(Search camp 2009) 5 mindset changes for Indian Webmasters – URGENT

Search camp was just an average conference as the audience was diverse, one a novice and another with 99 years of web marketing. Also most of the topics covered were a repeat. By saying that, I don’t want to discourage the organizers, they have all my appreciation. I know how difficult it is to arrange such a meet. All kudos to them for the initiatives and leadership. They have surely worked hard to arrange it so well. All my well wishes and appreciation for the team.

I had an opportunity to speak for 5 mins as a surprise audience speaker. I had to limit my words and thus put some thoughts really fast. Here is the PPT.

Since it was a short speak, let me explain what I meant:

1. “Understand marketing”: Most of the SEO & Web marketing professionals have a set of checklist to follow for each and every client. For most of them marketing is all about promotions or sales. They hardly bother about the usability, product perception and other user behavior. Understand marketing (things we learn in MBA) will help our Indian webmaster community to focus on bigger and right things than just search engine rankings. This change in mindset will take Indian webmasters community a long way. Books to read:
   • Philip Kolters marketing book,
   • Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae
   • Tipping point
   • Purple cow (Seth Godin)
   • Other books that will give you more dimensions to your thinking. I used to spent 2 hours every Saturday at Starmark as they used to allow reading books there. I bought many and read even more. That helps you to think bigger and better. Focus on marketing books with diverse viewpoint.

   Also I mentioned that Strategy is very important and we Indians need to be play a bigger role at strategy level as well. Many of us are used to create accounts, submit articles, submit to directories etc, which are mainly tactical work. We were paid for our hands not our brains. Let’s get respect by doing something really good.

2. Web is technical first: Yuk! when I see people eating every word coming out of Adam Lasnik’s mouth as Google secret. Most of us are focused on Google and cheap SEO tricks. Web is very technical and allows you to do a lot of things. We will be missing the major part of web if we don’t understand the architecture of web. I did mention that “God is God as God understands the architecture of Universe”. It is very important to understand the architecture to expertise it. I urge people to focus on architecture level as well. Understand atleast following things:
   • Web server (Install, manage, optimize and do crazy things with it)
   • Databases (Install, manage, optimize and do crazy things with it)
   • DNS servers ( http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/dns/, how does the website gets resolved)
   • Atleast one programming language (Server side)
   • JS
   • CSS
   • HTML
   • Image editing
   • Video editing

   All this will help you debug things, understand how many technical things like Google analytics work. One of the common question that I ask in the interview is “My website is not opening, how will you debug this problem”. The answer to this helps me understand his understanding about web architecture. Remember this learning will be much different from marketing learning as all the topics will be connected with new terms emerging in every sentence. Keep reading, keep fighting and after 3 to 4 years you will hardly see 1 new term in a paragraph. Most of the people lose patience as they feel that it is too difficult to study these technical things. This mindset change of learning technical things will take Indian webmaster community to a very respectful position and towards an much innovative path.
   Read books like: Information Architecture for the World Wide web, technical blogs, Steve souders book High performing websites.

3. Grow over Google: Let Google worry about algo changes and storage issues. Why the hell do you want to waste your time in understanding Google’s algo. Learning 80% of Google’s algo is simple and basic, stick to it, don’t worry too much about the 20% as it will consume your life time. We need to focus on following things:
   • Traffic (not only Search Engines but also affiliate marketing, community marketing, paid stuffs etc)
   • Ranking (Basic onpage, Good link attractive stuffs and good strategies)
   • User experience (How to make your users life simple)
   • Sales (What makes them buy)

   Read books like: “Why people buy”, “Usability books by Jakob”, “Don’t make me think by Steve Krug”

4. Think partners not employees I have hardly seen any team member who doesn’t have his own web stuffs. I had team members working till 2 am to 4 am on their own sites (kept secret) before coming to office at 10:00. Why they had to work for extra pennies? Very simple, web offers a lot of money and if you treat your employees as employees then you will get only the employee’s contribution. With good incentive structures team members spend a lot of extra time to speed up your web success. This is highly beneficial for the SEO company, clients and team members. Don’t treat them like employees, treat them like partners. Web industry is different, you need to have different HR policies for this. This mindset will improve the culture in Indian SEO companies (which is not like a blood sucking culture, I pay for 8 hours and make them work for 11 hours, 3 hours = 3*$15 = $45 profit per day kinda mentality, don’t work for these blood suckers for many days, learn and do better things soon).
5. Don’t be afraid of failing: On web the exit strategy is very simple as the investments are mainly sweat and your brain. Do checkout my previous post on why we Indians fear failure http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/indians-fear-failure/. This mindset change will help us try better things. This will bring India on the right web maps for better innovations and research oriented work. I hope we can put this mindset among many Indian webmasters who can support research work.

Hope this does some justice to want I wanted to share at Search Camp 2009. Enjoy!

Tags: architecture, books, google, indian web masters, search camp, SEO, usability, web marketing