All good except for the insult to our intelligence, A.K.A the Telkom presentation, but that a story for another post…
Summary of the better presentations on the last day:
Vinny Lingham (Incubeta)
Paid Search Engine Marketing
- CPM moving to CPA
- Vinny’s not a fan for optimising for certain keywords; prefers a long tail of keywords
- Traffic is coming through much more refined keywords on Google
- Where the eyeballs going?
- 86% of all travel research coming through search engines
- Over 50% of all online purchases through search engines
- Better to bid on more specific keywords
- Case Study
- Out of 4.5 millions bought keywords
- Only 209 keywords converted more than once in every month!
- 6758 keywords converted no more than once a month (tail)
- 1117 keywords converted twice over the period (tail)
- 4697 keywords converted only once over the period (tail)
- Over 80 000 new keywords became active (got an impression) over the period (tail)
- Marketing process
- Get your SEO right
- Start a blog/s
- Only start spending money on adsense etc. once the business is working for you (webmasterworld.com has some excellent resources for one man shows)
- Bid for unique and intuitive phrases which are relevant to your business rather than generic ones
Continue reading ‘Summary of Online Industry Summit – Day 3′
This morning featured the most informative and relevant session of the Summit so far and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire day’s presentations. I was also fortunate enough to have lunch with Rudolph Muller – the driving force behind the popular local ICT portal mybroadband.co.za – who presented an excellent synopsis of the current broadband landscape in South Africa and made some exciting predications about where the market is going in the next few years and the opportunities that this will create for online publishers.
Summary of the better presentations on the second day:
Sandra Boer (Webchek)
The South African Web User
- 13% of South Africans 16yrs and older in major metropolis have accessed the Net in the past 4 weeks (+- 1.3 Million people)
- The profile of the SA Web user has become more like ‘the man in the street’
- 50/50 male/female split
- 2/3rds of users are White
- Predominantly still English speaking
- Ave. household income has come down a bit (+- R13K / month)
- 2/5ths have a tertiary degree
- 21% of ‘Black Diamonds’ (black-middle class) have access to the Web and this is increasing
- More and more Web users are self-employed and work from home (72%)
- Web users’ experience with using technology has not changed much over the years
- 1/5th of users see themselves as being at the cutting edge
- 2/5ths are still hesitant of technology and eCommerce
- SA Web users access the Web almost 5 times a week (approx. 7 hours online per week)
- 1/3rd of users had no idea how much they spent on Net access a month
- Apart from email, searching for specific information is the most popular activity online
- Chat, downloading music, jobs seeking, auctions, blogs, and online dating are all on the rise
- More than 8 in 10 people think that the concept of Internet Banking is ‘very food’
- However only a minority of South Africans believe that it is safe to conduct online banking and even fewer believe eCommerce and online transactions are safe
- 2002 saw a major collapse in the uptake of online banking but since 2003 this has started to improve
- More people are using banking websites as a primary source of information even though this might not use Internet Banking
- 44% of all US Internet users are know using some form of Internet banking according to pew research and this is inline with the South African market
- Google (60%), Yahoo, Kulula, MWEB, SAA, Kalahari, Amazon, iAfrica are the most popular and prominent sites amongst SA users
- 1 in 2 South Africans have conducted an eCommerce transaction
- This is largely due to the proliferation of cheap airline carriers such as Kulula.com and the purchasing of tickets
- Books, Movie tickets, CDs and DVDs are all popular online purchases
- Interestingly Amazon has seen a steady decline amongst SA users and Kalahari.net has increased in popularity
- There hasn’t been a significant increase in online grocery shopping online largely due to no perceived significance
- The US has very similar purchasing patterns to SA, with clothing being a noticeable exception
Continue reading ‘Summary of Online Industry Summit – Day 2′
Well after getting lost on the way to the venue (Emperors Palace) and then taking the scenic route through Benoni and then picturesque Boksburg, I finally made it to the Online Industry Summit, albeit a little bit late.
My good-fortunes were not over yet – as I was soon to discover – as I mistakenly walked into the wrong conference venue during the tea break and had to listen to some guy with a yamalka (thanks Snitz) give a motivational speech to a bunch of businessmen which included a presentation with flow diagrams containing phrases such as “be happy”, “be secure”, “resist change” etc. etc.
After that rather bumpy start – and missing Arthur Goldstuck’s presentation and half of local resident Mike Stopforth’s (sorry Mike) – the Summit finally kicked off.
Here is a summary of the better presentations on the first day:
Mike Stopforth (Cerebra)
Radical Relationships – A New Approach to Customers
- Bloggers are worth paying attention to even if only a small amount of the content they produce is meaningful
- Blogs are just one element of consumer-generated content
- Aston Martin Consumerism – His car story was picked up by the AM dealership and then by Digg and consequently by Google
- Is any customer small enough to ignore anymore based on the power of web publishing and Web 2.0?
- Social media is affecting companies through branding and marketing ¾ you can’t control the message anymore
- Stormhoek used viral marketing and innovative business practices to rise up the Google rankings
Continue reading ‘Summary of Online Industry Summit – Day 1′
Top local business site Moneyweb.co.za recently underwent a re-design of their site and this is a screenshot of how it looks in Firefox 2 on the mac:
Hey guys!!! What about some testing for us mac users before going live?
UPDATE: Hilton Tarrant from Moneyweb emailed me to say that apparently it’s a problem with the proxy server here at Johncom which has old files in it’s cache and he tells me that they have alerted our Sysadmins. Kudos go out to them for being on the ball…
I’m happy to say that I’m now exclusively a Mac(book Pro) user and what a beauty she is. Vista can go to…
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