Digital 101 - Servant of Chaos

Digital rule #1: Don’t host where you register

One of the challenges of digital strategy is that you are – in most instances – wedded to a history of previous technology decisions. So while you may come in to an organisation to overhaul the strategy, you might find yourself constrained by some bad search engine optimisation, platform and publishing choices or hosting restrictions.

Generally these kind of problems can be undone with time. With money. With resources.

But there is one particular challenge that can be terribly difficult to unlock. And it happens at the very beginning of your digital journey – with your domain name registration.

Domain names are like your business name on the internet. They tell everyone where to find us. We all know that to order a book online, we visit Amazon.com. To search, we visit Google.com or Bing.com. These are domain names.

To get one of these domain names, we need to register that name with a Domain Name Registrar. These are companies that are authorised to sell and manage domain names. Popular registrars include GoDaddy.com, NetRegistry.com.au in Australia – and many others.

But registering your domain name is like registering your business name. You may register with the relevant authorities, but you don’t setup your business in the same office. You do so elsewhere.

And you should do the same with your domain name and your online business.

When you register your domain name, you will usually be offered hosting. That means that you will be provided space online to upload your website. While this may be convenient – and perhaps even cheap (or free) – I tend to avoid this situation.

Like any business, domain name registrars go through ups and downs. And should the registrar’s business fail, it can take your registration details with it.

If you have your website hosted with the registrar, you can lose both the website and the domain name.

I had a client recently who purchased a small business package with one of the country’s largest and most reputable brands. This included domain name AND hosting AND email and more. It sounded like a no-brainer and the package was purchased.

A couple of years down the track this package was discontinued. As it turned out, the domain names were registered through a European registrar (not locally as we expected), and the email, domain name registration and hosting were all outsourced and rebranded locally.

My client had expected that the emails that were being sent were just marketing spam, so ignored them until the website was offline. What followed was literally months of follow-up, documentation and phone calls until the domain name could be transferred.

Even the largest and most powerful brands can change their strategy mid-stream. So even if you are registering your domain name with a brand you know and trust, my advice is to host your website elsewhere. At least if something changes you won’t lose both the name and the business/technology.

Reputation Even Over a Resume: Why Personal Branding Matters in 2016

Digital 101, Jobs, Marketing, Personal Branding

Take a moment to look back over your career. Even if you are “new” to the workforce, you’re likely to see a hotchpotch of connected experiences. There will be paid and unpaid work, some volunteering maybe. You’ll have passion projects that took weeks or months of your time – like the time you decided to build your sister’s website to save her money, only to find that after it’s all up and working, she took a new job and was no longer interested in “going freelance”. There may even be whole folders of documents filled with words that one day will become your great business, breakthrough book.

Now, take a look at your LinkedIn profile and ask yourself – what’s the story it tells?

I have been saying this for years – but it’s a fact that grows stronger over time. Your resume is as dead as the tree it is written on.

In 2016, you are what you publish.

[Tweet “In 2016, you are what you publish.”]

LinkedIn as an inbound channel for your personal brand

I used to think of LinkedIn as a place of business, connection and social selling. It was a vastly under-utilised space where a strong profile and a good network would help you stand out from the crowd. But a crowd it certainly is. It is the place where careers and connections collide.

In short, LinkedIn has become the “internet of careers” – the internet that we look at when we are looking to find a job, an employee or a customer.

[Tweet “LinkedIn has become the “internet of careers””]

But these days, LinkedIn has a broader agenda, transforming from a massive database of resumes to a business publishing platform and a social selling engine. Every person with a profile can publish their thoughts, ideas and status updates just like Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Google’s Blogspot (remember that?!). And with the opening up of the LinkedIn Pulse publishing platform, there has literally been an explosion of content – some of it written by individuals and some of it written by ghost bloggers. Some is pure PR spin. Some is heartfelt and personal. There are even birthday notifications (as a side note, I find this mildly disconcerting).

And while this has made it more difficult for the average person to attract and engage potential business collaborators, clients or employers, there is still a great opportunity to use LinkedIn as an inbound channel for your personal brand. What does this look like?

