“Stock people on a website decreases your credibility. No, I haven’t done extensive studies on this, but I can spot stock photos of people from a mile off, and sites with it are much less likely to get my dollar than a site with a REAL picture of REAL people on it. … Do you ALWAYS treat your customers like they’re idiots? Do you really think they believe you dress in a suit everyday and your skin is flawless?”
I think he’s right. I think that real pictures work well on the web because visitors are hunting for signs of credibility. They can’t see you in person, or see the bricks n’ mortar, so they are looking for other signifiers of trust.
I think big companies tend to get away with stock people photography more often than small companies, because their credibility is established in other ways. Also, aspirational brands don’t tend to benefit from warts-n-all personal relationship-based approaches. That isn’t what they’re selling, so the objectified perfection of stock-beautiful people may work better for them.
I guess the trick is that we do what is appropriate for our audience and what we’re trying to sell, eh.
“Microsoft today announced its decision to use a tiered system for its search commission structure, with 15 percent as the maximum, which is in contrast to competitors Google and Yahoo”
This may put pressure on Yahoo! and Google, who recently scrapped or cutback their commission payments to agencies.
This post isn’t even vaguely search related. It is, however, Ipod related.
I have an Ipod. I love my Ipod. It is, without doubt, the coolest thing I own.
When I was considering buying a music player, some music-gadget obsessed friends offered a wealth of well-meaning advice. “No”, they said, “don’t get an Ipod because it can’t do xyz, unlike the XRX2000 (or whatever), which can do so much more! More stuff! Oh, and the Ipod is overpriced”. Those weren’t the exact words, but that was the jist.
They were probably right, but the problem is: I don’t care.
I knew that if I bought anything else, I’d always think “yeah, but it’s not an Ipod”. The Ipod is great, not because of its’ features, but the way its’ features are organized. Everything is in the right place. It feels right. It is just so…usable.
And it is a joy to use.
There aren’t many consumer electronics you can say that about…
“A publicly-funded BBC is the only organisation in Britain capable of taking on the global commercial giants of AOL and Google, its director general said yesterday. Arguing for an increase in the BBC’s annual £2.9 billion licence fee above the rate of inflation, Mark Thompson said the corporation needed the money to become a global player.”
Funding issues aside, the BBC may offer a valuable alternative on the search landscape. There are obvious dangers in having all our information filtered by purely commercial search companies, or, if we were to be a little unkind, search-related advertising networks.
But, is a few billion enough? Can the BBC even hope to compete with Google? Is this proposition realistic?
Affiliate programs can be a great source of revenue for webmasters. Programs have low start-up costs, are easy to get up and running, and there is no need to organise the back end.
BUT
Look at the great deal the vendor is getting - a salesperson working on a commission only basis, and there is little management overhead involved. It’s no wonder that many affiliate programs are currently begging affiliates to run campaigns for them.
That’s why when I see stuff like this, it makes me grin:
“Affiliate Manager Quote of the Week: You wouldn’t show up for a job interview in sweats, so why are you applying for programs with an empty domain?”
Now, I’m sure being an affiliate manager is an unenviable job, and there are many webmasters who probably give them grief, but the reality is that affiliate programs are a dime a dozen. There is no shortage of supply, unlike performing affiliates, who are scarce. The top 5% make 95% of the money.
Good affiliates get courted by vendors and affiliate managers, not the other way around. Open free-for-alls, with average payouts, are only ever going to attract monkeys.
ThePlanet & EV1Servers, two top dedicated server providers, recently announced a merger.
A little history might be handy.
EV1Servers used to be RackShack. They have a horrible record for customer service. They lose hard drives, lose entire servers. When you try to cancel, they refuse to cancel billing. They are possibly the most hated dedicated server company on the Internet.
A couple years ago, I had a dedicated server with RackShack, and after three weeks of working on it, RackShack informed us that they had inadvertently blocked the very IP’s they had issued to us. We cancelled the server in the face of this incompetence and moved elsewhere, yet RackShack refused to cancel billing for six months or so, maybe longer.
When I posted about it in the forum, their customer service manager and several staff members joined up to defend RackShack by insulting forum members. Yeah, pretty dumb. So we put up a RackShack / EV1 webpage, which ranked #1 for “RackShack” and “EV1 Servers” for quite some time. (That’ll teach ‘em to mess with SEO’s )
So, RackShack / EV1 is pretty much evil.
ThePlanet, however, is like a cold beer on a hot day. They offer great servers and great support for fair prices, and their customer service is second only to ServerBeach. ThePlanet is one of the most highly regarded dedicated server companies on the Internet.
So, if I wanted to make a textbook branding mistake, what would it be?
*Thinking*
I got it! Merge the two! Voila, ThePlanet gets to share the hatred of EV1 Servers, without all the hassle of years of incompetence.
There’s a reason Toyota doesn’t put “Toyota” all over Lexus. Brand confusion, brand dilution, and in this case brand murder.
I used to have several servers at ThePlanet at a cost of several thousand dollars a month. Now I have none. And it’ll stay that way.
I love this eyetracking/visual heatmap stuff. One of the best web design “tools” out there.
Here’s a really interesting video measuring eye-tracking patterns on Seth Godin’s Squidoo. Note that the eye-patterns virtually ignore the Google Adsense positioning. Squidoo integrates Adsense very poorly, if the aim is to generate revenue.
“I think websurfing is a hunting activity. The eye is looking for anamolies, for things that don’t belong. (That might be why the word anomaly, spelled wrong in the previous sentence, got your focus). Once our peripheral vision confirms that something is familiar, we can ignore it and just worry about the new stuff.”
Seth also hits on an aspect that good internet marketers understand: “bad” design can be good, in that bad design demands attention. Where there is attention, there is money.
“In general, linking to web spammers and “bad neighborhoods” can harm your site’s indexing and ranking….only natural links add value and are helpful for indexing and ranking your site….Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links…..natural links are links to your site that develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links are links to your site placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines”
Throw nofollow into the blender as well, and it’s a wonder anybody links to anything! Except sites owned by their closest and best-est friends, which I think is the “natural” unintended consequence of despotic link rules and regulations
Are any of the sites featured in my blogroll in “bad neighborhoods”? Are they in “good neighborhoods” now, but may soon be in “bad neighborhoods”? How would I know? Why should I care? I simply like to read them. I think others might, too.
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