In this presentation, Mike Moran addresses a Danish hosting‑industry audience, explaining that internet marketing is fundamentally the same as traditional marketing—targeting, positioning, and messaging—but the tactics have shifted to online channels. He stresses the need for hosting providers to differentiate themselves by understanding specific market segments and crafting unique value propositions rather than competing solely on price. Moran walks through a three‑step search‑marketing framework: selecting the right keywords (including early‑stage topics like domain‑name advice), ensuring content is helpful, well‑optimized, and link‑worthy, and then achieving visibility through organic rankings or paid search while measuring ROI to set appropriate bids. He highlights the importance of content‑driven SEO, using examples such as detailed guides that attract links and social bookmarks. The talk then shifts to social media, categorizing platforms (content‑based, personality‑based, interest‑based, fantasy‑based) and offering practical advice on how hosting companies can use each category—or ignore it—while emphasizing authentic community engagement over blatant promotion. Moran illustrates the power of honest crisis communication with DreamHost’s public apology post, showing how transparency can turn a disaster into customer loyalty. Throughout, he blends strategic concepts with concrete tactics, urging the audience to adopt measurable, customer‑centric marketing practices in the Web 2.0 era.
Chapters
First, I really want to just thank you for bearing with me doing this in English. It would be really bad if I tried to do it in Danish. You'd learn a lot less. And— but I mean, honestly, I'm a very typical American who— I can speak any language as long as it's English. So as long as you're there with me, then we're going to be okay. But then the thing that's scary is I'm coming here, I mean, I've been to Denmark a few times, but I don't know a whole lot about Denmark. And I also don't know a whole lot about the hosting industry. So, you know, I mean, right here I'm here to waste half an hour for you. I mean, there's really no chance of you learning anything here. But, you know, let's try, let's give it a shot anyway. Maybe something good might happen. Because I do know a lot about internet marketing. Yeah. I want to try and talk to you about it because one of the things that I think is really important is that if you think about how the hosting industry works, every one of your customers is savvy about the internet. It's pretty easy for you. You don't have to ask yourself, geez, I wonder if we should be putting some resources here, or maybe we should be doing more print ads. You don't spend a lot of time asking yourselves that like a lot of businesses do. Right. in some senses, simple. Because internet marketing is so simple, isn't it? I mean, it's— holy crap. All right, there's a lot of stuff, right? I mean, OK, there's a lot of stuff. And if you ever would figure it out, because you might, I mean, it could happen, just by freak, you might figure something out at some point, don't worry, because next week they'll change it. So by then, you won't know anything again. So the good news is that it's really, really painful. The bad news is that it only gets worse. I mean, every week there's some other thing. I mean, if I am trying to figure out a way I could set up my email spam filter so all new social network invitations go there. I mean, I'm in enough social networks. I mean, if you want to friend me on one I'm already on, that's great. But I really don't want to join any more. I already got one. It's very nice. Thank you. I mean, I don't want to hear about your social network and yours. And we've got another one here. I mean, I'm done with it. I don't know how to even be in the ones I'm in. And so what happens is that we kind of get overwhelmed. And we kind of get to the point where even those of us who understand the technology— I mean, when I was at IBM, I was a distinguished engineer. So it's a real highfalutin title, which meant I used to know things. And so I understood a lot of this technology. I knew what it was about. But it didn't make it any easier for me when I was talking to a client to try and say to them, here's what you should do. Here's exactly the right thing for you. Because honestly, I didn't know. The best I could do was say, you should try things. Here's something I think you should try. Here's something I think you should try. Here's something I think you should try. And if you set up the right feedback loops, then you can see which ones are working. And so to me, that's really what we need to think about. Because the thing I think that overwhelms people about this is that they forget that internet marketing is more about marketing than the internet. The things that have always been true in marketing, they're still true. And so what we want to do is we want to think about what is marketing about? So marketing is about the fact that you have to target your market. You have to know which market segments you're going for. You have to understand who the people are that you think you can persuade. And so now, all these— everybody sitting here, the people sitting next to you, the people sitting in the row after you, they're all in the same business you are. So you're all competitors. But I would argue that you're probably not all going for the exact same customers. Each of you knows that you have to figure out how to differentiate your