Share the message, own the destination: Ever noticed how everyone’s profile on LinkedIn looks the same? Makes it hard to stand out, right? Like all good strategy, I suggest you share the message – post your insights, presentations, speeches and updates on LinkedIn by all means, but own the destination – have a website or a portfolio that keeps track of all you do. Use that destination to more fully contextualise your work, purpose and outcomes. I use gavinheaton.com as a catch-all for my activities and ServantOfChaos.com as a showcase. DisruptorsHandbook.com focuses marketing-led innovation and practical strategy. And everything that is posted on one of these sites is cross-posted to LinkedIn.
Treat your LinkedIn summary like an elevator pitch: Can you describe your job, best projects and outcomes in 30 seconds? Rather than writing a career summary for your LinkedIn profile, write a summary of how you can help clients, employers and business partners. Make it less about you and more about the value you create.
Write case studies on your best projects: Sure LinkedIn’s publishing platform is a hot mess of content, but every time you publish an article, it reaches into the feeds of your network. That means that people you know, or would like to know, are learning more about you. So give your networks something worth reading – warts and all case studies of the projects you’ve worked on. Include the passion projects, the skunkworks and even elements of your day job that is reasonable to share. Showcase not just the results, but the workings of how you delivered value. Connect the dots, tell the story and bring the dull parts to life with anecdotes, quotes and images.
Treat yourself like your #1 client: Imagine you are writing a brief for a client – except that client is you. Determine your value proposition, key message and proof points. Put your best storytelling foot forward and explain just why you are the best person for the job/project/collaboration. Just remember, it’s hard work. Keep refining your message. Get feedback. Listen honestly and always seek to improve.

For more great ideas on building your personal brand, take a look through this presentation from Leslie Bradshaw. It’s chock full of practical suggestions that can help you shift from being a “thought leader” to a “do leader”. And in a world where you are what you publish, it’s not about the what you say, it’s all about who believes it.

Reputation Over Resume from Leslie Bradshaw

Selling on the Web – Landing Pages that Work

Digital 101, Web/Tech

While brand websites attract the lion’s share of marketing budgets, the great, largely hidden, power of selling on the web is driven by landing pages.

How do landing pages work?

I prefer to create landing pages with a single job in mind – to help the web visitor take the next step in the buyer’s journey. That may mean:

I want to change our relationship so that I know who you are – a name, email address or Twitter handle will do
I want to help you choose my product or service – provide some useful content such as a comparison guide
I want you to order – you’re ready to buy and my landing page will make that easy.

This means that my landing pages will do away with unnecessary distraction. There will be:

Only a single call to action
No menus or links that will take you away
Laser sharp focus on delivering you value.

There are plenty of great online tools that help you quickly create landing pages, but my favourite is Instapage. And while it is a little clunky, it integrates seamlessly into WordPress (there’s a plugin), allows for A/B testing, includes analytics (plus Google Analytics) and starts at an affordable $30 / month. Oh, and you can work with existing templates to create a launch your landing page in as little as 3 minutes.

Ok, you may want to spend a bit longer on your masterpiece, but you can do it with a drag’n’drop interface – and you don’t need technical skill.

Still need more tips? Check out the infographic from Copyblogger that provides 26 tips to help improve your landing pages.

Like this infographic? Get landing page advice that works from Copyblogger.

Don’t Throw Out Marketing Skills with the Digital Bathwater

Digital 101, Digital Strategy, Marketing

The marketing skills gap is a hot topic right now. No matter how many clients, colleagues or competitors that I speak with, it’s clear that the marketing industry is facing a skills crisis. And the questions and discussions are often the same:

Do we have the right people?
How do we understand data and put it to work?
Do we have the right technology?
What do we do with the technology we’ve already got?
How do we plug the gaps?

But it is NOT all doom and gloom. Many of the marketing skills and processes that have been developed over the last few decades are still eminently useful in the digital world. They just need some retraining, cross-training. As I explain on the newly revamped Telstra Exchange blog – marketing is from mars, digital is from venus:

In the traditional world of marketing, we’d think about this as media. We’d break it into paid media, owned and earned. It’s media that is created from a central point and pushed out, interrupting the lives of our audiences with its urgency. Even where that media is “earned” or “social”, it’s still created with a particular focus and intention. And from the inside of our marketing command centre we run the sums. Counting, measuring, assessing and reporting.

Read the full article here.

Tell the Story of Your #BigData with QuillEngage

Big Data, Digital 101, Disruptive Technology

Big data, small data, analytics. Blah blah blah.

It all sounds like a load of waffle, right? At least until we find a thread of narrative running through the information.

For many of us, the closest we are likely to get to a large amount of usable data is on our own websites. And believe it or not, even small amounts of web traffic, visits, comments on a blog etc can generate a substantial amount of information. If you get a chance, log in to your server and download the “log files”. You’ll soon see just how much information is generated by visitors to your website.

