the problem with optimization for usability, i.e. making your website easier and better to use, people are more likely to convert into sales or whatever it is you want them to do, you’ll change a page, and then you look at the results and you say, “Oh, results got better.” But you’ve changed the whole page, and it’s quite hard to tell what changes you actually made that impacted that change. OK?

So, more often than not, you’re kind of “um”-ing and “ah”-ing. You’ll change this page, that page. You’ll change a whole section. “Oh, it’s gone up by two percent, but I don’t really know why it’s gone up by two percent.” There’s always been an approach you could take where you could change small elements from a page, but you will have had to put an awful lot of time and effort into it, or buy very expensive software or get an expensive agency to do it for you.

What’s now happened, if you set up a Google AdWords campaign, which is the Google pay-per-click system, go and set yourself a campaign up. You don’t need to actually spend any money, you just need to set the account up. You will get access to a tool on the top bar that says “Website Optimizer.” What this allows you to do is to set up some tools in there. You set up some information in your account details what you’re trying to achieve. You need to install Google Analytics, OK?

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: So you go to Google Analytics–search for “analytics” in Google, you’ll find it–install that on your site as well.

Andy: Actually, it’s that little bit of code that you paste into the bottom just before the closing–is it the closing HTML body tag? It is the body tag, isn’t it?

Daniel: Yeah. To be honest, you can get away with pasting it pretty much anywhere at the bottom of your HTML page. A little bit of code on every page, and what that does, that will give you access to Google Analytics, which tells you what’s going on with your website. OK?

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: Very useful tool. I’d recommend it. If you’re not using it, you should some form of analytics anyway, OK?

But what this does, this integrates with Google Analytics. And what you can do, as opposed to changing whole web pages, you can set a page up, and you can change: “I’m changing the heading. I’m changing one paragraph of text. I’m changing this border.” And then what it will do is, each time someone goes to a web page, it will send them a particular version of the page, with one thing changed.

Andy: Ah, yeah.

Daniel: What it will then do is when you login to Analytics, you can look your conversion paths, i.e. how many people came to my contact form that came from Google, in this particular example? And you can say, “OK, from this particular version of the page, eight people did; from this version, 10 people did.” And you can work out which one’s working the best. You go with those changes, then you try and change something else.

And you can go through this iterative process of improving the page and improving the page to get better results. The good thing is it works out. When somebody comes to your page, it will say, “OK, this person saw this version of the page last time. I’m only ever going to give them that version of the page, so they don’t get confused.” Because the problem is, if people are coming to your website and seeing four different versions of the same page, it can be very confusing. So it gets around that issue, and that was a problem with a lot of previous software.

So, it’s a really good way of looking at usability, testing pages, making sure you’re making the very best of the traffic you actually get to your website. Because that’s what usability’s all about; it’s all about making the site easy to use and maximizing what you get from your website traffic.

Andy: So, it allows you to make multiple, or presumably, initially just two different versions of your web… I suppose it could be any, couldn’t it?

Daniel: You could have 10 different versions of the same page with different changes going on, and it will compare them like to like. I’d suggest doing a few, first of all, just making a couple of changes, just so you’ve got easy to cope with kind of data. Change the words in the title. Change the words in the headings. Try changing the words on the page. And you will see slightly different conversion rates from each of those pages.

Now, if you can even improve your conversions by one percent–well, one percent more business is a fair bit of business. Then do it by another one percent, and so on and so forth, you start to get a lot more business through your website.

Getting people to sign up for newsletters, that kind of thing. Think of all these different types of conversions: newsletter sign-ups, sign up to be updated on more information, actually buying a product, filling in a contact form, giving your feedback, whatever it may be, and you can try and improve the way people do that and just drive them through to do that.

And it’s a really exciting product, because you can see, “I did this; this is the result.” And you can get some good data to play with. It’s integrated into Google Analytics, as I said. And Google Analytics has just got a whole lot better recently as well. It’s a lot more visual, a lot easier to use.

So, if you haven’t got Google Analytics, go and get that. Get Google Website Optimizer, but remember, you need to set up an AdWords campaign in order to get it for free. OK? And then go ahead and have a play around and see what you can do.

Andy: That sounds really powerful.

Daniel: It is. There’s a Japanese testing principle, which I can’t remember what is actually the name of it, but that has done this exact thing, that you give the same results with slightly different changes and compare them. Now, lots of people have asked me about it, and the only way you can really do that, there’s been lots of software, but it’s very expensive. You have to set it up on your server. It’s quite complicated.

And I’m sure there are other ways of doing this, so please let me know; if there’s any list or there’s any other piece of software that do this, drop us an email. But this one I just found really easy to use. It’s very easy for someone who hasn’t got that much experience to do. You just tag up your HTML, the code of your pages, in a couple of pages, and it will just load the different versions accordingly. So it’s quite a clever piece of kit.

Andy: So there is a little bit of HTML diddling to do.

Daniel: There is. You need to be able to set up different versions of your page and understand how they’ll be set up differently.

Andy: Right.

Daniel: But that can just be literally changing the text. And then all you need to do is just mark, in that page, where the text of the different versions go. So, having an introduction to HTML, you’re going to need it to use this tool, basically. But once you’ve got that, you don’t need that much experience, and it’s a really, really good way of really seeing what’s going on with your website and then understanding how you can improve that.

Andy: So, it’s Website Optimizer from Google; free, if you’ve got a pay-per-click account going.

Daniel: Absolutely. You don’t need to be spending any money, so that’s just how you need to access it.

Andy: Sounds good. Give it a try, folks.

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Andy: Well, there you go. There’s are report from Daniel. Hope you found that useful.

Now, just before we go onto the next segment, I must talk about our main sponsor, Academy Internet, who have been with us from the start. Now, Academy Internet are a full service online marketing agency who cover the full spectrum of online marketing activities and objectives. It’s all about using the technology to make your business work, and they’re happy to guarantee that they will improve your return by at least 30 percent. And you can find them at www.academyinternet.com. Or you can call them on 44, if you’re outside the UK, or 0-1273-733433.

OK. So, onto our next and final segment. Here we have a very interesting lady. I’ve known her for a little while, and she has got a very interesting site that is making some great use of a lot of the things that we talk about on “Internet Marketing.” Let’s see if you can spot them. That’s your homework: spot the things that she’s using. Recorded over Skype, and not a bad interview, I have to say, from a technical standpoint. Enjoy.

OK, so let’s start from the beginning. Heather Berry. Now, you have a website…

Heather Berry: I do.

Andy: And you’ve got quite an interesting Internet marketing model.

Heather: Yeah.

Andy: And I’d like you to just tell us all about it. And I’ll try and understand what you’re doing and then turn it into English for the viewers, although I’m sure you’ll do a very good yourself, turning it into English.

Heather: I’ll do my best, Andy.

Andy: Fire away.

Heather: Right. Basically, where I come from is, I’m a health coach. And the whole thing is that a lot of people who want to get healthy, want to lose weight, know what they need to do. So, they know to eat less, eat better, exercise more, job done. But in fact, people don’t do it. And I realized that kind of what people need to do is they need the ongoing motivation. They need to have somebody kind of giving them a regular kick, because otherwise they just give up.

Andy: Human nature, after all, isn’t it?

Heather: Absolutely. And realizing that, because been there, done it myself, so I kind of realized what people need, and people were asking for it. And then I though, “Well, how can I get this out to as many people as possible, because at the moment, it’s just me standing up in front of an audience doing seminars, trainings and workshops but actually that only gets bums on the seats.

