Yes. If you can afford it!

Here’s why:

• Prospects are much more likely to enquire/buy from a local site.  I.e. Americans are much more likely to enquire/buy from a .com site rather than a .au site
• Google will rank your site higher in America if it is on a .com TLD (Top Level Domain), likewise a .au site will rank higher in Australia, etc
• The IP address of your site (while minor) does go someway to affecting your Google search results – so ideally the site would also be hosted in that country
• Content is king – and should be localised to the country you’re targeting.   Content is such a critical aspect of your SEO, and needs to be considered for each country individually
• Credibility – if you can get your hands on a US phone number and address to plaster all over your .com website – all the better – even if diverting to a messaging service
• In-bound links – another critical aspect of SEO is in-bound links.  If your local site gets links from other local sites, you’re also creating much Google love

Some things to consider:

• It can be expensive to build several websites, so try to ensure they’re very similar, and also use a CMS platform that supports multiple sites (I.e. Drupal for websites, Magento for eCommerce) to minimise development and maintenance costs
• Each of these sites requires their own SEO strategy, link building efforts, etc – which can be expensive.  Look to get discounts from your provider for bulk link building
• If you can’t afford all of this, then consider using sub domains or sub directories for country specific “satellite sites” that are optimised for those countries, then send the traffic back to your main site
• There are compromises you can consider – talk to your agency for some advice

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John McLaughlin, our Support Manager sent this email on September 20, 2011.  We’ve included it below for reference.

*************************************************************************

For those of you I haven’t yet communicated with, I’m the new Support Manager at Salsa. I look forward to working with you, and hope to talk to you all at some stage.

I’m writing to let you know that we’re simplifying the way we charge for hosting & support. Since Salsa started in 2003, we’ve bundled support & hosting together, providing a heavily discounted hour of support as part of the monthly hosting costs. This has caused some complications & ambiguity, which I’m looking to resolve.

In brief, the net outcome of the changes below for most customers is that you will save $30/month (for the month’s you don’t use support). For those customers that regularly use support, you’ll pay an additional $20/month on those months, however still gain access to a heavily discounted first hour of assistance from Salsa. We’re also reducing our hourly rate back from $170 to $155.

For more details on these changes, please read on.

*** CURRENT MODEL
Our current charging model is:

- Shared hosting – $100/month, including 1 hour of $170 support
- Dedicated hosting – $250/month, including 1 hour of $170 support

Other support we provide includes:
- 30 day warranty (support required to fix in-scope work within the first 30 days of site going live)
- Training (which can use the hour of free support)

*** CHALLENGES
- The included hour of support creates significant ambiguity between what is chargeable support, and what is not for both Salsa, and for customers
- Some clients don’t use all of their support, and so feel they don’t get value for money
- It is sometimes unclear what support is provided under warranty, and what is included within the free hour of support

*** NEW SOLUTION
To alleviate these challenges, we’re now offering hosting only for a lower monthly fee, and you only pay for support if you use it! (I hear your sighs of relief).

As of November 1, 2011 all customers will now be charged according to our simplified model:

- Shared hosting – $70/month, including NO free support
- Dedicated hosting – $220/month, including NO free support (still $50 for each additional site)

If you do need support:
- First hour is discounted to $50, charged in full if you require any support – you then have an hour to utilise as you please
- Subsequent hours are charged at the standard Salsa hourly rate of $155/hour, charged in 15 minute increments

** NOTE – we’ve also decreased our hourly rate for support from $170+GST to $155+GST, effectively immediately, based on feedback from our customers.

We’ve also included some important notes from the agreement below, many of which aren’t new, but worth re-iterating:
- Any support now requested, whether via email, phone, or the support portal will attract a $50 cost (and provide you with access to 1 full hour of support)
- All support requested will be billed at the end of the month (there is no concept of free support offered by Salsa)
- The only time support may not be charged, is during the 30 day warranty period
- Any work done within the warranty period that is not within scope of the original project, will be charged
- Any support required will be subject to electronic confirmation (via email or the support portal) before Salsa proceeds to provide the support
- Discount bulk support packages are available if more time is needed on a monthly basis

An important excerpt from our hosting agreement which is worth mentioning here:

You acknowledge that your website is hosted on computer systems and servers, whose environment, systems, software versions, log files, and other operating environments are constantly changing on a daily basis in order to keep the server operating smoothly. You also acknowledge that beyond the expiration of the 30 day warranty period offered, that your website may fail due to technical or environmental reasons without your intervention, or Salsa’s.

