Davai Blog

I often times see businesses kick off their online presence by trying to go after the mainstay giants. A local chain of bookstores would come out with a website and go after Amazon and Chapters because they think that since their web pages are prettier, people will flock like a bunch of banks on a government bailout. I previously wrote about the importance of niches for search engine optimization and marketing in general, but today I want to explore a different angle.

When visiting a website, you often times see personalized gimmicks being used to get your attention. If you are from Montreal, for example, you could see an ad about something going on in the city, but the ad is on a Brazilian travel agency website. Your location got traced and the ad got spiced up to make you feel special. Google’s massive pay-per-click money pit is based on such personalization, which is niche marketing at its best.

People want to feel special and unique, but if your marketing strategy is to go after the general public, then you miss the boat. For example, Microsoft releases multiple versions of Windows for a reason. One is basic, one is for business, one is professional (whatever that means), another one is for entertainment and media, etc. They could have just made one Windows that encompasses all of these, and it would have worked just fine, but they wanted to make the business people feel special by giving them “their own” version, and the same applies to people who use their computers for games and movies, and so on.

Niche marketing captures this concept. Here is an example from the user point of view. If you are looking for an apartment for rent, you would go to a site such as apartment.com, start digging for your hometown, and go through the ads. The problem with that is when you start, you are treated like a sand grain on the beach. However, if you visit a local website with apartment listings only for your city, you feel a little warmer inside.

If I am planning on releasing an apartment listings website, I would be better releasing a number of them, each for a different city, and focus my marketing on the different geographic niches, rather than releasing one countrywide generic site and going after apartment.com and other big name mainstays.

You see this phenomenon everywhere you look. Car dealerships let you customize your car to make it “you”, grocery shops are stacked with variety like never before (see if you can count the number of chip flavors out there), and so on. The fact of the matter is if you go generic, you will flame out unless you have an established brand name (Coke?).

If you focus on niches, you increase your “special” factor and along with it your marketing effectiveness.

Everyone knows Yahoo! lost the search engine battle royal and now Google is just running up the score. We all seem to be in awe of the colorful logo, but Yahoo! is trying hard to get people’s attention, and I think they have some substance to offer.

Y!’s search engine results suck. Unless you are looking for a major brand name, you are most likely to be disappointed. Believe it or not, I am and always have been a Yahoo! supporter. I even stuck by their search engine for as long as I could, but infrequent trips to Google finally convinced me to convert. However, Yahoo! isn’t simply a search engine, which by the way is used to fund all of their other fun toys that I plan on talking about. If you are a developer or an online business owner, you might want to do some Y! exploring. There exists a world beyond Google, it seems. This is more surprising than finding out that we erupted from volcanoes.

These days developers do less coding and more drag & dropping, copy pasting, and so on. The mouse gets more coding done than the keyboard, so with this spirit in mind, you should take a look at Yahoo! Widgets. There is a lot of garbage in there, but if you learn to get around, you can find some really fancy stuff that could be useful and isn’t difficult to implement.

What I am really excited about is the upcoming Web Analytics tool. It looks like it could make Google’s version look like a school project, but right now it is only available to people hosting e-commerce websites with Yahoo!, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. This tool can give Yahoo! quite a boost, so why not release it to everyone as a beta version a la Google? By the time it finally gets released to the general public, the buzz will wear itself out.

Another nice offering is the SearchMonkey. While Yahoo! holds roughly 16% of the search engine traffic market compared to Google’s 70%, you have to consider the sheer numbers. The 16% is still more than 40 million daily users, so why not take advantage? SearchMonkey lets you pretty up your search result listing when it gets displayed in Yahoo!, and since people often scour search engine results before visiting a website, this works well towards a good first impression.

Here is some additional stuff you might want to check out:

• Developer Network: If you are into this kind of thing.
• Fire Eagle and GeoPlanet: Let’s you offer up services according to the geographical location of your users. There is good value in it for small business owners who can’t compete with the big mainstays and must focus their attention on small market niches.
• The OpenID Project, which I am greatly in favor of, let’s people use a unique login across all OpenID participants.

