Tony Attwood's Blog

There is a book by Geoffrey Miller Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism. which seems to argue that people in develop an intuitive understanding of behaviour through their experience of selling stuff.

Well I suppose some do – but when they do, they don’t make much of a fist of it, because it is also vital to know about the psychology of perception – at least when sending out emails and direct mail.

People do not read messages as we expect them to – and unless one has mastered the psychology of perception then one can’t expect to get the maximum out of a message. If you don’t know how colour affects the way people see a message then you could be using completely the wrong colours.

The whole theory of the psychology of perception is on www.theory.bz – but there is also a complete index to the leading articles on http://www.theory.bz/factors.html

If there is any issue you would like to talk about from that site, do give me a call
Tony
01536 399 013
Tony@hamilton-house.com

It has been suggested that social media is the new super whizzo buzz thing that we should all look at. But the real evidence, more than the say so, shows that blogs are becoming more and more important – as long as you have the creative skills to write them.

This was shown in a Southwest Airlines case when a celeb was asked to leave a flight because of his size. Each side told their tale on Twitter.

But then they moved on to blogs, where much more of the story could be told.

Yet despite the obvious advantage of unlimited space that blogs give, most commentators agree that blogs are underused, or wrongly used.

Blogging about your products and services is one of the most powerful marketing tools that is utterly under your control, and which can reach a huge audience. (As you may have heard me tell before, the blog I set up 2 years ago to find out how to do it, now has an audience of 170,000 readers a month.)

What’s more if you build the blog around targeted keyword phrases, that page becomes an authoritative page in Google that can very easily be found in the top search results by those searching.

Of course not just any content will do. Something quirky and slightly amusing, and above all interesting and easy to read works best.

If you would like to see some samples, drop me a line or give me a call

Tony Attwood, 01536 399 013

The rapid development of new powers for the Information Commissioner seem to have slipped in under the radar – but they are quite alarming.

There is the ability to a £500,000 fine (from April 6), and the new guidelines of March 2008 new guidelines on data breach handling and disclosure are now in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act.

If you suffer a security breach in your organisation and you are fined anything up to £500,000 you will also get the stigma of failing, which will hardly be good for your business.

If there is any evidence that there were continuing reports of data breaches or failures, and action was not taken then you could be in real trouble.

Call me on 01536 399 000 if you want more information on this, or any aspect of selling via direct mail, email or the internet.

There’s more about Hamilton House on www.hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

My thinking is that blogs are worthwhile because they get your company message to wider and wider audiences, and allow you to become known to people who can find your background thoughts and information worth reading.

That is stage one – and is highlighted by the fact that blogs that are content rich get readers, not only for today’s blog, but for all the past ones you have written. A person does a google search for a phrase that turned up in your blog three months ago, and they find you – and there is a chance they will read more, and go onto your main web site.

Stage two involves placing a few advertisements on your blog. In the early days these don’t generate that much money but as the readership builds so can the response rates to the adverts build. Obviously you don’t take on anything that is competitive but you can still make something extra.

Stage three then involves exchanging links with people – getting them to mention you, and you to mention them. Not just the “blogroll” links (a list of links down the side of the blog) but actually in the article. As in “I was reading an interesting piece on…”. This doesn’t generate income but it helps take you up the rankings and gets your more readers.

Now suddenly your blog starts to become valuable in itself, not just because it sells product and keeps people in touch with you, but also because as you grow, other bloggers with non-competitive products, want to know you.

The first blog I set up, as an experiment to see how the whole blog thing works, now gets 170,000 individual readers a month. And this has led to interesting developments.

Each week now I get people writing to me asking me to link with them, or to mention them on my blog. When this started I was being offered sums so small that I took no notice – $20 a link was common. But as the reputation of my site has grown, so the amounts have grown. There are even companies out there who do nothing but organise links for clients – and the money comes in each month.

This is all because links have a double value – they can get people to go onto the other firm’s web site, and they can help take a web site up the rankings, if it is being linked to by a site that is already higher up the rankings.

So that’s stage four – and to summarise:

1. You promote your own products
2. You get a modest sum from adverts for non-comeptive products
3. You start getting links which helps the site develop and go up the rankings
4. You get paid for links.