So I need to take this out into the big, wide world and also therefore maximize my income. There’s no point talking to three or four people when you could be talking to three or four thousand people. So that was kind of the start of things.

Also I liked getting information from other people. I’ve been using sites from the states, people giving me ideas and stuff I incorporated into my work. So I was seeing the technology they were using to deliver that. And I hatched onto this thing-audio postcards. And I thought that’s actually very, very clever because you can put bits of film into it-I haven’t quite got to that stage yet but it’s entirely possible. And because it’s the whole thing of that human voice and what that adds to things.

So I could send one out and say, “Hello, Andy, you should be doing this, that and the other things.” But if somebody is just going to read that, it’s unlikely they’re going to respond. People don’t have the time. But if they receive something by audio, it’s almost like having me there. People will probably use earphones to listen to it.

It’s a very personal thing. People that have used it have said ‘it really sounds like you’re talking to me.’ So it really is an incredibly powerful tool but it’s also incredibly easy to use. I’m not Miss Techno Savvy person although I have built the site myself which I’ve very pleased with.

Andy: Before we go any further, what is the name of your company? What’s the name of your site?

Heather: It’s www.ifeellikeamilliondollars.com. Very nice and easy. Does what it says on the tin.

Andy: So if I wanted to participate in this, I would go to the site presumably and fill in some details presumably.

Heather: Absolutely. It’s a very-as I say it’s a site I’ve created and I’ve used the audio email on the home page as just a little blurb to tell you what it’s all about.

Andy: Welcoming people to the site presumably.

Heather: Yes and just to explain my philosophy about health which is all about fabulous real food. I don’t do any of this one bean burgers and all this nastiness.

Andy: And presumably there is some call to action in the audio, is there not?

Heather: Absolutely. Sort of “sign up here.” There are a couple of links to the Sign Up page on the home page. And on the Sign Up page, there is a link to Terms and Conditions. Because we have to tell people to look through the Terms and Conditions because we are talking about human’s health.

Then it’s a very simple process. Sign up here. And it’s reasonable-17 pounds a year-which is very inexpensive because I want to make it as accessible to as many people as possible. Literally it’s sign up and that takes you to a form with all the details and you pay via PayPal.

Andy: Really.

Heather: I’ve set it up very, very simply.

Andy: OK, I’ve now signed up, I’ve gone through the PayPal bit. What am I going to receive?

Heather: Then you’ll receive a message “Hi, Andy, welcome, etc., etc.” As soon as you’ve made your PayPal transaction the default page that it goes to from there is the Affiliate page because what I want to do is build up a huge big network of people who are involved with this. Because the more people who get involved, I earn more which enables me to do a lot more.

As the network of people grows I can create a much bigger business and I can give people a lot more because obviously there’s case flow going on. So the incentive is-as I say as people are signed up and have paid by PayPal it takes them immediately to an Affiliate Sign Up page which costs nothing for them to do and everybody that they introduce-they can then put a link onto their website or into an email and anybody that they introduce via that link, they will earn a little 10 percent commission.

Andy: Sounds pretty good.

Heather: Absolutely. They’re not necessarily going to make their fortune unless they sign up hundreds of thousands of people which would be wonderful, but it’s just an added little incentive for people. So it really is a three stage process.

Andy: So I’ve signed up and gotten a welcome email and then do I get some sort of automated response for a few days and then the….

Heather: Yes, I’ve got an auto-responder set up, the first one of which is a welcome, and I’ve used audio with all of these. Just because I think it gets people used to the idea of audio email.

Andy: Yes, absolutely.

Heather: So the first one on day one, which is automatic as soon as you sign up, which is, “Hi, welcome, blah, blah, blah,” and also what is going to happen next. A little bit of an explanation as to how things will progress.

Then basically for the next eight days, I’ve produced what I call a little audio “e-booklet” which is basically six or seven minutes each day. Day one, day two, etc.

Andy: Right.

Heather: Basically just giving people the guiding principles. This is my approach to health, so it’s a bit about the food, it’s a bit about the nutrients, it’s a bit about exercise, a bit about relaxation, a bit about how you put the whole thing together, etc. So that’s the first thing that you get.

Instead of having to sit there reading a book and delving through it, I’m being very generous and giving it all too you, you just have to listen, engage slightly in the process.

Andy: Yes, OK.

Heather: Ongoing from that, actually the real meat of the program, and the ongoing motivation that I want people to have, is that on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, everybody receives a little audio “motivating moment” I call them. It’s actually a minute to minute and a half, just saying, “Here’s a great idea.”

I generally have a little bit of a theme for the week, because it helps me to create something that’s more ongoing. It means it’s not so bitty for people. They’ve got the theme for the week; it might be around a word or a particular type of food, it can be anything that I choose.

Andy: OK.

Heather: I look at things; so I’ll look at the food, I’ll look at the nutrition, I’ll look at the exercise aspects, I’ll look at the relaxation point of view. So really, all approaches to health because they’re all important. That will be Monday, Wednesday, Friday that they each get their little motivating moment.

Andy: So they’re getting a slice of you three times a week?

Heather: Absolutely.

Andy: Tell us how you’re doing it. Do you create these new on an ongoing basis, or do you recycle any?

Heather: No, the intention is to keep going, creating new stuff, because there will be people who are not going to achieve their goals in six months, they might be a year or two years. But even once you’ve achieved whatever your health goals are, when you get there, you need to kind of maintain it.

Andy: Sure.

Heather: For people like that, they might not listen to every single one of them, but it’s just a quick addition just to kind of keep you going.

Andy: So let me get this right. This comes to the user in the form of an audio postcard, is that right?

Heather: It does. It’s delivered by email. It literally looks like a little post card, it’s very clever.

Andy: So when did you first discover this, because I had heard of them but I never really looked into them deeply?

Heather: It must be about a year ago. It was some American guy, I got onto a mailing list or I picked up something and I got a link through. That was very exciting. What it is, is you don’t actually send it as a big fat file that is going to take forever, all it is is a link.

The piece of audio is hosted on their server, so all you do is click on the link to hear the audio, which is fantastic. It means I’m not sending out vast volumes of space and it’s not taking up lots of gigabytes, all it is is a link. It’s a very simple email that’s not going to get stuck in spam filters and so on.

Andy: That’s right. It’s not going to be huge; it’s going to be an ordinary looking email, html formatted presumably.

Heather: Absolutely. And it goes out as both, just in case people can’t get html, it goes out as text as well.

Andy: Oh that’s clever.

Heather: The other thing I forgot to mention Andy was that people are getting this ongoing motivating bit three times a week. In addition to that, I’ve actually set up an author-only blog, which I am the only author, because I really don’t want to get too involved in moderating too much stuff at this point in the business.

Andy: Sure.

Heather: What it is, I add stuff, I probably update it once a week, and I put on recipes, or I hope to do more things like interviews like you and I are doing now, so record interviews, get other peoples’ input so that people are not just hearing from me, it’s becoming a much broader experience.

That is something that they can link into as and when they want to. I put in a recipe the other day for king prawn alfrezzi or something.

Andy: OK, because your approach Heather is very diet-based. Is diet the right word?

Heather: Ooh, horrible word.

Andy: That’s a horrible word.

Heather: It’s got the word diet in it.

Andy: I feared that might be the wrong word.

Heather: It’s got the word diet in it.

Andy: Is it nutrition based? Is that a better way to put it?

Heather: Nutrition based. Real food. Real Food.

Andy: Real food. OK.

