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Geek Chic of the Week: RSS, Part III

Posted on September 19, 2008

This is Part III of a three-part series. The first post covered why you should care about RSS and how to use basic RSS readers. The second post explained more sophisticated RSS aggregators. This final post will go more into the mechanics and history of RSS for those who are really interested in knowing more.

Okay, so we’ve talked about two different ways to subscribe to RSS and I hope everyone’s been experimenting with it. (And if not, come on ladies — get clicking!) For those geeks among us who also like to more about the hows, whats and whys, I present the following abbreviated FAQs about RSS:

What does RSS stand for?
Depends on who you ask and what version you’re talking about. RSS version 2.0 (the current version) is known as Really Simple Syndication. Earlier versions were known as Rich Site Summary (v 1.0) and RDF Site Summary (v .90). One site claims it stands for Real Site Summary but, they seem to be the only ones saying that. So, if you want to sound smart I’d say Really Simple Syndication.

So, how does it work?
In really simple terms, a web site publishes a file in a format known as XML. Your feed reader (or aggregator) that we talked about in Part I and Part II reads that file and displays it to you. Think about it like this: when you create a file using Microsoft Word. it saves the file in a DOC format, which other people can also open up using Microsoft Word. And Word knows how to display all of your fancy formatting like headlines and italics and highlighted text.

If you want to know what an XML file looks like (one that’s not being displayed in an RSS reader), you can see an example here. Your feed reader sees this and then displays it to you with nice, fancy formatting. Just like our Word example above.

This video is also a pretty sweet description of the whole system; I wish I would have found this when I wrote the first post!


The cool thing is that — like we talked about in Part II — just about anything can be syndicated via RSS: books you’ve checked out from the library, the date your garbage man is going to show up, photos you’ve posted to a photo-sharing account, whatever. It’s pretty sweet.

How did this all happen?
It’s a long story. And honestly, kind of boring unless you’re a programmer or a nerd history buff. But, you can read the gorey details on Wikipedia or a shorter version on the Harvard Law site.

How many people use RSS?
I have no idea, and no one else seems to know either. I can tell you is that it’s millions (according to this post, Feedburner —  one of many RSS feed publishers — has 65 million subscribers), but is still a pretty small percentage of overall Internet users (this site says that North America has somewhere around 237 million Internet users and Wikipedia claims there are 1.2 billion people online worldwide). So, this is your chance to be an early adopter. Take advantage of it!

This is the shortest of my RSS posts, and probably the least helpful (aside from that awesome Common Craft video). But, I promised I’d do a little bit about the boring details of RSS so there it is. Next week, I’ll be back with some sexier Geek Chic. I don’t know what yet, but I’ll come up with something!

Free is Never Free, But. . .

Posted on September 17, 2008

It’s counterintuitive for me to facilitate this discussion, but what the heck.  Who knows why, but people are always asking me where they can get an easy, free or very inexpensive website.  They want to be able to add content – photos, maybe a little video, text. Perhaps they are a consultant or small business and haven’t gotten to the point where their website is a real priority (perish the thought) or they want to have more than a blog to chronicle their family adventures.  There are many really good free blogging options out there, WordPress being, probably, the best one.  And, with some technical assistance and a little tweaking (the geeks call it hacking), WordPress can be a great web content management tool. But it still requires intervention from that geeky friend, brother-in-law, uncle who works in IT.  I encourage you to jump in and learn a little about how WordPress or other blogging systems work and try the tweaking yourself.  If you use the WordPress hosted option and you don’t install their software on your servers you can dive right into your website in no time at all.  If you’re still with me, I’m thinking that what you want is a simple, intuitive option that lets you bang out and publish a site in short order.  And maybe a ‘blog’ isn’t enough for you.  To tell the truth, there are some easy, free options out there, but you didn’t hear it here.  I don’t plan on making this post an exhaustive list of cheap, free or inexpensive web building tools.  Instead, I thought I’d look at a couple of free (or, ultimately very inexpensive) options for building and maintaining your own website.