Where your website (in whole) is completely off the air and inaccessible to the public internet, Salsa will work at no charge to rectify this and make the site available to public internet users. Any other lesser failure and remediation of such lesser failure, such as one part of the site functionality becoming unavailable, images not displaying, files not being up-loadable, or other partial failures are treated as support, and are billable.

You can read more about our hosting & support agreement at http://www.salsainternet.com.au/website-hosting-support-agreement.html

I trust there will be some questions about this, and hope to hear from you if you require any clarification.

You should expect your automated monthly charge to change to this new rate, starting from November 1.

Thanks a lot,

John.

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I wrote this article a few years back after picking up a key insight into optimising Google Adwords campaigns. It still applies today. Here it is, for all customers who run their own Adwords:

I recently had a client who we were running a large Google Adwords campaign for where the client had an abundance of different categories and words which we were targetting their ads at. We had done broad keyword research, setup around 17 categories with ads all worded and targetted at these categories. The client was spending around $100 per day on adwords and we were easily filling this my mid morning as the breadth of their keyword list and categories was huge, and some of the terms being targetted were quite broad also (this customer was targetting the home improvement market – with a consumer audience).

Ok, on to the point: The client pressed me to experiment with a drastically lower CPC than we were using. We were targetting positions 2 – 4 on average and paying around $0.50 – $0.60 per click for website visitors, and it was converting nicely at around 28% (their conversion actions were fairly easy for users to take hence the high conversion ratios). I was convinced based on various prior experiences that lowering the CPC, would of course lower the ad position, and that with less people seeing the ads, and seeing them buried down a long list of advertisements, the conversion ratios would surely plummet and the overall cost / conversion would go up – making their campaign less effective.

Boy was I wrong!

OK – so there was a drop in conversions, but it didn’t go from 28% –> 5% or even 28% –> 15%….their conversion ratios only dropped a little to around 25%. Their cost per click however COLLAPSED!! They went from paying around $0.55c on average per visitor to paying around 0.25c per visitor, and with conversions holding their ground, their cost / conversion also COLLAPSED!

The results:
a) Visitor traffic doubled.
b) Cost per conversion almost halved.
c) Volume of conversions per day doubled!

The moral of the story:

While the client was spending a lot of money on adwords, I should make it clear from the start, that this approach really works best where you have a limited daily budget to spend on Adwords each day / month and which is being easily filled each day by clicks. If you have a very small but lucrative market you are trying to reach, and a big budget, you may be in a situation where you are bidding big prices in order to win the clicks of a small group of people, so lowering your cost per click (and ad positionining) in this scenario may not make sense.

IF however you have a very broad keyword inventory, and you’re easily filling your daily click budget – I would strongly encourage you to do the following:

1. Download the adwords editor from Google which can be found here
2. Copy and paste the campaign or campaigns you are running and create a LowCPC variant of these which you can run side by side with the higher CPC campaign.
3. Lower your bid prices – halve them, go even further…..drop them to the minimum bids.
4. Sit back and watch carefully.

If you have your conversion tracking setup properly, then you should be able to clearly observe the variation in conversion %. From my experience now in trialling this approach for over 6 clients in the last few months, I predict that you will see a lowering in conversion, but in most cases not as far as you think and you will likely also see a drastic increase in the visitors, and conversions you are achieving within your limited budget. If you suddenly find you are underspending you daily click budget, then perhaps tune up the Max CPC / bid a little until you comfortably fill your budget, and observe the change in cost per conversions.

if you are in the situation described above, where you have a small budget you are spending Google Adwords each month, and a broad market you are targetting, this is highly likely to drammatically improve your return on ad spend, and potentially transform Google adwords as a channel to market for your business.

Clicks achieved in lower ad positions don’t necessarily convert at a lower rate!! As with everything in online advertising….don’t hold on to past prejudices about what you think works – just try it out and see what happens!

This article, was written by Phil Baddock, Salsa Internet’s Search Marketing Director. If any of this didn’t make sense, or if you need help doubling your sales with Google Adwords, Phil can be contacted on phil@salsainternet.com.au.