Heather: I’m a passionate foodie. I absolutely adore good, real food. Don’t muck about with things - don’t try and make it taste like chocolate, or taste like it’s got sugar in it. If you want to sweeten it, stick some honey in it or whatever.

There’s so many ways of being healthy without having to resort to very expensive, over processed, completely nutrient deficient, in my opinion, food. Get it as close to the way it was grown, born, or fell out the sky, and go for it.

It means - I think people have come - have moved so far away from what real food is. A lot of people have kind of forgotten what real food is.

Andy: Oh, absolutely.

Heather: And it’s actually - it’s very -it’s so easy to prepare. It actually takes half the time; it’s half the cost. Yet people sometimes think being healthy has to be expensive and tasteless, or just out of the reach of normal people. And it’s not.

I’m very aware that all the recipes that I do, all the ideas that I give, are accessible to people, whether you’re earning 10 an hour or 10,000 an hour. It really is across the board accessible to people.

Andy: Well this sounds absolutely fantastic! Let’s just see if we can summarize what you’ve done here. So you’ve basically — you’re using — I mean your primary tool, if you like, are these audio postcards.

Heather: Absolutely.

Andy: So you’re using audio in a very effective way on your website. You’re delivery channel or mechanism, if you like, is primarily audio over email.

Heather: Yes, oh and…

Andy: Basically, you’re consulting with as many people as possible using this distribution mechanism, which is absolutely fantastic.

Heather: Absolutely, absolutely. And the one thing I forgot to say was actually, in order to get the information out there, I’m using email marketing software.

Andy: Yeah.

Heather: Because, the great thing with that is I can see where it’s gone, you know, who it’s been delivered to. Make sure that nothing bounces and it’s all trackable.

Andy: Yes. So using a list manager.

Heather: Absolutely. And I can see also who’s opened things. So, although I’m not here to play Big Brother or anything, if people have signed up, I really want them to carry on using it.

If I see that people aren’t, I can - it’s just for me, it’s a little bit of market research. I can go back and say, “Is there any reason why you’ve stopped using it? Could we have done something different?” So just, you know, or, “Do you need a little bit of help?” So it really is something - I can enhance my service ’cause I know exactly what’s happening with the emails as well.

So just using - all the technology is there, and it - it doesn’t have to be expensive, either.

Andy: No.

Heather: As I say, I really am doing this on a complete shoestring.

Andy: Heather, can I ask, when you kicked this off and how it seems to be going so far?

Heather: Well, it launched last week, Monday.

Andy: What was the date? Monday, the… It was the end of March, wasn’t it?

Heather: Oh, the 20 something.

Andy: The 20-something-th of March. Yes.

Heather: Of March. Yes. Having had the - just the idea of the concept, obviously lots had happened before and I’m building on other stuff that I’ve done. But the i-the core of the idea, I had on the 22nd of December, so it literally was three months from inception to just - to going live.

Andy: To launch, yeah.

Heather: And there are still little tweaks and so on. I need to make sure when people sign up to be affiliates, my instructions are a bit clearer. They’re a little bit Americanized at the moment. They don’t…

Andy: You got to Anglocize them a wee bit.

Heather: Got to Anglocize them a wee bit so that everybody’s happy.

Andy: Sure.

Heather: But I’ve got somebody who signed up in South Africa.

Andy: Wow.

Heather: I’ve got someone to sign up in Austria, albeit a friend of mine, but you know…

Andy: It’s a start.

Heather: But, the great thing is that the application for this is enormous. I’ve already got a couple of corporates who are interested in adapting it for corporate programs.

Andy: Yeah.

Heather. The potential is phenomenal.

Andy: It is, yeah.

Heather: I’m even going to look at sort of doing it under license, etcetera, etcetera. It’s huge!

Andy: And what’s…

Heather: And incredibly exciting!

Andy: It does sound absolutely fantastic. What lessons, Heather, have you learned doing this, about sort of using the Internet to market yourself.

Heather: I actually just had a conversation with a friend of mine who’s in marketing who was saying very much about the whole idea of your brand and building that and creating something. If we look at things like, sort of - Amazon has created itself as a trustworthy brand. You have to create that sort of trust in who you are.

Obviously this is a website. I could be anybody stuck in a hole in some strange country. You have to deliver. If you say that’s what you’re going to deliver, you have to deliver immediately so that people trust what you’re doing.

I think that’s very, very important to keep moving forward. I remember there were a couple of days that things didn’t quite work, and people were going, “Where are you? What’s going on?” The distrust crept in very quickly.

Andy: Yes, yes.

Heather: So it’s to keep delivering - that was really important. Following up whenever anybody gives you feedback. The feedback can be negative or positive, but always take it on board to go through with that.

There’s lots of sites. Keep exploring ways of doing things. You know, like who are the people who do the audio pace card stuff? There’s one, two, three, four companies I can look at. They all have different costs and offerings. I went to an exhibition in London called TFM, which is “Technology for Marketing.”

Andy: Yes.

Heather: Loads and loads and loads of techie people telling you all these fantastic things, and delivering extensively the same service. It could vary from something like costing me about 50 quid a month to 3000 for exactly the same thing.

Andy: 3000 a month?

Heather: Oh, no, it was 3000 pounds setup fee, which is just outrageous.

Andy: Oh, I see, right.

Heather: But then there was still quite a high cost per month.

Andy: Wow.

Heather: So do your research. There are lots of people out there. Make sure that you’re getting something that can be sustained, that they’ve got good people at the end of their help lines. You do need it. And go for it! I know mine are not quite perfect yet, but I’m going for it, because you only learn these things by actually doing it.

Andy: We hear this a lot from entrepreneurs, don’t we, Heather? Just start, and then just tweak it as you go along.

Heather: Exactly. Richard Branson didn’t walk in with banners flying high and lots of airplanes - he started with one, with an idea, and that was, you know, odd, Richard stuff at first. But you go for it with the idea, because you know it’s good, and you just get out there and talk to as many people as possible.

Andy: Well Heather, it’s a fantastic idea.

Heather: Thank you.

Andy: You’re completely self-funded, aren’t you?

Heather: I am, indeed.

Andy: You’re on sort of a shoestring budget.

Heather: Oh yes, and a credit card.

Andy: You really are an inspiration to us all, and I absolutely wish you the best of luck for this.

Heather: Thank you.

Andy: To anyone that’s listening, the website again, Heather, is…?

Heather: www.ifeellikeamilliondollars.com.

Andy: No spaces… obviously no spaces.

Heather: No spaces, dots, spots, or anything else. All one word. Ifeellikeamilliondollars.com - lots and lots of l’s in it.

Andy: OK.

Heather: It would be great if anybody wants to come in. There is a contact us bit on the website, so if there’s anything you want to see, or any ideas that you have, or want to think about getting involved in some way, please do contact me, because I’m open to ideas, and very much looking forward to expanding this globally.

Andy: OK. Well Heather Barry. What’s the name of your company, Heather?

Heather: “The Vitality Junction.”

Andy: Heather Barry of “The Vitality Junction.”

Heather: And I feel like a million dollars.

Andy: And the I feel like a million dollars… what do you call it? A web service? Motivational service?

Heather: Health motivation program.

Andy: Health motivation program.

Heather: That might sort of ease into something slightly more user-friendly.

Andy: Yes.

Heather: But that’s what it is at the moment. That’s the brand that I am building, the “I feel like a million dollars” brand.

Andy: Well that’s fantastic, and I wish you the best of luck. Thanks for talking to us.

Heather: Thank you very much, indeed.

Andy: Have a great day.

Heather: Have a great day, too. Thanks, Andy.