Being second banana to Google puts the “who?” in Yahoo!, but big Y has some goodies to offer if only you are willing to pay it some attention.

Everyone is doing it, so you decided to do it too, and why not? If everyone is getting a website for their business, then it’s logical to think that the benefits are there. However, most either do a half-buttocks job due to a half-buttocks commitment, or don’t get involved altogether due to either fear of the unknown or the apparent massive personal investment required.

While putting up a website for your business is a daunting task, as it should be, it doesn’t mean you can’t handle it. Also, going about it the right way can save you time and money, but going about it the wrong way can really hurt your business.

The benefits of having a good website are obvious, so we go all in.

First, you need to know what you are trying to accomplish with your online presence. You could start selling a product or simply describe your services to potential customers. Find and analyze a few websites in your industry and see what they are doing, what you like about their approach, and how it can apply to your initiative. Develop a list of functionalities you want your future website visitors to benefit from, but if you are lost on the subject, don’t worry and do your best.

Now comes the time to find someone to actually design the damn thing. This is the single most important step in the process, especially if the territory is new to you. You must pick not only someone who can design the site, but who could also help you pinpoint your needs. If you got lost in the previous step, this is where you must find your path, so whomever you pick must have some experience in online business. This is important.

You have a choice between picking a particular designer or a company to do the work. I would recommend the latter, but I might be biased. However, a good firm has tons of knowledge, experience, and resources due to the number of heads. Like the [altered] saying goes: more heads are better than one.

One important issue to keep in mind throughout the process is that if you keep the developer’s cost down, you will keep your cost down. For example, I previously had clients in need of a simple $500 brochure website, but they insisted on meeting with me and my web and graphic designers when a phone conference would have sufficed. If I have to get my people to sit in a room for two hours, the cost of it will be integrated into the development cost. A lot of people will tell you that it’s alright to torture the designers until you get what you want, but they are people too, and the more time they spend working, even if it’s for a pointless meeting, the more money it will cost you.

Make sure you have a mutual agreement on the work to be done, and get it in writing. It’s a protection blanket for both sides. It should include costs, dates of delivery, and terms of support. Also, be sure to discuss the issue of registering a domain name and securing a hosting plan, both under your name. If you are unsure on how to proceed, discuss it with the designers. This is another reason why it is vital to pick someone who can guide you through the unknown.

Finally, don’t dump the project on the developers and forget about it until delivery date. You will surely have decisions to make, and you better make them or else the developers will. You know more about your business than they do, so it is in your best interest to have a presence.

Follow these steps and you too can reap the benefits of an online presence. Man, do I sound like an infomercial or what?

With the recent news that directory submissions of a website are now pointless for SEO, it is more important than ever to focus on your content. This means that you need to keep your visitors intrigued with what’s written on you web pages, but to do that you must understand what is good copy and what isn’t.

The ability to write good copy comes from the understanding of the way we humans look at what’s in front of us. The best way to demonstrate this is with an example. Suppose you write up a nice looking paragraph that starts off as follows:

According to various scientific sources, dinosaurs died due to a meteor striking our planet some 65 million years ago.

And on it went. However, a visitor of your website sees the following:

According to various scientific sources, dinosaurs died …?

Why? Because they are only willing to spend a couple of seconds to read the first few words and make the decision on spending the next five minutes reading the rest or moving on to something more interesting. There is no way you can make a sound decision from the given excerpt whether the text is worth reading or not, but we as people trust our instinct for better or for worst.

Simply observe your own behavior. Have you ever started reading something, didn’t have the time to read the whole thing, but decided to do it anyway, as if your eyes were a fly on fresh cow manure? Just couldn’t let it go. Case in point: the first 5 or 6 words of every paragraph matter, so invest a good amount of time in them.