The thing is, raw log files are relatively useless. Sure they might help your webmaster pinpoint a problem or recurring error, but thousands of lines of information only make sense in aggregation. Or when they are decoded. Translated.

And that’s where Quill Engage comes in. You simply sign up, provide access to your Google Analytics information and then each week, QuillEngage will email a report explaining what’s going on with your website.

Now, I have been a fan of web analytics before there were web analytics. I have created my own reports, created simple tracking systems to collate conversion data and so on, but in a world where there is ever increasing pressure on our decision making capabilities, handing off the data processing tasks to an artificial intelligence engine may be the smartest thing you can do. Especially when it produces not just a report, but insight.

My latest report highlighted a few important things to think about:

My mobile traffic was up 3% over last month and now accounts for 19% of total traffic
The most visits to Servantofchaos.com come from Sydney and NSW (which is big change over previous years)
Facebook replaced Twitter as my top social network referrer, up a massive 250% on the previous month

Why is this important?

Well, these days I hardly have time to write let alone check the performance of the site. But if I do check, I am unlikely to connect all the dots in this one email report in under 10 minutes. In fact, the email report from QuillEngage is so quick to read and easy to consume that you’ll be using those 10 minutes to think about what you might do differently next month.

And that’s really the point.

From what I can see, QuillEngage is a no-brainer for any business owner or marketer. Sure, you’re not going to get the detail that comes straight from Google Analytics, but the report should give you some quick thoughts on what to interrogate and act upon. And it’s free, at least for the time being. Get started here.

Getting Started with Online Marketing

Digital 101, Infographics

Over the last couple of years I have developed checklists galore, but some of the most useful have been the most simple. One in particular I use when setting up a new blog or website. It steps me through the process of establishing a digital footprint – the spaces in which your online conversations and interactions will take place.

And while these checklists are great, usable and effective, they are nowhere near as pretty as the unbounce Noob Guide to Online Marketing.

I will be printing this out and ticking off the spokes in the wheel. And then, when the footprint is done, it's down to some quality time with Darren Rowse's 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. From there it is almost like clockwork!

Via Andy Moore.

Getting to Know robots.txt

Digital 101

We all love visitors to our websites. We love the recognition, the sense of connectedness and the thrill of fame on whatever scale we happen to achieve. There is also a fascination with the numbers, pure numbers – where visitors came from, how they found our sites and what they are interested in. All this is good. The tingle of recognition ignites our passions and makes us want to improve. To make our sites better for our visitors, our customers and yes, even our communities.

But how do people find your site? How can you make sure that Google, Yahoo and all those other search engines are indexing your site in the right way? For example, you might want only Google to index your site. Or you might want to index everything except your photo gallery.

OR better yet … you might want to STOP search engines from indexing your site while you are still tweaking it prior to launch.

If you are using WordPress, you will be able to setup WordPress so that it hides your site from search engines with the click of a button.

But the rest of us have to rely on the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Why use robots.txt?

Because the vast majority of us find websites via search, the careful management of robots.txt can have two particular impacts for marketers:

Messaging – you can ensure that the bots index the pages that you want and specify the descriptions and information that tell your story – even before your customers get to your site.
Customer experience – craft and refine the experience of your site by focusing on the experience of discovering your site and engaging your customer’s imagination early.

Of course, you may just want to funnel traffic from particular engines, or exclude indexing altogether.

What is robots.txt?

As the name suggests, robots.txt is a text file designed for automated web robots. It is one of the first files that a web bot scans on your website amd it tells the bot what to scan and what not to. Of course, if the person who wrote/designed the bot chooses to ignore robots.txt, then there is not much you can do about it (beyond putting a password on your site).

Where do you put robots.txt?

It’s very simple. Put your robots.txt file in the top level directory of your website – the same place as your home page.

What’s in robots.txt?

On the first line of robots.txt, you specify which bot you are targeting. Using * indicates that robots.txt applies to ALL bots.

On each subsequent line, you specify the “rules” for indexing your site. For example, you may want to disallow your personal photo gallery and the directory that runs your website programming scripts (cgi-bin). If so, your robots.txt file would look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /photos/

Blocking all search bots in robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Allowing only ONE search bot in robots.txt

User-agent: Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Learning more about robots.txt

There are a few other tips and tricks that you can use to direct search bots to optimise your messaging and your customer’s experience. Check out the robotstxt.org website for more details.

This is part of my Digital 101 series – designed to explain the technical aspects of the digital landscape in a way that helps marketers do their job better.