Greg Krehbiel on Publishing and Online Marketing

I can understand when a pre-teen thinks that the price of some product should be calculated by an equation that includes the cost of making it plus a small profit. I can’t understand when a grown man falls for the same blunder.

The price of something is set by the willingness of the consumer to pay. The consumer doesn’t give a whiff what it cost the manufacterer to make the thing. (It cost just as much to make the CD that’s languishing in the dollar bin as it cost to make the best-seller that’s $20.)

Newspapermen seem to think that consumers care about their cost of production. I think they’ve been attending too many union meetings.

For example, listen to this.

Gathering news costs money, sometimes a great deal of it. Mr Brown presumably does not expect Marks & Spencer to give away its clothes and food, so I’m not therefore sure why he thinks newspapers should give away their journalism.

(Source: Stephen Glover: The future of the free press will rest on Murdoch making us pay.)

I suppose that gathering perfectly round pebbles exactly 2mm in diameter is costly as well. So what? The relevant question is whether people are willing to pay for it.

The thing is, I agree with Rupert Murdoch that “free” isn’t a sustainable business model for newspapers. But I don’t believe paywalls are the answer. There are other ways to monetize content. (In fact, I believe that will be the subject of my next post.)

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Publishers can’t get enough revenue from ads to support their efforts, so some of them are turning to paywalls as a solution. The logic is “we are losing money so you have to pay us,” as if the publisher’s business model is the consumer’s problem.

I think it’s misguided, and so does Ashley Friedlein in this interesting interview. (HT @epubsforum.)

Some content can be sold, some can’t. Regular news can’t.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

Had an interesting chat with some folks from PointAbout yesterday about iPhone development and the future of mobile.

They say that if you want to go mobile, you should focus on the iPod/iPhone for now. Blackberry is too fragmented, with each different type of device using a different operating system or browser. And since the iPad can run iPod/iPhone apps, focusing on the iPhone is the closest thing to one size fits all.

In app purchase sounds like the way to go for ecommerce. It sends a payment through the person’s iTunes account, and can be used for on-going purchases — like monthly or annual subscriptions.

The down side is that Apple takes 30% of every sale. The up side is that it’s incredibly easy on the user. He already has all his billing information set up with iTunes, so there’s no (additional) concern about security. I don’t know if the publisher gets the purchaser’s information. If not, that would be a big strike against it.

Appmakr.com is a simple way to create apps for the iPhone from any RSS feed. It costs $300 / app and looks very easy.

I have a hard time believing that magazines will do very well on mobile — at least not in their current form. The interface is going to have to change. I don’t suspect people will want to page through an online magazine the way they do in print.

I suspect the best place for content providers to get into mobile is in tools, reports and calculators.

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Nobody polices the internet, which means that it’s a cesspool, full of porn, scams and flagrant copyright violations.

I can’t let my kids have unfiltered access, and even “filtered” access is very questionable.

For some odd reason the Internet lives in a world apart. It’s okay to have laws that regulate the sale and positioning of Playboy magazine, but anybody can create a web page with garbage that would shock Hugh Hefner, and the suggestion that it should be regulated is met with scorn and derision.

We hear things like, “If parents don’t want that in their house, they should monitor their kids’ internet use.”

Yeah, right. And if parents don’t want their kids to smoke, they shoud follow them around all the time, so there’s no need for age restrictions on sales. And if parents don’t want their kids to drink, or drive cars, or take prescription drugs, or …. You get the point.

Where did we get the idea that the Internet is subject to completely different rules than everything else in life? It’s crazy. Somewhere along the way, libertarian geeks have staked their claim, and everybody else has just gone along.

It’s time to create a new internet with on an entirely different protocol. Rather than http://, we need safe://.

This would allow the wild-west libertarian geeks to keep their porn on http. Nobody would be “sensored.” But it would allow responsible people who believe in decency and property rights to have something they can allow in the home.

Anyone who wanted to participate in the safe protocol would need to follow certain rules related to content, copyright and security.

The wild-west radicals have won the battle for the internet. Fine. Let them have it. But it’s time for a new, responsible internet that is designed by grown ups.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

I’ve been in professional publishing since God was a lad, so I have a particular perspective on copyright and the rules for accessing content on the web.

As you might suspect, the “if I can get your copyrighted material off the web for free that’s okay” attitude that many people have really bugs me. I don’t pretend to be neutral about this. These people are stealing my paycheck.

I recently found a site that was giving away some of the stuff I sell at work. This particular site has a “report abuse” page, so I clicked through and found a lengthy set of requirements they expect you to fulfill before they’ll even consider your complaint.

This one was particularly amusing.

State that the information in the notice is accurate, under penalty of perjury.

So … these bastards steal our content and then they have the gall to require us to submit our request for them to stop “under penalty of perjury.”

There is no practical way for copyright owners to police all this nonsense, or to submit each site’s silly forms, or to file lawsuits, or whatever. Even if you get one site to stop, they’d just set up business under a different name and do it again. Or somebody else would.