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Andy: Well, that’s it for this weeks show. I thank you for listening. I do hope you enjoyed it. Now, we would love to hear from you. So if you have any questions or comments that you’d like to have featured on the show, then do send them to info@academyinternet.com. If you want to send a little WAV or MP3 file with some sort of comments or a question, please do so, and we’ll be very happy to play that, as well.

If you’re a subscriber, we’d like to thank you for your valuable time. If you haven’t subscribed yet, there are a couple ways you can do that. Go to iTunes and just search for “Internet Marketing” or go to www.summitsolutions.co.uk website, or the www.academyinternet.com sites, and you can subscribe there. This is Andy White signing off - have a fantastic week, and we’ll see you next time on “Internet Marketing.”

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Andy White: This is “Internet Marketing.”

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Andy: Welcome back to the show where we give you the low down — the inside information — the word from the experts, to help you use the Internet as part of your marketing machine. Internet marketing is brought to you by Academy Internet, at academyinternet.com, and wild world productions, at wildworldproductions.com.

In today’s show, we’ll be looking at a couple of interesting things. First of all, Google is going into the checkout area of things, which is a bit of a new move for Google. We’ll be talking to a gentlemen who’s using MySpace to great advantage, so stay tuned to that.

Let’s move straight onto the first story about Google entering the checkout market. I spoke to Daniel Rowles, to get the low down from him. So here we are again, with Daniel Rowles of Academy Internet. Daniel, what are we talking about today?

Daniel Rowles: I think we’re going to have a little look at Google Checkout — a new service Google’s offering. We seem to be speaking about Google an awful lot lately, because they seem to be bringing out new things all the time. This is quite an interesting one, because it’s a new kind of direction for them. It’s connected with AdWords, their pay-per-click advertising service, and it’s quite interesting how they’re going about it. I think for anyone with an e-commerce store, or looking at selling online, it’s quite an interesting topic.

Andy: Now, e-commerce. I always used to cringe a bit whenever I was going to put a site up that required payment. I don’t know if it’s any different, but you always used to have to get a merchant account, then you had to deal with the payment processing. How does Google make this easy?

Daniel: What they’re trying to do is centralize it. The problem is at the moment, if you buy online, each system is different. Integrating an e-commerce system is quite difficult, because there’s different elements involved. We talked about that a little bit, before. What’s different here is they’re trying to make one system which lots of different merchants can use. You have one login for all of them. So any shop you go to that uses Google Checkout, you can log in, use the same account, and you can do your payments with that.

The reason it’s good for the merchant, the people who are selling, is it’s completely free to 2008 to process your payments. Which is massively unusual, because you normally pay a monthly fee, a per-transaction fee, and a percentage. So it can become quite expensive. You end up paying 3, 4, five percent of each transaction. With Google Checkout, it’s actually free until 2008.

So let’s step back, and explain what it is. It’s just a system that allows you, so if you’ve got a shopping cart, you have an existing thing where you can pick products, and choose what the products are. You then need somewhere to process the payments. Google Checkout allows you to process those payments. Normally when you do that, you sign up, and as I say, you have a percentage of your charge, and a per-transaction fee. With Google Checkout, until 2008, it’s free.

The interesting thing after that is for people that are using AdWords, so their pay-per-click campaign, for every pound you spend with AdWords, you can transact 10 worth of transactions for free. So example, if you spent 1,000 a month with AdWords, you can have 10,000 come through your shop, transactions, and you wouldn’t pay for it to be processed at all.

Andy: Clever.

Daniel: Yeah, it is clever. What it’s basically doing is encouraging you to use AdWords to get people to your shop in the first place. Then you make sales. You see the use of using AdWords, and you continue to do it. It gives you another benefit to using them.

The other thing, as well, which is a real benefit, is if you’re using AdWords adverts, as in Google’s pay-per-click adverts, if you sign up for Checkout as well, and you use Checkout on your online store, you get a big logo that sticks onto your pay-per-click advertising that will make it really stand out from everybody else’s. They’re pushing this quite hard at the moment. And it is a good solution.

It doesn’t integrate directly with that many shopping carts at the moment, but there is an API. There’s a programming interface that makes it interface with pretty much everything. And lots of the popular stores are coming out with interfaces to work with it now. So things like Miva, which is quite an easy one to get into, there’s a plug-in for that now that will make it connect up to Google. And lots of other ones that are coming up as well.

Andy: Can we just move over to the side of the buyer now? Are you saying this works a wee bit like PayPal?

Daniel: In a way but all it really means is that you have a centralized log in for any store. So you don’t need to go through to the Google Checkout site or anything like that. It integrates quite seamlessly with any site you are using but it means you have one centralized login. So say you went to five different stores and if they were all using Google Checkout you could use the same login which means you wouldn’t have to put your payment details, your shipping address, your contact details in time and time again. It is only useful, of course, assuming that lots of the stores you are using are using Google Checkout.

Andy: Can you put your own money in? Is it like PayPal in that respect or is it, you just use a credit card and it just stores your login details so it remembers stuff.

Daniel: It just stores your login details. It is not at the moment being used for sending money between people. It’s a purely a kind of checkout system.

Andy: OK, so if you’ve got your e-commerce site and you want to use Google what should one be doing?

Daniel: If you did search for the word checkout in Google surprisingly Google checkout comes in at number 1.

Andy: Why is that?

Daniel: I can’t imagine why. I can’t imagine they’re filling in results. It must be the best optimized page in the world and you basically find that you go in there. You sign up for an account. You have your store. You integrate your store for all the solutions in there and you can process transactions for free until 2008 which is quite big because after even if you weren’t using AdWords at all and you were paying for transactions after 2008 got the figures here. They are going to charge 15 pence per transaction plus 1.5 percent which is significantly lower than a lot of the other merchant accounts ask for. They ask for about three percent.

Andy: That’s still good value isn’t it?

Daniel: It is good value. I think they are doing this purely because they want people to start using it to make it a world known solution. As with anything else with Google the more people they can get involved it gets weight behind them and it starts to snowball. I think that’s why they are doing it.

If you look at it now Google actually got most parts of the market. They’ve now got the advertising that takes you to the site in the first place with AdWords. Then you’ve got, when you are on your site you can see what’s going on. You’ve got Google analytics and then if people actually buy things from you they have Google checkout to process the payments. OK?

The one downside to this is Google saving the information on how people are searching, what people are doing on your website and where they are spending the money. They do have really good privacy policies and statements and legally they can’t do too much with the information. But some people are concerned about how much information Google has access to.

If you look at Gmail as well, they are now into people’s emails. There’s some privacy concerns that people come out with. I personally am not that concerned by it because I’ve seen their privacy statements. They have top privacy statements. If you are somebody that is really concerned about privacy then people start to get worried about it. Google Checkout looks like a good service. We are doing test things with it at the moment. We will let you know how we get on with it. We will feed it back to the listeners.

Andy: So you’re trying it yourself. Do you know of anyone using it apart from yourself?

Daniel: That’s the thing. I don’t many people using it yet. It is a new thing. It takes a while to integrate it into ecommerce system. There are sites out there using it but I think it will take a while to build trust in it. The one thing Google are really pitching is they have full protection. They have really good full protection and you don’t pay extra for it. With a lot of the merchant accounts you pay extra percentage to get extra full protection. Only time will tell how good that full protection is, how people are finding it. So as we hear things we will feed it back to the listeners and we want to try to get your feedback as well.

Andy: Daniel, thank you very much.

