Episode 9: Three Ways in Which Business Hurt Themselves in Online Marketing

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Episode 9: Three Ways in Which Business Hurt Themselves in Online Marketing

In this episode, I speak with Darcy Knapp, who is an Search Engine Optimization Expert and consultant, about the issues that businesses have in marketing themselves online, especially in search engine optimization.

One issue that we touch on is using competitor’s trademarks for metadata, which is a bad idea.  From a practical standpoint, Darcy points out the difficulty in lowering online marketing prices if a business uses competitors’ trademarks.  From a legal standpoint, the issue is that using competitors’ trademarks can lead to an infringement lawsuit.

Here is a lightly-edited transcript of the episode:

Intro:
It’s the Law and Business podcast hosted by Anthony Verna. We tackle the hard issues where law and business intersect to help you understand your business’ legal obligations better. Anthony’s law practice is focused on trademark, copyright, other intellectual property and advertising and promotion law. You can contact him at anthony@vernalaw.com and at 914-908-6757. And now, the Law and Business podcast.

Anthony Verna:
Welcome to the Law and Business podcast. I’m Anthony Verna. I am here with Darcy Knapp. How are you doing, Darcy?

Darcy Knapp:
Doing fabulous, Anthony. Glad to be here.

Anthony Verna:
Fantastic. Good. Well thank you for calling in. And how can everybody find you? Let’s plug you first.

Darcy Knapp:
Just Google me. I’m everywhere.

Anthony Verna:
Yeah.

Darcy Knapp:
Darcy Knapp –  K N A P P You’ll find one of my various iterations out there. No problem.

Anthony Verna:
Fantastic. Darcy-

Darcy Knapp:
If they want to call me, if I’m on the phone, like right now, you’re just gonna get my service, so  keep trying. You’ll get me.

Anthony Verna:
Darcy, you’re an SEO expert for lack of a shorter phrase.

Darcy Knapp:
That’s pretty short.

Anthony Verna:
Yeah. Well, exactly.

Darcy Knapp:
Yeah, a search engine optimization, online marketing, everything from web design through optimization. How to get your business found. We can make it bigger, better, faster, stronger.

Anthony Verna:
So let’s start here. Let’s start with a couple mistakes that businesses generally make in either getting a website up or doing online marketing. How does that sound?

Darcy Knapp: I can give you the biggest mistake.

Anthony Verna:
Go ahead. Let’s start there.

Darcy Knapp:
People start with a concept. They named their product. They go through all of their work and they never checked to see if a domain name is available.

Anthony Verna:
All right.

Darcy Knapp:
I can tell you their answer, as well. I put abc.com in the search bar and it didn’t come. Nothing came up, so I assumed it was available. That’s the biggest mistake. It’s the assumption of the name you want is available just because there was no website on it.

Anthony Verna:
Absolutely, yeah. Going to a domain name registrar, they all have a little search box and if you type it in and it’s taken, then it’s taken. And if you type in whatever domain name your dream is and it’s available, then buy it. Exactly. But you know, we’ve got a lot of new extensions coming out, a lot of new top-level domains coming out.
Darcy Knapp:
The only problem you have with a new top level domains, yes, they’re fabulous. But what you have to deal with is if your audience is 35 plus (the target audience for your business), unless you’re targeting college kids, you’re targeting the newly married, the homeowners, the accumulators, we all have embedded muscle memory. We type in the business name and our hands automatically type .com enter [bark! Bark!] Sorry, that’s my four-legged office assistant. She’s now outside. So, where did she bark?

Anthony Verna:
Oh, don’t worry. Just keep going.

