ICANN has agreed to introduce new generic top level domains (gTLDs). The names will be almost without restriction.

The new domains ain’t cheap. When applications open in January, you’ll fork out $185,000 to apply. And then you’ll go through 9 – 20 months of bureaucratic bullshit before you can trade. I hope you know what you’re doing.

Currently in Australia, we use .com or .com.au and almost never, 20 others. I’ve spoken to a few people who say, no big deal; .com is entrenched; look at .info; nothing will change. I disagree.

Let’s break this up a bit.

First, the easy one. The adult industry will largely migrate to .xxx. This is a scam and a bloody scandal. ICM Registry, who will administer .xxx, possess over 900,000 pre-registrations. Almost all of them are non-adult industry companies wanting to stop others bringing their brand into disrepute. It’s extortion and should never have been allowed.

Second, domain name registrars like GoDaddy will look to secure geographic gTLDs; countries, counties and cities. But they’ll need the support of relevant governments to get approval. I think most will cut a deal. There’ll be strong demand too. If you’re only doing business in Texas, a .texas address says it all.

Category 3 is domain names with non-latin characters (IDNs) and these will become strongly established where people speak funny.

There’s also provision for ‘community-based designations’ where you cater for a community you can demonstrate links to. Ethnic groups, professional bodies, lobby groups… can’t see strong demand there but might be wrong.

Now the fifth category is the most interesting from a marketing viewpoint. Corporates will shell out for new gTLDs partly because the price ensures they’ll be rare and therefore symbols of substance. More important though, they allow for more memorable URLs. So Hilton will use Singapore.Hilton, Berlin.Hilton… BMW will use 7series.bmw etc and Ikea will use ikea.catalog. Think about that last one. Ikea should buy .catalog, not just .ikea.

Advertisers will harness the novelty and format to surprise and amuse their audiences. They’ll also integrate slogans with URLs. Frinstance:

com.coke

omg.toblerone

The new format lets you surround your brand with verbs, nouns and exclamatories. But you’ll only succeed with these if you’re wrapping your brand in a big, tasty ad campaign.

Within a year or so of the changes I think .com will be undermined as the default suffix and the use of corporate gTLDs will be common in mainstream media. That connection between domains and advertising will in turn influence how big brands form their slogans.

There’s a final category I didn’t discuss: interesting, new, invented generic domains.

I have some ideas for these; have you got any play money?

The gTLD Guidebook for Applicants.

Arthur C. Clarke said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. And Bret R. Treasure said, “some magicians charge too much”. If you are a client, and you don’t know much about the web, you’re at risk of paying a lot more than you should.

Here are a few getting-started tips for people who need a web site but don’t know much about technology.

1. Be honest about your own capabilities

If you’ve never created a web page yourself, if you’ve never heard of ftp and if the following sends shivers up your spine,

you’re at risk of not getting good value for money. The word ‘sucker’ appears on your forehead as soon as you open your mouth and after that, your fate depends on the ethics and business model of the person/company you’re dealing with. Not to put too fine a point on it, the price you pay can be three times too high if you get it wrong. So if think Joomla is state of the art or even, a movie, use a consultant to help you through the process. Declaration of interest: that’s what I do.

2. Work out with the consultant/developer what the hell you’re doing

Because if you just walk into a web developer and say ‘I need a web site’, some will give you an off-the-shelf solution that is efficient for THEM to deliver and profitable for THEM to deliver. Some think it’s NOT in their interest to spend a lot of time with you working out your business objectives but that’s what needs to happen. If you’re already very clear on it and you are completely up to date on web technologies; different thing. Read on anyway.

3. Do things in the right order

If you’re not using a consultant I still recommend working out your business plan with an objective third party before you talk to a web developer. If you don’t know what the web can do for you, sit down with your consultant/advisor and brainstorm it.

If you want good SEO, involve that person at the planning stage, not after you’ve chosen a graphic designer or platform. Then do steps 4, 5 and 6.

4. Get your peeps together

A web developer will probably say they can do the lot – believe me; that’s not necessarily a good outcome.

Here’s what you need:

(a) Someone who can write good content (b) A good graphic designer (c) A web developer with experience on your platform of choice. By ‘platform’ I mean what software you’re using to create and maintain the web site. Many developers only use one platform; it may be over/underpowered and it may be overly complicated. Choose your platform with your consultant and your developer. (d) An SEO person. Search Engine Optimisation is only necessary if you want people to be able to find you on Google. (e) You may also need a professional photographer because, no, the ones you took yourself are not good enough. Likewise for video.

If there are people you trust with these skills, build the project around them. If you have a copywriter whose style you like, insist that the web developer use them. Same applies to the graphic artist whose style you like.

5. Do the pen and paper thing

Create a flow chart showing how you think the site should work. That way you’ll know how much content you need and people will be able to cost it properly. The consultant can drive this.

6. Get some quotes

Show your plan, your resources and your flow chart to a web developer. Crunch the numbers and make a decision not on the basis of the cheapest price but on who gives you the most confidence.

