Know Your Target Audience

Here in Bangkok there are 2 English language daily newspapers: The Nation and The Bangkok Post, along with 10 or so Thai language newspapers.

Every day I see Thai language adverts in the English newspapers and see companies advertising for Thai staff in the English newspapers. Why waste the money?

Sometimes it can be harder than others to understand your target audience. However, knowing what your target audience reads, especially knowing their native language, should be an easy one.

I also see this mistake online with webmasters not targeting the right keywords, or any keywords at all! You may think you know what people are searching for to find your product. However, there will be many more variations and completely different words you haven’t thought of.

Carrying out keyword research allows you to analyse the statistics for each keyword, including how many times people are searching for each keyword in Yahoo and Google, along with the amount of competition there is and the keyword competitiveness.

With any promotion, understand your target audience.

Domain Name Addiction

My wife is addicted to shopping, my daughter is addicted to chocolate and my friend is addicted to old cars. I’m addicted to domain names. I currently own over 300 domains, I would say at least 20 are highly valuable.

How do you stop a domain name addiction?

Simple, turn the domain names into a commodity. If the domain names are generating you income, you can keep the addition without feeling guilty.

Either start developing the domain names into the ideas you had when you bought them, I appreciate this is easier said than done! Alternatively, you can go the same route I did and create Adsense sites. They don’t make big bucks, but if done properly they should provide you with a) enough money to cover the renewal fees and b) a good indication on what domains to develop from analysing the site’s stats.

On average it took me 4 hours to create an Adsense site for the majority of my domains, which I dedicated to my Sunday mornings for a year.

Hour one - Research Keywords (find those niche keywords that have searches with no competition. Keyword Tracker is great for this using their KEI formula) Collect images, copy and links.

Hour two - Content - Write the content in your own words making sure you add the keywords to the copy once or twice.

Hour three - Add content and Adsense to a simple template and carry out on-page SEO from your keyword research.

Hour four - Upload the site to the server, set up an email account and set up Google Analytics.

Here are 5 benefits to creating a site early on with your domain names rather than just letting them get cold sitting with your domain register:

1) Providing you add some good content to each site, you should generate enough income via Adsense or affiliate programmes to pay the renewal fees.

2) If the onpage SEO and content is good, other sites that link to you may get your site climbing the search engine rankings generating more traffic/revenue.

3) It’s a lot easier to sell a domain name with an established site on it. If the site is listed in the search engines, with links, you will see a nice ROI.

4) You can monitor each site to see what sites are proving popular. Build the sites that are getting the most links/traffic and you could see a nice return.

5) Keeping busy developing sites will not give you enough time to search for other domain names!

How many domain names do you own? Have you got a domain name addiction?

10 Questions You Need to Ask Any SEO (Before Working With Them)

More and more business owners are turning to the internet as a route to market their product or service. As a result, businesses are in need of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation/Optmiser) services to help with generating targeted traffic and a strong online presence.

As with any industry, there are SEO’s that are worth every $ and there are many that are just interested in your money.

In order for you not to get burned if you decide to seek an SEO, here are 10 excellent tips on how to determine whether a SEO is worthy or not:

1) Ask what in-house sites they promote and where they rank in Yahoo and Google for which keyword terms. Any SEO who knows their stuff will have their own portfolio of sites. If they don’t, this is immediately a red flag.

2) Check their sites by typing the keyword(s) in each search engine, take note of the amount of results/competition (In Google, you will see the amount of results in the top right hand corner of the search results) In general, the higher amount of searches, the more difficult it is to reach to the top. Above 50,000,000 search results is a good sign.

3) Ask the SEO why they want to work on client’s sites rather than his own. Do they want to gain more experience within different industries or don’t they like the commitment of working on their own sites?

4) Find out what techniques they use to generate inbound links - Manual or Organic? Anyone can manually build inbound links (there’s nothing wrong with this technique). However, a good SEO will concentrate more of their efforts on generating organic links via quality content, social media/book marking sites. Find out what ideas they have for your site. Ask to look at their previous link building strategies and results.

