Paul Woods

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A few weeks ago the June edition of the Australian Marketing Institute’s Marketing Update newsletter was released - and in it is the second book review I have done for the AMI - Getting to Big the Small Way by Frank Prestipino.

For those who are not members of the AMI… here is the review

 BOOK REVIEW

Getting to Big the Small Way

By Frank Prestipino. Published by McGraw-Hill, New York, 2008. 322 pages. RRP AUD$39.95. ISBN 13: 9780071484404.

While taking on a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) can get you out of bed in the morning, chances are getting your project off the ground is fraught with challenges. Budget. Risk management. Board approval. Hmmm, all sounds too hard!

But what if you could fly under the radar and drive significant change in your organisation? In ‘Getting to Big the Small Way’, Frank Prestipino illustrates how taking baby steps to drive change is a sound business strategy.

The book’s argument focuses on the Pareto Principle — that 80% of the benefit is derived from 20% of the effort. Prestipino says that as a business you need to focus on the 20% (or even less) to drive incremental yet significant change in your organisation. All without the red tape and risk associated with big transformation projects.
Although the idea is similar to that of Tim Ferris in ‘The 4 Hour Work Week‘, ‘Getting to Big the Small Way’ targets what a business or marketing team (not an individual) should be focusing on to drive significant returns.

For example, moving into adjacent markets and exploiting the products, skills and resources that are already at your fingertips, or closing the perception gap between how you and your customers see your organisation. Prestipino supports each idea with plenty of real-world examples and draws significantly on his experience at Oracle and other organisations.

The book itself generally reads well, with practical tools that complement Prestipino’s arguments. Near the end of the book I felt the tools became very prescriptive and took too much of the focus — great if the tools fit your organisation perfectly, a little disappointing if you need to adapt them to meet the challenges of your business.

That being said, there are plenty of great ideas I have taken from this book and am implementing within the business I live and breathe every day. I would recommend this as worthwhile reading for anyone with a strategic marketing or communications bent.

37:  If it is going to more than 10 people - send it to someone else to check before you unleash the message on the masses… two, three, four pairs of eyes are better than one.

and how about…

38:  If you want me to respond, put me on the To: line.  If you don’t want a response, CC: me please (actually you should just reconsider if need to read it at all!)

… you can read #1 - #36 of the Email Checklist over at Seth’s blog.

Back in March I wrote my breakup letter to Virgin Broadband regarding their substandard offering.  Well after almost three months of troubleshooting, registered post letters, stern emails, negotiation, complaining to the ACCC and the TIO and a whole lot of patience we now have a reliable, fast connection at home.

The good folk at Virgin Broadband certainly lived up to the Virgin customer service standard and tried their best to sort out my problem (once my complaints got through to them) but unfortunately it just wasn’t to be. 

After a personal apology over the phone from the soon to be CEO of Virgin Mobile, and the offer of a release from the contract, I somewhat reluctantly cut my loses and walked away from Virgin Broadband.   I say reluctantly because my only other option was to sign up with the company I never wanted to sign up with again - Telstra.

… to cut a long story short, the signup with Telstra was easy, the problem is they can never ever meet any time commitments they make over the phone.  After eight phone calls to Telstra customer service over three weeks (that should have only been one), I now have a new phone line and ADSL2+ connection.

I guess the good part about poor customer service is that you can negotiate discounts at almost every occasion that something goes wrong, and Telstra are more than happy to come to the table - otherwise I would be incredibly unhappy at the moment, instead of content.

Lets just hope my Telstra ADSL2+ does not degrade like Virgin Broadband did.  Fingers crossed.

Last month I set myself a Search Engine Optimization challenge.  Essentially I wanted to substantially increase the traffic, ultimately revenue from a website that I run focused on Office 2007 help, tips, tricks, and tutorials called The New Paperclip.

The first tweak I made was to not focus on keywords, or backlinks or any other sexy SEO topic.  I know this might sound a little backward, but I actually focused on the reader first!

That’s right!  This wasn’t to increase my pagerank or anything like that… all I did was make it easier for someone using a search engine to make a decision on whether or not to click the search engine result that pointed to my site.

Obviously I was making it pretty hard for readers to make the right choice, because almost overnight (as soon as Google spidered my site again) traffic DOUBLED!  That’s right… DOUBLED!

How easy is it for your potential readers to decide if a page on your site is worthy or not?  Do a search and see what title comes up.  If it is long winded like “The New Paperclip: Tips, Tricks and Tutorials for Microsoft Office…” and does not have anything to do with not only the specific content of the page, but the search terms that the person used… then you are in big trouble!  You need to tweak straight away!

To learn about how I specifically made the tweak to my blog post titles using WordPress… click here

Remember - SEO isn’t all about the search engine - really it should be called Human Search Optimisation - because at the end of the day it is the reader looking for the content, not the search engine.

Actually the topic of Human Search Optimization sounds pretty interesting, I might see if I can dig up some more information or insight about it in the coming weeks.

For those following me on Twitter (paulwoods) you will know that I have been playing around with ways to automate some of my online life.  My ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes to do the regular things - like catching up on my favourite feeds, following folks on Twitter, keeping up with some of my favorite photographers on Flickr and much more.

My first attempt was to use Google’s iGoogle.  iGoogle is essentially a start page which you can load a multitude of widgets into to follow almost anything.  I can look at my Google Analytics data for the websites I run, my AdSense balance, my hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts, my Twitter feed, Facebook etc etc all from one page.  Basically an instant time saving of about 10 minutes every day simply because I eliminated the need to bounce between 10 or so different sites.

iGoogle is good… except that there were a few things I felt were missing.  The main one being that I could see all that great content, but I couldn’t do much with it.