Darcy Knapp:
Okay. So, if your target audience is in the accumulating stage of their life, even in the downsizing stages, we all have embedded muscle memory. We have been trained since the Internet first came out to type what we were looking for.com and then our hand automatically clicks enter. You’ve got 20 years before the kids of today become consumers and we’ll be typing .net., .biz,.Anything under the sun.
Anthony Verna:
.auto, .NYC,

Darcy Knapp:
.Guru, .web. Yeah, that’s not anything but the problem is the accumulators of today, the business people you’re trying to target today, we’ve all been trained to type .com enter. You don’t want the .net. You don’t want the .info. You want the .com. As your business grows and expands, you can look at other extensions for branding. And if you’re going to get a trademark, no one else is going to buy your trademark dot anything. But in a perfect world today, to sell to consumers today, you need the .com. If it means it means paying $2,000 to get the .com versus the .net, you need the.com.

Anthony Verna:
And that does relate to what a lot of businesses miss from a legal standpoint. Take choosing a trademark and whether that trademark is the business name or a line of a product, I find that doing the due diligence is a difficult sell to be honest with you. And that a lot of business owners would rather just put their head down and try to do the business. And if there’s trouble later, we’ll then they’ll deal with the trouble down the road rather than…

Darcy Knapp:
And they ended up paying $10,000 to get that .com or $1 million to get that .com once they’ve made their brand success because they didn’t do that first.

Anthony Verna:
Exactly. I think there is not just a cheapness in doing the due diligence, whether it’s a domain name, whether it’s a trademark search, ahead of time. I just think it’s proper business to make sure that the business can actually be branded without any legal issues down the road.

Darcy Knapp:
Oh definitely. Yes. If what you want for a .com is already owned by someone and there are direct competitors, you’ve got a huge problem.

Anthony Verna:
Exactly.

Darcy Knapp:
You’re going to invest all this time, effort, and energy, and money into getting your trademark and because that domain has been owned before your trademark came into existence, you can’t get it. That competitor has it, they own it, they’re working with it. The public’s gonna find that competitor, no matter how well you brand, people go to the search engine, type the brand name in the box and hit enter. They don’t necessarily type .com, .net or dot.anything. If your ABC business, and that’s what I’m typing, I’m going to get the strongest domain name first, which today is the .com.

Anthony Verna:
Let’s talk about, since you mentioned typing a brand name or something similar business name into Google. A lot of businesses, I’m sure, make mistakes trying to do SEO themselves, trying to do it a little cheaply. Obviously, you and I don’t recommend doing anything on your own, you know, hiring an expert.

Darcy Knapp:
If someone’s offering to get you on page one and giving you a guarantee, you just walk away because they’re going to have you on page one for a term, a key phrase that’s seven or eight words long that no one ever searches for. So, you end up on page one of the page nobody sees. There’s no ROI. If you can’t get ROI out of the proposition, don’t spend the money.

Anthony Verna:
And when you say that companies like that look to put a seven word phrase in, let me look at the converse of that. Are you saying that companies should be looking at one- to three-word phrases that relate to their business?

Darcy Knapp: (
Yeah, generally three, four, five words.

Anthony Verna:
Okay.

Darcy Knapp:
There are very few one- or two-word phrases that a company today is ever going to rank for only because of the big box stores. You’re going to get beat by Wikipedia, Walmart, and YouTube. If you’re looking for a one word phrase and you don’t own that one word.com, you’re never going to rank for it.

Don’t cheat. Don’t chase the windmills. That’s like the second biggest mistake I see is people thinking they can rank for something that they will never rank for and in most cases, you really don’t want that two-word phrase. You want that two-word phrase plus a modifier, which is going to be your geography.

Anthony Verna:
Can you give an example?

Darcy Knapp:
Sure. So, if you’re the personal injury lawyer, we talked to them all the time. You don’t want to rank for personal injury lawyer, you never will. So, it’s not even an issue. You want to rank for personal injury accident attorney  New York because you’re only licensed as an attorney in New York. So, you’re looking for someone that’s searching for that two, three, four, five-word string and then adding the geography. And if 90% of your clientele is locally based and you’re in Middletown, New York, you should be going after a personal injury lawyer in Middletown, New York. Don’t worry about that it’s six words long. Someone in your market area looking for a personal injury lawyer, Google will pick up your IP address and match their zip code to yours and you’re going to get served. And that’s someone who you can get into your office and close business on as opposed to the guy in Ohio that you can’t legally take the case and you can’t exactly get them in your office. He’s a thousand miles away. It’s about working smart.