I recently stumbled on an interesting service called Weebly.  Weebly is entirely web-based, which means there’s no software to buy and download or install.  This is a good thing.  You can build an entire site in just a few minutes.  This service lets you use drag and drop options for adding content to your site, you can add whole pages with just the click of a button.  The templates include all sorts of layout options.  And you can pull in things like photos from your own collections or from photo sharing sites like flickr.  You can drop in a blog for the day to day writing.  Or maybe you want to share a youtube video.  No problem.  Signing up is really easy.  The interface is very intuitive and the system walks you through the (seemingly) more complicated elements like pulling content in from these other websites.  If you want to get really adventurous the Weebly even gives you the option of pulling in GoogleAds so you can make money through your website.  Whoa!  What a concept.  Remember this, this is probably not appropriate if we’re talking about your small business website.  There are more advanced features in Weebly, but you have to pay for them.  The premium service let’s you password protect pages, have multiple websites, upload and store large files, use their proprietary audio player and get some more hands-on support.  This service is pretty reasonable, though.  It looks like it starts at around 4 bucks a month.  Here’s the thing that I think makes Weebly worth a look — the pages look decent.  Unlike a lot of canned offerings out there, these are clean and current in their design.  If you decide next week you hate how your site looks, no problem.  You can change that design on the fly.  Another plus is you can publish your site to your own domain.  If you don’t have one, you can get it through Weebly, for an additional fee, of course.  This is great because you can build your own site and publish it to www.MYOWNBUSINESS.com in a very short amount of time.  If that’s not a big deal to you, or if you just want a site to show off your kid’s macrame you can just be a subdomain on Weebly like mykidsstuff.weebly.com.  Every time you log back into Weebly you get a snapshot of your traffic too.  You’ll know right away when the family starts visiting to judge you for how you dress junior in his most recent pictures.  All in all, I’d say Weebly is pretty impressive.  I built a Geek Girls test site in all of 10 minutes.  I could definitely see my lower tech friends and family members using this service.

There are other cool web building tools worth a look.  Matt Wilson, president of MIMA and a Geek Girls Guide Men’s Auxilliary member (whether he likes it or not) mentioned Tumblr to me and I thought I’d take a look.  I liked it right away for its ease-of-use and intuitive walk-through of my first post.  It didn’t give me a global view of the features as they relate to my layout in the same way that Weebly did.  But it did walk me through creating and publishing a post with a very elegant, user-friendly, step by step process.  I have the same kinds of opportunities with Tumblr to add audio and video, and outside content to my site.  I liked some of the mobile options – I can ‘tumbl’ from anywhere with my mobile phone or handheld device.  I can also publish to my own domain.  I don’t see Tumblr being as useful for a small business, or someone wanting a website with multiple pages AND a blog.  But it would be PERFECT for the beginner wanting to share family photos or videos or maybe journal through a trip or whatever simple little stories you might want to share. In fact, Tumblr is really geared toward those people wanting to offer a more media-rich experience to their users.  Its all about the video, audio, image-rich content.  Start a vlog!  Or a Photoblog.  You’ll impress your friends and it’ll be SO EASY!

Don’t take my word for it, though.  Try some website building services on for yourself and see what fits for you and your requirements.  Here’s a few more for you to take a peek at:

  • blogger.com:  The original web-based blogging software. Its a lot more feature rich, user friend and robust than it was when it first came along.  If you know it, it might be time for another look.
  • clearblogs.com:  Easy enough.  And free.  For the most part, anyway.
  • terapad.com:  The basic service is free but ad supported.  Nice feature-set.  Great templates.
  • Xanga.com:  Blogging + social networking = xanga.
  • Squarespace.com:  Great interface.  Intuitive feature set.  Awesome designs. 

There you have it.  I’ve admitted some things can be free.  But you always pay a price.  You pay a price in terms of flexibility and scalability.  You pay a price in terms of support.  And, as you grow, you may really have to pay a price – to grow, and get more, and do more.  But as a stepping-off point, these services are worth a look.  I promise you, regardless of your level of competency with technology, if you can use a word processor, if you’re reading this post right now, you too can build and manage your own little website.  So, what are you waiting for?  Get on that!