Enter Flock!

Flock “The Social Web Browser” certainly lives up to its tagline.

I now have a browser that is pulling fresh data from my Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, GMail, Yahoo Mail and YouTube accounts.  Not only can I interact with all of them directly from the browser interface… I can also pull content from any of them and blog about it using Flock’s “Blog This” functionality.

For example, this image is part of my Flickr photostream (that’’s me third from the right about to ride 70km on my dual suspension mountain bike!).  All I had to do was drag and drop it into the Flock blog editor.  How easy is that!

Compared to the Windows Live Writer blog editor which I have been using since it was released, the Flock Blog editor is a little light on.  For example, I am unsure if this text will take on styles set out in my WordPress theme (the preview doesn’t really tell me much).  But I am sure it will improve over time.

All in all… two big thumbs up for Flock.  And I guess 15 minutes extra each day I can use to focus on the important things.

Tags: Flock

There is nothing like a good article on typography to get all the MarComms nuts out there like me excited.

Here is a great one “Ten typographic mistakes everyone makes“

Note… becoming a typography nazi is just as bad if not worse than being a grammar nazi.  Handle with care, or you will lose friends!

The other day I got an email inviting me to contribute to Brazen Careerist.  What is Brazen Careerist? In my words, it is basically a group of ‘younger folk’ like me who are passionate about their fields, and ready to change the game.

Or in their words…

What’s this site all about?
Remember those college career centers that you never used? You probably wish you had taken advantage of them (like we do), but now (maybe) it’s too late. Well that’s what we’re here for. We’re an online career center aimed at Generation Y — young professionals who want to design and define their careers using the new rules for success.

What’s a Brazen Careerist?
A Brazen Careerist knows that defining your own career, finding the right field, and pursuing it are key ingredients to a fulfilling life. Like the tag line suggests, when you define your career on your own terms first, you control your life.

Where are all the good bloggers?
Right here, of course. The Internet is loaded with talented writers, but there is no way to easily search for them. The Brazen Careerist network is made up of a vibrant, curious and ambitious group of career-minded bloggers, passionately covering a variety of fields: personal development, entrepreneurship, public relations, technology, marketing, and politics, each blog offers a unique, informed perspective to our ever-expanding audience.

So make sure you check out some of my new friends at BrazenCareerist.com  Check out my Brazen Careerist profile  and my articles here.

… was posted by Brian Clark on CopyBlogger this morning.  If you ever wanted to figure out how to increase conversions, whether you are a B2C or B2B marketer - check out this great collection of landing page resources.

This is one of many posts dedicated to my Search Engine Optimization Challenge on www.thenewpaperclip.com.  Read more in the SEO Challenge category.

The problem:  Whenever one of the pages on The New Paperclip comes up in a search page, the title on the search result means absolutely nothing to the searcher.

To illustrate, in the example in the image to the left, you can see the SERP for the search phrase "word 2007 comments" in which The New Paperclip has #1 spot.  But if you were searching for "word 2007 comments" you would not click on search result #1.

Why?  Because the title of the search result has nothing to do with the search phase.  You and I both know that if we were searching for "word 2007 comments" that we would all click on "Using Comments in Word 2007 documents" before "The New Paperclip: Tips Tricks and Tutorials for Microsoft Office…"

This problem is caused by a default behaviour in the popular WordPress blogging platform that I use.  Essentially it puts the blog title first, before the post title - hence why every single listing  I have on SERP anywhere has the same generic boring irrelevant title

So… how to fix the problem?

Well, I have upgraded to WordPress v2.5 which has a new feature as part of its core functionality (used to be a plugin) which allows you to swap the post title and blog title around.  Check out how to do this easy tweak here.

So Tweak 1 in my Search Engine Optimisation Challenge is complete.  Have no idea when Google will pick up the change, so stay tuned for the results over the coming weeks.

As those of you who know me well (or have read this blog for a while) will know, I run a little side project at www.thenewpaperclip.com.  Basically The New Paperclip was something that kept me busy for a while about a year ago - I wrote about 50 blog posts on tips and tricks in the new version of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook etc).

I learnt a lot (it was a very good way to come up to speed on the new products)… and I managed to make a little money on the side thanks to Google Adsense… emphasis on little!

Despite having the #1 spot on Google SERPs for "Word 2007 Undo" and 35 other keyword combos out of my Top 100 keywords… more important things have come up in my life…

Now, after 8months I am brushing off the cobwebs over at The New Paperclip as part of my "I actually looked at my Google Analytics analytics and saw heaps of obvious stuff I can do to improve this website" challenge.

For the last three months, the stats have been pretty static, but there is a slight downward trend - not a good thing.  And that has been reflected in the monthly revenue figures in Adsense.

So… for the next quarter, I am challenging myself to do achieve the following goals:

• Increase visits 500%
• Increase page views/visit by 100% over the last quarter
• Increase revenue by 300%

Where did I get those numbers from?  Gut feel.  What techniques will I use to get near those goals?  Again gut feel - unless any of you have any ideas you want to share!

That being said it will be interesting to see what can be achieved over three months focusing on key SEO optimisation techniques, and maybe some fresh content.

The baseline has been set today.

• Visits: 0% increase
• Page Views/Visit: 0% increase
• Revenue: 0% increase

Time will tell… the final results will be in 30 June.  But I will keep you updated on progress along the way.