7. Be afraid

- Graphic designers and web developers will often say they do SEO. Oh really?
- Some companies do everything in-house. Often means a lack of specialists and a factory-like approach.
- Freelancers may not have adequate business systems and structures.
- Make sure you ask who in the business is doing what. Understand the process they use.
- Make sure you ask who owns the intellectual property.
- Insist on a contract and make sure it spells out a cheap dispute resolution process.
- Make sure you ask what happens to your web site, its code and its passwords when their main man goes out of business/has a mental breakdown.

8. Be very afraid

The fixed price plans offered by web development companies are designed to suck you in and spit you out. You don’t need a 10 page web site with a template and an SEO package. You need a web strategy that improves your business and pays for itself very quickly.

Using individual specialists will almost certainly cost you less than an all-in-one solution from a larger firm and you’ll get a better result.

Google’s made two changes to its search results. The first is an attempt to give you more useful suggestions for your search. For example, when you search for ‘oil’, it will come back with ‘did you mean unburned Venezuelan crude oil?’ at the very bottom of the page under the heading ‘Searches related to oil’. This is practically useless to me, partly because Venezuelan crude was NOT what I wanted to mix with Balsamic Vinegar but also because I have Google set to return 100 search results per page. I usually don’t scroll all the way to the bottom. Lazy. *Thinks* Why can’t my browser make scrolling to the bottom a one click operation? We would call it ‘Page Down’.

Chris Crum from WebProNews describes this as Google trying to improve ‘intent-based’ searches and makes the point that they still haven’t solved the ‘Java dilemma’ that Bruce Cray talked about last year. Bruce said some people searching for ‘Java’ are looking for the programming language, some for Indonesia and some for coffee beans. Hint: most are looking for the programming language.

I would guess there is enough intelligence in Google’s algorithms to detect dramatically different contexts. Perhaps Google could give you a disambiguation opportunity, like Wikipedia do…

When the page loads they could give you their best guess as to what you’re searching for, but also give you a line of disambiguation options. Choosing one of those options would then re-do the query but add in whatever word is necessary to remove the ambiguity in the original search query. So that’s another issue I’ve over-simplified to my own satisfaction.

The other change is to increase the length of ‘snippets’, the (normally two) lines of description that appear in each search result. As of now, Google extracts longer descriptions if the user’s search query has lots of words. Which makes sense because people are writing longer search queries now than they used to. And two lines is often not quite enough to give you context.

There are two ways that snippets are chosen. If you write a Description tag on your web page, in most cases, Google will use what you wrote in that tag as the snippet. If you don’t write one, Google will pinch whatever phrase/sentence it thinks best matches the keywords searched for.

So if you’re trying to get people to click on your web page, it’s a good thing to get a four line description rather than a two line one, right? Question is, does this mean you should re-write your Description tags as four lines instead of two?

My guess is that it will not be necessary. Mostly what’s happening under the new system is that if Google finds lots of matching keywords it is ignoring your Description tag and pulling out the phrases surrounding the keyword. Indirectly, Google are increasing their control of the way search results are displayed and lessening the influence of the webmaster.

Having already suggested that the Australian Advertising Industry is generally clueless about marketing their own services on the web I thought to monster a couple of other industries. So I had a look at the web sites of 50 West Australian wineries – about 15% of the industry. I checked each for sensible use of Title and Description tags, site maps, animation and links. Here are the findings:

Comment: Some pretty sites; 3 Drops, Moss Wood, Beckett’s Flat and Matilda Estate; shame no-one is seeing them. Honestly, what’s the point if you’re not getting traffic?

Some fine examples of animation kitsch too by the way. If you’re into that sort of thing (then you’re as sick as I am): Amberley Estate, Brookland Valley…

Although my analysis here does not give the whole picture, it suggests a lack of web marketing sophistication, both in the area of web strategy and search engine optimisation.

The larger businesses were only better than the small businesses in one respect; more traffic and more incoming links. They showed no greater online marketing skills.

Businesses can improve their web rankings with a few hours’ work. Much can be done by adding text content that includes the keywords that people type into Google. If you’re selling ‘grenache’, make sure you have a web page, Title and Description tags that mention ‘grenache’. Yell out if I’m going too fast.

Companies wanting to make the web a serious part of their marketing mix should develop a web strategy. This may focus on particular export markets, distribution channels or niche market segments. In almost every case, it will require the company to develop content that is relevant/entertaining/useful to the reader.

Book in for Web Promotion SHOCK – it’s aimed at businesses who want to increase their web traffic. The cost is $75; designed to give usable knowledge that people can implement themselves or pass on to their webmaster.

Most Australian businesses, including some very large ones, have no idea about the basic principles of search engine optimisation. (I recently wrote about advertising agencies as an example). So part of my agenda is to share that knowledge. Here is the SHOCK: it ain’t that tricky.

There are still businesses that view their web site as one of those things you have to have. Like a Business Card. But the Internet has become fundamental to how people collect information. Much more powerful than just another advertising medium. Some of the companies I work with are generating ALL their new business off the Internet because they have web stategies that deliver relevant information to people who are looking.