Anthony Verna:
And what kind of metadata, I know I’m throwing out a word that we probably should define.. So, what kind of metadata do businesses need to think about?

Darcy Knapp:
Let’s define metadata. Metadata is information that goes behind your site that basically gives the heads up to the search engine what you want to rank for. What does not belong in your metadata? Punctuation. There shouldn’t be any punctuation in your metadata. It’s not about putting sentences together on a title tag. It’s not about using an ampersand or a bracket, something that could be misconstrued as html because Google’s just going to think you’re trying to put code into a metadata and ignore you. It should be about your core business, your core competency. And it should never contain a trademark that’s not yours or a business name that’s not your business. You’re not going to conquest and get Google to believe you’re a Ford dealer, if you’re a Chevy dealer. Putting the word forward in your metadata is not going to get you ranked. It’s not going to happen.

Anthony Verna:
And, and in fact, if there’s a direct competitor relationship between two businesses and one is putting metadata of the competitor in there. As you said, there’s…

Darcy Knapp:
You can cheat and copy your competitors metadata, but if you put their name in your meta, all you’re doing is promoting them and you’re going to end up with a letter from their attorney with a cease and desist for putting their name in your meta.

Anthony Verna:
Absolutely. Now, there are times, by the way, I will say that there are times when that may be acceptable just because there are trademarks like Amazon, there’s the Amazon River. So, if for some strange reason you have a, I won’t say strange reason, but if you have a travel website and you’re doing trips to the Amazon, okay, that does sound a little strange to me.

Darcy Knapp:
But Google will make an inference. Google is a logic engine. If you’re talking about the Amazon river, Google knows you’re not talking about Amazon, the shopping site. Yeah. Google is smart to that degree. This is the same way Google understands that certain words have the same meaning as other words, a book, a magazine. It’s all literature. So, it’s not gonna stop you from getting served if your meta says you sell comic books and someone’s looking for an illustrated book. It’s not gonna stop you from getting served, but you really want to choose the right phrases that have the most search when you write your meta. And you also want to remember the average American has an eighth-grade education. Don’t use big words. Meta should be nice and simple. If you’re the attorney, don’t use the word attorney. Use the word lawyer. People can spell it.

Anthony Verna:
Just one other thought on trademarks is that sometimes there are permissible uses in metadata. And there’s a bizarre case out there where a former Playboy playmate, and I have a feeling no former Playboy playmates are listening to us speak right now, but…
Darcy Knapp:
They’re all too busy dating basketball players.

Anthony Verna:
There’s a case where a former Playboy playmate used of course, Playboy and playmate in the meta tag and Playboy’s attorneys, of course, filed suit. And what the court said is that because there was a designation given to this particular person, while it’s a registered trademark, it’s what we call nominative views, you know, the product or service couldn’t be readily identified without that trademark. And only so much the mark needed to be used as is reasonably necessary just to make the identification and the, user. So, in other words, the user of the website creating the metadata does nothing to suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder. And that was completely acceptable. So it’s a very limited exception.
Darcy Knapp:
And that’s why you want expert help when you build your meta so you don’t end up talking to somebody who’s a lawyer.

That’s all. I mean, common sense that the best thing you can do is look at that title tag. You get eight to ten words. It’s basically three phrases and the phrases that you put out are what you expect people would be using a search engine to find you with.

Anthony Verna:
No, I think that that’s excellent advice. Can I move to a big pet peeve of mine that I actually just saw yesterday? I saw a business and, on its window, it had a domain name and then under it, it had its email address that went to Yahoo and not the domain name.

Darcy Knapp::
Okay. A couple of huge issues. When we look at email, number one, your customers, your business associates, your networking partners, everybody’s going to have that address in their address book and your branding Yahoo or your branding AOL or Hotmail or any other provider. You want to be branding your business. How many emails do you get a day? I probably get 300. The last thing I want is to be for people to be sending the email and typing, not my business name, but aol.com. It’s all about creating that top of mind awareness. And to do that you need to brand. Then we get into the next level. Providers like Yahoo and AOL that block so much mail, in particular website forms. If you’ve got a contact us form on your website and you’re using an AOL account, you’re probably never getting your forms, not to mention the fact that looks terrible on a business card and if anything, it looks more unprofessional. Do you want to be a JohnSmith@aol.com or do you want to be customerservice@yourbusiness.com and then we can get into email spammers. If you have an email address like info@yourbusiness.com and that’s what you’re using, you’re going to cut down on your junk mail tremendously because most of the email systems can’t send the Info app.

Anthony Verna:
By the way, I just pulled up the business that I passed yesterday and obviously on their website it has the yahoo.com email address and there’s a form on it.

Darcy Knapp::
They’re never getting them. I don’t care if you change that form, send a plain text dependent IP address. It doesn’t matter. They’re never getting that form. And again, when you’re going to go do business with someone and you’re going to hire a professional, that email address can actually make or break whether you get the job because using a branded email@yourbusiness.com is very professional. All the other alternatives are not.

Anthony Verna:
Is there a privacy concern as well with a lot of these services? Gmail really was the first one to put advertising in your inbox web interface. Is there a privacy concern as well?

Darcy Knapp:
More of a security concern? You’ve got a couple of issues. You’ve got email archiving. Every email is sent from your business. If it’s sent from a branded email and you have control and you have an archive, you have a record. An employee sends an email from their personal Hotmail to a client saying, oh yeah, we can do that for $10. That’s a contract. And the client can then print that email, back a zero out, make it $1. And if that employee doesn’t work for you anymore, you have no recourse. You now have to honor a contract cause you have no control. You have no backup. You have no archive of that email. You don’t know what’s been sent out. You don’t know if your employees are soliciting for other businesses, talking to your competitors, you know nothing. Because you’re letting everybody use their own personal private emails.

Anthony Verna:
Sure. No, I understand that  completely.

Darcy Knapp:
I archive every single email I ever sent  as a business owner. You have to, and then if you’re in the legal or medical profession you have regulations.

Anthony Verna:
Sure. I mean, as an attorney, I know that New York ethics rules have allowed Gmail and the reasoning was that a person is not the one looking at the email to insert advertising. It’s all done automatically. So, while every single email is scanned by Google, it’s only scanned for keywords to insert proper advertising. And I don’t know about you. I think that is going to change at some point very quickly once judges realize that, just because it’s not a person right now doesn’t mean it can’t be a person at Google. Very quickly.

Darcy Knapp:
In one step further, how many times do you hear that an email provider has been hacked and you get an alert saying you have to change your password? My Hotmail gets hacked on average every 45 days. I have to go in and change my password. I know what’s been hacked because it starts sending out links to my address book, right? And my sister, who’s in my address book is very proactive and she’ll say, Hey, Darcy, you’ve been hacked again. This is what your, your Hotmail sent me. So understand if you’re using one of those providers and it gets hacked and you start sending out malware, broken links, spam, you’re going to end up getting a phone call from the FCC saying you’re violating the Anti-Spam Act and it’s nothing you ever did. It’s a virus in your mailbox. But you need control. You’re the business owner. You need control. Your employees are using an email. It should be the business’ email. Leads come in. You need to track them. There’s no reason for things to be getting sent to a private email box that belongs to an employee. A business should own everything.

Anthony Verna:
I agree completely.

Darcy Knapp:
What’s going to stop that employee from selling those leads as they come in and those web forms as they come in to a competitor?