[music]

[commercial break] Now before we move down to the next section, let me mention our next sponsor. Academy Internet. They have been our sponsor from Day 1. Of course we’re delighted about that. They provide the experts like Daniel and Graham. They’re a full service online marketing agency; they cover the full spectrum of online marketing activities and objectives.

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Andy: OK let’s move onto the main segment. I spoke to Neil Cole. Neil Cole is in the entertainment industry. He has been using MySpace for quite sometime. He is using it to very good effect. He knows a lot about MySpace so I had a chat with him over Skype and all seems to give us a lowdown on the best way for using MySpace as a promotional tool. Enjoy!

Neil Cole! Hello, sir!

Neil Cole: Hello.

Andy: Neil, you’re using MySpace in a very effective way. Tell me, first of all, what you’re using MySpace for and secondly, some tips and techniques other people can use in your experience.

Neil: Well, the main reason I use MySpace — I find that it works very well for me is that as a comedian and a television presenter — that there’s a lot of people that I know who have their own MySpace profile and that they use well and update it.

For example, just at a very simple level, some that I know but I haven’t spoken to for few months — if I look at their MySpace page, I can ascertain pretty quickly what they’re up to before I speak to them. That’s on a social level and on a more professional level — lots of forums in which a guy might work.

For example, in a comedy club or TV production company — comedy clubs quite often have their MySpace profile as do people who work in TV production companies — so I can contact them directly through MySpace and say, “Hello! Can I come and play at your club?” or “Hello! I’ve got some ideas for television. Can I come and pitch them to you?”

In a way, that would have been more difficult because you have to find their phone number or find the respective person’s individual email address in the post. Then block up the courage to make that call which is quite an aggressive marketing technique…

Andy: Yeah, sure.

Neil: …of one’s self. But if you’ve got MySpace and they’ve put that information out — it adds well to access- then you feel a little bit safer and a little less cocky contacting people.

Andy: Yeah.

Neil: More often than not, the answer is positive. The answers are affirmative and you’ve made a connection. So, in whatever field you work in, if there are N number of like-minded people — your peers, your superiors, people who want to be in your position — online and have their own MySpace profile, you can build your network among these people, and further your career, definitely.

Andy: That’s interesting because I never really feel of MySpace in that regard. Never I thought of MySpace… The first thing that always came to my mind was like, oh, like building lots of links and lots of people so you can traverse through the network because it was a way to find the people.

That’s really interesting. From what you’re saying, it’s a real leveler and for some people who are very influential, for example, it could be very useful for other people to know suddenly make themselves very, very available without all the sort of hierarchy and difficulty of getting through to them.

Neil: Exactly. When I first started, I even felt it was just for dating or for teenagers to chat and say “Look, I’ve got a cat.” Or “I like driving cars fast. Aren’t they great?” There is a lot of that. For every million American high school children who have their own frat house and MySpace page, there are a hundred genuine successful professionals that could help you.

But also your average profession, let’s say in my field, the average actor or comedian or writer will have three hours where they’re just kicking about in their trailer — they got WiFi, they got a laptop and they’ll go online. Once they’ve surfed around and done their shopping and spent their millions, what would they do? They all switch on to their MySpace page and they’ll look at who else is out there.

Andy: Yeah.

Neil: And so a lot of them are these famous people in the world — now have their own official MySpace page because it is worth their while. It will draw people to them. They can generate their own, interestingly, accessible fan base. They don’t have to draw traffic to their own website; they just simply — people know. This is the official MySpace, for example, Jerry Seinfeld or for example, Eddie Izzard.

Andy: Yeah.

Neil: One problem is you have to distinguish the official ones from the fan site so the people who are pretending to be them.

Andy: There are also fake ones are there?

Neil: There are lots of fake ones.

Andy: Yeah.

Neil: It is quite easy with a little bit of experience to realize that actually yeah that is blah blah and that is their official site. You know you might send them a message and you might be the millionth person that year that sent them a message but you have contacts with them in a way that was unheard of.

Andy: Yeah.

Neil: ten years ago with a celebrity and that’s one of the beauties of it. Everyone is on a level playing field. Everyone has that direct interface with the Web.

Andy: Now how effective has MySpace been for you now? Have you used it successfully as a way of getting more business, more gigs?

Neil: Yeah. I would say yes. I would say on a number of levels. I mean you are able to, people ever want to see what you are up to it is much easier to update if you have a MySpace page on a minute-by-minute basis so that people can go there and go “Oh look, he’s doing something tonight” or “Oh he’s just blogged about what he has just done.” “Oh, there’s his show reel. Oh there’s some pictures of him. That’s what he looks like.”

All of those things mean there’s an instant CV photo show reel online that anybody prospective employer whether they’ve contacted you directly or not could anonymously access all the information about you they need to know. They might be going, we have got to cast a 35-year-old man with light brown hair in the role of someone who is slightly funny and doesn’t mind falling over a bit. I wonder what Neil Cole looks like.

Andy: Yeah.

Neil: They will go over to my MySpace page which is MySpace.com/theneilcoleshow. They will see that I fit the bill perfectly and then they will contact me through MySpace. That’s one level is a kind of passive way that people can contact you.

Then the other way you kind of go, I know this person that I worked with yesterday. I become a friend. I look at who their friends are. Oh they’ve got that person as a friend. That’s a good agent or a good promoter. I will make them a friend and ask them for work and it happens by a kind of process of attrition more and more contacts develop.

Andy: So what tips then would you give, Neil, to anyone thinking of using MySpace as a way to promote themselves and get more business?

Neil: Well just quickly, make sure your profile is very clear. Make it clear what you do. Don’t make it too sort of garish and personal. And then simply seek out like-minded people, people that you know already or people that you know do what you do. Add them as friends and then look at their friends and add their friends as your friends but just be fearless. You know contact people that you otherwise wouldn’t dream of contacting.

Andy: Yeah.

Neil: Be fearless but not too pushy, would be my advice.

Andy: Any little gotchas or things you need to watch out for on MySpace?

Neil: Oh nowadays you get lots of spam. People asking to be your friend and they are links to porn sites or marketing sites. Just like everything on the Net just be very careful don’t just randomly add friends.

Andy: Yeah.

Neil: because obviously the more friends you have the more kudos you have.

If someone looks at your site and you have got three friends one is Tom who’s the founder of MySpace then they are going to go this person is not very popular. If you’ve got 10,000 friends, they will go, “Blyme, this person has got a lot of friends.” Don’t add friends wildly and randomly at the expense of your own credibility, really.

Andy: Neil Cole, thank you very much indeed for sharing your experiences.

Neil: OK.

Andy: Well that’s it for this week’s show. Thank you for listening. I do hope you enjoyed it. Now we would love to hear from you. If you have any questions or comments that you’d like to have featured on the show then do send them to info@academyinternet.com. If you want to send a little WAV or MP3 file with some sort of comment or question, please do so and we’ll be very happy to play that as well.

If you’re a subscriber we would like to thank you for your valuable time. If you haven’t subscribed yet there are a couple of ways you can do that. Go to iTunes and just search for “Internet Marketing” or go to the www.summitsolutions.co.uk website or www.academyinternet.com sites and you can subscribe there. This is Andy White signing off. Have a fantastic week and we will see you next time on “Internet Marketing.”

[music]

Andy White: This is “Internet Marketing.”

[music]

Andy: Welcome back to the show where we give you the low-down, the inside information, the word from the experts, to help you use the Internet as part of your marketing machine.

