Steve Mills - Life, the Universe and the Digital World

Types of Shoppers, Online and Off

Sometimes it’s good to get a fresh perspective on your website or blog. To take a step to one side and look at it in a different light. It allows you to see all of the elements that make up your online presence, break them down, see what they do. Most people when they first start a site or blog think of it just as a mixture of code, information and design sitting in cyberspace.

But just for today I want you to think of it like a shop in a busy main street in your local town, or in the busiest shopping mall in the city. This is really just a preliminary exercise, and I will brush over a number of topics below, each of wish could fill an entire blog if you wanted to. This is just to allow you to start making notes and noticing the subtle way that everything in the site determines the final outcome (clicks, sales, downloads etc)

Just imagine this shop for a moment in your mind, what it looks like, what you are selling. If you are trying to blogg for a living or make any type of income online then you must have merchandise. You must have something that either people are willing to pay for, or that people are going to pay to get them to look at it. Factors that determine the price of things valuable in real life business are scarcity of what you are selling, percieved value (determined by such factors as how usefull it is to them, can they use it to make more money / goods), social value of the item and entertainment/novelty factor. If you are not giving a reason to buy (or click) then it’s time to assess why.

The other factor in the success of the physical store is the amount of people that activly shop there. In retail shops, as well as online site there are two types of shopper, the casual and the directed.

The casual shopper are people that wander by, finds the store by chance and as passing by sees something that catches their eye. The second is the type of shopper that has seen something pointing them to your store (site) from somewhere else and has made the journey there specifically on the notion of what you can give to them.

The casual site visitor is the type of user that finds you from social bookmark sites or random google searches. they land at your page not really knowing why they are there, and quickly want to establish context and content of the site.

In your vitual shop uou must be able to attract the passing shopper as they stroll past your storefront. How are you going to do this. Quality merchandise? Attractive Offers? Great service and attentive sales people? Next time you go to the local shopping center, or even to the commercial district have a look around at each shop. See what type of customers are theere, how many are there. What are they looking at, what are they taking up to the counter and actually paying for? How is the store attracting casual passing traffic?

In the physical world, the directed shopper finds a store via catalogs, advertising, directories, brochures. For your site this can mean traffic via adwords, targeted search, links via other sites and comments that you have made on other blogs. This type of shopper / user is after something specific as they enter the store, and are looking for the quickest way to it.
How are you helping them to do this on current site? You need to give this type of user clear directions to find the information and product they are after, and once that has been done how to then buy it.

The off line and online worlds are really not that far apart, its just being able to draw the analogy and get something out of it.

Happy Shopping

YOUR PERSONAL NARRATIVE

Just a short post today, but I want you to get your head around this key concept

You, as a person, are a product of your inner narrative.

We are narrative based creatures, constantly analysing our environment with internal dialogue and sharing these views to others via speech and symbolism. Since the dawn of civilization human culture has been passed down through the generations via story and narrative (songs, art). We all think in stories, we all carry around within us the story of our past, the story of our present, the story of our future. The story of what today might be like, the story of what yesterday meant. We are constantly re-telling the story, checking it against our immediate reality in order to make decisions, evaluate what other people are doing and to know our cultural place in certain situations.

It shapes the meaning that you give objects and events in your life. How you react to situations, what your goals are, what your fears are.

Today I want you to notice how everything that you perceive is filtered by the stories that you tell yourself. Notice how other people are trying to get you to take a part of their story and make it your own. The media, Advertising, people you interact with on the street. All of them pass information on to you that you assimilate into part of your story.

If you want to get into online marketing, knowing how your own internal narrative, and how the internal narrative of other operate is essential. People think in terms of statements like

• If I do x then I will get y
• I need to do x in order for people to give me y
• I only have worth if i do x
• i am responsible for x because of y

To sell something to someone online you have to give them a reason that fits into their story, or even better give them a new story to replace their old ones. Simple advice but well worth keeping in the back of your mind

Any questions about any of the material on this site, please leave a comment and I will get back to you

Memes and the introduction to a new way of thinking.

This is the first in a foundation set of articles that will set the stage for a new way of thinking. I’m sure that as you delve deeper into the information that I will be presenting over the next few months you will begin to see a fundamental shift in how you view online business and marketing, how you view your interactions with others, how the media that you consume affects you, and most of all you might see a fundamental change in how you view yourself. The information that I am going to present comes from a wide variety of sources, all of which have been long interests of mine. These areas are as wide and diverse as

Evolutionary Biology
Genetics
Computer Science
Information Theory
Systems Theory
Emergence Theory
Psychology
Meditation
Spirituality / Religion
Atheism
Marketing
Sales & Business
Fiction Writing
Philosophy
Sociology
Anthropology
Online Marketing & Search Engines
Blogging

A bit of heavy list, I don’t deny that. But there are a lot of common factors between them then are apparent at first glance. They all have to do with the transfer of information, and a traceable lineage of forms and information from one generation to the next. They are have commonalities in how information is adapted and recombined with other information to produce a new form of information.

If you don’t see now how scientific and observational data from these areas can converge together and provide an overall picture, I hope that you will after reading this series. This site, Greengem, is all about the power of ideas. The internet is fuelled by ideas. In fact all of modern civilization if fuelled by ideas. People crave novelty, they want to be seen on the edge of technology, adopters of the new trend. We all want best practice, we all want to know the newest way to make a million dollars.