Anthony Verna:
Well and I mean that’s just good business practice to begin with to make sure that the employer-employee relationship is set out beforehand. You know, also by a contract as well. So, you know, not just email addresses but everything.

Darcy Knapp:
You get a content management system and that building that like to protect with your life but yet you’re not protecting your email. You’re not renewing your domain name 20 years into the future. Your domain name is expiring every year. Proactive. A ten-year domain renewal is about a hundred bucks. You’re crazy not to.  Get branded emails for about $30 a year. You’re crazy not to. Cutting corners won’t save your bottom line when your employees start selling your leads to the competitor.

Anthony Verna:
I agree completely on that. Is there… I was going to say, with the control issue, is that because then it can come into the server, sits in outlook and it’s just sitting there at the office?

Darcy Knapp::
Well any email that comes in you can track inbound, you can track outbound, you can archive all the sent mail if you have control.

Speaker 3:
If you’re letting ten different employees send mail from ten different Gmails and Hotmails you have no control, you don’t know what’s going on in your business. Did that employee send that out a  hundred emails today and do his job or did he send out zero and not work and take a paycheck?

Anthony Verna:
And customer relationship management software and I’ve got a client that isn’t set up to work with a Gmail or AOL or Yahoo. It is set up to work with a system that is sitting in the office. Whether it’s a shared server or some kind of cloud-based system. It’s set up for the business’ own email. It’s never set up for an email provider.

Darcy Knapp:
Look at when you have an employee. I don’t care if it’s a brand-new employee or someone’s been with you 30 years that has just retired. You’ve got an employee that has correspondence with your customer base. When they leave, if they’re sending emails back and forth from their Hotmail, you’re done. You’ve everyone they’re in contact with because they’re not talking to your email. They’re talking to Joe’s Hotmail and they’re never going to send an email to you at the company.

Anthony Verna:
Yeah, I know someone who was recently speaking with a sales rep at a regional beer company for sponsorship for an event. And the salesperson had an AOL email address and the person that I know is like, this is just so unprofessional and how do I even know that this person is speaking for the company as well or work for the company.

Darcy Knapp:
And how do you know they have the job They tell you they have. Either they have a branded email. They can be like you need to protect yourself as a business owner. The best way to protect yourself, you have company email that the employees use. If your employees are conducting business on behalf of the company on the road, they should have company cell phones so that when that employee leaves and those phone calls keep coming in, the next salesperson takes over that phone. It’s just about being proactive to retain the business you have because it’s so much less time consuming to maintain your business and to go out and find that new customer.

Anthony Verna:
I think that’s very wise advice. I see a lot of businesses getting back to just what is online marketing. I see a lot of businesses with a website that are very home page focused and I find that whenever I search for data, I’m not really landing on home pages anymore.

Darcy Knapp:
No, you’re going to land on the page that has the information you’re looking for, which in general may or may not be the home page, but you also have to look at the average website. 90% of traffic on any website is going to start at the home page. Okay? That home page really does need to tell the story, who you are, what you do, where you’re located, all your contact information, and what do you want the customer to do? Do you want them to call you? Fill out a form, buy a product, click and purchase? That home page needs to be the do all-end all because you only have four seconds to make that first impression and most people won’t get past your home page. When we look at searches, those landing pages that you build are what are going to show up in searches when someone’s doing a very specific query Let’s say that you want to find a house painter in Saratoga, New York, you’re going to land on that page, so you’ll have ten different painter sites pop up, but your landing on someone’s page that talks about house painting and Saratoga, and you’re also going to get YouTube videos of funny house painters and people falling off ladders. It’s just the nature of search today.
So, don’t worry so much about the home page. What you really want and what you really want to worry about and what we see right now as critical for most businesses: what does your mobile site look like? Do you have one? What platform are you on? Is your site a dinosaur, which can be two years old and your website can be a dinosaur. Go get an iPhone, go get an android, and go get a tablet and take a look at your site. 40% of all web traffic today is mobile and tablet based and if you’re trying to deliver that desktop version to a device, you’re going to lose so much traffic.

Anthony Verna:
How about responsive websites and just to …

Darcy Knapp:
Being responsive is configuring to the device, right? I’m taking it a step backwards before you even worry about responsive and what color does it look like and how big is your logo on the device? Does your website even work on a mobile device? You might have a beautiful website if I’m on a desktop, but when I go to a mobile device, it’s so small I can’t read it no matter how big I try to stretch it with my fingers. It doesn’t work. And what happens is the user that finds you on a mobile device, takes one look at that teeny, tiny website that looks like it’s a postage stamp and walks away. Even if you have the right product, the right service, you’re in the building next door to them, and you have the best price in town. It doesn’t matter if they can’t complete the purchase, if they can’t find your phone number, if they can’t figure out who you are and what you do on that mobile version effectively on that device, you’re just out of luck. And for those of you that don’t have access to every kind of phone, there’s a great little website called mobile test dot m e so it’s mobiletest.me and mobile tests will let you put your website into any device you want, and it will give you a virtual look at how your website will appear to someone on that device.

Anthony Verna:
Hey, that’s not a  dot com.

Darcy Knapp:
No, it’s not a  dot com. It’s a great toy and you can look at what your site, and it’s not a hundred percent perfect, but it’s pretty good. And you can look at what your site, how is your site going to serve on that tablet or on that handheld and say, “Oh my God, I need work.” .because you don’t really think about it, but when you serve on a mobile device, generally people just want to tap and dial your phone number.If your phone number’s embedded in an image on your website and it looks beautiful and some fancy font. That’s great, but on a mobile device I can’t tap and dial it. I’m hitting my back button. Going to your competitor.

Anthony Verna:
I certainly have seen a lot of phone numbers coming up in pictures on websites and I’ve always thought that that was a bad idea, that it should always be text because even if I’m on a desktop, I can at least copy and paste it into another and I can’t copy and paste a picture.

Darcy Knapp:
No, no. What your mobile site really needs to be is very simple. Your logo, your phone number, your address so that people can tap and get a map, your email address that they can tap and send you an email. Give them everything at their fingertips and you can make a sale. Give them nothing and you made a hell of a first impression. They’re never coming back.

Anthony Verna:
Is there any other tips that you have for it? For a mobile device? I mean for a mobile website.

Darcy Knapp:
Depending on what platform you’re on, a lot of them, what we do predominantly are building in WordPress. WordPress gives you all kinds of functionality for mobile and you can have a different menu on your mobile device. So, you might have twenty buttons across the top and forty drop downs. On your mobile device, strip it down to the main pages. Because mobile is not for search, mobile is for the handheld user. You probably only need five or six pages on that mobile site and then have a switch to desktop version. If they really need to get more, they can switch and have your whole desk. That version, I’ll never use the button, but that’s okay. But there’s no sense in having twenty buttons on a mobile site. No one’s going to go that far.

Anthony Verna:
So keep it simple.

Darcy Knapp:
Keep it simple. Mobile needs to be nice and easy to use. And then some software will let you integrate for tablets differently than mobile. So, when your web developer’s working on your site, they should be looking at your desktop, your mobile, and your tablet version and they should be looking at it in multiple browsers. What you see in Safari is not necessarily what you see in Chrome, which is not necessarily what you’re seeing in Firefox or God help you, Internet Explorer. It’s different in every browser. It’s different in every device. The response was meant that your website configured to devices responsive is a given, but beyond responsive, what does it look like and are you going to engage the user or are you going to turn them off? And the key is to engage that user. Keep them on your website for more than four seconds. Get them to make that buying decision. Get them to fill out a form, get them to tap and dial you whatever in your e-commerce. Get them to click, purchase and checkout.

Anthony Verna:
Do you have any thoughts on design then, in general?
Darcy Knapp:
A website can be as wild and crazy as you want. It can be as simple as you want. Desktop design, black text on white background is always the easiest to read. If your audience has senior citizens make the font points a little bigger. If you’re targeting kids, you want lots of animation. If you’re gonna use video, put a picture of the video on your homepage, but the player deeper in the site. You’re going to look at traffic. Traffic is predominantly Monday to Saturday, nine to five. It’s at work search. Most people at work can’t run YouTube on their computers. They’re blocked. The employers are blocking Adobe. So, if you have a video on the middle of your homepage or at the top of your homepage, they see a big white square with a big red x. They can’t play it. And when you see a big white square, with a  big red x, you think you’re hitting something that’s gotten malware on that and  you just hit your back button.

Don’t make it harder to make that first impression and to get that customer. You can put a picture of that video, screenshot off the YouTube video on that front page. They click on the screenshot, it goes to an internal page, the video plays. There’s no reason to have video or audio playing on your home page and if you’re running music, turn it off. What you think is great music is not what everybody else thinks is great music and people at work, that are surfing at work, will get caught if there’s an audio track and they can’t control the sound system on their machine, they’re immediately going to x out of your site.

Anthony Verna:
Video seems to be the number one advice for a lot of businesses to put video on the website.

Darcy Knapp:
Fabulous. Get video on your site, get it on YouTube, optimize it, get it to rank. YouTube is the number two search engine behind Google. There’s more search on YouTube then there was on Yahoo and Bing put together.
Anthony Verna:
So how long should a video be if I’m gonna put video on my business website?

Darcy Knapp:
Less than two minutes. Yeah, generally a minute and a half about the tolerance for most people. If you’re going to do a how-to video, it can be, as long as it takes to show someone how to do something, that’s fine. If it’s on an internal page, it’s not gonna matter. If it’s on YouTube and someone seriously wants to know how to knit a sweater and the video takes 45 minutes, they’ll watch it. It’s the biggest dilemma for business today is the loss of employee at work hours to YouTube. That’s why they block YouTube. Sure. But their way to block YouTube is simply block Adobe, which means nothing runs. No Netflix. You’re not watching movies at work, anyway.

Anthony Verna:
Well, if you’re watching movies at work, you need a new job, I think.

Darcy Knapp:
Well, your employer needs to find you a new job or kick you out the door. But again, you have to look at how people work today, how business works today and work smarter. You know, under forty, they’re not going to read your 40-million-word essay. They will watch your minute and a half video. You have to have the essay there for the search engine. You want the video there for user experience.

Anthony Verna:
And if you’re putting video on the website, you need to make sure that everything you have is cleared. And that goes for making the titles, the PR. If you’ve got a production company doing it, you have to make sure that there’s a contract between your business and the production company. If you’re using music, you have to make sure that the copyright is cleared. I will tell you that it’s probably easiest to hire somebody local and make sure that it’s what we call a work for hire. And when a work is made for hire, it belongs to the person or business that’s paying for it. And you know, go get a fifteen second clip. There are plenty of musicians out there who make the fifteen second clips.

Darcy Knapp:
There are free audio files out there that you can use. Just make sure what you’re using is either guaranteed free or yeah.

Anthony Verna:
Right. Guaranteed.
Darcy Knapp:
Or not licensed by someone who’s gonna send you a bill.

Anthony Verna:
Exactly.

Darcy Knapp:
Yeah. We’re talking about big business mistakes, expensive business mistakes. Number one advice for our businesses managing their own website. Do not let your employees, yourself, your friends, your family. Nobody goes to Google images, looks for an image. They’re looking for a pine tree. Copy, paste and put it into your website.

Anthony Verna:
Absolutely.

Darcy Knapp:
If that tree image is owned by Getty images, you’re getting a bill for $1,100.