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I wrote this article a few years ago, but it still applies. Anything other than sensible link exchange where you are thinking of the user experience, and NOT your site’s optimisation – doesn’t make sense. Anyway, here it is again to explain why:

Introduction – the link phenomenon

One of the important factors in ranking well on search engines such as Google is ensuring that you have a number of links pointing from other websites to your website. Website links can be a confusing thing, there are many terms used to describe them including one way links, reciprocal links, backlinks, inbound links but to explain what I’m talking about here – lets say you own ACME Shoe Sales, and you are on another website say www.great-aussie-footwear.com and you see a link that says “Visit ACME Shoe Sales” and you click on it – and it takes you to the ACME Shoe Sales, then this helps the ranking of ACME Shoe Sales.

This type of link is called an “inbound link” to ACME, or confusingly, is sometimes referred to as a Backlink for the ACME website. These backlinks or inbound links tell Google that someone else thinks that your website is worth linking to. If lots of people think your website is important enough to create a link to, then this tells the search engines that your website must be important. Fundamentally this is because when someone writes an article about your website or product, they often link to it. Google know about this phenominon (links which attribute you credit, or give you recognition for something), and so recognise it as a thing of value.

So how do you get these links to your website?

Well, there are many ways to do this including posting messages to forums with links to your website, listing your business in online directory websites, getting business partners to link to you, paying people for links (a risky practice these days), general off-line PR activities, and “Reciprocal Links” where you agree to link to someone if they link to you. This Reciprocal linking is also called “Link Exchange”. Many people still exchange links with others hoping that they will rocket to the top of the search results because “their cousin who’s an IT guy told them that was how to get ranked on Google”.

Reciprocal links – will they help?

The answer is yes and no. A few years ago, reciprocal linking alone would get you ranked well on the search engines. The problem was that everyone figured this out and so many professional SEO companies abused the practice and setup massive reciprocal linking programmes – have you ever got one of those spammy emails from people asking you to link to them if they link to you? The practice is still alive and well. Given the disproportionate number of links that various websites ended up obtaining by the practice, the search engine companies caught on that most of this was an artificial practice, and they started to discount the value of links pointing to websites where that website linked back to the linking partner.

So they wont help?

The answer is yes, and no. There are two benefits you get from a link from someone else’s website that points to your website.

a) Referral benefit
b) Ranking benefit

Referral Benefit

By this we’re talking about the fact that if someone is on the other website, and they come across your link and they click on it – well they arrive at your website. If the place they found your link was on a site that is somehow related to your business (if you sell shoes, they may have been on an othopaedics website, or an price comparison website showing differnt footwear available for purchase in your country) then they may well be interested in shoes and so this could be a valuable website visitor. If they found your link on an online gambling website and clicked on it by mistake – well clearly there is limited benefit you receive from their visit.So typically speaking, referral benefit is strong when the link comes from a related website that is not competetive in your field (if you sell pillows, think bedding websites, if you sell tyres, think car websites etc)

Ranking Benefit

Ranking benefit is what we discussed earlier where the search engines will recognise this link as a vote of your websites importance and give you weighting / ranking for this.

So back to Reciprocal Links – will they help?

The answer is yes and no….but this time, we’ll try to really answer the question I promise! If a website owner approaches you who has a website that is related to your industry but not competetive to your business, and you think that people on their website may be the right sort of target audience who you’d like to have come to your website, then by all means exchange links with them.

Forget about the search engine ranking issues – if this business attracts people who are the sort of people who would buy or deal with your organisation (ie same area, same interests, same product category) then having a link from their site to yours has enough inherent value to exchange links. Same applies to whether a link should go on your website. Are your visitors going to find it interesting? Will it add value to their experience of your website? If so – go for it.

If a website from an overseas website approaches you but you don’t sell to overseas customers, or if a website from an unrelated industry approaches you, then don’t exchange links in the hope they will deliver strong rankings. On the issue of ranking, there is still much debate in the SEO industry about whether any rank is achieved from exchanging links. My personal view based on our SEO experience is that a small number of link exchanges with high quality “authorititive” websites in your industry will help to some extent. Be careful though, as linking out to a range of useless link partners who have sites filled with thousands of spammy links could actually hurt your rankings. If the person asking you to exchange links fits this category don’t do it.