5) The simple marketing test: If you have a set of links in your navigation bar, ask them their thoughts on what order they should be in and why. This will show if the SEO puts the end-user experience first, and you will also see some of their marketing thoughts and styles.

6) Find out exactly what you get for your money and the time lines they will be delivered in. Will the SEO work on a performance basis?

7) If possible, try to arrange a face-to-face meeting or at least a telephone conversation. Do they sound enthusiastic about SEO, online marketing? Have they got good ideas that will help grow your online business? Do your personalities match?

Ask how many other clients they’re currently working with, how many staff they have (if any). This will give you a good indication if theywill be able to put the required level of commitment/effort into your project.

9) Are their rates to low? This may sound crazy, but any SEO worth their weight in gold will not offer rates lower than what they can generate by promoting their own portfolio of sites. Why would he?

10) Ask the above 9 questions to at least 3 SEO’s, more if time permits. You will get a good feel on what SEO’s can add value to your business from the questions above.

I hope the above will prevent you selecting an SEO that is just out to make a quick buck from inexperienced webmasters.

Good luck!

Asiana Airlines - Poor Internet Marketing

I was reading the Bangkok Post about a week ago and noticed a half page advert from Asiana Airlines - 2 direct flights per day from Bangkok to Seoul. I have wanted to go to South Korea (and the north) for a long time now, so I made a mental image of Asiana Airlines.

Last night myself and my girlfriend started discussing our holiday plans for this year. My girlfriend voted for skiing in Japan, as she has never seen snow before whilst I voted for South Korea. We agreed that we would look into the costs involved with each and use the costs as the deciding factor on where to go.

So, with my fingers crossed I typed “Asiana Airlines” into Google and I got the following search results:

Now, from an SEO/M and end user perspective, this is poor on-page SEO. What link do I choose? Not one of the ten title descriptions or description tells me where I should click to book a ticket.

Anyway, I decided to check out the “Asiana Global Sites” link. Guess what? They don’t have a link for Thailand. Damn, what do I do now?

Hmmmm, I know, I’ll go back to the search results in Google. Even though the asiana.co.kr link says “For foreigners residing in Korea” I think this must be the corporate Asiana web site (with the .co.kr domain format). Hopefully I can find a link to where I can buy or find out a price for a ticket. This is what I got…

What link would you select?

I choose “International” above the bookings. I went to select the departure city and there was only one option - Korea.

Above I noticed a “Site Map” link - Hopefully this would direct me to the right place.

NOTE: If your site has more than 20 pages of content, I highly recommend generating a site map. If visitors are having difficulty finding what they are looking for, a site map will instantly point them to the right page. Check out Google Webmaster Tools to learn more.

On the site map they had a link “Reservations and ticketing - International” This took me to the page I was just at. Back to the site map. Next page “reservation search”, I got this message:

“For the security purposes for the user, it is impossible to change the reservation…..”

What is that all about?

Okay, by now I would have given up, but by this time I had already thought about writing this post so I wanted to continue (for your benefit ). At this stage, I honestly didn’t know where to click next. So, back to the site map. I selected “Worldwide Offices” which was under the “About Asiana” rather than “Reservations and ticketing. Wooo Hooo! I eventually get a number for Asiana in Bangkok. I called and asked them if they accepted online bookings, they said no.

Now the question is, why pay for advertising in national newspapers when you can’t get your internet marketing sorted out? Also, why are they not accepting online bookings, why not invest the print advertising budget in an online booking system? It’s not like they can’t afford it, they own multi-million dollar aircraft! I wonder how many other airlines don’t offer online bookings, I hope I’m right in guessing not many.

I also wonder how much business they have lost due to this? I would think a lot.

Asiana Airlines, if you are reading this - we offer a usability report that covers all the aspects I fount frustrating with your site, only small changes are needed for a huge improvement with communicating with potential customers online. Stop damaging your brand!