business. You have to understand what you are especially good at. So you can't just say, I'm trying to go after anybody who needs a hosting company. Well, I mean, you can say that, but I think that's not the most successful approach. Especially on the internet, you need to differentiate yourself. Because what is the difference between your service and someone else's service? If the only thing is price, that's pretty bad, because only one company wins that one. Right? What you really need to think about is, why is your hosting different and better for a particular market segment of people. That's what you really need to think about. And guess what? Marketing's always been that way. It's always— it has nothing to do with the internet. It has to do with— that's how marketing works. And so you have to understand what that market segment's looking for, and then what you need to do is figure out how you're gonna connect with a message that will motivate them to work with you. And that's what marketing has always been about. The fact that it's on the internet does not change any of that. The laws of marketing have not been repealed by Web 2.0, or Web 3.0, or Web 7.9, or anything else that they come out with. It doesn't make any difference, because you still need to know who your customers are. You need to know where they are. You need to know how you're going to attract them. It's the same thing that you've always had to do. There's nothing different about this, except the way that you do it. Right? So the way that you do it has changed. It used to be that marketing was about just plastering things everywhere, right? You wanted your message on a billboard. You wanted it hanging above the urinal in the bathroom. You wanted it anywhere someone would be. You wanted to make sure that they were seeing your message, right? And we don't do that anymore. It's not that it doesn't work, because it still works, but it doesn't work as well as it used to, and we have other alternatives that work better. And so the question for you is, where do your customers hang out? And how are you going to get them to give you permission to sell to them? Right? How are you going to get them to agree to spend a few minutes understanding what your message is? How are you going to get them to opt in? Right? Are they going to subscribe to a blog? Are they going to opt into your email? Are they going to search? When they're searching, they're essentially raising their hands and saying, I am interested in being sold to right now. And so the question is, are you there? Is your message there when they raise their hand? It's different from other kinds of marketing. Other kinds of marketing, you put an ad in a magazine. I mean, it might work, but you have no way of knowing whether any individual person reading that magazine is interested in hosting services at that moment or not. They might be, they might not. You hope maybe if they're not, they might remember your name for the next time they are. But that's about all you get. When you think about search, for example, they're actually telling you, no, right now. Now. Now. Come on. Here. I'm waiting. I'm waiting. Tell me who's got the best. I want to know. This is the exact moment that they're ready to be persuaded. That's different from the kinds of marketing we've seen before. So marketing isn't different. But some of the ways that you do marketing are different. And that isn't anything that's new to marketing. Marketing has changed as technology has changed all through the years. It's different to market on television than it was on radio. It's different to market on radio than it was in print. All the principles are still the same, but there are things about it that you have to understand. And the web isn't any different than that. So there are differences in the way that you go about marketing, But the essential rules of marketing are the same as they were. One of the things that's really cool, especially for this audience, is that it used to be that in order to do marketing, you had to know what media you were gonna use that would encapsulate your audience. So what media was going to get this? So what magazine, what television program? And guess what? What television program is really the right one for hosting Services? Yeah, right. None. Right? And so a lot of industries, like yours, the old kind of marketing didn't really work at all. There was no way to reach people then. So you were doing things like trade shows and tech magazines. I mean, there were other ways that you were trying to do things. But now, on the internet, you can really segment the right people. You can target even the smallest group. The other thing that's interesting is you can measure absolutely everything. I mean, if you're working with people who've grown up with brand marketing, where they were doing commercials that tell you how these large companies are kind to animals and all sorts of wonderful things about them to make you kind of feel good, and you get kind of a little gushy inside, and oh yeah, I kind of like them. But did they ever do anything based on that? If a nickel would roll in under the door, or a kroner— can you have kroners roll in under the door? I don't know. If any money would ever come over the transom, Because of anything that that commercial did, you'd never know. You have no way to tie those feel-good, brand awareness, loveliness messages. You have no way to know whether they actually drove any business or not. The difference with the