This article, was written by Phil Baddock, Salsa Internet’s Search Marketing Director. If any of this didn’t make sense, or if you need help with building high quality links to your website, Phil can be contacted on phil@salsainternet.com.au , or read the Free Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) eBook.

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It’s Salsa’s 8th birthday, I’m feeling nostalgic, so I thought I’d share a little about our young history.

August 25, 2003.  8 years ago today I sat at a 2nd hand desk in a spare bedroom (well, it was spare after we moved our 4 month old daughter into our room) of our 2 bedroom unit in Melbourne’s inner northern suburbs.  I stared at the screen of my 3-year-old self made PC, rolled up my sleeves, and started working… with absolutely no idea what I was doing.

Previously I was a lead developer for a large IT services firm.  I was made redundant during the DotCom bust, then spent a couple of months pondering life with my Fiance Nicole and our new baby Sienna – I actually considered getting out of IT all together.

My good friends Phil & Alfred asked me whether I’d be interested in running a new business idea they had – selling & building thousands (!!??) of websites using open source software for $99, and making money off the hosting & support.  Wow, how things have changed…

We hired our first employee a few weeks later (Murat, designer – family of course), then our second (Emil, developer – a close friend, who has recently re-joined the Salsa team actually!), then Nicole kicked us out of the house.

2004. We leased our first real office which was above a mechanical workshop in Northcote for $150/week, and then hired Conan & Hiroo, and shortly afterwards, Matt.  They helped us make a name for ourselves, and thankfully I’m still in touch with them (in fact I had a beer with Matty & Hiroo on Friday afternoon, along with half a dozen or so other x-Salsa employees).

2005. Over the coming year we met some amazing clients that had faith in us, and allowed us to learn & grow, including www.melbourneweddingregistry.com.au, who we still work with today.

2006. We moved into our 3rd location in Lygon St, East Brunswick, where Phil joined the business full time as our SEO Manager (and cold caller – that was funny).  We hired our first Office Manager, Rachel, and a series of developers that were to transform the Salsa business yet again to the agency it is today, including Sammy, Nathan, Chris, Steve, Dan (x2), Nick, Modi, & Alex (R.I.P Big Al, we miss ya).

2008. We moved into our current premises in Fitzroy, and now have a team of 29 staff across 3 countries, and about 200 loyal customers.  The journey continues – we keep changing the business, introducing new services, meeting new clients, and making great friends along the way.  Our staff are the difference for us – they’re the real Salsa.

I love what I do, what Salsa does for our customers, and that we’re able to provide jobs to some special people.

Since starting Salsa, I married my Fiance and we’ve had a couple more kids – my life has been amazing because of Nicole, and what Salsa has allowed us to do.  Nicole would kill me if I put a photo of her here, but here is one of our kids.

Adam DeGiorgio.

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We take on a lot of customers that have come from bad (digital provider) relationships.  We have over the years lost a handful of customers for the same reason (not very often thankfully!).  In almost every case, I think the problems can be avoided by adhering to a few principles in how you deal with your digital agency (and how your digital agency deals with you too of course!!).

It’s all about a relationship of course – built on trust first and foremost.  The sales process usually helps get this sorted, and you choose someone you feel you can trust.  Once you’ve chosen the lucky company you wish to partner with, here are some tips to help the relationship last as long as possible.

1. Understand your warranty – Unfortunately many customers expect a website to have an unlimited warranty (or a long warranty period), and for the website to work as it did on day 1.  This isn’t the case.  Providing a website is like buying any other piece of software.   Websites live on servers and computers which change every day.   The software which drives your website (web server, database etc) is under constant maintenance and upgrade by your hosting providers.  Because of this changing environment in which your website lives, your Digital Agency partner will almost always place a time limit on warranty fixes.  This is often <90 days in length.  Therefore it’s important to get all your testing done during the warranty period to ensure everything is fixed within the price.  For a website, the provider will fix bugs after the expiration of the warranty period, but it needs to be paid for.

