Yaniv Nizan's Personal Blog

10 Tips for Contacting a Blogger

Here is a post to those of you who have a product for bloggers. Here are the things that we have found to work:

1. Domain tools allows you to research a site - finding historic "whois" records that sometines have the contact information, reverse the IP and see what other sites are owned by the same person and figure out the contact information from there.

2. Leave a comment on the blogger site with a good advice or good feedback on the content. Most bloggers read their comments and will appreciate your contribution to the conversation. 

3. Link to them from your own company or personal blog. Bloggers love links and often monitor who links to them. You want the link to go out of a good interesting post so the blogger will find your ideas interesting.

4. Connect with them in social networks. I have found that most bloggers love to tweet and monitor their 'mentions' (every time . Pay them respect by retweeting, mentioning or responding to their tweets - they are very likely to respond to that.

5. Offer to write something for them or at least give them idea to write on (with an angle). Writing frequently is a hard job and new ideas for interesting and engaging posts are not easy to find. Most bloggers will have a list of ideas and half baked posts to help them survive dry spells. Bloggers love guest posts since it takes away some of the work load. 

6. Try following their tips and recommendations and tell them your feedback. This can be done through any of the methods above.

7. Email them. Once you got the blogger's attention and build a level of relationship, the next step is to email but my recommendation is not to go directly into hard sell mode. Instead, try to refer the blogger to content that might interest him and will build your authority in a domain that relates to your product. If you have an SEO product - refer to SEO content, if you have an infrastructure product - refer to tech elements, etc.

8. Invite him to a conference. Conferences are a great way for bloggers to learn from other bloggers, interact with them and get new writing ideas. One way - is to set up your own event - it can be even a small meetup for drinks at a bar.  Another way is to sponsor an event and hand out free passes or if you are on budget even recommending a good blogging event early on will help the blogger save with early bird discounts and will win you points.

9. Meet the blogger. Make sure to bring value. Interact with him, buy him drinks, bring value in the form of opinion about conference sessions, ideas to write on, connecting him to other bloggers, etc.

10. Follow up and talk about your own product. This is only the last step after you developed a relationship that provides value. Note that most bloggers are blogging on weekends and working during the week.

Top 10 SEO Tips

I recently did some research about the field of SEO. I thought I would share some observations:

1. from some reason my experience is that wordpress works much better for SEO compared to any other platform. Not sure why.

2. try to get back links from gov and edu sites. Some of them are easy to get and they have a high link authority.

3. SEObook and SEMrush are great tools for tracking your SEO progress

4. make a lean website that loads quickly.

5. have unique IP addresses for different domains. The hosting will be a bit more expensive but the SEO impact justifies it.

6. The juice of a backlink is dependent on the quality of the website linking to your site: page rank and authority but it also depends on how close are the topics of the pages on the two sides of the links. If you have a website about finance, linking in from a gossip blog would not give you much juice.

7. Deep linking is having other website link to internal pages in your site. The more pages you have links going to the better.

8. If your content is duplicate Google will simply ignore it. So far Google doesn't seem to penalize - just ignore duplicates.

9. You can get many back links by sharing content, video or a widget and including a link back. This technique of sharing something to get links is known as linkbait.

10. Focus on a small number of search phrases at a time and have a URL or domain that reflect the search phrase and content to match.

 

 

Business to Business Customer Handling Tips

I was going to write a long intro to this explaining how important it is to keep your customers happy. In second thought I realized its pretty obvious. So I'm going to simply list a few guidelines and insights I gave our project managers:

1.    Setting expectation from the beginning and along the way, will result in better flow and understanding on both sides.

2.    Calling  a customer is hardly ever a wrong move

3.    Being early for a call is much better than being late. Most conference  bridges allows you to be on the call early while continuing to do your emails

4.    It's recommended to use social networks to make the personal bond. Adding a picture in skype is also recommended.

6.    Try to gain as many access points to the customer as possible, this comes very handy at times of a crisis.  (ie: Email; skype; phone; mobile; phone of employee sitting close by; receptionist contact details).

7.    Whenever the customer is criticizing, try to take his side and blame the system, policy, process, industry, world, ...

8.    Answering an email with a phone call is very often a smart move. This is especially true when:

a)     You don't understand something the customer said - phone call can solve the misunderstanding in seconds

b)    The customer is criticizing you and there is audience in the cc list

c)     The customer is angry due to a misunderstanding

d)    The email thread becomes unnecessarily long 

9.    The customer contact is not making your life hard on purpose. Try to understand his challenges in getting you the information/approval you need. Once you understand his challenges you may be able to help him solve them.

10.  Whenever a crisis occurs the best thing to do is to increase the communication with the customer as much as possible, come with a plan.

11.  Notify the customer when he is misbehaving - simply let him know - don't make a fuss over it.

12.  Support issues:

a)     Notify the customer that you received his request.

b)    Let the customer know that you understand the severity/urgency/business-implications of the situation and that you will apply special effort / taking the problem very seriously.

c)     Communicate the process.

d)    Communicate to the customer when the problem was identified.

e)     Communicate the resolution estimated timeline to the customer even if you are unsure.

f)      Once the problem is resolved, inform the customer.
when relevant let him know we are also applying new procedure to essure that the problem will not happen again.