web is that it's really about direct marketing where you do know. You can measure everything that happens. What are the kinds of search marketing? There's organic, there's paid. A lot of people spend time in paid search. And that's good. Paid search is good. But it's only good if you know how much it's worth to get a new customer to come to your site. And so that's about measurement. So if you don't know how much you, on average, make every time a new visitor comes to your site, because you don't really know what percentage of them convert, and you're not exactly sure how much profit you make on each one of them, You really don't know what to bid. You can take a guess. You can try it, but you might be bidding too high. You might be bidding too low. You don't really know. Unless you've done the math to understand who it is that you're getting, what they buy, how much they spend, you don't really know whether you're spending the right amount to attract customers or not. For organic search, you have a different problem. Now, you guys are unlikely to have the problems associated with organic search. You're very tech savvy. I bet all of your sites are spidered properly. So you know what things to do and not do. So you guys understand that stuff. But it still takes work. It's still effort. It may not cost anything, but it's still time on your part. It's attention that you have to devote to it. It's either you or someone who works for you that has to focus on this. And so in that sense, it does take some time. It does take some resources. And you have to understand what your return is on that. Because otherwise, how do you know when you're done? You know, I'm going to keep doing that work on optimizing my search. Why? Well, because I think there's more things to do. There's still titles I could make better, and I still could get more links to that page, and I could still do this. Well, how do you know when you're done? I mean, you could do that forever. How do you know you shouldn't be working on something else? The only way you know these things is if you know what your return on investment is. And that's critically important. So I wrote a— I co-wrote a 700-page book on search marketing, and here it is. So we might kind of gloss over the details just a touch. It might not be as deep. But the 3 steps are choosing your keywords, which means knowing what it is that your potential customers search for. That one sounds simple. So I mean, yeah, they search for hosting services. They search for web hosting. Yeah, they do. But I bet they search for a lot of other things too. And so the question is, are there ways that you could hook customers maybe a little earlier in the process than when they're at the point of saying hosting services? So for example, suppose you tried to write some really, really helpful information About how to pick a domain name. I mean, you wrote 2, 3, 4 pages. All it was about was how to pick a domain name. What are the things you should think about? How much you're likely to pay for it if it's one that someone owns already? How you could acquire one that's owned already? And you guys know this stuff. You all understand this. You've done it 20 times. That's right. You know more about— you've forgotten more about choosing a domain name than I'll ever know. Right? I mean, you, you've got this down. But it's something that every one of your customers does right before they decide to pick a host, isn't it? And suppose they found your site then, and they were reading about all this stuff about how you choose a domain name. They're getting all this helpful information from you. Then at the bottom, you have a little thing that says, yeah, by the way, when you pick the domain name and you're ready to host, click here. Or, if you want us to arrange to register the domain name for you, click here. That may not be legal in this country, but I know you have a centralized registry. You get the idea. The idea is, can you get some of these customers even before they're at the point of saying that they're ready to work with you and prove yourself to be an expert in this space? And prove yourself to be trustworthy and helpful and the kind of person who doesn't mind putting a lot of information out, even that would hold their hand through the process. Because that's what some of them need. So if that's what your differentiator is, you're going to give better service, you're going to explain things to the newbie, that would be a really good thing to do. Right? And that's a different set of keywords than the ones that you may be going for. Might be an expanded set. Then you have to figure out how to get seen. Getting seen in organic is as simple as putting those kinds of pages out there, making sure that you're optimized, you're spidered, all that kind of stuff. That's how you get into the index. That's how it shows up. For paid, it just means putting in an ad for that. If you know how to put down a credit card, you're pretty much able to get seen. This is not a high skill area. Right? Now the next part is kind of tough, which is getting ranked. It's one thing for you to be in the search index or be in the ad database. The other thing is how are you going to get a high enough ranking so that people will see you and act on you? And so for paid, it's actually fairly simple. If you write good enough copy that has a high click-through rate, if you bid high enough, you're going to be up there. With organic, you know what you have to do. You have to write content that's better, more interesting, Has the keywords in it, sure, optimized for that, but more important, how many links are you gonna get? Is the content really, really strong? And maybe make sure the content isn't so salesy. If it's content that's like right out of your sales catalog and it's sell, sell, sell, here's what we have, we have this many gigabytes, this many megabytes, this many something else bytes. I mean, you got all that stuff in there, that's great, but it's just sell, sell, sell. Nobody's gonna link to that. 'Cause nobody, nobody gives a crap about your product. They just don't. They don't care. Nobody's gonna link to that. They'll link to that information I talked about earlier. Tips on how to choose a hosting service, tips on how to pick a domain name, all sorts of helpful information. You'll get links for that. And that's a way to get seen. And then you want to get clicked. So for paid, you know, you keep optimizing your title and your copy for your call to action. With organic, you want to make sure that the titles on your page have a call to action, but you also want to optimize your snippets. So if you know what words are being searched for, for that page, write your page copy so that the amount of information that's being shown on the screen under your title is something that's going to cause people to click through. And that's really what the secret is for search marketing. And you know how to do this stuff. You guys are more capable of doing this than anybody. But I would bet that you're also in an extremely competitive space because you all know how to do it. It's really hard. So that's why you have to start branching out a bit. That's why you have to start thinking about being helpful and going into other areas of the sale besides just at the moment that they're trying to buy hosting services. That's a way for you to differentiate yourself. Oh, here we go. It did start going. Okay. So I think you need search marketing. What do you think? I mean, is there anybody who isn't focused on search marketing right now? Yeah, that's what I thought. So they all buy online. That's how they all found you. And it's also how they're going to find the company they replace you with someday, isn't it? Mm-hmm. So in some sense, it's almost defensive, that you need to be there so that if they ever get really annoyed, you have a way of coming back and saying, hey, remember me? I can do this. I also want to talk a little bit about social media. Are any of you doing social media right now? I know it's relatively new in Denmark. Anybody working on it? Some of you, about maybe 20%. I think this is another area that's really important. This is not any different than public relations. This is just cheaper public relations. It's public relations where you don't have to deal with the media. You just get your customers to pass the message along for you. So we like to— because we're geeks, we need to make up new words for things people already understand. So instead of calling it word-of-mouth marketing, we had to call it viral marketing. It doesn't sound like something very appealing to me. I don't really want to catch any marketing. But this is how it really works. And what's important is that you actually are getting that message to move faster and faster. The message spreads online. Far faster than it does offline. And that's really, really important. And how many of you are familiar with the concept of the wisdom of crowds? So if you have things like, you know, folksonomies, if you have things like bookmarks, what happens is that people tend to tag things with the same kinds of words over and over again, and then a consensus emerges about what something's about. So if you can get content that's tagged on Delicious or Digg, right, if you can put buttons at the bottom of your pages that says, tag it. If you've written that kind of helpful content I talked about before, not only will it attract searches for things that you weren't getting searches before, not only will it attract links because it's helpful content that people want to expose their readers to, but it will also attract social search, social bookmarking. And that will give you another way of being seen. So let's look at the different kinds of social media, and let's try and categorize them. Because then you can make a decision that says, I think things in a certain category might make sense for me, let me look at those, instead of saying, oh man, another social media thing, what does this one do? Right? So you don't have to look at it that way. So if you look at content-based social media, this is all the kinds of things that depend on you creating content. So if you think people don't believe that your servers are secure, do a video. where you show exactly what the physical security is. You know, here, everything's locked in cages. Nobody can get at it. We have— our employees have access this way. We have outsourced it to a large hosting company that does this, that, and the other thing. Whatever it is you want to tell people, show them instead of telling them. Because they'll believe what they see. They usually don't believe what they hear. Right? So show them the things that you want them to think about you. And so blogs are really important. Any of these kinds of things can be good for your business depending on what kind of business you're running, depending on whether— what kind of customers you're going for. You know, you could have one of your techies write a blog that's all