Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Google seems to have its sights on the blogging community and specifically on those that get paid for some of their posts. How come?

Well, basically Google doesn’t like the concept of people being able to pay for links. Unless, it’s Google, of course, as they make quite a bit of money from adwords which is a system of payment for links.

However, the paid links aren’t really the problem for them. What appears to be more of a problem is that the links that the bloggers have been creating are in context. So, if you’re looking for information about, say, credit cards then the theory is that it’s much more likely that a blog talking about them will pop up to the top of the Google search results because the links that they’ve got are in context whereas a normal directory entry for credit cards wouldn’t come up so high because that’s just a link out of context.

However, not all bloggers have been hit by this which has muddied the picture somewhat. Nobody outside Google really knows for sure why some are hit (sometimes from PR7 down to PR0) whereas others are, so far, unscathed.

I’ve looked at some combinations of them and one possible common thread so far is that those who’ve been hit seem to write site reviews when they’re paid whereas those that haven’t been hit tend to write an article around the topic requested and just add the links to that. Whether this is true in all cases I don’t know but it would seem a logical thing for Google to hit: those doing the general article have a “real” in-context link whereas those doing a review have simply written a paid advertisement.

If my reading of it is correct then ironically those who have been doing exactly what the advertiser wanted them to do will have been hit whereas those who did what the advertiser needed (ie a link truly in context) have, so far, come through OK. Think of it like an enhanced version of the advice that some of the paid sites offer: rather than asking would anyone read your blog if the paid posts weren’t there, ask yourself if the article you’ve written would be valid without the link to the advertiser. If both apply to your blog, then you’ll have a much better blog than you would otherwise and chances are that Google will be happy about it too.

When we started off the original plan was to get going on the Internet marketing first as that would be a quick success (hopefully!) then we’d move onto advertising in the books & magazines. Notably absent was the idea of advertising by way of brochures and it was quite a deliberate omission too. Why?

Simple really: by and large you get roughly a 1% return on any marketing that you do. So if you want to get ONE sale you need to distribute ONE HUNDRED brochures. Unless your brochures are very cheap or your service is very expensive it’s easy to see that brochures are not the way to go. For example, say your brochure costs about £1/$1/‚€1 including any postage or distribution costs then that 1% rule means that you will be spending around £100/$100/‚€100 to get one sale which isn’t really a runner unless your product costs at least 10 times that.

This is, of course, why the Internet is so appealing. You can get thousands of people reading your “brochure” and at virtually no cost to yourself. Sadly, that 1% rule doesn’t apply to all the hits that your website will receive but it should apply to those that are relevant (which can be determined by looking through your site visitor stats). However, if you can manage to, say, double your site traffic then, by and large, the number of relevant readers will also double so, in principle, you should double your sales, or at least those that you get directly from your own website.

You might think that we’d see long term guests more than we see overnighters but in fact it’s the reverse that’s generally true.

There are two different reasons for this.

Firstly, the long term guests who come out of season are generally staying with us because they’re visiting relatives who live nearby. This means that they basically disappear right after breakfast and don’t come back ’til quite late in the evening.

The long term guests that come in the Summer season are quite different. In general, they have researched the area very well and know exactly what they want to see and how long it will take them to get from here to where they want to be each day. We don’t see much of them because they never need to ask us what there is to see locally nor do they need to ask directions.

In fact, it’s usually those staying two or three nights that we see the most. They’re generally not quite so knowledgeable about the region and neither know exactly what there is to see nor where they would go to see it.

As a general rule, places in towns require a little more in the way of directions than places in the country and therefore it’s natural that directions to hotels and whatnot vary in the amount of detail that they include.

We’re in the lucky position of being the only building on the road between two villages so we say that we are 3km after one of them or 7km after the other depending on the direction that people are coming in. You really can’t miss us. The building is right on the road and it’s massive. The winery next door even has a truly massive sign painted on the side of it.

So what happens? Well, despite us being the only building on the road, despite us being massive and despite us being well-lit, we’ve just had yet another couple zoom straight on past us. Twice!

Many places tend to treat repeat customers specially through offering discounts, extra services, or whatever.

However, they remain customers and one of the key things about that is that you need to get money off them for whatever goods or services that you sell, even if they are both a repeat customer and a large one.

One trap to fall into is to be more lax with the payment terms. Unless you habitually offer credit then you shouldn’t offer it to even the best of customers as sooner or later it’ll just cause needless friction between you and a good customer. If it’s pay on delivery for everyone else then that should be the case for even the best customers too as your sales contract probably doesn’t allow for any credit in such circumstances: a recipe for trouble collecting the cash if ever there was one.

So, yes, offer better discounts to better customers. Yes, offer, additional services to better customers. But, NO, don’t change your payment terms.