Another helpful self-study would be to monitor how you go through a newspaper. Do you read everything to try and find something you like? I don’t think so. Heck, we are so lazy we barely read the title, instead focusing on a few words in it to make the decision on spending our next five minutes. Case in point: write up some good headings for your content, and make them a little catchy and intriguing. It doesn’t have to be “SHE’S PREGNANT!” tabloid magazine style, but them folks are onto something.

The next tip to keep in mind is to write short paragraphs. Long paragraphs tend to appear as pains in rear to read, so people stay away. Organize your text into segments of 200 words or less, and the whole thing will appear easier to get through. Now, coincidentally, onto the next paragraph.

This is an obvious one, but a small mishap can cost you big time. If you guessed spelling, congrats. One spelling mistake can “kill the vibe” of the reader. You are focused and into whatever you are reading, and suddenly you come across a misspelled worrd, you snap back to reality. You check out the word to make sure you didn’t just imagine the fault, but it’s there. The author loses credibility in your eyes and the remainder of the text will be heavily scrutinized instead of being consumed for knowledge. Never stop editing your content, even after it is released into the wild, and yes, I misspelled on purpose. If you didn’t pick it up, never mind.

The final important point I want to make is you should know your reader. If your website is for rocket scientists, you can go nuts with the technical jargon and fancy wordings, but if your readers aren’t as linguistically gifted, adjust your copy accordingly. This aspect in itself can be split into a list of topics, but I won’t get into 6th grade English class.

However, here are a few basic tips. Keep your sentences short, but don’t overdo it. Your text will suck. People won’t like it. It will sound choppy. Read it out loud. You should be able to tell if you went over the line as I just did.

You can use little tricks to give emphasis to important points. You can really show the importance of something or other in your website copy. I can’t come up with any from the top of my head right now.

Try to stay away from the “we are awesome” way of writing. People hate being presented with promo blabbering, so keep it straight. The people making up television ads don’t get it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t.

And to finish with the cherry on top of the icing on the cake, since we are writing copy for a website, we want people to find it on Google, right? If you want search engine traffic to come your way, focus on niches. I recently posted a simple tutorial on how to find your keyword niche. Go through it, find some keywords that match your topic and are weak on search engine rankings competition, and incorporate them into your copy. Make sure that your incorporations make sense, otherwise it’s pointless. Always write knowing that the copy is for website visitors whom you are trying to convince to at least return for a second visit. Class dismissed.

This tutorial is a little follow-up on my previous post about SEO. If you decided that your business would benefit from a website, then I think it’s important for you to get a high return on your investment, but you can never tell by just looking at the way most people approach the issue.

A good idea would be for the website to do well in search engine rankings, but everybody wants that cake, but only a few can eat it too. There are fish out there you simply cannot fry, so you have to see what else is there for dinner. Alright, enough with the food idioms and lets move on to the meat of the problem. OK, seriously now…

I am assuming you aren’t an SEO expert, as most business people aren’t, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take a few baby steps. The best way I thought I can get through this post is with a concrete example, so adjust it to your particular situation accordingly.

The point of this tutorial is to find a way to get to the top of Google’s search results, and to do that we will need to use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. As an example I will be using a Chinese food restaurant named Zuzu as I did before, and we are again located in Montreal, Canada.

Looking up “chinese restaurant” you see that the competition level is high for that exact wording, but you have a long list of alternative keyword combinations with various search volume and competition levels. Scrolling down you can see the keywords “new chinese restaurant” present no competition and have over 14000 average monthly searches. Coincidentally, this keyword set is a perfect match for Zuzu, so the website can be optimized accordingly.

The next step is for us to get more specific. Looking up “montreal chinese restaurant” returns quite feeble search numbers, but this is the crowd you want the most, since they are looking for exactly what you are offering. Be sure to have the “Montreal” keyword sprinkled in your website and links.

