A little Gem from DoshDosh:

Imagine you’re a email spammer. Your strategy is to send out thousands of unsolicited emails everyday hoping that some unassuming individual will purchase your product or inadvertently get infected by your malware/virus, so you can phish for credit card and banking details.

So here’s the situation. You’re dealing with millions of people whom you don’t know. You might not even know their age and gender, the basic demographic yardsticks. You can data mine email archives on a zombie computer to create personalized and convincing email messages but you’re always going to be dealing with a barrier of not-enough-trust.

You don’t know the audience well. So how do you increase the chance that they’ll even open up your email and clickthrough on the links within it? By treading on common ground and leading with the familiar. People might not know who you are but they know Angelina Jolie, who incidentally is the most popular celebrity name used by email spammers.

2.28% of all emails sent in July 2008 contained her name in the subject field. As a personality famous worldwide, she’s an alluring referential point spammers use to breach the walls of unsavvy targets. The familiar is powerful. That’s why you’ll see domain urls that are almost identical to official institutions or receive emails that use the addresses of people you know.

But that’s not all, spammers also love to use current events as bait. Events like political elections, conflicts between nations and major sports events like the Olympics are all fodder used to hook unassuming users into clicking on links or videos loaded with Trojan viruses.

When you want to get someone to do something, you need to arouse their interest first. You might not know every single person who reads your site, but that’s fine. Because you do know what they are generally familiar with. Use those references to bridge the gap and connect.

Every single blog post or salesletter you write can be filled with comparisons, analogies, metaphors, name-drops, references and citations that make your offer/idea more vivid. More familiar. More enticing. So focus on getting your audience interested first, because if they tune out right from the start, they’ll never absorb your pitch or give you a second chance.

When you build your website, or when you launch an online business, a problem that you may have not anticipated becomes apparent. Where do you get content to put in your new website? We all know that good compelling content is what makes or breaks a site, right? So where can you get it?

1. Steal it
This is easy. Just Google any random topic and you will find thousands of places where you can steal from. Copy-paste and you’re done. Easy peasy. Except it does not work and is a little stupid in this day and age.

Sadly, it is worth noting that a significant number of clients who I have worked with before think this is what they need.

2. User-generated content
The idea here is that you hope people will come to your website and entertain themselves while at the same time filling your website with content. This approach has worked for many websites out there but it probably will not work for you. Sawa?

Sturgeon’s Law says that 90% of everything is garbage. This is even more true when you try to deal with user generated content.

Traditionally in Kenya, sites that depend on user generated content do not fair well at all. This is how zuqka died despite being backed by a whole lot of money. Mgangagenge expounds on this:

…UGC needs 24-hour surveillance of user behaviour to monitor usage trends, offensive content, and most of all, SPAM. Once you neglect a UGC site, it either degenerates into a flame war a la mashada, a porn site a la KenyanList/eastafricantube, or a SPAM farm a la Zuqka.

3. Mass Semi-Amateur Content
You know www.e-how.com? This is their content generation strategy of choice. Basically what you do is pay an army of underpaid freelancers to write articles for your website in mass. Learn more.

Of course the quality of content will be higher than user generated content but I personally do not feel that the difference in quality is very pronounced. I would not recommend this for your website.

Besides, Google is clamping down hard on this. Be warned.

4. Using Talented Expert Writers
In theory, this sounds really good. You can hire expert “artists” to write beautiful stuff, polishing every little bit to perfection. If you can do this consistently, your site will be known for its quality, well researched content. I would recommend this, but I feel it may be too expensive for almost everybody. I am tempted to call this the “New York Times” (NYT) approach.

Speaking of which, have you had a look at the NYT financial performance lately? If the NYT brand cannot make this method work, what makes you think it will be sustainable for your relatively small brand? Pole.

5. Scalable Content Creation
If you are going to be able to generate content that is high quality yet affordable and which advances your business goals then you will have to get creative.

A while back Ok Cupid published an article titled “How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get“. Please have a look at that article again – they received thousands of comments and no doubt many other websites talked about it.

Ok Cupid did something very smart. They used a kawaida user survey to publish an interesting, easily consumable, easily share-able piece of content. Brilliant! And you know what? Ok Cupid can do this over and over again because they already have the tools in place. All they need to do is come at it from a different angle and be the at the top of the social news sites again.

What’s the lesson here?

As a business you should strive to collect (or to be privy to) unique information. In almost every business imaginable, you can collect unique information and with just a bit of creativity whip it into amazing content for your website.