Look It Up

Posted on September 16, 2008

The other evening, on a short diaper-buying trip to Target, I passed two young women in the electronics department (Yes, I get distracted in Target.  Who doesn’t?) asking the help of a young red-shirt wearing fellow.  The question I heard started like this – “We don’t know anything about computers.  We’re totally computer illiterate.”  One waif-like creature was speaking for both of them.  She went on to ask, “Is this a router?”  I didn’t wait around for the young man’s answer.  Instead I went on my way comparing Huggies to Pampers and trying to remember if I’ve ever had a bad experience with either.  But I got to thinking, as one is likely to do while tooling aimlessly around your neighborhood Target store, isn’t it funny that those two young women represent the generation we’re all convinced is technologically competent and well-versed?  The funny thing was, the young gentleman they were asking for help could not have been more than a year or two older than the ‘illiterate’ girls.  But they were comfortable looking to him for his expertise.  The whole scene struck me as unfortunate.

When I was a kid my parents purchased the Encyclopedia Brittanica from a tv ad.  Every month for 26 months (not counting the bonus books) we’d receive a giant, quite handsome, leather-bound volume to add to our collection.  Eventually the set took up an entire shelf in our family room book case.  In the evenings at dinner, or while attacking our homework assignments, every little question my sister and I would take to our parents got redirected to that shelf of leather bound books.  “Look it up,” my mother would say.  “Don’t ask me.  Find out for yourself.”  In the moment it was probably frustrating.  It would have been easier and maybe more efficient for me if my mother just had all the answers to everything.  But she didn’t and the closest thing we had was the books marked A-Z.  It changed our behavior, really.  We learned that if we needed to know something there were resources at our disposal, the encyclopedia was really just the tip of the iceberg. 

Fast forward about 25 years.  If my son has a fever.  If I can’t sleep.  If my car is leaking oil, or my grass isn’t green enough, if I need a map, or the names of constellations, or a recipe for creme brulee.  If I want to find the name of an obscure poem I thought I read.  Or the lyrics of a song.  If, say, hypothetically speaking, I want to know what a router is I have the same response, I go look it up.  I have, at my fingertips, this fast sea of interconnected resources.  I start with Google and I can surf my way through world history and pharmacology and urban legends and infant development and, well, you name it.  So why, with this kind of knowledge available, were these two young women so willing to let this pimply faced, red shirt wearing fella be a key influencer in the future of their LAN?  You didn’t ask me, but, here goes – I think its cultural and it has a lot to do with how we talk about empowerment and knowledge and the spirit of curiosity.  I think it has to do with having the permission to explore and to try and to fail.  And, at the risk of offending some of our readers, I think it is a particular concern in terms of how we talk to and encourage little girls. Add technology to that equation and we’ve (generally speaking) got a culture making a whole lot of assumptions about a generation of users without really empowering them to get the full benefit of the resources available to them. 

What can we do?  Well, as parents I think its our responsibility to have at least a basic understanding of how technology fits into our families, our homes, the classroom, our communities. Too many parents are intimidated by technology and they either believe all the hype and are terrified of strangers on MySpace, or they let their young son or daughter be the resident ‘expert’ without having any real sense of what systems they’re putting in place for the family.  This is really a whole other post, and I plan on writing it.  But for this one lets just say that in order to encourage exploration in knowledge, parents have to first model it.  If you’re concerned about MySpace or Facebook – get on them.  Find out what the buzz is about.  Get a sense of how they work.  And don’t let your kid be a member without ‘friending’ you. But more than anything, encourage their natural curiosity and their interest in creative problem solving.  If your teen daughter has the money to go to Target and shop for routers, she’s probably got a broadband connection available to her.  If she has that, why not talk to her about finding the answer for herself?  Perhaps take it a step further, suggest she compare routers on a hardware review website.  And, if you’re really cocky, maybe you can encourage her to map out her own plan for the home network.  Its not that complicated, I promise.  Sure there will be failure and frustration.  But what’s the fun in learning without figuring it out?  What’s better than accomplishing something?  Especially if its something that the general population thinks is complicated.