Besides the obvious keywords, you might want to explore additional combinations on a related topic. If you look up “chinese cuisine”, you can see that the search numbers don’t merit adjusting your site, but scrolling down to the “Additional keywords to consider” you can pick out “eat chinese” and “chinese eating” with a total of over 14000 monthly searches and zero competition. Well, you know what to do with that, and as you can see by the lack of smoothness of the post, I’m doing it as I’m writing it.

Keep on searching relevant terms, and put in the necessary time to do a thorough job. All of this has to be done before you put your website together, unless you don’t mind the extra post-release spending. The competition bar is for pay-per-click advertisements, but it’s a good indicator of what your website would be up against in the search results. In Zuzu’s case it’s painfully obvious that “chinese restaurant” is out of the question with the brutal competition already out there, which is why you must focus on a smaller target.

Not long ago I was renewing my home Internet contract with Bell, and I was interested in an offer they had on their website. When I asked about it, I was told it is only available for new customers. I renewed for the regular rate because I had the bundle and switching ISPs would be too much of a hassle. I could just feel all the love Bell was throwing my way.

This got me thinking about what should be the focus of a company: keep current customers happy or risk existing loyalty and go after new ones? The first thing that came to my mind was Vista. Microsoft is running the “Mojave Experiment” ads to try and get people to upgrade, but what about the herd that is using Vista and is unhappy with it? I am part of that herd, and I haven’t felt any love coming from MS. Is that a good decision on their part?

In my opinion it’s a no, but I might be biased since I’m the one getting the shaft. Putting the rant aside though, keeping your customers happy is part of the new age of marketing that is filtering out the good guys and the bad guys.

Lets play pretends. Say Microsoft invested all that ad capital into Vista and made it work great. Would people upgrade? Would word of mouth bring in more customers than traditional advertising? The whole issue boils down to a simple question. Who would people believe more, television or a large percentage of overjoyed users? Furthermore, is there anyone who doesn’t know Vista exists? Did anyone see the recent Vista commercials and went “whaa”? This is why Google doesn’t advertise itself. They try their best to keep their peoples happy and word of mouth takes care of marketing.

I didn’t even mention the obvious advantages of customer satisfaction, like loyalty, a solid customer foundation, and a safety net when the feces hit the fan or the competition releases something shiny. So why do we still see all these companies screwing their own to go after the birds in the bushes? Next time I renew my Internet contract, I’ll be sure to ask.

The hot topic in online marketing today is search engine optimization, or SEO, so I decided to jump into the mix with my two cents. First, there are very many SEO articles on the web, and a lot of them are full of garbage that can throw people off, while others are strangely trying to remain mysterious (”Optimize for keywords”? How?!?). Before I start, note that I’ll be using a fictional Montreal Chinese food restaurant called Zuzu throughout this article when giving examples on topics I will be discussing. Kapish? Great. Let’s begin.

First, you need to assess your competition. Pick a few keywords related to your (future?) website and look them up on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. A simple way to see what you will be up against is to check the PageRank of the top sites listed in the results, or you can use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, if you get the concept. To easily check PageRanks, get the Google Toolbar. It doesn’t measure up your competition to a 100% accuracy (PageRank isn’t as important as some make it out to be), but it will give you a good idea. In Zuzu’s case, I would type in “chinese restaurant” and open up the first couple of results, then I would try “Montreal chinese restaurant”, and open up the first couple of results. Keep all open results organized according to searched keywords, as this is important for a topic discussed below. If I see that “Montreal chinese restaurant” returns some highly ranked pages, I will need to get more specific in my keyword selection to target a smaller audience. This way I at least have a chance to get Zuzu ranked at the top of the search results, and so I try “inexpensive Montreal chinese restaurant”, which returns some low ranked websites as the first few results. This is where I will claim my territory, and remember, this is SEO on a budget. If you have the dough, you can spend your way to the top for more generic search keywords.