Anthony Verna:
I have done my fair share of subtle copyright infringement settlements with Getty images on the other side. A lot of businesses do it and it winds up being a painful process. And while Getty may negotiate, they might negotiate down a hundred bucks. And get found because all people…

Darcy Knapp:
Their people are putting their photos everywhere on the web in hopes that you steal one because they make ten times the money sending bills for $1,100 to the people to put a picture on their website without permission, without buying a licensed copy than they make selling a photo for $10. It’s a hell of a business out there right now. And it’s not just Getty images, but don’t steal one of their images. You’re done. You’re going to pay because they might negotiate down to $900 but you’re still going to pay them.

Anthony Verna:
Right. It’s a lot easier to hire a photographer for$100 to $200 to $300 to go take a hundred pictures of a pine tree or give a list of the pictures that I’m looking for and make sure that it’s there. Now, if also if you need a person’s image, and of course we’re talking about business websites and you need pictures of people, you have to have those models give their rights away.
Darcy Knapp:
Or the other option is just use stock photography and stock photography can be bought at as little as $2 or $3 a picture. Don’t be afraid to use stock images and pay $2 or $3 a photo versus grabbing something off of Google images or Getty images and getting a bill for $1,200.

Anthony Verna:
I agree completely. I think that’s why it’s a plus.

Darcy Knapp:
I think it’s a very common mistake and usually it happens not because the business is trying to save money, but they just don’t know any different. No one’s ever told them, “Oh by the way, if you steal an image, you’re going to get a bill because you don’t have rights to use that image.”

Anthony Verna:
Also, if you’re using an image, and this would be my caveat from seeing clients use stock photography. Stock photography is a wonderful resource, but it’s not the image of the company.

Darcy Knapp:
No, it’s not real. Yes. And reality will sell. But if you’re going to do your own videos and you have reality in a video, it’s not going to hurt you if you have stock photography. Better to have stock photography that looks good then pictures you took with your own little, digital camera or your iPhone that look like crap. Oh wait, yes, I agree it’s a trade-off. But if you don’t have the resources to hire the photographer or to take your own pictures, stock images, if it’s gonna cost you $20 to buying a stock images to load your site up, do it. You can replace images over time very easily. And if you never get around to taking real pictures, at least your site looks good. Because if your site looks like crap. People aren’t going to trust you. They’re going to go to your competitor.

Anthony Verna:
You’re not going to hear me disagree with that.

Darcy Knapp:
It’s all about looking good and in the digital environment and if you don’t like your staff picture because you wore the wrong shirt that day. Yeah, get go, go spend two bucks, buy a stock picture of a guy and a really nice shirt. Take his face out there and people come in looking for him. They won’t know who you are.

You can secret shop your customers, because they’re looking for the CEO and he’s supposed to look like this, and you can talk to that person all day long and they’ll never know it’s you. Don’t go steal a picture of Brad Pitt off the Internet again, don’t steal pictures that are going to create problem. Yeah, you will pay for that one and don’t put a picture of your dog or your cat up there as your face unless you’re having to be like a veterinarian. That’s another strange thing that I see out there on the web. People will put a placeholder photo in and it’s a picture of an animal. You are not a giraffe. You’re not a walrus. You’re not a zebra. You’re a person. And the picture you put out there on LinkedIn, the picture you use on Facebook, put it on your website. Let people know who you are so, they walk in the front door, you get treated with respect that you deserve.

If you’re trying to hide from salespeople, use a picture that’s like 10 years old.
Anthony Verna:
Darcy, I think that’s wonderful advice and I think you and I probably need to run.

Darcy Knapp:
Yes, so we can do this again next time.

Anthony Verna:
Wonderful. Thank you so much for calling in.

Darcy Knapp:
You got it. Have a great day, Anthony.

Anthony Verna:
Thank you. You too. Talk to you soon.

Darcy Knapp:
Bye. Bye.

Anthony Verna:
Bye.