Rant: Automatic Video on Websites

May 11, 2006 at 3:02 pm · Filed under Business

I haven’t met one person who enjoys visiting a website that plays music or audio automatically when the site loads.

What is the first thing visitors do? Watch them…they hit the back button, or try and find the stop/ pause button to shut the sound off. WHY would companies want to annoy their visitors like this? Are customers supposed to frequent the site? Will they enjoy hearing the same message over and over again each time they go to the site….wait a minute…they probably won’t be back.

Over the past few days, I have come across a few sites that have force-fed me video that loads automatically. One was a pretty prominant SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company’s site, and the other was a cleverly designed affiliate marketing site that tried to sell me the instant that the site loaded. Both video segments were high quality.

Give me a break. Let me soak in the site and figure out what the company is all about before trying to annoy me with auto-loading video.

Now, I don’t mind video links on websites. In fact, I think it is a great way to get a message across, and it can be very effective. However, let ME choose when I view it. 

I just hope that sites like the examples mentioned above don’t ruin the perfectly good using-video-to-promote-yourself trend that is out there. That would be a shame.  

Got anything to add to this post? Feel free to leave a comment.

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Small Business and a $3000 keyword study

May 2, 2006 at 8:33 pm · Filed under SEO, Business

Businesses often don’t have enough funds to properly do SEO on their website, or are not educated enough to make wise decisions about it.

This statement was true about me a few years ago. I started an “internet” company a while back. I thought this was going to be easy…you know…build a great tool and people will come from far and wide to see how great my product was. I spent 30K on development of the product (basically an online application). I also wanted to make sure that search engines could find my site properly, so I hired a local SEO firm to perform a keyword study for me. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had heard a bit about this SEO stuff, and figured it was a good thing to do.

I spent $3000 on a keyword study that basically gave me a list of keywords that should drive traffic to my site. To be fair, the SEO firm I hired does know what they are talking about, but without the knowledge of how to use these keywords or where to place them on my site, I was lost. They tried to explain, but the terms they used were way over my head at the time. The other services (link building, explanation of where to put keywords into the content etc… cost more money, which I didn’t have). This experience made me pretty jaded towards SEO, especially when I found other tools like WordTracker that could have helped me for a fraction of the price.

Years later, I realized that the keywords I helped create with this SEO company were not correct at all, as the product and target customer changed so the keywords need to change as well. Bottom line is…I wasn’t wise enough in my business to know how to spend my limited budget with SEO.

Most business owners that I start chatting with have no clue about SEO or even some of the basic terminology in SEO. If the pitch is right (which usually has something to do with generating more traffic to the site or getting better rankings), then they are hooked. The problem is, this opens the doors for some pretty shady tactics, or high priced services that don’t give anything more than a managed pay per click campaign.

This industry is still in its infancy, so with good SEO’s rising to the top and educating the business owners about the industry, I believe that better decisions will get made.

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Thank You Cards Still Valued

April 18, 2006 at 4:43 pm · Filed under Business

A few months ago I received a hand written thank you card from a company that I used for writing some sales copy for one of my businesses.

Keyword = hand written

That means that someone took the time in this fast paced techno-crazed world to write me a note thanking me for using their services. It was a simple note with a couple of their business cards inside.

I have never met this person, as I hired them on a project that I posted on Elance. AND, the job was small (around $100).

The simple act of writing a personal note has caused me to think several times about this company whenever I consider hiring more writers.

Just something to think about as you consider how you make your customers / prospects feel valued.

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