Now that you have your main keyword set, you need to list a few secondary keywords you want to work with. In Zuzu’s case, I would include the neighborhood where the restaurant is located, as well as some specialty dish types if people search by this criteria. Moving on.

Now it is time to optimize your website for the keywords you picked. Don’t stress over your business’ name, as its uniqueness will get you at the top of the search rankings if people are specifically looking for you. In Zuzu’s case, the word “Zuzu” will most definitely bring up the restaurant as the first search result (maybe not zuzu specifically, as it is widely used, but any distinctive business name). Here is the bad news, and you won’t find this in the SEO articles on the web, there isn’t a bullet proof way to optimize your site for specific keywords. The basics always apply, such as the page titles, which you should keep distinct and not too long, as well as the “alt” tags of pictures, but the rest is quite fuzzy.

I can give you the following advice. From the search results you previously saved, look at those from the most generic search, which is Zuzu’s case would be “chinese restaurant”. Find one search result that is ranked high but has a lower PageRank than one with a higher PageRank that is ranked lower in the results. In Zuzu’s case, if result #2 of the “chinese restaurant” search has a PageRank of 3, and #3 has a PageRank of 5, #2 is well optimized for the search terms, which gives it the high ranking it has (not entirely true, but you can’t go wrong), so this website should be your study case. Find a couple of these, and open up their source codes. Look at all the keyword positioning and formatting you find. Try to notice a pattern. Are they always bold? Are they in links to subsections of the site? Do they run around and yell “STELLA!”? A combination of the first two? Whatever you find, take note and try to apply the same strategy to your site. If you expected a how-to guide, I apologize. There is no such thing, even if many claim there to be one. However, with this strategy you can find out what will work best in outranking your competition, and in the end that’s what matters. Be sure to sprinkle around your secondary keywords in the same way you did for the primary ones, but less frequently to avoid taking the focus away from your main website topic. I would prefer people finding Zuzu with “Montreal chinese restaurant” rather than with “fancy asian dishes” because the former search will bring me more customers, but the latter could be from people half way around the world, and I am focusing on a small niche (SEO on a budget, remember?).

Alright, so the website is optimized for keywords and ready to be seen around the world wide web. To get good rankings in search engines, you need to raise your site’s presence on the Internet, which means that you need links from other high traffic sites to point to yours. This can be achieved by submitting the website to numerous online directories, but be careful. I found that most SEO articles don’t address this issue, and people wind up hurting their rankings more than anything else. You must submit your website to online directories that search engines won’t consider to be hazardous. There is a process used to find out which ones are or aren’t, but that’s too complex, so instead use a simple rule of thumb. If a directory has a PageRank of 3 or higher, that means search engines (especially Google) considers it to be legit, and so should you. The obvious one to submit to is DMOZ, and that will boost your rankings up a notch, but it’s difficult to get into, so you will have to labor through lower class directories. If you are serious about your business and Internet traffic is a key element for you, then submit it to the Yahoo Business Directory or BOTW. I will cost you some money ($99-$299 per year), but your search rankings improve significantly.

However, you should also be careful when submitting your website to all of these directories. Search engines look at the text in the link pointing to your website, so avoid repeating the same thing for all directories, or you might be labeled a link spammer and penalized in search rankings. In Zuzu’s case, I would variate the link keywords between “Montreal’s Zuzu Restaurant”, “Chinese Restaurant Zuzu”, and so on, in order to avoid being too repetitive.

After some time your PageRank will rise and you will have more leverage on the Internet scene. If your PageRank reached 3, you can offer other high ranking websites with similar but non-competitive content to exchange links. In Zuzu’s case, I would exchange links with websites about Chinese recipes, cookware, etc.

