Asking the right question

In some of the books that I have read about internet marketing, including the one that I am reading now, "Call to Action" by Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg, it says that calls to action can be a question. I have heard this from other people involved in internet marketing.

It makes sense, ask someone a question to get their interest and get them to take action.

This week we at WorldVitalRecords.com have worked on several email campaigns. The consistent theme this week has focused on training. We launched our training programs this week and that is the subject of our campaigns.

We are testing server A/B/C messages including:
Are you ready to start your Genealogy?
Are you ready to start your Family History?
Are you ready to start your Genealogy and Family History?

They each look like they are doing fairly well from an open rate and click through rate. They are getting more opens and click throughs than the last campaigns that did not ask a question in the reference line.

However, it appears that some spam blockers are filtering the emails out because of the phrase "Are you ready" in the subject line. Apparently, some of the spam filters have recognized the use or over use of that phrase.

So it appears that asking a question is a productive and effective technique. However, the question needs to be asked without using standard questions that have been over used in the past by others.

The most valuable usage of YouTube

In today's Provo Labs Academy class, there was an intense discussion about the pros and cons of YouTube.com.

Examples of some of the absolute garbage that is on YouTube were given. Paul Allen talked about Mark Cuban's blog post that discusses the videos with the top 20 viewership. Cuban has been critical of the Google purchase of YouTube, and is not shy in identifying the problems.

There were examples of postitive and productive uses of YouTube from finding videos of actual quality to using YouTube for marketing purposes. The "Will it Blend" marketing by BlendTec (WillItBlend.com) got a lot of free marketing.

I proposed that the best and most valuable usage of YouTube is that you get to use their storage and bandwidth for free.

In the past I have worked with IT departments to set up video servers, primarily for training. When video on demand was in its infancy, and before services like YouTube.com, Revver.com, and OurMedia.org each company had to buy the expensive and frequently proprietary hardware, storage space (expensive hard drives), the fastest and most expensive servers available for video rendering and scaling, and the most expensive burstable bandwidth. This was easily over $100,000 for any company that wanted to play that game.

Yes, prices on hardware and bandwidth have dropped significantly. However, that $100,000 video on demand systems has been completely replaced by YouTube.com and its competitors.

All you have to do now is upload whatever video you have at whatever size you have to YouTube. Then put the simple html code on your pages to display the video inline on your pages. YouTube pays for the hard drive space and the bandwidth.

Do you know any other technologies where the price has dropped from $100k to $0 in a few years? I would like to see the automobile industry repeat that price reduction. ;)

Google Ranking Variables

Yesterday the Provo Labs Academy lecture was about Google Ranking Variables. This was a follow up to a recent lecture by Paul Allen about improving natural search rankings. In yesterday's class the top 15 or so Google Ranking Variables were discussed. There are about 100 or more, but we talked about the most influential.

At the end of class Paul ranked the variable. The list is below:

1. Page Rank of incoming links. (Meaning links to your page(s) come from pages with high rank themselves).
2. Anchor text of incoming links. (What are the descriptions of the links that come to your pages)
3. Quantity of links that come to your site.
4. Links from your site to other high ranking sites with relevant anchor text
5. Relevant Text in Title Tag of your page
6. Relevant text in Heading Tags H1, H2, etc.
7. Keyword density above the fold, meaning closer to the top of the page than the bottom. (This used to be the primary factor in the days before Google)
8. Internal site links, PR for your own site, anchor text, etc.
9. Your domain name (Is it relevant to the search terms)
10. Full URL names (Is the subfolder name relevant to the search terms)
11. File names (Are images, .PDF, .HTML pages named with relevant terms?)

The other variables that impact natural ranking but were not ranked in the top 10 are:

• Relevant Content on your page
• Click Through rates to your page
• Web presence
• Fresh content (this also drives click through rates, and page ranking)
• XML site map presented to Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.

One of the more enthusiastic discussions was about whether the folks at Google 'cook the rankings.' Paul was adamant that they don't and that everything is formula based. I gave the example of searching for 'analytics' on Google and surprisingly enough 'Google Analytics' comes up first. Paul pointed out that that ranking comes because of the formula. Since 'Google Analytics' is free, it gets more hits that other paid analytic sites.

I tested this on both MSN and Yahoo and sure enough 'Google Analytics' is their top result also.

Paul said that everything Google does is formula based so it can scale. It would take too many employees to monitor and tweak the results.

I guess that there were quite a few 'conspiracy theorists' that still believe that the search engines are 'cooking the results.' We have seen in the past how Microsoft would 'enhance' their operating systems (OS) so that their competitors struggled with desktop applications. Many people still consider this part of the game to give yourself an advantage.

We read part of the original student thesis by the founders of Google. All of this stuff was well thought out long before it was implemented by the billionaires at Google. Their original idea was to rank citations from research, scholastic, and education materials. It turns out that the same algorithms apply to the web as well.

I learned that Google actually used to be the search engine for Yahoo. Amazing.

Paul recommended anything written by Matt Cutts (MattCutts.com) and John Battelle (Battellemedia.com). These guys are the gurus and know what goes on 'under the hood.'

Interesting User Locations for WVR

At WorldVitalRecords.com we spend a lot of time reviewing our performance in dozens of critical metrics. Tracking performance against goals is critical to success. Paul Allen continuously drives home the importance of tracking our results.

One of the metrics that we track is the geographic location of our subscribers. We are trying very hard to be a truly international organization with an emphasis on vital records from around the world. We even ran a special promotion to get more subscribers from around the world.

I am looking at one of our an analytic tracking screens that shows a map of the world. Where there are higher concentrations of users the circle is larger. As expected the circle around Provo, Utah, where WVR is headquartered, and Salt Lake City, Utah are 2 of the larger dots on the screen.

We have dots that literally cover the US; Canada; Europe; metropolitan South America; East and West Coasts of Australia; New Zealand; metropolitan Asia including Beijing, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Seoul, and Tokyo; and the Middle East: Israel, Egypt, Dubai, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

What is surprising to me is the size of the dots over Oslo and Trondheim, Norway, Seattle WA, Houston TX, and Los Angeles CA. For the past week we have had more usage from Norway than Canada or the UK. That is an interesting trend that needs to be tracked.

I know that we have subscribers in those areas, as I have checked our user subscriber databases. I also know of high profile technology companies in those geographic areas.
Either we are getting the attention of some of industry leaders or these areas are concentrated areas of family history and genealogy research. I would like to know.