MarketingSherpa Blog

I just added comments so you can put your notes right into the Blogs here.

It was harder than I thought it would be because a heck of a lot of the folks offering free blog comments services as a hobby have gone under, or ceased taking new blogs, because there’s so much demand and none of these folks (who are invariably techies) have a clue about how to ask for money for the service. Turns out there are now more than 360,000 people publishing via Blogger.com, and tens of thousands more publishing blogs with competitors. That’s a 300% growth rate over the past nine months.

So, if you are a techie and can get cheap server space, and can also market your comments service, this would be a nice home- based business. You could conceivably pull in more than $100k a year offering pretty-cheap comment tech services.

I’m using YACCs who will no doubt shortly cease accepting free users too, so grab them while you can if you want comments on your Blog. YACCs is at

http://rateyourmusic.com/yaccs

I’m sorry but how dumb is this?? Overture just sent an email announcement to (I guess) everyone on the company list saying, “As you know, we changed our business name from GoTo.com, Inc. to Overture Services, Inc. in October 2001. As part of this change, the goto.com email address you are using will NO LONGER BE VALID in February 2002.”

My techies assure me that the cost of continuing the old email boxes is basically el zilcho. So why are they abandoning them? So every employee has to spend valuable company time in the next two weeks unsubscribing to all the useful lists they belong to and then resubscribing with their new email? Yeah, I think so. (Still feelin’ bitchy.)

Thanks to Raging Bull co-founder, Bill Martin (aka Raging Bill), who sent in a link to the NY Times article It’s Not What They Know, but Whom. (OK now I have to breathe for a Zen moment, and reflect on the beauty of their headline’s grammer, coupled with the stupidity of the wording which reveals so little nobody would ever click on it alone or search for its keywords in a zillion years.)

Anyway, if you are in or tracking the research business, this is an article worth reading. At a time when folks like Forrester, Jupiter and IDC are cutting back or floundering for more revenue models (see my earlier blogs), a small research firm, has dumped their unprofitable industry guidebooks publishing biz in favor of a consulting model where institutional investors and others can call their analysts (often independent consultants working on a by-the-hour basis). Clients pay $48,000-$70,000 for unlimited access to consultants for three-six months.

In my experience selling consultant access of this type, admittedly in conjunction with a report sale, about 80% of clients only called once, and the remaining 20% called daily and were such a pain that consultants loathed them. Anyway, it’ s a cool article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/23/business/yourmoney/23RESE.html

Excerpted from an essay entitled, “10 Things I Hope to be Grateful for in 2002” by Jeff Minsky VP/Director of Media Convergence RappDigital, that his PR guy just emailed over:

“4. Faster response times from sellers. While I am sure there are many sellers that would ask for planners to return their calls more often and in timely fashion, I refer to when a buy is made. If you pitch an agency on how great your media will perform and how wonderful the service will be, you probably should make sure you follow up on this or the buy will never be made again. How much more so when a major ad partnership is negotiated with a “portal” site? If you get the multi-million dollar buy, please make sure that you staff up properly, and not just with Sr. Level employees, but people who do the actual work as well.

A ContentBiz reader just wrote in, “When any of the big traditional publishers purchase companies, what kind of valuation metrics do you they typically like to use? Multiples of cash flow? xxx??”

It’s a question that comes up a lot, so here’s a quick down ‘n’ dirty answer:

Periodical publishing companies (newsletters, magazines, ezines, contentsites) typically sell for one to three times their annual gross revenues. So if you grossed a million last year, you could sell for one-three million. In boom times this can go as high as five times annual revenues. Veronis Suhler, a merchant bank to the media industry (which they call the “communications industry” even though they’re not talking about telcom) publishes an annual guide to these valuations for a lot of money, but you can usually wheedle a free copy if you know a client, or are considering becoming one.

The actual deal points are where it gets tricky. The buyer almost never ever pays that cash in a lump sum up-front. Their goal is to pay as little cash up front as they can get away with, and make the rest stock and/or contingent on your pub’s future sales.

Which means the seller is crossing their fingers hoping the buyer really is FABULOUS at marketing so the pub continues to grow and make them money. Often a seller will promise “Oh we’re going to put our weight behind this pub and make it huge, and you’ll get a cut of this if you sell to us now.” But then as the economy or their internal biz plans change, anything can happen.

Also beware accepting a percent of EBITDA (earnings before tax and interest) because the buyer can fiddle the books to take out all sorts of expenses before they get to the amount they give you a slice of. It’s the old Hollywood scam — the movie made zillions at the box office, but never showed a profit for investors.

ALWAYS talk to other companies the buyer has negotiated with in the past, to find out what they’re really like when the chips are down. Often the buyer that wins is not the buyer who offers the highest price. Cultural fit, marketing promises, product line fit, the buyer’s passion for your product, ego stroking, etc., all affect selling decisions.

When you decide it’s time to sell, first put together an “offering package” (aka “a black book”) with the following
information:
– history of the publication
– total market size
– circulation/ traffic
– renewal rates if relevant
– marketing tactics used
– financials for past three years
– worst-case scenario cash flow projections for next year

You can hire a broker to shop the offering for you. Generally they’ll get 5-10% of the price as a commission (the smaller you are, the higher it will be to make it worth their time.) Contact the folks at the Newsletters & Electronic Publisher’s Association or American Business Media to get a list of brokers’ names who handle deals like yours.

http://www.veronissuhler.com
http://www.newsletters.org http://www.americanbusinessmedia.com

Bitching time: MediaPost (who I generally admire) just named OgilvyInteractive as “Interactive Agency of the Year”.