WHAT IS A MEME

A lot of the information below has been doing the rounds on the net for well over a decade. I’m sure a lot of you have a good idea what a meme is

The idea of Memes has been around since Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976. It was in his book the Selfish Gene, and for the purposes of brevity below is the wikipedia explanation of them

“Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity (such as a song, an idea or a religion) that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as replicators, generally replicating through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (though not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Memes do not always get copied perfectly, and might indeed become refined, combined or otherwise modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes. These memes may themselves prove more (or less) efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a theory of cultural evolution, analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.”

And here is some more information on Memes by Susan Blackmore

“Memes are habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information that is copied from person to person. Memes, like genes, are replicators. That is, they are information that is copied with variation and selection. Because only some of the variants survive, memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods, and they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes.

The word “meme” has recently been included in the Oxford English Dictionary where it is defined as follows “meme (mi:m), n. Biol. (shortened from mimeme … that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”.

According to memetics, our minds and cultures are designed by natural selection acting on memes, just as organisms are designed by natural selection acting on genes. A central question for memetics is therefore ‘why has this meme survived?’. Some succeed because they are genuinely useful to us, while others use a variety of tricks to get themselves copied. From the point of view of the “selfish memes” all that matters is replication, regardless of the effect on either us or our genes.”

I present this because I want you to get a thorough understanding of what memes are and the implications of the idea before I move forward to the general thrust of the article series. This is not new, Memes are being used by you and against you in almost every interaction you have in the world, both online and off line. The first thin I want readers of this become aware is the idea that Memes that are around you and, more importantly within your own mental sphere.

The other definition of the Meme in blogging circles is a list of questions is sent around from blog to blog, like a chain letter where the blog owner fills it in and posts it on his site. This does follow the principals of memetics, but don’t let this one definition of memes narrow your perception of the wide ranging scope and power of these agents of information

Coming up next is a different idea, but one that converges on the idea of memes, and that is the idea of the self as Narrative

Google Adwords success by targeting sites

I have had a great deal of success in the last week for one of my Search Engine Optimisation clients. Although I have been getting good numbers through the site from the traditional SEO techniques, from a small change in strategy we have had a 500% increase in traffic.

The site is for an online mortgage broker, of which there are Hundreds of in Australia. It is a very competitive market and the difference between success and failure can be down to where your page sits in the google main search page. There are companies using all sorts of tricks to get in the top 5 searches for keywords such as mortgage, home loan and first home buyer. I will analyse some of the specific strategies they use in coming days to help give you some edge against competitors in your specific niche’s. In fact I find that bloggers can learn a lot from how the tradition bricks and mortar companies and dotcoms use search engines.

The point of difference for this client is that they are a mortgage broker that gives rebates to local sporting clubs when their members sign up for a loan. When a customer signs up for finance with them, they nominate their local football or cricket club. Then for the life of that loan the club gets a percentage of the loan amount as a rebate for every year of the loan.

I think that it is a fantastic selling point and gives people a sense of empowerment in being able to help their local community and get a great deal on their finance. There is also a great point of difference in that it is to a sporting clubs best advantage to tell their members about the service and to try to get them to settle any finances and mortgages with them, as the more members that do so the more money goes to the club. However it has been hard to get this across competing head to head with the large mortgage companies in google where you only get 70 characters to say your piece.

Traditionally we were using adwords based around mortgages, home loans etc as well and were having a moderate amount of success, although to get at the top of google we would have to pay around $10 per click, which is an outrageous amount to pay for a single person to look at your site. However you also have to weigh up that in a high commission industry like mortgage broking this kind of money can be worth it if you are having a high conversion of customers dues to other factors and most of all brand recognition. The top players in the industry will do anything to squeeze the little guys out, even if that means making everyone pay $10 plus per click.

This is my google adwords trap #1 : Getting in a bidding war with companies bigger then yourself. I will be writing about these traps over the next few weeks.

The difference in what I have done in the past few weeks is to use a combination of market research, google adsense tools and then target my adwords ads to specific URL’s that get high traffic in the target niche. From my research I determined that there were sites getting 500,000 hits a day in the target market where the cost per click was only about $1. From placing ads targeted to the administrators and managers of sporting clubs on these sites we have increased the amount of click through traffic on the site by 500%. In the future on this site I will be placing step by step instructions on how to think outside the box with adsense traffic and find the hidden traffic generating sites where the competition are too ignorant or lazy to use.

I can definitely recommend the strategy of using targeted URL’s for adwords advertising over just letting your ads run wherever they will appear.

Thanks.

Steve Mills

Inspirational and Thought Provoking Talks

If you haven’t already checked it out, go and watch the talks from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) over at http://www.ted.com.au/talks . The talks are given every year and bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives. The talks are short, to the point and extremely engaging.

On the site you can see talks from the likes of Al Gore, Daniel Dennet, Tony Robbins (it’s surprisingly good), Richard Dawkins, Jeff Bezos and heaps more. These TED talks are all about getting a thousands intellectual and creative types at the head of their fields and getting a cross pollination of ideas. A sharing of positive and progressive memes. There should be more of this in the world, people from different fields sharing the knowledge of their respective disciplines in order to see their own unique problems in a different light. Bloggers already know the power of this, and the intelligence that can come from distributed communications like this. A problem shared is a problem halved so they say. A problem told to 1000 of the worlds most creative and intelligent must be a step closer to being solved before the day is out.

I refer you to this site as I will be applying the ideas of some of these radical scientific and creative thinkers to the ideas of online business and personal development in the future of this blog. This is uncharted territory for most, but form the foundation for my life and business for the past ten years.

Happy viewing