2. Understand your IP ownership rights - About 25% of the new clients we take on come from clients that have been burnt by the cost of having to revert to the software author of a proprietary content management system (CMS) which cannot be edited by you, or your chosen software developer (if that isn’t the original provider of the CMS software).  There are sometimes huge (tens of thousands a year!) license costs associated with these proprietary CMS systems which may be running your website, which cannot be avoided – and in some cases, you also can’t take the site elsewhere and are stuck with the original CMS vendor. Ouch!

3. Don’t be rude – Rude or aggressive emails which are personally insulting and take the focus off the issues and place it onto the people, rarely evokes the most helpful and useful response.    We hold ourselves to high standards of courtesy and professionalism at all times.  A polite but firm customer who points out problems and demands a sensible strategy to fix them, will ALWAYS get a better result, than a rude or insulting client who vents frustration and burns relationships in the process.

4. Remember its a partnership – As much as all businesses want more customers, this is a two way street.  Service providers are looking for long-term customers, and you are no doubt looking for a long-term service provider.  To achieve this requires productive, positive, supportive and respectful relationships.

5. The golden rule – It goes without saying that we all need to show respect, honesty, transparency and ethical behaviour in business.  If you treat your agency as you’d like to be treated – put yourself in their shoes – it usually all works out just fine.

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A lot of our customers use POS systems to manage inventory, front of store transactions, etc.  The providers of this software are great at creating Point of Sale solutions – that’s what they do.   Some of these providers offer eCommerce software platforms (which integrate with their POS solution.  This is fine for customers with a need for a very simple eCommerce website.  For large companies wanting a professional approach to eCommerce, unfortunately these providers will sometimes be a bit opportunistic and over state the capabilities of these POS eCommerce solutions.   In short, it’s often the case that these eCommerce “add-on”s to a POS solution, are unsuitable for a professional eCommerce sites.

Apart from the fact that these eCommerce solutions are proprietary (see my post about the problems with this), they pose the following advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of an eCommerce solution offered by a POS provider

• They integrate seamlessly with the POS system – they’re created by the same vendor, so obviously work very well together.
• They’re typically much cheaper to setup.  The solutions are usually rather simple, and quick to setup, with a few configuration files, and few  template files to be edited to suit.

Disadvantages of an eCommerce solution offered by a POS provider

• They’re typically not SEO friendly (they may have some basic SEO capabilities) and they’re not built with SEO in mind.  They’re built with integration in mind, and the software vendors expertise is in POS systems, not eCommerce, so SEO is overlooked or given limited focus.
• Closed platform (proprietary).  As mentioned already, this makes it hard to customise, and almost impossible to partner with an expert eCommerce agency, as they’ll know almost nothing about the vendor’s system, and are unable to modify it to maximise your ROI.
• License costs – as with most proprietary software, there will be license costs.
• Product evolution – since the software has been written by a POS company – whose expertise and main focus is selling more POS systems, the product evolution will be slow in comparison to a dedicated eCommerce platform provider.
• Addons & customisations – if you need a new component built, or changes to the standard product, you need to pay the provider to do it – which is likely to take a while since they’re busy writing and selling POS solutions and may have many large customers – are you big enough to be a priority in their product development stream?

All of this is important to consider, however the overwhelming issue we see with most POS based proprietary eCommerce solutions is that they are an afterthought of the POS software;  they’re created to fill a perceived hole in the market, and while you may end up with a “suitable” software solution, you can often miss out on a “business changing”, well thought out, professionally executed, eCommerce solution that opens up a new channel to market for your business – which is what a good eCommerce solutoin is all about.

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Who doesn’t love mobile apps? No question, they’re changing the way we do a lot of things – particularly communicate (have you seen heytell.com? Unbelievable!).  But does your business really need one?

I’m now starting to see apps made for the wrong reasons.  We’ve had customers ask us to build apps for things that just don’t need apps – I have to hose them down a little and help them understand why.

There is no doubt that mobile is huge – your website should have a mobile version – our new brand is being launched on July 1, and we’ll certainly have a specific mobile version of our site.  Nielson reported recently that smartphones account for 63% of the mobile market now, and as this continues to grow, users will require a more powerful mobile experience from the websites they visit on their phone.

mCommerce is also an incredibly fast growing industry.  Of PayPal 3.6 million active customers, 400,000 (over 10%) used PayPal on their phones in 2010, purchasing 2.5 million items from a mobile device – up from 1% in 2009… 1000% growth!