This is all there really is in terms of SEO. There are other things you should consider, but that’s getting too specific and the results are marginal. You can pay someone (like me) to do it for you, but if you’re reading this, you probably decided to do it yourself, so I spill the beans. Just remember one important thing: the website’s content should first and foremost be pleasant to the eye of the human reader, so if your site is super-duper optimized for search engines but the text on it has major grammatical errors, then you messed up. In Zuzu’s case, I don’t want visitors to read “Zuzu Chinese food restaurant good food low price” since the point of SEO is to drive traffic to your website, and keep it there, not scare it away. Also, SEO is a continuous process, so keep monitoring your rankings and don’t stop trying to improve. The minute you do, your competition will outrank you. That is all, so congrats, you are now a SEO expert, relatively speaking…

Many in the field of software and web development fantasize about kicking off a start-up and racking in the dough while enjoying endless vacations and absurdly flexible working hours. I know because I’m one of those people. However most of the time (well, almost all of the time), you actually have to pray to break even, have no vacation time, and work absurdly packed schedules, at least until your business gets off the ground. Over 90% of businesses fail to make it past the first couple of years for various reasons. The initial idea might have been flawed, planning and operations might have failed, or the people simply gave up after getting overwhelmed with all that comes with starting a business in the field of technology.

Then again, a number of people made it. I am running Davai Design for over four years now, and while it isn’t my primary concern (school is), I did manage to keep it afloat, pay the bills, and ride a bike (GSXR-1000, out of this world), and it sure beats working for somebody else. Along the way I learned a lot by personal experience or from someone who was in my position and succeeded, and I realized that successful start-ups have a few things in common, so I decided to write’em up here for those looking for a ray of hope.

#1) Perseverance

Of all the people I know living off a start-up, the first thing that jumps out is tenacity. You have to endure failure after failure after failure, learning from each one and applying newly acquired knowledge to your next attempt at stardom. A lot of people I met who run working start-ups have previously filed for bankruptcy due to past failures, which is astounding, and yet they just chugged along until things got better.

#2) Let Go

People often fail in their attempts at entrepreneurship because of personal attachment and unwillingness to admit failure. The idea flopped, but they keep hoping it somehow comes back to life, thus wasting time and resources. The sooner you realize you failed and cut your losses, the sooner you can move on to something else with new knowledge in hand.

#3) Focus your focus

When starting a business, there are tons of factors to consider, such as legal and financial issues, product and/or service, marketing, and customers, among others. It is easy to get overwhelmed with everything. In addition, you have articles such as this one telling you tons of things you should do, each different from the next. With all this information overload people tend to try and absorb it all, never having time to actually spring into action. It’s important to focus on specific topics. Do some research, find one or a few places to get information regarding your own business, and stick to it. It is also important to hire an expert when needed, such as an accountant or lawyer. It is costly, but it lets you focus on what you can actually do (run your business) while avoiding potential legal trouble due to your lack of knowledge in certain areas of expertise.

#4) Grow Your Network

Everyone knows networking is important, but few know how to do it effectively. Besides the standard methods which I won’t list here (Google it), you can get creative. For example, in my case, I often do very small projects (web sites) at a loss, meaning I make no profit, if the customer is well connected. My goal is to make sure the product or service I deliver is top notch and at a very low price (hence a loss on my part). Keeping up with this practice landed me several referrals to work on large projects on which I made profits that compensated for earlier losses, and I greatly expanded my network. Simple, yet effective.

#5) Get the Word Out

Finally, you need people to know you exist, and that necessitates some serious thinking. Depending on your business, you need to pick a marketing strategy that suits your business. However, one important rule applies. Focus your products and advertising on one small market niche at a time. If you try to appeal to a broad audience from the start, you will be up against large mainstream corporations. Good luck with that. Work a niche and see what works and what doesn’t. It saves you money while giving you valuable knowledge about how you should market your business. Don’t try to explode onto the scene unless you have that kind of capital behind you. Small-scale marketing will get you much further, unless of course your product doesn’t live up to the hype.

These are my observations after four years of navigating the shark tank that is entrepreneurship. I hope it helps.