It’s a strange world – but it can have a huge effect on your business – and those firms that are not part of it, will, I feel, find themselves marginalised over time. At the moment business blogs that work are not that common – but they are growing in number by the day.

Tony Attwood
www.hamilton-house.com
01536 399 000

You aren’t reading because of “email fatigue”.

Even if your email gets through to you and is not blocked by filters and the like, “e-mail fatigue” then clicks in. The fact that you get 128 billion emails a minute means that you have had enough.

They have it worse in the US where only 10% of emails get looked at, while in Europe it is 13%.

The point is that once you are reading a message, there is a chance that you will click on a link. Getting clicks is not the issue, getting people to read the email in the first place is the big problem.

So what to do?

Firstly, stop sending emails to people who really don’t want to know. If you have 5000 emails going out but only half a dozen people opening and clicking through, then the service providers (who have systems that do this sort of thing automatically) will start treating your transmissions as spam, and either send them straight to spam boxes, or refuse to deliver them altogether.

Second, use stunningly brilliant headlines. Headlines that are so amazingly exciting and engaging that you force people to look, even if they are utterly disengaged. “You are probably not reading this” is not the greatest headline in the world – but it is a damn site better than most that hit my in box each day.

(It is certainly better than “Transfer of funding responsibilities is fast approaching!” which just landed in my in box. Anything with an ! in the headline usually counts as rubbish with me).

Third, stop writing in “email speak”. Use a natural conversational voice. With an interesting personal accent. And just one little moment that no one else could ever write.

Fourth, replicate the emails on a blog, so they stay in a permanent record. This makes them public, and other people will find them and then be interested and join in. This item started out as an email to a news group – and now is here.

We get about 4,000 individual readers a month for this blog – not nearly as many as the 170,000 a month we get on another blog, but 4,000 is 4,000 and some of them then become customers. Maybe it’s you.

If you want to talk about writing blogs and emails, or sending them out, or anything else come to that, call me on 01536 399 013 or email Tony@hamillton-house.com

Tony Attwood

Way back in the dim and distant past (well last year) I wrote an article about email open rates and how unreliable they are.

But despite the fact that one or two others in the business did the same (I cite the very best analysis of open rates in my article) nothing much changed.

But now a research paper in the States has come out and said that open rates are just a mess. Each approach is different from the others, and each one under-estimates the number of opens that it gets.

There is talk of unifying open rates, but that is probably going to be a long way off. Until then, it is best to ensure that you only compare open rates using the same technology – not from one supplier to another.

My article on open rates is on http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/OpenRates.htm

The latest cry for uniformity is at http://www.marketingvox.com/industry-calls-for-standardized-email-metrics-046107/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=mv&utm_medium=textlink

Tony Attwood

1. Create content that relates to the people who will search on google for your details. Some firms put their brand name or product name everywhere and use all the snappy buzzy phrases but this doesn’t help. You need lots and lots of articles that are relevant to people you want on your site.

2. Write well. Not everyone can write in a way that engages readers. Just doing it yourself if you are not a professional writer with a clear style, doesn’t help, because people will read a bit and then leave. The material you put up has to be to the point and well written. Don’t assume that people will read all your material – they will treat it like anything else. If it is not clear, lucid and to the point they go.

3. Don’t just copy all the latest internet ideas. Some audiences go for snappy headlines, click throughs, and pictures, but others want clear information. Decide if you are writing to a reader of the Sun or a reader of the Guardian.

4. Give the reader the chance to find you on every page by having your email, phone, fax and postal address everywhere.

5. Create more and more articles which include the words that people are likely to search for, and then give them the answers in a meaningful way.

If you want that summarised into one simple concept: write a lot about everything you sell in an informative and open way. That way people will find you with searches and you will go up the rankings.

If you would like to talk about this do give me a call on 01536 399 013 or email Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

If you think emails and web sites are coming under attack from the dark side of online activity, then you don’t want to get too close to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. For this is where the cybercrooks are really turning up the heat.

Sophos’ Security Threat Report: 2010 is a huge, significant review of what we really don’t want to think about – the awful mess that resides underneath on line activity.