What’s necessary is an appropriate market-driven way to punish them, and I know how that could be done. (I’ve posted something like this before, but it’s on my mind today so I’m at it again.)

Somebody with substantial market power on the web — like Google — should set up a copyright registry for legitimate publishers. The publisher would submit its copyrighted material to the registry along with a list of the sites authorized to display it.

If a site violated those terms and displayed copyrighted content without the owners’ permission, (1) it would disappear from the Google search listing, along with any ads that link to that site, (2) the authorized contact at the copyright owner would be notified, and (3) the company that controls that site’s DNS entry would be notified with a recommendation to redirect any traffic to a copyright violation page.

We don’t have to rely on the FCC or some other bloated and inefficient government agency to police these things. There is echnological solution, and I don’t think it would be that difficult.

Google, are you listening?

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Here’s a helpful little video the good folk at ExpertClick have prepared that shows how you can automatically have content from an RSS feed show up in your twitter account.

The video is specifically about their news wire service, but you’ll easily figure out how to use the same technique for any RSS feed.

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If you want people to read your articles online, most of your visitors are going to find you through search, so you need to use words people are going to be searching on. Especially in the headline.

For example, I was writing a post on my home brewing blog and my marketing hat suddenly slipped onto my head. I thought, “Hey, optimization boy, take some of your own medicine.”

So I started to use various online tools to make sure I was picking the right words for the title of my homebrewing blog post. Then I realized I should blog about that process over here.

I was writing two posts at the same time. One on homebrewing and one (for this blog) on how I picked the right words for my homebrewing blog. I was going to title this post “Before you write that blog post,” and then — again — I realized I wasn’t following the right seo principles.

“Before you write that blog post” would sound good enough for a pre-qualified audience — i.e., people who are already interested in how to write a blog post to get maximum traffic. So if you’re writing a newsletter to people who want to know about that, fine.

That’s not the way blogs work. (Who searches on “before you write”?)

So off I went to google again to see which words to use for this post (on how to pick words for blog posts).

The first thing to do is dream up a couple options. I wondered if “article” or “headline” got more traffic, so I typed them into Google trends and found that “article” gets a lot more search.

But … what about “blog”? I tried that, and it’s no contest. “Blog” gets way more search than “article” or “headline.”

What other words should I use? Should my title be “blog headline” or “optimize blog” or … hey, what about “blog seo”?

That was killer. “Blog seo” creams “blog headline” and “optimize blog.”

I would like to be able to test “blog seo tricks, blog seo ideas, blog seo how to,” but google trends doesn’t show any results for those phrases, so I just did “tricks, ideas, how to” — and “how to” takes the field.

Now there’s no guarantee that “blog seo how to” is the best phrase, but it’s sure likely to be better than “Before you write that blog post,” and it only took me about a minute to figure that out.

The lesson is — before you write an article for the web, do some research to see what words and phrases work best!

Now then, back to homebrewing, which is what got me over here in the first place.

I was about to blog about my son’s new porter recipe, which I am enjoying as I type.

I write a weekly post on homebrewbeer.biz about home brewing.

So then. What words work best for an article about a porter recipe?

There isn’t a synonym for “porter,” so I’m kinda stuck with that word.

I do have to decide between “home brew” and “homebrew.” Consulting google trends, “homebrew” wins.

Now this is where the editor and the marketer have to come to terms, because from time to time the editor will say that X is better, and the marketer will say that Y gets more search.

You’re going to have to make up your mind. Do you want to be the lonely little correct guy in the corner who’s ever-so proud of his grammar, or do you want people to find and read what you’ve written?

I thought so.

Now — as you experiment on google trends you come up with some odd ideas. For example, my first thought for a headline was something like “Ben’s Home Brew Porter — an intermediate homebrew recipe.”

(Note that I slipped “home brew” and “homebrew” into the same title to cover my bases.)

But what about “how to”? It killed on blog optimization. So I tested “homebrew recipe” against “homebrew how to,” and … “how to” killed again.

People seem to search on “how to” quite a lot. There might be a lesson in that.

Anyway, are the people who search on that phrase the right people for my article? Are people who are searching on stuff like “homebrew how to” looking for beer recipes?

(It turns out there’s this Nintendo “homebrew” thing that has absolutely nothing to do with making beer at home.)

But the good old wonder wheel guided me on this one. When I typed in “homebrew how to” it was clear that most of the sub-topics are related to making beer at home. That’s all good.

So I settled on Homebrew how to — Ben’s Mild Porter Recipe.

I could have spent some more time on this and tweaked it a bit more, but … hey, home brewing is just a hobby of mine.

Nevertheless, it’s always worth five minutes of your time in the google tools to pick the right words. And “right” (in this context) means words people actually care about and search on.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

Consumer product marketing isn’t my thing, so don’t expect any great insights here, but I thought I’d post a quick note about a campaign I saw this morning on the streets of D.C.

Nescafe is firing back at Starbucks’ new instant coffee. Reps were handing out samples outside the metro this morning.