about server performance or bandwidth utilization or redundancy and failover or whatever it is that they're expert in, and that will attract your customers who are interested in those things. So if you're differentiating based on those kinds of technical differences, that gives you a hook to explain yourself and set yourself up as an expert. So my old company, IBM, used YouTube. I mean, it seems stupid, right? I mean, you take a picture of a server, it just kind of lays there. It doesn't really do anything, right? I mean, this doesn't seem very video-centric. Well, what did they do? They started doing software demos. Why? Because the last thing you want is to be in the salesman's Rolodex, calling every week saying, hey, have you thought again about QED Wiki? I mean, you don't want to be on the other end of that phone call. And so you don't want to ask the salesman to come out and do a demo for you. Because you might find out in 5 minutes it isn't what you wanted. So instead, thousands and thousands of people have looked at demos online. Then when they're interested in one, they call the salesperson. It's better for the salesperson, because they're not wasting their time on sales calls that aren't going to close. And it's better for the customer too. So if you have things that you can demonstrate in that way— so maybe some of those software tools that you give away with your hosting, That's just this big list on a web page. Why don't you do demos of some of them so people understand what the value is? I think it could really help. So if you don't think this stuff works, this is actually an incredibly non-techie person who I know, who in Bergen County, New Jersey, in the States, she has the number 1 ranking for Bergen County psychotherapist. And you know how she did it? She created a free page on Squidoo. Free. One page. Her call to action is her phone number. So how'd that work? The way it worked is she wrote good content. It was the best content for that query. It comes up. And so if you can find places where it's not competitive, it's really easy to write content. I mean, you already have a website. It's got a domain. It's got longevity. The search engines will like it even more than they like this stuff. So you have to find content that your customers are interested in that other people aren't talking about yet. that the other companies haven't gotten onto yet. So personality-based social media. A lot of people are talking about things like LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook. I don't see that you would use this at all in this industry. I would say, unless you guys have some real unique idea, I would ignore it. I mean, if you were a consulting company and you have consultants that go out and, and work with people, and those individual consultants want to have pages, and that's a way to get business, that makes sense to me. But if you're a pure hosting services company, I mean, most of them don't care who's working there, right? They want to know what your services are, what's the phone number for me to call, what's the email address, how do I get support, where are my metrics reports, and that's what they care about. They don't need to see you on Facebook. Interest-based social media. I think this is a really big opportunity for hosting companies. So if you're a hosting company, you know that there are forums out there everywhere. There are message boards everywhere with people debating What— or asking questions. Who's the right web host for me? What's the right thing for me to do? Who's having good luck with their web host and who isn't? If you have people that are out haunting these boards, not because they're trying to be in people's face and sell them on your company, but because they're legitimately trying to help them. They're out there answering questions. They're being a resource to the community. It's going to make a big impression. People are going to say, well, if that company is so nice that even when we're not their customer yet they answer our questions, I wonder how much they must do for me when I am their customer. If your differentiation is on customer service, you ought to be out here. This is a place for you to be because it'll let people see that you are an expert in the things that you're talking about. Fantasy-based. I don't know if there's any opportunity here. So maybe there is, but I don't know that opening up an island on Second Life makes any sense. I mean, it's fairly expensive. I'm not sure the people you're looking for necessarily hang out there. I'm not sure what kind of money you'd make doing that. But for some businesses, these things make sense. And so maybe you have some kind of niche where it makes sense for you. I don't know. But for me, mostly I'd think about hosting industry. I'd say, eh, probably not there. Not sure I'd go there. And that's why categorizing these things is so important. That's why understanding this is this kind, this is this kind, this is this other kind, because that can help you make a decision. So when Twitter comes along, you can say, oh, that seems a lot like message boards. So I think if my service people were out on the message boards, I think they should probably be monitoring Twitter too. So as new things come along, you can kind of put them in a category. And you've already made a decision about how you're dealing with that category. So what don't you do? Don't submit your own content to Digg and Delicious and all that stuff. Don't bother doing that. Let