13.    Angry customer is better than indifferent customer. Anger shows that he still cares while indifference shows he gave up and made a decision to cancel.

14.    The customer is not stupid (it doesn't get you anywhere saying he is), take proactive action to explain things better/in a different way.

15.    It will be easier to get the customer's attention at the beginning of the project - right after signing the contract. the willingness to assist is higher and the resources are more available at that time.

16.    Complicated integrations require the attention of the relevant team (from both sides) at the beginning of the project.

17.    Long lasting issues – should be solved by getting the relevant people to the same room/ phone call (if impossible) à push until issue is identified & solved (always better to do it at the beginning of the project when the customer is more dedicated).

18.    Customer does not like to feel in the dark – most of the time it is better to communicate the difficulties/delays expected then to be late.

19.    When you have conflicts – you may find it helpful to consult the customer, he may solve it to you easily.

Google AdWords Retargeting Feature Will Change the Face of the Web

In a recent post I commented on a troubling trend towards compensating publishers at the low-end of the funnel and the implications this may have on the entire online advertising industry. I anticipated that this problem will get solved over time and today we are one step closer to that. 

Earlier this week, Google announced a new feature for AdWords called remarketing (also called retargeting). Essentially this gives advertisers a way to present targeted ads to users who have already been to the advertiser website by planting the double click cookie. This new feature presents great value for advertisers and I'm sure it will be adopted quickly by the majority of the advertisers.

Putting aside the privacy issues that this new feature presents, Google just created a very big opportunity for publishers at the higher end of the funnel to get better compensation for "intent generation". As this new feature gets widely adopted it's implication on conversion rates will be quantified and it will be easy to associate a dollar value with the act of planting the cookie (flagging). I expect that soon after a new payment model will be developed to compensate such an act - let's call it cost per flagging (CPF). The advertiser will be able to plan a campaign where a user gets flagged on the publisher website if he reached certain criteria based on time of exposure to the ad, dwell time over the ad or some interaction with an interactive ad (widget). Since the advertiser can now associate a dollar value with the flagging he will be able to pay much higher rates in CPF as compared to CPM and since very little user actually click out of the publisher website, CPF will also yield more RPM/eCPM than CPC for the publishers.

This can have very significant implications on the entire web since it can revert the current trend towards the end of the funnel. Giving more revenue to the publishers at the higher end of the funnel means more quality online content and less annoying aggressive advertising which tries to get you to click out of the website. So essentially, it means better web experience for the users.

The implication on the online advertising industry can also be tremendous. The existing trend towards trapping the online advertising industry in the "intent harvesting box" can now be reverted and the advertisers will start shifting the huge brand advertising budgets from other media channels to the online channel as they will be able to measure the ROI on "intent generation" / brand advertising.

Online Sales - Doing it Right

My background is 100% b2b enterprise sales which are rarely done online. Since EyeView is all about increasing online sales, I had a lot of learning to do in order to understand how online sales works. What I discovered is that the basics are very similar - it's all about engagement and commitment.

In order to close a sale (either online or offline), you want to engage your buyer and then turn his engagement into commitment. This is done in multiple steps in which you get a commitment and then leverage it in the next step.

In offline sales, the engagement is done through a presentation and personal relationship and the commitment you want to achieve can be customer actions like:

1. Spending time learning about your product
2. Coming to your office
3. Risking his reputation by championing your product in the organization
4. Getting other resources in the company commit time to evaluate the solution
5. Making a commercial commitment

In online sales, the engagement is done through creative content and the best tool for that is video (check out www.eyeviewdigital.com). The commitment is usually done by the customer taking actions like:

1. Spending time on your website
2. Sharing with others
3. Giving away personal information (aka - signing up)
4. Downloading and installing something on his PC
5. Giving away credit card details (without payment)
6. Submitting a payment

If you want to see some good samples of how to do this right, check out EyeView, Yield SW, Readysite, Ginger SW and Caphyon. 

Trade Shows for Startups

I'm getting ready for the first trade show EyeView will exhibit in. We put a lot of effort and resources into the show so you can imagine the excitment. Trade shows can be a huge marketing tool but can also be a very big waste of time and money if they are not done right and while I still don't know how this show will turn out I wanted to share some tips from the last trade shows we participated in

My first tip is to choose the show wisely. I'm a very big fan of shows that address vertical markets as opposed to industry shows (like e-metrics, adtech or "mobile world conference"). I have seen a lot of small companies following the industy leaders and going to the biggest show only to get unnoticed. Going to a vertical show which is much smaller would allow them to make bigger impact as a startup company. 

Another trick which can get you a lot of impact on a small budget is to target the exhibitors instead of the audience. You will need to choose a show where the exhibitors are in your target market and than simply attend the show without exhibiting. Every trade show will have a list of exhibitors which make it pretty easy to contact them before the show and set up meetings. In EyeView, we were able to book 30 meetings in advance in each one of the shows we attended. Needless to say that this is a very good return on the price of 2 flight tickets and the registration fee.

I hope that after this show I'll have good tips for exhibiting in a show. Until than I highly recommend reading "Going to a trade show like it matters" part 1 and part 2 by Steve Blank.