Spending wisely and making the most of your Consultant

So now you're thrilled about doing some site analytics and improving your marketing online. You want to get the best tools and the best capabilities to make it work best for your business. Great! That will put you ahead of the game, but it will also cost you, financially. It all comes down to wise resource management. Say if you have a dedicated person or team, depending on the size of the company, who will be working on this, then what you need to do is minimize on the licences and upgrades, initially picking the minimum required or custom package to meet your needs and spend some on the technical support. Have your people learn as much as they can on their own in order to best utilize the consultants. Consultants could be a great source of information, but only if you use them wisely. So the bottom line is get your people as excited about site marketing as you are, have them go out there and read and learn as much about the background material as they can, then get them the licences to get their hands dirty, and then get them some tech support to make the most of that tool. Don't jump into buying the best top end suite of licences on the market, start with the more affordable one that will meet your needs and make the most of it. You will get more for your buck that way!

This brings me to maximizing your consultants. They have a lot on their schedule, they probably service a number of projects simultaneously, so the less you ask the happier they are. So what you need to do is ask, and ask a lot! But don't just throw questions at them, you'll annoy them. Go do that background research and learn to speak their language, guess who they'll be spending more time on now - you, rather than your competitiors.

So basically to sum this up. Get a good overview and feel of the product you're buying. Don't get carried away with the sales pitch and get the minimum for your needs to maximize your spending (you can always upgrade as you expand and select those upgrades intelligently with all of the acquired knowledge from using a cheapter tool). Then invest the money that you save on the basic necessities on your people to train them up to make the most of that tool, so that you will not be constantly relying on outside consultants. Knowledge is power, so make sure you do your background reading before working with a consultant to make the most of them and pick their brain more than the competition. And then enjoy the fuits of your labor.

If you can't have a dedicated person or team to do the site marketing for you. Then make sure you catch up on the topic to interview your consultant wisely. Learn their world and help them understand your company to make their time and your money most productive. Remember the more you ask the more you learn, but asking the right question is key, so do your homework.

Complexities of the Internet Continued: Focusing on IP address

So hope you’ve been well, as we’re back to the topic of the workings of the internet. Even though it seems to you that we haven’t even talked about “it”, we just spoke about machines communicating…how odd, but how essential!

Let’s go back to the IP address. The broadcast address that we mentioned allows you to communicate with the machines in your subnet and involves delivering a message from one sender to many recipients. This broadcast is 'limited' in that it does not reach every node on the Internet, only nodes on the subnet. Also, it is not of much use for you as a site marketer since you can't "see it", since only the people in the subnet can. MAC address on the other hand, also known as a physical address, is particular to your network card in your computer. So if you know the MAC address you know the exact machine, that’s great, but the only people who can see it are the ones on the subnet. So it doesn’t work for you as a marketer tracking to see what machines are communicating with your servers where your website is located. All you see requesting your link is the router IP address. This is where the ISP comes in, they loan you the router IP address. This is the only way you can connect to other machines and read this current blog. When you type http://sitemarketingandanalytics.blogspot.com/ you are requesting the blogger.com server to display this page that you are currently reading on the machine that you are using identified by the IP address loaned to you by your ISP. I am emphasizing loaned to you here, because you don’t own your router IP address, your ISP does. IP address you are loaned could change and reallocated to another user, unless you are operating within a network where having a static IP address is critical. An example of such network would be a university, where the network administrators are required to track all of the user’s activity in case suspicious or inappropriate activity needs to be tracked to the culprit.

ISPs generally make it easier on themselves and keep a log of loaned addresses, but allocate them dynamically. They do that for a simple reason – more business. If they have 1000 subscribers and only a block of 100 IP addresses, then can reallocated to addresses for people to connect to the internet at different times and keep everyone happy. This is just an example, and those numbers or ratios should not be taken seriously. And if you do track your IP address, you’ll see that it is relatively stable unless there is a power outage or administrative work done by your ISP that may cause it to be reallocated.

So now we know that an internet is a network of networks and we communicate through routers with other networks using IP “virtual” addresses. We also know what an IP address is and how it is used? But, how do we interpret it and how can we use it to understand our online customers? Can we use it to show customized offers to our customers and improve their experience? To have them want to come back and visit our website again, since it was just so easy to use? We'll talk about it tomorrow.

Have you ever wondered about the complexity of the Internet?

So, what is the internet? We use it all the time, we practically can't live without it, but how many of us actually "know" how it works?

The best way to describe this mysterious beast is to see at as a network of networks, none more superior than the other, but all interconnected, like a web, no pun intended. This is the beauty of it, and this is what makes any little guy out there powerful. Everyone can access it and everyone can voice their opinion.

Being a techie, here is a visualization or a simple schematic of one little "subnet" within the "net".

This schematic could represent your home situation or office. Say if you have two computers at home and you use cable to connect to the internet. Well, then you have two computers in your so called "subnet", your two machines can communicate directly to each other using a so called "broadcast address". However, if one of your machines would like to communicate to your friend next door or another "subnet" then you have to go through the "router", which is able to send messages to someone outside of your own "subnet. So the takeaway is this, when you communicate within the subnetwork you use a "broadcast address" and the two machines could see each others machine's IP addresses and MAC or physical address; however, when you are communicating with someone outside your subnet, all their machine sees is your router IP address and same for you - your machine only sees their router's IP address. So if you'd like to know what your router's IP address, you can do that by going to www.whatismyip.com to find out.

Here we've been talking about a common home cable connection, or say dial-up, DSL, and the likes where you use a modem. However, the structure doesn't change when you look at a big corporation with their own network - it is just the same, a network of networks where routers are just dedicated Sisco routers or it could just be a computer that you modify to work as a router. The scale is larger, but the communication mechanism stays the same. When you are at home, your router is owned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), when you're in a big corporate office, your router is owned by your corporation's own network. It has two main functions send and receive packets of information and serve as a firewall to protect your computers connected to it. It is critical to realize how simple this is even though it may initially seem very confusing.

So we mentioned a machine IP address, MAC or physical address, and the router IP address. So you'd think there will be no difference between these, but there is! And we'll talk about that tomorrow.

Changing Careers?

If you're thinking about changing careers - good for you! There is only one life to live and lots of things out there to try. Well, of course if you believe in reincarnation, that's a whole different story, worrying about who you might come back as, but for me knowing I only have so much time, I have to make the most of it.

Changing careers is a challenging thing though, not for faint hearted, but an exciting experience. You go in, diving right into the deep, feeling like you've got the ground pulled from beneath you, no specific knowledge, experience or expertise to back you up or to make you a name. Once a go-to-person, now just a new person on the block. Humbling experience for sure. Starting out from a blank canvas, but with your mind and those soft and transferable skills with you. Those are essential and extremely valuable, since that's what's going to make you successfull in the new role. And that's probably what got you that job in the new field in the first place.

So here I am five and a half months into my brand new job and a brand new career, feel pretty settled in, humbling stage has passed, now filled with a certain sense of accomplishment, and still excited to learn. So my new job has to do the workings of the internet, site marketing, analytics, website optimization, and all the wonderful things that the online world has to offer to a savvy businessman or woman. Lots of things to learn, lots to talk about. I might be a career changer diving into this, but I'm along for the ride with people who are switching from traditional marketing to the new marketing...I wonder which switch is harder. I vote for the latter, since I'm luckily riding on those transferable skills, lots of analytics, technology, and data experience on my side.