your customers do that. Don't fool around with this stuff. Don't fake your own identity. Don't go on the message boards and badmouth other companies because you're trying to act like you're a customer of theirs that's unhappy. Don't do stuff like that because that stuff inevitably gets found out. It gets found out and you end up looking much worse after you do that. So if it's the kind of thing that you wouldn't want people to know you were doing, my advice is just don't do it. It's the easiest way for them to never find out. Just don't do stuff like that. Because somebody's going to tell someday. If it starts to work, that's when people are going to tell. It could be some disgruntled employee of yours who leaves and knew about it. Somebody's going to think on you. And they're only going to do it when the stuff is really working well. When you do all this stuff and it doesn't work, then you get away with it. And you tell yourself, oh, see, you can get away with this stuff. But it actually didn't work. That's why you got away with it. As soon as it starts to work, then all of a sudden people have a motivation to tell on you. And then they do. And you end up looking way worse than if you'd never done that stuff in the first place. So remember that social media is a community. It is a group of people. And they don't want to be marketed to. So think about how— almost like try to be a missionary to the community. So if you think about it, if you dropped into a third world country, and your idea of how you were going to convert them was, you're all going to hell unless you go to church, 10 o'clock on Sunday in the big hut, right? That's probably not going to win any converts. So similarly, if you show up in social media and say, we have the best web hosting, it's the cheapest, the best, our customers love us, They're going to say, get out of here. We're not interested in you. If, on the other hand, the missionary comes in and looks around and says, what kind of problems do these people have? It looks like they don't have potable water. I know how to dig a well. Let me help them dig a well. And they go in and they start helping. They start assisting people just because they're people and they're going to help them. And what happens is, after not too long a time, people start asking the missionary, So why are you here? Why did you come here? Why are you here helping us? There's nothing in it for you. And then you get to tell them why you're here. And then they might convert, right? Because then you, then you're telling them, this is the reason I'm here, and I can tell you all about my motivation. And now they might listen to you. And the same thing is true in social media. If you go in and you try and help people, you solve their problems, even solve the problems they have with your competitors, right? Help them. Eventually, they may decide they'd rather be working with you. But it's not because you're selling them, and it's not because you're saying lousy things about the competition. It's because you're just being yourself, and you're being helpful, and you're being a good person. And so they decide they'd like to work with a good person. And I think that's the kind of thing that you want to remember. So what does this have to do with hosting? Right? I mean, geez, what about hosting? So I want to just tell you a quick story before we have the break. Suppose you're in a really bad situation. Servers have been going down, network got cut, your outsourcer's screwing up, and you really blew it for a couple of weeks. What would you do? Here's what one company did. This was their blog post. This is a company called DreamHost. It's a web hosting service. They had this huge disaster post where they apologized to all their customers. They said, this is what kind of week we've had. It's been horrible. We screwed it up. We're sorry. This is what they wrote. We've had nothing but troubles, large troubles the last 2 weeks. Some of these things were beyond our control. Some of them weren't. They were just our fault. We screwed it up for you. We're really, really sorry. What I want to do is explain to you everything that happened and tell you what we're doing so this will never happen to you again. That was their blog post. I mean, would you guys have the guts to do that? No. So you know what happened after that? These are the comments they got. Can't believe that a company would actually do this. I was ready to leave until I saw this blog post. And I said, you know what? I'm going to give them another chance. Read them. This is what they said. I have to say, without this post, I'd be out of here. I'm rooting for you. You know what else happened? It got picked up by the blogosphere. They got enormous business after this. Why? Because they were honest. They were real. They said, we screwed up, we're sorry, we're fixing it. And people were so used to companies just not even responding when something goes wrong, right? Saying, no, no, nothing's happened, must be on your end. Sorry, sorry. And meanwhile, they're running around trying to fix everything, right? And they're used to being treated that way. And so someone comes along who just treats them as human beings, And all of a sudden, they're heroes. So I know I had a lot to say, but luckily I wrote it all down. So I think you're getting a copy of Do It Wrong quickly. We'll take a few minutes of a break. Then I'll come back and talk to you some more about how Web 2.0 is affecting marketing. Thanks a lot. Great demo.