The package says “Nescafe, the smart choice” on one side. On the other are two opposing cups of coffee. One says “a lot of hype” on a mocked-up Starbucks cup; the other says “a lot of flavor” on a Nescafe cup. It looks somewhat like this web page.

The bottom of the package says “taste for yourself” and inside is a collection of various Nescafe versions of instant coffee.

I’ve tried them both (Starbucks and Nescafe), and I think they’re both good. The Starbucks version has that characteristic burnt, strong flavor, and the Nescafe version is milder.

All other things (like price) being equal, I’d pick one or the other based on what grabbed my fancy at the time. Sometimes I like that burnt, strong Starbucks flavor and sometimes I don’t.

Nescafe seems to be capitalizing on the down economy.

“Why pay extra for hype?”
“Get a lot of flavor for less.”
“It’s the smart choice.”

And that seems like smart marketing to me.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

This link is only open access for a little while, so go look at it now.

Behavioral Economics in Marketing: 7 Insights to Lift Results

People who study the brain and decision-making often come to some very disturbing conclusions — for example, that we often make decisions un- or sub-consciously and later rationalize them. We wrap a story around our decision to justify it, but our story isn’t really why we made the decision.

The article linked above points out some ways marketers can use this phenomenon to sell products.

This raises the question whether it’s wise to use such tactics to sell subscription products. If all you’re after is one sale, it might make sense. But with a subscription, you’re relying on renewals, which means the person has to actually like the thing.

So a subscription marketer that uses tricky tactics might want to check to see if renewals for people who purchased from the tricky offer differ from renewals off the standard offer.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

Do display ads really work? If so, how can you know that they work, and how can you know much of an impact they have?

There are studies that show lots of interesting things about display ads. For one thing, most people don’t click on them, but the ad still affects behavior. For example, a person might see an ad and then type in your site’s URL, or he might google one of your brand terms.

The folks who sell ads know this, and they know that ads simply don’t pay for themselves based on clicks. So the ad salesman wants you to measure the effectiveness of their ads based on “view-through conversions,” which is a misnomer. Just because the ad was displayed on the user’s browser does not mean the user saw the ad. “View-through conversions” should really be called “display-through conversions,” and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to take them at face value. It’s way to easy to imagine a scenario where an ad has been displayed and the person purchased for some other reason.

This leaves us with two rotten metrics for ads. Clicks undervalue the effect of a display ad campaign, and display-through conversions over-estimate the value of the campaign. What can you do?

The simplest thing to do is believe the studies, bite the bullet and invest in display ads anyway. If you’re the owner of the company and want to do that, go ahead. It’s your money. But if, like most of us, you’re spending somebody else’s money, you need to show some return. And even if management believes the general idea that display ads increase direct traffic and brand-related search, that doesn’t help to much. How much do you need to spend in display ads to get the effect you want? What is the proper proportion of spend on display ads vs. spend on search? The studies aren’t going to tell you that — at least not for your industry and your product line.

Another (not) solution to this problem is to compare the behavior of people in a “display network” with people outside that network.

Here’s how that would (not) work. As you know if you’ve ever run a spyware problem on your computer, display networks cookies people when they go to a site that show their ads.

Here’s a scenario. I go to D.com, an ad gets displayed on the page, and the ad system writes a cookie to my browser recording that fact. Later I go to your website and buy your product, and your “thank you” page has a tracking pixel that reads the cookie and says, “Hey, look! We showed this guy an ad and then he purchased. Yipee!”

Sounds good, … but … something isn’t right here. The ad might have had nothing to do with the sale. Maybe I got an email that led me to your site. Or maybe I was going to buy anyway. Or maybe I saw the ad and my wife (using the same computer) bought your product.

If you push this, the display ad salesman will say how smart you are and offer something like this.

“Oh, but we can compare the behavior of the people in the network with the people out of the network.”

What he means is this. If the tracking pixel on your thank-you page looks for the cookie and can’t find it, it records that conversion as an “everybody else.” Then, the (phony) argument goes, you can compare the behavior of the in-network and out of network people.

The trouble is that a fraction is made up of a numerator and a denominator, and you have to have a real value in both places. You can’t compare X conversions over Y people in the network with A conversions over “everybody else.” It doesn’t make sense. Unless, of course, you can assign a real number to “everybody else.”

You need to be able to do a split. You need to be able to take a definable universe of people, show the ad to some of them and not to others, and compare the behavior of those two groups. This doesn’t resolve every conceivable objection, but it gets pretty close.

Here’s how you do it.

First, you need a definable group of people. The most natural group is “people who visit your website,” because (1) they’ve shown some level of interest in you, and (2) you can set a cookie on their browsers.

Second, you need to split this group in two. You do that with a google optimizer experiment. Version A drops a retargeting cookie, Version B does not.

Third, you set your “thank you” page as the target page of the google experiment.

Presto. Now you have a defined group of people that you can split in two, show your ads to one group and not the other, and compare the behavior of the two groups.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized