Web of Success: 15 Years of KidPub.com

KidPub was on the road with a booth at the NJ State Homeschooling Convention a few weekends ago.  Some people hate trade shows, but I’ve always found them a great way to get feedback from your audience. Back in the day I did many shows as Editor of 73 Magazine, then later on with CUSeeMe Networks, and now with my own publishing company.

Here are a few notes for those who are thinking about doing their first show and might be wondering how to maximize their time.

1. Keep the message simple. Are you introducing a new product? Trying to sell an existing one? Both? Don’t confuse the audience…you have about 15 seconds to capture their attention, and if there’s too much information at your booth, they’ll just walk away. Pick the message that you want to drive home, and build your booth around it.

I violated this rule at the NJ show, and it haunted me for two days. We have two lines of business…books and a membership-driven web site. On the first day I tried to talk about both and ended up confusing people. On the second day I let the visitors drive which they wanted to talk about, which worked better, but I could have avoided the issue entirely by just doing one or the other.

2. People will take just about anything that you hand to them.  If you wait for visitors to come to your booth, you’ll miss about 75% of the attendees. It isn’t rude to walk up to a complete stranger and hand them a brochure at a show…they are there to collect information. Standing around behind your table is much too passive, you must get in front of your booth, hand out information, and literally lead people back to your table.

3. ASK FOR THE SALE. Even professional sales people forget this simple advice. You aren’t going to make a sale unless you ask for it. Create urgency by offering a ’show special’ price, and ask visitors point-blank if they want to purchase RIGHT NOW. Again, it isn’t rude…visitors don’t have a lot of time to spend while you go through a long-winded sales pitch. Show them what you’ve got, tell them the price, and ask for the sale. If they decline, hand them a coupon for the special price that they can redeem later.

4. Save money on booth decorations. Here in Boston, you can spend a couple of hundred dollars on a single 6′ x 2.5′ vinyl banner for the back of your booth. Or, you can go to Vista Print and get the same thing for $25. No one is going to remember what your booth looked like when they leave the show…make it look nice, but don’t spend a fortune on decoration just because you like it.

5. Use the 15-foot rule for signage. For some strange reason, even though people go to trade show vendor areas to look at the booths, they will do everything they can to avoid actually visiting your booth. They’ll avoid eye contact with you, walk out of their way to keep outside your zone…it’s really silly but I see it all the time. Because of this, any important message that you want to be seen should be readable from about 15 feet away. The message should be nonthreatening and make the viewer want to come over to see what you are doing.

6. Wear comfortable shoes. Take some time during your pre-show planning to consider what you’ll need to stay comfortable during the show. If you’re a small business it might just be you manning the booth, so take water, simple snacks, paper towels, and maybe a special treat or two, plus comfy shoes. You’re going to be standing for eight or more hours a day for a couple of days.

7. Take plenty of notes. You’ll have lots of great insights and ideas during the show. You’ll completely forget them if you don’t write them down. Just keep a little notebook under the table and jot them down as they come to you…you can process them once you’re home.

8. LISTEN. This is your chance to do invaluable market research. It’s tempting to want to explain everything about you, your company, your product, the weather, and so on, to every visitor that walks into earshot, but avoid the temptation and just listen. You’ll find out whether people understand what you do, or are confused by your messaging, by listening to their questions. You might even start a conversation with, “What do you think we do here?”

I think that this is one of the biggest reasons to do a show…it gets your company in front of thousands of potential customers in a short period of time, and it allows you to observe how they react to your product.

9. Talk to other vendors. You’ll get to know your immediate neighbors pretty well, but make a specific effort to talk to other vendors at the show, even your competitors. Find out what shows they go to, how they are doing at this show, look for opportunities for cooperative marketing, and get your name out there. Be sure to bring a long a stack of your business cards to hand out to these folks. Follow up with the vendors that interested you after the show, even if it’s just a ‘Nice meeting you’ note.

10. Have fun. Shows can be a lot of fun. Take the time to wander a bit and take it all in.

Good luck at the show, especially if it is your first. You’ll have a great time, meet a lot of nice people who are genuinely interested in what you do, and gain valuable insights into your business!

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Many small companies, like KidPub, have to watch every dollar spent. I’m always looking for ways to cut costs while not sacrificing either quality or progress toward my business goals. For a publishing company, PR is incredibly important, but it can also be incredibly expensive. We send out a press release for each books that is published, plus releases for contest announcements and general news.  It can add up to five to ten releases each month.

When I started shopping around for a PR agency to handle my account, I quickly realized that press releases were going to be a significant slice of my marketing budget. I wanted to know if there were alternatives to traditional agencies that might save money but still be effective.

I’ve used some of the online firms in the past with limited success. They typically charge a per-release fee with a suite of add-on services that can inflate the final bill. These companies, such as PRWeb, do an ok job of sending out your release and tracking it, but it seemed that my releases were getting lost in the flood of PR that goes across their wire.

Finally, by a stroke of luck, I found Mondo Times and its sister site, EasyMediaList. Mondo’s goal is to be a source of media information. Say you wanted to send a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Herald. it takes just a few clicks on Mondo to pull up contact information for the paper. Mondo is a membership site, and to get the phone, fax, and email of the editor it’s $80 a year.

That’s actually a pretty good deal, and I use this service to look up editorial information for hometown news media of each author that publishes with KidPub Press. I’ve found that the local newspaper nearly always will run a story about the young author.  Mondo lets you search by city, so it’s quick work to find the half a dozen news outlets in an author’s hometown and put together a list for the press release.

The better deal at Mondo, though, is their Professional level membership at $199 per year. You get all of the data and lookup features of the $80 membership, but you also get five free mailing lists for Mondos sister site, EasyMediaList.

EasyMediaList sells contact lists for media. You can purchase lists by state, major metro area, subject, and so on. The lists are priced according to size and range from $30 to a few hundred dollars each.  For KidPub, I used four of my five free lists from Mondo membership to grab the top 100 media outlets, the educational media list, and the parenting and kids media lists. The lists are high-quality (for example, Parenting Magazine, Scholastic, Nickelodeon, and Sports Illustrated Kids are included) and clean…I get very few bounces on the emails included.

I send out press releases to segments of these lists, depending on what the news is. Do they work? Yes. I’ve gotten responses from many major media outlets from releases sent to these lists. It’s well worth the $200 annual membership fee.

The other piece of the shoestring is Skype. We only have one phone in the office, and for $5 per month we’ve set it up with an inbound phone number and unlimited domestic calling, and it includes an answering machine. I can afford to spend afternoons on the phone calling media contacts…the phone numbers are on the EasyMediaList lsits…to follow up on press releases. I think that editors appreciate hearing an actual person on the other side of the press release, and I’ve gotten a great response.

Between Mondo and Skype the majority of KidPub’s PR needs are met, and I can concentrate on growing the business instead of worrying about the marketing budget.

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I saw an interesting article in Delivery magazine today profiling the US tween market (kids ages 8 to 14), which is our market here at KidPub. There were a couple of factoids that stood out. First was the size…23 million strong. Next was the average disposable income, $2,047.

The last fact was the most fascinating. Of the 23 million tweens in the US, eighty five percent (85%) spend at least one hour PER DAY on the Internet. That’s a $47B market that is spending a minimum of 5 to 7 hours per week online.

I don’t think we’ve really figured out yet how to deliver a message to tweens in a way that is responsible, respectful of their age, and yet effective. This is population that doesn’t notice banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, or contextual advertising. The kids I’ve talked with about it say that they simply ignore this kind of advertising.

It seems like old-fashion word of mouth (or word of mouse, these days) is probably the most effective way to get a message out to this group. Social networks are starting to show their potential for this kind of marketing, but few will admit to targeting tweens. Facebook demographics are continuing to skew older, and although it’s hard to assess Twitter’s audience, I think it’s also an older crowd.

At KidPub we’ve offered more than one word-of-mouth program, including a reward for referrals and an invite-a-friend link on every page. None have really been successful, and we’re still looking for a way to encourage our members to invite their friends.

The bottom line is that tweens represent an exciting market, but one that is already savvy and largely resistant to marketing methods that have been around for as long as the web itself. We’ll continue to market one tween at a time!

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Back in August, KidPub was ranked around 400,000 by both Compete and Quantcast. We targeted the 100,000 mark back in November when we started doing serious work on building traffic, mainly through SEO and grass-roots marketing. I just looked at today’s Quantcast number…119,146. Last week was 127K or so. We’re getting closer!

Once we hit the 100K mark the hard work begins…gettting KidPub into the top 50K web sites. I know there are ways to ’spoof’ Alexa to get a high ranking, but Quantcast numbers don’t lie, since they are directly measured.

We’re not getting many conversions yet from the Facebook ads, but the exposure is helping a bit, I think. It’s only been three or four days since the FB campaigns started…it needs more time before I can really analyze the results. We’re still watching click-through rates on several ads to figure out which are the best performers.

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I seem to be stuck on marketing with Google search results. With good reason, though…if your web site is like most, the majority of your traffic comes from Google.

In a previous post I discusses the importance of the title tag and how Google uses it in its display of search results. Heat maps show that most of the time spent looking at the search results page is on the upper-left part of the page, which tends to be the top three to five results.

The title tag, if you have one, is used for the link to your web site. Directly below is about 25 words of text that can come from the page being indexed, or from the meta description tag, if it exists.

If the title tag becomes your billboard, the description becomes your call to action. This is your 25-word chance to give readers (who spend just a second or two looking at the result) a compelling reason to visit your web site. Use action words here, and give the reader a reason to click. For KidPub we use the words ‘visit’, ‘play’, and ‘read’, and ‘write’ as well as ’safe’ and ‘fun’ since our target is not only children but their parents.

The description goes into the meta description= tag. Take advantage of essentially free marketing by paying attention to how Google sees your pages, especially the title and meta description tags!

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KidPub is built on the Drupal platform. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to page titles and how they are used in marketing, but I now think that they are incredibly important.

The text in the title tag of a page are what shows up at the top of your Google search result. Drupal out-of-the-box doesn’t do a very good job of filling this in, especially if you are using the default naming convention for posts. Heat maps of the Google search results pages show that the eye gravitates to the upper left of the page, and concentrates on the top line of each result. The title of your page may be the only thing that a potential visitor sees on Google.

Let me repeat that: The title of your page may be the only thing that a potential visitor sees on Google.

What you don’t want here is some random text that Drupal or Wordpress or your staff web designer has inserted into the title tag. The title should tell the Google search user, in seven or eight words, what the site is about. When I took a hard look at the way KidPub was showing up in search results, I found everything on that first line from ‘I hate Twilight’ to ‘Advice on avoiding homework’ to ‘Welcome!’. Not very marketing-friendly.

I created a ten-word description of what KidPub is and used the Drupal Nodewords module to insert this phrase into all title tags. What you see now in a Google search result is:

KidPub : Publisher of Stories, Books, Poetry For Kids, By Kids

This tells the reader exactly what we do, and it includes keywords that generate significant Google search traffic. KidPub is the first result returned for a search on ‘kids publisher’, for example, and also for ’stories by kids’. There’s no ‘and’ between Books and Poetry because it causes the phrase to exceed the character limit used by Google, which means the phrase ends abruptly with a …

Take some time to look at your page the way the Google web crawler sees it. Your title tags are a significant marketing tool and shouldn’t be ignored.

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