Ogilvy’s Web sites are among those that prove the adage “the cobbler’s children have bad shoes.” A wealth of no-nos on display, including:

– Frames and pop-ups used extensively so there’s no unique URL for many important pages that visitors might want to link to. (Not to mention the fact that search engines will NEVER see them.)

– We, We, We, Our, We, Our, We, We, Our ….. I defy you to find customer or visitor-centric wording or navigation anywhere on the site. The copywriter was obviously (a) massively egoed and (b) into brochureware. (Warned you I was feelin’ bitchy)

– Flash used at the drop of a hat for any possible pretext, and many non-pretexts. OK I understand a Flash movie to show me a creative sample. But Flash for text?? Not only do reporters like me hate Flash, many international clients don’t like it because their bandwidth sucks. Also, search engines LOATHE it. (But I guess “we” are so famous that “we” don’t need to be found by search engines.)

– No press contacts, no personal contacts, no human beings. On the positive side, since I last went to this site about nine months ago, they have added phone numbers for their various offices (Wahoo!), but apparently very few human beings, aside from the inimitable “We”, work at Ogilvy.

– Nothing to collect my name — no online press list I can join, no email newsletter offers, no form to capture my comments, or anything else. Ogilvy is apparently content that traffic drifts up to its site and then drifts away again. Heaven forbid they should capture it.

How can an agency that is this clueless on a fundemental level win best interactive agency of the year?? Well the big brand name pulled in some big clients who had big budgets and they got to do some really neat stuff for them. Lucky them. Any smaller agency that tries to copy this approach will be doomed.

BTW: I own first editions (lucky me) of David Ogilvy’s books, which are excellent reading for any agency wondering how to market itself, online or off. In fact “Confessions of an Advertising Man” is one enormously fun-to-read sales brochure-disguised-as-a-bestseller that I will bet you a zillion dollars the folks in charge of the Web site never laid eyes on. It may have been written before most of us were born, but it’s got advice that could perk this site up immediately. Wanna get your own copy? They’re fairly cheap at ABE Books, the Web’s best used bookstore.

It’s beginning to dawn on me (I know, I’m slow) that online journalism is more different from print journalism than I had imagined. At first I thought it was about getting to the point quickly, without dawdling in introductory paragraphs; and, generally writing more concisely with some hotlinks tossed in.

The only other difference I spotted was in the importance of headlines. In print they try to get you to glance down. In “e” we try to get you to click. Which is harder. Or we try to show up in search results, which requires even more pre-thinking.

(In my past life, I have many fond memories of giving speeches to groups of hard bitten journalists, to whom the concerns of marketing were as dust to be ground beneath their church ‘n’
state feet. “Please remember to use terms in your headlines that people might search Lexis-Nexis for!” I’d urge. The editorial staff would look suitably bleary-eyed and non-business-minded in
response.)

This morning during a phone conversation with Nancy Robeke of Profnet.org (no, not the PRNewswire folks, a different group), the whole thing crystalized for me. It’s not only about story length and searchability, it’s about tone and personality.

Nancy’s theory is that online people can’t see your body language or hear your voice’s enthusaism, so you need to be more personal with your tone to reach across that breach. But, coming from print which never had audio or visual before, I think it’s just that people want content on their computers (and PDAs) to be slightly more personal than the official voice of hard copy.

Will this continue forever? Certainly not. Does this affect your online business (email open rates, clicks on your house ads, clicks on 3rd party ads) for now? Absolutely.

Of course, this adds a whole ‘nother level of complication when it comes to hiring these days. Not only do reporters have to be good at investigating and writing, but they also have to have a personality that both comes across and appeals — without turning into one of those egomaniacal deals in 24 months where you’re paying through the nose salary-wise to keep their massive personal fan club on your readership list.

Sort of a shameless-self-promotion: The SEOToday news site just published a two-part article that I wrote:

Behind the Scenes at the SEO Industry’s First Buyer’s Guide
Part I: “How the Buyer’s Guide was Created”

Part II: “Surprising Results from the Buyer’s Guide”

BTW: Please note that the picture of me next to the articles is from two years ago, and I look much nicer now. (Oh vanity, be still!)

Maya Draisin, Executive Director International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (the folks who run the Webby Awards that I mentioned in the Blog earlier this week) just wrote in, “As for why we don’t have a B2B category, The Webby Awards are given to sites that the average user goes to daily for information, entertainment, community, products or services. We are considering a second event that would focus on the B2B and Marketing side of things.” which I think is exceptionally good news.

Also, Barbara Coll, aka WebMama, advised in her Journal yesterday, “Submit to the Webby Awards. The potential traffic is worth it. Winners of these prestigious awards watch the traffic on their sites increase beyond their wildest dreams. And, like in horseshoes, close counts – the traffic generated for nominees is almost as good.” which I think is a very clever idea for site marketers to take note of.

Here’s a link to the Webby entry form for you. If you have a pretty good site in one of the allowed categories, from fashion to news, go for the gusto!

In the fall of 2000, I started reporting in ContentBiz that the biggest trend in the content syndication industry was to, well, not focus on selling content. Content resellers and aggregator/syndicators such as YellowBrix, Moreover.com, iSyndicate and ScreamingMedia were all talking about how their tech products were gonna make the big bucks. 2001 saw Moreover.com change its name to Moreover Technologies, and iSyndicate was acquired by YellowBrix who promptly shut down the express syndication services.

Today the trend continues despite the fact that nobody seems to be doing incredibly well with this we-sell-tech biz model.

ScreamingMedia just announced their new CEO and President, Kirk Loevner, “brings ScreamingMedia 20 years of experience managing some of the leading technology companies. So I’m taking a wild stab in the dark here and predicting that the content sales checks publishers get from ScreamingMedia, which according to both my personal and ContentBiz reader experiences have been dwindling at a steady rate, will not get much fatter in 2002.