Are you a wedding planner? Whats the most comment color themes at your weddings?; Do you sell spare parts? What item breaks down the most? How can people take care of it better?; Do you sell cakes? Why not share unique recipes? What is bought most often? etc etc

The idea is that if you run any business, stuff that you do every day can be turned into simple and interesting content for your website.

If you have not yet started collection interesting data, you can start analyzing existing data. The recent Open Data movement should get you started! Keep in mind that anyone else can do this, though, so use it as a temporary solution while you build your own unique stuff.

We all want our names, companies and products to come up when you search for them on Google, right? This is what SEO.; Search Engine Optimization – the art and science of making sure you are found when people search on Google and other search engines.

I get clients asking me for this everyday. The problem is, of course, no one knows how this works. A while back an angry client was up in arms for making their brand seem “cheap”. They could not understand why their brand did not come up when you searched for certain words on Google. (In fact, they went on to call Google Kenya so as to make a complaint). But I digress…

How do you make you site pop up first in the search engine results pages? You can click here to read a detailed answer. Basically, what you need to do is to prove to Google that your website is relevant to the topic being searched and important relative to other websites.

If you company is ABC Ltd and your main competitor is XYZ Ltd, it is fair to assume that you’d both get pretty good websites. After a (hopefully short) while you would both realise that it is important to be found on Google and you would start investigating this. The first thing you’ll likely come across is that you have to optimize your websites. This is sometimes called “on page” SEO. Everyone does it perfectly (or they should!).

Going back to our example, the CEOs of XYZ and ABC would both ensure that their on page SEO is done perfectly if they are reasonably good as CEOs. What next? How does one get an advantage over the other as far as SEO goes? If you ask me, gains from on page SEO are marginal because everyone does it well. The important part of SEO is what you do after you have optimized your website.

Invariably, the other part of SEO can be boiled down to one thing: making sure that as many other websites as possible point a link to your own website. This works this way: when example.com publishes a link to your company’s website, it is taken to mean that example.com is voting for your site’s importance. The more such links you can get, the better!

The problem is that getting these links is expensive and/or time-consuming.

So how do you do this in a scalable way?

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This post is based on statistics of visitors to www.likechapaaa.com of the period January 2011 to January 2012. The data represents the operating systems and browsers used by the people who visited Like Chapaa in the year 2011. Here’s a nice little graph for you:

PC Operating systems
Of course it is no surprise that Windows is far and away the most popular operating system in Kenya. But it was VERY surprising to me that there seems to be more Mac users than there are Linux users. Does this seem strange to you?

1. Windows – 74.31%
2. Macintosh – 3.88%
3. Linux – 1.76%

I haven’t taken mobile into account above, see blow.

Mobile Operating systems
As you can see in the graphs, the leading mobile operating system is “not set”. I will assume that this can be attributed to the “kawa” phones such as your Nokias, Samsungs and whatnot – i.e. “feature phones”. These feature phones contribute a whopping 11.46% of the visitors to Like Chapaa.

It is interesting to note that the Android operating system is at a respectable 2.71%

1. Feature phones – 11.46%
2. Android – 2.71%

According to this data set, the most popular mobile operating system in Kenya:

1. Symbian OS
2. Unknown
3. Android
4. Samsung
5. Sony Ericsson
6. iOS
7. Blackberry
8. Windows mobile

Most Popular Browser
Firefox is the most popular browser with Internet Explorer coming in second and Google Chrome third. Interestingly, the lead that Firefox has is huge, being more than double its nearest competitor. Another interesting thing is that Google Chrome is almost at par with Internet explorer.

To be honest, these stats are very much unexpected. Globally, the most popular browser by a huge margin is Internet explorer. Perhaps this means that visitors to Like Chapaa are more ‘sophisticated’ when compared to the average Internet user.

1. Firefox – 40.68%
2. Internet Explorer – 17.20%
3. Chrome – 16.28%
4. Safari – 2.70%
5. Opera – 1.91%

Mobile Vs Desktop
It is interesting to note that Mobile visits were at 14.17% only. I’m sure we have all heard that “mobile is the future of Africa”. I agree with that statement to some extent, but the data just does not seem to back it up, does it?

Like Chapaa is an “information/”news” type of website and I attribute the relatively high number of mobile visitors to this fact. I would argue that if you look at the visitor stats of a normal company website, you would get much fewer numbers of mobile visitors.

What does this mean? I am not sure, but, to me, clearly personal computers are still the dominant Internet device among Kenyans. Further to this, if you are building your company website do not put a significant amount of resources into developing a “mobile” version (unless you can afford it).

What do you think of all this?