I do think we send different messages to girls over boys.  I think boys are encouraged to be adventurous in their thinking, where girls are encouraged to be careful.  Boys are encouraged to care little about being watched.  But girls are encouraged to consider who might be looking at all times.  Handling little girls with kid gloves teaches them to be tentative and it’s limiting.  We’ve come so far, and we’re defensive when these topics are broached because of all the progress we’ve made.  But come on, if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit the crap our parents subjected us to still comes out sideways.  And there is just way too much opportunity out there to be tentative.  There’s too much to learn.  Too many connections to make.  To many conversations to take part in. Women have got to be part of those conversations.  They’ve got to be influential in how those conversations are shaped.  And they won’t be if they aren’t encouraged to jump in as children.  I’ll stop preaching now.  But the moral of this story is simple.  Look it up.  When in doubt — look it up.

 

Pay-Per-Click Advertising, by Nina Hale

Posted on September 15, 2008

Geeky reader Jamie in St. Paul submitted the following question recently: “Could you talk a little about google ads and google ad words? What’s the difference and how does it work? I have a basic idea but I’d like to learn more.”

I know enough about the topic to be dangerous, but contacted fellow girl geek and search engine maven Nina Hale to give a more expert explanation. She was kind enough to submit the following explanation of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. From Google Adwords and beyond!

What is PPC and how does it work?

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is the practice of bidding on specific keywords when they are typed into search engines. You bid in an auction system for an ad to show based upon the keyword, channel, time-of-day, geographic location, or other factors. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Common ad networks are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, and more recently Facebook social targeting.

The advantages of PPC:

  • the ability to launch, modify, and stop rapidly,
  • the ability to get onto the front page of search engines,
  • the ability to take searchers to a very specific landing page of your choice,
  • the ability to easily measure leads and revenue from the channel.

The disadvantages of PPC:

  • the market is mature and generally has efficient competition,
  • you must be able to effectively convert your visitors,
  • unlike natural search—it costs money for each click and once you stop funding it, it’s over. Meaning that natural search takes a lot of time to optimize, but once you’ve done it right, there is a half-life of benefit (but that also goes away).
  • PPC can be complex to manage which may require outside help.

Funding PPC

As the advertiser, you identify how much you’re willing to pay if someone clicks on your ad, and you compete in an auction system with other advertisers who are also bidding on those keywords. You can specify a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) for each keyword that will trigger an ad. A product that costs a lot of money and has a short time to purchase might be highly competitive. “Residential drug treatment” may cost $31 for each click. But “mouthguard for braces” might only cost $0.30 per click. But, even if you offer the highest bid you are not guaranteed the top listing; there is a complex system of ranking based upon a large number of variables.

You can set budget limits on campaigns for mere dollars a day, or go as high as the available volume of searches supports. You can also define geographic locations, times of the day, or where on the search result page you prefer to have your ad show.

Measuring PPC

Since you can track which keyword produces a lead or sale for your company, you should be able to know what CPC and conversion rate will make you money.  For example: if you determine that the keyword “mouth guards” sells $400 for each 100 clicks, you should be able to set a maximum cost you’re willing to pay for each click. All the networks use credit card billing and most of them charge you after the fact rather than having you pre-fund your account.

Brand Considerations in PPC

Because part of natural search optimization (SEO) requires a site to have keywords in the page copy that someone has searched on, PPC allows you to portray a more appropriate brand image. For example, if someone searches for a “fat farm,” and you want your website to come up in natural search, the word “fat farm” has to be very apparent in the page content. In paid search you can have an ad trigger from the keyword “fat farm” but the ad and your website could say “luxury weight loss resort.”

PPC Channels “search vs content” Networks

Most of the PPC ad networks have multiple channels: search networks and content networks. Search networks show ads on actual search engines, so they are based upon someone typing the keyword into a search box – clearly a pre-qualification to sales. Content networks are web pages where the keywords or keyword themes are present in the copy. Hence someone might be reading about the topic on another web site and see your ad. Clickthrough rates for the content networks are much lower, and have variable results based upon the industry and target.

Facebook PPC

Facebook social ads are a middle zone that falls into what is called behavioral targeting (BT). You identify interests people have listed on their profiles or updates, and if it’s in the Facebook database, you can show ads to that interest group. I’m a member of a Star Trek group on Facebook and had an ad shown to me for a Star Trek t-shirt, which I promptly bought. The Facebook database is currently not as extensive as it could be, and word is that they are working to expand this.

