thinks

Obviously, the focus here at thinks is helping you build your business using e-commerce and the internet. But long-time readers may have noticed a not-so-subtle shift lately into talking about search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC). The reason is, today, these tactics dominate how customers find your business online. Want proof? Read on, dear friend.

• Two recent reports - Display Stumbles As Search Remains Strong and The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search - give a great overview of how customer behavior strongly favors search.
• So, how do you get more value from your search marketing? Linda Bustos provides an excellent 3-step process for PPC advertising success: PPC Split Testing: Reducing Risk When Testing New Ads Against Control, PPC Advertising: Are You Selling Yourself In Your Ads? and Testing PPC Ad Copy: Strategies for Split Testing.
• Successful search marketing techniques like these aren’t just the domain of the big guys. In fact, Jonathan Mendez gives an excellent case study of a big guy getting it way wrong in Macy’s Magical Online Disappearing Act. Maybe they should subscribe to this blog?
• Finally, Microsoft is trying to connect searching and shopping behavior. Danny Sullivan explains why they’re not succeeding at it. Better yet, the fine folks at GrokDotCom point out 3 Great (and Quick) Optimization Reads from Omniture that will help you succeed where Microsoft stumbles.

OK, so search is all well and good today. But, what’s next? The most likely outcome - certainly the most widely touted - is the shift to mobile search. I’m bullish on the growth of mobile search. And, apparently, I’m not the only one: the guys at Read/Write Web have a new Report titled The Mobile Web is the New Hangout that talks about where we’re going. And Search Engine Land talks about how NearbyNow plans to make local (product) search widely available.

Well, folks, that ought to be enough to keep you on your toes this long holiday weekend here in the States (and the early part of next week for those outside the US). Have a great weekend. We’ll see you right back here next week.

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Immediately? Nothing.

Longer-term? Still probably nothing. But possibly quite a bit more. Social search is supposedly the next frontier. Jeremiah Owyang notes today that social is tough to monetize, but I’m betting some folks will figure out how to do it.

For example, Google launched its profile product about a month ago, with little fanfare, but it’s clear the search leader aims to gain detailed demographic information both to aid search (”help me find this person”) and to help advertisers (”help me find this customer”). What few seem to mention is the vast customer database Microsoft and Yahoo will share as the largest single email provider on the web (Time Magazine reports [Feb 18, 2008] Micro-Hoo would have 426 million users worldwide compared with 90 million for Gmail). If Microsoft and Yahoo could power an Answers-like social recommendation search using what they’ve learned from their failed algorithmic search and more successful enterprises like Flickr and del.icio.us, they just might be onto something. Twitter does a great job of answering the types of search queries social search should excel at, in this case finding a song title from a partial - and incorrect - lyric. Doug Sherrets from VentureBeat and I compared notes a couple weeks back about this topic. I think that the most likely winner in social search is someone we’ve never heard of yet, especially if Micro-Hoo takes a year or two to integrate. But, if they can manage this feat, they’ve got a large community of users and great scale to ensure profits overall, even if individual clickthrough remains low.

So, what action do you need to take to grow your business? For now, none. If you’re doing paid search marketing - and if not, why not? - you still should allocate your spend according to where you’re getting results. Yahoo’s rejection of Microsoft’s overtures this morning, while probably a play for more cash, is all the more reason to ignore it for now. In the longer term, however, if social search catches on, don’t be surprised if the combined Microsoft-Yahoo behemoth gives access to the most - and best - customers.

How’s your week been? Mine. Not so great. Last Thursday, my web hosting company appears to have closed their doors, taking this site down with them. Gone. Dead. Kaput.

How would you like to spend your weekend trying to get your site up and running again from scratch? Worse, how would you like to do it on big revenue days like a Monday? Yeah, me neither.

I’ve learned - re-learned - some valuable lessons during this period. I thought you might appreciate avoiding my pain by hearing what they are.

1. Keep backups. I know, I know. We’ve all been told this. Here’s the thing. How many days do you want to spend getting your life together after if it goes away? Backup one day less than that. If you’re OK with spending a month putting your life back together, back up every 29 days. I did my last backup on November 4. When my site died on November 25, I got screwed. EVERYTHING between those two weeks was gone. Is gone. If anyone has a copy of my blog posts, boy I’d sure like to have them. Seriously.
2. Make a copy of the backups. No, really. It doesn’t take much to backup your hard drive with a site like Carbonite (PC-only today, though Mac is coming) or any number of Mac services. I had the nightmare scenario. My laptop - where I do all my writing - died the same week as my web host. Think stuff like that only happens in Ben Stiller movies? Surprise! Fortunately, I had a copy on a share drive in addition to the one on my laptop. I’d have been way more hosed if I hadn’t. It’s likely I still wouldn’t have content on this site. And just imagine what happens to your Google PageRank then.
3. Develop a checklist of emergency tasks. For instance, should you stop your paid search campaigns first or should you put up a page telling your customers what’s happened? Most small companies don’t have the resources to do these in parallel, so it’s critical you - and your team - understand what the priorities are. When you find yourself in a hole, first you need to stop digging. It’s bad enough that you’re losing revenue. Don’t make it worse by not knowing how to stop.
4. Make sure you have all your critical contact information for your hosting company, development shop and other key providers available in more than one location. For instance, I didn’t have my web hosting company’s super secret tech support phone number I’d dug up a while back anywhere but on my local drive (see item #2 above). While I found their main number on Google, they weren’t answering that line anymore.
5. Manage your DNS separate from your hosting. If my DNS was hosted by the same company as my website, I’d seriously be dead right now. In truth, I wouldn’t remotely know how to deal with that situation. Which is another item for #3 on this list now, isn’t it?
6. Pay attention to trouble with your service providers. I don’t recommend jumping ship every time you have a little bugaboo with your service. Managing websites/hosting/development is complicated and occasionally things go wrong. But if you start to see a pattern of issues with a provider, demand immediate resolution or start shopping for a new provider.
7. Always have a Plan B. What saved my butt was that I was already in the process of moving my site from one host to another. You don’t want to have to figure out what your alternatives are when you have no alternative. No matter how happy you are with your hosting company, development shop, analytics provider, marketing agency, what-have-you, you need to know who else is out there and what they can do for you. Take an hour or two every month at lunchtime and review alternative providers. That way, if you do need to make a sudden move, at least you’re not starting from scratch.

I know this list is incomplete. Preparing for emergencies with your site can be a full-time job. But, these are the critical items most businesses need to have covered. Please add anything I missed to the comments. And I hope you have a better week than I did.

Is the picture of the mobile, local web (the backyard web) beginning to take shape? With over 3 billion mobile phones in consumers’ hands and with increasing access to valuable mobile services, like Google’s new geolocation services, it seems likely consumers will start expecting tools like these. How ready is your business to have your customers find you via their mobile?

What’s on your mind? Automated features, like the search suggest Mike Moran and I talked about a few weeks ago, sometimes bring curious results. See the ones CNet picked up on it this week. And ask yourself, how can I ensure my brand looks good here?

Genius. Mike Moran suggests, brilliantly, what a game changer search suggestion will represent. Today, you anticipate what keywords your visitors will use. Suggest will funnel users towards particular search terms. Are yours the ones that win?