This is Andy White, and in episode 24 — good heavens, we’re a quarter of the way to a hundred — we have got two segments for you. First of all, we are having a look at, or revisiting, should I say, web spiders. We’re talking web spiders here, not the sort of spiders that fall on your back when you are bending over to clean your teeth, having been on the bathroom ceiling. No, we’re talking about web spiders, the things which crawl your website while you’re not looking.

And the main segment is an interview with a chap who is using videos to very good effect, so please stay tuned. But first, over to Dan.

Daniel, you wanted to say some more about search engine spiders.

Daniel Rowles: That’s right. We haven’t done anything on search engine optimization for a while, and I just wanted to take a step back and just remind people how the whole thing works, and talk about some new developments as well.

So, search engine spiders. What a search engine spider is is a piece of software that’s owned and run by Google or Yahoo or Microsoft Live, whoever it may be, the search engine. And it goes and visits websites, follows the links, and reads the pages. It then takes those pages and reports back to Google, or whoever it is, what the content of those pages is. Then Google takes that information and decides the theme of the page, what it’s all about, and where the search results should come back. OK?

There are lots of other elements that go into deciding where the pages rank, but the search engine spiders purely read the pages and feed the information back.

The key thing to remember about this is that they don’t see the web page as you or I would see it, as the user sees it, OK? They will see the code of the page rather than the page itself. So the HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language, the stuff that the page is actually written in in the first place, is what they read.

There’s a few things, because of that, that you need to bear in mind. First of all, pictures. Search engine spiders can’t understand pictures. And this is where some of the news has come in that’s quite interesting. There’s been some research going on at a few of the universities to make computers understand what a picture is, which, as you can imagine, is quite a difficult thing for a computer to do. And unfortunately, all they can really recognize at the moment, apparently, is beach scenes and pornography.

Andy: [laughs]

Daniel: Now, the reason for that is a beach scene generally has yellow sand and pink people.

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: We’re obviously being very Eurocentric from this point of view, in terms of skin tones.

Andy: Yes.

Daniel: And then, also, pornography tends to be lots of pink skin tones.

Andy: Lots of skin, yes. [laughs]

Daniel: [laughs] So apparently, unfortunately, that’s where we are at the moment. Which, I’m sure that covers quite a lot of the Internet content, but not that useful for identifying pictures at the moment. And that’s to the extent such that, you know when you go to a whole lot of websites, and you try and log in and you have to put a word in to make sure that you’re a person?

Andy: Oh, yes. That funny, wibbly-wobbly word you have to copy in.

Daniel: And it’s quite hard to read.

Andy: Yes.

Daniel: The text is. Well, they’ve realized that, actually, computers aren’t bad at interpreting those, if you write a bit of software, but they can’t interpret pictures. So what they’ve started doing now, a new system, is it’ll have a picture of a cat or a picture of dog…

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: And you have to say if it’s a cat or a dog. It’s as simple as that.

Andy: Ah. Oh…

Daniel: A computer finds that incredibly hard to do, because they’ve both got a blurry outline, they’ve both got four legs, they’ve got a nose sticking out, and all that kind of thing.

Andy: Yes.

Daniel: So I just wanted to reinforce that point.

Andy: Especially if you have a cat in some grass or something, or just the nose of a dog or something. Yeah.

Daniel: Exactly. So there’s all these kind of things that you have to look at, and computers can’t understand images at the moment.

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: OK, so just bear that in mind, OK? Search engine spiders can’t understand images at the moment, so you have to account for that. You have to remember the elements of the page that they’ll be reading. And if you’re interested in that bit more, refer back to our “Search Engine Optimization” podcast in particular; it talks about all the different things.

The one thing we’ve noticed lately, and this probably will change again, is that Google is visiting sites a little bit less than it was. OK? Google seems to be making a lot of changes at the moment. There’s lots of the local search stuff that’s been coming in. They’re adding lots of pages to their index. For example, the “online casino” search, which is one that always brings up masses and masses of results.

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: Doing a search of “online casinos,” it seems to have increased its index by about 20 million pages.

Andy: OK.

Daniel: Which is a massive amount and just happened very suddenly, so they’re obviously indexing lots of new websites they weren’t before.

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: Which has meant that this spider will be revisiting other pages a lot less.

Andy: Oh.

Daniel: So why I wanted to mention this is don’t get concerned if you’re looking at your web logs and you’re seeing the search engine spiders come back a lot less.

Andy: OK.

Daniel: Because it may just be that Google is getting on with something else in the background, and they’re busy doing that.

Andy: Just as an aside, Daniel, there must be hundreds and hundreds of instances of these spiders running at any one time. Do we have any idea how many?

Daniel: I don’t know, off the top of my head. The way Google works is it’s not one big, mega-powerful computer.

Andy: No, it’s a whole farm of servers.

Daniel: Yeah, a swarm of computers, a swarm of servers, absolutely.

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: So any of those servers, whichever way they’re employed, could be going out and spidering and running software that’s spidering on websites. Any one of those particular servers could be running a thousand instances of it at a time.

Andy: Sure, yeah.

Daniel: And in order to cover the entire web, there must be tens of thousands, hundreds, if not millions, running at any particular time.

Andy: There must be, yeah.

Daniel: But you have to realize there is limited computer power. And obviously, they’re always growing that, and they’re always building it up and finding new ways of making it more efficient so they can run more in parallel at the same time. But it has seemed–and this is hearsay, really, let’s be honest, because this is what we can just see from what…

Andy: We’re just guessing, aren’t we?

Daniel: Yeah.

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: But it seems that they have been visiting most sites a lot less. And across our clients, and across a lot of our kind of competitors’ clients, having spoken to them, the spiders are coming back a bit less frequently at the moment.

Andy: OK.

Daniel: But you’re probably going to see that pick up again in the future.

Andy: OK.

Daniel: It’s just a kind of thing to bear in mind. So, never forget about search engine spiders, but your website should be built for users, not for search engine spiders. Try and make it easy for the spiders to see your website.

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: So refer back to our “SEO” podcast. But bear in mind, it’s all about users and content.

Andy: Sure.

Daniel: And, as the theme of a lot of our content’s been lately on the podcast, the most important thing on the web is content for users.

Andy: Yeah, absolutely.

Daniel: And that’s what we were saying.

Andy: Now, do you think it’s still true that if you make a change to your website and the spiders recognize the change, or when you re-submit it to Google, which I’m not sure if that’s a good idea or not…

Daniel: Yeah.

Andy: Perhaps you can comment on that.

Daniel: Sure.

Andy: Is it still true that they’ll come back a bit more often, then?

Daniel: Yeah, I think so. The search engines do like regularly updated content, because it sees the site as relevant.

Andy: This is why blogs go down so well, isn’t it?

Daniel: They do, yeah. And what you’ll find is that the search engines will visit your site, they’ll come back the next time, they’ll see there was new, fresh content then, so they’ll visit more quickly the next time.

Andy: Yes, yes.

Daniel: That seems to have chopped and changed a bit at the moment, because they seem to be so busy indexing more pages.

Andy: Sure.

Daniel: But we seem to be falling back into that loop again now.

Andy: Right, OK.

Daniel: And different websites will have different speeds of being indexed. Something’s interesting. There’s some webmaster tools now that you can get from Google. You go into Google, you register for webmaster tools, and you can see when the page was last indexed, if Google had any problems indexing your website…

Andy: Ah.

Daniel: OK? And you can change the speed. So maybe you put normal. You can slow it down so it visits less regularly.

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: Now, that would be because you had a server that wasn’t very powerful and you didn’t want it being slowed down by Google visiting all the time.

Andy: Right, yeah.