Types of ads on PPC

While text ads are most common, most networks now offer image ads, mobile ads, and listings on local maps as options.

When to Use PPC Advertising.

PPC Advertising does not grow demand, it captures demand that is there. It should have higher close rates because people are further down on the funnel. If there are people who are actively searching for what you sell, PPC is an excellent source of advertising.

You have to be able to close. If you don’t have an efficient manner on your website to get people to buy or start an inquiry process with you, you need to start there. It’s the “lead a horse to water” idea, if there’s nothing for them to drink, you wasted your money.

You have to be able to measure. If you can’t measure what happens on the website once people get there from a paid ad, it is going to be very hard to justify continuing the program. You can measure engagement in terms of time spent on the site, page views, etc., as well as actual sales and leads. Conversion rates for landing pages on PPC average 3.84% for in-house management of PPC, and 5.4% for outsourced managed PPC. (source: “MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook – second ed. 2008” Covers both B2C, B2B)

If you’re thinking about a long-term natural search investment, PPC is a good starting point. You can use this to show that search does create leads or sales for the company. Or you may find that it doesn’t convert and that you either need a redesign, better call to action, or different form of advertising. Natural search also takes a long time to really take hold, depending upon the competition on the first page.

If the natural search competition is too intense, PPC can work well. Sometimes you just can’t get past the Wikipedia’s of the world, the huge directories that have been putting $100,000 annually into natural search optimization, or the millions of fans who have been linking to a site. However this works in reverse, if there is a very competitive term, chances are there are lots of companies willing to pay a lot of money for a paid ad.

If you want to get a message up fast, such as in response to an article about your company, PPC is an excellent way to launch immediately.

PPC is a good way to test new designs or sales offers. Since you can direct traffic precisely to a page, you can do A/B tests to bring in traffic, test the response, then turn off the ad.

When not to use PPC Advertising.

If you want to grow demand, search is going to be more expensive and have worse results. They are better channels for building your brand. Sometimes you have a product that no one knows about and there is no exact demand for it. In this case, you can’t even target a keyword that fits. In this case turn to PR or media.

If you have a product that has a long research process, or is an “ambition” item, PPC may be hard. For example, lots of people want to liquidate their lives and escape to Mexico to live simply, but not many do it. Lots of them may be searching at 11pm after they’ve had a bad day at work. So spending lots of money for PPC ads about cheap Mexican property may get you tons of clicks and zero sales. Low conversion rates and high interest can be an opportunity for natural search where the long-term investment will result in “free clicks.”

Search is ok, but riskier for “pain points” because the customer is higher in the funnel when they don’t really know what they need to fix the problem. The lead time is longer as they research, and harder to attribute the lead to the original search terms.

Nina Hale, Geek

Nina Hale is Principal of Nina Hale Consulting, a Minneapolis search engine marketing agency that works with brands such as Edina Realty, Lifetouch Portrait Studios, Red Wing Shoes, and the Hazelden Foundation.

Geek Chic of the Week: RSS, Part II

Posted on September 12, 2008

This is Part II of a three-part series. The first post covered why you should care about RSS and how to use basic RSS readers. This second post covers more sophisticated RSS aggregators. The third post will go more into the mechanics and history of RSS for those who are really interested in knowing more.

Last week we talked about adding RSS feeds to your My Yahoo! or iGoogle pages, which is a great place to start with RSS. Now that you’ve mastered that (right?) let’s talk about another, more sophisticated way to monitor feeds: an RSS feed aggregator. There are two types of aggregators I’ll talk about here: web-based and local applications.

Web-based Aggregators

Let’s start with the web-based aggregators. Two of the most popular are Google Reader and Bloglines.

I know many people who use — and love — Google Reader. But, honestly, I’ve never tried it. So, I’m going to focus my examples on Bloglines, which I’m more familiar with. But, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when it comes to learning new stuff online, don’t be afraid to just try things out. Give both apps a test drive and see which one you prefer!

Here’s a screenshot of my Bloglines page: