In an email freakishly entitled, “A Ray of Hope in Difficult Seas”, research firm IDC announced this afternoon that they are ceasing publication of their eBusiness Trends email newsletter.
The title about hope applied to the article accompanying this announcement. This morning competing research firm Forrester also announced layoffs of more than 100 employees.
You’ve got until Jan 31st to get your site nominated for a Webby Award . These are the most prestigious awards in the Web world … and there are a bunch of cool categories you may fit under. However be forewarded: competition is fierce, each entry costs $95-$150, and B2B sites need not apply. Heaven forbid you’d want to use the Web to market to businesses. (That’s me being virtually sarcastic.)
How do you make money in the directory business online? Here’s what I learned while doing research for an unrelated report we’re working on. The vertical was directories of ad agencies.
Almost everyone was the same in one key way — they have three levels of service, usually with cute names (bronze, silver, gold .. you know the drill.) Generally a free level for a plain vanilla listing, a moderately priced level ($20-100 month) for a listing with a few bells and whistles, and a top priced level ($50-350 month, or a flat annual fee around $5000) for a listing with lots of bells and whistles.
There were two different business models – one which is basically a deluxe hosting service, where you can send them your stuff and they create a lovely online portfolio (aka mini-site) for you and promise lots of their client-side traffic will notice it. The second is the RFP model where in return for paying for a listing, you then get emailed any sales leads (requests for proposal) their site garners from visitors in your niche. The two biz models were never offered together under one roof. Either you can use a site to get noticed, or you can get RFPs.
(The only unusual one was Newmediary who offer both their self- named RFP service and IT Papers, a service marketers pay so links to their marketing white papers are distributed across the Web to gather sales leads.)
Although everyone knows biz execs are buying and researching vendors more online now these days, one thing became apparent. Nobody is making out like a bandit yet in either biz model. The RFP sites still don’t get enough qualified RFPs into the pipeline to please clients. The portfolio, get-you-noticed, sites still don’t get enough client-side (vs. competitors checking each other out.)
Part of this is due to too many competitors during the boom, which split potential traffic into too many factions. Parts also due to the fact that 90% of these sites know that they need partnerships and co-brand sites to get traffic, but they still don’t use Web usability principals and hard-core marketing, to really get the traffic funneled in from their partners that they deserve. You need more than a link or a button on a navigation bar to get the real stuff. Some B2C sites have learned the hard way how to hand-hold partner/co-brand relationships to really get the traffic flowing, now the B2B directory sites need to follow their lead.
On the good news front, two of the portfolio-style services I researched were using great email newsletters to push traffic to their paying members’ site sections. For samples of these sign up for the newsletters at Portfolios.com and AgencyCompile.com.
On the bad news front, Newmediary’s IT Papers appears to be selling marketers visitor’s email addresses when these visitors click on to view those vendor’s white papers. Although this fact is probably noted in privacy policy fine print and perhaps alluded to in a phrase when the visitor first register to surf the site, I’ll bet 99% of these visitors don’t exactly realize their email is given out to a different company each time they click on a white paper link. And I’ll bet the sales reps for said companies who get these leads, probably receive very little instruction about how NOT to use the names to avoid the appearance of spam (such as, don’t add them to your broadcast list and email them relentlessly until they scream stop.)
Anyway, it’s a cool biz model — pay us to distribute your marketing materials to our directory surfers. Kinda the grown-up version of trade magazine bingo cards. BitPipe is their top competitor.
When you ask a rich media email provider (one that sends emails with audio, Flash or other streaming video), “will it work in my lists’ email inboxes?” they always say, “Oh yes!!!” Thing is, that’s not always true. One Sherpa subscriber told me last week that he did a $10,000 test campaign with a well-known company that promised that 80% of recipients would be able to see the rich media properly. Results showed that only about 20% of recipients were capable of seeing it. (These numbers are not click through or open rates — just capabilities.)
He suggests that if you are planning to test a rich media campaign, instead of spending the money on the test, first set up your own test email boxes at AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, plus one using MSN Outlook and one using Eudora, and then ask the provider to send sample emails using their technology to you at each of these boxes. Plus if you are sending B2B, also get a test at a box using Lotus Notes for email (you may need a pal at a company that uses that system to agree to tell you if it worked.)