Daniel: There is an option that says there “faster” but it’s grayed out. So unfortunately you can’t change it to be any faster at the moment. There’s a few other tools you can do as well. Go to Google, search for webmaster tools and you’ll get the result, the output gives you these tools.

Andy: That’s a first, isn’t it? Where we’ve actually been able to control the frequency that spiders, directly control the frequencies the spiders go.

Daniel: I think that Google is realizing that their approach at the moment of going out, visiting a web site, deciding the content and indexing it is becoming inefficient because there’s just too much content.

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: So they’re having to add to that input from people as well. So people are saying, “Where are my web pages? Here’s a site map of all my pages and I’ll tell you how relevant and important each page is.” So we can start adding guidance to what Google actually indexes and what they look at.

And that helps Google do its job at the end of the day. They don’t obviously trust all of that information, but it gives them a guideline to start in the first place. There’s also now a lot of information on Google in their blogs that tells you what they’re looking for. What’s a good thing to have on your website and what isn’t a good thing.

Andy: Oh, OK.

Daniel: So they’re giving search engine optimization tips to a certain extent.

Andy: Now here’s a lovely example of a large corporation using a blog, Google themselves. They’ve had that blog for ages, haven’t they?

Daniel: Yeah, they’ve got lots now, they’ve got dozens of blogs on different topics.

Andy: Right, OK.

Daniel: To look at any of the stuff that Google is doing, if you go to the front page and on the bottom of the page there is a very small “About Us” link. You click on that and you’ll see lots of information about Google, things they are testing, what they’ve got in beta testing, tools that you can use as a webmaster if you’ve got your own website.

It’s really worth having a look at what they are doing all the time. The blogs are great, because they tell you what they’re up to at any particular time so you can try and take some guidance from it. But for the first time you can start to see what the spiders are up to, how they work and actually get involved in the process a little bit.

See when they last visited, if they are having any problems looking at your web pages, did they find any broken links, things like that. So it can be really useful.

Andy: Just a little aside, do you remember a little while ago we talked Google doing this new map thing?

Daniel: Yes.

Andy: Where if you register and say “I am here” then you say yes to the bit of paper that comes to your door, you get a balloon. Are we seeing more of that in the UK now because I know that was mainly in the US, wasn’t it?

Daniel: Yeah, it’s building up more and more. More people are registering for it, more people are using it and the results are being used more places. On the note of people actually getting things in the mail, with the AdSense account where you put Google ads on your account, they’re starting to send out a PIN number as well, so people can’t fraudulently use that.

Andy: OK.

Daniel: So it’s interesting how Google, this big online massive agency and company, is suddenly having to send things out by snail mail in the post to make sure things aren’t fraudulent. So the old technologies have still got some pros and cons to them.

Andy: We still involve paper-based mail.

Daniel: Absolutely. I’m still trying to find a use for pigeons.

Andy: We should bring them back. We should use pigeons to, I don’t know, we’ll have cyber pigeons. We won’t have spiders, we’ll have pigeons.

Daniel: Going around indexing where people live. Anyway, we’re going off tangentially.

Andy: We are slightly. But thank you very much for your input, Mr. Daniel Rowles.

Daniel: Thank you, Andy.

Andy: Right, so let’s move right on to the next segment. This is really interesting because last time we had Heather who was using podcasting to help her really move on in the sort of getting her web presence up using podcast.

Well this gentleman, David White, another guy who I interviewed at the Podcasting Summit several weeks ago now, he’s using videos. I think you’ll find this very interesting.

It’s a little bit noisy, I’m afraid, but there’s rather a lot of background noise because we were recording this in the middle of a restaurant. But I’m sure you’ll understand fully what he says, and enjoy.

[new segment]

I’m at the Corporate Podcasting Summit in London, and I’m talking to David White. David is the CEO of Web Optimizer Group Ltd. and David is doing something very interesting with video. What are you doing with video, David?

David White: Interviewing friends and family, family being the IAB, where I’m the chair of the search taskforce in the UK and for Europe. I’ve got to meet some really interesting people from far a field.

Some people who are managing directors and senior within their firms, and people from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and sort of leading players in the market as well as people who run the IAB in the UK, Europe, Spain, Germany, France, Italy. And also speaking to people wanting to join the IAB. At a recent leadership conference on January 26, just a few weeks ago, I just decided at the last minute to turn up with my camera.

I had done a little bit of preparation, I’d worked out some questions to ask, and I put them on a PowerPoint on my laptop and handed the control of the laptop over to each person who the organizer of the event put my way and asked them to run through a series of questions.

The result of which was 17 videos, of which 14 are usable, and are up there on IABEurope.ws.

Andy: OK, let me get this right. You videoed a lot of experts on how they’re using SCO?

David: Actually, that particular event was the leadership event for the IAB council, or Interactive Advertising Bureau, and some of the people were there as speakers. Some of the people were there as country heads, they ran the IAB in different countries, some of them were new and some of them were planning to join.

Basically what I did is I asked them questions about the Internet, the advertising industry, how search was in their country or their company, so I was able to ask them questions about their industry. But I dropped in the conversation questions about search. I did 17 interviews in the afternoon, turned into 14, and they’re all listed at IABEurope.ws.

You can see everyone’s answers. Anthony House from Google gave us an introduction of why Google was participating with the event. Caroline Voight, who’s the European research director for Microsoft gave a lot of insights and gave lots of her research data which we got on video there.

Elliott Nate from Jupiter Research just did an absolute thunderball presentation, he was fantastic. We’ve actually had to transcribe that, so that would be good for search as well as soon as I get that up. We had Metrics Lab who also gave us some great feedback, again his video is up there.

But we also had people from Spain, from Germany, from Romania who were explaining how the Internet industry was in their countries. And it’s just interesting to get everyone’s view down on tape.

Andy: OK, so you’ve got all this fantastic content useful to everyone. Two questions: what kind of response did you get, what kind of hit rate did you get to the videos, and secondly, how are you using it to benefit your web traffic and your code offs?

David: The IAB Europe has included a link to its membership, and there’s about 10,000 people that receive those emails, and there’s a typical low percentage of actual click-through and viewings. But interestingly what I’m seeing is as the weeks progress, understandably the viewings are continuing.

I’ve got them hosted on Google video, or video.google, and there’s a report section there and it shows you how many were played yesterday. And it’s not just the best looking ones that get the best viewing figures. Although there are some very good looking people there, I have to say. It does prove to an extent that content is king.

My benefit really is at the end of each video I get to flash my name. And if you like, I’m the sponsor by default by arranging the video, and by asking the questions. I also get an enormous value by meeting these people. Otherwise I would have been a delegate amongst 200 other delegates and would have perhaps had five or six conversations. This way I had 14 — well, 17 — in one afternoon, the last five or six on each of the two days prior.

Subsequently, I’ve also had lots of emails from people. I even had an email from a very large international company and their opening line was, “We want to buy WebOptimser.” And actually I had a meeting with them, and we’re in discussions. And that particular company from a far off place would never have found or understood WebOptimiser. But of course on investigation they looked into us and started discovering our footprint, if you like, which included these videos, plus some other videos.

I’ve done so many videos since then. In February alone I’ve done 50. I went a bit mad. And so I’ve got 14 on the IAB Europe. Some of the videos turned out in reality of my customers, so I put my hand up and said, “Yeah, these are my customers.” And I put them on a separate site and created a new site especially for them, which is semcasestudy.com.

So you can go and see those videos. And some of them are hilarious because you won’t see the equipment I used, but I think one of my clients I was setting on fire the lights were so hot. He was complaining of getting a tan and he made some comments. And the videos are very, very entertaining, but just a couple of minutes each. And then I got a very interesting video, results that I never imagined.