You don’t need a web site. You need a web strategy. Part of that is usually keywords-based SEO that puts you at the top of the Google results for certain terms. Like I am for marketing consultant Perth and like my clients are for most of their target keyword phrases.

I will probably pick up some work optimising people’s web pages, but for me, it’s not so much about editing the Title tags, it involves working out the best use of the web to deliver a business result.

If you know someone who’s not making the most of the web, I’d appreciate your mentioning the seminar to them. Here is the Web Promotion SHOCK flyer if you’d like to print it out. Register here.

Mischief. The first twelve Advertising Agency web sites I looked at are making no effort to attract web traffic. Either they have as much work as they want or they don’t believe that potential clients search the internet for advertising agencies. Maybe they rely on being in the Yellow Pages.

All sites run fancy Flash animation; none of them deprecate properly for people with JavaScript turned off. The full Flash sites are extremely annoying for users. Hit the Back button in your browser while visiting The Brand Agency, Campaign Palace or Naked and get thrown out of the site. Oh good, I get to look at that animation all over again!

None of the sites have Title tags that include any reference to ‘advertising’, ‘media’ or ‘marketing’. This is part of the reason why none of their sites are found when you type “advertising agency” into Google.

None of the sites have Description tags. Which means that when you type ‘saatchi‘ into Google it tells you this about the company:

Saatchi & Saatchi PR in Romania has been appointed by Alpha Bank, a leading name in the financial sector, to handle its PR account. READ MORE > … Compelling content for English-speaking people interested in Romanian bank Public Relations – alas, I’m one of the few …

Saatchi’s site was broken when I visited; none of the links worked. I tried IE and Firefox and re-downloaded Flash but still nothing. I emailed their webmaster. Waiting on a response. Update: links now working.

When you type GPYR into Google it tells you this about the company:
home; about us · work · services · tools · contact us · brand partners · careers. George Patterson Y&R is Australia’s newest (and oldest) advertising agency …

‘Wunderman‘ gives you this:
Welcome to Wunderman : Welcome to the site for Wunderman, the original direct marketing agency. To get our conversation… Welcome, welcome. Should be called Doorman, not Wunderman.

Clearly none of the agencies understand that you can control the way Google presents your search result. Many of the sites don’t work if you omit the www; this can be fixed with a simple re-direct. And it seems none of them know how to get a full Flash site properly indexed by Google, thereby increasing web traffic. I digress.

DDB have a one page site that allows you only an email link. Times are tough. The design of many sites, such as BMF and Clemenger has not been updated in years. The gratuitous use of sound is particularly 1990s.

JWT, Grey and Singleton Ogilvy make up the twelve.

It’s as if they created their sites before Google was invented.

Oh! Found one traditional agency who know what they’re doing: Marketforce use the words “marketing” and “advertising” in their Title tag and have written one Description tag. As a result, they come up at #12 when you search for “Advertising Agency”. A bit of tweaking would put them in the top couple.

I’m running some half-day seminars on web promotion shortly in Perth. If you’d like to pre-register, give me a yell.

Henry Ford is credited with the insight “I know half of my advertising works really well. I just don’t know which half”. The success of Google, the leader in online advertising, is largely due to the impressive accountability that they give advertisers.

Having done the online training course provided by Google, I sat for (and passed) the Google Advertising Professionals exam. The course covered Adwords, cost per click marketing (CPC), cost per impression (CPM), pay per click advertising (PPC), contextual advertising, placement advertising and a slew of other web marketing devices (WMDs; I made that one up).

It all amounts to a fantastic amount of control for the advertiser.

You can start with a tiny budget. Try that on television.

Not only can you select individual web sites that are of interest to your market, you can target based on demographics and/or keywords. In the case of search marketing, you can confine your advertising spend to people in the Perth area who type “model cars” and exclude people who search for “models”, though why you would do that is beyond me.

The system rewards relevance. If you write ads which contain words irrelevant to the web site you send them to, your cost of advertising increases.

You can experiment with different campaign wording and compare the effectiveness of alternatives. Most of this experimentation costs you not a cent.

Having done all that, you can then monitor and adjust at a micro level every aspect of every alternative whenever you want. For example, you can increase your advertising on the weekends or in a particular time-slot. This contrasts sharply with the way NineMSN sells advertising for example. Theirs is a conventional media package: Buy this product, pay this amount, call us if you need a change.

Serious advertisers can also use the Google API to automate keyword changes and daily budgets.

Finally, you can track the conversion rate of every aspect of a web campaign. How effective was each banner ad, Adwords ad, Yahoo ad … in generating an online sale or a page view? Then compare each to your cost of advertising. It’s a system which combines with Google Analytics to give you a comprehensive method of measuring what works and what does not.

Here is one of the sixteen AdWord variations Henry and I are using to launch the Model T:

Ford: Universal Car
Model T; Open Touring & Roadsters
$300 only. 20HP 4 cylinder. Black.
www.ford.com

Call to Action: let me know if you’d like a hand using online advertising. In Australia: 040 990 8133. In the US, 714 656 4001.