It’s crucial to understand however, that many brands and businesses just don’t need an actual app – a mobile enabled version of your website is fine, and in many cases, even more suitable, than an app.  Who, for example would download an app of the salsainternet.com.au website (except me!)? Apps are great if they actually provide extra functionality, that a person is actually likely to use, such as interacting with the phones camera or address book, for example.  Even GPS can be integrated with the site (as you can see on our customers mobile site – m.oovie.com.au).

Once you build an app, you’ve at the mercy of the platforms of the distributors – Apple, Google & Blackberry are often altering their systems, requiring further investment in updating apps to suit.  95% of what most people want to do on an app, is available on a mobile website.  In fact, business that are considering an app may want to consider a mobile site as a first step – it’s quicker, cheaper, and will give you some exposure into the mobile use of your brand before you take the plunge into an app. If you build it correctly, you can also leverage existing site content, so you only update content in one place, which is then reflected in your main site, and your mobile site.

Online retailers may benefit from actually having both a website and an app – I think this could only work if you’re a big brand, that users use for regular, repeat purchases!  oo.com.au (only online) have both, and believe that having the oo logo in the palm of the shoppers hand is priceless.  I’m not sure I agree,  since you can setup a mobile site to popup a message asking you to add an icon to your home screen – which effectively then has the same effect as an app icon.

Roses Only also have an app and mobile site – again, given the brand, and it’s likelihood for repeat purchases, running an app may very well be worth it – it’s also likely to make the purchase process incredibly simple for the user.  I can imagine getting a popup on your phone when it’s a week before your wife’s birthday, with a simple one click purchase to send her the same bouquet you sent her last time.  Awesome use of an app for a well established, popular retail brand.  Founder and CEO of Roses Only, James Stevens does agree however, that apps are not suitable for all brands – you wouldn’t necessarily buy large ticket items from an app, for example.

The take-out: If your app is just about delivering simplistic content – create a mobile site instead – not an app.  If you can actually deliver more useful, smart functionality that needs to either integrate with the phones technology, or something that can’t be done via the web browser, then you may very well need an app.

I’ve love to hear your thoughts, or of any other apps that you think are note worthy for our readers.

Thanks to BRW for some of the inspiration/stats in this article.

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When was the last time you went to the doctor, told them what was wrong with you, and prescribed your own medicine? Unfortunately the web has created a bad reputation as having plenty of dodgy providers, and the simplest form of the industry has absolutely become commoditised.  You’d be amazed at how often clients come to us with what they think their problem is, and tell us exactly what to build (to solve it). They have little faith in an agencies ability to define and solve a problem for them.

I’d like to think however, that there are a bunch of real, professional digital agencies that can help identify and solve your problems – not just grind out the work to solve a problem you think you’ve already identified.

A podcast I listened to recently (from an ad agency) mentioned that ad agencies started a trend – offering the same old solutions to any problem the customer threw at them – “You need a TV ad”.  Their customers became unsatisfied with the same solution to every problem.  The ROI of TV ads compared to online is another discussion all together, however we’re now seeing the really good agencies creating really effective campaigns that do really solve problems, and that are about more than TV ads.  Some of the banks are doing an amazing job of this.  I think this is what is now separating the big players from the jokers in the agency world – the ability to really identify the problem in the market, find out how the company can solve it, and then execute a genius plan to capture the heart of the consumers.

Companies are now starting to put more faith in really good ad agencies to help them identify and solve their problems.  Instead of banks saying “the competition is tough, we need to be in front of consumers more than everyone else, spend a zillion dollars on TV”, they’re now creating campaigns like the recent nab campaign which firstly identified the real problem (high interest rates, bad relationship with their bank, high cost/effort to exit), realised they have a solution (lower interest rates, payout exit fees, simple transition process) to the problem, then connected with their audience by executing a genius plan (humorous campaigns around portraying a human relationship breakup – with a bank).

We’re now seeing a lot more customers with real marketing problems coming to us with an open mind.  They tell us about their business, we try to understand the problems they can solve for their customers based on their strengths, then execute a web design and online marketing campaign to help solve the problems.

Every website should be created with the same perspective from the outset – what problems are we trying to solve, and how can a website do that?  Gone are the days of just creating a website because you have to – people want to engage with you online, they want to have their problems solved.

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