Also note: yes, you can add a line at the top of an email saying words to the effect of :”If you can’t see this email properly, please click here for the online version” … however bear in mind, hardly anyone ever clicks through. They just hit delete and move to the next email. (Maybe copywriting that line so it has a strong offer — click here for $100 discount coupon — would help a bit.)
Allen Weiss of MarketingProfs just emailed over an addendum to the Blog on emails I posted earlier this morning. Her says, “You might tell readers about similar experiences with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that many email marketers use. Not all corporate people allow CSS (they can turn it off for example with Microsoft Exchange) and all the pretty little fonts, etc. that will show up nicely in a test with hotmail, yahoo, aol, outlook, etc will go to a very bland default mode…”
I’m loving this link (Beware before you click it goes to a PDF.) If you ever wondered which search engines feed results into others … and just where Overture’s paid listings show up across the Web, check out this handy graphical Chart from search engine optimization consultant, Bruce Clay. This is a horribly confusing topic, that Clay’s chart makes sort-of simple, or as simple as it can be anyway.
Funniest email newsletter subscription offer I’ve ever seen just arrived in my inbox from Media Unspun:
“Why else should I pay now? Because I will pick two of the first 50 people who sign up and clean either their house or their office. Really.”
Media Unspun is a new ezine from the editorial team of seven (that’s more editors than practically any ezine on this planet these days) who did Industry Standard’s Media Grok ezine. It’s basically the same exact zine with a different name, and fewer subscribers for now (Grok had 100k+, Unspun has fewer than 10k.) The Unspun team hope to raise the opt-ins to the old high level — which is unrealistic because without a high traffic site like The Standard funneling subscriptions to you, or without buying
them through co-reg, it’s unlikely an ezine of this type will grow that big anytime soon. (Also, um, it would help if they put a subscribe form on their “About us” web page.)
They also plan to start charging $50 year ($39 intro offer) for the zine when it goes from weekly to daily in March. And expect to take payments through Amazon honor and PayPal. My take on that is, it’s easy enough to get a real merchant account and cart online these days — why do something that not only looks far more professional but also more subscribers are apt to use?
Will people pay for this type of content? I don’t know, but suspect it won’t be an easy sale because Grok was always more fun-to-know than need-to-know. When people buy content, usually it’s for something that will seriously improve their life or job. A good laugh and handy news round-up doesn’t strike me as mission-critical stuff the way that info on how to lose weight or make more sales does. This strikes me as more of an ad-based play. But, hopefully, I’m wrong
Press release just in, “DaySpring Cards, Inc, a subsidiary of Hallmark Cards, Inc., saw a 350% increase in e-cards sent from its web site www.dayspring.com over last year’s Christmas season.
The Excite @Home bankruptcy-transition continues to be problematic. According to numerous Sherpa reader emails, many East coast former Excite-customers have been given their new email addresses by Comcast .. only to find that they don’t work. At least for now. This CNET article (link below) talks about some of the messy, messy, mess, which continues to affect more than a million of American broadband users. (Flacks, I don’t want to be pitched another rich media story until this mess is cleared up, ok?)
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-8307650.html
Last night one of my local public radio stations played a selection of golden oldies — archived New Year’s Eve radio shows from years and years ago, including a Jack Benny show from 1939 and a Father Knows Best from the very early 50s. At the very start of one show from 1957, the male announcer burbled enthusiastically, “Here’s to another Great Year!!!” Which made me feel tired, jaded and just plain old. We are a generation of content business survivors; unable to be naive enough to think things will ever be unremittingly
“Great!” again.
But then I remembered my all-time favorite New Year’s poem, “Nostalgia” by America’s current Poet Laureate, Billy Collins.
This deliciously witty poem reminds everyone that the golden days have always been behind us… whether in 1340, 1790, or even the
recently departed dot-com bubble years. Check it out at: http://www.bigsnap.com/p-qa-02.html
Personally the whole bubble burst is a bit of relief. Many of my friends risked their marriages and/or health in the all-or-nothing dash for almost instant wealth. Now we’re back to the ground. Now we can carry on. Happy 2002.
