Enriching Lives Through Internet Marketing

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Pretentious title, huh?

I’m still in post-holiday mode at the moment, so you get to enjoy the ramblings of a deranged mind that was deprived of internet usage for a whole 2 weeks! It’s also an excuse for me to play a bit with WordPress 3.0 and Flickr and to dump my holiday images on you like one of those sad family slideshows from yesteryear.

Seville and Cordoba August 2010

Of course there’s a serious side to this all. As I was wandering around Seville in Spain taking these picture, I was struck (as is almost always the case) that the world at street level is a fairly grubby place. Apart from the stunning Spanish women, there is often a real lack of things to photograph when you look straight ahead and even when something amazing is down at eye level, it’s invariably blocked by cars or signs or workmen.

So, as you can see from the album, I started to look up and take pictures of the skyline of Seville. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and I learned a lot about the city that I think can be applied to our IM efforts as well. The builders of Seville had to put up a load of buildings for various functions. Much of what they did was pretty utilitarian and much of what they built at street level has changed or been torn up in some way over they years.

However, as soon as you get above head height they built ornamentation and colour and twiddly bits all over the city….and the majority of this is still there and is as engaging now as it was when it first went up.

So how does all this relate to internet marketing? I think it’s in the way that we perceive things as humans. It’s in the detailing that catches the eye on a building and it’s in the detailing that holds the attention of your customers as they look at your own work. I’m as guilty as the next person of building sites that contain reviews that are “workmanlike”. They answer the basic questions but sometimes miss the very thing that would have my customers actually buy the product.

You can see this in the classic longtail traffic that your site log will tell you about. I have a website talking about TV’s and it does a good job (I think) of taking the reviews up a level….but when I go to my log file, I find folk arriving on my site because they want to connect their PC to the HDMI input and because they are unsure what a screen size really means. This is the stuff that will grow my traffic and I had no idea it was even necessary!!

So from now on, my sites will have reviews that try to go just a bit further into the worlds of my customers….not away from the subject completely but just extras that will help more of them straight away. Maybe in years to come, folk will be taking pictures of my buildings in the same way that I did in Seville.

Oh, and as an extra bonus, when I went to see “Knight and Day” last night, there was a long section set in the places I walked round in Seville  just last week. Fantastic!

Short report on Robert Puddy’s IM conference.

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I think I’ve said this in the past but having just got back from Robert Puddy’s UK IM conference, I’m going to say it again.

There is nothing quite like going to one of these conferences in person. I still haven’t been to one of the mad ones in the States yet, so this was the biggest show so far and I’m just starting to understand fully why everyone says the deals are done in the bar!

So, short and sweet as conference reviews go. I’ve finally got to the point where I feel like I know a bit of every technique and I just have to get down to doing only one of them until I make some money!

Standout sessions included Jonny Andrews – not sure if telling him he’s as mad as a box of frogs really translates across the Atlantic divide, but a great exposition on using “The hero’s story” in selling. One of the 7 stories that go back through all of human history, Jonny spoke about how it has changed hs own approach to the sales offer process.

Second up for comment was Sterling Valentine. He came across as very “sensible and understated” but was an excellent speaker…I’m still not sure if the comment about his slide being in the wrong currency was planted in the audience (it was in dollars at a UK conference) but his reaction – just flipping the $ to a £ on the pre-prepared slide – was one of the finest bits of showmanship I’ve seen for ages! Not only that, but his “change the offer in order to change the price” gambit at the end of the pitch was something I’ve already made a note of for my own use.

Finally, there was Ambar Hamid. He spoke about taking your offer to the world of B2B deals rather than B2C. This has been an area that I’ve felt for some time that the IM world is missing out on. My old life in corporate IT left me very comfortable in that world so I’ve signed up for Ambar’s UK training on all of his techniques…..feels like a good investment.

So, plenty of material and even more making of new friends and generally drinking until ridiculous times. I really felt like I was involved with it all this time….

What can I say, make it happen for you too….you just need to find something going on nearby and treat the travel and accomodation as an expense item for your new business. Let the tax man take some of the strain of making new partners.