There were over 70% more spams on social networking sites last year than the year before, and 36% more malware attacks – and the numbers are rising daily. The biggest security risk is seen to be Facebook, followed by MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Despite the risks it seems that most companies allow staff to use Facebook etc on line at work. And although LinkedIn is not the highest rated risk, this is probably only because fewer people use it. Those in the know say that LinkedIn poses the biggest security risk and Sophos says that by publicly posting information there, companies make it easier for criminals to launch targeted attacks on a corporate directory.

In short, social network use poses a threat to companies, and very few companies have much awareness of how much danger they are in.

Meanwhile, there is widespread awareness that there is a huge threat to companies through the vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer – and yet despite this most firms keep using it – even though it is so simple to switch to Firefox or an alternative free browser. It is important however to consider and download free antivirus software online to help protect your computer against the prevalent threats that exist online. Considering all the risks highlighted in the sophos report, it is important to have antivirus software ready.

The overall answer is simple: don’t allow social networking on your firm’s computers, don’t be tempted to join LinkedIn, and delete Internet Explorer from your computers (although do set up an alternative browser before you do!)

These opinions are of course just mine – but if you want some background here is the full report.

Full report: http://www.sophos.com/sophos/docs/eng/papers/sophos-security-threat-report-jan-2010-wpna.pdf

If you would like to know more about Hamilton House and our mailing services, please call 01536 399000

Tony Attwood

If you think emails and web sites are coming under attack from the dark side of online activity, then you don’t want to get too close to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. For this is where the cybercrooks are really turning up the heat.

Sophos’ Security Threat Report: 2010 is a huge, significant review of what we really don’t want to think about – the awful mess that resides underneath on line activity.

There were over 70% more spams on social networking sites last year than the year before, and 36% more malware attacks – and the numbers are rising daily. The biggest security risk is seen to be Facebook, followed by MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Despite the risks it seems that most companies allow staff to use Facebook etc on line at work. And although LinkedIn is not the highest rated risk, this is probably only because fewer people use it. Those in the know say that LinkedIn poses the biggest security risk and Sophos says that by publicly posting information there, companies make it easier for criminals to launch targeted attacks on a corporate directory.

In short, social network use poses a threat to companies, and very few companies have much awareness of how much danger they are in.

Meanwhile, there is widespread awareness that there is a huge threat to companies through the vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer – and yet despite this most firms keep using it – even though it is so simple to switch to Firefox or an alternative free browser.

The overall answer is simple: don’t allow social networking on your firm’s computers, don’t be tempted to join LinkedIn, and delete Internet Explorer from your computers (although do set up an alternative browser before you do!)

These opinions are of course just mine – but if you want some background here is the full report.

Full report: http://www.sophos.com/sophos/docs/eng/papers/sophos-security-threat-report-jan-2010-wpna.pdf

If you would like to talk about the information here please call me on 01536 399 013 or email Tony@hamilton-house.com

September 2009 I started placing copies of email adverts from some of our company’s clients on one of our web sites. There is nothing else on the site, just the adverts.

By January 2010 we had around 28,000 individual readers of the site for that month. This excludes those people who come on and disappear at a moment’s notice – clearly not having found what they wanted. To be counted these people had to come on and stay there.

There was no marketing for the site – it just exists – and so it is obvious that the reason people pour onto the site each day is the content. They do a Google search and find something on our site and click. The average client of HHM gets around 70 reads of the advert each month. Not a huge number, but we’ve only been running the experiment for a few months and it is very unfocussed. Just imagine what it could be like with a focussed site.

The reason this is such a good idea is that the total worldwide online search market grew 46% in December 2009 compared to December 2008.

During December 2009, internet users conducted 131.3 billion online searches, compared to 89.7 billion online searches in December 2008.

The UK grew by 35% from 4.6 billion to 6.2 billion searches.

The only issue is, what do you put on your web site by way of content. In a separate experiment we set up a blog exactly two years ago, and have published a story on the site each day ever since except for a couple of periods when I went on holiday!

In the first month we got 2,000 individual readers, after one year it was at 60,000 readers a month, and for January 2010 it reached 170,000 individual readers.

If you would like to know more about how to use this method of reaching clients, and potential clients, do drop me a line or give me a call.

Tony Attwood

01536 399 013