I expect when I ask my clients if they would provide us a reference, to get an email saying, “Yeah you’re great. It’s fantastic working with you. Great and fantastic results. And it’s an absolute pleasure to go into work with one of our engineers.” On video I found our clients open out for 40 minutes extolling the benefits of WebOptimiser. And admittedly I’ve had to cut that down to six or seven minutes to make it worthwhile.

But I’ve got a third set. My two sets are my industry video, the IAB which is absolutely wonderful positioning for WebOptimiser and for myself. I’ve got my case studies which of course is great for our sales team future clients. So you get to understand a bit more about what to expect about the VIP service which we provide.

Some of it very technical, some of it less so. And also I think you’ll be surprised even if you’re not interested in becoming a client of ours, what the hell people do optimize. People say you can’t optimize a block of cement, well I think you probably can. I’ve got a guy who is hiring us to optimize logs, and I mean he’s tracking trees from stump to chair.

Andy: Oh nice, I thought you meant like computer logs. You’re talking about wooden logs, actual logs.

David: Yes. And he goes on to explain that this IP technology of ours, and this Internet marketing is helping him lobby various governments around the world to fight global warming. And illegal logging is a major contributor to global warming. Those drug barons whip away the trees in Columbia and sell them illegally. And we might even be sitting on them. We are contributing inadvertently to global warming.

So literally, through optimization, Internet marketing, IP technology, all the way through, back to blogging, we are actually doing something and communicating the effectiveness of search and this instant technology has astounding effects. To the extent where we can talk in terms of we’re fighting global warming.

Andy: I like that. That’s a good thing. You cast your loaves upon the water in the form of high-quality video content. And they’re coming back buttered in the form of lots of traffic, and also inquiries and business from the sound of it as well.

David: It’s absolutely fascinating. I’m living a dream at the moment. It’s a small investment. It was a risk. I put myself in the lion’s mouth really. I figured most of my stuff came back afterwards. And I said when I heard you were doing it, that was a crackpot idea and it would never work. And we’re a marketing company. What the hell are we doing videoing? We’re going to confuse and upset our clients.

But in fact, I’ve been able to use this content to compile DVDs, and give it to our sales people. It demonstrates our connections in the industry. We’ve got videos on there of Google, Yahoo, MSN, et cetera. It explains to the extent IAB and the benefits to everyone. And it does expand and explain the purposes and opportunities valuable to people in Internet marketing. And all of those things nee to be communicated. But there’s one final area, VIP briefing.

I ended up interviewing some very interesting people who are neither clients nor necessarily members of the IAB. So, for instance, well I did interview Nate Fulley of IAB from Jupiter Research. It is a fantastically powerful presentation he made to ChemLawn.

And so I separated these out based on merit alone. People have got a lot to say, and I don’t mean to be rude about those that have got less to say. These people have got different things to say that I think are more appropriate. And I can categorize them as VIP briefings. I was thinking recently of cutting them in half and delivering half and saying, “You must sign up and then you get the other half.”

But actually I just plunked them on my website under the VIP briefing–weboptimiser.vipbriefing.html. You’ll see if from the front page. Click through it. And I’m actually just presenting the videos in full for people to watch. And I believe that people will want to come back and want to see more content like that. They will, and actually I don’t really need to sell it. Because people are either buying it, and taking it, and doing good stuff with them, or not. And I hope eventually, and expect eventually in fact that already has occurred, and so it’s not even an eventual outcome.

I expect the links to our website to continue to get comments on people’s blogs. I’ve got people queuing up for the next go-round, and I’m really excited about the whole thing. This is social networking. It’s web 2.0. It’s all the things that we talk about and it’s an absolute pleasure to be doing it. It’s really not that painful.

David White from the WebOptimiser group limited. Thank you very, very much.

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Andy: Well, that’s it for this week’s show. Thank you for listening. Hope you enjoyed it. I’d love to hear from you. If you have any comments or questions that you’d like to have featured on the show send them to info@academyinternet.com, and feel free to send in an MP3 file if you want to record what you want to ask, and we’ll be happy to play those.

If you’re a subscriber we’d like to find thank you for your invaluable time. If you haven’t subscribed yet and you’d like this delivered directly to you automatically, you can find us at marketing at iTunes or at the academyinternet.com, or the summitsolutions.com websites and follow the subscription buttons. So this is Andy White signing off. Have a fantastic week and we’ll see you next time on Internet marketing.

[music]

Andy White: This is “Internet Marketing.”

[music]

Andy: Welcome back to the show, where we give you the low down, the inside information, the word from the experts, to help you use the Internet as part of your marketing machine.

This is Andy White and in Episode 23 we have a couple of segments for you. We’re talking about Web 2.0. Yes we’re revisiting it. A little bit of confusion, little bit of fear about, Web 2.0, so we could be talking to Daniel and just be clearing up a few ideas and concepts about Web 2.0 that some people might be getting a wee bit confused about or slightly concerned about.

And we have a marvelous interview at the end of the podcast with a lady who has been podcasting for a very, very long time, actually. Certainly, I would say, since the dawn of time in terms of podcasting. Podcasting is, I would say, the dawn of time means two and a half years ago. That’s what I mean when I say “the dawn of time.”

I am in no way suggesting that this lady is advanced in years because she is actually very young. Anyway, first off, let’s speak to Daniel. So enjoy.

Andy: Daniel, hello!

Daniel Rowles: Hello Andy, how are you?

Andy: I’m extremely well, thank you very much.

Andy: Now, you wanted to talk a little bit more about Web 2.0.

Daniel: I did. We got a little input on this from my colleague, Graham. I just wanted to add my two cents worth into this because we are doing a presentation this evening to the Chartered Institute of Marketing in Brighton this evening. We’re talking about Web 2.0, and this is to some people that are not familiar with “Internet Marketing.”

I have to take you back a bit and think a little about what’s it all actually about. There has been lots of buzz created and everyone’s quite excited by it — user-generated content, podcasting, blogging and — the bottom line is, to me, it’s not new. All these things, it is bringing together existing technologies.

Andy: Yes, just like podcasting.

Daniel: Absolutely. It’s audio recording, but it is just a new delivery method.

Andy: Yes.

Daniel: And this thing’s like blogging. All it is is just recordings with date spaces, nothing complicated about that, now putting this in a certain sequence of files, allowing people to search in a different way. Places like MySpace are just creating profiles. You could do that lot of places already.

It’s just how the technology is being used. It’s just ideas moving forward. What I wanted to point out to people is that Web 2.0 — they’re not missing anything, if they can’t quite get what the new technology is because, really, there isn’t any new technology.

There’s some things like AJAX, which is quite clever, which allows you to change things on screen, without reloading the screen. So, for example, you could your postcode and get some local weather without having to reload the whole page like you would do normally in a browser.

Andy: This is where the web page behaves more like a local program running on your own machine. People have probably noticed.

Daniel: Yeah, But even that isn’t actually a new technology. It’s taking elements of technologies that already existed, like JavaScript, and how we manipulate the browser. So there’s nothing that’s new. It’s just using new ideas to combine these technologies to do something new.

Andy: Mm-hmm.

Daniel: One of the things that lot of people have said to me is, “I don’t really get Web 2.0. I don’t know what this new technology is.” There isn’t one. It’s a lot of guff basically. It’s a lot of old nonsense, really. And there’s lots of hype being spoken about it and I just think people should be aware of that. But the bottom line with all of this is, it